I recognized the voice as belonging to Helen Someone-or-other, a blonde who was being squired by a life-and-soul-of-the-party type. I dug into my coat pocket and found the cigarettes, then paused as I heard Sheila say, ‘Yes, he is.’
Helen said, ‘I don’t know why you bother with him.’
‘I don’t know, either,’ said Sheila. She laughed. ‘But he’s a male body, handy to have about. A girl needs someone to take her around.’
‘You could have chosen someone more lively,’ said Helen. ‘This one’s a zombie. What does he do?’
‘Oh, he’s some kind of an accountant. He doesn’t talk about it much. A grey little man in a grey little job – I’ll drop him when I find someone more interesting.’
I stayed very still in a ridiculous half crouch behind that screen. I certainly couldn’t walk out into full view after hearing that. There was a subdued clatter from the dressing-table as the girls primped themselves. They chattered about hair styles for a couple of minutes, then Helen said, ‘What happened to Jimmy What’s-his-name?’
Sheila giggled. ‘Oh, he was too wolfish – not at all safe to be with. Exciting, really, but his firm sent him abroad last month.’
‘I shouldn’t think you find this one too exciting.’
‘Oh, Jemmy’s all right,’ said Sheila casually. ‘I don’t have to worry about my virtue with him. It’s very restful for a change.’
‘He’s not a queer, is he?’ asked Helen.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Sheila. Her voice was doubtful. ‘He’s never appeared to be that way.’
‘You never can tell; a lot of them are good at disguise. That’s a nice shade of lipstick – what is it?’
They tailed off into feminine inconsequentialities while I sweated behind the screen. It seemed to be an hour before they left, although it probably wasn’t more than five minutes, and when I heard the door bang I stood up cautiously and came out from under cover and went downstairs to rejoin the party.
I stuck it out until Sheila decided to call it a night and then took her home. I was in half a mind to demonstrate to her in the only possible way that I wasn’t a queer, but I tossed the idea away. Rape isn’t my way of having a good time. I dropped her at the flat she shared with two other girls and bade her a cordial good night. I would have to be very hard up for company before I saw her again.
A grey little man in a grey little job.
Was that how I really appeared to others? I had never thought about it much. As long as there are figures used in business there’ll be accountants to shuffle them around, and it had never struck me as being a particularly grey job, especially after computers came in. I didn’t talk about my work because it really isn’t the subject for light conversation with a girl. Chit-chat about the relative merits of computer languages such as COBOL and ALGOL doesn’t have the glamour of what John Lennon said at the last recording session.
So much for the job, but what about me? Was I dowdy and subfusc? Grey and uninteresting?
It could very well be that I was – to other people. I had never been one for wearing my heart on my sleeve, and maybe, judging by the peculiar mores of our times, I was a square. I didn’t particularly like the ‘swinging’ aspect of mid-sixties England; it was cheap, frenetic and sometimes downright nasty, and I could do without it. Perhaps I was Johnny-out-of-step.
I had met Sheila a month before, a casual introduction. Looking back at that conversation in the bedroom it must have been when Jimmy What’s-his-name had departed from her life that she had latched on to me as a temporary substitute. For various reasons, the principal one having to do with the proverb of the burnt child fearing the fire, I had not got into the habit of jumping into bed indiscriminately with female companions of short acquaintance, and if that was what Sheila had expected, or even wanted, she had picked the wrong boy. It’s a hell of a society in which a halfway continent man is immediately suspected of homosexuality.
Perhaps I was stupid to take the catty chatter of empty-headed women so much to heart, but to see ourselves as others see us is a salutary experience and tends to make one take a good look from the outside. Which is what I did while sitting in the car outside Honiton.
A thumbnail sketch: Jeremy Wheale, of good yeoman stock and strong family roots. Went to university – but redbrick – emerging with a first-class pass in mathematics and economics. Now, aged 31, an accountant specializing in computer work and with good prospects for the future. Character: introverted and somewhat withdrawn but not overly so. When aged 25 had flammatory affaire which wrung out emotions; now cautious in dealings with women. Hobbies: indoors – recreational mathematics and fencing, outdoors – scuba diving. Cash assets to present minute: £102/18/4 in current bank account; stocks and shares to the market value of £940. Other assets: one overage Ford Cortina in which sitting brooding; one hi-fi outfit of superlative quality; one set of scuba gear in boot of car. Liabilities: only himself.
And what was wrong with that? Come to think of it – what was right with that? Maybe Sheila had been correct when she had described me as a grey man but only in a circumscribed way. She expected Sean Connery disguised as James Bond and what she got was me – just a good, old-fashioned, grey, average type.
But she had done one thing; she had made me take a good look at myself and what I saw wasn’t reassuring. Looking into the future as far as I could, all I could see was myself putting increasingly complicated figures into increasingly complicated computers at the behest of the men who made the boodle. A drab prospect – not to mention that overworked word ‘grey’. Perhaps I was getting into a rut and adopting middle-aged attitudes before my time.
I tossed the stub of the third cigarette from the window and started the car. There didn’t seem to be much I could do about it, and I was quite happy and contented with my lot.
Although not perhaps as happy and contented as I was before Sheila had distilled her poison.
From Honiton to the farm, just short of Totnes, is a run of about an hour and a half if you do it early in the morning to avoid the holiday traffic on the Exeter by-pass, and dead on the minute I stopped, as I always did, on the little patch of ground by Cutter’s Corner where the land fell away into the valley and where there was a break in the high hedge. I got out of the car and leaned comfortably on the fence.
I had been born in the valley thirty-one years earlier, in the farmhouse which lay snugly on the valley floor looking more like a natural growth than a man-made object. It had been built by a Wheale and Wheales had lived in it for over four hundred years. It was a tradition among us that the eldest son inherited the farm and the younger sons went to sea. I had put a crimp in the tradition by going into business, but my brother, Bob, held on to Hay Tree Farm and kept the land in good shape. I didn’t envy Bob the farm because he was a better farmer than I ever would have been. I have no affinity with cattle and sheep and the job would have driven me round the twist. The most I had to do with it now was to put Bob right on his bookkeeping and proffer advice on his investments.
I was a sport among the Wheales. A long line of fox-hunting, pheasant-murdering, yeoman farmers had produced Bob and me. Bob followed the line; he farmed the land well, rode like a madman to hounds, was pretty good in a point-to-point and liked nothing better than a day’s rough shooting. I was the oddity who didn’t like massacring rabbits with an airgun as a boy, still less with a shotgun as a grown man. My parents, when they were alive, looked on me with some perplexity and I must have troubled their uncomplicated minds; I was not a natural boy and got into no mischief – instead I developed a most un-Whealeish tendency to book reading and the ability to make figures jump through hoops. There was much doubtful