‘Oh.’ Phoebe meant Larkin. ‘That might be a tall order…Wait, I know. Just keep your business suit on. You won’t have to change after work, if you’re rushed. It starts early, remember. Or just put on a different business suit.’
‘Why would that sex him up?’
‘Lots of reasons.’ Martin didn’t go on about the work ethic and men of a certain era and fear of the poorhouse and the blacking factory and all that. ‘In his case it comes down to cold cash. The idea of a woman who might go Dutch – that’d sex him up.’
Phoebe said, ‘Well I think that’s too, what d’you call it, that’s too generic. I want something more – more customised. Now. Larkin likes…Oh sorry Mart, but the bod from Acquisitions wants a word. Shall I ring back or can you wait for two minutes?’
He said he’d wait. When he called her at Transworld Financial Services there was always some bod wanting a word – the bod from Deacquisitions, plus the bods from Revendications, Encashments, Subreptions, Transmittals, and (his favourite) the bod from Realisations. He, Martin, was at present a bod from Realisations. He realised something was wrong, something was missing, something was not as it should be. He went on thinking about it, but he had no idea what it was.
‘Are you still there?’ she said. ‘Now. Larkin likes schoolgirls.’
‘Well he likes daydreaming about schoolgirls.’
‘What was the bit in the letter to your dad? You know, about schoolgirls plating each other.’
‘Mm.’ The quote Phoebe was after went WATCHING SCHOOLGIRLS SUCK EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM. ‘So, Phoebe? How’re you going to manage that?’
‘It’s a challenge, I admit. But I’ll see what I can do…Hang on. Acquisitions wants yet another word. When’re you picking me up? Sixish?’
It was September 1980. The Night of Shame (July 1978), then the period of costly debauchery, then the biennium of perfect love. It can now be revealed that the time of perfect love (it in fact lasted twenty-five months and twenty-five days) had about ten hours to go.
Apollo 1
‘They’re not dreads and dreams, Hitch, they’re more like…more like strange dissatisfactions. I can’t describe them, I can’t even identify them. Maybe it’s just to do with not going to an office any more. Phoebe gets up early, so I do too. I’m at my desk by nine, and I write till one or one-thirty. And then what?’
‘Mm, it’s meant to be why writers are such pissers, isn’t it. You do your four or five hours, then you’re no good any more, so you slope off down the drinker.’
It was two o’clock on a Monday afternoon and we were in the Apollo, a West Indian bar and onetime music hall near Christopher’s flat on Golborne Road. The West Indians, all of them tall and muscular young men, were sipping Sprites and Lucozades; they glanced with perfunctory pity at my pint of lager and the double Scotch of the Hitch, and at our steadily filling ashtray. I said,
‘I’m in a drinker, true, but this is an exception. Boozing in the afternoon…it fucks up boozing in the evening. We’re not all like you. We can’t take it – pissed all day.’
‘Pissed all week. It’s my new unit. Fresh as a daisy till Tuesday afternoon when I do my column. Not too clever by Thursday. And completely tonto by Friday…Oh, this is going to be a heavy sacrifice when I cross the Atlantic.’
‘Heavier than being ruled by Reagan?’
‘Personally much heavier. Alcohol’s suddenly uncool over there – even in New York. No more nine-Martini lunches. They’re all on iced tea. Or fucking Sanka.’
I got more drinks and he said,
‘How does it hit you, the dissatisfaction? Tell.’
‘It comes on me when I stop work and feel alone. A restless vacancy, a sense of – what’s the next thing? Where is it?’ I arched my back. ‘When is it?’
‘Maybe it’s because around now everyone seems to be settling down. Ian’s settling down with Penny. Julian’s settling down with Pat.’
‘And you’re settling down with Eleni.’
‘As I said, she loves the Hitch, she wants to marry the Hitch…It’s a pity about the timing. Because I finally got the hang of promiscuity – thanks to America.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Well, first off, you know my besetting weakness, don’t you. It’s a sort of timidity, or a fear of giving offence – or a fear of rejection. And in America it’s the chicks who make all the moves.’
‘Oi. What about Lady Mab and the others? They made all the moves and you still didn’t come across. Because you’d have to string them up the next morning.’
‘That’s the other half of it. There are no chicks worth stringing up in America. None of them sound like Lady Mab. Even the heiresses’ dads were at some point poor. I know there are dynasties, but very few US chicks are born entitled, which is what I can’t stand. They have a different class system over there.’
‘And it’s just race and money. But you say it’s also very weird.’
‘One example. The poor whites, the hookworm-and-incest crowd, have made an unspoken deal with the rich whites. You can sneer at us so long as we can both sneer at the blacks. And then there are little fripperies like the Boston Brahmins.’
‘…Julia’s dad’s a Boston Brahmin. Not at all rich but very Mayflower.’
‘Any developments there?’
‘With Julia? Don’t talk stupid. It’s at least a year too soon.’
‘When was it again?’
‘Just over a month ago. Cancer. At his age…So Hitch. Who am I going to settle down with? Phoebe’s finite. She loves Little Keith, I think, but she doesn’t want to marry Little Keith. Or anybody else. She’s completely reconciled to it. And I always sort of knew I shouldn’t marry Phoebe. She isn’t the love of my life.’
‘You just want to get to the end of her sexually.’
‘Yes – while I’m at it. And I keep thinking I’m nearly there. But on the phone with her this morning I had a sick bonk throughout
