We Had It So Good Read online

  Growing up in the hotel, Andrea understands that no one is going to pay her any attention, or not the kind her parents would permit. Her role is to stay out of the way in the family rooms, go to the kitchen if she needs food, ask one of the chambermaids when she is ready to go to bed. If she wants, she can go into the residents’ lounge and climb the mountain of an armchair and watch television if she is incredibly quiet and good and the guests do not complain about her presence.

  She is not allowed to reach into the major’s trouser pocket at his request to fish out a sixpence. She must not enter any guest’s room with or without their permission unless in the company of a maid. She cannot hide behind the bar and jump out to surprise people sipping sherry. She must at all costs avoid the bloodthirsty chef, who is rumored to boil children for soup and serve their flesh in slices. She can permit the weekly visiting manicurist to paint her little fingernails shell pink. She can play in the chained ornamental gardens with their shrubs and begonia beds as long as no one is being served a cream tea. She must listen attentively as her parents complain about the grueling hours and the incompetent staff and the ungrateful, infrequent guests.

  It is inevitable that the hotel will fail. By the sixties no one wants these Enid Blyton holidays anymore. They don’t want rock pools, shrimping nets, buckets and spades, long walks along the cliffs, rented rowboats, cardigans to protect their arms from the shivering cold. They want sun, swimming pools, the smell of suntan oil. They don’t want to dress for dinner or listen to a palm court orchestra playing moldy show tunes from before the war. They want jukeboxes and jiving. The kinds of guests that the hotel is supposed to attract are starting to summer in Tuscany and Provence. They don’t want consommé or shrimp cocktail, they want boeuf en daube and risotto. The kinds of guests who think shrimp cocktail is sophisticated can’t afford to stay in this hotel and don’t have a dinner jacket or cocktail handbag, so would not be permitted to enter the dining room.

  “People have got too much money for their own good,” Andrea’s father said. “Or not enough for ours.”

  Once, Andrea overheard her mother say to the housekeeper, “If I had my time over again, I wouldn’t have had children, I’d have been fancy-free. We should never have left London, Frank wanted to get out, not me. I still miss the shops.”

  But her mother seeing her standing by the door said, “Don’t listen to me, Andy Pandy, I wouldn’t give you up for anything. Come and give me a kiss.”

  Listening to this story, Stephen thought of the house in Los Angeles where he had grown up, the wayward sisters, his mother’s arms steaming as she hung out the washing, the sweat on her brow, his father thwacking the side of his head when he tried on Marilyn Monroe’s champagne mink stole, and he turned away from Andrea and smiled: because it was all happiness, all of it, even being sent to sea. He had grown up awash with love. He wished he had paid more attention to his sisters, to their inexpensive glamour, their cheerfulness, their wild excesses. They were both married now, one already divorced, and he had nephews and nieces he had barely seen or paid attention to. They were coming up, in America, with everything to hope for and all their wishes were sure to be granted.

  Andrea remembered the final frightful scene, her father trembling by the boarded-up window. He held his head in his hands and cried. Her mother said, “Now, Frank, don’t weep, it isn’t manly.” Julia looked disheveled, it had been some days since she last wore lipstick. “Show some backbone, Frank.”

  She stood for a moment, contempt on her face. “Husbands are useless, Andy Pandy, never get married, they’ll just tie you down. Keep your options open.”

  Frank looked up. “Get out,” he said to his daughter. “Go away and leave us.”

  “You bloody coward, Frank,” said Julia. “You don’t want her to see you like this. Well, don’t behave like this. You’re a damned disgrace.” And she belted him round the face with a beer towel from the bar.

  “What a story!” Stephen said. “What happened to them?”

  “They went to the Lake District to be a live-in couple for an elderly housekeeper.”

  “And did you go along?”

  “No. They didn’t have any accommodation to offer me. I stayed with friends from school until I came here and now I stay with Grace in the vacs, except now we have this house we’re not going home anymore.”

  “And the hotel? What happened to that?”

  “It’s boarded up. No one wants it. They don’t have the money, I suppose, to take it on.”

  “Why don’t they tear it down and build houses or apartments?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They could take a stick of dynamite. They could throw hand grenades at it.”

  “Some people think it’s romantic, a decaying ruin.”

  “Then they should think more about the future, the past is bullshit, believe me. That’s what’s wrong with this whole damned place.”

  “Oxford?”

  “No, Europe.”

  And yet they still wanted to go on sleeping with each other. The reasons had nothing to do with the past, with life stories, champagne minks or executed soft toys.

  Pity the Poor Immigrant

  Stephen’s first year as a Rhodes Scholar was spent industriously toiling in the Dyson Perrins Laboratory over his research area: peptides. To synthesize a molecule is a daunting thing but if it were possible to make full-size biological proteins, the pharmaceutical applications were awesome. Stephen was one small but critical cog in the grand endeavor to make synthetic analogues of insulin; the pharmaceutical industry was breathing down their necks—the market could be measured in the billions of dollars. So there you were in your white coat, pursuing a doctorate, and the world was waiting, all those diabetics out there who were relying on you, reading the articles in the popular science magazines, or Reader’s Digest, or the newspaper reports of these groundbreaking miracles, because that was how the future was made in those days: in the lab. Scientists were above the common herd of men. They had done away with the need for the old god and Stephen felt himself to be, at the very least, a minor deity in the new scheme of things.

  Outside Dyson Perrins, Oxford was not what he had expected. It was not a university as UCLA was: a campus, a student newspaper, classes, cafeterias, the administration, sit-ins and demonstrations against the war, a huge student body, most of whom you never saw. Oxford was a private members’ club, it was something to which you gained admission and once he had entered, it was a world he did not understand. There was no membership fee, the government actually paid you to go there and no one had to work their way through college. His own career as a merchant seaman, shipping out every vacation, was regarded with bewilderment. These guys had never had a job.

  There were dinners in hall, gowns, the dons sitting at their High Table (like a wedding back home) and common rooms for students graded in some way he didn’t understand. There were student societies that involved their members wearing tuxedos and top hats. Meanwhile, out on the grass, the freaks were smoking joints and from the windows of a seventeenth-century bedroom with oak carvings came the unremitting sound, amplified by professional equipment, of Pink Floyd battering the gillyflowers.

  But Stephen Newman was likable, and he was from California, and he had a comprehensive record collection of West Coast music dating back to the early sixties. Of the early stuff he had Jan and Dean, the Surfaris, the Beach Boys—all their albums—then the Chantays, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Creedence Clearwater Revival (“Oh Susie Q!”) and the Grateful Dead. Of course the Dead. His hair was thick and black and curly and had the potential to grow into a mighty bush. He was invited to sit out there on the grass with the freaks; he became friends with the college dealer (His flashing eyes, his floating hair!) and ensured himself a regular stash that alleviated the boredom of life at Oxford, the ennui experienced by a man who was used to going to sea and mixing with the common merchant seamen, and observing the potentates who traveled in
first class.

  He badly missed ports, entrances and exits. Oxford lay in a stagnant marsh by a sluggish river that got interesting only when it had gathered speed and moved out of meadows, toward the industrial buildup of the city.

  He was also homesick for sunshine, blue skies, for everything he thought of as America, which included Coca-Cola machines and jelly doughnuts. Stupid things to miss, he thought. You could get them here, but they tasted nothing like the same.

  Men. Celibate, bored, stoned men. There were no women in his college or any of the men’s colleges. There were colleges for the chicks, but they were guarded by gate rules. In one of them, he was told, when a lady had a gentleman visitor, she had to move the bed out into the hall.

  He spent all day in Dyson Perrins, which women seldom entered, and when they did, they were ferocious brain-boxes in staid tweed skirts and lace-up leather shoes. He had a few moves, you could not get out of high school in Los Angeles without them, but there was nothing here that resembled dating. You asked the English if they wanted something and they said no. You couldn’t take this refusal at face value because it was merely the appetizer, you asked again, maybe two more times, before the answer came, “Are you sure?” or, if food were offered, “If you think there’s enough.” This tedious game had to be played out in every social situation, including, he assumed, sex. If it took three tries to get a girl to share a package of potato chips with you, what would you need to do to get her into bed?

  At the end of his first year, the summer of 1969, Stephen moved out of college with John Baines, another Rhodes Scholar, to Jericho, a neighborhood of small Victorian houses, built for dolls, they both thought, but at least they had finally left the Middle Ages behind and accelerated into the architectural future by several centuries to the nineteenth.

  They were cottages for artisans, and were coming to be admired as charming, but theirs was a slum, with mattresses on the floor and an ashtray full of roaches. The deck, amp and speakers of the stereo were the only items that resembled furniture. The squalor depressed him. The cabin of the ship where he could not even sit upright to read was more romantic than this Lilliputian dwelling, and at least above it life was in ceaseless motion, people coming and going. His idea of a class system was defined by dollars, the rich and the not rich, that was clearly observable on a ship and in Los Angeles, but in Oxford, class was something that could be understood only in the long centuries it took to roll the lawns perfectly flat.

  It was difficult to keep the house clean, and the kitchen’s antique fittings were grimed with dirt going back to the Roman Conquest. The gas stove was filthy and unhygienic, damp seeped in from the river. Stephen developed colds and was prey to viruses. It was at Oxford that he first developed a condition called bronchitis, when a cold went to your chest and you wheezed and coughed up green phlegm. He would have bronchitis with every cold until he finally gave up smoking in his thirties. In the meantime he dosed himself with a pharmacopoeia of drugs. He was sick and miserable.

  And then two girls moved in next door. What a stroke of luck, what a lifesaver. They had taken the house for their third year and were not returning to their parents’ homes for the summer, waiting it out, like him, in quiet, deserted Oxford, a city now without thronging bicycles, replaced by American and French tourists with cameras that swung from their chests like bulky breastplates.

  He had seen these girls before, even if you hung out all day in Dyson Perrins they were still one of the sights of the city, drifting arm in arm along the High, trailing behind them the smoke from their roll-up cigarettes and the pungent scent of heavily perfumed Oriental oils dabbed on their arms and throats. Their eyes were rimmed with black, like film stars’ of the silent era, and their lips stained purple with paint applied from a matte black tube. Each wore matching green stockings, but the blonde with her hair shorn like a lamb’s was outfitted in skirts with rips in them, exposing a slash of cerise petticoat, while the redhead was a pre-Raphaelite painting: a tangle of tawny hair and ankle-length green velvet robe.

  Soon, all over Oxford, girls appeared in ripped skirts and shocking-pink petticoats, and cascades of hennaed hair fell across the pages of books in the Bodleian Library.

  But beyond the involuntary turn of his head at a sight so bizarre, even in California, Stephen had paid no attention for he was not part of a crowd which asked who people were and where they had come from. He assumed that everyone, like him, came from nowhere and was a nobody. They were just two weird girls, part of the ongoing pageant of Oxford life, for you could find at Oxford men in cricket whites self-consciously carrying teddy bears, girls with monocles and cigarette holders, guys with Old Etonian accents wearing donkey jackets (a serge fabric with plastic patches on the shoulders, usually seen on hod carriers). Who cared?

  The girls were part of that parade, and now they were next door, moving about behind the party walls, their voices inaudible. They rode bicycles and hauled the heavy machines in to their tiny hall. In the evenings, Stephen could hear the sound of bath taps and imagined them sliding, naked, into the tub; this picture sustained him for many nights alone on his mattress, though usually he thought about his last girlfriend but one, Polly. He remembered the time they drove down to the Mexican border and stared across it, to unknown lands. He had been that close to asking her to marry him but had come to his senses. It must have been her French perfume that had half-crazed him.

  He was sitting in the garden under a tree smoking a joint. Next door the two girls were having a dolls’ tea party with cups and saucers and finger sandwiches laid out on the weedy grass. He heard cries of raucous laughter and the lower murmurings of another voice and a tabby cat that mewed on the fence, an empire, he thought, of fleas and other sneeze-making contaminants. He was allergic to cat fur and pollen and spent as little time in the garden as he could, especially during hay fever season, but the warmth of the day, the need to feel sun on his face after the endless English spring of low cloud and tepid temperatures—the relentless averageness of English life—compelled him outdoors.

  A joint toward late afternoon relaxed him, and he had begun to take an intellectual interest in the hallucinogens, LSD and peyote, which you could still buy legally at a horticultural shop on the Banbury Road. Once he’d got to the bottom of them he would probably take a trip, but he liked to be sure, to know exactly what he was ingesting, the chemical properties, the toxicity.

  The mild summer sun made him drowsy. Along the street someone was playing the Doors, and closer, the girls’ voices rose and fell, bees moved with determination toward the lavender bush, and a worm made its way unheeded across the obstacle of his bare foot.

  A head appeared above the fence. “Hey, man. Do you have a stash, can you bring it over?”

  It wasn’t a girl but a guy with blond curls, blond muttonchop whiskers, an Afghan waistcoat and, yet to be revealed, pink bell-bottoms and suede desert boots.

  Stephen stood up unsteadily and walked to the fence.

  “Hello, I’m Ivan. I’m just visiting the girls.”

  He could see them in the garden with their cups and saucers, teapot, jug of milk, a tray. The two girls lounged around on the grass, the redhead in the long green velvet dress lay back with her head on the lap of the blonde.

  “Stephen. Hi.”

  “I’m Balliol. Grace and Andrea are St. Anne’s.”

  “Wadham. I’m a Rhodes Scholar.”

  “Do you know Clinton of Univ?”

  “Yes, we met on the ship coming over.”

  “Excellent, so we might as well have been formally introduced. What have you got in your stash?”

  “Just grass, I don’t like hash, it’s too strong for me. There are a lot of side effects they don’t tell you about, especially if it’s opiated.”

  “Grass is more than acceptable. Can you climb over?”

  “Sure.”

  He put a leg over the rickety fence and tried to vault across to the other side. The redhead stood up. “I’ll give you
a hand,” she said. He didn’t know if she was Grace or Andrea.

  “No, I’m okay.” The fence swayed beneath him.

  “It might come down altogether,” said the blonde.

  “You’re a bit betwixt and between,” Ivan said.

  “In fact I’d say you were stuck,” said the blonde.

  Stephen crashed down into a patch of nettles.

  “Oh dear,” said the redhead. “I think vinegar is good for stings. I’ll go and get some.”

  “No,” the blonde said, “my mother always says dock leaves, dock leaves grow near nettles, they’re nature’s remedy.” She handed him a large coarse green leaf. “Rub that on your hands.”

  Stephen thought about the patent paper he had read on ibuprofen. It was supposed to knock pain on the head like a mallet, he couldn’t wait to try it.

  “You probably won’t be able to skin up with those fingers,” Ivan said. “Should I do it.”

  “Good idea.” He handed him the bag of grass from his jeans pocket. “What are your names again?” he asked the girls.

  “I am Grace,” said the blonde.

  “And I am Andrea,” said the redhead.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t know that already,” said Ivan. “The girls are famous.”