chipped cups, Crippsy gets smashed and starts crying, Petal makes a pass at Garth, Lester pukes in the middle of Cronk’s message of Christian goodwill: “Backs to the wall, you play ball with me, and let’s all go forward to the promised land”; and I have it away with Dawn in the ‘out of order’ ladies’ on Cromingham station before I catch the three-thirty back to civilisation. Two things stick in mind about the whole pathetic business: some of the incredible things those birds had written on the bog walls and Dawn telling me she is three weeks overdue as the train pulls out of the station. Bloody nice Christmas present, isn’t it?
It doesn’t really need that to make Christmas with the folks as bloody as it is, but it helps. Sid and Rosie have gone to his parents, so I am left playing Wimbledon tennis between Mum and Dad, and going ape with the crystallised fruits which they have got because Mum remembers how much I used to like them when I was a kid. It makes it even sadder, somehow, the way they are so pleased to see me. I would like to be able to blame them for the whole turgid proceedings and it is a real effort having to watch the royal laugh riot from Sandringham without feeding it my usual chorus of eye-rolling yawns. Dad’s eyes close and he starts dribbling down the front of his new Marks and Sparks pullover, which he will change on Monday, whilst Mum’s expression registers the kind of blind devotion usually seen in dogs when it is getting near feeding time. I have been through the whole bad scene too many times and I can actually remember the first time I realised I was not enjoying it. I remember the feeling of guilt. It was like having a wank when you knew that it was an odds-on certainty that you would go blind if you did. This, and numerous other memories of past Christmases at the family Lea haunt me through the next few days until I can lie myself back to Liverpool Street Station with a carrier bag full of furry dates, burst figs and all the other rubbish that nobody else wants. I have told the parents that I have to work on New Year’s Eve but in fact I intend to go back to Cromingham and drown my sorrows between Mrs. Bendon’s legs. From a hundred and fifty miles away she has become a mixture of Marilyn Monroe and Silvano Manure, or whatever that big Italian bird’s name is, but, of course, when I get back I find a note explaining that she is still with her sister in Stockwell. Stockwell! I could weep. Three stations away on the Northern line and I have struggled all the bloody way back to living-death-on-sea. What a tragedy! I try to ring up Dawn but she has been invited to the New Year’s Eve ball at the golf club so I don’t even know if there is still an infant Lea up the spout. Bloody marvellous way to see out the old year, isn’t it?
I’d like to be able to report that a raving nympho with a bottle of Scotch in her hand threatened to slash her wrists if I don’t belt the arse off her, but in fact I end up in the public bar of the Sailor’s Return watching a bunch of half-pissed old tits link arms and sing Auld Lang Syne thirty seconds before the landlord shovels them out into the street. Thank you and good night!
Luckily, Dawn is not in the pudding club, so I can breathe again there, but when Mrs. B. returns from London there is a noticeable change in her attitude which does not bode well. She keeps mentioning some bloke she has met. “I don’t think Mr. Greig would agree with you there,” and makes dark references to needing the spare room at some not too distant date. The crowning insult comes when I ask her out for a drink and she says no: “Thank you, dear, but I’ve got a bit of a chill and I think I’d better stay at home. Another time, perhaps?” Of course, all this makes her so desirable I nearly explode every time I see her and I could kick myself for not having got across it when I had the chance.
The arrival of her daughter, on whom I had set high hopes, is a bit of an anti-climax, too. I had imagined myself staggering from one to the other or indulging in some monster orgy with both of them on the white rug in front of the ‘Cumfiwarm living-flame log-effect gas fire’, but Jenny sweeps through on the way to stay with friends at Brancaster—which is apparently the only place to have friends—and looks at me as if I’m somebody who brings in the logs in a Victorian melodrama, the kind of thing the BBC put on the telly every Sunday teatime.
Putting it mildly, she is a right pain in the arse and I spend a frustrating night thinking of ‘Mummy’ and her lying there in the big bed and of all the things I could be doing to them both. She is pretty, too, which makes it even worse.
But, fortunately, even my life does have its occasional moments of pleasure, and about the time that the first snowdrops are trying to force their stupid way through the rock-hard earth, a really nice piece of nooky drops into my lap. ‘Drop’ is not quite the right word, because for some time I have been conscious that Dawn has a lot of control over the way the new learners are allocated and is using it to divert anything that approaches being a good-looking bint from yours truly. I accept this because I can understand any woman wanting to hang on to me, and you can’t always have your cake and heat it, as King Alfred found out to his cost. (Ugh! Ed.)
I land up with Mrs. Carstairs because there is no alternative available. Garth has the ’flu, Petal is in the South of France with one of his actor friends—bloody nice being a pouf, isn’t it?—and the other two are booked up to the eyeballs, so Dawn has to grin and bear it.
Mrs. Carstairs makes Mrs. B. sound like a nun that has taken a vow of silence. From the first moment she rears up like a female polar bear in the E.C.D.S. reception, covered from head to toe in furs, she never stops rabbiting.
“You must think it absolutely amazing that anyone of my age doesn’t know how to drive,” she yodels as we sweep through the door with me trying to keep up with her. In fact, I would never have given it a thought, but I don’t have time to tell her because she is already trying to climb into the driver’s seat.
“If you haven’t driven before, I think we’d better start somewhere a little less crowded,” I suggest, steering her across to the other door.
“You’re probably right. It would be a bad advertisement if I killed somebody outside the School, wouldn’t it?”
I smile my ‘customer is always right’ smile and whip her up to the golf course. By the time we get there we have covered Vietnam, pollution of the environment and vivisection—or rather she has. Some of her sentences end in questions but I never have time to answer them because she has done that herself or started on something else. I don’t mind too much because I am busy lapping up her luscious contours. She has ‘lovely bones’, as my Mum is always saying about the nobs she so much admires, and big blue eyes you could comb your hair in. She must be over forty but is better preserved than Dad’s war record and her figure would win whistles on a girl of nineteen. What I like most about her is her smell. My hooter is very sensitive to the perfume a bird uses and it is a change to have something that tickles your scrotum rather than bashes you over the goolies with a rubber mallet.
She is also no fool and from the very first lesson performs a bloody sight better than most of the rubbish I get lumbered with. She is confident—possibly too confident, and takes in what you have to say very quickly. I can see what Garth means about bright pupils being death to a driving school. I learn that her old man is a director of ‘Python’s Pesticides’ and that she decided to take lessons because she was bored. Normally, my ears would have pricked up at the mention of the word ‘boredom’ because a bored woman is nine-tenths of the way towards taking her knickers off for you, even if she doesn’t know it at the time; but in this case there is something so assured and upper-class about Mrs. C. that I dare not entertain any hopes. Maybe I take after Mum, but an upper-class accent and a bit of swank always make me reach for my forelock.
“I tell you this at the risk of boring you out of your mind,” says Mrs. C., “but if I have to entertain one more Scandinavian expert on how to wage germ warfare on slugs I will go stark raving mad. I think it affects them, you know. I mean, working with pesticides. Something gets into them and makes them mentally and physically impotent.”
“Don’t you mean sterile?” I say, because all the long words I know come from the sex books I used to get out of Battersea Public Library.
“Mr. Lea,” she says, shaking her head in a mock-serious manner, “I fear that in my case it may be both. Very unkind of me to say so of the man who provides my wherewithal, but I think that somewhere along the line he’s been got at. I could probably make a fortune telling the story to the Sunday newspapers.”