MRS BANNISTER was all smiles and helpfulness. Yes, she would be glad of the money, though she felt it was a shame the family had ever parted with the pictures in the first place, and it would be a marvellous gesture if all Americans gave back the pictures and furniture that rightfully belonged to English houses. The Anglo-American alliance was the basis of the free world, and sometimes in spite of the common language, misunderstandings did take place. A really generous gesture like that would show that whatever the surface disagreements of politicians, and she didn’t trust any of them, of either party, the two people had a common heritage.
“We should respect the British,” she said. “They gave us so much. And what do we give them in return? Ingratitude, and Marshall Aid. Well, I guess Marshall Aid’s a good thing. But we owe so much to England, Mr Barlow. England was the cradle of liberty. The home of Parliamentary democracy. We had a talk on Parliamentary democracy last week at my club. It was really interesting. Your country has a great past, Mr Barlow.”
“Yes,” said Harold. “But I’d say the future belonged to you in America. You talk about England in the past tense, you know.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Mr Barlow. I guess we do tend to think of England that way. With your traditions and all. Your cathedrals. But you’re not dead yet. You put up such a fight in the war, with that great man, that very great man, Winston Churchill at your head.”
“Oh, there’s life in the old dog yet,” said Harold. “But the lively people, the ones with vitality, they emigrate or they sit at home and tell everyone how gloomy and second-rate England is. There doesn’t seem anyone on the other side, really.”
“Now, surely, Mr Barlow, Winston Churchill——”
“Winston Churchill is a very old man, Mrs Bannister. And it’s hard to think of Harold Macmillan or Hugh Gaitskell as men of quite the same calibre.”
“Well, you may be right,” she said. “Here comes Mr Bannister now. Right on time.”
Mr Bannister was a corporation lawyer and prosperous, but his wife, Harold gathered, was the one who had the big money and the lech for culture. Their house had a superb view of the Rockies, particularly now, in the evening, but one wanted to look at the things inside as much as the ones on the horizon. Among the Manets (three of them), the Renoirs (two), the Titian, the Tintoretto, and the alleged Van Eyck, the Dangerfield Lawrence seemed rather brow-beaten. But it appeared that Mrs Bannister was not quite as fluid in her assets as she looked. Her husband, Harold gathered, had been investing with a certain lack of caution recently, and she didn’t want to have to miss her trip to Paris, which was why she had written asking Harold to come soon.
She was a big woman with glasses that turned up elaborately at the ends of the frames, and her husband was small and white-haired. He spoke with a Southern accent. They discussed world affairs at dinner, and it seemed that Mr Bannister thought that if Richard Nixon didn’t win the forthcoming election, that would be the end of the western world. Democrats, it appeared, were all class-traitors, like Roosevelt. After dinner they watched the last of the sunset over the Rockies, and Harold felt a strong urge to be back where the sun would still be shining, in California. He told them he liked California very much, and found the climate delectable.
Denver, Mr Bannister retaliated, was the fastest-growing business community in the U.S.A. Mrs Bannister looked bored.
Next day they arranged for a dispatcher to collect and pack the picture. The day after, in response to Harold’s cable to Dangerfield, a large sum of money was deposited in the Bannister account in the First National Bank of Denver. The Bannisters asked Harold to dinner again, and looked rather sad at the gap on their walls, but the Jack Daniels bourbon was excellent afterwards as they stared, at loss for conversation, at another fine sunset.
The next day Harold flew back to Los Angeles. The airport was a long way from Beverly Hills, and as he drove there he wondered what had happened in his absence. No one was expecting him back so soon. He had been away exactly four days. His thinking about the general situation, far from clearing things, seemed merely to have muddied them.
When he got to the hotel he bought a paper and went to soak in his bath and see what had happened in his absence. Nothing. There was a teenage girl who swore she had been abducted by a movie star. There was another who was declared by her mother to be out of control. There had been a huge pile-up on the Harbor Freeway and six people had been killed. Someone accused someone else of political corruption. There had been a brush fire in the Hollywood Hills which had threatened a movie star’s home for a while, but it had been put out. The paper said it was the third fire of the kind this year and had been caused by a small boy playing with matches. There had been a hold-up at a liquor store and a policeman had been shot dead. In the world news there was no mention of England at all, except for a short humorous paragraph about something dull that had happened to the royal family: some council had painted some derelict houses on the route of a royal visit to make things look better for the monarch’s eyes. A school principal had given a lecture on the dangers of lung-cancer (to get back to the real news) to his school, and been pelted with cigarette-ends for his pains. Juvenile delinquency was said by an authority to be on the upswing. The Dodgers had lost their third game in a row to the Pirates.
Thinking about the Pirates reminded Harold of the evening he and Eddie had gone to see Lou, and of the black leather jackets of Pete’s gang. Juvenile delinquency wasn’t on the upswing, it was on the rampage. But for overgrown juvenile delinquents like Eddie there could be no pity. He was a most peculiar man, one of those who assumed he could get away with anything and usually did. But he had a fascination, he’d read quite widely, if ignorantly, he didn’t let you settle down. And perhaps that was a good thing. With Eddie around the place you could never tell what might not happen next. The thing was not to let him be around the place too often. Harold hoped that he hadn’t taken advantage of his absence to go and see Diane. Not that Diane wasn’t to be trusted, but that Eddie and Diane should never have met in the first place. They belonged to different worlds, and both worlds were really of Harold’s making: his feckless London world, where he didn’t care what happened, and his Californian world where he did.
He hadn’t thought about it before, but it was true that he took things a good deal more steadily, more seriously these days. When he thought about Helen, which he tried not to, he wondered what kind of moral and physical lethargy he had got into to let that dismal affair linger on so long. It was all part of feeling so well here—of not having anything to get up for in the mornings except what he liked doing. No Fenway, Crocker and Broke. No bloody old Blackett. No Mrs Fanshaw, no Craxton Street. He rose to fine mornings and the thought of Diane, and the prospect of another tussle with Mrs Washburn.
He got out of the bath and dried himself slowly, in order to delay having to open the letter from Dangerfield which was waiting for him in the next room. It might say anything. Dangerfield might be winging his way across the Atlantic right now. He might be dismissing Harold with a curse. He might be pleased. He’d certainly said nothing while Harold was in Denver. The only sign of life had been the money and a cable saying, simply, “Good work”. But then he wouldn’t have got the letter Harold had written by then, or would he?
It was no use delaying. He put on some sexy red underpants, which he had recently bought, and went to open the letter.
“My dear Harold,” it said, “I don’t know how to thank you for what you have already done. I am very glad that you have been able to identify the miniature at last. Don’t come home without it. That’s all I’ll say. Yours ever, Edward Dangerfield.”
Harold swore for several minutes, marching up and down the room and pulling at the elastic of his underpants. Then he went and lay down on his bed and asked for the Wash burns’ number.
Diane answered the phone.
“Hallo, darling, it’s me.”
“Harold! Where are you calling from? Are you in Denver?’’
“No, I’m back in Beverly Hills. I couldn’t stay away from you any longer, Diane. What’s new?”
There was a pause.
“I told Grandma about Uncle Henry.”
“Oh. Does that mean I can’t come up there any more?”
“Oh, no. She just laughed. Why don’t you come up and see her? Are you busy this evening?”
“Of course not. I’ll be up around five, is that O.K.?”
“Marvellous. Honey, I’m so glad you’re back.”
“Me, too.”
They made gurgling noises at each other and Harold felt better. Over his sexy red underpants he put on a pair of sexy black trousers, thoroughly unenglish in style and cut, and for top dressing he decided on a white shirt with a red bow-tie. He looked at himself in the mirror and was delighted. There was nothing like the mountain air of Colorado for making one feel ready for a little advanced sex-play.
He was admiring himself and striking a few attitudes when the phone rang.
It was Eddie. “Hi, Harold, welcome back.”
“How on earth did you know I was back?”
“I get to know everything. Did you have a good trip?”
“Yes, thank you. I refuse to answer any more questions till you tell me how you know I’m back.”
“I guess you’re not the observant type, Harold. You remember a guy called Chuck? At that party?”
Harold searched for a face. Chuck was a vaguely familiar name, but it might well be “chick”.
“No,” he said, “I don’t. Was he the one that tried to rape me?”
“No one tried to rape you, Harold. What gave you that idea? You were raping Teresa, remember? Chuck was a guy at the party, anyway. And he does some kind of job around your hotel. And I call him once in a while to see how things are going. I’m kind of fond of Chuck.”
“Yes,” said Harold. “I seem vaguely to remember you saying something about that before.”
“Well, I just called him, and he said you were back.”
“O.K., O.K. Well, why did you call me?”
“I had an idea. You being an Englishman, you don’t really understand about America, I guess. Not the real America. I’ve got a piece of one hundred per cent real urban American culture to show you. I’ve written a poem about it, do you want to hear it?”
“Is it very long?”
“Yes, I guess it is. I’ll show you later. When do you want to go. Now? Tomorrow?”
“It’s a little late today, isn’t it? I’m going to see Diane soon. What’s the time?”
“Four o’clock. No, we couldn’t make it.”
“I thought it was nearly five.”
“You’re probably still on Denver time.”
“You’re quite right, I am.”
“You should never wear a watch. A watch ties you down to Time. There are more neurotics walking around because they think they’ve got to know what time it is than there are ex-virgins. Time is a figment.”
“All right. Shall we go tomorrow, then? We could take Diane. I’m sure she’d like to go. What is this one hundred per cent place called?”
“It’s called the Watts Towers. Now tell me you’ve seen them. I bet Diane hasn’t even heard of them.”
“I’ll ask her. Tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah. Around eleven, then.”
“O.K. Tell me, Eddie, what do you do for a living?”
“I don’t do anything. I just hang around. If I want a meal I go with a chick. They always feed you afterwards.”
“Good God,” said Harold. “All right, then. See you tomorrow around eleven.”
“Keep swinging,” said Eddie, and rang off.
Harold wondered what he was going to do with his extra hour. He looked for the Watts Towers on his street-map, and found a place called Watts, miles away, far beyond the airport. He assumed that the Towers, whatever they were (and they were probably just a block of apartments with nothing at all but glass, or no glass at all, or one of those gimmicks), were there. It was typical that Eddie had chosen something as far away as possible to go and see.
He folded the map up again and rang for a drink. One of the very best things about America was that they always gave you masses of ice, and in a gin and tonic they always put lime instead of lemon. Really well-iced gin and tonic with lime showed that people like Crocker were all wrong to think that the Americans had no sense of taste. He went into a quiet dream about American food and drink. There was the meat, to start with. After a few months of American steaks, French cooking seemed simply a lot of sauce, very good sauce, admittedly, hiding not so good meat. He thought of rare steak, with a potato in its jacket the way they did it in Texas, with masses of sour cream and chives and bacon fried very crisp and chopped very small. His mouth began to water. Then there was American ice-cream. And then there was bourbon, to say nothing of Californian wine. You could buy huge quantities of the very cheap wine for practically nothing. It was fairly nasty, of course, but no nastier than that muck you called vin du pays and thought you were so smart to drink beside the road in France. And then there were the good ones, which were really very good. And then there were American vegetables. All those different kinds of squash. And the sea-food in New England and along the east coast and in the South. Why on earth did people in Europe think that Americans had no sense of taste? Mrs Bannister was right. A common language simply hindered things. When an American ordered steak he expected to get steak, and in Europe, on the whole, he didn’t.
He rang for another gin and tonic with lime, threw away his newspaper, savoured his drink, looked out of his window at the roofs of some houses which all looked very rich and pleasant, with swimming-pools and station-wagons, no doubt, outside the door, and everyone inside them complaining about conformity. Too bad, really. Better to conform in comfort than be individual in poverty.
That was really rather a shocking thought, he decided. The affluent society must be getting in his veins.
He finished the drink and went down in the elevator.
He asked the elevator man if his name was Chuck, but it wasn’t, it was George, and Harold said, “Of course, I’m sorry”, at which the elevator man looked surprised.
He drove slowly up to San Domingo Canyon, feeling very happy that he was going to see Diane again, and not thinking about what Mrs Washburn was likely to say to him. Gradually, though, the not-thinking stopped being any good, and by the time he reached the door he was trembling slightly. He tried to attribute this to the fact that he was going to see Diane, not to her grandmother, and succeeded.
“Hallo, honey,” said Diane, and kissed him.
The way the door always opened when he wasn’t expecting it was one of the pleasures of visiting the Washburns. He never knew what might be the other side of it.
“Come in,” she said, after they’d vied with one another to show affection for a minute or two. “Grandma’s doing some shopping.”
“How does she do that?”
“One of the neighbours takes her. She likes to have her hair done once a week, too. I guess she thinks you come up here to see her, not me.”
“Naughty,” said Harold. “I’d hoped we’d got over all that. You’d better tell me what happened, so I can prepare a face to meet her with. I hope you didn’t exaggerate anything.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I did,” she said, settling her head on his lap as he sat on one of the sofas. Her legs, he noticed as he stroked them with one hand, the other being busy with her face and hair, were really very good indeed. Harold was very attracted by slim legs. He felt very strong and manly and even a little protective.
“I told her about Uncle Henry and about how you didn’t know what to do, and how I was all upset. And you know what she did? She laughed out loud. Then she called Uncle Henry and told him to come and see her. I thought there was going to be a hell of a row, Harold. But he came in and she kissed him, like always, and then she said, ‘You listen here, both of you. I don’t care what you do when I’m gone, but till the day comes you won’t have a thing of mine to sell to strange Englishmen, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.’ And then she was very cheerful, and we all had dinner, and Uncle Henry made lots of jokes and was nicer than I remember. You know what I think, Harold? I think maybe he is nice, kind of. I mean, just because he doesn’t like girls, that’s no reason to say he’s a bum. And maybe Pedro is no good, but Uncle Henry’s pretty respectable. I may be wrong, though. He can be mean as hell sometimes. Not that evening, though. We were all happy as larks. Like a real home, you know?”
“Sort of,” said Harold. “What does all that mean?”
“Gee, I don’t know. I guess it means that Uncle Henry is out, as far as you’re concerned. It’s Grandma or nothing.”
“Or you,” said Harold, idly.
“What do you mean?”
“You could steal it for me.”
“Why, Harold Barlow, you must be out of your mind. You know I would never do such a thing.”
“I know, darling,” he said, “I was only joking.”
“Well, that’s a real bad-taste joke, a sick joke. Don’t make any more like that. I don’t like them.”
“All right. What else happened while I was away?”
“Mom called. Nothing else.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. I said I might be down to see her, and she said ‘Uh-huh’. That was about it.”
“You miss not having a mother, don’t you? You need someone younger than your grandmother to gossip with and to tell you when you’re behaving badly, and all the rest of it.”
“Maybe. I guess Mom’s too busy with the kids, though. You know what she said? She’s going to have another! You’d think she was Catholic or something. But Tony’s not anything. Kind of lapsed, I guess. And she’s forty-three, Harold.”
“One of the wonders of modern science.”
“Yeah, you could call it that, I guess.”
He stroked her legs and her hair for a bit, then he said, “Eddie wants us to go and see something called the Watts Towers tomorrow. Have you ever heard of them? Or it?”
“No. Watts is some slum, miles away from here. I don’t get to that part of town, ever.”
“Well, shall we go? Eddie says it’s an example of one hundred per cent American urban culture. He’s written a poem about it, even. I never thought he was a poet, did you?”
“Kind of. I guess his hair’s a little short. But some of his ideas, they’d be better in a poem than in his head. Fewer people would get to hear them that way.”
“True; I’ve always suspected him of being a beat, but he never seems to wear sandals, and he has no beard.”
“Those are beatniks, honey. The real beats live up in San Francisco and see no one.”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I read it some place. Life magazine, I expect. Or Time. They’re always writing about the beats.”
“Eddie says you should never wear a watch, it fetters you to Time or something. I wonder if he meant the magazine.”
“I should doubt it. He’s too busy reading Plato.”
“It’s a lovely idea that, isn’t it? About the twins, I mean. It’s not true, but it ought to be, don’t you think?”
“No, I do not. A girl made a pass at me once, and I’ve never felt so awful. I thought I’d die if she touched me.”
“I like a girl that doesn’t like women. That means I only have half the human race to compete with.”
They were involved in some advanced spooning, as Mrs Washburn called it, when she returned. They heard the car stop, and had time to straighten things up before Diane went to open the door.
“Hi, Grandma,” she said. “Guess who’s here?”
“I can see from the look in your eye, child,” said her grandmother. “He didn’t stay long in Denver, did he?”
It was no use, Harold thought, as he greeted her, hoping that she would ever die. She looked younger than ever, her hair washed and rinsed with some blue and set in an elegant way, and her face plump and happy, in spite of the cavernous wrinkles. He might as well go straight home. The only possible way of getting the miniature out of her was to ask her to give it to him as a wedding present when he married Diane. Dangerfield would just have to wait. Probably she would outlast him, too. She might even outlast Harold.
“And how have you been?” said Mrs Washburn, giving him a strong handshake. “I thought you were to Denver?”
“I was. But I’m back. You look fine, Mrs Washburn, like a young girl.”
“There’s no need to try and flatter me, young man. I know what you want, and you won’t get it that way.”
“How can I get it, Mrs Washburn?”
“You can’t,” she said, triumphantly. “It’s mine and I’m keeping it. You can get it from Henry or from Diane or from Diane’s father when I die. I don’t know who I’ll leave it to, now. Henry’s a dirty son of a bitch to try and deceive me. And to try and deceive you, too, son.”
“We don’t seem to be any further forward, then,” said Harold.
“I’d say you were a few steps back,” said Mrs Washburn. “I’m a mean old woman and that’s the way I’m going to stay.” She looked as though she was thoroughly enjoying herself.
Harold mentioned a very large sum quite casually, but she only laughed, and said, “I hope you’ll stay to dinner, young man. I bought a piece of steak large enough for ten. I feel real good today. On top of the world.”
She went back up the stairs to her room. Diane laughed at Harold’s face, and said he looked like a schoolboy told he couldn’t go fishing.
“Diane,” he said. “You and I have some serious thinking to do.” He kept his voice low, with some difficulty. “You do realize what my position is? I’ve done everything I can for Mr Dangerfield, short of stealing and murder. I’m never going to get your grandmother to sell me the miniature. So my job’s over, I have to go home. Or get a job here.”
She frowned. “Well?”
“Well, it’s up to you, Diane.” He pointed to the terrace. “Let’s go outside a moment, shall we?”
They stood and looked down at Los Angeles.
“Darling,” said Harold, his arm round her waist, “when I left England it was because I felt I was wasting my time. I wasn’t doing anything worthwhile, I was in a mess—my private life was terrible. I was getting somewhere, true. I was getting to respectability and middle-age like every other young man who started with my advantages. Now, how do I stand? My job in America is over.”
“But you can stay, honey, you can stay, can’t you?”
“Not unless it’s worth my while. I’ve always thought of myself as being a little bit better than the next man. It was because I wasn’t doing anything better than the next man that I wanted to get away from England and my English life. I can’t sit around doing nothing. I want to show the next man that I’m better than he is. And I’ve learnt a lot since I’ve been in America—I told you. I’ve learnt to be tough. I can take defeat from your grandmother. I can admit it, and get on with the next thing. I don’t think I could do that before. Well, the next thing——”
“Yes,” she said. “I follow you.”
“Do you marry me, or not? Because if you don’t, I might as well go home. Or to Australia. Or anywhere. It doesn’t matter. But I’m not going to hang around here waiting for——” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Waiting for Grandma to die?”
“What are you two doing out there?” said Mrs Washburn, coming out to the terrace. “I’ve got a surprise for you. Come on in and I’ll show you.”
Harold looked at Diane, but she looked away, and he felt her body tense and stiff.
They went in.
“Guess what I have behind my back here?” said Mrs Washburn. She was smiling broadly, triumphantly.
For a moment of wild and joyful anticipation, Harold thought she was going to give Diane a ring and tell her she approved of Harold as a future husband.
But it wasn’t a ring.
“There!” said the old woman, holding out her hand, the miniature flat in her palm. “Since it means so much to you, young man, and since you come to my house whether I ask you or not, I’m going to put this on the wall where you can see it, and look at it to your heart’s delight.” She laughed hugely to herself, monstrously. “Diane, go and get me a hammer and a nail. They’ll be in the drawer in the kitchen.”
Harold turned scarlet. Diane was white.
“This is quite unnecessary, you know,” he said.
“You think I don’t know what I have to do and don’t have to do? I do whatever I please, son.”
Diane came back with a hammer and a nail.
“I suppose you want me to do it,” said Harold, feeling rebellious and outraged. “I’m afraid I won’t, Mrs Washburn.”
“Did I ask you to? Give those to me, Diane.”
“You’ll hurt yourself, Grandma.”
“The day I can’t knock a nail into the wall, you can start knocking nails in my coffin, child. Give them here.”
Diane gave them to her, and she began to knock the nail into the wall. Her aim was steady and her shoulders and arms still had a good deal of power. Harold was shocked. Each time she hit the nail he felt she was driving it into his pride. It was the sort of totally unnecessary gesture of which he was always afraid. It marked his complete failure, her complete triumph, it was deliberately offensive, it was an insult and a very pointed one at that.
“That should hold it,” said Mrs Washburn, not in the least out of breath. “Now we’ll hang it.”
The “we” was an added insult. Harold rose. He would not stay any longer in a house where he was mocked.
The miniature swayed a little on its chain, then hung still. Hilliard’s masterpiece dangled from a nail in Beverly Hills. It was a triumph of the new world over the old.
“I’m afraid I can’t stay to dinner,” said Harold, trying not to be rude, for Diane’s sake.
“That’s too bad,” said Mrs Washburn, “after I just hung the picture for you. You can put these away again now, Diane.”
“I must go at once,” said Harold. “I’m sorry you have felt it necessary to make me feel so very unwelcome. Perhaps it would be better if I did not call again.”
“You don’t have to feel like that about it,” said the old woman, smiling at him intolerably. “I was just trying to make you feel at home.”
At home! It was too much.
“Good-bye, Diane. I’ll see you tomorrow about eleven, if that’s all right.”
“I can’t, Harold,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “I have to have my hair done tomorrow morning.”
“I see. Well, good-bye, then.”
“Good-bye, Mr Barlow,” said Mrs Washburn, still smiling.
“Good-bye.”
Diane came with him to the door, and said very softly, “I’ll call you, honey. I’m terribly sorry. Let’s not say anything else right now.”
“You must do whatever you think right,” said Harold.
“I shall,” she said.
He looked at her closely, wanting to touch her, to stroke her hair, to let his hand slide gently along her calves. She smiled briefly, impersonally.
“Good-bye, then, honey.”
The day, he thought, should have become overcast, a leaden sky should be mirroring his feelings. It wasn’t. The sun shone brilliantly down, dazzlingly bright. The cicadas were louder, more cheerful than ever.
If this was the end of the affair, and the end of the job and the end of everything, then he had better go home. America had beaten him. He had fallen in love with its landscape, with one of its girls, but its demands were too strong. It wanted him to understand things that he couldn’t understand, the mysterious workings of the mind of an old woman, the impossible feelings of a mad family. America was vast, sprawling, beautiful, it had small farms and endless prairies, Grand Canyons and Rocky Mountains, fertility and desert. Its variety was too great. He was born in a mild country with a mild climate, where extremes were unknown. He was too old, too set in his Englishness to be able to stretch his imagination to encompass it all, or even a small part of it. He didn’t belong. The people who belonged were the Eddie Jacksons, who skimmed its surface, took what they wanted and ignored the rest, and the Mrs Washburns, who took it all and became part of it, as irresistible as rocks and desert, moulded by the land to the land’s shape, and hardened to it, representing it against intruders like himself, tourists in search of views over which they could rhapsodize but who never entered the landscape and became part of it, never wrestled with it, never felt it shape and harden them. America was welcoming, but demanded a submission, demanded extremes, from those who risked coming to it from a less extravagant continent. Europe and America shared some things: Europe and England shared more. To think, as Europeans and still more Englishmen did, that America was somehow a projection of Europe, was mistaken. Surely, it was Europeans who came and settled here; surely, it was they who established the laws of the land. But the land itself, that was established and set in its ways before the Indians came, before man, probably. And if Europe and its inhabitants had come together over the thousands of years to produce a harmony, with a mild climate and a rich earth to help them, then in America the process of taming was still young, the roots of man were still shallow. It was a challenge which had to be met: born here, you understood that, probably, from your earliest years: arriving here by plane or ship, you didn’t understand. And you didn’t, therefore, understand the people, the curious unity which held together every race on earth, their special attitude towards things that was not, and could not be, like the attitude of the European to his surroundings, or the African to his, or the Asian to his. Americans were divided in everything but this, their relation to rocks and rivers and deserts and mountains. And it was something of the same indigenous relationship, which must always baffle a visitor, that explained Mrs Washburn’s feeling for the miniature, Diane’s feeling for her grandmother. It was not only the situation and the characters involved in it that were defeating him, it was the country itself, for all its hospitality, its easygoing charm, its friendliness.
He went back to the hotel, wrote briefly to Mr Dangerfield that there was no hope of recovering the miniature while Mrs Washburn lived, and that there was little chance of her dying in the near future. He said also that he would be returning to England in a few weeks, but wished to drive back across the continent to see more of the country. This was not what he really meant, and he knew it, but although he felt defeated, he still wished to study the conqueror, to try and probe its secrets. And there was no need to tell Dangerfield about Diane: a white lie would give him a little time.
He did not mention that the Dangerfield miniature, the small masterpiece that had once passed through the hands of Elizabeth the First, now dangled from a nail, driven into the wall of a house in Beverly Hills by an indomitable old woman.
He posted the letter, then watched television for a while. There was a comedian who made American jokes that Harold did not understand. He felt more isolated and alien than ever. But things weren’t all bad. It was a relief, in a way, to be able to forget his obligation to Dangerfield, to be free again. It had been a job that stretched him to a limit, in a sense: but it wasn’t a very interesting limit. One would have to be inhuman never to be defeated by another human being. And there was Diane: she understood, she would realize now that it was a choice between him and her grandmother. He was sure she would choose him: thinking of it, he felt a light euphoria, and he even laughed at one of the comedian’s jokes.
The phone rang.
“Hallo?”
“Harold, honey?”
“Diane. That was quite a demonstration we watched, wasn’t it? I’m sorry I left like that, but what else could I do?”
“Honey, I don’t know what to say. It was so awful of her to do that. She must have been planning it ever since I told her about Uncle Henry. It was the meanest thing I ever saw her do. She must—I don’t know. She must hate you, really hate you.”
“I came to take her picture,” said Harold, “and then I stayed to take her child. There’s no reason she should like me.”
“I’m not her child.”
“Well, I’m glad you feel that, darling. But she thinks you are her child. She calls you ‘child’. She depends on you. She needs you. She may even love you, the way tyrannical parents do, in a strange way, love their children.”
“You don’t make it any easier, Harold. I want to see you so much, God, I want to see you. When I said I was having my hair done tomorrow, you looked at me as though I was saying good-bye. But I wasn’t saying that, honey. I mean, I do have this appointment tomorrow morning. That was all.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to look like that. But we never did finish that conversation, did we? You have a question you have to answer.”
There was a pause. “It’s not the sort of question I answer on the phone, honey,” she said, eventually. “Besides, you make everything so dramatic. I don’t feel I really know you yet. I’m damned if I’ll answer you yet.”
“Spirited, eh?” said Harold. “We’ll see about that. You haven’t got long, you know.” He was full of confidence. He rather enjoyed the prospect of watching her struggling to make up her mind, certain what she would decide. He didn’t know why he was so certain, but the confidence was like a good dinner inside him, warm and relaxing. “I told you, Diane, I’ll have to start home soon.”
“Oh, honey.”
“What time will you be free tomorrow?”
“Oh, around lunch-time.”
“O.K. I’ll go to these Towers with Eddie, and be back about two, I should think. Where shall we meet?”
She named a drugstore in Beverly Hills.
“I can’t wait, darling. We’ll have the afternoon and evening for ourselves, shall we? And then maybe we’ll go to San Diego one day to see your mother?”
“Oh, that would be marvellous, honey.”
“We have a lot to say to each other,” said Harold. “But there’s just one word I really want out of you.”
“Patience,” she said, and laughed.
He felt very happy after the call, and went down to the bar. There was a different man working the elevator, but his name wasn’t Chuck, either. Nor, it seemed, did he know anyone called Chuck on the hotel staff.
The barman wasn’t called Chuck, nor were any of the waiters. It was probably that Chuck wasn’t really called Chuck at all. Even more likely, if he was a buddy of Eddie’s, that he had been sacked. He asked the man at the reception desk, who raised his eyebrows and said as far as he knew there was no one called Chuck who worked there. Was there, he wondered, any special reason Harold wanted to know this non-existent person?
“No,” said Harold. “Someone said there was someone called Chuck who worked here, that was all, and I wanted to get in touch with the first someone, and I don’t know his number.”
“He’s not in the book?” said the clerk.
“It’s most unlikely,” said Harold. “Anyway, I don’t know where he lives.”
He had dinner in the hotel and went back to his room to watch more television. There was an old movie about Hong Kong, and on the little grey screen he couldn’t really tell which was villain and which hero, since they both wore the same kind of hat. He drowsed.
As he was thinking of going to bed and reading The Ambassadors (he was now on page 120), there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” he called, switching off the set. He always felt guilty watching television, as though it was a secret vice which it would be shameful to admit in public.
A young man came in, dressed in the uniform of the hotel, and at first he didn’t recognize him. Then he realized it was the waiter who had brought him the bartender’s hangover cure.
“Hallo,” said Harold. “I feel fine right now, that stuff worked like a charm. What do you want?”
“I’m Chuck,” said the man. “I heard someone was looking for a guy named Chuck, and then I heard it was you, so I thought I’d see what you wanted.”
“No one admits to your existence,” said Harold.
“My real name’s Walter. Walter Friedricksen. That’s a kind of dumb name. But I use it for work.”
“Oh, I see. Well, I didn’t really want you for anything, to be honest. I just wondered who you were. Eddie said you worked here. You don’t happen to know a phone number at which he could be reached, do you?”
“I wish I did,” said Chuck, standing on one leg, then the other. “I don’t get to see him as often as I like.”
“Is he a great friend of yours?”
“Oh, sure,” said Chuck. “Hey, look, do you mind, I feel kind of awkward talking to you like this. I don’t want to lose a job fraternizing with the guests. The manager doesn’t like that too much. He says we should be friendly without being insinuating. If you know what that means.”
“Quite right,” said Harold. “Sorry you’ve been bothered. You showed a great deal of tact the other day about my hangover. The manager should be proud of you.”
“Oh, Eddie asked me to keep an eye on you,” said Chuck. “He said he didn’t want you getting into bad company. He’s real fond of you, I guess.”
“Well, I don’t think he actually dislikes you, come to that. We’re going to see the Watts Towers tomorrow. Have you ever been there?”
“Nope. Eddie talks about them. He wrote a poem about them. It’s kind of good in a funny way.” He shifted his weight again and said, “Look, I gotta go.”
“O.K. Good night. Sorry if I’ve caused you any inconvenience. I didn’t really want to see you at all.”
“That’s all right.” He went to the door, then he said, without turning round, “If you see Eddie, tell him I can’t get off tomorrow night. I have to be on call all night.”
“Certainly,” said Harold. “I’ll tell him when he comes tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” said Chuck, and left.
Harold thought about Chuck and Eddie for a minute or two, but it wasn’t his business, and he didn’t really want to know about it. It did, though, solve the problem of how Eddie ate. Chuck obviously ransacked the kitchen before he went off duty.
He yawned and went to bed.