介绍:
He rested his hands on the keys while he confronted the urge to type her name again. “Cee, I don’t think I can blame the heat!” Now jokiness had made way for melodrama, or plaintiveness. The rhetorical questions had a clammy air; the exclamation mark was the first resort of those who shout to make themselves clearer. He forgave this punctuation only in his mother’s letters where a row of five indicated a jolly good joke. He turned the drum and typed an x. “Cecilia, I don’t think I can blame the heat.” Now the humor was removed, and an element of self-pity had crept in. The exclamation mark would have to be reinstated. Volume was obviously not its only business.
He tinkered with his draft for a further quarter of an hour, then threaded in new sheets and typed up a fair copy. The crucial lines now read: “You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad—wandering into your house barefoot, or snapping your antique vase. The truth is, I feel rather lightheaded and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat! Will you forgive me? Robbie.” Then, after a few moments’ reverie, tilted back on his chair, during which time he thought about the page at which his Anatomy tended to fall open these days, he dropped forward and typed before he could stop himself, “In my dreams I kiss your cunt, your sweet wet cunt. In my thoughts I make love to you all day long.”
There it was—ruined. The draft was ruined. He pulled the sheet clear of the typewriter, set it aside, and wrote his letter out in longhand, confident that the personal touch fitted the occasion. As he looked at his watch he remembered that before setting out he should polish his shoes. He stood up from his desk, careful not to thump his head on the rafter.
He was without social unease—inappropriately so, in the view of many. At a dinner in Cambridge once, during a sudden silence round the table, someone who disliked Robbie asked loudly about his parents. Robbie held the man’s eye and answered pleasantly that his father had walked out long ago and that his mother was a charlady who supplemented her income as an occasional clairvoyant. His tone was of easygoing tolerance of his questioner’s ignorance. Robbie elaborated upon his circumstances, then ended by asking politely about the parents of the other fellow. Some said that it was innocence, or ignorance of the world, that protected Robbie from being harmed by it, that he was a kind of holy fool who could step across the drawing room equivalent of hot coals without harm. The truth, as Cecilia knew, was simpler. He had spent his childhood moving freely between the bungalow and the main house. Jack Tallis was his patron, Leon and Cecilia were his best friends, at least until grammar school. At university, where Robbie discovered that he was cleverer than many of the people he met, his liberation was complete. Even his arrogance need not be on display.
Grace Turner was happy to take care of his laundry—how else, beyond hot meals, to show mother love when her only baby was twenty-three?—but Robbie preferred to shine his own shoes. In a white singlet and the trousers of his suit, he went down the short straight run of stairs in his stockinged feet carrying a pair of black brogues. By the living room door was a narrow space that ended in the frosted-glass door of the front entrance through which a diffused blood-orange light embossed the beige and olive wallpaper in fiery honeycomb patterns. He paused, one hand on the doorknob, surprised by the transformation, then he entered. The air in the room felt moist and warm, and faintly salty. A session must have just ended. His mother was on the sofa with her feet up and her carpet slippers dangling from her toes.
“Molly was here,” she said, and moved herself upright to be sociable. “And I’m glad to tell you she’s going to be all right.”
Robbie fetched the shoeshine box from the kitchen, sat down in the armchair nearest his mother and spread out a page of a three-day-old Daily Sketch on the carpet.
“Well done you,” he said. “I heard you at it and went up for a bath.”
He knew he should be leaving soon, he should be polishing his shoes, but instead he leaned back in the chair, stretched his great length and yawned.
“Weeding! What am I doing with my life?”
There was more humor than anguish in his tone. He folded his arms and stared at the ceiling while massaging the instep of one foot with the big toe of the other.
His mother was staring at the space above his head. “Now come on. Something’s up. What’s wrong with you? And don’t say ‘Nothing.’”
Grace Turner became the Tallises’ cleaner the week after Ernest walked away. Jack Tallis did not have it in him to turn out a young woman and her child. In the village he found a replacement gardener and handyman who was not in need of a tied cottage. At the time it was assumed Grace would keep the bungalow for a year or two before moving on or remarrying. Her good nature and her knack with the polishing—her dedication to the surface of things, was the family joke—made her popular, but it was the adoration she aroused in the six-year-old Cecilia and her eight-year-old brother Leon that was the saving of her, and the making of Robbie.
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