Under the Skin Read online

  I said, ‘Do you like Jay?’

  ‘What? Oh – yes.’ She put her hand cream away and blew at a film of dust on the dressing-table before she stood up to take off her gown. ‘I think he’s an absolute love and a pet,’ she said. This awkwardly gushing, schoolgirl tone was one I had often heard her use when she was talking to her mother or to women friends. She screwed up her face thoughtfully and said in a more normal voice, ‘I’d not really expected anyone so nice. I suppose because I’d not really thought about what he would be like. Does that sound silly? What I mean is, I’d wanted him to come and stay with us because he was African – someone different, someone I could sort of boast about. I hadn’t really thought of him as a person. So it was an especially good surprise when he turned out to be so nice.’

  For some reason her innocent honesty irritated me. No – not ‘for some reason’. I knew why. She was saying what she thought quite simply for once, without wondering whether I would think it naïve. It seemed to mark the extent of her deliberate withdrawal from me.

  I said, ‘Do you find him attractive? Physically, I mean.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said at once. She was standing quite still, poised with one knee on the bed. She looked at me attentively.

  Her calmness goaded me.

  ‘I suppose you couldn’t possibly imagine being attracted to a black man.’

  ‘Did you want me to be?’

  I hadn’t expected her to say that. ‘No. But—’

  ‘But what?’ In spite of her sharp, schoolmarmish tone, she bit on her lip to conceal a slight tremor. This encouraged me.

  ‘You wouldn’t have said you weren’t attracted to him in quite that way if he had been white.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh.’ She began to laugh helplessly, doubling up as if she had a pain in her stomach. She collapsed on the bed and laughed until the tears came. Her face was lustrous with a shining mixture of tears and face cream. ‘Oh, Tom,’ she said, on a sighing breath, ‘you are funny.’

  I lay, rigid with offence. ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  She giggled weakly. ‘Whatever I said would have been wrong, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I admitted reluctantly.

  She giggled again and got into bed.

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. I moved my leg against her thigh. She lay still. I put out a tentative hand to touch her breast but she shook it off, flouncing over onto her side.

  ‘I’m worn out, laughing,’ she said.

  ‘There’s always an excuse,’ I said, trying to sound good-humoured. She was always so hurt if I showed disappointment.

  She gave an indignant snort and prodded her bottom towards me.

  ‘Make me a chair.’

  I curled round in the way she liked to sleep, with my knees under her knees, my left hand gently encircling her waist but not ‘touching’her, as she put it.

  She was asleep in two minutes.

  Chapter Five

  I heard Jay coughing while I was in the bathroom. When I came down to breakfast he was sitting at the table, looking pinched. He smiled with agonized politeness every time a cough shook him.

  ‘You’ve caught a cold,’ Louise accused him and flew upstairs for the thermometer. His temperature was up; we put him to bed with Julia’s spiny hot water bottle and gave him hot lemon juice. He lay there for two days, looking very young and fragile and resigned in a pair of black satin pyjamas embroidered with purple peacocks. (Where did he get them? Louise asked, awed.)

  To my relief, she did not seem to mind looking after him: in fact, she positively enjoyed it. She bullied him as if he were a favourite younger brother; forced him to drink warm milk, which he hated, and taught him to play bézique.

  On the third morning his fever had gone but he was still coughing – in no state, Louise said firmly, to go and meet Philip at the airport. Though it would have been difficult, as I had two lectures that morning, I offered to fetch the child, but she said there was no need, she was perfectly capable. She was in a manic mood; she raced round the house, washing up the breakfast dishes, lighting fires, heating milk to leave by Jay’s bedside.

  ‘Don’t wear yourself out,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t.’ She looked at me. ‘It’s nice to have someone to do things for.’

  ‘I wish we’d had that baby,’ I said suddenly. It was something I hadn’t said, or thought about, for a long time; now, remembering her misery, her terrible sense of failure, the long, exhausted bouts of weeping, I wished I hadn’t spoken.

  But she was not in a mood to be distressed.

  ‘We might still.’ She smiled and kissed me.

  When I got back that afternoon Jay was sitting by the fire with Philip on his lap, asleep.

  He was more simian looking than Jay. His face was like one of those rubber moulds children use to make shapes out of Polyfilla. Awake, gazing at us with mournful brown eyes, he was appealing, like a sad-eyed monkey or a picture in an advertisement for Famine Relief. He was pathetically thin; the neat, school suit Jay’s uncle had bought for him in Nairobi hung on him like a grey sack.

  ‘All African children have thin legs,’ I comforted Louise, who was almost weeping in the kitchen over the pathos of his appearance.

  ‘But he won’t eat anything,’ she wailed. ‘And I can’t get him to speak to me.’

  ‘He’s scared. It’s all horribly new. Don’t worry, he’ll pick up in a day or two.’

  I had underestimated his resilience. Within an hour he was excitedly exploring the house, rushing up and down stairs on his pea-stick legs – he fell down them twice because stairs were new to him too – shouting with laughter and asking questions. ‘What’s this for, Aunty Louise, how does it work, why, why, why?’ He was certainly not scared of us; when I sat down he climbed on my lap, butting me in the stomach with his sharp little knees while Jay watched him with loving pride from the other side of the hearth. ‘He is so glad to be here, with his Uncle Tom.’

  Louise beamed on us all and made plans. Philip was due at his school on Monday, but we had the week-end. If Jay was well enough, we would all take Philip to the zoo on Saturday. (Why, I wondered? Surely it would be rather like taking an English child to inspect a lot of caged dogs and cats?)

  ‘And on Sunday, of course, he can play with Giles,’ Louise said in a bright voice, avoiding my eyes.

  ‘Giles?’ I said, thunderstruck.

  She gave one of her little pursed-up sighs to show it was irritating of me not to know something I had not been told about.

  ‘Reggie and Shirley are staying for a few days with Mother. They’ve got the children with them. Did you expect them to leave them behind?’ she asked indignantly. I raised my eyebrows and she turned pink. ‘I’m positive I told you.’

  ‘You did not.’ I explained to Jay. ‘Reginald Trim is Louise’s brother. He lives in Nottingham.’

  ‘But he has come to London to stay with your mother?’

  Jay’s evident astonishment was puzzling.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ Louise asked.

  Jay frowned. ‘In my tribe, once we are married we do not stay with our parents. Not in the same house.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘It – it is not thought proper.’

  ‘Why?’ There was a glint in Louise’s eyes; she liked to get to the bottom of things.

  He looked shy. ‘For reasons of modesty. Once you are married, it would be most embarrassing. Under your mother’s roof – to be naked in bed with a stranger;’

  ‘Oh,’ Louise said. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that.’

  ‘Why should you?’ I said. ‘It’s a reasonable tabu when you live in a hut. It’s simply something that grew up because there were no houses with separate bedrooms. Like the Jewish tabu about not eating pork or shellfish because originally they lived in a hot climate.’

  Jay said, ‘My mother has a new house with two bedrooms, at Kitale. But I still stay with a cousin when I go to visit her.’

  �
�And some English Jews don’t eat bacon. Tabus hang on after the need for them is over.’

  Louise said, ‘But this is different from not eating bacon. I mean, this is a basic, human thing. I mean’ – she looked at me and, surprisingly, blushed – ‘when we stayed with Mother when we were first married, I was always horribly embarrassed when we went to bed.’

  ‘Do you mean that?’ I looked at her pink face and saw that she did. Certainly, it explained a few things that had been highly mysterious at the time. I threw back my head and laughed. Philip, still sitting on my lap, whinnied shrilly and toppled backwards onto the hearth rug. Louise picked him up. ‘Time you went to bed,’ she said. He took her hand with docility.

  ‘I don’t think I should mention the family sleeping arrangements to Louise’s mother on Sunday,’ I said, when they had gone.

  ‘Of course not. I would never talk about such matters to an old English lady.’

  I thought how little Julia would like that description. ‘She is very well-preserved.’

  ‘I am looking forward to meeting her. Louise told me that she lived much of her youth in Kenya. It will be interesting to discuss the changes there.’

  I wondered about that. I had the uncomfortable feeling that I should prepare him to face the Trim family en masse. It was something I did not find easy. Julia was one thing, Reginald another.

  Reginald is one of those unfortunate men – though in his case one felt it was not so much misfortune as deliberate perversity – who combines and exaggerates the worse features of both parents. Augustus is a big man whose portliness is controlled to an extent that makes him almost graceful. Reginald is beefy – or porcine, rather; a fat, unjolly man whose flesh appears to be contained not by muscle and skin but by his clothes: you feel that without the waistband of his trousers his belly would sheer off from him like jelly from a mould. In his mouth, his father’s arrogant opinions – formed in the happy, happy days when Britain was a First Class Power and an English gent was still a fine, secure thing to be – sound shrill, whining, tasteless and a little fearful. When Louise was still trying to make me like him she used to say he was ‘basically insecure’. It was the most sympathetic thing she could find to say about him. Certainly, if he isn’t insecure he ought to be, for he is his father in decline: fat without muscle, power without duty, arrogance without honour. Sitting with him over an expense-account lunch, watching those heavy jaws masticate the steak he will never pay for, you long to hear the creak of tumbrils.

  He is a crashing money snob – Julia’s old-fashioned ladies-and-gentlemen snobbery has become coarsened in him – but like her he has a nose: he can tell what a man is worth by sniffing at him, at his car, his house, his wife’s furs. Though he believes everyone except himself should do a good day’s work for a good day’s pay, he despises people who earn a salary as witless loons. (No one he has ever heard of works for a weekly wage.) When Louise and I were first engaged he asked me what I earned as a lecturer in a technical college and snorted incredulously when I told him. ‘You can’t live on income nowadays,’ was his only comment. He pronounced the word income the way a fastidious Victorian lady might have spoken of tainted money.

  He has never suffered such a fate, though he came dangerously close to it when he qualified as a doctor when he came out of the Army. The introduction of the Health Service saved him by making medicine an uneconomic venture for a sensible man. He joined a drug firm to ‘make his way’; in the brief period before they made him a director he was ‘Dr T.’ in the glossy hand-outs generously dispersed to the simple-minded, hard-working general practitioners who had not realized that medicine was finished in this country. He made so much money doing this that he was able to buy a farm on which he could make a tax loss and so deprive the Government of the money they needed to buy the drugs his firm over-charged for. He married a wealthy American, a pretty, languid girl whose father manufactured razor blades, and fathered two children, Giles and Veronica, both born at the end of a financial year so that he was able to collect the tax allowance on them retrospectively.

  ‘Has Dr Trim never practised?’ Jay said in a puzzled voice.

  ‘No. It wouldn’t pay him well enough.’

  ‘But surely, in England, a doctor receives a good income?’

  I hesitated. ‘A mere pittance, compared to what he could make in business,’ I said, quoting Reggie but not – unfortunately as it turned out – making this clear, and changed the subject. It seemed almost impossible to explain Reggie to Jay. Jay was too innocent and I was inhibited by shame.

  They arrived on Sunday just before half past twelve. Skulking at the window of the sitting-room as they alighted from the Bentley I had that sinking feeling common, I suppose, to all men who have married into families larger and more affectionate than their own.

  Julia saw me and waved cheerfully as she walked up the path between the standard roses. She was wearing a suit of bluish grey tweed and had had her hair newly dyed to match: she looked like a hyacinth. She wore an elaborate gilt choker and pink kid gloves. Behind her, Reggie’s wife looked unready to face the world – as if she had just tumbled out of bed to answer the door and slipped into her mink coat for warmth. This was slightly unfair – Julia made most women look under-decorated and Shirley was naturally pale, though not from ill-health; she was tough enough to have survived nineteen years of Reggie and to have kept both her figure and that dewy, wise-virgin look American women so often have.

  Her daughter did not look in the least virginal. At seventeen, Veronica looked twenty-seven, a tall, ripe, luscious twenty-seven with an undulating walk, a statuesque behind and a mouth soft and sweet and dark as a Victoria plum. She was a walking incitement to rape; if she had been my daughter, I sometimes thought despairingly, I would have kept her locked up in an attic with bars on the window and a eunuch on duty outside the door. She scared me; even now, the knowledge that she was about to hold up her rich, pouting mouth for my avuncular kiss made me sweat with fear and regret. I dreaded the kiss and dreaded the moment when it would be over and she would withdraw out of reach with a low, muttered, insolent, ‘Hallo, Uncle Tom’, to perch in bored silence on the arm of a chair, occasionally yawning and stretching her long, beautiful legs.

  This morning the kiss was perfunctory. She gave me the suggestive, smouldering smile she gave all males under ninety but with less thoughtful art than usual. Her mind was elsewhere: she was in the sitting-room and had got at Jay before the others had taken off their coats. I could hear her voice – low, rich and musical, like a stage vamp of the’thirties – as I helped Shirley off with her mink and hung it on the special padded hanger Louise had brought down from the bedroom to preserve her brother’s possession.

  Julia seemed in a hurry, too. She pecked Louise’s cheek and vanished. When I went into the sitting-room she had elbowed Veronica out of the way and was shaking Jay’s hand insistently. ‘I am so delighted to meet you, I do hope they are looking after you properly.’ Reggie and Shirley were close behind her. There was a great deal of convivial hand-shaking and laughter so that the sitting-room appeared at bursting point – it was moderately sized but the Trims would have made an empty railway station seem crowded – and the small chandelier danced on the ceiling.

  The spectacle, which I watched from the doorway, was that of the Trim family presenting a united front to the world. If Louise was determined to entertain Blacks, they were equally determined to stand right behind her.

  There was one awkward moment. When Julia saw Philip, who had retreated behind the door and so gone unnoticed in her first impetuous rush through it, she let out a hoarse cry. ‘Gracious heavens, what’s this?’

  Philip ran to his father and buried his face in his jacket.

  Jay said, ‘This is my son, Philip.’ His eyes danced with pride and pleasure.

  Astonished rage made Julia temporarily speechless. Oh, that we should have hidden this from her! Her eyes raked the room and nailed me with freezing fury.

  ‘Say goo
d morning to Mrs Trim, Philip,’ Jay said gently.

  ‘Good morning.’ One sad, monkey’s eye emerged from the folds of Jay’s jacket to entrance Julia. She would have had to be made of stone.…

  ‘Well …’ she said, on an expiring breath, and bent as gracefully as her corsets would allow. ‘How do you do, Philip?’ She laid her ringed hand on his stiff, woolly head. ‘I’d no idea Louise was looking after two of you.’

  Her voice was gentle, but the words were meant to carry. Her message was clear: I would not get away with this. When she looked at me next, her face was pink and sparkling, not with anger now, but with the prospect of battle. I comforted myself with the thought that there would be little chance of our being alone together. I determined to lessen what chance there was.

  I dispensed drinks all round, carefully avoiding Julia’s eye and the touch of Veronica’s fingers as I handed her her glass, then escaped to help Louise in the kitchen. Julia appeared there almost at once, on the pretext of despatching Giles and Philip to play in the back garden – they both wore a resigned and bullied air. I prepared to dart back to the sitting-room with a bottle of tonic water hastily snatched from the ice-box but, anticipating this, Julia moved quick as a fencer and planted herself slap in the doorway.

  ‘Now, Tom,’ she began, squaring up to me, her eyes bright. My heart sank; I preferred to joust with her on the telephone. To my relief, Shirley’s tall, elegant form emerged from the shadows of the narrow hall. She slid her long hand round Julia’s firm waist and said, ‘Darling, guess what! I’ve an extraordinary thing to tell you. …’

  I lingered, long enough to hear that some friend of Shirley’s had seen Augustus and Georgiana in a restaurant in Rome where Georgiana, dressed in silver lamé, had been seen to dance all evening with an Italian count. It sounded preposterous, but seemed to please Julia. It was one of her hopes, expressed of course as a fear, that Georgiana would one day go off and leave Augustus for some younger, richer man. (It would be so terrible if she went off and left him after all these years.) I was surprised that Shirley should feed Julia a story of this kind – Shirley, after all, had seen Georgiana – but I suppose she did it out of affection for Julia and pity for her need. I liked her for this, though I could never have liked her, or any wife of Reggie’s, for herself.