Now the fellow was really annoying me. I wasn’t out of my area of competence so much as my area of interest.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s really not that at all. But you see,’ I added, looking at him with melancholy seriousness, ‘it’s just that I’m a member of a played-out generation. You may think we’re a bit young for it, but even so, we’re played out.’
He left shortly afterwards.
‘Oh, Casey Paul, you are one wicked person.’
‘Me?’
‘You. Didn’t you hear him say he’d worked for Reynolds News?’
‘No, I thought he was a spy.’
‘You mean, a Russki?’
‘No, I just mean he was sent along to check up on us and report back.’
‘Probably.’
‘Do you think we should worry about that?’
‘Not for a couple of days at least, I’d say.’
You decide that, since you are a student, and all your fellow-students, apart from those who live at home, pay rent, then you should do so too. You ask a couple of friends how much they pay. You take the mid-point: four pounds a week. You can afford this out of your state grant.
One Monday evening, you hand Susan four pound notes.
‘What’s that?’ she asks.
‘I’ve decided I should pay you rent,’ you reply, perhaps a little stiffly. ‘That’s about what others pay.’
She throws the notes back at you. They don’t hit your face, as they might do in a film. They just lie on the floor between you. Awkward silences follow, and you sleep on your sofa bed that night. You feel guilty about not having introduced the subject of rent with more subtlety; it was like when you gave her that parsnip. The four green pound notes lie on the floor all night. The next morning you pick them up and put them back in your wallet. The subject is never mentioned again.
As a result of Martha’s visit, two things happened. The attic rooms were let out to lodgers, and Susan went back to the Village for the first time since we ran away together. She said it would be necessary and practical to return from time to time. Half the house belonged to her, and she could hardly rely on Macleod to pay the bills or remember to get the boiler serviced. (I didn’t see why not, but still.) Mrs Dyer would continue to serve and thieve on a daily basis, and would alert Susan to anything that needed her attention. She promised that she would only go back when Macleod wasn’t there. Grudgingly, I agreed.
I said a bit ago that ‘This is how I would remember it all if I could. But I can’t.’ There’s some stuff I left out, stuff I can’t put off any longer. Where to start? In the ‘book room’, as they called it, downstairs at the Macleods’. It was late, and I was unwilling to go home. Susan might already have been in bed; I don’t remember. Nor do I remember what book I was reading. Something I’d picked off the shelves at random, no doubt. I was still trying to get my head round the Macleod collection. There were leather-bound sets of the classics, old enough to have been handed down through maybe two generations; art monographs, poetry, a lot of history, some biography, novels, thrillers. I came from the sort of household where books, as if to confirm that they should be respected, were put in order: by subject, author, even size. Here, there was a different system – or rather, as far as I could see, no system at all. Herodotus was next to The Bab Ballads, a three-volume history of the Crusades next to Jane Austen, T.E. Lawrence sandwiched between Hemingway and a Charles Atlas manual of bodybuilding. Was it all an elaborate joke? Mere bohemian muddle? Or a way of saying: we control the books, they don’t control us.
I was still musing when the door banged back against the bookcase, then rebounded far enough to be kicked again. Macleod stood there in his dressing gown, which – and this I do remember – was plaid, with a maroon cord tied and dangling. Below were his elephant pyjamas and leather slippers.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, in a tone of voice normally attached to the words ‘Fuck off’.
My default position of insolence kicked in.
‘Reading,’ I replied, waving the book in his direction.
He stomped across and ripped it from my hand, briefly inspected it, then threw it like a frisbee across the room.
I couldn’t help grinning. He thought he was chucking my book away, when it was one of his own. Hilarious!
That was when he hit me. Or rather, aimed a succession of blows – three, I’m pretty sure – one of which landed as a wrist slapping the side of my head. The other two flailed past.
I got up and tried to hit him back. I think I aimed one blow, which skidded off his shoulder. Neither of us was doing any snappy defensive work; we were just equally incompetent attackers. Well, I’d never hit anyone before. He, I assume, had, or had at least tried to.
While he was concentrating on what to say, or where to hit, next, I squirmed past him, ran to the back door, and escaped. I was relieved to get back to a house where I hadn’t been assaulted since a few doubtless-merited spankings a decade and more previously.
No, that wasn’t quite true – about never having hit someone. In my first year at school, the gym master had encouraged us all to enter the annual boxing competition, which was organised by weight and age. I had absolutely no desire to inflict or receive pain. But I noticed that, with only a few hours to go, there were no entrants listed under my category. So I gave my name in, expecting to win by walkover.
Unfortunately for me – for both of us – another boy, Bates, had the same idea at almost the same time. So we found ourselves in the ring together, two skinny, scared things in plimsolls, vests and house shorts, with these big bobbly gloves suddenly at the end of our arms. For a couple of minutes we each did a reasonably good job of feinting attacks and then back-pedalling at great speed, until the gym master pointed out that neither of us had yet landed a blow.
‘Box!’ he had commanded.
Whereupon I leaped at the unprepared Bates, whose gloves were down near his knees, and punched him on the nose. He squealed, looked at the sudden blood on his clean white vest and burst into tears.
And so I became school boxing champion in the under-12, under-6-stone category. Naturally, I never fought again.
The next time I went to the Macleod house, Susan’s husband couldn’t have been friendlier. Perhaps that was when he showed me how to do the crossword, making it some kind of exclusive male preserve. Or at any rate, a Susan-excluding one. So I put the book-room incident down as an aberration. And anyway, it might have been partly my fault. Perhaps I should have engaged him about which version of the Dewey system his library was organized under. No, I can see that might have been equally provoking.
How much time then went by? Let’s call it six months. Again, it was lateish. At the Macleod house, unlike my own, there was a main staircase near the front door, and a narrower one near the kitchen, presumably for those mob-capped servants now replaced by machines. Often, when I visited Susan during term time, I would sleep in a small attic room which could be reached from either direction. Susan and I had been listening to the gramophone – preparing for a concert – and the music was still in my head when I reached the top of the back stairs. All of a sudden there came a kind of roar, and something which might have been a kick or a trip, accompanied by a thump on the shoulder, and I found myself falling back down the stairs. I managed somehow to grab the banister, wrenching my shoulder but just about keeping my balance.
‘You fucking bastard!’ I said automatically.