Although I have let some time since I last blogged excerpts from my old novel Help! about growing up in the 1960s, I haven’t got to the end – and the end is, I think, the best of it. As usual, the conventions of blogging mean that, when they are all published, the extracts will appear in reverse order…
[Rachel - who, as we rejoin the story is being led up a hill by our hero Simon – was the teenage girl who gave Simon his first kiss. He realised, belatedly that he was indeed a heterosexual, and, back at Cambridge entered into a busy but unsatisfactory series of relationships with young women. Then, only a few days before the events described here, Rachel had appeared in his life again… ]
Less than three hours later, we were walking up Kensington Church Street, towards my father’s new flat. “Everything has been redecorated” I told her. “Over Christmas.” But Rachel wasn’t interested - not even in Buckingham Palace, when we had passed it in the taxi. The driver dropped us by Derry and Toms - a short walk might restore colour to Rachel’s face, her morning cheerfulness.
Some chance. It felt like taking a five year old to her first day at school. “I’ll do the talking. Unless you want to talk... Okay, don’t worry about it. There really is no need to worry. Honestly. My dad has brought me up to be completely straight with him.” Well, in a way. I had almost used up my reserves of public school confidence. “I promise you, Rachel, he’s not like other dads.” I had promised twenty times already.
“What about a cup of tea?” she asked. We were passing a sandwich bar. Rachel’s first trip to London. Nothing was as she’d expected - even the sandwiches. “Are you sure there’s no where we can just - go?” A wave of a wand, an anonymous destruction of the foetus, a miraculous return to square one.
Mind you, I only had a sketchy idea of what would be involved, from a medical point of view. “Rachel, I’m out of my depth, and my father won’t be.” We needed somebody who knew what to do, to make phone calls - to demand action, not plead for mercy. Someone who understood how to dodge the law, not transgress it. Rachel chewed her avocado sandwich, pulling a face at the taste, not listening to a word.
“Simon, lets go back, and just wait till the doctor...” Usually, when I needed to ask my father a favour, I spent months preparing the ground. Maybe, if Rachel had believed all my words of reassurance, it would be her who would be dragging me away from the sandwich shop, along the last hundred yards.
