Los Angeles and Nassau, 1981–82
‘I JUST CAN’T stand this any longer, Miles,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘Either you get yourself a proper job or I’ll tell the police about all that dope you’re smokin’.’
Miles looked at her across the table and smiled his enchanting, irresistible smile.
‘You wouldn’t, Granny Kelly. I know you wouldn’t. You couldn’t.’
‘I would and I could.’
‘But you’d have to prove it. How would you do that? You’d have to bring them down to the beach, or up to my room, and watch them catch me in the act.’
‘I’d be prepared to do that. For your greater good.’
Miles smiled again. ‘I just don’t believe it. I just don’t believe you’d come marching down to the beach with the law in tow and say, “Look, officer, there he is, that’s my grandson, and he’s smoking a joint right now.”’
‘Miles, I would.’
‘Then I shall have to keep a very careful eye open for you.’ He got up, kissed her fondly and walked towards the door.
‘Where are you going, Miles?’
‘To the beach. Where else? With a positive mountain of grass.’
‘Miles, please come back. Please let’s talk about it. It’s not just the dope. I’m scared you’re going to get on to stronger stuff. You’re throwing your life away, Miles, and I just can’t bear to see it.’
‘Granny, I promise you I never touch anything else. Ever. I don’t need it.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
‘I know. And OK, maybe a couple of the guys take the odd snort. But not a lot of it. And certainly not me. I can’t afford it. Now stop fretting.’
She looked at him as he stood there, leaning gracefully against the door frame. Whatever he was doing, he managed to look as if he was posing for a photograph in some glossy magazine, and yet it was entirely unself-conscious. His great beauty was like a present that he didn’t really want, something he was very mildly pleased to have been given, and then put carelessly aside, unused. And yet it was not wasted, was not really unused at all; it opened doors for Miles, that beauty, made him welcome, sought after, everywhere he went. Women fell in love with it; and because of its singular nature, it did not repel men either, it lent Miles desirability. On a man with ambition it would have been dangerous; on Miles with his complete lack of concern for any kind of a future it was in safe keeping. He was now twenty-three, tall, a little over six foot two; his golden-blond hair hung over his narrow shoulders and halfway down his back; he was slim, but not thin, not gangly, and quite fine boned, with a long graceful neck and a beautifully shaped head. He had a high, sloping forehead and a perfectly straight nose with very slightly flaring nostrils. His eyes were exceptional, dark, dark blue, flecked with brown, and his lashes so extravagantly long that women became irritated just contemplating them. But it was his smile that made his looks exceptional, and that saved them from the cliché: it was sweet, his smile and all embracing, but it also contained much humour and, above all, just a touch of self-mockery. You felt when you saw it, that smile, that you were part of a conspiracy, taken inside a charmed world; that you knew its owner and you liked him, and that he was anxious that you should not think he cared in the very least about how he looked or whether you might care either. He was constantly being approached by the photographers who came to Malibu, shooting fashion spreads or advertisements or commercials, to model for them; he had been asked not once but three times by movie people who had (in the way of all the best Hollywood fairy stories) watched him as he filled their cars, delivered their groceries, simply walked along Sunset with his swinging rangy grace, to come and test; several friends of the Tylers had suggested he go to castings for this and that film; but to them all he threw his most brilliant regretful smile and said that was really nice of them, and he was really really flattered, but he had no wish to be a model, and the film business did not interest him, and he was actually much happier doing what he did.
Which was almost absolutely nothing.
It was eighteen months now since he had graduated; after his first angry outburst he had relaxed into a lazy contentment. He no longer saw Joanna; as far as Mrs Kelly could make out he didn’t see any girls at all. Or certainly not committedly. There were girls at the beach parties in the evening, but they were hangers on, they came and went, none of them were part of the surfing community, Miles brought none of them home. She felt sometimes that even if he could get committed to sex that would be better than nothing, and then she hastily stifled the thought and told herself that at least he was doing no harm the way he was.
Apart from the dope smoking, he seemed to be leading a blameless life. He never asked her for money; he wouldn’t take any money from anybody. When he needed some, which wasn’t very often, he earned it. He was strangely easy to live with; when she wasn’t feeling irritated by his idleness, the wastage of his life, she couldn’t help enjoying him and his relaxed, good-natured company. He spent many evenings just swinging lazily on the seat out on the lawn of the house high above the ocean, talking to her about anything that happened to engage him at the time, asking her opinion on things, listening carefully and consideringly to her answers; he did not exactly challenge her views, that would have been too exacting for his philosophy of minimum intellectual effort, but he would gaze at her from the depths of his blue eyes and say, ‘Do you really really think that’s right?’ and she would say, nettled, ‘Yes, yes I really do,’ and he would raise his eyebrows mildly and smile at her, and shrug and resume his survey of the evening sky; and she would find herself against her will challenging her own views. He was kind to her, and thoughtful; he never stayed out late without telling her, he was almost always home to dinner, he brought her occasional presents, he took her for drives into Santa Monica. He did the marketing, and he did the garden; he stopped short of the housework or the cooking, but he would mend and fix things for her if she asked him. And he often told her she was the only person who had never let him down.
‘Now Miles, that is ridiculous,’ she had said, the first time he voiced this opinion. ‘Joanna didn’t let you down, the Tylers didn’t let you down, Mr Dashwood didn’t let you down when you got busted that time, and your parents both died, God help them, that isn’t letting you down. How can you even think such a thing?’
And he had looked at her very seriously for quite a long time, and said that maybe they hadn’t been able to help dying, although since his father had committed suicide even that was arguable, but the fact remained he had been left all alone when he was very young, to manage as best he could; that Joanna had not understood how he had felt about Dashwood’s betrayal as he saw it, and that then she had tried to push and mould him into her own pattern, which was letting him down as he saw it; that the Tylers had done the same thing; and that as for Dashwood, all he had ever done was write a few cheques, and that they came pretty cheap.
‘Miles, how can you say that, when all these years Mr Dashwood has taken so much interest in you, visited you, encouraged you to make something of your life?’
‘All he did,’ said Miles, his eyes distant, ‘was turn me into some kind of hobby. When it began to turn into hard work, he was gone.’
‘Well, I don’t see it like that.’
‘Don’t you, Granny? Ah well.’
And the subject, like so many, many others, was closed.
It was a year now since Hugo had visited them; he wrote frequently to Mrs Kelly impressing upon her that she must ask him for help if it seemed that he could give it, inquiring after Miles’ progress (and, when the progress became clearly non-existent, his welfare), offering him constantly a large allowance the day he went out and got a job, and making sure that the regular payments into Mrs Kelly’s bank accounts were kept up and that she was using them. But personal visits were too painful; Miles simply now went out. The last exchange between them had been ugly; Hugo had begun with coercion, and then moves to bribery and even threats (of withdrawing financial support entirely) in his attempts to make Miles use his education and his qualifications.
‘I want to feel proud of you, Miles. Is that so much to ask?’
Miles had stood up, looked down at Hugo, an expression of absolute disdain on his face, and said, ‘What right do you have to feel proud of me?’ and walked out of the room.
One of Mrs Kelly’s only confidants in her anxiety was the old priest from St Monica’s, Father Kennedy. He had long since retired from the active administration of his church, and spent his days in the pastoral care of the long line of vagrants, homeless, single-parent families, alcoholics and drug addicts who came to the refuge he ran with the help of volunteers, students and the occasional rich widow anxious to reserve for herself a guaranteed corner in the kingdom of Heaven.
Mrs Kelly, who saw no reason to doubt that there would be a corner for her, after the requisite and hopefully short time in Purgatory, nevertheless worked at the refuge from time to time, out of the goodness of her heart, and indeed passed on the occasional percentage of the allowance made her by Hugo Dashwood when Father Kennedy, or rather one of his vagrants or their families, was in particular difficulties. She liked the atmosphere of the refuge, the strange marriage of earnest endeavour and fecklessness that existed behind its crumbling, peeling, walls; she was fond of many of the regular inmates who regarded it as almost as a permanent home, particularly the half-crazed but perfectly harmless drunks; and she enjoyed talking to Father Kennedy, who remembered Lee so fondly, and who had shared with the rest of them such high hopes for Miles.
Initially, when Miles had taken to the beach he had urged silence, counselled patience: ‘He’s a clever young man, Mrs Kelly, he will grow tired of the life.’ But now, going on for two years later, he had to admit that the situation was becoming serious. ‘It’s a terrible thing to see such cleverness going to waste. And he is such a charming and such a personable young man. I can understand you feeling distressed. Your friend Mr Dashwood, now, is he unable to persuade Miles to take life a little more seriously?’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Kelly grimly, ‘quite unable. The least likely, Father. As I told you, Miles feels very strongly that he should have given him a job in one of his companies, he is a rich man – and to be honest, I can’t quite see why he couldn’t. But now it’s become a matter of principle, and I don’t blame him one bit. But Miles won’t even see him, just walks out of the house. Mr Dashwood hasn’t been to see us for a while now, and quite frankly I’m relieved. I feel I can’t ask him for any more help, or even look him in the eye. It makes me feel just terrible to see that boy turn his back on him, after all he’s done, and it’s so out of character too, he’s a charmer is Miles, even though he is so idle. But you can take a horse to water, Father, as you yourself know, and then it’s up to the nag itself whether or not it takes a drink.’
‘Indeed,’ said Father Kennedy with a sigh, looking at his flock, who were so extremely eager most of them to take as many drinks as possible. ‘There is nothing you can do when a strong will is pitted against you. But the boy is young, Mrs Kelly, there is time.’
‘I don’t know that there is,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘Every day that passes he gets more settled, more happy with his life. And then it’s the drugs. Father, he smokes marijuana all the time. Sooner or later there’ll be trouble with the police, and you know he has a record already. And I’m so afraid he will turn to other stuff, to cocaine. He says some of the boys are taking it. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Can’t you threaten him with the police if he doesn’t stop?’
‘I’ve tried. He says I’d never do it. He might be right. I’d certainly find it hard.’
‘I think you should, Mrs Kelly. For his own sake, I think you have to do it.’
‘Father,’ said Mrs Kelly, ‘could you shop your own grandson?’
‘Mrs Kelly,’ said the old man, ‘these days I feel I could do anything to anyone, to save them from the dangers of these terrible things. And you’re right, it won’t stop at the joints. It will lead to the other stuff. And the police are tightening up their controls all the time. The boy will end up in jail. I would urge you very strongly to take the necessary steps. I will support you if you need me to.’
‘Thank you, Father. I’ll think about it.’
She did think about it, long and hard, and rejected, as Miles had known she would, any idea of shopping him to the police. Pride and embarrassment prevented her from bothering Hugo Dashwood. But she continued to worry at the problem night and day, like a hungry old dog with an overchewed bone. And in the end, she came up with a solution.
‘Miles, I think we should move.’
‘Granny Kelly, whatever for? Wherever to? You know I like it here. You know you like it here.’
‘I don’t like it that much, Miles. I’ve never made friends. I’ve never felt at home. Not really.’
‘You have me. I’m your friend.’
‘I know that, Miles, but you’d be mighty big-headed if you thought that was enough.’
He sighed, and smiled at her regretfully. ‘I guess you’re right. I’m sorry. But I really don’t want to move.’
‘I do. And maybe it’s my turn.’
‘Well, you could go and I could stay.’
‘No, Miles, I want you to come with me.’
‘Granny, I’m twenty-three. I can go – or stay – where I like.’ He was smiling, but there was an edge to his voice.
‘I know that, Miles. But I think you owe me something. Some loyalty. Some return.’
He was silent for a while. Then: ‘Well, maybe. Where did you think of going?’
‘The Bahamas.’
‘The Bahamas! Why there?’
‘I have an old friend there. In Nassau. I had a letter for her six months ago. She has a big house, it’s beautiful Miles, you’d like it. She lives alone, and she’s lonely. She suggested I went and stayed with her for a while. I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want to leave you. But I think I will. For a week or so at least, just to see if I like it. I asked her how she’d feel about us moving there and she said she thought it would work out real fine.’
‘For you and her maybe. Not me.’
‘Why not?’
‘Granny Kelly, you know why not. I like it here. There’s no surf in the Bahamas. I wouldn’t know what to do.’
‘You could get a job.’
‘I could not get a job. I don’t want to get a job.’
‘Miles, have you never wondered what we really live on?’
‘Well, you have some money, from my mom’s insurance – my dad’s, rather. And the house. And I bring in enough for food.’
‘Yes, that’s true. But if I chose to withdraw it from you I could. And you’d get pretty hungry and uncomfortable pretty fast.’
He went over to her and kissed her. ‘You wouldn’t do that to me. You wouldn’t want me to be hungry and uncomfortable.’
‘I just might. I’m pretty tired of being uncomfortable myself. I don’t really like this climate that much. And I’m lonely, like I said.’
Miles sighed. ‘I’m sorry you’re lonely. It was really bad of me not to realize. I’ll try to come home more.’
‘Miles, I don’t want you to come home more. I want friends of my own. Now I think we could have a good life in Nassau. It’s a great city. I’ve been reading about it. There would be opportunities for you.’
‘I don’t want opportunities.’
‘I know that, Miles. But I want them for you. Think about it. Please.’
‘All right, Granny. I’ll think.’
Thinking was cheap.
Partly out of a sense of guilt about his grandmother’s loneliness, partly out of a wish to make her think he was indeed giving consideration to her plan, Miles stayed home next day and dug the garden. The surf was virtually flat anyway. Towards evening he took the truck and drove it down to the beach to see his friends and say he’d be along next day. The beach was swarming with police. He drove home again thoughtfully.
Later that night two officers from the Los Angeles drug squad called at the house. Miles went to the door.
‘Evening, sir,’ said one of them, a thickset, bullnecked man with shifty, darting black eyes. ‘Are you on your own here?’
‘Good evening, Sergeant. No, I’m not. My grandmother’s here. She lives with me.’
‘Could we come in?’
‘Why?’
‘We have reason to believe you may have drugs on the premises.’
‘Now what leads you to that line of reasoning, officer?’
‘Those guys on the beach. Your friends.’
‘Some friends,’ said Miles lightly. ‘Do you have a warrant?’
‘We certainly do.’
‘OK. You’d better come in.’
Mrs Kelly appeared from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Miles, what is it?’
‘These gentlemen feel we may have drugs in the house, Granny. Do you have a stack anywhere? I certainly don’t.’
‘This is not a laughing matter, sir,’ said the sergeant with a look of such menace that even Miles felt a heaving shudder somewhere in the region of his bowels. ‘You do have a police record, Wilburn, you were convicted and fined over a drug offence, as I am sure you will remember, and your friends did lead us to believe, quite strongly, that you have drugs in your house.’
‘OK,’ said Miles. ‘Go ahead. You won’t find anything.’
They started in his room, and wrecked it; they ripped open pillows, quilts, curtains; they tore out drawers, tipped out cupboards, threw books, clothes, tapes, records on to the floor. They moved into the bathroom, emptied the linen closet, the dirty-clothes basket, tipped the entire contents of the medicine cupboard into a plastic bag.
Mrs Kelly, who had been watching half frightened until then, looked at them fiercely. ‘You just watch what you’re doing with that. There’s things in there I need. All the time.’
‘Are there now, ma’am? And what kind of things would that be?’
‘My laxatives,’ said Mrs Kelly firmly. ‘Doctor Forsythe will have a great deal to say to you if I get bunged up again now. Nearly two weeks I went last time, and it was real bad, agony I was in, had to have an enema to shift it and I’m telling you I shall tell him you’re personally responsible if it happens again. Which it will,’ she added darkly.
The sergeant looked at her, and reluctantly opened the plastic bag again.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Now perhaps you’d be kind enough to help me sort them out as you’ve muddled everything up so badly. There’s a packet of suppositories as well, which I also have to have with me all the time, so you can keep an eye open for them too.’
Miles hurriedly left the room.
But it was a small triumph, and one she paid dearly for, for they went through her room too, taking her mattress up, her curtains down, rummaging through her underwear drawers, tipping her jewellery box out on the bed. They cleared the kitchen too, every drawer, every cupboard, and then turned their attention to the living room, taking up every cushion on every chair, and turning out her beloved china collection from the corner cupboard on to the floor with a reckless, deliberate carelessness. When they had finished, and gone through every box and case and old jar in the garage too, taken the seats out of the car, the saddle off Miles’ bike, they looked at the two of them with an expression of odd suppressed anger.
‘Well, there doesn’t seem to be anything. We might come back. Would you like us to clear up for you a bit now?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Kelly. ‘I wouldn’t fancy your clearing up. Just go.’
She was stiff-backed and tight-lipped until the car had vanished down the hill; then she suddenly collapsed on to one of the cushionless chairs, her eyes frightened and full of tears.
‘Granny Kelly, don’t,’ said Miles, taking her in his arms. ‘I’m so sorry. So terribly sorry.’
‘But Miles, did you have any? Where had you put it?’
‘Yeah, I had some hash. I put it down the toilet. That was all, though. They were looking for coke, but they’d have been really pleased to find the grass. It would have done them for now . . .’
‘When did you do that? Why?’
‘This afternoon. I saw them on the beach. I thought they might come.’
‘Oh, Miles.’
‘The bastards,’ he said, in a sick quiet anger, ‘the bastards.’
‘They are, Miles, the police. They are pigs.’
‘I don’t mean the cops. I mean my friends. My friends, shopping me. How could they do that to me? After all we’ve been to one another? How could they?’
‘I don’t know, Miles.’
‘You see. Everyone lets you down in the end. Lets me down, anyway.’
He looked down at her and kissed her wrinkled, sunburnt old forehead. ‘Except you. What a performance, Granny. You were great. You made it almost worth it.’
‘Not quite, though.’
‘No.’ He was silent for a while, looking at the mess. Thinking.
‘Maybe,’ he said slowly, ‘maybe we should think seriously about going to Nassau.’
Nassau didn’t suit Miles. He felt lonely, bored, hemmed in. He couldn’t believe he could have been stupid enough to agree to come. He spent most of his days wandering through the back streets and the markets, wondering how he could escape back to California. It didn’t seem on the face of it terribly easy.
They had left quite quickly, and very quietly. Only Father Kennedy had been informed of their destination, and that in the vaguest possible terms. Mrs Kelly had not sold the house or even put it on the market, simply put anything under covers and locked it up; she said she didn’t feel it was really hers to sell, and that one day maybe she might want to go back. Miles had said that now he was over twenty-one wasn’t it his, but she said no, Mr Dashwood had bought it for her, it was in her name, and there was no way she was letting Miles get his idle hands on it.
‘And besides,’ she said tartly, ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d want to taint yourself with anything provided by Mr Dashwood, Miles Wilburn.’
Miles had shrugged. ‘Maybe not.’
He had never gone back to the beach; he couldn’t. The betrayal went deeper than that of friend by friend; it was brotherhood by brotherhood, the brutal denial of a whole, lovely, lifestyle. He could not believe that the fellowship, and what seemed to him the inherent goodness of life on the beach, could have been hacked to death in five brutal minutes by a load of cops, and that a dozen or so close brothers under the sunburnt skin could sell him down the river for nothing more than the half-baked promise of a more lenient sentence, a lower fine. He felt more than hurt; he was sickened. He had lost faith, trust; he didn’t know where to go or what to do. And Nassau, suddenly, had seemed as good as anywhere – from a distance.
Flying in late one November afternoon, stepping out of the plane into the warm windy air, looking at the black faces everywhere, hearing their sing-song voices, discovering immediately a way of life that made California seem urgent and aggressive, he had felt briefly intrigued and charmed. Mrs Kelly’s friend, Marcia Galbraith, had sent her car for them, driven by Little Ed, her chauffeur; Little Ed was six foot five tall and going on as wide; the name had been bestowed upon him by his father, Big Ed, who had been driver to Marcia’s father until he died at the age of eighty-three. Little Ed was now sixty-seven. He took them on a brief tour of Old Nassau before delivering them to Mrs Galbraith’s mansion; Miles and Mrs Kelly, looking out at the grand, colonial-style white and pink houses, the policemen in their banana-republic white uniforms with their pith helmets and gold braid, the tourists driven about in the open horse carriages, felt they had come to a new and romantic country and smiled happily at one another.
Inside the Galbraith mansion, hidden behind high walls near the centre of the town, Mrs Galbraith waited for them, with afternoon tea.
It came served in a silver tea set and brought in by Little Ed’s wife, Larissa. They sat in the shabbily grand drawing room filled with ornate furniture and painted cabinets, gilt chairs, overlooking a cool, shady garden, all palm leaves and extravagantly flowering shrubs, fluttering with small, brilliant birds, and drank china tea and nibbled wafer-thin cucumber sandwiches; later Marcia Galbraith showed them their rooms, equally shabby, equally grand, both with verandas set with rocking chairs, looking over the garden; they had big high beds, with posts and tapestries, horribly lumpy, piled with old, worn, chintz quilts; the walls were hung with portraits of Galbraith ancestors, and above their heads whirring fans with whirling arms shot the hot air round and round the room. The whole place had a strange, dreamlike quality; Miles felt as if he was watching a film or reading a book, and half expected it all to vanish and to find himself safely back in the house on Montego Canyon. Dinner would be at seven, said Marcia, no need to dress tonight, as they were tired; Miles went out for a walk and found himself near the water, looking at the high bridge over to Paradise Island and the modern, skyscraping buildings, and wondered what he would find to do here, to pass his days.
Dinner, served by Larissa, four courses, each separated from the last by a ritual with finger bowls and glasses of iced water to clear their palates, was tedious and endless; Marcia, who proved to be a little more than slightly senile, reminisced about her days in the last war when the Windsors had been resident at Government House, and she and her husband St George Galbraith had been frequent guests, and she had helped the Duchess – ‘So charming, so very very kind’ – with her Red Cross work. Miles and Mrs Kelly went early to bed.
But over the days that followed, Mrs Kelly settled down, settled in, began with astonishing speed to pick up her old friend’s affectations, lethargic accent, ladylike ways. She bossed Larissa about, took up petit point, and went out shopping and exchanged her rather sexless, shapeless clothes for some girlishly flowing skirts and lacy blouses. She also managed to persuade Little Ed that some hens would be a useful addition to the household and could be kept at the bottom of the exotic garden.
‘I feel,’ she said happily to Miles, rocking a little too vigorously for a true lady, on her veranda after lunch one day, ‘that I have come home.’
Miles kissed her hand, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances, and smiled down at her. ‘Good,’ he said.
After a few days, wretched with inactivity, he crossed the bridge and spent the day on Paradise Island. He sat on the silvery white beach and looked at the sea, so much greener than its Californian counterpart, so still, so dull, it seemed to him; he looked at the hotels, stacked one upon each other, with no breathing space between, he studied the people, the tourists, who looked mostly so rich and so old, and thought he had never been so lonely, or so unhappy. Later, he found there was more to like; but that day he was in despair.
Miles had never been bored. When he had been a small boy he had had his skate board and his bike, and the beach; when he had been grown up he had had his surf board and the beach; those things had filled his days, and he had never asked more of life. Now suddenly there were these long, achingly dull hours to fill. There were things that intrigued him, but they cost money, and he had none. He would have liked to ride the water bikes that skimmed across the greeny blue water like so many triumphant flying fish, but the hire fee was sixty dollars an hour. He was fascinated by the flashy gambling halls in places like the Nassau Beach Hotel, so big you could hardly see from one side across to the other, where you could fling pocketfuls of change into the fruit machines, or sit down to a serious game of craps, or play the roulette wheel – but he never won, and the little money he took there was gone in minutes. He liked the look of the younger women he saw sometimes, driving their stretch limos in and out of the hotels, and the hyper-smart Ocean Club, rich, sleek, glossy, not unlike the ladies who shopped on Rodeo Drive, and yet somehow in some strange way different, more restless-looking, less American, bored, sybaritic. They would always notice him, often smile, as he passed, but he could see no future in them, except maybe a highly risky one, and he had had enough of danger for now.
And Nassau was a dangerous place. You could feel it in the air. Beneath the surface of the old gentility and the new money, humming beguilingly in the warm air, lurking behind the huge smiles, the easy manners of the people on the streets, was a sense of crime. This was not a law-abiding place. The drugs industry was thriving; Miles had heard it said that up to seventy per cent of the money changing hands came from it. Drug-related crimes – robbery, murder, prostitution – throbbed in the arteries of the city.
And yet side by side with that was a lovely innocence. In the markets, where you could beat anyone down from ten dollars to fifty cents without a great deal of difficulty, the gospellers sang to themselves all day; women and children sat and gossiped and played the hours away; the old people were kind, generous, caring. In the Old Town the shops were modest, almost villagey; and there was a grace, a charm to life there that took a hold, quite without his realizing it, of Miles’ heart. And so, for six months, he waited, not quite unhappy, but not happy either, watching his grandmother descend into delusions of gentility, and thence, in the company of her friend, senility, and wondered what on earth was going to happen to him.
And then he met Billy.
Billy de Launay was the son of Nassau gentry; his father was in the civil service, his mother had grown up in the Windsors’ court, as a child. Billy had been sent to Hampden Sydney, where he had with great difficulty just mustered a pass in American History and was now home again, ‘resting’ as he put it to Miles, before he decided on a career worthy of his education and intelligence. It wasn’t easy to find. Billy was not unlike Miles to look at, being blond and blue eyed; he did not have Miles’ outstanding good looks, but he was very prepossessing nonetheless, with the old-fashioned slightly fey charm of his background and upbringing.
He and Miles met at a lunch party, given by the de Launays, to which Marcia Galbraith had been invited and to which she insisted on bringing her old friend and her old friend’s grandson; the old ladies were both dressed in outlandish creations of flouncing lace, and carrying parasols, Miles good-naturedly out of character in white flannels and a navy blazer.
Billy de Launay came up to him, smiling broadly, and held out his hand. ‘Hi. I’m Billy de Launay, you must be Miles Wilburn. I’ve been hoping you’d come. I’m just about starved to death of company here. Can I get you a drink?’
‘Sure,’ said Miles, smiling back at him.
‘Bloody?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Bloody. Sorry, Bloody Mary,’ said Billy, wondering how anyone could have got this far in life and indeed to a party at his parents’ house without knowing what a Bloody was. ‘Vodka and tomato juice. OK?’
‘Oh, yes, sure,’ said Miles, smiling. ‘Sorry. Love one. Thanks.’
‘How are you enjoying Nassau?’ asked Billy, detaching two Bloodies from the tray passing him and handing one to Miles. ‘Having fun?’
‘Not a lot,’ said Miles, and then realizing this must sound rude, hastily added, ‘I mean, in Nassau generally. This is a great party.’
‘I don’t think I’d go that far,’ said Billy, laughing. ‘We’re a trifle short of young blood in Nassau. What do you do, or what are you going to do?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Miles cautiously. ‘I’m – waiting and seeing a bit.’ He smiled his glorious smile at Billy. ‘I think I have plenty of time.’
‘You do,’ said Billy, responding to this philosophy with gratitude and pleasure. ‘We both do. Plenty. I keep telling Daddy there is absolutely no rush, that it’s crazy to go into something I’m not sure about just for the sake of getting into order, but he doesn’t see it that way.’
‘None of them do,’ said Miles, recovering swiftly from the cultural shock of hearing a six-foot twenty-three-year-old refer to his father as Daddy; Ivy League talk he supposed. ‘They all feel we should follow them on to the conveyor belt the minute we’re out of college and stay on it till we drop off. I think there has to be more to life than that.’
‘Me too,’ said Billy, beaming delightedly at him. ‘Here, have another Bloody.’
‘Where did you go to college?’
‘Berkeley.’
‘Uh-huh. What did you major in?’
‘Math.’
‘God!’ Billy’s gaze was respectful. ‘And how did you graduate?’
‘Oh,’ said Miles with a shrug. ‘Summa cum laude.’
‘Jesus! Why hasn’t some bank snapped you up?’
‘I didn’t want it to.’
‘Did you even try?’
‘Nope!’
‘Good man! Your parents are dead, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m sorry. That must be – well – hard.’
‘Not really. It was a long time ago. My gran brought me up.’
‘Is she your guardian?’
‘Yeah. And some old guy put me through college, he was a friend of my parents.’
‘He sounds like a good guy.’
‘Kind of,’ said Miles briefly. ‘I didn’t really like him.’
‘He must be kind of sick you’re not using your education.’
‘Yes,’ said Miles with relish. ‘I think he is.’
Billy, realizing there was more to this story than he was going to hear just now, dropped the subject.
‘Met any girls here?’
‘Haven’t met anyone under eighty till today.’
‘Well there are a few. Pretty damn dull, though. Not many game ones.’
‘That’s bad.’
‘Yeah, it is. The talent is over on Paradise Island. The older ladies, you know. Divine.’
‘I have seen a few.’
‘Well, hell,’ said Billy, ‘you don’t have to stop at looking. They’re really hot, half of them. Married to rich old guys who can’t get it up half the time.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Honestly Miles, you can get most of them, just with a smile. With your smile,’ he added, without even a touch of envy, ‘you could get all of them.’
Miles decided he liked Billy more and more.
‘But how do you meet them?’
‘Oh, it’s easy. Just hang around. Round the pool at some of the hotels, that’s a good place. Up in the Mirage Club.’
‘Yeah, but how do you get into those places?’
‘Oh, it’s easy. You just walk in. Settle down. Look like you’re staying there. Dress the part. Club tie, battered old tennis hat, that sort of thing. I’ll show you. The club’s harder. I actually have had to pull out of there, there’s a funny old French guy who runs it, who wears a morning suit every day, he’s really spaced, and he’s got to know me. And then once you’re there, they just come flocking. It’s so easy. After that it’s parallel parking all the way.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Parallel parking. Fired up. Sex. All the way. You know?’
‘Oh, sure,’ said Miles, laughing. ‘I know.’
Billy laughed too. Miles might be just a bit of a dork, he obviously hadn’t been anywhere too smart to school, and he seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake a lot of the time, but he was a really nice guy, and living almost next door. There was nothing socially that Billy felt he could not fix. Miles was clearly good-natured and a quick study; he could teach him all the right things to say and how to behave. It was all too good to be true. Life was obviously going to look up a lot.
It did. The boys had a marvellous time. Billy had been absolutely right, and (just as Miles had himself suspected) many of the rich, bored ladies were indeed all too ready to spill their sexual largesse over the bodies of two charming and totally available young men. What was more, Miles discovered, their innocence was considerably in their favour. Women of thirty-five, forty, forty-five, painstakingly tutored in every possible variation, legitimate or deviant, of sexual behaviour were delighted to find themselves in bed with near virginal material. Miles, experienced for the most part in the straightforward, if greedy, sexual appetites of college girls and the beach groupies, learnt a great deal very quickly; he became expert in the ways of the flesh he had never dreamt of. He became skilled in cunnilingus; he discovered a woman’s anus to be capable of huge pleasure; he learnt to enjoy fellatio. He became masterly at delaying his own orgasm, at tormenting and teasing, at talking a woman into a state of intense excitement and then leaving her for an hour, maybe two, and then returning, his smile just a trifle more triumphant than usual. He and Billy both became favourites; the hall porters and doormen at the hotels, initially suspicious, hostile even, swiftly learnt that their tips from this or that beautiful, bored woman would grow considerably in size in exchange for a little cooperation in the front hall, over the internal telephone, a message delivered, or even delayed, an alarm raised, should the true provider of the tips return unexpectedly early from his golf course or his business meeting.
The boys worked usually separately; and resisted any attempt to engage them in group sex, or troilism; and they also set themselves against any attempt to persuade them to indulge in anything that approached perversion, as they saw it. Many was the afternoon they fled as a result of being presented with whips, ropes, rubber, women’s clothes. They had their standards, as they saw it, they maintained some semblance of innocence, and they were united in the view that once they had set out on that slightly dubious road, there was no way back.
The main trouble was, from Miles’ point of view, there was still no financial advantage from his occupation. There was absolutely no way either he or Billy were actually going to take money for their activities; they saw the whole thing as a lark, as fun, as something to do, and there was no way either the ladies would have given them any. Having an entertaining time with some charming boy who was clearly from a good family was one thing; paying for the entertainment would have put a very different complexion on it.
The boys were constantly being given presents: ties, silk shirts, belts, wallets, all very nice and good accessories in their work, particularly when they were moving on from one liaison to the next, but that was all. Nevertheless Miles did occasionally wish some of the presents could be turned into cash. The occasional belt or wallet provided him with a few dollars, but the market value for such things was poor; one particularly rich and, it had to be said, plain, lady had given him a Cartier watch one afternoon, but it was something Miles could not bear to part with. He had (he was discovering, and encouraged by his social education at Billy’s hands) a serious liking for beautiful and prestigious things, he wanted more and more of them, and he would rather go without spending money for a month (as he frequently did) than part with anything of lasting value. Nevertheless it was frustrating. Because their work, as they called it, left their evenings free, they both liked to go and gamble; Billy had a little money, which he was generous with, but it never seemed to last for more than an hour, even on a good evening, and besides Miles had his pride. He had tried to persuade Mrs Kelly to give him a bit more, but she was increasingly withdrawn into her new persona of genteel widow, along with her friend. She had aged a lot in the year they had been in Nassau; relieved of the strain of caring single handed for Miles, and worrying about his future, she had suddenly descended into confusion and delusion. And she was after all nearly eighty; she had had a lot to cope with. Miles, who genuinely loved her, and was truly grateful to her, did not want to intrude on her new happiness. He could wait. It was not after all, he felt, her problem. He was a young man of rare integrity, as Billy and he often agreed.
The solution to their monetary problems came from a rather unexpected source: the doorman at the Bahamian Palace, who had grown fond of them, and saw them in a rather benevolent light.
‘You boys play tennis?’ he asked them one day as they wandered out blinking slightly into the sunshine after a long afternoon’s work in the shaded air conditioning of two of the hotel’s finer suites.
‘I do,’ said Billy, ‘played for Hampden. How about you, Miles?’
‘A bit,’ said Miles. ‘I could remember. Why?’
‘They need a new tennis pro here. I’d apply if I were you. Probably take on the two of you. It wouldn’t interfere with your other occupation, I wouldn’t imagine. Might even help it along a little bit.’ He grinned and winked at them. ‘Go and see the manager now. He’s by the pool.’
Miles and Billy played a test game, charmed the manager, who was pleased with the notion of what was clearly some old money on his staff, and Billy got taken on immediately. Miles was told to go and polish up his game and then he might be allowed to work with his friend on busy days. Given his facility for sport, he was on the courts at the Bahamian Palace in three weeks.
They benefited in two ways: they had an income, albeit a modest one, and they were able, as the doorman had prophesied, to pursue their prey with greater and more graceful ease.
Billy’s parents were initially unhappy with the arrangement, but swiftly came round to the view that any employment was better than none, and at least were relieved of continuing to make Billy his modest allowance, which in their straitened circumstances was a relief; and Mrs Kelly was almost speechless with delight at the news, as presented by Miles, that he was working as sports and social manager of one of the island’s most prestigious hotels.
Miles, in possession of money for the first time in his life, felt strangely exhilarated. He had never properly made the connection between work and money; had not thought of getting a job as the route to worldly delights. In any case, worldly delights had never interested him before; the surf had come cheap. But sitting in the gilded air of the Palace, taking in heady whiffs of the rich aroma of real money, studying the women he was making love to, who somehow managed to look rich even naked, looking at their jewels, their clothes, feeling underneath his skin the sensation of silk sheets, savouring the almost sensual pleasure of good champagne, he felt a swiftly growing desire for more and more of it.
He changed his outward appearance; basing much of his style on Billy’s he cut off his long hair, he bought himself suits, and shirts and ribbon belts, and knotted silk cufflinks, and loafers and some L. L. Bean’s Norwegian pullovers, and a whole set of Lacoste sports shirts, and even, in a fit of strange sartorial madness, sent for some madras bermudas from Trimingham’s. He looked superb, an outstanding example of money of the very oldest kind.
He had proved, as Billy had suspected, a talented student of the social school Billy put him through; he learnt all the right preppy phrases and words and behavioural attitudes; he changed his accent slightly from his Californian drawl to something he based more on Tigs’ than Billy’s own; he learnt to display the peculiar WASP-mannered brand of ennui rather than his own rather more ingenuous Californian laid-backness.
And yet he remained true to himself and his roots. He never lied about his background, never disowned Granny Kelly, never set aside his happiness and his loyalty to Samo High and his days on the beach. He became something interesting and unique: a carefully stylish, rich blend of old-money behaviour and modest philosophies. Put together with his looks, and his charm, and a genuine sweetness of disposition, he found hardly a door anywhere that would not open for him. For the first time in his life he felt a sense of anticipation. He wondered where he might find himself next.