Chapter 24
Alone in his room, Tom slumped to the floor, pulling his bow tie from his neck and, without realizing it, gave a low, animal moan of pain that grew louder and louder, until his throat hurt, and his neighbour, Richardson, banged on the walls.
‘You made an utter idiot of yourself in front of everyone, Raven. You’re drunk – go to bed, old chap. Think about what the hell you’ve done.’
Tom lay on the floor. He did not think he could move.
He swallowed, his throat hurting: he was so thirsty.
He’d drunk nothing but champagne for hours.
Memory kept assaulting him. His voice echoing around the sweltering marquee.
The uncomprehending faces, expressions of stilted embarrassment turning to open contempt as he stuttered on.
Try as he might to block them out, images from the evening unfurled across the room as though they were playing on a big screen: Celia, in a black satin minidress, her dark pixie haircut and flushed cheeks, her incredible silver shoes, her slim tanned fingers entwined round his, clutching his arm as they set off from his room towards the sound of the ball.
And, as always, the utter pride and joy he felt when she was by his side, a longing to shout to the world: Look!
Look at my wonderful, darling girlfriend! I’m in love!
‘Oughtn’t we to let her in?’ Jenny asked anxiously, actually holding a candle, like something from a nursery tale. ‘She sounds terribly distressed.’
‘’Course not. I’m going back to bed. Tom, stay away from girls like her, I’m warning you. Trouble.’ Henry had turned, slamming the door to his bedroom behind him, prompting more hammering on the front door.
Then Shirley, a girl he knew from various Calypso scenes with Gordon, who finished with him because she only went with Black men, then Jazz Girl again, more and more unhappily, then Frances, the doe-eyed daughter of an MP who was dull as ditchwater and kept a drawer full of lichen samples in her bedroom.
Tom wouldn’t have minded that, but she wouldn’t show them to him.
It spoke to a meanness of spirit that he couldn’t abide.
None of them was Celia. None had her body, and her funny droll ways, her quick intelligence, her eyes, her body again, because it really was remarkable, her smile, the way she smiled at him, knew things, held his hand, his heart.
Tom was astonished at how unhappy he was, how love consumed him.
It was like the time he and his father had been caught in a fog out on the hills, and you couldn’t feel it but it surrounded and enveloped you.
He was weary of school, of the boys and their smells, their wild enthusiasms for the same three records, their pranks, their ridiculous sporting jokes, their mortifying jingoism and arrogance, their lack of finesse.
Celia, in one smooth fingernail – her fingernails were so beautiful, the pale crescent like a delicate moon – had more sensitivity, class, maturity – oh maturity, it meant so many things – than all the people he had known in the last year combined.
He wanted her; he pined for her. He felt he was wasting away.
He sent her poems, copied out in his tiny, difficult handwriting: ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’ and ‘They Flee From Me’; and a curated selection of what he solemnly told her he considered the best of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
And she would reply, postcards scrawled in her unique hand: So clichéd, darling, try harder / Did you write this?
/ You are a poppet. / And the last, which he kept close by at all times: See you at Sevenstones?
The following summer, 1964, they met again and it was different.
He had left school and travelled around Spain, and could speak a little Spanish.
He had stayed at the foothills of the Alhambra Palace, and camped by the Alcázar, sailed across to Fez, swum off the coast of Africa.
Lying with her on the sweat-soaked sheets of the little bedroom with its view looking out to the white horse, he did not tell her he had done all these things to make himself seem more interesting, to show he was nothing like her brother, that he was becoming his own man, someone worthy of her.
In the end they were alone for three days; they had sex almost continuously, parting sore and happy and with their stomachs empty but both their hearts full, so full.
She had kissed him at the station, panting into his ear as she held his head, furiously, in her hands.
‘I thought it was just fun, it’s not fun, it’s it, isn’t it? It’s it –’
‘Yes,’ he’d whispered, unable to believe she felt the same way, but she did.
The following autumn he went up to Pembroke College, Oxford, to read History, and they took the train between Edinburgh and Oxford when they could, but mostly they wrote and telephoned.
Everything was working towards his graduation and hers, when they would move to London together – it was all about that for him.
He fell into life at Oxford within days, finding a group of friends akin to Guy and Antoine: clever, amusing, thoughtful, kind young men with a detached, amused approach to life, and he thought – oh, yes, he thought – he was himself.
For his second year at Oxford he and Celia agreed on another period of time apart.
She was busy, studying abroad, and working out what she wanted to do after, be a barrister or a solicitor.
She was older than him, and she wanted him to experience everything Oxford had to offer.
He took her up on this suggestion, telling himself he must not lose her by being too intense, that he must step back and let her think he was fine.
So he enjoyed himself, and saw some other girls – but that summer, back at Sevenstones, Celia came over for a week this time, and they realized they were as much in love as ever, and for their final year they tried to see each other as much as possible.
Their relationship was always easy. No drama.
She did not turn up at midnight, with eyeliner around her eyes, torn tights and broken heels, having had a huge row and stormed off, then changed her mind, like Foley’s girlfriend.
She did not write him intense letters detailing their future life together or send him a pair of baby’s booties she had knitted, like a girl at St Hilda’s whom Richardson had gone out with, albeit extremely briefly.
She was just enormous fun, enormously sexy – God, he wanted her all the damn time – and she was far, far out of his league.
Guy, and Sir Hugh and Lady Mannering, were hugely welcoming, and he grew to love family evenings at Eaton Square, and Christmases in London with them, and even, once or twice, to understand what Sir Hugh meant when, on a Boxing Day walk in Hyde Park, he suddenly began talking about ‘the future’ with long pauses and a waggle of his eyebrows.
Even Guy, who at first had coped with the news his best friend was going out with his elder sister by playing the trumpet whenever he saw Tom at home to avoid having to talk to him, had got used to the idea and was happy about it. Everyone was happy about it.
One incident made him uneasy, but he brushed it out of sight, told himself it meant nothing.
Back in London, after his first Michaelmas term, Tom was hurrying to post his father’s Christmas present.
It was sleeting so thickly he could hardly see a thing, and, as he was passing by the café that had been Totobags – the Caribbean place where he and Gordon used to go and that had been succeeded by Mike’s Café, where some chilly-looking hippies stood looking forlornly out into the wintry storm – someone stepped out and he ran straight into them.
‘Tom!’ The stranger gripped his arm. Tom, staring into his face, gave a shout of joy.
‘Gordon! How the devil are you!’
Gordon slapped him on the back, grinning so widely Tom felt moved to tears.
He gestured with his thumb to the straggly dressed men and women in the café, and to the Dog Shop, next door, Tom’s favourite shop.
It sold water beds, jewellery, candles, psychedelic posters, records, dope stuff – chillums and pipes – and was packed to the gills every weekend with young men and women who’d travelled from miles around to visit.
‘What on earth is happening to this neighbourhood?’ said Gordon, his eyes shining. ‘Talk about bringing the place down!’
They both laughed, and then were silent. Standing on Blenheim Crescent, hands on each other’s shoulders. Tom couldn’t get over how delighted he was to see him, and couldn’t remember now why he hadn’t caught up with him for so long.
‘Dad – I’m bored,’ said a little Cockney voice below them. Tom looked down. Gordon had a little girl with him, and she stood next to her father in glistening yellow wellingtons, her hands in her shiny blue mackintosh coat pockets, staring at Tom curiously.
Gordon had married a white woman called Beryl, and they had moved out towards Acton and had two children, Robert, who was five, and Angela, who was just three.
Gordon had brought Angela with him to buy a Christmas present for her mother, but in general he still came here to go to the café up on Ladbroke Grove that he said did proper goat curry, to see his friends, to hear about the plans for the new Carnival, to keep in touch.
He continued to work for London Transport, now overseeing the hiring of new bus drivers and training them.
He had even been back to Trinidad, and gone to Jamaica too, on a couple of recruitment drives.
It was very cold as they stood there chatting, the wind whistling along the crowded streets. Gordon tucked Tom’s large Pembroke scarf back around his neck.