Chapter 24 #2
‘I’m forty next year, boy!’ Gordon had said with great amusement when he noticed Tom glancing at his grizzled grey temples.
‘I’m an old man, like all the old men round here.
I’ll be on the allotment complaining about the weather …
you’ll see. I’ve got an apple tree,’ he said, proudly. ‘Full crop this year, two boxes.’
‘You always loved apples,’ Tom said. ‘I’m so glad, Gordon.’
‘I love them, my boy. And one day you’ll come to Trinidad with me, and you’ll try a cocorite.’
‘Yes, please.’ Tom smiled but suddenly gripped Gordon’s wrist tightly. He remembered that first dreadful day, when he’d run away from the bomb site. Gordon had picked him up, hugged him. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said suddenly.
‘You too, boy. Be good to know what you do next,’ said Gordon, inclining his head as if he wasn’t sure about something.
‘Can I write to you?’ Tom said suddenly, taking a small pencil and a scrap of paper from his jacket pocket and thrusting them at Gordon.
‘’Course, Tom.’ Gordon wrote down his address. ‘Keep in touch, you understand? And – listen to me, Tom. Go well. You’re a good boy. A good man, I should say. Look at the size of you. A young oak, aren’t you? I bet I was right about you and the ladies.’ Tom blushed.
‘Dad!’ said Angela, tugging at his coat. ‘I’m cold. There’s sausages for tea. Let’s go!’
‘Okay, okay, Angie. Just one moment.’ Gordon looked down, stroked the pink-and-blue beads in her hair and turned back to Tom. ‘How’s your aunt? She okay?’
‘Not really.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Gordon looked round, at the red-and-green lights on the road, the twinkling Christmas decorations in the window of the house next to them.
‘You still never heard about it all, I guess. And it’s so long ago now.
’ Angie tugged on her father’s arm again and Tom knew time was running out.
Someone pushed past them to get into the shop, and Gordon moved closer to Tom.
‘But I sure wish they’d tell you, Tom my boy.
I wish they’d free themselves from it. For themselves, but for you too, Tom.
It’s coming for you, and you can’t avoid it. ’
‘What on earth does that mean?’ said Tom, trying to sound jolly.
Gordon hesitated. ‘We both came to the city looking for something new, right, Tom? I found it. You didn’t find it, not yet.’
‘Oh, I did!’ said Tom happily, but Gordon shook his head.
‘None of this, Tom, none of it’s the person you are. I know you, remember. I knew you before you were born. I know where you come from. What …’ He stopped. ‘I’m just saying, perhaps this isn’t it, not yet.’
‘I’m very happy,’ Tom said. He had to shoehorn her name in whenever he could. ‘I’ve got a lovely, wonderful girlfriend, Celia. Guy’s sister. You’ll have to meet her, Gordon. You’ll love her.’ He smiled at him. ‘Honestly, you’re wrong. It’s all fine.’
‘Ah, take no notice of me,’ said Gordon suddenly. ‘I’m wet and tired and grumpy, that’s all.’ He handed him his address, folded over. ‘Yes, Angela, I hear you, and I’m ready. Say goodbye to Tom. He’s a good friend of mine.’
Tom shook Gordon’s hand and patted Angela on the arm. She glared at him through her dark eyelashes, turned around and stomped off, her little arms wrapped awkwardly round her small body, then began to splash defiantly in puddles, kicking up the grubby sleet-water.
‘Oh, that one. Boy, she gives me trouble,’ said Gordon, looking thoroughly delighted about it.
Tom watched them walk away towards the bus stop, on their way back to Acton, where there were sausages for tea and the maps of London, the city Gordon had introduced him to, on the wall no doubt, and the allotment and a family life.
He turned and hurried back to Montpelier Crescent, and tried to forget what Gordon had said.
Tom had planned out the whole evening. He was on the events committee, and knew when the band were on because he was introducing them.
He had primed two chaps to be on standby with the requisite items. He had the ring in his breast pocket, which he had extracted from Montpelier Crescent by prior agreement.
‘Mother’s ring!’ Henry had said over Easter, when Tom had asked for it. ‘Dear God, what on earth do you want that for?’
‘Well … for Celia.’
‘Who?’ Jenny had said.
‘Celia Mannering. My girlfriend, Aunt Jenny – she came to tea, remember? You’ve met her.
I told you before. I’m going to ask her to marry me.
’ Tom cleared his throat. He knew he mustn’t sound nervous; they were so odd, Henry and Jenny, unaware of anything outside their front door – ‘Who is Sergeant Pepper? Why does the wireless keep droning on about Sergeant Pepper? Young idiots’ – but they had a canny operational ability to pick up on insecurities, cracks in a smooth facade.
They were like the bedraggled old herons you found along the canal up by Paddington, standing hunched on the tow path, perfectly still, only their chin feathers swaying like wispy beards, waiting to dive, dive in, snatch, grab.
‘You’re marrying someone?’ Henry looked up from The Times , which was spread out on the kitchen table. He had an old pair of reading lorgnettes in his hand, like a maiden aunt in a drawing-room farce. ‘Tom, really, dear boy. You’re a child!’
‘It’s very good news,’ said Jenny, blinking. ‘Hugh Mannering is a super chap – you remember him, Henry dear, a few years below you, in Liddell’s. He was at Caius with Donald Urquhart, you know. This is their daughter. We’d love to meet her, Tom.’
‘You have met her, Aunt Jenny.’
‘Oh. Really? When?’
‘Several times.’ He had had Celia to stay, in the tiny, ordered bedroom at the top of the house, wilfully disregarding convention, where he had spent all night fucking her, with an intensity more usually shown by her, not him.
He had found it intensely, satisfyingly liberating to have this gorgeous, gamine, svelte, curvaceous, smooth, divine beauty on top of him in the room where he had spent so many sad hours missing his father, conjuring up worlds around him.
As he climaxed inside Celia yet again on the first night she stayed over, pushing as far inside her as he could, shifting around so she gasped, holding her face between his hands and rasping into her ear, ‘I want you so much’, he kept thinking of Tom, aged nine, in bed, staring at Helen Caught Bathing – how silly a painting it was, how unrealistic the women were, with their globular breasts and their pert, come-hither luridness, nothing like real life, and then, to help him delay coming, he wondered where Helen Caught Bathing was now, whose eyes rested on it, in whose house was it on display.
And, as Celia arched her back and then collapsed on to him, sweating, smiling, red-faced, glistening with happiness, and he rolled over in the tiny bed, riding out the last waves of pleasure with her, he wondered if his aunt or uncle could hear them. But they didn’t seem to.
They didn’t even notice when, the following day, she came downstairs to breakfast and drank a cup of black coffee with them. Or, if they did, they didn’t say anything.
Since then his aunt and uncle had met her in more formal circumstances: at his twenty-first birthday dinner at Simpsons of Piccadilly, a supremely awkward evening when Henry drank too much and Jenny fussed and started at everything; and at a cocktail party given by their new neighbours on New Year’s Eve, where Jenny wore a straw hat, hair escaping wildly around the sides, and talked about mysticism and runes with their bewildered hostess, a Swedish diplomat’s wife, then cried and had to be taken home.
‘I’m going to ask Celia to marry me at the Commem Ball in June,’ Tom said to them now. ‘I’m going up on stage in front of everyone. She’s always saying I’m not wild enough. I need to make her believe I’m not square.’
‘You could never be square, Tom darling!’ said Jenny. ‘You have the soul of an artist. Being wild is overrated, anyway. It’s more of a philosophical attitude, not knocking policemen’s hats off or streaking or being fined for all sorts of dreadful things, like those Rolling Stones.’
‘I suppose,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes!’ Jenny said, beaming. She stood up, went over to the bureau and handed him a gold-tooled black leather box. Inside was a gold ring twisted at the top into an intricate, beautifully wrought knot, topped with a large diamond and sapphire in a claw setting.
‘Jenny,’ Tom said, suddenly rather afraid. ‘Are you sure?’ He had been worried his family ring wouldn’t be good enough for Celia Mannering, granddaughter of a duchess, and now, staring at it, the enormity of what he was about to do swept over him, felling him. He felt knocked for six by it.
‘It’s rather special. Burne-Jones designed it for your great-grandmother, Aurelia. She was Julian’s mother, a great beauty, even the prince of Wales thought so.’
His uncle gave a loud, trumpeting laugh and lowered his paper, an incredulous expression on his face. Tom looked over, confused. Jenny glared at her brother, a look of spite and fury.
‘Oh!’ said Henry. He made a moue with his mouth. ‘I – awfully sorry. Lovely ring,’ he remarked drily. ‘Delightful history, and all that.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Jenny, dismissing Henry with a sideways glance of irritation.
‘You may give it to Celia with our love.’ Then she hesitated; taking out the ring, she clutched it between her fingers, gazing intently at it.
‘Let me go and polish it up.’ She stood up, stumbling towards the pantry, and he saw tears filling her eyes.
Next to her, Henry raised the paper to his face, flicking it out flat with a loud whipcrack that echoed around the kitchen. The light was fading as the sun edged higher into the sky. LEFTIST MPS JEER US VICE-PRESIDENT , the headline said.
‘Damn commies,’ Uncle Henry muttered, one hand shooting out from behind the paper to swill some more from his glass. ‘Got us all by the throat. Out to ruin the whole damn show.’ He burped loudly.