His hair went white, not overnight, but over a fortnight — fifteen days to be exact — and this must have been a few days into the change. There was almost as much salt as pepper in his hair at this point, and in another ten days there would only be salt. No dark grains at all.
Ray arrived at six, as he’d said he would, and I had my toilet bag ready. That day I moved in with Ray, the day after I’d met him. How’s that for changing your life in a hurry? But at the same time I never exactly moved out of Mum and Dad’s. I had two addresses, two very different ways of life, though the distance between them on the map was only small — five miles, if that. I didn’t become two people, but I suppose I did become a person whose life had two different sides to it.
Of course at first I had a horribly strong feeling of being in Hampton on a trial basis. I thought I was on approval, and would be boxed up and sent back where I came from if I didn’t come up to scratch, though Ray never said anything to give that impression. I came up with that idea all by myself. It’s the sort of idea my mind spins out all the time.
I tried to work out what my place in the household was, apart from the obvious. What do you do for the man who is everything? I tried to tidy up, until he told me not to, to leave everything as it was. Then I decided that the cooking must be my department, and he didn’t tell me any different, so I set myself to that. I struggled to put meals together, undecided between the plain and the fancy, fish fingers one day, my forlorn attempt at coq au vin the next, while Ray ate without comment, day after day. He cleaned his plate, but without passing judgment. I’d look up to him, trying not to read too much into his expression. It took me ages to relax.
Maybe any two people, every two people, have one thing in common, one thing at the least, and I took my time to realise that this was where Ray was like my little Dad. He really didn’t care what he ate. He ate what was put in front of him. If there was a second similarity between that particular pair, though, I never found it.
Apart from my difficulties in understanding how I fitted into it, Ray’s domestic life was entirely regular and orderly. On Saturday mornings he cleaned the bike; Saturday night was always poker night. The game convened in the members’ houses by rotation, so every six weeks or so Ray played host. He took me with him on club nights from the first, but I never got interested in the game — either the technicalities or its underlying psychology. It wasn’t a problem. Nobody minded if I brought along a book and read it quietly.
Sundays there was always a bike run. The membership of Ray’s bike club was exactly the same as the membership of his poker club. You couldn’t ride with the bike club unless you played poker, and you couldn’t play poker unless you rode with the bike club. It was all the same fellows — Big Steve and Little Steve, Mark, Paul, Alan and the others. It’s just that for Saturday night and the poker game, bike riding wasn’t compulsory, the way it would have been for an actual bike club meeting.
Alan was the odd man out. The others liked to act mean, but he sometimes seemed like the real thing, which isn’t so attractive. He didn’t wash. You could imagine him sleeping in his leathers — in fact, you couldn’t imagine anything else. There was a shine on all the others, on Ray, obviously, but also on the others. There was no shine on Alan.
Ray may not have made the rules, but he seemed to be the one to enforce them. He was strict about drinking. Members could have one drink on a Saturday evening, and no more, if they were biking — so there was the loophole, if people really wanted to drink, that they didn’t have to bring their machines on a Saturday night.
Ray himself always rode to the poker club meetings, and never even had the single drink his rules allowed. Only when he was the host at poker night, every couple of months, at home in Hampton, did he have a few carefully spaced tumblers of Scotch. I never saw him drunk.
Bets on poker night tended to be modest. Maybe that was because some members were comfortably off, and some weren’t. The biker lifestyle made people’s differences less glaring, but it couldn’t be expected to make them disappear. There was no set maximum bet, but members were expected to donate half of their winnings to the expense of food and drink. Any actual surplus subsidised the bike runs.
The club made regular expeditions to Box Hill, but also to destinations further out, like Bath and Bristol, preferring to head west rather than cross London. The members came from Teddington and West Byfleet and Woking, from different walks of life, so that sometimes poker night took place in a large detached house, and sometimes we squeezed into a rather poky flat. If the weather was unusually cold and there was no central heating, Ray didn’t mind if I wore a few clothes.
All the members of the club rode British bikes. BSAs, Triumphs, Nortons, Royal Enfields. There wasn’t an actual rule about that, but the peer pressure would have been pretty overwhelming. Most of them had kick-starts, though Ray was the only one who never seemed to need more than one kick, one authoritative nudge with his boot, to make the engine catch.
The domestic bike industry was already dead in 1975, but the club hadn’t really noticed. There was still plenty of British iron on the roads. Nobody bought new, even if they had the money. People preferred to buy second hand, and they weren’t afraid of a bit of maintenance. Spare parts weren’t difficult to come by just yet.
Ray was always at the front of the motorcade, if that’s the word. The stately rush of chrome in procession. He wasn’t an officer of the club, but then the club had no officers. He was just a natural leader. Lads on building sites and road works would often make the vroom-vroom gesture at us as we passed, the revving of an imaginary throttle, and sometimes, just sometimes, Ray would oblige. I noticed that the bikes in the pack behind me only ever played to the crowd by revving their engines if Ray had given the lead. These days even royalty acknowledges the cheers of well-wishers, but Ray showed no interest.
Ray’s safety-mindedness meant that he wanted the bike club to spread out properly on the road, and not bunch together dangerously. What he actually said was: ‘I don’t want you berks breathing down my neck.’ In fact all that happened was that the other riders left Ray some space, and then they all bunched together a little distance behind him. Perhaps Ray wasn’t too annoyed by this, the way the club divided on the road into a charismatic outrider and a following pack. A thoroughbred pulling away from a field of also-rans. You couldn’t argue with that. He was the only one of the bunch who read a newspaper that didn’t print horoscopes.
Except that this thoroughbred was a stickler for speed limits, whether he was leading the pack or riding alone, and invariably stopped at pedestrian crossings when someone was waiting, or even approaching. Perhaps it amused him to show good manners when nothing was expected of him but thuggish haste. I noticed that the pedestrians he deferred to, however infirm, scuttled across the road, as if they were mortified rather than pleased that he put their lowly interests before his own. Somehow by treating them with respect he drew their attention to their own worthlessness.