four

I WAS ON MY SECOND SHERRY BY THE TIME Alan, Colin and Hugh arrived, having walked through the freezing streets from Green Park.

‘Gwenny not with you?’ Stanley tried to sound casual.

‘They should have been here by now,’ said Hugh, looking round as if expecting to find them behind a pillar. He caught sight of Mavor, stared sharply, but didn’t say anything. ‘They were taking a taxi – they’ll be along any moment.’

The waiter came to our table with menus and a jug of water. By the time he returned some minutes later to take our order, Stanley was fidgety. ‘Where are they?’

‘Let’s order anyway,’ said Alan. ‘What about roast beef followed by apple pie, Dinah?’ He beamed at me, my childish behaviour was forgiven, but he didn’t wait for me to reply. I agreed meekly, because although I’d wanted to choose for myself, I wasn’t going to risk another quarrel.

When Radu and Gwendolen finally turned up it was with some story of their taxi running out of petrol. ‘And me in these shoes!’ Gwendolen gestured at her feet and we all stared at her elegant, silk-stockinged legs and high heels. She laughed, but I thought she was nervous, as she headed off to the ladies. We all laughed – a bit too loudly.

My eyes flickered to where Titus Mavor sat at the opposite side of the restaurant. He had his arm round a girl with black hair in a bob with a fringe. He looked up at the loud burst of laughter. He’d seen us. I looked quickly away.

The next thing I knew he was looming over our table, the girl dragged along with him, his arm still round her shoulders. ‘Well, look who’s here,’ he said, swaying slightly. I concentrated on the girl. She was wearing a red bouclé sweater with large wooden buttons marching diagonally across the bosom. Mavor looked more than ever like a cherub gone to seed.

I realised that, drunk as Mavor was – as they both were, I think – they were waiting for me, the only woman present, to invite them to sit down, so of course I had to. Alan kicked my ankle under the table. Mavor slumped on the banquette next to me.

Gwendolen wove her way back from the ladies between the tables. Mavor stared at her as she sat down at the opposite end of the table, next to Colin. A strange, unpleasant smile twitched his rubbery lips and he half rose in what seemed a parody of good manners. ‘Lovely to see you, Gwendolen.’ She smiled back, a tight, tense smile. His fat fingers spread over his girlfriend’s shoulder and stretched towards the highest button as if they were thinking of undoing it, but his eyes swivelled biliously towards me.

‘So you’re the little girl hitched up with Alan Wentworth. Finally settled down, has he?’ I knew all about Alan’s colourful past, and it didn’t bother me, not at all. I ignored the leering innuendo. I took out a cigarette. His hand shook as he lit it. ‘And still knocking round with Comrade Harris,’ he continued, speaking to me, but of course it was meant for them. He was looking at them all the time. ‘Wentworth never quite took the plunge, did he, just hung about on the edge of the pool, not quite daring to jump in. But Colin Harris – my God, it’s so true what they say about converts. He’s worse than St Paul. And the funny thing is, his road to Damascus was the Nazi Soviet Pact. My Party right or wrong. Just when anyone with any sense was getting out, he took it as the great test, the supreme test of loyalty. Since then, of course, I’ve become a rotten element.’ He sagged against the red velvet bench and laughed, but the laugh turned into a bubbling, heaving cough. Spittle sprayed. His poached-egg eyes watered. ‘What’s your assessment of Comrade Stalin? Think he’s the people’s hero, eh?’ As his voice rose I could feel the sweat under my arms. This was horrible. Mavor leant towards me, but the words were directed towards Colin. His thicket of red curls fell over his sweating forehead. He had bad breath and bad teeth. And then he spoke directly to Colin. ‘How are the comrades these days, old chap?’ And he smiled with insulting insistence.

‘We’re making advances,’ said Colin, tight-lipped.

Titus snorted. ‘Making advances! Advances on what? You make it sound like a seduction; making advances on the great British people. Or is it a military campaign? Advancing over difficult terrain, what,’ he said in a Blimpish accent.

Colin should have laughed it off, but of course he didn’t. He scowled. ‘Things are obviously more difficult than they were during the war. There’s so much anti-Soviet propaganda now – everyone’s forgotten who really won the war. The reason we’re sitting here, y’know, is the battle of Stalingrad. The Yanks seem to think they won the war, but it was the Soviet Union that saved us.’

‘I thought it was the Battle of Britain,’ said Hugh rather sharply.

‘If you take my advice, old man …’ Titus leaned forwards in a distinctly hostile way. I wondered if he was ever sober. ‘If you take my advice, your lot should shut up about the Soviet bloody Union. There’s a lot more going on in Russia than we get to hear about, and even if there wasn’t, the Soviet Union is the Soviet Union and England is England, it is a different animal,’ he said, with a drunken wiseacre nod, ‘and old Comrade Stalin will do what he thinks is good for him and possibly them, like he did with the Nazi Soviet Pact. Or have we forgotten all about that?’

Hugh leaned forward. ‘Let’s leave politics out of it, Titus.’

But Titus wouldn’t be shifted. ‘That’s precisely the problem. You can’t separate art and politics. You’d agree with that I think, Colin. Art is always political. The comrades are very hot on that. Unfortunately, the result is the incredible idea that the highest form of painting is a huge canvas showing burly factory workers or alternatively what are actually the conquered inhabitants of Uzbekistan rejoicing in their slavery, in the most disgustingly sentimental Victorian style you can imagine. Now for a humble Surrealist, such as myself, that’s just a little hard to take.’

‘Look, hang on –’ began Hugh, and Colin had gone very red, but now the three men at the next table began to get involved. Two were dishevelled arty types, in the usual corduroy and dusty hair, cut long to touch the collar; the third, who looked younger than his companions, at the same time dressed older, in an uncared-for suit with a waistcoat, a conventional shirt and tie. He was going bald, wore glasses and had buck teeth that seemed too large for his pale, round, schoolboy’s face. He leaned forward, holding a card towards Mavor.

‘Remember – we met the other evening – I’ve opened a gallery–’

‘He thinks the moment has come for a great revival of Surrealism,’ said one of his companions, rather jeeringly. ‘He’s after those Dalí paintings you’re always banging on about, Mavor.’

Mavor took the proffered card, and leered craftily at his fellow painter: ‘Who says I own any Dalís?’

The man laughed. ‘Well you, mostly, old boy.’

Colin couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘Revive Surrealism? People want something uplifting, not that sick Freudian fantasy stuff. It’s degenerate, utterly degenerate.’

Weirdly, he was beginning to sound like my father.

‘So my work’s degenerate, is it? Salvador Dalí’s degenerate, Max Ernst, André Breton. It’s degenerate to paint the unconscious, to unleash the imagination, to explore the erotic. That’s degenerate. But it’s not degenerate to sell your soul to the Party, to lap up their propaganda, for all we know you were one of their double agents, one of their spies. What exactly were you up to in the Balkans, Harris? Doing the Russians’ dirty work for them?’

There was a horrified silence. He’d gone too far. I looked round the table, seeing them for a split second frozen, as if caught in a flashbulb photograph: faces distorted with anger, or apprehension; only the onlookers, Radu and Stanley, detached and even amused, while Gwen’s face was a blank white disc, expressionless as ever as she gazed at Mavor.

Colin leaned forward, his face even bonier in rage. ‘You are degenerate, you absurd, drunken aesthete, with your effete, ephemeral paintings and your … look at you, if you weren’t so drunk I’d knock you down, I’d kick you all the way to–’

‘Colin! Shut up!’ Alan laid a hand on his friend’s arm. Titus was smiling and smiling. He was enjoying himself. Colin had responded exactly as he’d hoped.

‘Oh dear, I must have touched a raw nerve there, hit a chord. We have a spy in our midst. Spying was heroic, of course, during the war. We should be grateful to you, Colin, just as we should be grateful to the glorious Soviet Union.’

Seeing the look on Colin’s face, the girlfriend was agitated now. ‘Titus,’ she whined.

‘Shut up, Fiona.’

Colin stood up, lurching slightly. Perhaps he was a bit drunk too. ‘Shall I tell you something – I hate people like you. You’re the scum of the earth and after the revolution, there won’t be a place for people like you.’

‘I’ll be liquidated, I suppose.’

‘That would be a very good idea.’ Colin stepped dramatically backwards and his chair fell over. He left it where it was and strode out of the Café. The two artists at the next table clapped. Not the little bald man – he seemed appalled.

Titus stared stupidly, his mouth open. Then he started to laugh and splutter. I felt a pinpoint of spittle on my cheek.

‘What the hell were you thinking of?’ muttered Alan.

Titus blustered, but he was looking a bit shaken. ‘It was only a joke – no need to go off the deep end like that. You heard! He threatened to kill me!’

The food arrived. What a relief. Now we could all eat. It covered the thick, awkward silence.

Stanley said calmly: ‘You know, I think we were all in a state of chronic hysteria during the war. Everything was mad and crazy. Extraordinary things could happen. The street I was living in then, there was a bomb and a woman in her bath was lifted right out of her house by the blast – still in the bath, stark naked – and landed on the pavement. She was completely unhurt. How could that happen? But things like that happened all the time. We were permanently on this hysterical plane where everything was exaggerated. Now we’ve come down and we can’t cope with it. And nothing really is back to normal anyway.’

Titus said: ‘I like the woman in the bath – that’s pure surrealism.’

I watched him, repelled. His flaccid lips, his mouth gaping open; the whole of him was incomplete, soft at the edges, a monstrous mollusc without its shell. His appetite amazed me. We’d hardly started and he’d cleared his plate and started to grab bits from his girlfriend’s. He was appetite incarnate, a giant baby, a mouth, an orifice. Now the mouth was nuzzling Fiona’s cheek and neck, grazing snail-like, slimy. I squirmed inwardly, felt suddenly very prim, but at the same time unpleasantly fascinated. He was a kind of life force, something rising from the primeval slime, in a primitive way more alive than any of us with his viscous, oozing extremities and the malice gleaming from his eyes.

Yet within a few weeks he was dead.