The Lemon Table Read online

  “But perhaps you’re not the marrying kind, sir.”

  Now hang on. Who’s accusing who of being queer? He’d always loathed hairdressers, and this one was no exception. Fucking provincial mister two-point-four children, pay the mortgage, wash the car and put it back in the garage. Nice little allotment down by the railway, pug-faced wife hanging out the washing on one of those metal carousel-things, yeah, yeah, see it all. Probably does a bit of refereeing on Saturday afternoons in some crap league. No, not even a referee, just a linesman.

  Gregory became aware that the fellow was pausing, as if he expected an answer. He expected an answer? What rights did he have in the matter? OK, let’s get this guy sorted out.

  “Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.”

  “Yes, well, I’m sure you’re a cleverer man than me, sir,” replied the hairdresser, in a tone that wasn’t obviously deferential. “What with being at the university.”

  Gregory merely grunted again.

  “Of course, I’m no judge, but it always seems to me that universities teach the students to despise more things than they have a right to. It’s our money they’re using, after all. I’m just glad my boy went to the tech. Hasn’t done him any harm. He’s earning good money now.”

  Yeah, yeah, enough to support the next two-point-four children and have a slightly bigger washing machine and a slightly less puggy wife. Well, that was for some. Bloody England. Still, all that was going to be swept away. And this kind of place would be the first to go, stuffy old master-and-servant establishments, all stilted conversation, class-consciousness and tipping. Gregory didn’t believe in tipping. He thought it a reinforcement of the deferential society, equally demeaning for tipper and tippee. It degraded social relations. Anyway, he couldn’t afford it. And on top of that, he was fucked if he was going to tip a topiarist who accused him of being a shirt-lifter.

  These blokes were on the way out. There were places in London designed by architects, where they played the latest hits on a funky sound system, while some groover layered your hair and matched it to your personality. Cost a fortune, apparently, but it was better than this. No wonder the place was empty. A cracked Bakelite radio on a high shelf was playing tea-dance stuff. They ought to sell trusses and surgical corsets and support hose. Corner the market in prostheses. Wooden legs, steel hooks for severed hands. Wigs, of course. Why didn’t hairdressers sell wigs as well? After all, dentists sold false teeth.

  How old was this guy? Gregory looked at him: bony, with haunted eyes, hair cut absurdly short and Brylcreemed flat. Hundred and forty? Gregory tried to work it out. Married twenty-seven years. So: fifty? Forty-five if he got her in the club as soon as he whipped it out. If he’d ever been that adventurous. Hair grey already. Probably his pubic hair was grey as well. Did pubic hair go grey?

  The hairdresser finished the hedge-trimming stage, dropped the scissors insultingly into a glass of disinfectant, and took out another, stubbier pair. Snip, snip. Hair, skin, flesh, blood, all so fucking close. Barber-surgeons, that’s what they’d been in the old days, when surgery had meant butchery. The red stripe round the traditional barber’s pole denoted the strip of cloth wound round your arm when the barber bled you. His shop-sign featured a bowl as well, the bowl which caught the blood. Now they’d dropped all that, and declined into hairdressers. Tenders of allotments, stabbing the earth instead of the extended forearm.

  He still couldn’t work out why Allie had broken it up. Said he was too possessive, said she couldn’t breathe, being with him was like being married. That was a laugh, he’d replied: being with her was like being with someone who was going out with half a dozen other blokes at the same time. That’s just what I mean, she said. I love you, he’d said, with sudden desperation. It was the first time he’d said it to anyone, and he knew he’d got it wrong. You were meant to say it when you felt strong, not weak. If you loved me, you’d understand me, she replied. Well, fuck off and breathe, then, he’d said. It was just a row, just a stupid sodding row, that was all. Didn’t mean anything. Except it meant they’d broken up.

  “Anything on the hair, sir?”

  “What?”

  “Anything on the hair?”

  “No. Never mess with nature.”

  The hairdresser sighed, as if messing with nature was what he’d spent the last twenty minutes doing, and that in Gregory’s case this all too necessary piece of interference had ended in defeat.

  The weekend ahead. New haircut, clean shirt. Two parties. Communal purchase of a pipkin of beer tonight. Get stonking drunk and see what happens: that’s my idea of not messing with nature. Ouch. No. Allie. Allie, Allie, Allie. Bind my arm. I hold out my wrists to you, Allie. Wherever you please. Non-medical purposes, but plunge it in. Go on, if you need to. Loose my blood.

  “What was that you said just now about marriage?”

  “Eh? Oh, the only adventure open to the cowardly.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind my making a point, sir, marriage has always been very good to me. But I’m sure you’re a cleverer man than me, what with being at the university.”

  “I was quoting,” said Gregory. “But I can reassure you that the authority in question was a cleverer man than either of us.”

  “So clever he didn’t believe in God, I expect?”

  Yes, that clever, Gregory wanted to say, just exactly that clever. But something held him back. He was only brave enough to deny God when among fellow sceptics.

  “And, if I may ask, sir, was he the marrying kind?”

  Huh. Gregory thought about it. There hadn’t been a Madame, had there? Strictly mistresses, he was sure.

  “No, I don’t think he was the marrying kind, as you put it.”

  “Then perhaps, sir, not an expert?”

  In the old days, Gregory reflected, barber-shops had been places of ill repute, where idle fellows gathered to exchange the latest news, where lute and viol were played for the entertainment of customers. Now all this was coming back, at least in London. Places full of gossip and music, run by stylists who got their names in the social pages. There were girls in black sweaters who washed your hair first. Wow. Not having to wash your hair before you went out to have it cut. Just saunter in with a hi-sign and settle down with a magazine.

  The expert on marriage brought a mirror and showed twin views of his handiwork to Gregory. Pretty neat job, he had to admit, short at the sides, long at the back. Not like some of the blokes in college, who just grew their hair in every direction at the same time, bogbrush beards, Olde Englishe muttonchops, greasy waterfalls down the back, you name it. No, mess with nature just a little bit, that was his real motto. The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps us on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization. It wasn’t simply the choice between the life of a beast and that of a bourgeois. It was about . . . well, all sorts of things. He had an acute pang for Allie. Bleed me, then bind me up. If he got her back, he’d be less possessive. Except he’d thought of it as just being close, being a couple. She’d liked it at first. Well, she hadn’t objected.

  He realized that the hairdresser was still holding up the mirror.

  “Yes,” he said idly.

  The mirror was put down on its face and the wanky nylon robe unwound. A brush swooshed back and forth across his collar. It made him think of a soft-wristed jazz drummer. Swoosh, swoosh. There was lots of life ahead, wasn’t there?

  The shop was empty, and there was still a glutinous whine from the radio, but even so it was a lowered voice close to his ear which suggested, “Something for the weekend, sir?”

  He wanted to say, Yeah, train ticket to London, appointment with Vidal Sassoon, packet of barbecue sausages, crate of ale, a few herbal cigarettes, music to numb the mind, and a woman who truly likes me. Instead, he lowered his own voice and replied, “Packet of Fetherlite, please.”

  Complicit at last with the hairdresser, he walked out i
nto the bright day calling for the weekend to begin.

  3

  Before setting off, he went into the bathroom, eased the shaving mirror out on its extending arm, flipped it over to the make-up side, and took his nail scissors from his sponge bag. First he trimmed out a few long mattressy eyebrow hairs, then turned slightly so that anything sprouting from his ears would catch the light, and made a snip or two. Faintly depressed, he pushed up his nose and examined the tunnel openings. Nothing of extravagant length; not for the moment. Dampening a corner of his flannel, he scrubbed away behind his ears, bob-sleighed the cartilaginous channels, and gave a final prod into the waxy grottoes. When he looked at his reflection, his ears were bright pink from the pressure, as if he were a frightened boy or a student afraid to kiss.

  What was the name for the accretion of stuff that whitened your damp flannel? Ear-crust, he called it. Perhaps doctors had a technical term for it. Were there fungal infections behind the ear, the aural equivalent of athlete’s foot? Not very likely: the location was too dry. So maybe ear-crust would do; and maybe everyone had a private name for it, so that no common term was required.

  Strange that no one had come up with a new name for the hedge-trimmers and topiarists. First barbers, then hairdressers. Yet when did they last “dress” hair? “Stylists?” Fake-posh. “Crimpers?” Jokey. So was the phrase he used nowadays with Allie. “Just off to the Barnet Shop,” he’d announce. Barnet. Barnet Fair. Hair.

  “Er, three o’clock with Kelly.”

  An indigo fingernail stumbled down a row of pencilled capitals. “Yes. Gregory?”

  He nodded. The first time he’d booked over the phone and they’d asked his name he’d replied, “Cartwright.” There was a pause, so he’d said, “Mr. Cartwright,” before realizing what the pause had been about. Now he saw himself upside down in the ledger: GREGGORY.

  “Kelly be with you in a minute. Let’s get you washed.”

  He still, after all these years, couldn’t slide easily into the posture. Maybe his spine was going. Eyes half closed, feeling with your nape for the lip of the bowl. Like doing the backstroke and not knowing where the end of the pool was. And then you lay there, with cold porcelain holding your neck and your throat exposed. Upside down, waiting for the guillotine blade.

  A fat girl with uninterested hands made the usual conversation with him—“That too hot?” “Been on holiday?” “You want conditioner?”—while half-heartedly attempting with scooped palm to keep the water out of his ears. He had, over the years, settled into a half-amused passivity at the Barnet Shop. The first time one of these red-faced trainees had asked, “You want conditioner?” he’d answered, “What do you think?,” believing that her superior view of his scalp made her the better judge of his requirements. Stolid logic suggested that something called “conditioner” could only improve the condition of your hair; on the other hand, why pose the question if there wasn’t a valid choice of answer? But requests for advice tended only to confuse, drawing the cautious answer, “It’s up to you.” So he contented himself with saying “Yes” or “Not today, thank you,” according to whim. Also according to whether or not the girl was good at keeping water out of his ears.

  She watchfully half-led him back to the chair, as if drippingness were close to blindness. “You want a tea, a coffee?”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  It wasn’t exactly lutes and viols and the assembly of idle fellows exchanging the latest news. But there was stonkingly loud music, a choice of beverage, and a good range of magazines. What had happened to Reveille and Tit-Bits, which the old geezers used to read, back in the days when he squirmed on the rubber mat? He picked out a copy of Marie Claire, the sort of women’s mag it was OK for a bloke to be seen reading.

  “Hi, Gregory, how are things?”

  “Fine. Yourself?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Kelly, like the new hair.”

  “Yeah. Got bored, you know.”

  “Like it. Looks good, falls well. You like it?”

  “Not sure.”

  “No, it’s a winner.”

  She smiled. He smiled back. He could do this stuff, customer banter, meant and half-meant. It had only taken him about twenty-five years to get the right tone.

  “So what are we doing today?”

  He looked up at her in the mirror, a tall girl with a sharp bob he didn’t really like; he thought it made her face too angular. But what did he know? He was indifferent to his own hair. Kelly was a restful presence who had quickly understood that he didn’t want to be asked about his holidays.

  When he didn’t reply immediately, she said, “Shall we splash out and do exactly the same as last time?”

  “Good idea.” The same as last time, and next time, and the time beyond that.

  The salon had the mixed-ward atmosphere of a jolly outpatients’ department where no one had anything serious. Still, he could handle it; social apprehensions were now long gone. The small triumphs of maturity. “So, Gregory Cartwright, give us an account of your life so far.” “Well, I’ve stopped being afraid of religion and barbers.” He’d never joined the Crusaders, whatever they had been; he’d evaded the hot-eyed evangelisers at school and university; now he knew what to do when the doorbell rang on a Sunday morning.

  “That’ll be God,” he’d say to Allie, “I’ll do it.” And there on the step would be a spruce, polite couple, one of them often black, sometimes with a winning child in tow, and offering an uncontentious opener such as, “We’re just going from house to house asking people if they’re worried about the state of the world.” The trick was to avoid both the true Yes and the smug No, because then they had a landing-line across to you. So he would give them a householderish smile and cut to the chase: “Religion?” And before they in turn could decide whether Yes or No was the correct response to his brutal intuition, he would end the encounter with a brisk, “Better luck next door.”

  Actually, he quite liked having his hair washed; mostly. But the rest of it was mere process. He took only mild pleasure in the bodily contact which was all part of things nowadays. Kelly would lean an unaware hip against his upper arm, or there’d be a brush from another part of her body; and she was never exactly overdressed. Way back when, he’d have thought it was all for him, and be grateful for the draped sheet that covered his lap. Today it didn’t stir his mind out of Marie Claire.

  Kelly was telling him how she’d applied for a job in Miami. On the cruise liners. You went out for five days, a week, ten days, then had shore leave to spend the money you’d earned. She had a girlfriend out there at the moment. Sounded like fun.

  “Exciting,” he said. “When are you off?” He thought: Miami’s violent, isn’t it? Shootings. Cubans. Vice. Lee Harvey Oswald. Will she be safe? And what about sexual harassment on the cruise ships? She was a nice-looking girl. Sorry, Marie Claire, I meant woman. But girl in a way, because she provoked these semi-parental thoughts in someone like him: one who stayed at home, went to work, and had his hair cut. His life, he admitted, had been one long cowardly adventure.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven,” said Kelly, as if at the ultimate extremity of youth. Without immediate action her life would be compromised for ever; a couple more weeks would turn her into that old biddy in rollers on the other side of the salon.

  “I’ve a daughter almost your age. Well, she’s twenty-five. I mean, we’ve another one as well. There’s two of them.” He didn’t seem to be saying it right.

  “So how long you been married then?” Kelly asked in quasi-mathematical astonishment.

  Gregory looked up at her in the mirror. “Twenty-eight years.” She gave a larky smile at the idea that anyone could have been married for the enormous length of time that she herself had been alive.

  “The elder one’s left home, of course,” he said. “But we’ve still got Jenny with us.”

  “Nice,” said Kelly, but he could see she was bored now. Bored with him, specific
ally. Just another ageing geezer with thinning hair he’d soon have to comb more carefully. Give me Miami; and soon.

  He was afraid of sex. That was the truth. He didn’t really know any more what it was for. He enjoyed it when it happened. He imagined, in the years ahead, that there would be gradually less of it, and then, at some point, none at all. But this wasn’t what made him afraid. Nor was it anything to do with the daunting specificity with which they wrote about it in magazines. In his younger days they’d had their own daunting specificities. It had all seemed quite clear and bold, back then, when he stood up in the bath and Allie took his cock in her mouth. All that stuff had been self-evident, and imperative in its truth. Now he wondered if he hadn’t always got it wrong. He didn’t know what sex was for. He didn’t think anyone else did either, but that didn’t make the situation any better. He wanted to howl. He wanted to howl into the mirror and watch himself howl back.

  Kelly’s hip was against his bicep, not the edge of her hip either, but the inner curve of it. At least he knew the answer to one of his youthful questions: yes, pubic hair does go grey.

  He wasn’t worried about the tip. He had a twenty-pound note. Seventeen for the cut, one for the girl who’d washed him and two for Kelly. And just in case they put the price up, he always remembered to bring an extra pound. He was that sort of person, he realized. The man with the back-up pound coin in his pocket.

  Now Kelly had finished cutting and stood directly behind him. Her breasts appeared on either side of his head. She took each of his sideburns between thumb and finger, then looked away. This was a trick of hers. Everyone’s face is a bit lopsided, she’d told him, so if you judge by eye you can end up making a mistake. She measured by feel, turning away towards the cash-desk and the street. Towards Miami.

  Satisfied, she reached for the dryer and finger-flicked a soufflé effect which would last until the evening. By now she was on automatic, probably wondering if she had time to pop outside for a ciggie before the next damp head was guided to her. So each time she would forget, and fetch the mirror.