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Authors: Stuart Prebble
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occupied, but he will need extra support as well as that – and will have to find a way to pay for it. And I don’t think the insect farm is going to do it.”
The subject had gone away, but now, in the absence of my mother, it had come back again. At eighteen or nineteen, you still assume that your parents are going to live for ever. They seem to have been put on the earth to serve you and your needs, and the idea that that may one day stop is far off your horizon. Obviously at that time I had no way of knowing that the life-changing decisions which were going to be necessary were in fact coming up quite so soon.
Chapter Seven
Life at university gave Harriet the freedom to develop her individuality even further than before, and wherever she went and whatever we were doing, she could always be relied upon to stand out. At college discos, when most students cultivated studied neglect, she might wow the crowds by dressing as a Spanish flamenco dancer, complete with corsets, cleavage and roses in her hair. Often the men found it impossible to disguise the effect she had on them, and I would catch a glimpse of some of the girls who made little effort to hide their disapproval. One day I was struggling to finish an essay when she burst into my room bubbling over with the news that the quartet had been booked to play at a dinner and award ceremony for the Royal Television Society at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. There would be TV producers and even some celebrities there, and who knew what might follow from such a gig? It was their first really grown-up and professional engagement, and they had been told that they would have to wear formal dress.
I hadn’t ever seen Harriet wearing a ball gown before, and it’s not within my powers of vocabulary to express the effect it had on me. She looked absolutely fabulous, quite literally breathtaking and, as far as I was concerned, about ten yearsolder than her twenty years. Suddenly she was a proper adult, doing something properly grown up, in the real world, and getting paid real money for her efforts. It was a shock.
The quartet had been hired to provide background music while everyone gathered to drink champagne and get a bit oiled up before their dinner and the prizes. She had managed to wangle a job for me at the same event, walking around with trays of canapés, and as I look back on it I realize that she had probably done so because of the risk that otherwise I might actually be physically consumed by my own jealousy. After our falling-out on the subject, I obviously had to withdraw my objections to her teaming up with Martin and Jed, but my initial reservations were nothing compared to what I had felt a few weeks later when she came home and told me the proposed fourth member of the quartet.
“Brendan Harcourt? You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Why have I got to be kidding you?”
“Because, for one thing, fucking Brendan isn’t even in the fucking music department. And that’s before I get on to the 2.4 million other reasons why I don’t believe it.”
“Brendan’s major is Economics, but his minor subject is Music. But the most important thing is that he plays the cello, and everyone else in the department who plays the cello has already joined another group, so we didn’t have a lot of choice.”
The long and the short of it was that Brendan Harcourt was there that night, playing in a quartet with Martin and Jed andHarriet, and I loved one of them and hated the other three. More accurately, I loved one of them, disliked two and hated the fourth, and now I also hated all these blokes dressed up like penguins who had no reason or occasion to disguise their lust for my girlfriend, while I had little choice but to listen quietly as more and more drunken jackasses made less and less subtle remarks about what they would like to do with her.
“Have you seen that fabulous bird in the quartet?” The speaker was an overweight ex-public-school boy
The subject had gone away, but now, in the absence of my mother, it had come back again. At eighteen or nineteen, you still assume that your parents are going to live for ever. They seem to have been put on the earth to serve you and your needs, and the idea that that may one day stop is far off your horizon. Obviously at that time I had no way of knowing that the life-changing decisions which were going to be necessary were in fact coming up quite so soon.
Chapter Seven
Life at university gave Harriet the freedom to develop her individuality even further than before, and wherever she went and whatever we were doing, she could always be relied upon to stand out. At college discos, when most students cultivated studied neglect, she might wow the crowds by dressing as a Spanish flamenco dancer, complete with corsets, cleavage and roses in her hair. Often the men found it impossible to disguise the effect she had on them, and I would catch a glimpse of some of the girls who made little effort to hide their disapproval. One day I was struggling to finish an essay when she burst into my room bubbling over with the news that the quartet had been booked to play at a dinner and award ceremony for the Royal Television Society at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. There would be TV producers and even some celebrities there, and who knew what might follow from such a gig? It was their first really grown-up and professional engagement, and they had been told that they would have to wear formal dress.
I hadn’t ever seen Harriet wearing a ball gown before, and it’s not within my powers of vocabulary to express the effect it had on me. She looked absolutely fabulous, quite literally breathtaking and, as far as I was concerned, about ten yearsolder than her twenty years. Suddenly she was a proper adult, doing something properly grown up, in the real world, and getting paid real money for her efforts. It was a shock.
The quartet had been hired to provide background music while everyone gathered to drink champagne and get a bit oiled up before their dinner and the prizes. She had managed to wangle a job for me at the same event, walking around with trays of canapés, and as I look back on it I realize that she had probably done so because of the risk that otherwise I might actually be physically consumed by my own jealousy. After our falling-out on the subject, I obviously had to withdraw my objections to her teaming up with Martin and Jed, but my initial reservations were nothing compared to what I had felt a few weeks later when she came home and told me the proposed fourth member of the quartet.
“Brendan Harcourt? You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Why have I got to be kidding you?”
“Because, for one thing, fucking Brendan isn’t even in the fucking music department. And that’s before I get on to the 2.4 million other reasons why I don’t believe it.”
“Brendan’s major is Economics, but his minor subject is Music. But the most important thing is that he plays the cello, and everyone else in the department who plays the cello has already joined another group, so we didn’t have a lot of choice.”
The long and the short of it was that Brendan Harcourt was there that night, playing in a quartet with Martin and Jed andHarriet, and I loved one of them and hated the other three. More accurately, I loved one of them, disliked two and hated the fourth, and now I also hated all these blokes dressed up like penguins who had no reason or occasion to disguise their lust for my girlfriend, while I had little choice but to listen quietly as more and more drunken jackasses made less and less subtle remarks about what they would like to do with her.
“Have you seen that fabulous bird in the quartet?” The speaker was an overweight ex-public-school boy
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