A close shave
Matthew Bell
Ihad forgotten I had a phobia about razor blades when I agreed to be shaved at George F. Trumper in Mayfair. It was only after waiting for half an hour in one of three ex-headmaster chairs which lined a wall heaving with hunting prints that anxiety set in, overtaking annoyance at being made to wait for the barber who, I was told, had overslept (a luxury I would have enjoyed myself).
Being of a fair complexion and with no more than seven years of shaving behind me, facial hair has not troubled me as much as it has some of my friends, who experiment with beards, sideburns or moustaches as ways of putting the sprouting stuff to good use. Karl the classicist has a magnificent black bird’s nest of a beard, while Fred the rock star has been sporting two fine lamb chops ever since leaving university; both require consider able maintenance, I’m told. It was only when a colleague sneered that I was the kind of ponce who got shaved by Trumper’s that I awoke to the reality that, far from it, this was one of the few fogyish experiences I had so far never enjoyed. I thought of Rex Mottram ordering a barber from Trumper’s to shave Charles and Sebastian before their appearance at Bow Street magistrates’ court and remembered that in the days before Mach III the best a man could get was at the hands of the old coves in Curzon Street.
An hour after my appointment the man who had been sitting next to me showed me into a curtained cubicle. I had assumed he was another client, but while I had been skimming listlessly through glossies waiting for a barber, he had been waiting for a client. It was by now too late to pull out of the whole thing on the grounds that I didn’t think shaving was for me. I had spent 60 minutes waiting for the wretched ordeal, and in the service industry 11 minutes is supposedly the watershed after which a client feels obliged to go through with the transaction.
And so into the chair I slipped, making grunts of gratitude to prove that I, like the barber, was aware that this was one of the great privileges an English gentleman could enjoy. I tried to relax as the leather chair groaned a mechanical dirge as it lowered me into the right position, jugular to the air, legs helplessly splayed out at awkward angles over the edge. I stared into the dark space where pipes and cables had been exposed by a hole punched into the polyester ceiling tile and wondered what could have led someone to do such a thing, and why this smart Mayfair establishment had not had time to fix it.
Some breezy conversation was required, I felt, with this sullen-looking chap in the red waistcoat, on the grounds that a little banter might cheer things along. But after his second line of conversation — ‘Oh, I don’t like journalists’ our terse exchange was over, and my head was swallowed up by a wonderfully hot white towel, a sensation that must, I thought, replicate the first stage of readmission to the womb. It was sad to feel this go and open my eyes to find the man (we never got on to any kind of name terms, but he looked like a Gaston) roughly applying the Coral ‘skin food’, Trumper’s own lotion that softens and ‘feeds’ the skin before shaving. Next he got busy with the application of shaving cream with a big badger brush before, with a comically burlesque flick, whipping out the most enormous razor blade from its ivory handle.
It was at this point that Richard Attenborough’s gleaming eyes flashed into my mind when, as the heroically evil Pinkie in Brighton Rock, he steps across with an open razor and effortlessly slashes the face of Brewer, a rival petty crook. As Gaston gravely leaned in to take the first scrape of hair and skin off my face, I shuddered. Ten appalling minutes passed as I thought of all the razor-associated atrocities I knew: Gary Oldman as Bram Stoker’s Dracula licking the blood off Keanu Reeves’s used razor; Sweeney Todd slicing then dicing his customers to make meat pies; and snatches of dreadful murder stories gleaned from the inside pages of newspapers. On one occasion I involuntarily kicked out when trying to control my fevered imagination, and Gaston stopped for a moment to inquire whether I was quite all right. ‘Oh, just a little nervous, you know,’ I simpered. He paused briefly before resuming scraping, and then, a minute later, said, ‘Yes, I suppose one could do quite a lot of damage with one of these.’ All that was needed was a crack of lightning and the howl of a banshee for the full horror of this ridiculous situation to be complete.
Trumper is an old Mayfair establishment for old establishment clubland types. Leathery skin and the whiff of an alcoholic breakfast was what the other customers seemed to have in common, and the only other young twerp in the room was the PR chap in pink shirt and penny loafers who emerged to look after me. A rash appeared all over my neck later that day, and the stubble that grew soon after had the hard metallic feel of iron shavings pressed though a tea towel.
Would I have experienced such a reaction if I had been more relaxed? Could a barber who had made an effort to soothe my irrational fear have caused the same onslaught of spots that had emerged? To find out, I checked out one of the many new trendy barber shops that have appeared in London in the past few years, catering for footballers rather than the employers of footmen.
Gentlemen’s Tonic, a slick modern boutique in a mews just off Berkeley Square, is one such place. When I telephoned and explained my little problem, the boutique suggested I come and watch a shave before having it done myself. One Syrian barber shaved another, explaining about following the grain of the hair and pointing out the various trouble spots on the face where special care is required. Charmed by their enthusiasm, and intrigued to hear stories of their longestablished family barber shops back home, I wanted to show my gratitude by agreeing to having a shave myself. But when Khalid flicked open his best razor with great pride, and flashed it through the air with a familiar flourish, it was Brighton Rock all over again and I made my excuses and left.
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