The Herring Seller's Apprentice Read Online Free Page B

something for which my scout blamed (and never quite forgave) my immediate neighbour.
    ‘Somebody usually gives me a drink round about now.’ It was a very Rupert phrase. So was, ‘It’s been such a pleasure to see me.’ Some people – the majority of people, I think – found Rupert intensely irritating, but others could not resist succumbing to his peculiar charm. I couldn’t. Later, in a much more comprehensive manner, nor could my wife.
    There was a theory, amongst the girls in our year, that Rupert was homosexual. When I pointed out that he had innumerable girlfriends, they merely gave each other knowing glances and said, ‘Exactly.’ I had no girlfriends, but nobody felt the need to attribute this to my sexuality.
    Geraldine first entered my life as one of Rupert’s transitory companions. She was two or three years younger than we were and was, at the time, at one of the secretarial colleges that flourished as a sort of distant penumbra of the university. In some ways she was Rupert’s perfect counterpart – a lively blonde with almost perfect legs, a seductive smile and eyes that sparkled with a constant mischief. She anticipated by some years the fashion for dressing in black that, much later, everyone seemed to adopt. I am not suggesting that she was in any way fashion-conscious, still less a leader of fashion. Indeed, she usually dressed very simply in a sweater or polo-neck and a skirt just short enough to display her black-stockinged legs to the best possible advantage. But black suited her and she knew that it suited her.
    I met her from time to time, in Rupert’s room or punting on the Cherwell or at parties; then she was replaced, with no warning at all, by Victoria or Amanda or Kate or somebody. After university, Rupert and I worked in different parts of London. Victoria or Amanda or Kate was replaced by Elizabeth, a pleasant, sensible, but wholly unremarkable girl who was training to be a nurse and who seemed unlikely to hold Rupert’s interest for long. If I thought of Geraldine at all it was only in the context of a tenner that she had borrowed from me and clearly never intended to return. In due course, Rupert married the sensible Elizabeth. I was only mildly hurt at not being asked to be best man.
    It was some time after that that Geraldine reappeared, not to repay my tenner, either immediately or at any stage in the future, but to invite me to a dinner party. She made some polite chit-chat about my last book (I was a proper writer by then – not just a biographer of penguins) before, apparently as an afterthought, asking whether I could let her have Rupert and What’s-her-name’s new address. At dinner (there were about a dozen of us squeezed into her small flat) Rupert was seated next to Geraldine. Elizabeth and I were at the far end of the room; Geraldine scarcely exchanged more than a dozen words with either of us all evening. But she then surprised me by phoning up the following day and suggesting a trip down to Kent – with Rupert and What’s-her-name if they could be persuaded to come. Could I speak to Rupert? I spoke to Rupert, who immediately said that he rather thought they were free that weekend. His enthusiastic response struck me as odd at the time, though not of course with hindsight.
    If I said that Geraldine married me to get closer to Rupert it is unlikely you would believe me, but later I was never able to come up with any better reason. The only really solid argument against this theory is that Geraldine never thought far enough ahead for that type of long-term planning. Of course, it is possible that she saw in me something that I was never able to see in myself – at least for a while. But, if so, I still have no idea what that thing could have been and sometimes wish that she had told me. The knowledge might have helped me in the bleak years that followed.
    Elizabeth later told me that she had been onto Geraldine’s game from the very beginning, though, that being