He’s here. Oh! He’s rather special. He arrived at ten-thirty, and was delighted when I opened the front door to him in a dressing-gown. He’s brought me a present; a first edition of one of D’Annunzio’s plays, you tie it with green velvet ribbons. I’m a bit wary. Does this make me the Duse?
There’s no question that I’m pleased with this present; I love books that you can lock up with a fastening like a suitcase, or tie up like a nightgown. Also, he’s slower than usual about sitting down, usually he goes down like a meal-sack into the first chair. But this time he stands about in the sitting-room and inclines himself over me at a worshipping but restrained angle. This brings out the best in me, and I start being very charming. I do a number of unnecessarily delicate and amusing things, which used to make my grandmother call me her ‘lily-white angel’.
His shirt seems to fill up the great divide between the lapels of his suit, like rumpled white paper – as though some composer just wrote a line on it and then scrunched it up. His tie today is magenta with red spots (aren’t we getting warmer as regards the elephant’s sampler?), and the handkerchief, matching again, is really lolling out like a thirsty tongue.
Even more extraordinary, no smell. Not a whiff. I don’t like it. He’s taken abnormal precautions, obviously out for a quick kill. And why doesn’t he start boring me? What’s happened? Surely I can’t be as sex-starved as all that? No; it’s just that he’s keeping silent for fear of irritating me with his rich, vibrating voice. How wise of him! Oh dear. He’s much cleverer than I thought.
What a lot of hair the Bloater has! Curious; I never bothered to look at his head before, but now I see that there’s masses and masses of thick dark hair, some seems to be curly and there are streaks of very shiny grey. Not at all bad, and quite a temptation for a head-hunter. But I’m not a head-hunter. I just want to be left alone to get on with my gout. I’ve been talking about him far too much in the last few days and I’ve built him up into something. Whereas he’s just a stupid old jumbo-sized baritone.
You know what he’s waiting for, don’t you? The first course; that’s when he makes me behave so badly that I have to apologise to him. I flick my mouth into a whiplash smile. He seems dazed by this.
Hullo. I think he’s going to sink down now. He’s getting very near that piano stool. His legs are wilting. Ah, he’s down. He certainly knows how to occupy a piano stool and have a real rest on it.
I refuse to make conversation; it’s tiring, and I’m an invalid. Of course we already know each other very well indeed, and hardly have to talk. I maintain my deathly silence right to the end; and finally he says casually:
‘I like your dressing-gown.’
This instantly annoys me. I redouble the quality of my silence. Trying to lead off with a bedroom remark is not the way to get into my good graces. I freeze him and freeze him. Just when I think I’ve won, he says with the same casualness – and exactly as though we’ve been having a conversation:
‘You know, I can’t get through to most women. But I feel a great rapport with you.’
The impudence of it. And there’s a gloss on his eyeballs like fine Chinese porcelain. I believe he had Sicilian grandparents.
‘Really!’ (You should hear my dry, ferret’s cough!) ‘Then it’s a very one-sided rapport.’
After a pause, he laughs with real pleasure. Oh what a pest! He’s already started dining off my nerves.
‘That may be the reason.’ He looks away as though it’s too important to live with. ‘I mean your honesty may be the reason.’
‘Honesty! How dare you say that? Cheating and double-dealing are my speciality. And don’t think I’m going to give you the pleasure of either.’
I’m passing him at this moment, and he suddenly touches my arm with a restraining gesture which makes me jump back as if he’s got scabies. He says gently: ‘I didn’t mean to annoy you.’
‘You didn’t annoy me.’ (Huh!) ‘I’m probably a bit sharp and irritable with this foot trouble, and I’m afraid it makes me rather bad company.’
Apologising already; don’t say the Bloater isn’t crafty. I’m furious with myself. I add:
‘And I don’t mind if I am bad company.’
Another pause, and another laugh of the same kind. Ha-ha-ha. We’re getting back to normal after all; although there were two or three minutes when he kept his sensibility well back in its kennel and I was quite definitely attracted. I’ve forgotten all about the first-edition D’Annunzio with green ribbons now, and I ask acidly:
‘By the way are you less blocked than you used to be?’
The Bloater went to a psychiatrist when he was singing in Rome last year, and ever since then he’s spoken of being ‘blocked’. I think this means he’s less good at seducing women than formerly. He once told me he’d slept with fifty or sixty, so the ‘blocking’ is something relatively new. He treats my question with serious interest, as though I’d asked with concern in my voice, and says:
‘It’s getting a bit better, thank you. I think if I had more commerce with people, it would help. For example, if I had more normal dealings with people, I’d know how to talk to you.’
‘Don’t you know how to talk to me?’ (Careful!)
‘No. I never know what to say next.’ This is accompanied by a very dark honest glance, and a shake of the head. (That’s right; put yourself at my mercy and let me trample all over you. For a man who doesn’t have commerce with people, your skill is abnormal.) I pass it off lightly:
‘Everyone has that trouble. Just make it up as you go along.’
He ponders this, as if it were a real contribution. Then unselfishly (!) tries to put the best complexion on his trouble with this priceless remark:
‘Oh, don’t worry. I think I’m gradually unblocking. And you know,’ a sly look at me, ‘you’re a great help.’
You – animal! With your blocking and unblocking. Do you imagine for one moment that I want to be a help? I do not! You can unblock yourself all alone. How can you be so absurd, taking yourself so seriously and talking the sort of nonsense neurotic women talk? If you knew how less masculine it made you, you’d drop it on the spot.
‘… although sometimes,’ he hasn’t finished yet, ‘you make me feel I’m dull.’
It’s my moment, and I take it with a burst of laughter:
‘I’m very glad to hear it.’
Now you must admit that was vicious. No one has an ox-hide which can keep out a remark like that. I must have done horrible damage inside. He seems to be making a little choking noise. Oh God, I have smashed him. How terrible. A great big man like that too, it seems to make it far worse. I go up impulsively and touch his head and press a kiss on his brow, noting as I do so that it’s fine, smooth and slightly moist.
‘Sorry.’
His arms close around me, and I’m still looking down on the top of the head, conscience-struck, when it’s pushed back and the Bloater’s face appears and says with a superior smile:
‘I always find what you say interesting.’
Not a ripple on the surface. He hasn’t even felt it!
‘Let me go!’ I’m wild, and have already made a pair of fists.
‘Why?’ says the idiotic face.
‘Because I’m ill and in pain.’
There’s a slight loosening in the grip; the face presses itself against my dressing-gown and says with humorous, muffled lust:
‘Well, I’ll make you better.’
‘Carlos, will you please let me go. My foot hurts.’
He unbinds his arms, and turns away as if I’ve insulted him. I hobble out of reach, sit down and prop my foot up. If it was anyone else, I’d talk to cover up the situation, but I simply know him too well, and don’t bother. Besides, it’s not necessary; a moment later he’s drumming on the piano with his fingers. And look – smiling at me! I feel very worn and defeated. Isn’t it time to phone Claudi?
I say feebly, hardly convincing myself:
‘I really ought to phone up the fishmonger’s.’
‘Let me get something for you.’
‘No, no,’ I make peevish invalid’s movements, ‘it’s not necessary. They bring it to the door.’
‘Well, you tell me what you want, and I’ll do the telephoning for you.’ He stands up, and is all alacrity and consideration.
‘No, I’d much rather you tried the piano. I’ve just had it tuned, and I know your ear is ultra-perfect. Would you do that for me, Carlos?’
Can he resist an appeal to his vanity? He cannot. Even the fact that what I’ve asked him to do is beneath him doesn’t register. He slews his head round and looks at the piano.
‘Is that it?’ Why do people ask questions like that, I wonder. I reply:
‘Certainly not. I keep it in the kitchen built into the sink unit.’
‘I see.’ His response is definitely firmer this time; there may yet be hope for us. He sits down again, plucks open the lid, and bends with a lifetime of longing over the keyboard as if it was the body of a woman. (No. 61.) Then, with infinite strength and delicacy, he starts on it. Oh! Oh! Oh! that’s better. He has absolute authority, and regains every shred of personality he’s lost in the last half-hour. So long as he doesn’t sing, the emotional barometer may go up again. I enjoy seeing him press on the pedals, the clutch and the accelerator. With that handkerchief dripping blood out of his pocket, and the dip of his concentrating head, he’s on the verge of being fabulous. MacFisheries can wait a bit.
The hard core of the trouble with the Bloater is that most of the time he’s not real to me. To someone else he may personify reality. I think he must have booked into too many not quite first-class hotels and this has simply become his milieu. And then he must have climbed on to too many platforms; and men get this infection, this ‘platformitis’, much more easily than women. The men who are absolutely like oneself are the dangerous ones. Do I mean Billy?
At this moment the telephone rings, and I tremble in case the fishmonger has taken the initiative and is phoning me. It’s Jenny. She’s having one of her tea-breaks at the sound workshop. She’s in the wars, just like me. She’s been burnt, right at the top of her thigh! I at once think of the guitarist:
‘What happened?’
‘I was sitting in a coffee bar with a very fascinating middle-aged man who said he was psychic. Well, there was a mechanic from the local garage who came and sat down on the other side of me. Then there was a curious sort of silence, because we both stopped talking, and I had the feeling that my psychic man was somehow trying to bend the will of the other boy to make him go away.’
‘Oh dear.’ (The Bloater plays ‘tum-te-tum’.)
‘Instead of going away, the boy suddenly overturned his hot coffee – on to me! And I was wearing tightfitting chenille trousers, so the boiling coffee soaked right in, it was agony.’
‘What did you do? Scream out like a scalded cat?’
‘No, I went on sitting there without moving a muscle, because I was somehow being spiritually conned by my psychic man.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ This isn’t at all like Jenny.
‘Well, I just felt I mustn’t make a scene in public. It suddenly became terribly important. Then my psychic took me off to hospital in a taxi to get it dressed.’
‘Who is this psychic? Is he new on the scene?’
‘In a way. He’s my insurance against the guitar.’
‘Meaning to say that if you’re covered with burns you can’t make love to your guitar?’
‘No. He’s supposed to bolster up my ego, so that whatever the guitar does I shan’t care.’
‘And what has the guitar been doing?’ There are more polite noises off from the Bloater, so I know he’s begun to listen in. He plays very lightly.
‘He’s a monster!’ Jenny howls down the telephone.
‘I knew it.’
‘He asked me to lunch. And I said: “All right, where?” And he said: “Oh, I hate meals out, they’re so bad. I’d like to cook something special for you.”’
‘Oh boy, you didn’t fall for that one!’
‘Well, honestly it’s very difficult not to look ridiculous. I just said I didn’t like being in enclosed spaces. And he said: “We’ll have the windows open”.’
‘You could say he has a sort of lousy honesty. At least he didn’t say: “All right, we’ll lunch out, just look in at my place for a drink on the way”, and when you get there you find him making meat balls and rice, or any other terrible slop which he thinks is the price of some ghastly sort of advance he’s going to make.’
We agree heartily on this. There is dead silence from the sitting-room.
Jenny says morosely:
‘I gave him strict instructions. I said I must have potatoes, I must have food. I thought it would keep him busy. And when I arrived, not a potato in sight.’
‘He probably thought you were incredibly smooth, and this was all a blind.’
‘Just tinned salmon, mashed up in a wooden bowl to look interesting, and some lettuce leaves.’
‘Worse than our fifth-rate cheddar cheese and barley wine.’
‘I ate up every single morsel, really hating him.’
‘Oh good!’
‘But then I felt sleepy.’
‘Jenny!’
‘Honestly, I couldn’t help it. I was dead tired when I arrived.’
‘So I suppose you lay down, being a child of nature.’ I’m a bit snappy to her.
‘I did lie down, Min. And so did he. And we just rested, side by side, like two little goody-goodies.’
I groan; I know what’s coming next. I say:
‘And then I suppose he kissed you on your brow, just at the phony old hairline?’ The phone is silent, recording my direct hit. ‘They always do. And you told me he had a sense of timing. You said he knew everything.’
‘Listen: I spent three days longing for his mouth! It’s lethal, lethal! And Min, he shudders every few seconds when he’s touching me, with a really violent controlled shudder. I’ve just never felt anything like it. And his lips are round, not flat – and do you know, that makes all the difference.’
My finger instinctively moves up to my mouth; round or flat? Nothing much there at all. Just something pouting, and then you’re in to the teeth. I say wearily:
‘Then I suppose you went to bed with him?’
‘No. I remembered the potatoes. And I stopped.’
‘Because he didn’t give you any potatoes!’ I’m really delighted with her. ‘What an excellent reason!’
‘Yes, but I’ve seen his chest. And I want him dreadfully.’
‘Pooh! What’s a chest?’
‘This one’s absolutely smooth, with thick rounded shoulders. And it shudders when it’s near me.’
I reflect that you really can’t ask much more than that. So I say disgustedly:
‘This is all very objective, Jenny. But what sort of person is he, for God’s sake?’
‘Quick as a flash, very pop Cambridge, I told you, success and plastic high living. He’d flit through any kind of situation without turning a hair.’
‘He sounds genuinely nasty.’
‘He almost is. But, you know, when you begin to make love to someone, if they’re nasty inside you can’t go on. Well, he’s unselfish in making love.’
‘This is serious.’
‘I know.’
I leave the telephone rather shaken. For the moment I’ve totally forgotten the Bloater, it’s like the night when I switched out the light in the kitchen while George was eating his evening meal, locked the door behind me, and went thoughtfully upstairs to bed. It took me three months to live that down.
I re-enter the sitting-room, forgetting to hobble because my mind’s not on it, and start reading an old letter which is lying on the table: ‘I don’t like Spain as much as I did, although I have seen a lot while I’ve been in Barcelona …’
Someone moves in the room, and I give a start.
‘Oh, Carlos. How are you?’ I’m distracted, but he’s full of glowing lechery and says:
‘I’m afraid I couldn’t help hearing part of your conversation.’
What a ham-fisted opening! How could he? Where is the palm-court orchestra? Where are Vicki Baum and Grand Hotel?
‘I kept my voice as low as possible. It was a personal matter.’ Sorry, I forgot, the Bloater never squirms. He just enters into things with a wholeheartedness that is nauseating. So he says:
‘I knew that. Is she – in some sort of trouble?’
‘She doesn’t know whether to go to bed with a man, because he attracts her too much and doesn’t give her any potatoes.’
‘Oh-ha. It’s quite a normal situation then.’
I’m slightly interested in his response and ask:
‘What makes you say that?’
‘The abnormal situation is – when the woman doesn’t know that she’s attracted by the man.’
There is a deafening silence. I daren’t move in case I cause an explosion. I’m riveted against the table, staring at ‘although I have seen a lot while I’ve been in Barcelona …’
Oh, you clever old Bloater! I suddenly get a flashback to a night in a restaurant when he listed his passions: ‘Women, my own voice, my own body, money, lobster.’ How could I underestimate a declaration as naïve, as experienced as that? But the word lobster saves me; fish, of course, what I need is a fish.
I go to the telephone without a word and dial Claudi’s number.
Claudi replies so quickly that I’m put off, and say doubtfully:
‘Hullo. Is that MacFisheries?’
‘Yes, madam,’ says Claudi firmly in his character actor’s voice.
‘Oh well—’ I’m dumbfounded for a moment by the way he’s caught the spirit of the thing, and then a convulsive, agonizing mirth shakes my whole body. I gasp out: ‘Well, could you send round a …’ Here I pause and rack my brains for the name of a single fish; the Atlantic, the Pacific are full of them, and the only thing I can think of is lobster. Surely that won’t do. Isn’t it just the thing to increase the uric acid in my swimming pool? Yes, gout and lobster obviously go together. Think of something, quickly! What’s the next thing to a lobster? A prawn. And how do they sell prawns? By the – the what? Quickly! ‘Could you send round a measure of prawns?’
That’s done it. An experienced fishmonger would snap out some tart reply; I realise there’s no such thing as a ‘measure’ of prawns. It didn’t feel right when I said it. Claudi answers warmly:
‘Yes, madam. Certainly madam. Will that be all?’
By now I’m racked and in pain, with the laughter leaking out of my nose and my ears. If only he wasn’t so deadly serious! I’m helpless, weak as a sapling U-shaped by a gale-force wind. Make an effort! Finally I get out in a gagged voice:
‘Yes, thank you. Can you let me have it in about an hour?’
‘In about an hour?’ asks Claudi, thunderstruck.
There’s a dead silence between us. Oh God, Claudi’s taken it literally. We’re at cross purposes, and if I don’t say something quickly he’ll wait an hour before coming in. This is what comes of over-playing the part you’re given; he’s ruining everything. I must now be very convincing and yet casual.
‘Or as soon as you can.’ I do that quite well; Claudi catches on at once and we’re saved again.
‘I’ll be right round, madam,’ he says sternly, and rings off.
It’s only when I put down the phone that I remember I haven’t given my name or address. I hobble upstairs on my gouty foot and stuff a handful of clothing in my mouth and lie on my bed making spasms like a spastic.