George, it appeared, had already established contacts in the area, Max being one.
Max drove us to The Black Sheep, where George had decided we’d lunch, then Max waited in the pub car-park, reading a newspaper contentedly and sipping the large Coke George had bought him as the clock on the meter ran merrily on.
Forrel entered the pub like a man returning after too long an absence to a loving home. Everyone but Vanessa had stiff vodka-tonics, and thereafter en masse got through three bottles of Sauvignon. Vanessa drank orange juice. As for food, we all ate fish and chips, which wasn’t bad, considering how far it had had to travel, frozen, from the sea; except, again, Vanessa, who had a prawn salad without chips.
Forrel only toyed with his meal. I was uneasy, fearing a recurrence of projectile vomiting. But what he had, thankfully, stayed down.
Once, he nodded off, unconsciously leaning to one side, his head a moment resting on my shoulder. Vanessa smiled, nearly glowing with affiliation. “You see, Roderick,” she said, “how simple it is just to act as you want. These days no one, except a savage, would have any problem with it.”
I’m afraid the vodka and Sauvignon spoke. “You’re making quite a mistake, Auntie. In fact, this young man is insanely in love with a striptease dancer.”
“Well, Roderick, I’m sure that will pass. I’m sure this other young man in the sex trade looks very good to Edward,” (this was Forrel’s first name, it seemed), “but a good relationship means far more. A perfect body isn’t everything. And you could take some time to visit a gym, perhaps, improve your muscle tone. Edward would appreciate that, I’m sure.”
My mouth had dropped open. I closed it. I had a vision of Forrel (Edward) prancing after some well-packed member of the Chippendales. I laughed.
George too looked amused. I thought he had very likely spotted her error from the first. Fortunately, though, the laugh dislodged Forrel, who sat bolt upright, and said, “It’s nice.” And smiled radiantly, and then got up and, in a sort of staggering amble, headed for the gents.
“Would you like another orange juice, Van,” Uncle George courteously inquired.
“No, thank you, George. And I insist, when we get back, that I pay you for my groceries, and my lunch.”
“Right you are,” said George, lazy as a cat on a just-the-right-temperature tin roof.
Vanessa then also rose, and walked with the carriage of a queenly policewoman, to the ladies. George and I watched her progress, as other men might wait out the passing of a tiger.
71
“You know, old son,” said George, “I have a bit of advice to give you.”
I must confess I was worried, briefly, when he said that.
I’ve mentioned my far and distant pink past. How much of this either George or Vanessa knew I had never been certain. Neither of them had ever given me a clue. Unless, of course, I counted Vanessa’s determination that I must be gay, which stemmed, I might suppose, from my being treated as a girl until the age almost of fourteen. What now though would my uncle say to me, in the intervals of Forrel’s perhaps puking and/or passing out in the lav, and Vanessa’s wholesome adjacent visit?
“Ever read Cervantes?” George asked me.
Surprised, I had to think. “I’m not sure. I may have tried to and not got very far. But I’ve seen it dramatized on TV once or twice. You mean Don Quixote, yes?”
“Yes, good old Don Quixote…” adherently, George pronounced it, yet as it would have been in his youth, Don Quick-Sott. “After all,” George would doubtless have pointed out, “we have from this name the description quixotic—can hardly pronounce that kee-hoe-tick, can we?”
“So you know the idea, at any rate,” he continued. “And you’ll know the bit about the windmills?”
“Yes, of course. Most—well, a lot of us do. Tilting at windmills, when he thinks they’re giants.”
“Quick-Sott’s whole life, more or less, is that, at least in the original intention. I don’t mean, old chap, he always does things that are useless, because for what he wants out of life, they give him just the buzz he needs. The barslut is a princess, the innkeeper can knight him. The windmills are giants, meant to be slain by the perfect knight.”
“And the advice?” I had just seen the door of the Ladies open, but actually it wasn’t Vanessa who came out, but another woman in black jeans. She went up to the bar.
“The advice is this, just what Sancho Panza the servant-squire says to old Quick-Sott: ‘Take care, your worship, those things there aren’t giants, they’re windmills.’ ”
“You think I take too much on myself, George?”
“No, Roderick. I think you don’t see life quite as it is. You see girls as princesses, maybe, and ordinary streets as castle corridors, trains as chariots, for all I know, clouds as camels, (though that’s good old Hamlet, of course), and giants where there are only windmills. Or, maybe, the odd princess as a waitress, and giant—as a windmill. We all do it a bit. But you do it a lot.”
I gazed at him, quite unable to relate this statement to anything at all in my life. What did I ever see in such a reckless, mad and glamorous manner? My bloody awful job? The irksome train journeys? My lonely, stuck, just-adequate tiny life?
I was about to question him in a way unusual for me, when two new things occurred. Forrel emerged from the gents looking presentable and face-washed, though not yet shaved, and walking reasonably steadily. And as that happened the girl in black jeans came up to us.
“He says you’re with that woman that’s in the toilet.”
George and I both goggled.
The woman in jeans resumed, “She’s throwing up like crazy. I’ll go back in, but we may need,
