Chapter 22
One evening the French ambassador gave a party for an actress who had come to town, and Antoine invited Tom and Guy.
The ambassador’s residence was on a private road behind Kensington Gardens.
The boys, being three fifteen-year-olds, drank slightly too much champagne, then stole one of Antoine’s father’s cigars and escaped to the front garden, where they sat in the still, warm autumn night, taking it in turns to suck alternately on the cigar and the bottle of brandy Antoine had purloined from the drinks cabinet while pretending to enjoy both.
The road was wide, and quiet, since no traffic was allowed. Inside, the lights of the party and the chandelier in the grand ballroom glittered, the soft chatter of the guests just audible.
‘What do you think,’ Antoine said into the silence between them, ‘is going to change the most? In the next few years?’
Tom, leaning against a magnolia tree, felt light-headed and intensely wise – as though he understood all the problems of the world. ‘People,’ he said. ‘How we see each other. Man’s inhumanity to man and all that.’
‘Revolution?’ Antoine raised an eyebrow. ‘The British will never revolt. You are too bourgeois, every last one of you.’
‘I say,’ murmured Guy.
‘I think you’re wrong,’ said Tom. ‘I think a revolution will come. Class, race, everything. We will all be changed at the end of it.’
Antoine laughed. ‘Ah, no. You are all too – what is the word? The way you boil your vegetables is the way you attack life. You will over-boil the vegetables of change. You will boil everything so it is tasteless and shapeless.’
‘Absolute rot,’ said the always amiable Guy, but he didn’t move, just handed the cigar to Tom.
A policeman walked slowly past, truncheon over his shoulder, staring at them. ‘Good evening, officer,’ Antoine called to him, nodding, and the policeman, peering at them, said, ‘Ah. Mr Runnow. Goodnight to you, sir.’
‘Your police are placid, lazy, they do not fire, they do not shoot. Yes, it is as I say: you boil the life out of everything. Ha.’ And, as Antoine moved to lean back against the magnolia tree, he missed the branch behind him and fell backwards on to the ground with a loud, cursing oath.
The other two roared with laughter, then helped him up.
‘The vegetables of change have deserted you,’ said Tom. He found he couldn’t stop laughing. ‘But, still. I think change will come.’
‘You sound like Celia,’ said Guy. ‘She’s always banging on about it.
Drives mother up the wall. She says Celia needs to go to finishing school and start wearing gloves and frocks and going for tea with old ladies, like Susan.
And there’s Celia hopping about the place in black polo necks, trying to break out at night and go to folk clubs, smoking surreptitious cigarettes and talking about fomenting riots. ’
‘Oh, Celia,’ said Antoine appreciatively, lingering over the syllables of her name, and Guy, who was untested when it came to girls and any mention of that sort of thing, looked horrified. ‘That’s my sister, old chap,’ he said, stiffer than ever.
Tom swallowed, and hoped Guy didn’t notice how uncomfortable he was, how any mention of Celia made him feel rather funny. He’d seen her several times since her sister’s party, but he had thought about her far more.
‘Mr Carter asked me, what do I want to be doing in ten years’ time?
’ Guy said, when a little later they’d thanked their host and left, walking up towards Notting Hill.
‘One couldn’t say, for example, one loathes politics and all that reading gives one a headache and what one would really like to be doing is, oh, I don’t know, playing cricket or messing around on the trumpet with some other chaps for a living. ’
The others listened in sympathetic silence.
Guy’s place at Trinity and his career in the Civil Service, like his father and his father before him, were clearly mapped out.
But jazz was his life, the trumpet his closest companion.
Tom had never seen anyone work as hard at anything as Guy did at the trumpet.
He practised for hours on end. And Tom loved, on the rare occasions that he saw him play, how Guy’s face changed: his diffident, rather world-weary natural expression giving way to someone experiencing almost unconscious ecstasy – utterly unselfconscious, unaware of his surroundings, head flung back, eyes slightly rolling in their sockets.
He didn’t care how he looked: he was the instrument and the instrument was him.
Antoine, by contrast, was to train to be an avocat , had a place at the Sorbonne and was looking forward to returning to Paris.
He knew a girl, Sophie, whom his family liked and whom he fully expected to marry.
He had lost his virginity, the only boy in the year so far as they knew, the previous summer on the ?le de Ré with the older sister of a family friend.
Antoine had no reason to lie about this; he did not court popularity, one of several things he had in common with Tom and Guy.
‘In ten years’ time it will be 1971,’ said Antoine, blowing out his lips and taking the cigar from Guy. ‘I shall expect to be on my way to my own practice. I shall have an apartment in Paris, and a house in the South. I shall have travelled across America –’
‘You? But you hate America!’ said Tom, astonished.
‘Do not be reductive, Raven. It doesn’t suit you. I do not like the striving for a new imperialism of America when France and Britain struggle to release themselves from theirs. That is all. It is a philosophical question, not an ideological position. You understand. Besides, I love hamburgers.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Absolutely.’ Both the others nodded certainly. Tom noticed with some relief that Guy was walking in a slight zigzag, one eye partially shut. (He had, famously, fallen asleep the year before, as they walked back from a coffee bar in Soho.)
‘What about you, Raven?’ said Antoine. ‘In ten years’ time, what do you want to be doing?’
Tom screwed up his nose, concentrating on the view ahead, which, in the dark and after a few drinks, was trickier to navigate than it had been on the way there. ‘I have no idea,’ he said.
‘Typical,’ said Guy. ‘A man of mystery to the last.’
‘I’m jolly well not.’
‘Oh, you are, Raven. One doesn’t know your people, your house, your views – you take the long view on everything.’
‘You’ve met my aunt!’
‘Barely. To wave to on the street. Look here, it doesn’t matter,’ said Guy, smiling. ‘Don’t look so furious.’
‘I’m not furious.’
‘Of course.’
Tom hated it when Guy was reasonable. He said, ‘You sound like a ruddy civil servant already, Mannering.’
‘Come off it. Forget I spoke. Now, tell me what you’ll be doing ten years hence: 10 October 1971.’
‘I want to be in love.’ Tom spoke without thinking. The brandy seemed to make his mouth heavy. ‘I want to love someone so much that it’s my life’s work, that we exist only for each other, that we make the world – the world better because of our love.’
The other two laughed. ‘How bourgeois, Raven,’ Antoine said.
‘I don’t think that’s bourgeois,’ said Guy, and Tom turned to him gratefully. ‘But I do think it’s so pretentious as to be sickening.’
Tom shrugged, as if he couldn’t care less. ‘You’re entitled to your –’ He stopped. ‘Oh dear.’
They had reached the top of the street that opened on to Bayswater Road.
The night was colder now, the stars visible in the sky above Kensington Gardens.
Autumn was coming. A man was leaning against a lamp post, the light pooling down on his bent form as he emptied his stomach contents into the gutter.
Guy, who was a compassionate chap, said, ‘Should we perhaps –’
‘No,’ said Tom, disgusted. ‘Leave him.’
‘He’s a tramp,’ said Antoine. ‘I often see him. Ignore him.’
‘I don’t think he’s a tramp,’ said Guy. ‘Oh, I say. He’s waving at you.
’ The man had straightened up and, oblivious to his recent troubles, was waving at them enthusiastically with one hand, cramming a battered old trilby on to his head with the other, all the while smiling at them and running his tongue ruminatively around his teeth.
‘He’s rather noble-looking, actually. Help! What should one do?’
‘Ignore him,’ said Tom. He was sure, even from here, he could smell the old man’s vomit. And then the man called over:
‘Tom! Old thing! I say! You walking this way?’
‘I’d better go,’ said Tom, striding off. ‘I’ll see you chaps on Monday. Thanks awfully for a terrific evening –’
‘Tom! I say, can you hear me? Tom, old thing!’
The cheerfulness was the worst part about it, how oblivious he was to it all.
‘Raven,’ said Guy. ‘I think he knows you –’
‘Yes,’ said Tom, and he took a deep breath.
‘He’s my uncle. I’m coming, Uncle H. Stay there.
’ He crossed the wide road, dodging a lone cyclist. His friends watched in silence.
Tom nodded at his uncle. ‘Come on.’ He walked on, motioning for him to follow.
Henry stank of alcohol, of vomit, of staleness.
Tom’s cheeks burned but he did not flinch.
Raising his arm to his friends, he set off west, followed by Uncle Henry, stumbling quietly in his wake.
‘Slow down, young Tom!’ Henry muttered, as they passed Notting Hill Gate, then the cinema, with hordes of people coming out of the late showing of What a Carve Up! He paused to stare, open-mouthed, at the poster: Shirley Eaton taking her clothes off. ‘I said slow down, my boy!’
‘We’re nearly home, Uncle Henry,’ Tom said, stopping to wait for his uncle, and it was then he realized he felt nothing like disgust any more, just vaguely sorry for him. ‘And I’m not a boy any more, sir.’