Under the Skin Page 5

  The gibe was unlike him. It sprang from irritation and despair.

  I said, just as stupidly, ‘I’m not so taken with Chirk.’ We looked at each other in embarrassment. I said quickly, ‘I can see he might be just as tiresome as Prout.’

  Agnew answered, equally quickly, ‘Of course one can see how he got pushed into this exaggerated pro-black position.’

  ‘Faced with someone like Prout?’

  We both smiled, relieved.

  Agnew said, ‘It’s the most difficult thing in the world to be moderate in your opinions. Especially here. It’s easier if you live in a temperate climate.’

  ‘Or if you’re just a visitor to a hot one.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Though I had meant to help him out – as my part in this tactful duet – I was irritated by the comfortable smugness of his tone.

  He went on, ‘You get on well with Nbola, I take it? He’s a good chap. We could do with a lot more like him.’

  ‘I like him. He’s coming down to Nairobi to see me off next week. He’s got some leave.’ I glanced at Agnew; this seemed a suitable moment for a spot of judicious’blackmail. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m hoping to persuade him to have a shot at one of those Government grants to go to England – Commonwealth scholarships or whatever they’re called. Anyway, to find out about them.’

  ‘Do you think he’d like that? Well – tell him to let me know if he applies and I’ll see what I can do.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry this happened. You can tell Nbola so, if you like. I wouldn’t want this stupid affair to upset him.’

  ‘It won’t. Because I hadn’t mentioned it.’

  ‘Oh. No – of course not.’ His eyes smiled at me openly. ‘Don’t let it upset you either.’

  ‘It hasn’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t give a tuppeny damn for Prout.’

  Chapter Four

  Really, though, it was Prout who prompted me to offer Jay a home. Even if there were few full-blown Prouts around, there were enough Prout-ish sentiments to worry me. I was not being charitable to Jay – I am not a charitable person. I simply couldn’t stand the thought of chicken-necked landladies shutting the door on his hopeful, smiling face. I had stressed the financial necessity of the arrangement to Louise, partly I suppose because I didn’t want her to think me sentimental, but chiefly because I knew it would have more effect. Louise is a feminist – it would seem to her of the first importance that Agnes should be provided for – and she is also a patriot: she cannot believe that there is any real colour prejudice in England, even if some people are a bit ‘stupid’. ‘Stupid’is a word Louise uses a lot to explain away human wickedness and folly: she likes to think well of people.

  As a matter of fact, I didn’t much care whether Agnes was well provided for or not. I thought her a horrible woman. I had been prepared, when Jay took me to visit her, to find that she was less sophisticated than he was – few Africans have educated wives – but I had been shocked to find someone so actively unappealing. She was a big, giggly woman, fat and smooth like a swollen black fruit, with dusty looking hair that was fastened into tiny pigtails all over her head. They must have taken her a long time to arrange; certainly there was no sign of her finding time to do anything else. The children looked healthy enough but the house was filthy. It was a new house, a box-like structure with a corrugated iron roof. The floor of the main room was covered with a linoleum square, vilely patterned – wherever you could see the colours through the dirt – in purple and orange. The only furniture was a derelict sofa and a bookcase containing the novels of Buchan and Henty, prizes Jay had won at the mission school. There was a biscuit tin lid with a picture of the Queen on it tacked to one wall. While I was there, one of the children opened a door into what was presumably a bedroom, a dark, windowless hole, musty as an old hen run. The chief burden of Agnes’s conversation, through giggles, was a complaint that Jay had not been offered one of the Government bungalows: perhaps she thought I could do something about it. I thought it hardly surprising; one could say of Agnes, with truth, that she would probably have kept coals in the bath, or whatever is the African equivalent.

  It seemed a miracle that Jay should have emerged from such a background. I was astonished that he seemed so fond, almost proud, of Agnes and even more surprised, when I mentioned my visit to Mrs Agnew, to hear her say Mrs Nbola was a very nice woman. A bit lazy, she conceded, when I said I thought Jay deserved something better, but cheerful and sensible. Her attitude made me furious: it hinted at a patronizing double standard. She wouldn’t have wanted her son to marry Agnes, surely? She answered this with an odd look and said in her flat, cool voice that this could hardly arise, could it? Her son was only thirteen and Agnes was married already.

  At least Jay would have somewhere comfortable while he stayed with us. I had painted the spare room – the sluttish Agnes had been in my mind while I did it. It looked very pleasant, with apple-green walls, a grey carpet and a new yellow bed-cover. Jay was delighted. He said, smiling at Louise, ‘You have a beautiful home. It is in lovely taste, like a church.’

  Our house is Victorian and full of bad stained glass. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ Louise said.

  The telephone rang. I went to answer it in the bedroom. ‘Has he arrived yet?’ my mother-in-law said. She spoke in a sepulchral voice, like someone announcing a death.

  ‘All safe and sound,’ I said. ‘You’re out of luck, Julia.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that, Tom,’ she said in a livelier tone. ‘I don’t wish your young man any harm. I just thought there might have been a hitch somewhere.’

  ‘No. No plane crash, no nothing. Thank you for the hot water bottle.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. I may not approve of your guest, Tom, but I wouldn’t want him to be cold. I bought the kind that has a special spiny cover so that he can’t burn himself – he won’t be used to hot water bottles.’

  ‘That’s very thoughtful of you.’

  ‘Not really. It was a line Boots were selling off cheap – I happened to see it when I went in to change my library book. Am I invited for Sunday?’

  ‘Of course. If you want to come in the circumstances.’

  ‘I’m not going to avoid your house for a whole year, Tom. Nor am I going to play box and cox with Mr Kenyatta.’

  ‘Nbola.’

  ‘Mr Nbubble, then.’ She gave an exasperated, trilling laugh as if it was too absurd to expect her to remember such a ridiculous name. ‘It’s quite bad enough having to play box and cox with Him. Though I don’t suppose He manages to drag himself away from the Abode of Love very often.’

  This time the anoymous pronoun referred to Louise’s father, Augustus Trim. Julia seldom gave names to people who were beyond the pale. The woman for whom Augustus had left Julia twenty-five years ago, was That Creature. There had been a legal separation giving Julia the custody of the children but she had refused to divorce him – out of spite, Louise told me. I don’t think this could have been true; Julia is never spiteful, she enjoys life too much. She simply found it preferable, less dull, anyway, to be an abandoned wife than a divorcée: it meant that she continued to be involved in an interesting situation. She could still say to people – she had gone on saying it for twenty-five years – ‘My husband is living in sin with his secretary.’ This hint of boudoir rapture cast a kind of perverse glamour over her own lot.

  It presented rather a distorted picture, though. There could have been few couples as cosy and respectable as Augustus and his wife – I could not, really, think of her as anything else. Certainly, she could never have been a sequined siren except in Julia’s lusty imagination. When young, she was probably prettily wholesome; now in her late forties, she looked ten years older, a tubby soul who wore gold-rimmed spectacles and elastic stockings and enjoyed a nice game of whist. Louise and her brother, Reginald, called her Auntie. Louise was fond of her but her affection, like her father’s, was indulgent and slightly contemptuous, the affection you show to a good, gentle dog. An
d Auntie – her name was Georgiana – behaved rather like one. Her manner was always grateful; a shade apologetic.

  She would have been a great disappointment to Julia had they met, and worse. Julia was not easily humiliated but one look at Georgiana would have compelled her to re-think her own part in her husband’s defection. It was to spare her this mortifying exercise that I frustrated Louise’s attempts to bring her mother and father together – it’s so childish of them after all these years – and to play Julia’s game whenever Augustus and Georgiana came to see us. Their visits were not frequent. Augustus could not often tear himself away from his week-end golf. But when they did come for lunch, Julia always decided to ‘pop in’for tea. She would telephone at intervals during the afternoon to ask if ‘They’had gone, often using an assumed voice in case Augustus should answer her ring. Again, this wasn’t spite on her part, simply a lively dramatic sense. She did not even resent Louise’s affection for her father; indeed, she often said, ‘You must be a comfort to him, dear. He needs his children’s love more than ever now.’

  I said, ‘He’s not coming next Sunday, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Sounding slightly disappointed, she added, ‘Perhaps it’s just as well. He was never as broad-minded as I am.’

  ‘Wasn’t he? Anyway, he has some business conference in Rome.’

  ‘I suppose She’s gone with him.’ She paused, sighing a little to underline how much she had lost, then continued, ‘I believe the weather is atrocious in Italy just now. I’ll see you on Sunday, then.

  Twelve-thirty. And don’t worry, Tom. Manners makyth man. I’ll be nice to Mr Whatever-his-name-is.’

  ‘I never doubted it, Julia. I’ll see he has a bath before you come.’

  I put the telephone down, smiling. A conversation with Julia affected me like a brisk work-out must affect a boxer: I felt toned up after it. I went downstairs to the drawing-room, bouncing athletically on the balls of my feet.

  Louise was slightly flushed with the first drink of the day. She looked remarkably pretty, crouching on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and leaning slightly forward, in a position that gave her a tense, excited air. As I came in, she was talking in a low, rapid voice.

  ‘Of course, British behaviour in Kenya must have made all Africans terribly bitter. I’m surprised any of you speak to us. I can’t bear to think of it. They say the women are the worst. But you must understand, Jay, that very few people here, in England, are really like that. English people are really awfully considerate to underpriviliged people. I mean London must be the most cosmopolitan city on earth, we have all races here, Chinese, Negroes, Jews.…’

  ‘Lay off, darling,’ I said. Jay was looking startled, sitting bolt upright at the other end of the sofa with a large drink in his hand. Louise had given him gin which he didn’t drink but obviously had not liked to refuse.

  He said uneasily, ‘Do you mean, Mrs Grant, that there is no colour prejudice in England? That is not what I have been told. I thought, some time ago, there was a battle on a hill outside London.’

  Louise glanced at me, half apologetically and half for enlightenment.

  ‘The Battle of Notting, darling,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’ She smiled prettily at Jay. ‘Please call me Louise. That was nothing, really. Just a few delinquent boys and undesirable elements, it was stupid, really. Everyone was horrified.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ I said. ‘The whole country’s stuffed full of little Hitlers, just aching to find someone to fix their grudges on.’

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ she said reproachfully.

  ‘If there’s been less trouble here than in some other places it’s because we’re more law-abiding. Also because we’ve never had much of a problem, as they have in America, say, except in some overcrowded areas. Wait till you get a real bout of unemployment – on Moss side, for example – and see how the nice, tolerant British behave then.’

  ‘Tom, you’re being horrid,’ Louise said.

  ‘I’m only trying to make you face up to the facts of life,’ I said, enjoying myself. ‘And the facts of life are that the only people who can afford to be tolerant are the comfortable ones who’ve got a warm place to sleep and food in their bellies. The moment you haven’t, you turn on the nearest whipping boy – the Irish, the Jews, the Blacks. That reminds me, I saw an advertisement for rooms in the paper shop that said ‘Sorry, No Welsh’. A splendidly recherché prejudice, I thought. But the point is, people aren’t nice. Only the lucky ones.’

  ‘You don’t believe that. You’re just striking an attitude,’ Louise cried. Her voice rose shrilly, the way it always did when I behaved like this. The pain in her eyes was the pain of all trusting, gentle people confronted with cynicism. I loved her for it, but it always made me sadistic. ‘I’m just a realist, that’s all,’ I said comfortably. ‘I admit it would be nice to think as you do that people only need a little help and encouragement to love their neighbours as themselves but we all know now that anyone who does is a neurotic – or worse, raving mad. Normal people are just as self-centred and grasping as we were when we first dropped down from the trees.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Louise, ‘Oh.’ She drew a deep breath and said in a loud voice, ‘Tom, you’re being hateful – you’re being just like my mother. You enjoy being a prophet of doom, even though you don’t believe any of it. You like to think of yourself, sitting among the ruins and gloating.’

  Her face was beet-red with vexation. She rose from the sofa in an agile movement and advanced on me, fists clenched. I took a step backwards, for safety’s sake, but she halted a yard away and stood, glowering.

  I grinned at Jay. ‘You’ll get used to her in time,’ I said.

  Jay was looking at Louise. ‘African women do not shout at men,’ he said.

  It was not a reproof, simply an expression of bewilderment, but I saw Louise start, as at an unexpected jab in the back. She swung round and stared at Jay with an astonishment that I thought I understood. She had seen her relationship with him as entirely one-sided and benign. It was a difficult moment for her, as difficult as it must have been for Pygmalion when Galatea first answered him back.

  But Louise is sensitive enough. She learns her lessons quickly. She said, humbly, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. But Tom does get on my nerves sometimes.’

  ‘He just likes to talk,’ Jay said serenely and suddenly they both smiled at each other in a gently indulgent way that made me feel left out.

  This feeling persisted throughout the evening. It was as if they had both entered into an unspoken alliance against me. As a result I was provoked to fresh absurdities which made them exchange glances that said, ‘Let the Boy have his say.’ I did not altogether mind this build-up as an enfant terrible – it took me back to my boyhood when I had enjoyed shocking my mother and her frumpish friends. But it was unlike Louise to behave like this. She was clearly enjoying herself; from time to time she looked at me with a little air of mischievous superiority. I was torn between two emotions. I was glad they were getting on so well – I had feared they might not – but I was also irritated, perhaps very slightly jealous.…

  Don’t misunderstand me – I liked to see Louise happy. Our relationship had always been a loving one but love by itself is seldom enough; married people – childless married people, anyway – have to be something else to each other besides lovers, to avoid boredom. So when I teased Louise for her terribly sentimental approach to things – I, of course, was the voice of reason – it was simply to provide spice in the matrimonial pudding. When she did not react, I felt lost; I simply did not know how to treat her.

  It was remarkably late before Louise suggested we go to bed. She was usually obsessional about getting nine hours sleep every night. When I had filled Jay’s hot water bottle and settled him for the night, I went into our bedroom to find her creaming her face in front of the glass and humming tunelessly. She looked very well and pretty.

  I said, ‘You enjoyed yourself this evening, didn’t you?’
>
  She paused, a grubby Kleenex in her hand, and beamed at me.

  ‘I thought we all did,’ she said. There was no inquiry in her tone. Clearly she had no idea, or pretended to have no idea, that I was hurt.

  ‘It was an excellent dinner,’ I said pointedly.

  ‘Yes, wasn’t it?’ She tossed the Kleenex into the waste basket and unscrewed the lid of a new looking jar. She began to cover her face with a white paste.

  ‘Whatever’s that?’

  ‘It tones up the pores. You have to leave it a minute or two while it dries.’

  She sat, her face immobile, her eyes a dark, glittering blue in the white mask.

  I picked up the jar and sniffed at it. ‘It’s a foul smell.’ Experimentally, I rubbed a little on the side of my nose.

  ‘Don’t waste it,’ she said sharply. The skin round her mouth had tightened into a prunes and prisms O so that she sounded like a little girl having an elocution lesson.

  ‘I don’t see why my pores shouldn’t be toned up too.’ All the same, I put the jar down. ‘Though it seems a bit futile, just before you go to bed. Won’t the pores have loosened up again by the morning?’

  She gave me a pitying smile – rather ridiculous in that stiff, clown’s face – and got up from her stool to go to the bathroom. I heard the water running. Presumably, she was washing off the mask. I undressed and got into bed.

  She didn’t look at me when she came back but began to tidy, picking up my clothes as well as her own and hanging them carefully in the wardrobe. Then she sat down on the stool again to brush her hair. That finished, she rubbed cream into her hands, holding them aloft and smoothing each finger separately. Usually these arcane rites did not worry me – in fact, I enjoyed watching her – but tonight her absorption in them bothered me.