George is an unusually successful travel agent, providing other people with the adventures he dare not risk. Though content to wrap himself in fantasies, he is haunted by the fact that 'the important things happened whilst his back was turned' and by the belief that he fathered the daughter- now a desirable young woman- of his best friends, Sam and Claire. To avoid temptation, George stumbles into a disastrous marriage and determines to mould himself into a supportive husband. But a holiday in Turkey snaps his private world when George finds himself in the midst of intrigue and murder and is forced to acknowledge that life is not the fairy-tale he'd imagined. In this superbly constructed and mercilessly observed novel, part comedy, part thriller, Nina Bawden exposes the fictions we impose on our lives.
Release date:
November 3, 2011
Publisher:
Virago
Print pages:
191
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
Sometimes George felt that nothing real had ever happened to him. The world swept on its passionate and catastrophic way and
he stood on the edge of it, watching.
Not that it mattered. How could it matter what happened – or didn’t happen – to him? That he should get up every morning looking
forward to the day seemed not only frivolous (in the face of earthquakes, wars, the population explosion) but almost impossible.
The co-existence of his small, eager life and the great, burning world, was impossible.
And yet he went on with it. Slept sound at night, woke happy and hopeful, showered and shaved, put the coffee on, turned on
the radio. News of enormous, incredible events came to him at the flick of a switch, while he ate eggs and bacon. His appetite
seldom faltered – his body, that intricate, fragile machine, had its own innocent logic – but often his mind froze, amazed.
Here I sit, eating breakfast!
His best friend, Sam Catto, said, ‘Since Marconi invented the wireless, old boy, it’s been hard for anyone to take themselves
seriously.’
Sam had always managed it, though. While George hovered above the abyss like an irresolute bird, uncertain which way to fly,
Sam saw what he wanted, believed it important, and shot straight towards it, hard as a bullet. He wasn’t brutal – George had no brutal friends – but he had a certain civilized
arrogance. The confidence of a healthy young man who has never been hurt.
George had not been hurt either. Sometimes he thought – that’s the trouble! Children pinch themselves, don’t they, to make
sure they’re not dreaming? Not that he wanted to suffer; to starve, go to war, or to prison. But it did seem to him that his
life was under a peculiar blight; that the important things happened while his back was turned, while he was eating, or sleeping,
or quietly picking his nose and thinking his own, private thoughts. The day his father’s ship went down, sunk by a German
submarine in the North Sea the first, bitter winter of war, he had been playing with a pet rabbit in his grandmother’s garden.
When they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, he was in bed with measles. His tongue was coated; his grandmother brought him bread
and golden syrup and he cried because it tasted so horrible, mixed with the fur on his tongue. His grandmother was crying
too. She said, ‘All those poor people.’
His father, and all those poor people – but when, some years later, the adolescent George set himself to think about the moment
of their deaths, what came into his mind first and foremost was a tame rabbit he had loved more than his father, and the physical
memory of an unpleasantly coated tongue. This apparent lack of true feeling shamed him deeply. He cultivated an air of melancholy
pride and boasted to Sam, ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit of an emotional eunuch.’
‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous.’
‘But I am bloody ridiculous. My life is bloody ridiculous!’ He felt this increasingly. He longed to be purposeful, of some clear use in the world. But however fast he ran, chance always
whisked away round the corner.
The war, for one thing. He and Sam, ten years old at the end of it, were of an age to think they had missed something. But
by the time they left school to do their National Service in Kenya, even the Mau Mau troubles were over. Nothing left except
what were called ‘mopping-up operations’, which sounded (Sam said) more domestic than military.
George bought a second-hand Leica in Nairobi. He took some photographs of a baby elephant that had fallen into a ditch and
been rescued by his unit, and sold the world rights to Paris Match for three hundred pounds. After this astonishing commercial success he took his camera with him whenever his platoon was
sent into the bush for some foolish manœuvre or other. One day he was angling for an artistic closeup of a ten-foot-high,
pinky-grey ant-heap, when a whirling dark shape burst out of a patch of scrub and charged straight at the man next in line
to him. George, who had left his gun in the truck, swivelled round with his camera. The dramatic picture he took might have
provided striking evidence at his court martial if it had not been for a telegram waiting for him back at camp, and the sympathetic
attitude of his battalion commander to the news contained in it.
The telegram informed him that his mother was dead. She had been dying all the time George was in Kenya, playing at soldiers
and taking photographs of baby elephants and ant-heaps and lance-corporals being torn apart by crazy buffaloes, and George
had not known it. Discharged from the Army two months early, on compassionate grounds, he flew home and asked his grandmother
why no one had told him. She said, ‘We thought there was no point in your being unhappy, so far away.’
George thought he detected reproach in her voice. Perhaps she felt he should have known in some extra-sensory way that his
mother was dying. His grandmother believed in psychic power. She had powers herself, of a sort: as a girl, she had been a
water-diviner, she always knew when snow was coming, and once, standing on a cliff by the sea at Hunstanton in Norfolk, George
had seen her tremble and turn pale. The ground had shifted beneath her, she said, and when they got back to the cottage she
had rented for his summer holiday and turned on the radio, they heard there had been an earthquake in Turkey.
She was unusually sensitive to barometric pressure perhaps. There is a scientific explanation for everything. But remembering
– in a soaring flash of absolute clarity – how miraculous the incident had seemed to him at the time, made George feel earthbound
and guilty now; a lumbering, insensitive clod. What right had he to be angry with his grandmother? She had only done her innocent
and loving best as she had always done; bringing him up while his mother worked, cooking and cleaning and playing with him
like another child. In a second memory-flash George suddenly saw her flushed, pretty face many years younger, and heard her
voice singing, ‘If all the world were paper, and all the sea were ink …’ Her face was old now, a used crumpled envelope, but
a child still looked out from her eyes.
She said, ‘I do hope I did right. But it would have made you so unhappy to see her as she was at the end. And there was nothing
you could have done, was there?’
George saw the apprehensive, sixty-five year old child in his grandmother’s eyes and couldn’t tell her he felt cheated by
the way yet another thing had happened behind his back; that he had loved his mother and would have liked to say goodbye to
her. Instead, he kissed his grandmother, whom he loved too, and said of course she had done the right thing and went up to Oxford, on a government grant, to read modern languages.
Halfway through his first term, Sam Catto joined him. Sam was married by then to a girl he had met in Nairobi; an intelligent
and beautiful girl called Claire, whose successful financier father had not cared for the idea of his expensively educated
daughter marrying a grammar school boy with no money, but had made the best of it. He had said, Sam reported, ‘I daresay a
few years at the ‘Varsity will polish Sam up a bit.’
He bought Claire a house in Holywell so that she could start married life comfortably and give little dinner-parties, which
would be useful for Sam who had nothing behind him and couldn’t begin too soon to meet the right people. ‘There must be some
of those, even in Oxford,’ Claire’s rich father said.
Claire didn’t give dinner-parties. She and Sam lived in the biggest room in the house and let out the others to fellow students
of whom George was one. They were all hugger-mugger and happy together: Sam-and-Claire, and George, and an Anglo-Indian girl
with a lovely skin and pop eyes, and a handsome young Turk called Omer Kemal, who was reading Greats, and a rather weird young
man from a private progressive school who smoked pot (which was an uncommon habit, then) and a pleasant, fat girl who came
from the Midlands and intended to go into politics. This girl, Jane Derby, fell deeply and hopelessly in love with George,
but he never knew this. He had no idea he was attractive to women.
Sam read medicine. He played rugger and put on weight and changed his accent to camouflage his lower-middle-class origins
and impress his father-in-law. Taking as his model a bluff, old-fashioned medical tutor, he used quaint phrases like ‘doncha know’, and ‘shouldn’t wonder’. He was self-conscious at first, sometimes winking when he caught George’s eye
to show he knew it was only a joke, this absurd game of social mobility, but quite soon it became second nature and he could
say ‘old boy’, or ‘the wireless’, without twitching an eyelid.
Watching Sam grow into his part of embryo surgeon, learning his lines, industriously fleshing the contours, George felt himself
become sketchier daily; little more than a faint outline on the page. He grew a beard to make himself visible, joined the
Labour Club and an experimental theatre group, and developed a trick of crinkling up his eyes when he smiled. But he still
felt oddly insubstantial; a negative wraith in a world of positive people. Their certainties might be sometimes naïve, but
his own lack of direction dismayed him.
Not that it mattered. How could it matter where he went, what he did? To take too much account of one’s own life was ludicrous
and George had a strong sense of the ludicrous.
He would never otherwise (so some of his friends said) have married his dreadful wife, Leila, and there was a small grain
of truth in this. There was a ludicrous quality about their first meeting that made, you might say, a George-story (when he
met his friends something absurd had often just happened to him) and although these stories were not always quite true, being
a shy man’s form of defence, perhaps, by the time he was thirty-six (the age when he married) he had invented a style for himself which sometimes affected his actions, although he preferred to think it explained them.
Like the story he told about the man in Rome …
When he was asked why he had gone into the travel business (it was mostly strange women who asked him this, idly inquisitive wives at suburban parties) he sometimes said one thing, sometimes another. If the tone of the questioner’s voice
suggested she thought it a quaint occupation (her man being a doctor, or a lawyer, or a producer in the BBC) he might say, ‘Well, why not?’ Or, ‘Given a name like George Hare
it was a logical development, don’t you think? Hare’s Travel – Swift and Sure!’ But occasionally, when he was in the mood,
or caught up in an intense eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation towards the end of a drunken evening, he would say, ‘Well, you
see, love, I met this man in Rome.’
George was twenty-one then; a tall, skinny young man, all knees and elbows, with a fair, curly beard. He had gentle manners,
of a punctilious, rather old-fashioned kind, and a cheerful, hopeful smile. A cynic by persuasion, he was an optimist by nature:
although he had accepted, intellectually, that life was a series of terrible jokes, he still couldn’t help believing, secretly,
that things would somehow turn out for the best. For him, anyway.
He had been reading French and Italian for three terms at Oxford and had found a job for the summer vacation with a travel
agency. He was a courier, leading cultural tours round Italy. Vicenza, Venice, Florence, Rome.
The customers on these tours were mostly English ladies past their youth; schoolteachers or intelligent widows, uniformly
equipped with pre-war guide books and flat shoes for museums, crumpled nylon macks against the chance of rain, and various
ingenious devices, such as cloth pouches fastened round their waists, to keep their money safe. There were usually a few middle-aged
couples, but rarely any single men. In fact, the only one George encountered that summer was the man he claimed to have met
in Rome.
This man was in his forties – ancient, to George’s eyes then – plump and pink-faced, with receding hair and a small, neat moustache. He had the professionally jaunty air of a retired military man, but according to George’s records, he was
a solicitor called William Barnet, with a practice in Slough. Although he had, actually, been with the tour since the beginning,
he had been so little trouble that George had barely spoken to him. Other people lost their tickets, their raincoats, even
(incredibly to George) their false teeth; they needed doctors, dentists, chiropodists, stamps and medicines, special food
and lavatories at inconvenient moments, advice on where to buy souvenirs and on what they could take home free of duty through
Customs, but William Barnet asked for nothing. He seemed contented enough, intelligent – at least he listened to the intelligent
things George told his party about the art and architecture of Italy – and quite undemanding. George, who enjoyed being a
good shepherd to his elderly flock, was not especially grateful for this.
The tour took ten days. They reached Rome on the seventh day and that evening was free – a kind of late half-term holiday.
They arrived at the hotel at eight o’clock, dined at eight-thirty; most went to bed early.
George went walking. Not looking for girls, not looking for anything, except perhaps his own youthful self. For seven days
he had kept pace with old people, anticipating their needs, the moment when backs would begin to tire, feet to swell, and
it took him a little while to feel a young man again; to stretch his legs to full stride, open his lungs to the air.
Rome had delighted him ever since his first visit; from the moment he had seen for himself how tiny the Forum was. When they
had acted Julius Caesar at school it had seemed so ridiculous, the way Cato and all the conspirators kept bumping into each other whenever they went
out of doors, but when George stood on the site it made sense at once: the centre of the vast Roman Empire had been only the
size of a village! He loved Rome for this discovery. He also loved it for its bustle and jostle and general urbanity, as much as for its blue skies and fountains and ponderous history. Surely
there was no other city in the world where people smiled so much, or where all the girls looked like princesses? He knew most
of them were probably poor, and had scrimped to buy just one expensive outfit each season, because it was so important to
present a bella figura, but this vanity, which would have struck him as shallow in London or Paris, seemed quite proper in Rome: its citizens dressed
beautifully to honour their beautiful city.
And it was easily the best European city to go walking in. Even now the traffic presented no problem since it was stationary
so much of the time. All the same, George preferred the streets of the old town where there were no cars at all, and this
evening he walked there, pleasurably, without purpose, turning at the end of each narrow street whichever way took his fancy,
stopping occasionally to stare into shop windows and secretive courtyards and intimate restaurants.
He lingered outside one of these; a small pavement café with a striped awning. He was reading the menu when a voice spoke
from behind a frieze of greenery. ‘Care for a drink, would you?’
George saw William Barnet, grinning at him between two potted plants. His cheeks, normally rosy, had darkened to purple, and
his eyes had red threads of blood in the corners.
George said, ‘I didn’t see you at dinner.’
Barnet shook his head. ‘Had enough of all those fussy old biddies. Daresay you have too. Young chap like you, what a job,
eh?’
‘I enjoy it,’ George said.
He joined him behind the plants. Once he had sat down Barnet fell silent. He poured wine for George, refilled his own glass,
. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
