‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
We have to face each other sometime, he was thinking. Moments of honesty are rare, elusive residues of living that must be panned with infinite patience. And this was one, a bright second of clarity riddled by chance out of a day of dross, and presented to them. When would they find another? He had to be honest now. Helen was making patterns in his hand with her finger. In the next room, Alice was singing tunelessly.
‘The car’s on the bum,’ he said, stopping his mouth with a biscuit the children had left and pulling a droll, clown’s face.
He felt as if that mask would freeze onto his features, and become himself.
5
‘I mean I was only eighteen,’ Jim Forbes was saying. ‘This was the first girl I had really fancied. And here she was, you know? Telling me to give her five minutes to go into the house, let her parents think that was her in for the night. And then slip back out, you know?’ Eileen Forbes was gazing interestedly into her husband’s face as if she hadn’t heard the story a hundred times, but her dessert-fork moved like a conductor’s baton. Elspeth Morton kept her eyebrows arched in interest while her jaws busied themselves with the gateau. Allison noticed that either Elspeth was wearing a new ring or her diamonds were putting on weight. Morton was toasting himself in secret with the last of his wine. Cameron watched a girl three tables away, fascinated by the versatility she showed in being able to eat, talk, pat her companion’s hand and run a survey of her audience-rating, all at the same time. He wondered what her feet were doing. Tramping grapes? Knitting? ‘So there I was. With Eden five minutes away. I’m telling you. My knees were knocking like a one-man band. I was standing in their back garden. About ten yards away from the house. And my breath was misting their windows. I was ready to show Romeo one or two tricks. Her window was the one above the kitchen. She’d told me that. Five minutes. And then the signal was to be the light going on in her room. A second, and then off again. I cleaned my teeth with my hanky. Combed my hair. Flexed my arms for the clinches. I mean, she was a lovely bit of stuff. And I waited. Nothing. Not a sausage. Five minutes. Ten. I thought maybe her watch is slow. But hell, it would have to be going backwards. I thought of everything. A power-cut. Her old man had coughed it kissing her goodnight. She couldn’t find the light-switch in the dark.’
‘You were always a bit of an optimist, Jim,’ Morton said.
‘ ‘Ope spregs ’ternal,’ Elspeth said suddenly, giving voice to her gateau.
‘A new ring, Elspeth?’ Allison asked, under the impression that Forbes’s anecdote was concluded.
Eileen dropped her fork on the floor.
Meanwhile, back at the asylum, Cameron thought. An incidental profundity occurred to him: perhaps Elspeth had accidentally revealed the machinery behind the unfathomable ambiguity of utterance achieved by the priestesses of Delphi. They spoke with their mouths full. Then he said: ‘And then, Jim?’
‘Well, anyway,’ Forbes continued, experiencing the sedentary equivalent of an audience walkout, for Eileen was cleaning her fork with a paper napkin and Elspeth was nodding in delayed action response to Allison’s question. ‘Fifteen minutes. And I thought: right! Some communication is called for. I had seen it done in the pictures. I lifted a piece of clay and chucked it cautiously at her window. Nothing. So I went on doing it. I was hissing: Linda! Linda! all the time. That was her name. And all the time my ammunition was getting bigger. Till I was really on the heavy bore stuff.’ And you still are, thought Morton. ‘Then, smash! Right through the window. I put in a full pane of glass. What happened after that was strictly Keystone Cops. Lights seemed to go on in every room but hers. I heard footsteps running downstairs. It sounded like a centipede with hobnailed boots. And a dog was barking. I didn’t know what the hell was happening. I was running four ways at once. Then the back-door opened and I hears this voice shouting: ‘Seize ’im, boy!’ Seize ’im? This thing like a Shetland pony comes out, going like a racehorse. I was off. I was wishing they had cut their damned hedges more often. Five feet if they were an inch. I went over with this thing hanging to my bum like a booster-rocket. It must’ve been with me for about a hundred yards. Before I broke free. Never again. I left my arse in San Francisco, right enough. That’s when I took up golf.’
They laughed.
‘It’s a lovely ring, Elspeth.’ Eileen was first with a follow-up, since she had recognised the golfing remark as epilogue.
‘Do you like it?’ Elspeth smiled, her hand turning like a lighthouse.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Allison said. ‘A good bit bigger than the other one, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. The other one’s about the size of yours, Allison. Sid’s been promising me another one for years. And this is it.’
‘Very good too,’ Allison said. ‘Though I always think nothing can replace the sentimental value of the first one. Don’t you? I mean that’s the one you got engaged with, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, I’d never part with mine.’ Eileen looked nostalgically at her own ring, each diamond of which was like a facet of the ones on Elspeth’s ring.
The women withdrew behind the purdah of diamond talk. The men lit Forbes’s cigarettes and blew out smoke signals of satiety.
He took too long, Morton was thinking. Could have taken at least two minutes off the telling. But that was typical. Forbes was one of those people who nearly always pull the punchline too late, so that the joke explodes in their face. His ego bore the marks. He kept trying. But he was one of life’s natural casualties. Amen.
They’re always against himself, Cameron thought. He watched Jim’s face brood upon the moment, hatching another anecdote perhaps. Cameron felt a tremendous liking for him. He tried so damned hard. But it was embarrassing the way he was always so funny about himself – like a cripple whose party piece was balancing on his crutches. He kept showing you his scars and asking you to laugh. Cameron remembered irrelevantly how at school Jim could walk for fifteen yards on his hands. He held the record. They had measured it. He had also been able to skid pebbles on the water more times than anybody else. That was another record. And he could weep anytime at sad films. All the qualities that weren’t viable, he had. It was sad to think that perhaps there were some men who passed their prime with conkers. He had wanted to be a missionary. Now he worked with the Electricity Board. That was a funnier joke than any he could tell – the irony that each of them had to some extent become. Hadn’t idealism festered in every one of them and healed into indifference? Only some of them, like Cameron himself, kept picking off the scab to contemplate the diminishing wound.
What happens to us? Cameron thought. We start out as real people. What makes us hide from our own dreams, submit to a cage cliche, refuse to face each other?
He looked round their table, round the restaurant. He saw them as if under glass cases. Genus suburbanus: found only in semi-detached houses. The sexual behaviour of these creatures is their only interesting feature. After mating, two offspring are produced at intervals mathematically calculated by the female. Whereupon, the female swallows the male whole and re-emits him in the form of a bank-balance. Homo aquaticus: this creature hibernates for fifty weeks of every year. For the other two weeks, it can be seen at coastal resorts being buried by its young. Unfortunately they usually dig it back up. Genus Cameron: this creature is believed to be extinct.
‘Did you hear about Charlie Slade, Eddie?’ Morton asked.
‘What was that?’
‘Died two days ago. Complained