Chapter 4 The Company He Kept #2
And so it proved. The very next week, George arrived in a whirl of Miss Dior, effusive greetings, and carpetbags overspilling clothes.
She declared herself thrilled with the room and the whole setup.
Before long, she had charmed the household—even Greta, the ill-humored daily woman, hitherto supposed impervious to charm.
Never mind that George’s room turned into a constant dump.
She flicked cigarette ash on the floor (even though Honor banned smoking in bedrooms), slept in complexion cream that made greasy marks on her pillows, and left dirty underclothes strewn everywhere.
Lesser domestic crimes resulted, typically, in Greta withdrawing her labor.
She wouldn’t even run a duster over surfaces if she came upon a room in too much disorder.
But George was exempt from the normal rules.
Greta scolded her, but she was quickly placated by George’s extravagant self-flagellation.
“You must think I was raised by wolves! How can I ever atone for my horrendous slovenliness? I’m a disgrace to my sex, aren’t I?
” And so on and so forth, until Greta was embracing her and clucking her tongue and saying now, now.
The only person immune to George’s legendary appeal was Robbie.
Why she stirred in him such antipathy, he couldn’t explain.
She just made him feel ill at ease. The worst was when he accidentally encountered her in the company of her men friends.
She would smoothly and warmly make introductions, only for Robbie to revert to a bumbling clueless undergraduate.
He always imagined them discussing him afterward.
“I know, darling,” George would say. “Isn’t he an odd little chap?
I do my best to be kind, but really, what can you do with someone like that?
He gives me the creeps, if I’m honest. That’s Honor for you, unfortunately.
She will adopt these pathetic little lame ducks.
” And the man, who in Robbie’s perception was always infeasibly handsome and athletic, the type to head a rowing or rugby team, would laugh briefly before forgetting about him entirely.
Robbie was intrigued to hear that Honor had rescued George from her previous situation.
He’d assumed George floated from one congenial atmosphere to the next, invulnerable to distress or misfortune.
Hence his surprise when she’d confided in him the other night.
For the first time, he saw her as a vulnerable young woman, not the dauntless figure whose poise he so envied.
Now he was the keeper of her shameful secret.
Whoever would have thought it? And not one, but two of her exemplary specimens of manhood were in the frame!
It wasn’t surprising, he reflected. They all fairly oozed virility.
Robbie wondered if he himself would ever have a child.
The notion was somehow preposterous. It was disturbing to consider that at his age, his father the reverend had sired five children.
Maybe that was Robbie’s problem. Maybe growing up as the only and youngest brother to four sisters had warped him in some irrevocable fashion.
What was that game they used to play? Flapper, that was it.
They’d dress up and pretend to be nightclub girls who danced with men for money.
His eldest sister always took the part of the man, and the rules required her to start by offering a lavish compliment, in response to which they each told a wallet-loosening sob story, of escalating rococo-ness, to explain why they were reduced to selling their company in a seamy Soho nightery.
Thus were many summer afternoons happily squandered.
Robbie had slightly exaggerated about making a friend of Jimmy. They’d shared one proper encounter, when Robbie invited him into his room for a cup of tea. It was late in the afternoon, and they’d met on the stairs.
“That would be very nice,” responded Jimmy. “Very nice indeed. So long as you’re not busy, that is.”
Robbie asked him to sit down while he lit the gas ring and put the kettle on.
But Jimmy walked around the room, looking at everything: Robbie’s shelves of books, his pictures, the Chinese bowl where he kept cufflinks and sentimental scraps like cinema ticket stubs.
“I must say, this is homely,” said Jimmy sincerely.
“You’ve arranged things well, haven’t you?
” He peered inside a decoupaged metal box on a high shelf and lifted out a brown leather holster.
“Is this a pistol? From the war?” He opened the strap, ignoring Robbie’s request that he put it back.
“That’s smart!” he said, holding the gun in his hand. “Is it loaded?”
“No, of course not. Sit down and have some tea.”
Jimmy sat on the desk chair and accepted his teacup.
“Who’s that?” he said. He looked toward a silver-framed photograph of a young woman gazing unsmilingly at the camera.
Her pale hair was shorn into a shiny helmet, and she wore long earrings and a choker necklace.
“Is she your girl?” He sounded faintly incredulous.
Robbie was used to this. Pamela, while no beauty, had a sort of arresting sexiness.
“Yes and no,” said Robbie. He sat down on the rug, his shoulders against the wooden bedstead. “It’s my wife. We’re separated.” He tried to think of the last time he and Pamela had been in touch. It was six months ago, maybe even nine.
“Oh dear, what happened? If you’d rather not talk about it, of course, I—”
“No, I don’t mind. She got fed up with me, that’s all.
I can’t honestly say I blame her. She was always wanting me to get a proper job.
You know, instead of scrabbling together a living as a literary person.
She wanted babies, and a nice house, and the usual things girls want.
In the end, I told her she’d be better off finding someone else. ”
“How long were you, you know, together?” How brave, thought Jimmy, ditching your wife like that, not a care for what people might think.
“Not long. We met at university. She’s living in Cambridge now, working as a secretary in a solicitor’s office.”
Jimmy frowned. “But she must be mad. Who’d want to do that instead of sharing this life you’ve got? Living in London, working in publishing. It’s much more exciting, isn’t it?”
“It depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Not everyone wants excitement, do they?”
“Too true. I certainly don’t.”
“Oh, why’s that?”
Jimmy looked rueful, almost maudlin. “When I was a kid, I was a right little hooligan. I don’t know why, even.
I never meant any harm. I had too much energy or something.
I was always getting into bother of one sort or another.
The way I was going, I could’ve ended up in prison, like a few of my mates.
” The first part, at least, was true. It was proving more difficult than he’d expected, sticking to a consistent story.
He just hadn’t expected these people to be so nice.
Astonishingly, they seemed to find him acceptable.
While he knew he’d be better off keeping to himself, it was so novel, so strangely vitalizing, to not be treated like scum, to enjoy intelligent conversation.
Robbie was mildly shocked by the mention of prison, but he didn’t want to show it. “I think locking people up is barbaric, don’t you?”
Jimmy laughed. “I bloomin’ well do not. Society’s got to punish criminals, doesn’t it? Or there’d be anarchy.” Only the cosseted upper classes, he thought, could ever imagine otherwise.
“Would there really, though? It’s not as if we’ve ever tried, as a society, to solve crime with rehabilitation rather than punishment.”
Jimmy raised his eyebrows in amused forbearance.
“One of those bleeding hearts, are you?” He took a sip of tea.
“At least when criminals are locked up, they can’t be a bad influence on others.
Fathers passing down evil ways to their sons, and that type of thing.
” He shook his head. “All I know is, if someone murders your mother, you won’t be thinking about how to rehabilitate him into an upstanding member of society.
You’ll be hoping they throw away the key.
Better still, hanging.” He made an unnecessary noose-tugging gesture.
Robbie thought about his tyrant of a mother, who reserved all her affection for the three border collies that followed her everywhere.
She dressed year-round in a battered sou’wester and a green hunting jacket dating from Victoria’s reign; her favorite activities were smoking, barking instructions at her social inferiors, and threatening cheeky village children with her shotgun (also of dangerously ancient vintage).
You knew when Harriet Trafford was nearby from her particular smell, a mixture of Senior Service cigarettes and the rose water she brewed and splashed on in lieu of bathing, which she considered unhealthy.
An abiding memory: When Robbie was six, he proudly presented her with a poem he’d written.
A bleak little reflection on eternity, it went something like, “The stars which shone / In our lifetimes / Will shine still when we’re gone / The church bells, their chimes / Keep ringing though death has come.
” She declared the poem “a feeble effort,” which “lacked scansion” and was “just doggerel, really.” His first harsh professional rejection, the taste of many more to come.
Robbie tried to imagine someone murdering Harriet. He didn’t fancy their chances.
“I suppose,” he ventured, “I can understand the eagerness for capital punishment when the case is cut-and-dried. But it so rarely is. What about poor Derek Bentley?” He referred to the simpleminded young man who, just weeks earlier, had hanged for the murder of a policeman.
“Dead at nineteen. He didn’t even hold the gun. ”
“You want to know what I think about Derek Bentley?” Jimmy was suddenly vehement.
“I think he ought to have been a far sight more careful about the company he kept.” For goodness’ sake calm down, he told himself.
Don’t take it to heart so. He went on, but tried to sound more casual: “Christopher Craig—the actual shooter of that copper—his older brother, older by ten years, had got him into armed robberies when he was just a kid. The brother’s in prison now, but too late for Christopher, who’s there, too.
And rightly so.” He finished his tea. “So you’re not with your wife anymore. Got any girlfriends?”
Robbie smiled at the conversational swerve. “Not really. No one special, at least.” No one at all, but he didn’t feel like announcing that.
“What about the girls who live in the house? They’re both nice-looking, aren’t they? I thought maybe you and Miss Mountford…”
“George? Gosh, no. She wouldn’t look twice at me.”
Jimmy thought about this. “I don’t see why not.” He frowned. “What did Mrs. Wilson mean when she said George was the linchpin of the household?”
Robbie snorted. “She meant George can do no wrong in her eyes, that’s what. She adores her. Don’t ask me why.”
“Yeah. I thought she seemed a bit stuck-up myself. But I’m off women, just for the moment. Got too much else to think about. Who needs the aggravation?”
“The aggravation,” echoed Robbie, testing the phrase on his tongue. “Exactly.”
Later, in his own room, Jimmy went over their conversation in his mind.
Had that declaration of being “off women, just for the moment” sounded the right note?
Robbie had seemed to take it at face value.
A lot of people should find it suspicious: a man his age, still without a wife.
No parents, either, though that was hardly his fault.
They’d both died young, especially his mother, who was only fifty-three.
But she was old for her age, worn out and sick of everything.
She’d been like that for as far back as he could remember.
His earliest memory: He was no more than a year old, in the drawer that doubled as his cot, breathing in the smell of beeswax polish, looking up at the white ceiling, and blubbing.
Not wailing, just sobbing quietly. Nothing much was the matter probably, except for wanting to be picked up.
His mother, father, and sister kept coming in and out of the room, talking to each other while ignoring him.
He knew—knew in some cosmic, prophetic way—that he was doomed to stay separate from them.
They were a unit and he was unwanted, a nuisance, to be fed and clothed and kept alive, but only out of obligation.
As he grew older, he saw that other small children were liked by adults, even doted upon.
But his essential wrongness somehow repelled affection.
If a better explanation existed for why no one liked him, he couldn’t imagine what it might be.
He never asked his mother why she rarely touched him, or his sister why her expression always held such—this was the only word for it—such distaste.
In the mirror, he saw a normal, nice-looking boy, so the problem had to lie deeper.
When he was around ten, he resolved not only to learn what was wrong with him, but to fix it and live happily in the world, just like everyone else.
Now he was nearing thirty, and though he hadn’t managed to achieve his goal, he hadn’t given up.