The Essence of the Thing Page 5

  ‘Wonders will never cease.’

  ‘Exactly. If only we could all bear that in mind—oh and by the way, I said he should bring her round for a meal some evening, okay?’

  ‘Oh, that was good of you.’

  ‘Yes, well, what could I do?’

  ‘What indeed.’

  ‘Important step in a chap’s life.’

  ‘Considering it’s taken him so long to make it.’

  ‘Well, some of us are slow starters. Not the chap’s fault.’

  ‘No, nothing is ever one’s fault. It’s still one’s responsibility to sort it out, though.’

  ‘So he has sorted it out.’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘So anyway, let’s have them round. Don’t you want to take a look at this Nicola?’

  ‘Yes. Sure. Have you got the number?’

  ‘No. But you could telephone him at work.’

  ‘Write down the name of the firm then, I’ll never remember it. On the calendar there. Only I can’t do anything for a few weeks, I’m up to my ears.’ Lizzie was an independent television producer, a fairly discernible operator. But once in a while she cooked the dinner, as tonight, for therapy. She got up and went on with it.

  ‘Okay,’ said Alfred, who was madly curious to see the woman in the case. ‘I’ll remind you.’

  ‘You sweetie you,’ said Lizzie. ‘Now you’d better buzz up and see Henrietta while you’ve got the chance, or she’ll be asleep. You could ask Marie-Laure to come down here for a moment if you will.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Harry. Has she been good today?’

  ‘Ish,’ said Lizzie. ‘Just ish. From what I hear. But it’s better than nothing.’

  ‘She’s a girl of spirit,’ said Alfred proudly. ‘I like a girl with spirit.’ And he went up to Henrietta, and read her The Fox and the Grapes.

  20

  The sitting-room windows faced south, and gave a view of a terrace of stucco-fronted Victorian houses like the one they inhabited, and beyond these the tops of trees growing in the communal gardens: it looked, especially in the evening, like a stage set for an urban operetta. They’d just finished painting the sitting-room walls midsummer-sky-blue, with the cornices picked out in white.

  ‘We’re pretty good, aren’t we?’ said Jonathan. But he’d decided to get a professional in to do the ceiling.

  They sat down on the sofa, the rather good old one which they’d bought at auction and which had cost them an arm and a leg—how appropriate—and Jonathan opened another half bottle of champagne.

  ‘It might be nice to do something about the bathroom,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Nicola. ‘I’m cleaned out.’

  ‘Let me give it to you for a present,’ said Jonathan. ‘It can be your Christmas present.’

  ‘But that’s not for months and months,’ said Nicola.

  ‘An early present,’ said Jonathan.

  And so one way or another the flat was, after all, substantially upgraded, and pretty good it looked, too, in a laid-back, understated, Notting Hillish way. Part of the upgrading of the bathroom was the latest and best thing in showers, with very shiny taps and hoses and five different kinds of spray. Bliss!

  ‘Are we doing anything on Sunday?’

  ‘I don’t know, are we?’

  ‘Not if you don’t think so.’

  ‘We’ll ask Guy. We’ve probably promised him something and forgotten it. He’ll remember. Guy!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Did we fix anything for Sunday?’

  ‘No, Saturday. Rollerskating, remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. You bet. Right. That’s all then, you can go away again if you like.’

  ‘No, I’ll stay, in case you’re talking about something interesting.’

  ‘We’re not. We’re only talking about Sunday.’

  ‘What about Sunday?’

  ‘Nicola’s asked us to go over to Notting Hill for lunch.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She wants us to see her posh new flat and her posh new cohabitant.’

  ‘Cor.’

  ‘So since we’re not doing anything else, we will.’

  ‘Oh, Susannah, must we?’

  ‘Can I stay at home, Mum?’

  ‘Yes we must. No you can’t.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘You like Nicola.’

  ‘But there’s him.’

  ‘You hardly know him.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘We needn’t stay long.’

  ‘We won’t.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I don’t want to go. I want to stay here.’

  ‘You can’t stay here alone, my treasure. We’ll go somewhere nice afterwards. We might go to a film. We’ll see what’s on.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Whizzy!’

  21

  ‘Well, that was painless enough wasn’t it?’ said Susannah.

  She and Geoffrey and Guy were in the car on their way from Notting Hill to the South Bank to see The Navigator as per the agreed quid pro quo. Guy’s behaviour throughout the luncheon had been exemplary; even Geoffrey’s reluctance had been dissipated.

  ‘Blokes who can come up with plonk like that,’ said he, having drunk Jonathan’s claret liberally, ‘are okay by me.’

  Susannah (who was driving) frowned but said nothing. She was doing Hyde Park Corner.

  ‘What did you think of him?’ she asked Guy.

  ‘He’s all right,’ the child replied. ‘I don’t think he’s met anyone of my age before. He’s fairly nice.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said Susannah.

  ‘And his wine is better still,’ said Geoffrey.

  ‘So we’re all happy,’ said Susannah.

  ‘Especially Nicola,’ said Geoffrey unexpectedly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Susannah. ‘Isn’t she? It almost breaks my heart to look at her.’

  ‘Why does it break your heart?’ asked Guy, genuinely puzzled.

  ‘Ah, if I could only tell,’ she said. ‘But I canna.’

  This impasse was breached by their having arrived at their destination, so they parked and hurried inside just in time to buy the tickets and get themselves settled in before the great work commenced, once again, its déroulement.

  Much later that night when Guy had gone to bed, ‘What did you really think of him?’ Susannah said to Geoffrey. ‘Now that we’ve had a good long look.’

  Geoffrey was catching up with the Sunday papers—‘Not that there’s a bloody thing worth reading in these rags, except for some of the political commentary’—he looked up, nonplussed. ‘Who?’ he said. ‘You mean Buster? A genius. Haven’t I always said so?’

  ‘Not Buster Keaton, you fool. I mean Jonathan.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I see. Jonathan. Well, as I said, his liquor’s first-rate. More than that I cannot tell.’

  ‘Oh, do make an effort.’

  ‘What do you want me to say? He’s just another lawyer, isn’t he, just another cunning, cautious, conservative, overpaid jackass. Not my kinda guy, but why should he be? I’ll be happy to drink his wine whenever the occasion arises.’

  ‘You’re the limit!’ said Susannah. ‘Of all the snobbish, prejudiced, narrow-minded—’

  ‘Ah, you girls,’ Geoffrey interrupted. ‘You do love a man of means, don’t you?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘You can’t buck biology.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re programmed to admire these good-provider types. Can’t think what you’re doing with the likes of me.’

  ‘No, I must try and work that out some time.’

  ‘The answer may shock you.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘Can one be shocked but not surprised?’

  ‘Oh, belt up!’

  She threw the colour supplement at him and he replied with the review section. Soon the newspapers were in a state of disarray exac
tly analogous to the world they chronicled.

  22

  ‘There, what did I tell you? Was I right or was I not?’

  ‘What did you tell me?’

  ‘Transformation. Stagnant no more. Sweet young thing. All systems go.’

  ‘All right, you were right. So far. Although young isn’t quite the word, she’s almost as old as I am.’

  ‘You’re young.’

  ‘You’re sweet.’

  ‘There you are then. And I was right.’

  ‘I think she’s got more brains than you gave her credit for.’

  ‘Oh, brains, yes of course, isn’t it extraordinary how you’ve all got brains, these days. It must be a mutation.’

  ‘If only men could catch it.’

  ‘You don’t catch mutations. They just arrive. Acts of God.’

  ‘Dear old God. He’s certainly done Jonathan a favour. I hope the man is grateful.’

  ‘I doubt if Jonathan believes in God.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No one to be grateful to. Therefore no gratitude. Dangerous vacuum in the circumstances.’

  ‘I don’t believe in God either, and neither do you. Do we have a dangerous vacuum?’

  ‘No, but we’re different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ve got Henrietta.’

  ‘Oh, yes. We certainly have.’

  ‘Nicola was very good with Henrietta, did you notice? I did try to persuade her to go to bed before they arrived but it was useless.’

  ‘Whatever happened to obedience?’

  ‘Obedience? Oh, that went the way of—well, what?—liberty bodices, and cod-liver oil—and the rest—years ago.’

  ‘Seems a mistake to me.’

  ‘I can’t personally see there’s much to be said for cod-liver oil, or liberty bodices.’

  ‘Or obedience?’

  ‘The problem is that we’re all too worn out these days to instil it, I’m afraid. Anarchy is so much easier.’

  Alfred looked almost grim, but then his expression brightened. ‘She’ll have to learn it at school,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lizzie, ‘so she will. That’s the best place for it. That’s one of the things school is for.’

  ‘The one where she’s going, anyway,’ said Alfred.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Lizzie. ‘She’ll get the hang of it quick enough, from all I can remember.’ And for a moment she looked almost grim herself. ‘Poor little sprog,’ she said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Alfred. ‘We all need something to cut our teeth on.’

  ‘She’s actually quite a good child, on average,’ said Lizzie. ‘Good enough, as it were.’

  ‘I should dashed well hope so,’ said Alfred. ‘She’d soon hear about it from me if she weren’t.’

  ‘I expect she knows that.’

  ‘Good.’

  23

  Jonathan was driving back from Gloucestershire, with the sun setting behind him, Radio Four wittering away from the dashboard. He was about half way home when he got caught in a tail-back, and the wittering became intolerable. He switched over to tape and stuck in the first cassette he was able to lay his hand on. It was a bootlegged talking book which he vaguely remembered some BBC employee friend of Nicola’s having given to her.

  ‘It might be handy for long journeys,’ she’d told him, putting it in the glove box.

  The story began, and went on: some footling tale about some shop assistants in an antipodean department store, fretting about their wombs and their wardrobes and other empty spaces—ye gods! No wonder women were forever peering into one’s soul! They were compensating for their own innate emptiness. Perhaps, truly, they had no souls of their own. Jonathan was altogether prepared to consider this proposition. Of course no one knew what a soul was, or even that such a thing objectively existed, but it was fairly certain, thought Jonathan, that women did not have souls of the same order as those of men. Jonathan was much too stricken and angry to be bothered to think straight.

  By teatime on Sunday afternoon he’d had more than enough: his father’s expostulations, his mother’s irrelevancies, the whole horror of having been born, there, to them and of having had, therefore, to experience just what he had experienced: the burden of its remembrance and the agony of its continuation, even now, so long as they all should live: the banality and the pain: neither was more endurable than the other, and the admixture was poisonous. He did not want to be Jonathan Finch, but he was nevertheless condemned to it, through no fault of his own.

  Just as he was packing up the last of his things in the holdall, just before tea, his mother had come into his room.

  ‘Excuse me, darling,’ she’d said—her diffidence was not her least irritating characteristic—‘I just thought—look—I have something to show you—here.’

  And he’d turned from the chest of drawers, hairbrush in hand: ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘It’s your great-grandmother’s lovely ring,’ she’d said. ‘I’ve just had it cleaned. You can’t be too careful with these old settings. Look, hasn’t it come up beautifully?’

  Jonathan obliged her so far as to inspect it. He wasn’t interested in such things, but it looked even to him fairly impressive: a pigeon’s blood ruby encircled by diamonds.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Sophie was trying to choose the right words. ‘I’ve never worn it,’ she said. ‘Somehow, rubies are not my stone. I have the wrong colouring.’

  This was correct. She, like Jonathan and his sister, Clarissa, was very fair.

  ‘Issa’s been after me for years to let her have it,’ she went on, ‘but I’ve always meant to give it to you for an engagement ring for the girl you decide to marry. That is if you’d like it. If you think she’d like it. And then I was just thinking the other day, whoops, what if Jonathan were to pop the question and go out and buy a ring, never knowing I meant him to have this—wouldn’t that be perfectly silly? I should have offered it to you years ago! What a duffer I am. Anyway, no harm done, I hope. Here, darling. Please take it. Or I’ll mind it for you, whichever you prefer. But as long as you know it’s here. I’ll have a codicil put on my will so that it goes to you anyway, just in case anything happens to me before you should get engaged. It’s an awfully good stone, you know, a pigeon’s blood ruby is very rare, and the setting of course is antique, it really is worth quite a lot of money, I was surprised—I’m sure any girl would love it.’

  Jonathan could have wept. Irritation—even hostility—vexation, sorrow, shame, guilt, gratitude and, finally, love, helpless, unarticulated, endless, all violently clashed together in his miserable heart. He gazed down at the ring, which still lay, innocent, invulnerable, in the palm of his mother’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He looked up at her. There were tears in his eyes. ‘That’s really—’ but he could say no more, he was afraid of crying, and furious, furious at the prospect, furious with himself, furious with life, which could turn such tricks.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Sophie hastily, ‘it’s nothing at all. I’ve always meant you to have it. Shall I keep it here for you? It’s on the insurance, you wouldn’t have to worry.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jonathan, his tears now suppressed. ‘Please. That would be truly kind!’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s a pleasure.’

  There was no need to say exactly how her kindness might be repaid, and Jonathan felt a new anguish, a new guilt, in his secret knowledge of the awful unlikelihood of making this repayment in the near or even distant future. The ring might glitter here in the darkness for years, even decades, until with his mother’s death it came (like a homing pigeon) to him. He suddenly remembered another thing about pigeons. That they mated, so he’d heard, for life.

  Later on, with tea and all its malheurs—‘Oh, do have another scone, won’t you? I made them just for you’—‘I suppose you’re much too busy up in London to get do
wn here more often than you do—of course you have better things to do of a Saturday than play cricket, why the bloody hell should you? Let the village team go to the devil, who cares these days? I suppose you’d rather be pumping iron, isn’t that what they call it, in some foul gymnasium, with a lot of blacks, and women wearing silver leotards. I’ll tell Anstruther he can forget having your services this season, or any other I dare say. Sic transit, sic transit, who the hell cares’—with all this, Jonathan’s mind was delivered from the state which had been induced by Sophie’s present of the ring; by the time he was on the point of leaving—‘Back to London, then! Sooner you than me!’—he suffered merely from the usual symptoms. Gloucestershiritis, he and Issa (in the days before they’d grown so slowly, but finally, apart) had used to call it. But it had become with the passing years more virulent and intense: then it had been a bad cold, but now it was influenza.

  And he was out of the county altogether before it was revealed to him that, of course, his mother, in showing him, then giving him, the ring, had managed—and had this been her purpose?—once more to peer, however inconclusively, into his soul.

  Just as he had turned the key in the ignition she had frantically tapped on the window. ‘Wait!’ she cried. ‘I almost forgot. Wait!’

  She ran inside and returned with a carrier bag and signalled to him to open the window.

  ‘Marmalade,’ she said. ‘For Nicola. With my love, of course. Yes, I know you don’t care for it, any longer, but I’m sure she’d like to have some. Homemade is so much nicer. There!’

  Marmalade, for Nicola. With any luck, by the time he got back to the flat, if not long before, she’d be gone.

  24

  ‘I mean, I think it’s a bit too cool altogether,’ Lizzie declared, ‘for Jonathan to ask you to leave this flat. You were here first.’

  ‘Well, he did say I could buy him out if I liked,’ said Nicola miserably. ‘But I can’t afford to.’

  ‘Exactly!’ cried Lizzie. ‘As he perfectly well knows.’