A Disturbing Influence (6 page)

‘Romeo,’ I say, murmur rather. ‘Alfa Romeo.’

‘What?’

I’ll be your Alfa Romeo, sleek and fast, and we will go together all over Europe, across the Bosphorus to Turkey, and then on and on, at a hundred and fifty, to Syria, Persia, India, Siam, Indo-China …

‘Nothing.’

‘You’re funny, Teddy,’ she says, and she slips away from me and leans against one of the prehistoric trunks and looks across the small dip which we call a valley to where the spire of Cartersfield church is like a finely sharpened pencil against the horizon.

‘I’ll be your Alfa Romeo,’ I say.

Do you love me, Teddy? Oh, but I do, just ask me, please ask me, but she doesn’t move, her brown hair is curly and soft at the back of her neck, and her mouth is a serious straight line. The longest distance between two points, so I define our kisses, never yet kissed. And her eyes are hazel, and they look out across the water-meadow, with the cows strung out like amber beads from one of my mother’s old necklaces, and the sky is like the cyclorama in the school theatre, and she has been Mercutio and I am Alfa Romeo, and I want to say: ‘I love you with my whole heart and soul, Molly,’ but I don’t.

And we wander together again, holding hands, away from the avenue, into the beech wood that skirts the meadow, and high above us an aeroplane drones like a mosquito, and then we can’t be seen and I kiss her, the first kiss this holidays or ever, and her lips feel very soft and slippery, and my wrists feel weak again, and I tell her about how I skidded two days ago.

And then we walk slowly back again, because the Simpsons will be going soon, they can’t stay to dinner, they’re so sorry, they have to get back, but it was a lovely drink and so nice to see us again. And as they go, the car moving very slowly away, careful of the gravel on the drive, I see her face, turned back over her shoulder, watching me, grave as ever, and not so much as a smile, though I stand and watch the dust settle for five minutes, trying to pluck one from the air.

*

August the twelfth, grouse season opens, my diary informs me, it is a Saturday, there is a gymkhana.

There is a small crowd, local people only, watching their children compete. They sit on rugs and move picnic baskets about
with an air of authority. The shells of hard-boiled eggs are snatched into paper bags. Apple-cores, of course, go to the ponies. The sun blinds from a hundred windscreens.

I sit in the car. My father is scornfully angry because I am listening to the radio. At Silverstone the Ferraris are leading. On the twenty-fifth lap Stirling Moss is in trouble. He pulls in at the pits, he withdraws from the race. I switch off, grief gnawing my hero-worshipping heart.

A single full-bellied cloud drifts majestically above the bending races. Next is the jumping. Already Molly has won a blue rosette. Shylock wears it on his bridle, not sure whether to ignore it or treat it as an excuse to misbehave. At first I had enjoyed myself, strolling among the cars, noting two Bentleys, a Hudson and Cartersfield’s only really interesting car, an Atalanta. Then I reached the Simpsons’ Rover. Molly was sitting down, picking at the grass by the rug, her jockey cap hiding most of her hair, though the soft curly down on her neck was visible, slightly ragged, like the first drifting seaweed that promises land. Shylock pawed at the ground near by, occasionally lifting his head to watch in astonishment as other horses minced and snorted by.

‘I hope you do very well.’

‘Thank you.’ The hand—I had held it how many times now? Still single figures—went on scrabbling at the dry short grass by the rug, a red-and-green tartan.

‘How are you doing so far?’

‘One second in the potato race.’

‘Terrific!’

‘We could have been first, but Shylock got so excited. He prances about so much as soon as we get in the ring.’

‘But second is jolly good.’

‘We could have been first, though.’

I squatted down beside her and said: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘There’s no need to be sorry,’ she said. ‘It was my fault for not controlling him properly. But he can be such a
pig
.’

Molly nervous, plucking at the hard white dry grass, her cap on tears hovering about her face, eyes cloudy.

‘Can I do anything?’

‘No, thanks awfully.’

‘Well, good luck. I shall be watching you.’

No response, she missed her cue, eyes on Shylock, Molly in a world of horses, who wants horses? Silverstone starts in two minutes. I must be off. I get up.

‘I’m sure you’ll win.’

‘That’s me,’ she said, listening to an announcement, not to me. She jumped up—Molly in jodhpurs!—untied Shylock, led him away from the cars, put one foot in the stirrup, and then she was up. Molly vaulting, one leg flinging up and over, be careful, Molly, avoid violence, treat your body with tenderness, don’t do the splits, don’t have a fall.

And she was off to the parade ring. I went to the car, to the radio, to Stirling Moss. It could have been a big day for the BRM. Molly nearly fell off in the bending, fell dangling a-straddle Shylock’s neck, and I was out of the car before she’d grabbed his mane and slithered, me watching in outrage, back to the saddle. Such litheness, such a supple slither. Back in the car it was the nineteenth lap and the BRM was doing well, very well. But then the fatal twenty-fifth, and Moss retired. I got out of the car and stretched.

‘Is it over at last?’ said my mother.

‘Moss has been forced to retire.’

They looked at me as though I was mad. They understood an exact and perfect circle of nothing.

‘At least it’s better than listening to cricket,’ said the traitor Jane.

‘I suppose
tennis
is exciting,’ I said. ‘Bang-bang, bang-bang, love-fifteen, bang, fifteen all, bang-bang, bang-bang, thirty-fifteen, bang-bang——’

‘Oh, be quiet, Teddy, for heaven’s sake,’ said my mother.

Jane had developed a passion for some ludicrous tennis player.
I sat as far from her as possible to watch the jumping. She stuck out her tongue at me. I ignored her, superbly.

At last came Molly, trotting out of the parade ring, making a neat turn before breaking into a canter and heading Shylock into the first jump. As she went over, the white number tied round her waist (what a salmon-thin, salmon-sprung waist!), her body flat along Shylock’s withers and reaching neck, my right leg jumped with them, sympathetic magic. Oh witchcraft in white numbers, the girl jumped over the horse, and the moon shone for ever on Molly Simpson and Edward Gilchrist as they walked out into an eternal blaze of dawn and dusk, all midday and midnight vanished and banished, only the early morning and the evening left for our endless enjoyment of each other….

But now she had completed one side of the course, and she made the turn and came down towards the gate opposite our car—that gate over which she perpetually soars in my imagination, the same gate as last year, when the paper had caught her in mid-flight–and now she was over the brush fence and coming to the gate, and Shylock was cantering easily, easily, all in control, and heading now into the jump and over she—— No! Oh, Molly! Shylock refused, stopped dead, put on the brakes and skidded the last six feet and into the gate, carrying it forward on his chest, till he stopped and it fell, plunk, red and white, on the grass of the ring. But Molly stays on, she backs him out of the shambles, he is snorting now and picking his feet up high and his eyes are rolling, and men run out and put the jump together again, and here she comes again, those knees so tight against the leather of the saddle (such soapings, such tender polishings, to produce that burnish, as though it was a wedding-gown and every pearl had to be separately shone) and——Oh no! Humiliation squared and cubed! Shylock runs out, runs swerving away from the red-and-white monster he has suddenly found in the five-barred gate. Oh you coward and traitor, you animal, you despicable, insensate thing, you ingrate, you horse! But Molly has one more attempt, a final try, and she gathers him up, and
she calms him down, she halts him and strokes his neck and speaks sweet nothings into his flat-back felt-like ears, and then she comes back, try again, Molly Simpson, and he prances a little as he walks, walks edgily, warily, and she talks to him all the time, too low to be heard, some magic incantation, no doubt, some witchcraft, and here they come again, up to the jump, oh please get over it, Shylock, for Molly and me, listen to what she is saying.

No. He stops dead. Molly flies over his head, over the jump, it is all so slow, so graceful, picks up her hat, takes Shylock by the reins (he is standing there quiet now, shocked at what he has done) and leads him out of the ring.

The crowd mumbles sympathetically, wipes its brow, there is a general feeling of exertion over. The jumping proceeds.

First Stirling Moss, and now this. It has been a bad day.

‘Gosh, what rotten luck, Molly.’

‘He can be such a
pig
.’ Her eyes red, searching for the handkerchief in her sleeve.

I look away. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’

Blow it all out of your nose, the whole world of those objectionable beasts, then come to me, Molly, I will console you.

‘I was afraid you might have been hurt.’

‘If only I had been!’ she cries, bursts into tears for her shameful graceful flying fall, for having been mocked by a horse, by her own Shylock.

‘Oh, go away, Teddy, please go away!’

*

August the fourteenth, a Monday evening, and the sun is striking back at the clouds, issuing purple and black summonses, writs, judgments, while the sky cringes away from the west.

I walk alone in the avenues of yews, muttering fragments of poems. Pigeons wheel, calling among themselves, like a family unpacking after a journey. A slow black rook flies ploddingly towards Cartersfield. God is unjust. There is no truth except there is no
truth. Molly is going on Wednesday. Blackness is all. Very well, then, I am a man, I will have blackness. Give me blackness, blacker than black. And the telephone has not rung for me.

My mother calls me home across the quicksands of sixteen. Dinner. I am not hungry. I never want to eat again.

‘Teddy!’

Perhaps I am hungry after all.

*

Tuesday morning, and I lifted the receiver and dialled the number and Molly was out but she would call when she got back. Into the dining-room for an orange, to the kitchen for a lump of sugar. Sucking the sweetness of an August morning, I walked round the garden, sniffing the fragrant exhaust-and-hay smell of the motor-mower. Arthur was spinning it round at the far end of the lawn. The noise was good, grew louder, deafened, died away again. I would never drive such a petty machine. No chance to double-declutch, no opportunity for fancy pedal-work.

‘Teddy!’

Shall I answer?

‘Teddy!’

‘I’m here!’

‘Telephone!’

The crew-cut grass scarcely feels the weight of my feet as I speed, through the gear-box and into top, brake at the door, in and slam, to the phone.

‘Teddy?’

‘Molly?’

‘Hello.’

‘How are you, Molly? I mean, why don’t you—if you haven’t anything else on, that is—why don’t you come over?’

Pause. The line hums to itself, haws a little, like a cook mumbling over her pots on the stove. I have been too fast, I should have——

‘Well, that would be awfully nice. What are you doing?’

‘Nothing, really. It would be nice, I was thinking, with you going away tomorrow—I mean—we could think of something to do, couldn’t we?’

‘Yes, all right. I’ll just go and ask Mummy. Hang on.’

The line is now a choir, high up near the roof of a great cathedral, the basses and trebles soaring out, then the low continuo of alto and tenor. They are singing our song, Molly, they are singing our song.

‘She says all right. After lunch. I’ll be over about two, if that’s O.K.’

‘Yes, yes. Marvellous. I’ll think of something by the time you get here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something to do.’

‘Oh. Well, at two, then.’

‘Yes. And—Molly? I just wanted to say how sorry I was about the gymkhana. Really.’

‘But didn’t you stay?’

‘No, we went home after the jumping. What happened?’

‘Shylock and I won the bare-back jumping!’

‘You won!’ Bare-back, and jodhpurs, knee and thigh, against the bare animal back. And I missed it. Good. I could not have watched her pressing her knees into the bare back of Shylock, no, not that.

‘How marvellous! Congratulations. No one told me.’

‘It was rather nice, wasn’t it?’

‘Gosh, yes. Stupendous.’

‘Well, it was just my lucky day, I suppose. And after the proper jumping, I was just determined——’

‘You did very well. It wasn’t your fault. It was Shylock.’

‘No, it was me. The rosette—the one we got for the potato race—had got loose, and was flapping near his eye.’

‘What an awful shame. Rotten luck.’

‘He couldn’t see properly.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Well, see you this afternoon. Mummy says she wants to use the phone.’

‘O.K., Molly. I can’t wait.’

‘Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye.’

My mother is arranging flowers in the hall. Listening in, probably. No privacy, anywhere.

‘Who was that, Teddy?’

‘Molly.’

‘Oh?’

‘She’s coming over this afternoon.’

‘Oh? What will you do?’

‘Oh, things. You know.’

She tidies a final zinnia. ‘Good, darling.’

*

Molly arrives in the family Rover. Her mother says: ‘I’ll be back about six, darling. Have a nice time.’ She drives off without saying anything to me except ‘Hello’ and ‘Good-bye’.

‘What would you like to do, Molly?’

‘Could I have a drink, please? I’m terribly thirsty, I don’t know why.’

In the kitchen Mrs Clark, our cook, is finishing the washing-up from lunch. We get in her way, choosing among lime-juice, orange and lemon squashes, and cider. Molly takes orange. I fetch her ice, mix it for her with a silver swizzle-stick, help myself, to be bold, to cider. Then we go out to deck-chairs on the lawn. We sit and talk of this and that, mostly of her triumph at the gymkhana. I look covertly at her legs, swinging freely from under her dress, think of them clamped to Shylock’s back.