The Men and the Girls (7 page)

He began to clear the table. Everything seemed coated with stick, even the rush mats. He aimed washing-up liquid at the table, to unsticky it, but it was the concentrated kind, and the surface of the table vanished under a dense blanket of unconquerable foam. Hugh rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. The foam dissolved into clouds of bubbles which were lighter but thicker, and began to blow about the room and make him sneeze. He scraped them off the table surface with a fish slice, and then dried it vigorously with several clean, ironed tea towels, and stood back to admire the effect. The surface of the table, usually as pale and gleaming as the twins' and Julia's hair, looked dull, smeared and unhealthy.

‘Bloody, fucking hell,' Hugh said.

He lit a cigarette and began to slam things into the dishwasher. He broke the handle off a mug. From next door in the sitting-room, the roars of the gorilla were mounting and it suddenly struck Hugh, for no reason, that, in the three and a half hours since Julia had been away, the telephone had been completely silent. It seemed the last straw. He dreaded it when it rang, but he was desolated when it didn't. Prompted by nothing more than impulse, Hugh pulled the bar stool up to the dresser, settled himself there with his ashtray, and dialled James's number.

‘Richmon' Villa,' said Mrs Cheng.

‘Is Mr Mallow there, please?'

‘James out,' Mrs Cheng said.

‘And Miss Bain?'

‘Kate workin'.'

‘When will Mr Mallow be back?'

‘Don' know,' said Mrs Cheng. ‘Never say. You want to leave message?'

‘No,' said Hugh. ‘No. I don't want to leave a message. I want to
talk
to someone.'

Then Julia came home. She brought an apple tart from the French baker in St Giles. She said, ‘Oh Hugh, have they been awful?' and he said with miserable thankfulness that he thought it was his fault, he'd egged them on. He managed to ask if her lunch had been a success. It had.

‘We planned the next three programmes. It's so amazing, the way that talking to someone who's brimming with ideas makes you have ideas too. I remember thinking that when I met you, I remember thinking that it was all right to think things that weren't conventional.'

‘And now you're used to me.'

‘Of course I am, in a sense, because you aren't a stranger any more. What happened to this cushion?'

‘It was the victim of a game. Don't be cross with them.'

Julia looked from the cushion to him. ‘I'm seldom cross with them. I explain things. Has anyone rung?'

‘Not a soul.'

Julia put the cushion down. She went over to Hugh and put her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes, behind her huge spectacles, were huge too, and serious.

‘Darling Hugh, I know this is hard for you, I know it's hard to change. But we've got to live, haven't we? We've got to live and educate the boys and have the nice things we're used to and the holidays and so on. I suppose it was inevitable that our roles would change a little, over time, that we would have to adapt, that the emphasis would shift. I can cope. I don't mind shouldering more. I don't feel any differently about you if I shoulder more. But I don't think I can shoulder your resentment as well.'

‘I'm not resentful. I'm simply in mild despair.'

‘But why? You've had a wonderful career, you've been a household name, you've still got a very good job, why do you feel in despair?'

Hugh took her hands from his shoulders and held them a little and then dropped them. ‘Because, my darling child, I am simply not effective any more. And when we cease to be effective, then it is that the iron enters into our souls.'

While Julia was bathing the twins, and washing their hair which she always did on Thursdays, she remembered she had not told Hugh about seeing Kate. Kate, Julia thought, had not looked very well, she'd looked pinched and tired, though her manner had been as sweet as ever. Privately, Julia thought working in Pasta Please was a tiny bit affected, though she genuinely admired Kate's voluntary work. Well, she would tell Hugh about Kate at supper, and then she would have a serious, constructive talk with him about things he could do in life which would restore to him this sense of being effective that he said was so vital.

After supper at Richmond Villa, Kate's friend Helen rang. Helen ran the home for battered wives. She spoke for a long time, explaining how the money-raising side was claiming more and more of her time and attention, and that she really did need someone prepared to help much more with the administration, though of course she couldn't pay such a person more than pocket money, so it would have to be a person well circumstanced enough to feel they really owed it to society to do something difficult for nothing. Then she paused and waited for Kate to volunteer. Kate, winding her legs round the legs of the kitchen chair she was perched on, and feeling a rat, didn't volunteer. Helen then admired Kate. She said she had such understanding and compassion and humour and that her days at Mansfield House (named after Katherine Mansfield whom Helen particularly respected) were days everyone there looked forward to. Then she stopped again, and waited.

‘I'm sorry,' Kate said. She tried to say something else, she tried to say that she would love to help, and, even more, to mean that she would love to, as she would have done, she told herself, only recently, but nothing came.

‘I've rung you,' Helen said, not troubling to hide the reproach in her voice, ‘because I thought I could rely on you to see how I'm situated and to want to help.'

‘I do want to, but I can't.'

‘Why? What's happened?'

‘There are,' Kate said carefully, ‘a lot of changes here.'

‘Don't tell me. Don't tell me James is throwing you out—'

‘No. No. Nothing like that.'

‘Then—'

‘Helen, if I could explain myself properly, I would. I'll go on helping on my usual days, but I can't do more. I'm sorry, but I can't.'

‘I see,' said Helen, who didn't, and put the telephone down.

Kate drew her knees up so that her feet were on the seat of her chair, and wrapped her arms round her shins. I'm changing, she said to herself, I'm changing. How could I say no to Helen when I know what she does, how hard she works? How could I? But I did, and I don't want to ring her and take it all back, either. What's happening? I feel I'm losing all the things in myself that I value, that I'm hardening, that I'm trapped. Is it because I live with someone a bit inflexible, someone a bit old? I'm mad. Sixty-one isn't old. Sixty-one's nothing. It's very wrong of me to think of James as old. And it's very wrong of me not to want to help Helen. Help, Kate thought, pushing her knees into her eye sockets, help. Where is all the loving going?

The door opened. James put his head round it.

‘Kate. Are you all right?'

She raised her head. She looked at him. She managed a smile.

‘I've just been very unhelpful to Helen, on the phone.'

‘Good,' James said, who thought Helen was bossy.

‘No,' Kate said, shaking her head. ‘No. Not good at all.'

Four

The Penniman Agency in London occupied two small but graceful rooms in Bedford Square. Vivienne Penniman, who had been a Rank starlet in the days when Hugh Hunter was first entering television, had set up the agency with all the shrewd realism of an actress whose career manifestly had a certain lifespan, and no afterlife. The purpose of the agency was to organize money-making public appearances for celebrities, in order that they might be able to put something by for the bleaker days ahead when the public, reminded of them by a chance remark, would say, ‘He's never still alive! Heavens, I thought he'd copped it years ago, you never see him now, do you?'

Actors and actresses, television personalities, footballers and lesser tennis players came to Vivienne Penniman to be offered things to open or promote, supermarkets, garages, sports complexes, leisure centres. Depending upon the position their star currently occupied in the popular firmament, she could offer them either a four- or more often a three-figure sum for an appearance of not more than two hours, minus her ten per cent. Some of her clients were realistic and cheerful about this, enjoyed joshing around with the public, and had no illusions about the ephemeral nature of their best success. Others were resigned, but professional, and regarded the whole business as a necessary evil, with whining about it being out of court. Yet others felt diminished and resentful, unable to pass up several hundred pounds an appearance, and equally unable to reconcile themselves to how it was earned. Being of this latter group, Hugh Hunter had so far resisted joining Vivienne Penniman's agency.

But Julia had talked to him. She had been very sweet, not in the least patronizing, only sympathetic and firm. Hugh had been surprised at how firm she was. She had said look, there's this problem and here are some of the ways I think we could help solve it. If you have better ideas, fine; if you don't, perhaps you would look at mine. Julia had reminded Hugh about Vivienne Penniman.

Hugh reminisced about Vivienne for a bit. ‘She was fearfully pretty. I remember her coming in to the studio with a whole lot of other Rank girls, and it was like having a bunch of flowers sitting there. They were asked to predict their futures, and told that we'd look at them again in ten years, and see where they'd got to. It was terribly funny, not just because they were so innocent and hopeful, but because of the cameras. We only had one set in the studio then, of course, and we had to use them for everything. They'd been taken out on the Solent the day before, filming ocean races, and every time the turret turned you could hear a layer of sea salt crackling.'

Julia was not deflected. ‘Hugh,' she said, in the kind, steady, adult voice she used when the twins were on the verge of doing something awful.

‘I know,' he said. ‘I'll go. Don't bully me.'

‘I'm not. I'm simply trying to focus you.'

‘And you're right. I know you're right. But it is terribly, painfully, difficult to go against one's instincts.'

‘I do understand.'

Hugh filled his wineglass again and took a gulp. ‘Please don't,' he said. ‘Please don't be so sweet and understanding and reasonable. Please, my darling Julia, don't be so fucking perfect,' and then he had taken himself and his glass out to his little chill study at the back of the cottage, and hunted about among the files of thirty-five years for Vivienne Penniman's telephone number.

‘Hugh,' Vivienne said. She was standing up behind her desk, her hands held out to him in a clash of bracelets. The girl like a flower had matured into a formidable magnificence of bosom, and strong, shapely legs and richly tinted hair. She wore black, and too many pearls for the morning. ‘My dear Hugh. After all these years.'

She leaned across the desk and gave him a kiss whose powerful fragrance took him abruptly back to all those dear departed theatrical dressing-rooms of the fifties. ‘And what a success you've been.'

‘Past tense significant.'

‘I don't allow that kind of talk in here. I wouldn't have agreed even to see you if you weren't still going strong. Mind you, you should have come years ago. I could spank agents, really I could. A business like mine is no skin off their noses, but they won't urge their people my way when it's to their best advantage to do so. I like to get someone when they're rising, bully them into investing what they earn with me and then, when they're fading, hey presto, there's a nest-egg.'

‘I'm a late starter,' Hugh said.

Vivienne looked at him as if she were appraising a prize pig. ‘You certainly are. But there's mileage in you yet. Certainly mileage in the Midlands.'

‘Garages in Bicester, businessmen's hotels in Birmingham—'

‘Exactly so,' Vivienne said crisply. She pressed a buzzer on her desk. ‘I'll give you our details, and we'll look and see what we've got that might do for you.'

A girl came in, a lively girl, all hair and exuberance, and put down some papers in a plastic folder on Vivienne's desk. Hugh looked at her. She gave him a wide, remote smile. He looked at the plastic folder. Vivienne had spun her chair away from him towards a computer screen behind her.

‘See you,' the girl said, and went out.

Vivienne tapped and pattered on the computer keys. Hugh watched her. The telephone rang and was intercepted in the other room.

‘What luck,' Vivienne said, without turning. ‘What luck. There's a delicious new golf course, sponsored by Japanese car people, just outside Wolverhampton. It's the real thing, thirty-six holes and all the trimmings. They've got a golfing star to open it, and they want a well-known telly face to be his sidekick, ask him things.' She swung back. ‘You can do it with your eyes shut. They'll pay all your expenses, and three hundred pounds.' She looked at him. Her expression changed. ‘Smile, please, Hugh,' she said.

Joss knew it had to be Miss Bachelor. She had that old-fashioned posh sort of voice, and she was wearing a dire coat, and she was asking Mr Patel in the grocer's for Nice biscuits. Joss didn't think that was how you pronounced them, she'd always thought they were called that because they weren't nice at all, but boring.

‘And oxtail soup, if you please,' Miss Bachelor said to Mr Patel. ‘Just one tin, and some brown boot polish and a pint of milk.'

Mr Patel was very polite to Miss Bachelor. Other customers, trained by supermarkets, collected their groceries in a wire basket, but Miss Bachelor didn't seem to have cottoned on to such independence, and Mr Patel humoured her. Mr Patel was a second-generation Christian, his father having been converted in Rawalpindi, before the Second World War, by a missionary who had looked very much like Miss Bachelor, and whose photograph was glued into the Patel family album. It would have distressed Mr Patel very much to know that Miss Bachelor was an atheist.