S e r i a l i s e

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Part XII

I did not see Megan again for almost three months, by which point my school career was finished and I had chosen to defer university until I had a clearer idea of what I would do with my life. The question of our continued relationship – if ‘question’ is not too strong a term – was resolved quite emphatically by the encounter. It was entirely by chance that we met, in the market place at Borough, where she was shopping for flowers for a niece’s birthday, and where I worked three days a week with my friend Maurice on the cheese and dairy stall operated by his father. I had spied her in the late morning across the concourse, a wicker basket rested in the crook of her elbow, fingering the gaudy petals of a rose-red chrysanthemum. I crept up behind her and called her name, causing her to jump with fright.

 

Once she had regained composure she explained why she was there. I told her I had never heard of little girls wanting gifts of tulips, or any sort of plant for that matter. It was dolls that they liked. But she would be joshed on the matter, and was quite cold in terms of her manner.

“What is it you want?” she snapped.

“It’s lovely to see you too, Megan. I haven’t been following you. If you must know I work over there on the cheese stall.  It was merely a happy coincidence.”

She rolled her eyes and continued her walk along the flower-seller’s stall, occasionally shooting queries at the vendor about certain bulbs and blooms. It gave me the chance to regard her in profile. She had lost some puppy fat and looked healthy, and she was well turned out. I noticed she had dyed her hair blonde and it suited her. I hung back, hands in pockets, and said nothing. At last, when she had purchased a small bunch of irises, she turned to me.

“I suppose you’ll want to buy me a drink?”

“A drink?”

“Yes, you know – ” and she made a sipping motion with her hand.

“Ah, yes, a drink… The trouble is that I can’t leave the market. But I have some tea in my flask. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind sitting on a stool and having some tea?”

In fact, there was no stool, and moreover the tea belonged to Maurice. But at that time he and his father were away on an errand, and so the flask – and the stall – was unguarded. I made a mental note to top it up with water afterwards and hoped he would not notice the dilution.

It was clear that Megan did not appreciate the ramshackle state of the place. Borough Market was not a tourist destination until many years later. At that time it was entirely authentic, catering to local shops and restaurants. The cheese on the stall smelt too strongly, complained Megan, and the tea was too hot to drink. She winced as it ran onto her tongue and abandoned the cup besides a wheel of brie.

“So, who have you seen recently?” she asked.

It was quite telling, I thought, that her opening question – besides demanding to know what I was doing there, and asking for a drink – was whom I had seen recently, and not how I was. Nevertheless I reeled off a few names, some of them made up, but in truth I had hardly seen anyone. Mathilde had telephoned just once recently for the briefest of catch-ups and she had done much of the talking. She was wrapped up in Felice, and from the sounds of it a number of his friends too. Elmo I had not seen nor heard from since when he clobbered Patrick on that strangest, most distressing of evenings. No one seemed to know where he had gotten to. In my life then only Maurice was a regular fixture.

“And what about you, Megan?” I asked her. “What have you been up to?”

“I have joined a curatorial collective in Balham. We’re putting on a contemporary sculpture exposition in a fortnight, so I have been extremely busy speaking with prospective exhibiters and inspecting their works.”

I worded my pleasant surprise, and as if she had read the thought which crossed my mind, in a quite malicious tone she added:

“I haven’t approached Elmo. His style is nowadays considered rather old-fashioned.”

“Oh?”

“Too humanoid, too unaffected. Nobody is doing it anymore. As I said, rather old-fashioned.”

I had always considered his sculptures to be anything but humanoid, and certainly they were not unaffected. I thought of the twin helices like human arms, spiralling tortuously into a melted pool. I was no critic, nor even an informed amateur, but those metallic interlaces were to me deeply expressive. He had cast sorrow in a bronze alloy.  

“It would be good to see what you manage to collection for the expo,” I said, having lost the train of conversation. Megan stared at me, almost crossly. She then picked her basket off her knee where it was resting and stood up, straightening her dress as she did so.

“It was nice to see you,” she said. “I suppose I’ll see you again soon at one of the parties.”

“Yes, one of the parties,” I replied gloomily, wondering where or when these might occur, and my hands emerged from their pockets, uncertain of what gestures to enact. “So about…us, Megan?”

“I don’t think there is an ‘us’,” she said curtly. “Do you?” And with that she spun on her heels, a monumental three or so inches off the ground, and marched away in the direction of London Bridge.

Half of me wanted to dance a jig. I had dreaded having to undertake the inevitable conversation. But the other half felt strangely empty. I did not mind so much that my conduct had offended Megan – if I had learned anything from our relationship it was that she more or less set out to be offended, and was in turn frequently offensive. What I had minded was the mention of “the parties”. Which parties were these? Mathilde had not mentioned any, and no invitations were forthcoming from other quarters. Had I focused my attentions too closely on Elmo, to the detriment of useful friendships elsewhere? And in doing so, with Elmo’s apparent withdrawal from public life, it seemed very much as if I had backed the wrong horse.

 

An answer of sorts came some time later when I attended, some months later around Christmas time, a Dulwich College event for recent and not-so-recent alumni. It took the form of drinks and canapés in the headmaster’s suite and the purpose of the occasion, so I gathered, was to provide a careers network for new leavers. Established barristers and merchant bankers would share the fruits of their experiences, and where feasible arrange for pupillages, apprenticeships and favourable references for promising young Old Alleynians. I was there mainly to get a square meal. My parents and sisters were on a camping weekend in the New Forest, to which I was not invited, and so I was half-starved. After quarter of an hour of tedious chit-chat with a self-important financier – one whom I vaguely recalled five years earlier, as a school prefect, had been absolutely the worst sort – I caught sight of Hubert and Sophie stroll entering the room, arm in arm. Sophie was not the only female in the room, but certainly the only one of her age group. I made excuses to the financier and moved to intercept the couple.

“Well, old mucker!” cried Hubert, clapping me on the shoulder and laying it on just a bit thick. “It’s been a long time, how are you sir?” Hubert had been away for his first term at Cirencester to read agricultural and estate administration, edging ever closer to country squire-dom.

Sophie too seemed pleased to me, and with Hubert away in search of drinks for they two, we held the briefest of conversations. She was clearly most interested in news of Mathilde, with whom I gathered she had not had a great deal of contact in the preceding nine months or so.

“You see the thing is,” she said, at last approaching the point, and with a needless delicacy, “I’m organising my father’s sixtieth birthday party and I just don’t know whether to invite her. Daddy doesn’t want a big affair, and so numbers are limited.”

“And do she and her uncle not get on?” I asked. We were standing beside an ornately painted and quite ancient-looking grandfather clock which, besides the rhythmic, practically arthritic clunk of its pendulum, seemed to be whirring manically as if a cog somewhere in its workings had come loose on its axel and was spinning uncontrollably. I had the peculiar impression of a third, rather noisy participant in our conversation.

“Oh, nothing as extreme as that,” answered Sophie, unfazed by the clock. “But I do feel as if Mathilde has gone off the rails a bit and I don’t want to have her to it if she’ll act improperly.”

I said that I could not imagine Mathilde acting improperly, and it was the truth. At an orgy she would be indecent. At a church wedding she would be perfectly charming. In every circumstance her behaviour would be proper.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Sophie. “But you must allow she has some unsuitable friends, like that great big Dutchman with the odd name.”

“Van Solling?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Doesn’t he just sound like a character in some vampire novel? The kind who would suck your blood or sleep in a crypt or do something else unspeakable.”

I was going to ask if she had ever met him, but we were interrupted by Hubert returning with glasses of suspiciously thin-coloured wine and a small plate laden from the buffet. Nothing looked appealing, but given that rationing was still in full swing it was an impressive effort by the school’s cook. Sophie brought Hubert up to speed with our discussion.

“Oh, the colossal mute? Queer fish. Yes, I remember being at a party with him. Weren’t you there too? I think Percy was sick all over the chap’s bedroom, poor sod.” I was not clear if he meant Percy or Elmo.

“Well I’ve clapped eyes on him just the once,” said Sophie. “He was pointed out to me in the street a while ago – in Marylebone, I think. But anyway, the rumour is that he’s abroad with a politician’s son, sailing his yacht on the French Riviera.”

“Well what sort of rumour is that?” asked Hubert, his mouth filled with masticated croutons.

“I mean that he and the politician’s boy are not quite just friends.”

Apprehension dawned on Hubert and he narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Can’t stand for that. I knew there was something about him. Here,” he turned to me, “was he not a pal of yours?”

I denied it. Cowardly though it was to do, I could reasonably protest that Elmo and I never were exactly “pals” – acquaintances perhaps.

“Hm, could have sworn it,” said Hubert. “Who’s the politician Soph?”

“You know Roderick Heather-Sykes?”

“Good Heavens, not the cabinet minister – well I never.”

Mr Heather-Sykes was in fact a shadow cabinet minister at that time, an MP for an East Anglia constituency and, coincidentally, like Mitchell’s father he was also married to a minor sporting celebrity, in this case a golfer of some renown. They might even have been at school together, and that is perhaps how the rumour mill had come to confuse the true identity of Elmo’s lover, unwittingly shielding Mitchell from the cruelties of gossip and media attention.  

“And they’re rumoured to be away together, are they?” I asked Sophie, affecting a merely casual interest.

“So they say. In any case, if my father caught wind of it I am pretty certain he wouldn’t want Mathilde at his sixtieth. He wouldn’t like her to be fraternising with sorts like that. Doesn’t look at all good.”

I nodded, and looked around the room for someone else to talk to. It was one thing for Sophie to be wrapped up in the perceptions of Society – she was young and aspirational, after all – but to imagine that her sixty year-old father would snub his own niece to appease the snobs and chatterers was, frankly, rather depressing. What was the point of aging if not to break free of petty social conventions, and be excused? I liked to believe I was immune to all that rubbish, perhaps because I had no standing which to lose. But in that room, besides the pompous – and, I suspect, actually quite junior – financier, there were only a number of stern-looking men of my father’s age, moustachioed and outwardly joyless. One or two, judging by their laden plates, were also in attendance mainly for the free food.

I smiled at a meek, bespectacled man of about five and a half feet tall, who caught my eye as he stepped out from behind a larger guest. His thin, sandy-coloured hair was neatly combed; his suit was black, and his small pink hands were clasped before him. He had an undeniably clerical air, and I was unsurprised to discover – upon joining him in conversation – that he was in fact the new school chaplain.

“Hoping to recruit for the seminary, Reverend?” I joked, when he told me about his posting. He shook his head and laughed beautifully, like a trilling songbird. He proceeded to explain that he was hoping to garner interest in the alumni gazette, responsibility for which he had inherited from his predecessor. He then asked if I wished to sign up to receive the publication. I certainly did not, but to avoid hurting the man’s feelings I provided the address of an aunt, whom I knew would not register the mistake. In any case much of the post she received went straight into the kindling basket by her stove, unread but ultimately un-wasted.

I left the event a short time after that, having entirely failed to grasp a helpful leg-up into the world of salaries and steady employment. But I was chirpy as I made my way up the gravel driveway, towards the common. I had been fed and watered, so to speak, and best of all had heard news of Elmo. So he was yachting with Mitchell? Safe and far away from grey, oppressive London. It was certainly for the best. God only knew what possessed him to switch on the boy Patrick in the way he had, as a habitually docile hound turning suddenly vicious and mauling a stranger’s thigh. Dogs which did that were usually shot afterwards, or kept on a chain forevermore, but Elmo had somehow escaped either of these fates. I wondered if Mitchell knew – or cared – what lay behind his lover’s urge to escape. And I wondered if he would look me up when he returned.

The run of positivity continued when, the following weekend, I received a letter from Florence asking if I would like to join she and her father in Capri for a short holiday which they were planning to make over Easter. Mr Barclay was increasingly enfeebled and worried that it might be his last chance to visit the cottage there. It was proposed that I sail to Gibraltar where they would meet me, and together we would sail on a specially chartered ferry to Capri with a number of other expat islanders.

Now, I have written it matter-of-factly, for that was how it happened, but I should be clear that this was absolutely what I had dreamed of for many years, to be alone with her in that paradise. There was nothing matter-of-fact about my reaction. I had never expected to be invited to Capri, nor really vied and jostled for the chance. I had sincerely believed it was their private retreat – a kind of inviolable sanctuary where none but their own were bidden. Certainly, that is was I had gathered from what little the Barclays spoke of it. It was not a holiday home in the conventional sense of the term, for the leisure and entertainment of one’s friends, like a rich man’s hunting lodge, or a chalet in the low Alps. And so to be asked to step behind the familial veil was an honour, and doubly so – perhaps triply so – because it was Capri, and thus exotic beyond measure. I had at that point in life never been abroad and had been outside of London only once or twice. With family I had visited the seaside, in Suffolk, and found it to be grim beyond description. It was November at the time, all fog and frigid spray. It was no poor reflection on Southwold, which I am sure – in sunshine, at least – is the stuff of postcards. I had not seen nor felt the Mediterranean sun in my life, and I envisaged a warm sea, Roman ruins and a tropical, deserted island; Florence and I alone, in a kind of rustic splendour. I saw glimpses of her tanned skin; slim limbs in the spume; hands held and wet, translucent hems, and I shivered with anticipation. At the thought of it my imagination grew quickly rich and fevered.

At that time, before civilian air travel was popularised, Capri’s non-native inhabitants were mostly wealthy artist-types and cultured European businessmen. The brash tycoons and luminaries would come later, in the sixties and seventies. Mr Barclay, neither an artist nor really a businessman, had inherited the cottage – a mile or so from the island’s marina hub – from his elder half-brother, who had purchased an acre plot for a pittance in nineteen-twenty, and a few years later built the cottage with a view to cultivating a citrus grove. The Sorrento-type lemons, he reasoned, would make exotic curds and syrups for sale in Britain and the United States, and it might have been a lucrative enterprise too, judging by similar ventures elsewhere.

But the war put an end to many of the best laid plans. Trade restrictions in Italy and an increasing mainland hostility to native Britons – whipped up in a compliant populace by Fascist thugs – spurred Mr Barclay’s half-brother to return to England, to his family’s home outside Hereford. When he perished from flu, quite soon after that, the title of the property was passed down to his half-sibling, but it was a long time before Mr Barclay was able to visit, and when he eventually did he discovered the grove had withered from neglect. Dense clumps of basil and marjoram had sprung up at the feet of the rotten trunks, like flowers on a grave, and the cottage itself was a nesting hive for warblers and turtle doves. It didn’t matter much to Mr Barclay, at least not economically, since he had his holdings in Gloucestershire to look after – profitable for the time-being – and so the acre plot and the cottage were permitted to decay as nature intended, to be used intermittently by Mr and Mrs Barclay and their daughter as a holiday home.

It was on these trips to Capri where Florence acquired her suntan, seemingly never fading, as well as that stubborn odour of exoticism. (I wonder, though, would a pallid Florence really have been more forgettable?) So whilst Mr Barclay tended to the thicket which annually enveloped the borders of the cottage, Florence would explore the forests and the caves and the township, and swim in the sea. When she was older she would also swim out to the boats which moored in the smaller of Capri’s two harbours, near to the picturesque limestone crags, sometimes for curiosity’s sake, and sometimes to offer sprigs of parsley or basil, or a cluster of eggs to the boats’ occupants. These items she stowed in a watertight bag, tied loosely to her neck with a plaited woollen rope. Some boat owners would wave her off – being weary of intrusion – but most were delighted to haul her aboard, where she was tipped for her efforts and plied with almond sweets and pudding wine. Precisely what these worldly sun-seekers thought of her I cannot say, emerging dripping from out the blue like some gorgeous nymph of an ancient fable. I suppose, like everybody else, they fell very quickly under her spell, and in a way she too fell under theirs, for it was on these boats amongst deposed nobles, nautical captains and captains of industry, voguish artistes and hangers-on, where she learned to imitate the subtle pouts and purrs, chic hairstyles and makeup – some of the wickedest weapons in her armoury.

And so, presently, I wrote back to tell Florence I should be delighted to join them, and soon afterwards began budgeting for the trip, in particular the ferry ticket, for which even a third class fare at that time unaffordable. Considering my income from the market stall, and the threat of being charged rent by my parents, no amount of accounting chicanery could produce the required sums in time for Easter. If prevailing rates of saving persisted I would be more than twenty-three years old by the time I could afford the trip. I pondered which of my friends had sufficient cash which they wouldn’t mind loaning out but could think of no one, and so I begana campaign of frugality.  I sold a pocket watch to a fellow marketer, as well a pair of running shoes, which I believed I would no longer require.

My turn in fortune came in the tall and rounded form of Philip, my old school friend, who one evening had joined my family for dinner, as on occasion he would. It was a running (and slightly cruel) joke in our house that Philip – socially quite an awkward young man – made his appearances at our table only ever because my mother, whenever she encountered Philip in the neighbourhood, would blurt out an invitation for want of anything else to say to him. She was too unerringly polite to avoid Philip altogether, and yet so inept at small talk – which with Philip was virtually impossible anyway – that the only means by which to avoid actual paralysis on the roadside was to offer him dinner and scuttle off on a made-up errand.

And here he was, having joined us directly from his new work at the car repair shop near to Tulse Hill, and apparently having not washed his hands of grease beforehand. On his chin and cheeks was a soft, almost downy stubble, and his thick brown hair was unkempt. We ate dinner in near silence and Philip chewed ponderously, his heavy brow creased in thoughtfulness. Dressed as he was in grey-coloured mechanic’s overalls, he resembled some philosopher-golem, carved out of rock and older than the Earth. Katie and Ruth found his appearance to be hilarious, and they gawped openly. At last, my father ventured to engage with our guest.   

“So…”, he said, between mouthfuls. “What is it exactly you do at the garage, Philip?”

Philip looked up at the sound of my father’s voice, and his face was one of slight surprise, as though he had not expected there to be a conversation held during the meal. Perhaps his own family ate in silence. He glanced at my mother, almost accusingly. She was the culprit, his eyes seemed to say – she was the one who had lured him there under a false pretence. Finally, albeit with some resignation, he addressed the question.

“My specialism is single-barrel carburettors,” he said. “But the vehicles which come into the shop have a wide range of problems – more often structural.”

“I see,” my father replied. “So not just engine work.”

“No.”

The conversation, if it could be called that, would otherwise have petered out there and then, perhaps like a vehicle with a malfunctioning carburettor, only Philip happened to add, in a sort of afterthought, that he only worked at the garage until three o’clock each afternoon. The time then was seven o’clock in the evening, which begged the question: having finished work, for what reason had Philip remained in his overalls for four whole hours?  My mother rose to the bait, and Philip explained.

He had a personal project, he said. Much earlier that year an uncle had sold him a car for a nominal sum, a broken down Ford Model ‘A’ roadster, from the early nineteen-thirties. Philip was restoring the car with a view to selling it on. At the sound of this, my father perked up. He was not a motoring enthusiast by any means, but Philip’s venture was a prime example of the kind of entrepreneurial zeal which he found lacking in his son.

“Well, what about that!” he cried, leaning forward in his chair, and for a moment is looked as if he might slap Philip on the back. “Good for you.” My father was positively beaming. “And when do you expect to finish?” he asked.

“Sometime next month, I expect,” said Philip.

“Next month, eh?” my father repeated, and again: “good for you.” He then lifted his glass of beer in a half-hearted toast, which nobody – least of all Philip – reciprocated. In fact, Philip appeared to be nonplussed by the attentions which my father was lavishing on him, and evidently he would have preferred to eat his dinner in peace.

Later on, nonetheless, during pudding when conversation had once more lulled, my father returned to the topic of the roadster. It had plagued him in the interval, clearly – as would any conversation which is interrupted before its climax; the vital questions unasked.

“Do you reckon you’ll turn a profit on this Ford, once you’re done?” he asked Philip.

My mother scolded him. “It’s rude to talk about money at the dinner table,” she said, and Ruth and Katie tittered quietly. In fact, money was often discussed at our dinner table, but my mother was prone to putting on appearances in front of guests, even those as unglamorous as Philip.

“Oh, leave off will you?” replied my father. “No one else is talking,” he said, which was true.

Philip then cleared his throat and named a figure. This was what a prospective buyer had quoted him, he said, and in terms of my Borough Market wages it was almost a half-year’s salary. Philip would, in barely one month’s time, have that amount in a lump sum. I almost gasped aloud at the thought of it. The money – which, if only a small part mine, would solve the immediate problem of travel costs – seemed so close at hand that I could reach out, almost, and grasp it.

He, Philip, would make me a loan, I decided. So long as I kept my position at the market, I would not have to worry about being unable to repay him; it was only a question of the speed with which I could do so, and since Philip lived with his parents and socialised minimally, what possible need did he have for immediate cash? I would indebt myself for years if it only meant that I could sail to Capri and spend a summer there with Florence, to an exotica beyond the horizon – beyond the whitish fog of the Channel, and the grey oppression there in London – to a place where the skies were clear and warm, and where she, where she was all my own.

Dinner wound up shortly after that, uneventfully, and I offered to walk Philip home on the pretext of wishing to drop in on another former school friend en route. The absurdly named Connor O’Connor was a real person, although our friendship was entirely fictional. At school we had never gotten along. We were not enemies as such, merely indifferent to one another. I had not seen him since moving to Dulwich, but he often provided – unwittingly – an alibi for my elicit errands in the neighbourhood. His family, two parents and six siblings, lived above the butchers on the corner of Blenheim Grove and Rye Lane, which was just far enough from our house to be unfamiliar territory. My mother was unlikely to happen by on one of her shopping trips, pop in to see the O’Connors and, in doing so, blow my cover. But in any case neither of my parents were ever close to the O’Connors, who were a little too rough around the edges for their tastes, and being Catholic Irish as well they were not fashionable to know at that time.

Once Philip and I were out of earshot of my parents, tramping up the pavement in the balmy lamp-lit haze, I broached the subject of his making me a loan. To my surprise, he did not blanche. He did not even ask what I wanted the money for, and I felt oddly compelled to justify myself. It was not the first time I had borrowed money – I was not squeamish in that regard – but previous creditors had invariably wanted to know what lay behind the request. I suppose you would undergo the same sort of interrogation with a bank manager who wants to know that he’ll see his money again – that you aren’t planning to abscond with it, to build a new life in Panama, or wherever it is these chancers go. But Philip was uninterested. Uncharitably, I concluded that this was because he had no social life to speak of. Once a month or so he might be persuaded to venture out and drink a beer in a pub, but more often than not he spent his evenings at home, reading a book or simply dozing in a chair beside the wireless set. It was not an expensive lifestyle, and thus he had no actual need for the money – or no immediate need in any case. We agreed terms for repayment, shook hands and parted ways.