‘She’s the new Zastava Caribbean,’ Arthur said, standing on tiptoe in his trainers, a habit by which he expressed enthusiasm as well as elasticity. ‘Jugoslav-made, newly imported. The Kidlington garage is the only garage in all Oxfordshire where you can buy it. Sole agents. Er – Cheri and I will be able to drive everywhere in it.’
‘Except, presumably, the Caribbean.’
Arthur laughed good-naturedly. ‘We’ll see about that,’ he said.
They walked along together.
‘I’ve promised not to drive too fast,’ Arthur said. ‘Not with Cheri in her condition.’
Clement recalled that Mrs Stranks, who had changed her name from Cherry to Cheri – to be more interesting, her husband said – was newly pregnant.
In Clement’s room, the accustomed piles of papers and books awaited him. He looked about with a show of pleasure. Here at least, he could bring some sense and order into life.
Arthur Stranks blinked a welcome through his glasses and nodded his head a bit.
‘I hope the New York conference was a success? Fun? You get the material you needed?’ His manner was solicitous.
‘Some of it, some of it. I had a long conversation with Prof Stauffer and I’ve brought back photocopies of a bundle of his material.’
Arthur looked interested and did some more nodding. He had tidied the room while Clement was away, and the old box files now stood in military array under the wide window. The photograph of Willy Wilkes-Smith, the late Master of Carisbrooke, Clement’s friend, still hung awry behind the door. Clement went over and straightened it.
Two stacks of wire baskets, six baskets tall, stood on the broad central table. They contained documents, together with photographs and cuttings culled from European and transatlantic sources. One day, with the aid of Arthur, a secretary who came twice a week, and a computer, all this paper, with which the room was slowly filling, would be processed into more paper: into, to be precise, Clement’s next work, a study entitled, Adaptability: Private Lives in Public Wars. The title was a compromise between the academic respectability he had already achieved and the popular acclaim he felt he deserved; of course the publishers would probably change it anyhow.
‘Er, the breakdowns of the VD figures have arrived from the National Archives in Washington. Came on Thursday.’
‘Good.’ He began to open letters. ‘How’s Cheri? Any morning sickness?’
‘Cheri’s fine. Great.’
They looked at each other across the room, expressionlessly. Clement, in a fit of good will, put down the letter he was holding and commenced to tell Arthur something about the Modern History conference he had attended before flying to Boston to meet Green Mouth.
Clement, who was rather a distant man, discovered in Arthur a desire to get a little too close in their relationship. Also, there was the generation gap, much though he might try to discount it – indeed, he disliked the very phrase. At forty-nine, Clement was conscious of his age. His once curly hair now harboured ash to dilute its previous chestnut and, even more regrettably, was thinning in a silly fashion, behind and in front. His ruddy cheeks had become patchily sallow, in a way that made him uncomfortable before his mirror. Although no hypochondriac, he imagined himself due for a heart attack at times, and had cut down accordingly on the College port. Caring little about politics, he still clung to his liberal socialist principles, born in the early days of Harold Wilson, the first Prime Minister he had voted for, and believed those principles helped keep his faculties from ossifying.
Arthur Stranks was twenty-two and sallow to start with, a stubby young bespectacled man with a pleasant air of wishing to please. His dark hair was cut flat on top; the Scrubbing Brush cut was how Clement and Sheila thought of it. As if to assert a wildness of character acquaintances would not otherwise have suspected him of possessing, Arthur had a small tattoo on his left wrist, a bird of prey with something resembling a rat in its beak, probably holding some arcane sexual significance, thought Clement. He knew his assistant for one of Mrs Thatcher’s conformists, tethered to his job and monetarist respectability, but there was another side to Stranks, a side represented in part by Mrs Stranks, Cheri, a rather silent lady of sidelong glances, sighs, and a self-evident bosom, who was always to be seen – at least by Clement – in very tight stone-washed jeans. Regarding Stranks, Clement found himself thinking of the bird with the rat and of Cheri.
Stranks had made it clear from the first that he considered it a privilege to work for Dr Clement Winter. In an early attempt to be friendly, Sheila and Clement had taken the Strankses to Covent Garden to Janaček’s opera Jen
When the day came, Sheila was too busy finishing a novel to go out. She had excused herself, and Clement had gone on his own with Arthur and Cheri to the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre to see Tina Turner live.
He was the only person in the audience in a suit.
The show, the noise, the audience, the enthusiasm, had overwhelmed him. Until that evening, he had never heard of Tina Turner. She was a light coffee-coloured lady wearing a tight-fitting white two-piece which laced up over her exuberant breast, and, even more effectively, a huge wig like a lion’s mane. As she screamed her songs at the audience, the mane shook with fervour. The stage could barely contain Tina Turner. She prowled and stamped about it, shrieking her strange love laments, as if seeking a way of getting at the audience and devouring it.
She was a marvellous and, to Clement, a terrifying spectacle. His ideal of feminine beauty had been formed at about the age of ten, when he distinctly recalled rubbing a pubescent penis against a photograph of Miss Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr had been presented as static, even icy, with the best bits (as he had put it to himself) always chastely concealed. This secretiveness, this pretended show of privacy, had enhanced Hedy Lamarr’s stunning beauty. All such artifices were flung out to allow Tina Turner’s beauty full play. He was looking at a new age, heralded triumphantly by the singing, the stamping, the tossing mane.
And, like the other males in the audience, Clement was filled with lust. That was what he found terrifying. Savage though Tina might appear, barbaric though the noise was, he saw or imagined a delicacy to her limbs, her hands with their long red claws. In particular, there was a sunny good humour about the whole performance from which it took him days to recover.
The audience, clapping and shouting, was another matter. Art and Cheri beside him were suddenly half-naked, which was to say in T-shirts; paying him no attention, they became part of the mass-mind. Clement, too, dropping his jacket on the floor, also gave in. The whole great cavern became a pool of amplified noise and heat and emotion. And Tina Turner, her carnivorous teeth gleaming at the fun of it all.
The next morning found Clement out of sorts with himself. He sent his suit to the cleaners in Summertown. There were worlds which were not his.
Since then, Clement had kept a mental distance from his assistant. He feared that Stranks and his wife, who had really looked astonishing in that T-shirt, might invite him again into those lower depths. And was affronted that they never did.
Now he averted his eyes from the sinister tattoo, and called his attention back to the reason that had brought them to this untidy room.
‘Better pick up the threads again,’ said Clement, after they had talked for some while. He rubbed his hands together, staging enthusiasm, but doing no more than frown at his chair.
‘How’s Sheila?’ Arthur needed more conversation before starting work. ‘Er – her side of things go okay?’