A Disturbing Influence (13 page)

‘Don’t you like England, David?’ said Raymond, irked by
something
in his nephew’s tone.

‘It’s all right.’ He looked unblinkingly at Henderson. ‘There are other places.’

‘But it’s your country, David.’

‘I’ve lived here for a total of five years in my entire life,’ said David. ‘That’s a quarter, exactly. I don’t feel very strongly about it one way or the other. Except that no other country’s succeeded in getting me into its army.’

‘But don’t you think of England as your home?’

‘Home?’ The young man, his pallid cheeks stretched thin between jaw and temple, stared at his uncle with amazement, almost with discomposure. ‘I don’t look on anywhere as home.’

‘Well!’

‘But I’m glad about those gravel-pits. They sound as though they might be fun.’

*

At ten-thirty Henderson said: ‘I think I’ll be going to bed, now.’

‘Good night, then, Raymond.’

‘Won’t you be going to bed soon?’

‘Not for a while. I don’t usually go to bed till quite late.
Otherwise
I don’t sleep.’

‘I should have thought that as a convalescent you should try to get as much sleep as possible.’

‘I get it all right,’ said David. ‘I’ll turn out the lights, Raymond.’ He hardly glanced from his book.

Thoroughly put out, Henderson fidgeted by the door. He didn’t like the idea of someone being up and about while he was in bed; it was wrong somehow. But ten-thirty had been his bed-time for so many years he couldn’t break the habit now.

‘Are you sure you want to stay up?’ he said, almost pleaded.

David looked up from his book with an expression of mild but mocking surprise. ‘Quite sure, thank you. I never go to bed till after midnight.’

‘Good gracious,’ said Henderson. He was shocked. ‘Well, good night.’

He locked all the doors, left a single bulb burning in the hall and another on the landing, and went to bed.

For a time he lay awake, thinking about his nephew. What an odd boy he was, what extraordinary things he said. Not thinking of anywhere as home. Mildred had really brought him up very badly, obviously allowed him to do just as he pleased. And it made that fuss about national service look rather different. He hadn’t realized that the boy felt no sense of patriotism. He was very thin, too, and very pale. Mrs Crawley should see to that, though. Perhaps the young were all like that nowadays, never thinking of anything but
their own pleasure. But he was too old to argue with. Or he didn’t seem to understand the basic principles from which one argues in a place like Cartersfield. The simple virtues of the country—would he enjoy them? Well, he could always go back to London whenever he wanted.

He dozed, but kept waking to look at his watch. It was after two when he heard David come upstairs, go to his room, then the bathroom, then back to his room again.

I
CAN’T
say I
liked
him—gosh, that hardly entered into it—you see, it was terribly difficult to know where you were with him, he
was
peculiar, it’s perfectly true. He was different. He never tried to pretend he wanted something else, like all the other boys who start just wanting to hold your hand or something, and then think because you’ve let them do that they can start fiddling with your bra as soon as the lights go out and look hurt when you tell them to stop, as though you’ve broken a promise, when all you did was let them hold your hand for a moment.
He
never asked to hold my hand at all, he just looked at me, and I suppose every girl likes to be looked at like that, not with the usual undressing look that boys start practising even before they know what there is for a dress to cover up, but with a straight question, Will you or won’t you, which sends shivers up and down your spine as you give him a really haughty look back. I didn’t
like
him for looking at me like that, but it’s very flattering and he was rather attractive, too, apart from being able to send shivers up and down my spine with that sexy look, I mean almost before we were introduced, not staring at me or summing me up or telling me how pretty I looked, just asking me with his eyes and not even considering that I might not know what he meant or not like it.

Of course I
did
know, exactly, and I dare say any girl would, even if she’d never actually been in bed with a man before, which I had, because it was so obvious and anyway it was so exciting, so you
couldn’t miss it possibly, unless you wanted to, and then it was pretty difficult. Not that the boy I’d slept with ever looked at me like that. He would have thought it caddish to look at anyone that way, and he wouldn’t have known how to even if he’d wanted to. He was a Guards officer called Ralph and he didn’t actually call me ‘old girl’, though he would have done if we’d got married which he pretended he wanted to, only they all say that because they know and the girl knows that they’re not allowed to, because of some silly rule, but he was nice, all the same. David wasn’t nice, at least I never thought about him being nice, it wasn’t one of the things you thought when you thought of him. His way of looking at you had nothing to do with being nice at all, and that was exciting, anyway it made a change. And of course I had no intention of letting him do anything of the sort, in fact I pretended I didn’t understand what the look meant, and then I tried acting as though I was very shocked and insulted, and I hardly spoke to him the first time because I thought he needed snubbing, looking at someone like that when he didn’t even know her, though it was exciting. But he simply didn’t pay the remotest attention to what I was doing, he just went on looking at me in the same way, and, well, you know, even if you don’t know the man very well, it
is
nice, and I like being whistled at on the street, though Ralph always used to get very angry, though I never turn my head, of course, to see who’s whistling.

When David came over to play tennis for the first time, I’d already decided what to do to put him in his place, so I was watching from my bedroom window when the car drove up, and he parked it and looked around for a minute or two before he came to the door and rang the bell. And I thought to myself—I was really quite angry—if he thinks he can look around like that as though he owns the place he’s got another think coming, that young man, because I really made myself feel angry with him, which suited what I meant to do anyway, which was keep him waiting. And surely enough Mummy came and yelled up the stairs that he was there, and I
yelled back that I’d be down in a minute, and then I just sat on my bed and read a book of Giles’ cartoons, and then a few pages of a book by Jack Kramer on how to play really top-class tennis, and by that time I thought he’d be furious, so I went down without even brushing my hair or anything, to show him I didn’t care at all about him. I mean it was obvious to anyone who looked at me that it would have taken exactly a minute to change into my tennis dress and that I hadn’t done anything else in the half-hour or so I’d been upstairs, which is what I meant it to look like. And I breezed into the drawing-room and said: ‘Oh, hello, are you here?’ or something casual like that, and he was sitting reading
Country
Life
or
The
Tatler,
and when he looked up he saw exactly what I wanted him to see, that I didn’t give a damn for him, and that I’d kept him waiting deliberately, and he just said: ‘Oh, hello’, and looked at me with that same question in his eyes, which were very beautiful, actually, very dark brown and big, and he didn’t even have the manners to get up, he just looked at me, and it wasn’t a pleading look, it was just a question demanding the answer ‘Yes’, like in Latin, but I wasn’t going to say ‘Yes’, so we went and played tennis.

I hadn’t really expected him to be any good, but he wasn’t bad at all, actually, very steady, though he had no style at all, and he got the ball back over the net and ran about and returned quite difficult ones and had quite a decent serve, in fact he did pretty well. He wasn’t really
good,
but he would have done jolly well in club tournaments and things till he met someone who
was
good, and he would have made a very decent partner in a mixed doubles, because he was so reliable and steady. So I forgot all about him and his look and concentrated on beating him, getting him into the wrong position and then passing him with my backhand drive, which is easily my best shot, and very strong, but he caught on to that quite quickly and tried to feed only my forehand, so it was good practice for me, and I was really rather enjoying it, though not extending myself, of course. I won the first set pretty easily, and I was winning
the second five-three when we changed ends and met at the net and he said: ‘You’re not bad, are you?’

‘Of course I’m not bad. If you practised a little more and took some lessons you might be quite good yourself. But your swing is all wrong, you don’t have any style.’

‘I get the ball back where I want to most of the time,’ he said, and smiled with that funny smile of his which made him look cynical, which was right in a way, because he was pretty cynical. And even while he was smiling he was looking at me like that, not touching me, but letting his hand swing free across his thighs in a sexy way, and he made me feel his hands were all over me which I didn’t like much, because I was thinking about tennis, so I said: ‘Come on, and I’ll really beat you up.’

But somehow he made me lose my concentration, making me feel that, and he won the next game, which was my service, and then his own service, and eventually he took the set nine-seven.

‘Whew,’ I said, ‘would you like to rest a little now? Or shall we go straight on?’ I was sweating a little, which I don’t often do unless it’s a tough game, and I’d had to fight myself as much as him the last few games. I was getting a little wild and not getting the shots in.

‘You ought to wipe the sweat off your face,’ he said, ‘or it’ll get in your eyes.’

Well, that made me
furious
, no man should
ever
say a thing like that to a girl, it’s insulting, and what made it worse was that he wasn’t sweating at all, and you expect a man to sweat when he’s playing games. And then he began to unbutton his shirt without asking me, and he had it half off before he said, in the most casual way: ‘Mind if I take this off?’, and I had to say: ‘Not at all,’ though I did mind, really, not his taking it off but the way he didn’t bother to ask until he’d already started. Actually, though, he had a nice body, and he wasn’t thin at all, really, he was sort of spare, lots of muscle and no fat, though his skin was pale and like an American’s—they don’t have the same kind of complexion, somehow, more of a
sheen and less colour than us, and not darker exactly but—well, different. And he didn’t have any hair on his chest, though there was some on his legs, and I liked that, because I don’t like hairy men, it’s disgusting somehow, some of them have it all over their
shoulders
and everywhere, but he just had a little on his legs, and that’s all right, I don’t mind legs so much. Well, I suddenly realized that I’d been looking at him more than I should. I mean girls aren’t supposed to look at boys the way boys look at girls, so I pulled myself together and said: ‘Would you like to go on?’

‘Just as you like,’ he said, and obviously he meant just that, that he could take tennis or leave it (he was always saying he could take something or leave it, and I picked up the habit), and that he wasn’t there just to play tennis but to give me that look all the time, too, and that made me cross. He seemed to want to have everything his own way, so I said: ‘All right, let’s keep going, then,’ so we did, and after the next set, which I won, after nearly losing it by forcing instead of taking my time, we went and sat in deck-chairs and relaxed, by the little pavilion thing where we put towels and chairs and things while we’re playing. He had very bony hands, I thought, long and looking as though you could snap the fingers like twigs, so I said: ‘What funny fingers you have,’ and then he looked at them slowly back and front. ‘What’s funny about them?’ he said at last, looking at me with that look again.

‘They’re sort of like bunches of twigs.’

‘Oh, really?’ And then he lost interest in them, and let them fall on his hairy thighs, because he wore terribly short shorts and almost all of his thigh was visible—not
all
, of course, but an awful lot—and he kept on looking at me, so I said: ‘Don’t look at me like that.’

‘My God, you do nothing but criticize.’

‘I didn’t mean that, I meant——’

‘—that I shouldn’t look at you like that. Don’t you like to be looked at?’

‘Yes, but not like that.’

‘Why not like that? How
was
I looking at you? How do you want me to look at you? Do you
want
me to look at you?’

‘Really,’ I said, because all this was very bewildering, and I didn’t begin to know what to say. I just didn’t want him to look at me like that
then,
when there was no one around, and he made me feel nervous.

‘I can’t even remember how I was looking at you. Like this?’ and of course it was just exactly like that, so I said: ‘Yes, and stop it,’ and he said: ‘But I always look at people like that.’

‘I bet you don’t look at my
mother
like that.’

‘But you aren’t your mother, thank God,’ he said, and while I was trying to think of some way of saying that he was the rudest man I’d ever met and that if he couldn’t be polite he’d better go home, he closed his eyes and completely vanished, not literally, I mean, but just seemed to withdraw from the scene, and when I said what I thought I
should
say he ignored me completely, so we sat in silence for a bit, and then I said: ‘Your shorts are awfully short, where did you get them?’

‘I can’t remember,’ he said, after I’d given up hope of getting an answer out of him. ‘It could have been almost anywhere.’

‘You certainly couldn’t have got them in England.’

‘No, you can’t get anything in England that you really want at the time, place and price you want it.’

‘Don’t you
like
England?’

‘It’s O.K. It makes very little difference to me where I am.’

Well, I thought that was pretty rude, after the way he’d been looking at me, so I pouted a bit, hoping his eyes were open by now, and eventually I said: ‘I suppose
you
’
re
an angry young man or something silly like that.’

He sat right up at that and looked terribly surprised, so I felt pleased, and he said: ‘A
what
?’

‘An angry young man. You know—one of those people who say the queen has an awful voice, and so on—they’re always complaining.’

‘Oh,’ he said, and sank back irritatingly, ‘then I’m not. I don’t stay anywhere if there are things to complain about.’

‘Then you
do
like England, because you’re here.’

‘I’m here because I have to be here,’ he said, and when I asked him what he meant he didn’t answer, he just laughed and said: ‘Didn’t you know I was a convalescent?’

And then we just lay there for a bit, me thinking about how awful he was, but how exciting, too, and how irritating that made him, and how he needed taking down a peg or two, and he
thinking
about whatever he
did
think about, pretty odd things, I should say, when he suddenly sat up and said: ‘Well, shall we go?’, so I said: ‘Where?’ and he looked at me again, so I looked away, and then he said: ‘I’d better be getting back, then. Raymond may want the car.’

That was what was so
utterly
maddening about him, he never even made a pass the way you expected him to, he simply looked and expected
you
to come when he called, and if you didn’t he didn’t waste time trying to persuade you, he just went away, as he did that time, leaving me furious, though he had given me quite a decent game.

Anyway, he came again a couple of days later, and we were changing ends in the middle of the third set when he looked at me like that very strongly and I was just
paralysed
, and he came up very close to me and put his hand straight
there
, where no man is
supposed
to put his hand on a woman in the open, and not often in private, either, and I was so flabbergasted, I mean I simply couldn’t think of anything to say, and by the time I’d thought it was too late, we were half-way to the house, and that was the first time, with me terrified that Mummy would suddenly want to know where we were, but she was out in the garden, luckily, weeding, and so we lay there, ears cocked for any
sound,
at least mine were, while he looked at me crossly and said: ‘But you didn’t sweat,’ and I was so astonished by everything, I just said: ‘I don’t sweat much.’

‘You do playing tennis.’

He was funny, too, because as soon as we’d finished he’d cover himself up, or put on his shorts, so that I couldn’t look, not that I wanted to, particularly, but it was odd, I thought, and
he
looked at
me
all right, in a sort of measuring way which made me want to hit him, but I didn’t. Of course, he was much better than Ralph, who was terribly clumsy and often rather drunk, too, by the time we got that far, and awfully sentimental, which I quite liked, though it was sickening sometimes, too. And then he—David, I mean—would lie there absolutely still, so I lay very still, too, beside him, and after a bit he’d say: ‘You didn’t sweat,’ crossly, and I would say: ‘What do you want me to sweat
f
or
?’ and he’d say nothing, he’d just get up abruptly and get dressed and say: ‘I’d better be getting back. Raymond may want the car.’