Illywhacker

The famous Mr L. sprawled in the settee while remaining, somehow, as neat as a pin. He was boom-voiced, big-nosed, with a sensuous mouth below oddly pinched, slightly disapproving nostrils. His hair was cut fringed like a boy's but was flecked with silver and Charles, attempting to understand the gist of the argument, gathered only that the speaker did not like communists, Jews or proponents of what he called "Bank Clerk Culture". He went on and on about "LCD" and it was twenty years later that an older Charles realized, one insomniac night, that he had been referring to Lowest Common Denominator and that what he was most frightened of was democracy.

But it was to my wife that Charles gave the bulk of his attention, and it was not the polite uncomfortable look he felt obliged to give the self-satisfied Mr L., but something its object felt to be a reprimand. Charles stared, his eyes heavy with love and censure. His mother was, in her mid-thirties, still a young woman. If there was something dark and shadowy around her eyes it suggested no more than the burdens of beauty. Charles's mother was like a gypsy. She was totally beyond imagining. Everthing about her (the painted pillars, the arching cats, the smooth honey colour of her skin) was unlike anything Charles had ever seen. She wore a scarf wrapped around her head and its tail fell, a cascade of tiny roses, over one bare shoulder. Her hands were shapely, the fingers long, flexible and expressive. When she spoke a throaty contralto came from lips which hardly seemed to move and yet enunciated her vowels in a manner that her son could only describe as posh; the manner of speaking suggested great passion and great control.

He waited for a pause in the man's speech, imagining that, when it came, his mother would have a chance to explain that he was Charles Badgery, her son, and that they would, of course, wish time together and then the man might look at him less oddly. She had introduced him, with a jerky motion of her hand, as Charles, then held her bare throat and laughed. It was a jarring, silly outburst. Mr L. had blinked and continued with his speech.

The pause, at last, arrived. His mother stood. She took the saucer and cup from his knees and departed, with a murmur, to the kitchen.

Charles, disappointed, stretched himself inside the confines of his suit. He knew that Mr L. was staring at his brown boots and knew that Lenny had been right and that he should have bought shoes, or, if he were intent on boots, at least black boots. Now he was sorry he had been stubborn about the brown boots, but he had always wanted them, although this would be difficult to explain, just as he knew – looking at the man's pale sleepy supercilious eyes – that he could not explain that the suit was only so ill-fitting because he had been in a hurry to get here, that it was to be returned to Anthony Hordern's tomorrow where the legs would be lengthened, the sleeves let down, the backside made more generous.

"Nice day," he said to Mr L., unable to stand his staring.

"Noice day," said Mr L., and Charles could not believe that he was being mocked.

Meanwhile Phoebe clattered around the kitchen in a tizz, not knowing what it was she should do. Afterwards she would regret (particularly when in her cups) not having sent the famous little satyr away and thus removed the problem of having to socialize with two such different personalities at once. Yet both of them had arrived, almost together, and both without warning; she had found herself trapped between what she had once been and what she would like to be.

One always gave boys biscuits. She looked for biscuits but Annette had been up in the night, prowling the house, and had eaten them all. Her son (she found it hard to credit she had ever had one) and not even a damn biscuit to give him. He had smelt (she wrinkled her nose, looking for sugar lumps) distinctly odd. He was like a yokel in a suit. He was odd, repelling, ugly, with frighteningly demanding eyes that she was tempted to label as insolent but could not, of course, because she was his mother. Also there was this: that he was disconcertingly familiar, like photographs of her father as young man, and she felt towards this image a halting pulse of affection that was no weaker than the undertow of her irritation.

Yet she could not send Mr L. away. She had laboured long to get his attention, had done what she always had – mixed up her literary ambitions and her powers of sexual persuasion. It was, as Annette was never slow to remind her, a bad habit to have fallen into. But to this Phoebe would bitterly reply that their whole life was a bad habit, a habit none of them could break, not even Horace who, although he was presently away, working as a purser on a coastal steamer, would return as soon as he had forgotten how sharply he was cut by frustration and jealousy, or when he was dismissed for epilepsy and put off the ship, whichever was the sooner.