The Rachel Papers Read online

  Quarter to eight: the Costa Brava

  On average I get through seven diaries a year; no matter how big the pages are, and no matter how pithy and austere I try to be, my days always run into weeks. These early sections are embarrassingly full of teenage largesse. But now I glance down the closely written columns and I smile, dear Charles, at your past holidays.

  'I see. So you've already got in.'

  'To Sussex, yes, but not Oxford.'

  'I see. Then you'll be wanting to take the scholarship exam this-November?'

  'Yes' (you stupid bitch, you dull clit), I said. 'And I'll need Use of English and General Paper.' Shouldn't she know all this? 'And Latin O Level.' I grinned across the table at my future Directress of Studies. She was most unpleasant to look at. I won't go into it, but she was about thirty-five, had eyebrows as big as teddy-boy quiffs, and her teeth bucked out from her gums at right-angles.

  'I see. So you'll only be taking the three subjects with us. and they are... ?'

  I repeated them. 'And Oxford Entrance,' I added, as if it were not necessarily relevant but perhaps of interest in its own right.

  Glancing again at my newly compiled dossier she read out in an incantatory honk: 'A-Level passes: English, grade A, Biology, grade A, Logic, grade A.' Her chins settled on her throat. 'Curious subjects ... but, yes, I don't think we'll have much trouble getting you through your ... O Levels. Um ...' She cocked her head in decorous misgiving. 'You're a bit old to be going up to Cambridge, aren't you?'

  'Oxford. Only nineteen,' I said.

  *

  When I awoke that morning the bedroom was a rhino pen, the sheets hot straitjackets. Gloria had insisted on sealing the window and keeping the gas fire on - for the purpose, one imagines, of simulating jungle conditions. There appeared to be a seam of sweaty mist all over the floor, as in student productions of Macbeth. My head came up like a periscope, on the lookout for air.

  I inched out of the bed, without waking Gloria, and stalked upstairs dressed only in my duffle-coat. No one seemed to be up. I made two cups of tea and - for the lady - two slices of energy-giving Hovis, after some thought spreading them with Marmite, which I hoped would help create a Bacchic after-breakfast atmosphere.

  'Good morning,' I said, putting the tray down beside Gloria's cracked smile. I drew the curtains back an inch or two. A gash of sunlight fell athwart the bed, causing a token shriek from the compromised Gloria, who was sitting up and well into her second round of toast. I watched her finish. She wiped her mouth with freckly knuckles, lay back with a grunt and lit a cigarette. Her breasts were exposed; they looked very white now. What did I feel for her? Ambiguous lust, genial condescension, and gratitude. It didn't seem enough.

  She was so much better in the morning - in fact there was no comparison - because one knew that it couldn't go on all night. I slipped in beside her, tricked out with a bladder-filled erection. Why, the reechiness of the bed began to strike me as rather stimulating. Gloria was evidently bucked by her breakfast, and we rolled about hugging and tickling each other, and laughing, in an evasive cross-fire of bad breath, before coming together cautiously for the first kiss of the day. In my limited experience, this is nearly always tolerable if one is wholehearted about it and almost invariably emetic if one isn't. I was wholehearted about it, what with adulthood pending.

  Tragically, though, Gloria was 'too sore'. Normally, of course, I would have been greatly relieved. Normally, of course, this would have been one of the most bewitching things she could possibly be: too sore.

  Gloria looked actually ashamed. 'Don't worry,' I told her. 'It's quite flattering really.'

  I went into a long routine of being good about being good about it, gently reproaching her for being so attractive, suggesting that there might just possibly be ways of getting round this problem: all in a diverting, twinkly-eyed manner which Gloria found vastly entertaining. She said things like 'Oh, Charles, you are terrible,' and 'It's not my fault,' and 'Ow, that hurts.' Eventually I pointed out that she could, you know, always sort of, well, I don't know, perhaps, I mean ... She laughed uproariously at these antics before moving softly on top of me and downwards so that her head lay in the vault of shifting, sunlit dust. It was divine.

  Gloria held the assistant pet-food saleswomanship in, handily, a Shepherds Bush emporium. I walked her there, then came back up the Bayswater Road to the Tutors, which was barely half a mile from Campden Hill Square.

  Mrs Noreen Tauber, B.A. (Aberdeen), went on to bore me some more about dates and things. Then, with a frowsy sigh, she offered to take me on a tour of the school, probably with nothing more ambitious in mind than to show me that it wasn't a workhouse or blacking-factory after all, We walked up a corridor, admired two identical classrooms, and walked back down it again, over wobbly parquet, past farting radiators. The pace was relaxed, donnish; the conversation general, discursive; we tried, in our small way, to make the place seem nicer than it was.

  Legless buskers cavorted outside Holland Park Underground. I bought some newspapers (Fleet Street's big two, in fact, the Sun and the Mirror), leftily dropped ten pence into the musicians' bowler hat and stood there reading the headlines, tapping my foot to a trilled-up version of 'Oh, You Beautiful Doll'. I was about to aim up to Notting Hill for a coffee at the Costa Brava when a hook-nosed queen with flat hair appeared from behind the curtains of the station photograph booth. He asked if I knew the time. I said what it was, referring him to the large clock attached to the wall opposite. He thanked me and inquired if I ever went down the Catacombs club in Earls Court.

  'I don't think so,' I said, flattered.

  It was being a good September, quite warm in the sun, so I took my time, glancing through the papers, occasionally halting mid-stride to mull over a joke or the better to marvel at a pin-up.

  I was a queer, too, once upon a time.

  The point is worth elaborating.

  For possibly the most glamorous thing about me is that I am, actually, a delicate child - or as near to one as you can well get nowadays.

  I got bronchitis - absolutely spontaneously - at the age of thirteen.

  The night after it was diagnosed I crept down and looked it up in the encyclopedia. There it was, 'acute bronchitis', which was what the doctor said I had. Better still, though, was 'chronic' bronchitis: you got that at least once a year. I asked old Cyril Miller, our GP, whether there was any chance that I might develop, or acquire, the chronic kind. Praising recent scientific breakthroughs and modern drug techniques, he said this was unlikely. Chronic bronco was reserved for nicotined oldsters with suede-shoe lungs.

  Yet, if you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it's amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do.

  Besides, there were plenty of other things to keep me going. Take, for example, my mouth - literally a shambles. My milk-teeth wouldn't go away, they just curdled, although politely moving over to accommodate my grown-up ones. At the age of ten I must have had more teeth in my head than the average dentist's waiting-room. Soon, I used to think, they'll be coming out of my nose. Then months of high-powered surgery involving metal strips, nuts, clips, bolts ... you name it. For two years I went about the place with a mouth like a Meccano set.

  The diseases you're supposed to get only once I got twice. My bones were the consistency of fresh marzipan. I nurtured seasonal asthma.

  Patently, it was all right by me. Dozy afternoons slugging on opiate cough mixtures, sleeping-draughts dropped at noon, stolen handfuls of Valium, a sheet of aspirins before breakfast. I read every readable book in the house, and also most of the unreadable ones. I wrote two epic poems: an heroicall romance in twenty-four cantos entitled The Tryst' (© 1968), and an asthmatic, six-thousand-line Waste Land called 'Only the Serpent Smiles' (© 1970), some parts of which reappear in the aforementioned 'Adolescent Monologue' sonnet sequence. I wrote cameos of everyone I had ever met. I recorded all I saw, felt, thought. I had myself a
time.

  About my queer period.

  I was being a bit roguish (for dramatic purposes) when I suggested to my friend Peter in the sixth-form coffee-bar that I hated all my family. I don't really mind the women in it. This bias officially dawned on me towards the end of my second bedridden winter. I concluded that it was merely rather trustingly Godfrey Winn of me, nothing more sinister. My age? Fourteen.

  However, one afternoon, in a doped half-state, I read a Chunky Paperback on Sigmund Freud.

  I spent the night in a state of mild, run-of-the-mill delirium, sweating quietly as my mind wobbled and raced and swerved: and with morning, came the unshakable, indeed serene, conviction that I was a homosexual. It all added up: I had had, it was true, one queer experience (a smegmatic handful of queer experience in my primary-school cricket pavilion); I was a soprano, a first soprano, often taking descants, in the choir; I was as yet a virgin, and had to lie my unpimpled head off to my friends about how I wanked as often, and with as much piston-wristed savagery, as they said they did. Clearly, the minute I was off my arse I'd be getting it on the bus to Oxford and hawking it there to the friendly undergraduates at Magdalen. In puzzled preparation I read the collected works of Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and (for what little it was worth) E. M. Forster.

  Next, exploring my powerhouse elder brother's desk I came across a body-building mag, called Tensio-Dynamism or something, one of the ones that explains to you how to kick the shit out of anyone who bugs you at the seaside. Resignedly I went back to my room, curled up in bed with it, started turning the pages, waiting equably for an erection. No way. Idiot faces glaring in pinhead conceit, ghastly all-out-of-control tenements of beef-cake. Never felt less sexy in my life: it beat me how females could fancy them. These gentlemen were, I realized, unrepresentative - but even so.

  Luckily, I had, and still have, a mind like a bear-trap; as soon as one idea wriggles free I'm sprung and tensed for the next unwary paw. As with most people who pass for sensitive, obsessive types, I simply can't get enough of things to get worked up about - an interest. Now I was keen to know why all woman weren't dikes. Anyway, that summer I had a formative heterosexual experience. I'll go into it later. Let me say only that as a direct result I got my first decent pimple, a fine double-yolker, and that that pimple flourished over the weeks, to become the object of much silent envy when I returned to school in September.

  To be fair, there weren't all that many maniacs in the Costa, and hardly more than a smattering of blinkies.

  Sipping on my coffee I tackled the Mirror crossword. If I completed it I would fuck Rachel within ... three weeks. Putting in a couple of clues I decided I would ring her when I got back. It would be intelligent to do it while I still felt tolerably spermy and Joycean after my night with Gloria. In my mind I saw young Charles leaning against Jenny's passage wall and smiling into the telephone. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but his eyes were bright and his face pleasantly animated. 'Hi, Rachel ? This is Cha - ... Great - thanks - how're you ? Whoah, baby. Yeah, sure, tonight's fine.'

  I ordered another coffee. An old woman passed by surreptitiously dropping paper-wrapped sugar-lumps on to the chair opposite. 'Hello. Good afternoon. I should like to speak to Rachel Noyes, if I may. I wonder whether this would possibly ... ? Thank you. So kind. Hello, Rachel Noyes ? Rachel Francette Noyes? Good afternoon. You probably don't remember me (why should you?) but in fact we met at the party in August ? August pth ? I was wearing..."

  We met at the party in August. It was a wine and lights flashing and everyone jumping up and down party, as opposed, say, to a lie on the dank carpet cradling empty Pipkins wishing there was more than one girl there party, or, again, to a smoke hash and eat syphcakes while Charles Manson, Esq., pats the bongoes and recites scabrous prose poems party. It was the very best kind of party.

  Geoffrey and I had got wind of it from a young (quite posh) hippie in the Marble Arch Okeefenokee Pancake House. He wouldn't tell us the address until Geoffrey offered him a hallucinogen (in fact an asthma pill of mine he had momentarily immersed in a bottle of blue-black Quink).

  'It's LDH,' Geoffrey had whispered to him, 'just over from the States. Better than acid. Stronger than MDA. Chas?'

  'Oh - any day.'

  'Make it a beautiful one, man," Geoffrey nodded to him as we left. 'Peace.'

  Rachel arrived in a group of four - what looked like a random car-load - but stayed alone by the door, arms folded adultly. She talked to no one, although she kept waving and shouting hellos. I stood with some other girlless duds along the adjacent wall; my pits prickled as she twice refused offers to take the floor. The second loping Greek lingered awhile to remonstrate with her. Far from stepping in and saying 'Okay, mac, you heard the lady,' I waited for him to go away.

  She looked confident and self-possessed all right, as young ladies in these circumstances generally do, but, like myself, excluded rather than merely detached from the festivities. She must have soul, I thought. In my case, though, it was simply a question of being unable to dance in front of other people. Geoffrey, who was gyrating away quite giddily not ten feet from me, postulated that it was one of the best, if not in fact the best, ways of pulling girls. But I dance only when I am alone, in ten-second spurts, usually before a mirror, sometimes naked, more often attired in sexter-style underpants.

  She lit a cigarette. That would give me five precious minutes in which to think.

  I did an instant assessment. She was fairly formidable, a bit out of my league really. She didn't belong to the aggressively sexy genre, like some of the more tear-jerking girls there, whose golden thighs and teeming breasts I found about as approachable as leprosy. However: tallish, nearly my height, shoulder-length black hair conventionally shaped around strong features, she made much of her eyes, her nose made much of itself, black boots and black cowgirl skirt met at the knee, manly white blouse, expensive handbag, few bracelets, one insignificant ring, rather stern no-crap stance, intelligent lower-middle class with a good job, something bossy like public relations, living alone, older than me, possibly half Jewish.

  The ethnic detail, yes, would provide me with an opening. I am in rny own appearance if anything rather oppressively Caucasian, but I could always go up and say This party's none too kosher, is it?' or 'I see your schul-days are over.' At that moment I glanced round and guessed that I was the proprietor of the only foreskin in the room. Perhaps I should appeal to her Aryan side then, or at any rate show my sensitivity to this two-way pull she must so often feel. 'Hi there, couldn't help noticing you looked possibly half Jewish. It must be..." Oh, I'm a right one I am.

  In fact, I only just did it. A mental chant, timor mortis conturbat me, and I began on my clumsiest pull ever. My legs started off, at first spasticly shooting out in all directions, then co-ordinating into a groovy shuffle. The top half of my body sloped forward fifteen degrees. My arms flapped limply from the elbow. My shoulders became ear-muffs.

  I opted for thick Chelsea :

  'Hhulloh,' as if someone had just informed me that this greeting had an initial h and I was trying it out.

  'Hello.' Her tone was patronizingly neutral; her accent instantly turned mine into educated upper-middle.

  'Hello,' I said, now with prurient emphasis, a squadron-commander introduced to a fetching Parisienne. 'I notice you haven't got a drink.' This was an excellent line because there usually followed: 'Are you giving this party?'

  'Are you giving this party?' she said. But here there was no gate-crasher cringing to be put grandly at its ease. Rather, a dull incredulity.

  Nerve going, I elected to be literary. 'Certainly not. Parties of this kind are not given, they are received.'

  There was a silence.

  'Man comes and drinks the wine and lies beneath,' I said. -It was completely spur-of-the-moment, I promise you (Tithonus, line three.) But she wouldn't get the reference and would simply think I was being hearty. My rescue operation ?

  'And after many a
summer dies the swan,' I added consumptively, then Tennyson said that,' with a little more of the old satirical edge. I laughed, as if at a private joke. She looked at me, unblinking.

  'Sorry. I tend to talk crap when I'm nervous.'

  'How come you're nervous?'

  The same reason you're not.'

  'Which is?'

  I had no desire whatever to enlarge on this cryptic reply. 'Christ, how should I know?' Christ? Was that wise, what with her being half Jewish and all ? I held up a hand, to silence her, to call a halt. 'Why don't we talk about something that interests you? Make-up ... clothes ... babies... ? Anything you like. Let me get you a drink.'

  'How do you know they interest me?'

  'You're a girl.'

  'So?'

  'They interest you. All girls like talking about those things, surely you must know that. It's all all girls ever talk about. Shops ... pillow-slips ... hairbrushes.'

  'You can't generalize like —'

  'Why no—'

  ' — because, there are so many exceptions.'

  'Oh really?'

  She sighed. 'I'm an exception.'

  'Then you're the exception that makes the rule.'

  Bloodcurdling, I quite agree; yet the bookish teenager will often find himself behaving in this way.

  The Costa Brava was filling up now. Wild-eyed birdlike persons cruised to and fro; the coat-stand had become cluttered with crutches and white sticks; suspiciously a nearby mutant checked me over for deformities. Why didn't I mind it here?

  To my right, dentures clicking like castanets, an old man chopped through a hot-dog at insect speed. Straight ahead, a middle-aged rocker snivelled and yawned. To my left ... Mad Millie herself, whose home was a wheelless 1943 Bedford van parked on the brow of Kensington's Rackham Hill. She was at present menacing the window-pane in a tired mutter. I accidentally caught her eye. She coughed me a transient rainbow of germs, and chased it with the toneless observation: 'You're the foulest little creature I've seen on the moon.' My expression replied, 'You may well have something there.' A chartreuse caterpillar of glinting phlegm crept easily down her chin. She staunched it with a wad of left-over hamburger roll and placed it primly between her lips.