Lucky Jim Part 4

The only person in the room was the Callaghan girl, sitting behind a well-filled plate. Dixon said good morning to her.

'Oh, good morning.' Her tone was neutral, not hostile.

He quickly decided on a bluff, speak-my-mind approach as the best cloak for rudeness, past or to come. One of his father's friends, a jeweller, had got away with conversing almost entirely in insults for the fifteen years Dixon had known him, merely by using this simple device. Deliberately intensifying his northern accent, Dixon said: 'Afraid I got off on the wrong foot with you last night.'

She looked up quickly, and he saw with bitterness how pretty her neck was. 'Oh... that. I shouldn't worry too much about it if I were you. I didn't show up too well myself.'

'Nice of you to take it like that,' he said, remembering that he'd already had one occasion to use this phrase to her. 'Very bad manners it was on my part, anyway.'

'Well, let's forget it, shall we?'

'Glad to; thanks very much.'

There was a pause, while he noted with mild surprise how much and how quickly she was eating. The remains of a large pool of sauce were to be seen on her plate beside a diminis.h.i.+ng mound of fried egg, bacon, and tomatoes. Even as he watched she replenished her stock of sauce with a fat scarlet gout from the bottle. She glanced up and caught his look of interest, raised her eyebrows, and said, 'I'm sorry, I like sauce; I hope you don't mind,' but not convincingly, and he fancied she blushed.

'That's all right,' he said heartily; 'I'm fond of the stuff myself.' He pushed aside his bowl of cornflakes. They were of a kind he didn't like: malt had been used in their preparation. A study of the egg and bacon and tomatoes opposite him made him decide to postpone eating any himself. His gullet and stomach felt as if they were being deftly sewn up as he sat. He poured and drank a cup of black coffee, then refilled his cup.

'Aren't you going to have any of this stuff?' the girl asked.

'Well, not yet, I don't think.'

'What's the matter? Aren't you feeling so good?'

'No, not really, I must admit. Bit of a headache, you know.'

'Oh, then you did go to the pub, like that little man said what was his name?'

'Johns,' Dixon said, trying to suggest by his articulation of the name the correct opinion of its bearer. 'Yes, I did go to the pub.'

'You had a lot, did you?' In her interest she stopped eating, but still gripped her knife and fork, her fists resting on the cloth. He noticed that her fingers were square-tipped, with the nails cut quite close.

'I suppose I must have done, yes,' he replied.

'How much did you have?'

'Oh, I never count them. It's a bad habit, is counting them.'

'Yes, I dare say, but how many do you think it was? Roughly.'

'Ooh... seven or eight, possibly.'

'Beers, that is, is it?'

'Good Lord, yes. Do I look as if I can afford spirits?'

'Pints of beer?'

'Yes.' He smiled slightly, thinking she didn't seem such a bad sort after all, and that the slight blueness of the whites of her eyes helped to give her her look of health. He changed his mind abruptly about the first of these observations, and lost interest in the second, when she replied: 'Well, if you drink as much as that you must expect to feel a bit off colour the next day, mustn't you?' She drew herself upright in her seat in a schoolmarmy att.i.tude.

He remembered his father, who until the war had always worn stiff white collars, being reproved by the objurgatory jeweller as excessively 'dignant' in demeanour. This etymological sport expressed for Dixon exactly what he objected to in Christine. He said rather coldly: 'Yes, I must, mustn't I?' It was an idiom he'd caught from Carol Goldsmith. Thinking of her made him think, for the first time that morning, of the embrace he'd witnessed the night before, and he realized that it had its bearing on this girl as well as on Goldsmith. Well, she could obviously take care of herself.

'Everybody was wondering where you'd got to,' she said.

'I've no doubt they were. Tell me: how did Mr Welch react?'

'What, to finding out you'd probably gone to the pub?'

'Yes. Did he seem irritated at all?'

'I really have no idea.' Conscious, possibly, that this must sound rather bald, she added: 'I don't know him at all, you see, and so I couldn't really tell. He didn't seem to notice much, if you see what I mean.'

Dixon saw. He felt too that he could tackle the eggs and bacon and tomatoes now, so went to get some and said: 'Well, that's a relief, I must say. I shall have to apologize to him, I suppose.'

'It might be a good idea.'

She said this in a tone that made him turn his back for a moment at the sideboard and make his Chinese mandarin's face, hunching his shoulders a little. He disliked this girl and her boy-friend so much that he couldn't understand why they didn't dislike each other. Suddenly he remembered the bedclothes; how could he have been such a fool? He couldn't possibly leave them like that. He must do something else to them. He must get up to his room quickly and look at them and see what ideas their physical presence suggested. 'G.o.d,' he said absently; 'oh my G.o.d,' then, pulling himself together: 'I'm afraid I shall have to dash off now.'

'Have you got to get back?'

'No, I'm not actually going until... No, I mean there's... I've got to go upstairs.' Realizing that this was a poor exit-line, he said wildly, still holding a dish-cover: 'There's something wrong with my room, something I must alter.' He looked at her and saw her eyes were dilated. 'I had a fire last night.'

'You lit a fire in your bedroom?'

'No, I didn't light it purposely, I lit it with a cigarette. It caught fire on its own.'

Her expression changed again. 'Your bedroom caught fire?'

'No, only the bed. I lit it with a cigarette.'

'You mean you set fire to your bed?'

'That's right.'

'With a cigarette? Not meaning to? Why didn't you put it out?'

'I was asleep. I didn't know about it till I woke up.'

'But you must have... Didn't it burn you?'

He put the dish-cover down. 'It doesn't seem to have done.'

'Oh, that's something, anyway.' She looked at him with her lips pressed firmly together, then laughed in a way quite different from the way she'd laughed the previous evening; in fact, Dixon thought, rather unmusically. A blonde lock came away from the devotedly-brushed hair and she smoothed it back. 'Well, what are you going to do about it?'

'I don't know yet. I must do something, though.'

'Yes, I quite agree. You'd better start on it quickly, hadn't you, before the maid goes round?'

'I know. But what can I do?'

'How bad is it?'

'Bad enough. There are great pieces gone altogether, you see.'

'Oh. Well, I don't really know what to suggest without seeing it. Unless you... no; that wouldn't help.'

'Look, I suppose you wouldn't come up and...?'

'Have a look at it?'

'Yes. Do you think you could?'

She sat up again and thought 'Yes, all right. I don't guarantee anything, of course.'

'No, of course not.' He remembered with joy that he still had some cigarettes left after last night's holocaust. 'Thanks very much.'

They were moving to the door when she said: 'What about your breakfast?'

'Oh, I shall have to miss that. There's not time.'

'I shouldn't if I were you. They don't give you much for lunch here, you know.'

'But I'm not going to wait till... I mean there isn't much time to... Wait a minute.' He darted back to the sideboard, picked up a slippery fried egg and slid it into his mouth whole. She watched him with folded arms and a blank expression. Chewing violently, he doubled up a piece of bacon and crammed it between his teeth, then signalled he was ready to move. Intimations of nausea circled round his digestive system.

They went in file through the hall and up the stairs. The ocarina-like notes of a recorder playing a meagre air were distantly audible; perhaps Welch had breakfasted in his room. Dixon found, with a pang of relief, that he could open the bathroom door.

The girl looked sternly at him. 'What are we going in here for?'

'My bedroom's on the far side of this.'

'Oh, I see. What a curious arrangement.'

'I imagine old Welch had this part of the house built on. It's better like this than having the bathroom on the far side of a bedroom.'

'I suppose so. My goodness, you certainly have gone to town, haven't you?' She went forward and fingered the sheet and blankets like one shown material in a shop. 'But this doesn't look like a burn; it looks as if it's been cut with something.'

'Yes, I... cut the burnt bits off with a razor-blade. I thought it would look better than just leaving it burnt.'

'Why on earth did you do that?'

'I can't really explain. I just thought it would look better.'

'Mm. And did all this come from one cigarette?'

'That I don't know. Probably.'

'Well, you must have been pretty far gone not to... And the table too. And the rug. You know, I don't know that I ought to be a party to all this.' She grinned, which made her look almost ludicrously healthy, and revealed at the same time that her front teeth were slightly irregular. For some reason this was more disturbing to his equanimity than regularity could possibly have been. He began to think he'd noticed quite enough things about her now, thank you. Then she drew herself up and pressed her lips together, seeming to consider. 'I think the best thing would be to remake the bed with all this mess at the bottom, out of sight. We can put the blanket that's only scorched this one on top; it'll probably be almost all right on the side that's underneath now. What about that? It's a pity there isn't an eiderdown.'

'Yes. Sounds all right to me, that. They're bound to find it when they strip the bed, though, aren't they?'

'Yes, but they probably won't connect it with smoking, especially after what you did with your razor-blade. And after all, you wouldn't have put your head right down the bottom of the bed to smoke, would you?'

'That's a point, of course. We'd better get on with it, then.'

He heaved the bed away from the wall, while she watched with arms folded, then they both set about the unmaking and remaking. The vacuum-cleaner could now be heard quite close at hand, drowning Welch's recorder. As they worked, Dixon studied the Callaghan girl, despite his determination to notice nothing more about her, and saw with fury that she was prettier than he'd thought. He found himself wanting to make the kind of face or noise he was accustomed to make when entrusted with a fresh ability-testing task by Welch, or seeing Michie in the distance, or thinking about Mrs Welch, or being told by Beesley something Johns had said. He wanted to implode his features, to crush air from his mouth, in a way and to a degree that might be set against the mess of feelings she aroused in him: indignation, grief, resentment, peevishness, spite, and sterile anger, all the allotropes of pain. The girl was doubly guilty, first of looking like that, secondly of appearing in front of him looking like that. Run-of-the-mill queens of love Italian film-actresses, millionaires' wives, girls on calendars he could put up with; more than that, he positively liked looking at them. But this sort of thing he'd as soon not look at at all. He remembered seeing in a book once that some man who claimed to have love well weighed up someone like Plato or Rilke had said that it was an emotion quite different in kind, not just degree, from ordinary s.e.xual feelings. Was it love, then, that he felt for girls like this one? No emotion he'd experienced or could imagine came anything like so close, to his way of thinking; but apart from the dubious support of Plato or Rilke he had all the research on the subject against him there. Well, what was it if it wasn't love? It didn't seem like desire; when the last corner was tucked in and he joined her on her side of the bed, he was strongly tempted to put his hand out and lay it on one of those full b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but this action, if performed, would have appeared as natural to him, as unimportant and un.o.bjectionable, as reaching out to take a large ripe peach from a fruit-dish. No, all this, whatever it was or was called, was something nothing could be done about.

'There, I think that looks very nice,' the girl said. 'You couldn't guess what was underneath it all if you didn't know, could you?'

'No, and thanks very much for the idea and the help.'

'Oh, that's all right. What are you going to do with the table?'

'I've been thinking about that. There's a little junk-room at the end of the pa.s.sage, full of broken furniture and rotting books and things; they sent me up there yesterday to fetch a music-stand or whatever they call the things. That room's the place for this table, behind an old screen with French courtiers painted on it you know, floppy hats and banjos. If you'll go and see whether the coast's clear, I'll rush along there with it now.'

'Agreed. I must say that's an inspiration. With the table out of the way n.o.body'll connect the sheets with smoking. They'll think you tore them with your feet, in a nightmare or something.'

'Some nightmare, to get through two blankets as well.'

She looked at him open-mouthed, then began to laugh. She sat down on the bed but immediately jumped up again as if it were once more on fire. Dixon began laughing too, not because he was much amused but because he felt grateful to her for her laughter. They were still laughing a minute later when she beckoned to him from outside the bathroom door, when he ran out on to the landing with the table, and when Margaret suddenly flung open the door of her bedroom and saw them.

'What do you imagine you're up to, James?' she asked.

VII.

'WE'RE just... I'm just... I was just getting rid of this table, as a matter of fact,' Dixon said, looking from one woman to the other.

The Callaghan girl made an extraordinarily loud snorting noise of incompetently-suppressed laughter. Margaret said: 'Just what is all this nonsense?'

'It isn't nonsense, Margaret, I a.s.sure you. I've...'

'If anybody minds me saying so,' the girl interrupted him, 'I think we'd better get rid of the table first and explain the whys and wherefores afterwards, don't you?'

'That's right,' Dixon said, put his head down, and ran up the pa.s.sage. In the junk-room he nudged aside an archery target, making his crazy-peasant face at it what flaring imbecilities must it have witnessed? and dumped the table behind the screen. Next, he unrolled a handy length of mouldering silk and spread it over the table-top; then arranged upon the cloth thus provided two fencing foils, a book called The Lesson of Spain, and a Lilliputian chest-of-drawers no doubt containing sea-sh.e.l.ls and locks of children's hair; finally propped up against this display a tripod meant for some sort of telescopic or photographic tomfoolery. The effect, when he stepped back to look, was excellent; no observer could doubt that these objects had lived together for years in just this way. He smiled, shutting his eyes for a moment before slopping back into the world of reality.

Margaret was waiting for him at the threshold of her room. One corner of her mouth was drawn in in a way he knew well. The Callaghan girl had gone.

'Well, what was all that about, James?'

He shut the door and began to explain. As he talked, his incendiarism and the counter-measures adopted struck him for the first time as funny. Surely Margaret, especially since she wasn't personally implicated, must find them funny too; they formed the sort of story she liked. He said as much at the end of his account.

Without changing her expression, she dissented. 'I could see you and that girl were finding it all pretty funny, though.'

'Well, why shouldn't we have found it funny?'

'No reason at all; it's nothing to do with me. The whole thing just strikes me as rather silly and childish, that's all.'

He said effortfully: 'Now look, Margaret: I can quite see why it looked like that to you. But don't you see? the whole point is that naturally I didn't mean to burn that b.l.o.o.d.y sheet and so on. Once I'd done it, though, I'd obviously got to do something about it, hadn't I?'