Free Getting It Right by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

should do you,’ he said: ‘one of the advantages of having shorter hair, you’ll find.’ He settled her in with a clean towel to protect
her neck, told her that Mrs Silkin would bring her her lunch and hurried over to his next client, an anaemic young woman who stammered terribly (the stammer somehow neutralized the fear he might
have felt about her youth). She looked up from her book (she was one of the very few clients who actually brought real books to read). They smiled at each other, and he picked up the book to read
its title – he enjoyed and she liked his curiosity in this respect. ‘
Time Was
,’ he read; ‘Graham Robertson: don’t think I’ve heard of him.’
    ‘Erse erse uss uss
Sar
gent p – pppppp painted him when he was a young – ermmmmm man,’ she said, and showed him the frontispiece.
    ‘Oh yes. I know that one. Very fine portrait. Although, I think I’d rather have been painted by Whistler, wouldn’t you?’
    ‘Only when I was very old. The er er erra erra rest of the time, I’d rather ersa ersa
Sar
gent.’
    Her hair was very fine and she wore it in a longish bob with a fringe. She was one of the few people whom he preferred to cut dry, as, wet, it contracted to such tiny wisps that it was difficult
to see its shape. It was a delicate business, getting her hair right, and usually protracted because, in her enthusiasm for what she was reading, and with a touching acceptance of her speech
problems she would leaf through the book and show him some particular remark. Thus he got Mrs Patrick Campbell: ‘My eyes are really nothing in particular, God gave me boot buttons, but I
invented the dreamy eyelid, and that makes all the difference.’ And: Once at a rehearsal Sir James Barrie, impatient at the impossible subtleties demanded of the players by a producer, called
out to an actor, ‘Mr—, I want you to cross from left to right silently conveying to the audience that you have an aunt in Surbiton.’
    ‘Aren’t they erwer erwer erwer erwer
un
derful?’ It was indeed a bonus to be presented with entertainment of this kind: it also opened up the charming, if organized,
vista of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras which he knew he had not explored enough. But, and perhaps this was because he felt a bit tired by now (although the day was barely half done), he
also felt that somebody like Miss Wilming must be rather lonely if she felt the need to tell him, only her hairdresser, after all, what she was reading. He found himself worrying about her stammer,
and how lonely this might make her; she might even be shy, poor thing . . . the terrifying thought occurred to him that
he
might have been landed with a stammer: God, if he had been,
he
wouldn’t have been able to talk to anybody at
all
! He wouldn’t have dared to do this job, for instance, he would have had to be a lighthouse keeper or something
like that. Of course, people could get cured of stammering – look at George VI and Demosthenes: on the other hand, Somerset Maugham, who loathed his stammer, had never got over it. Perhaps
the need to orate was a spur, in which case he would probably have had his stammer all his life. At this point, just as he was realizing gratefully that not having a stammer was one thing
he’d got going for him, he also realized that he’d taken off too much of Miss Wilming’s hair behind her left ear and would have to do a general trim all round again to redress the
balance. She was reading quietly, and he had to resist the host of other disabilities by which he might have been afflicted that crowded into his mind. Winthrop’s mother, for instance; how on
earth would he have managed with a cork leg? He certainly wouldn’t have thought of being a prostitute: Winthrop’s mother seemed now to him to have lived at the very top of the Ladder of
Fear, and minus one leg to boot. Then there was a host of frightful diseases . . . shutting the door on leprosy and inherited syphilis, he wrenched