While Dexter and I were still living in Hindhead he’d bought an old Riley, a 1952 model that looked as though it should have Al Capone at the wheel. We’d taken it to America with us, driven all over the country in it and brought it back to England on the QEII. We landed in Dover and headed towards France. The idea was to eat wonderful food, drink lots of wine and, well, live in a country where nobody knew what a terrible failure his novel had been. My French wasn’t brilliant – little more than serviceable tourist – but Dexter’s was lousy. He wouldn’t try. The whole idea of struggling to buy a loaf of bread in French embarrassed him, and I could feel him getting more and more tense as we neared the coast and Plymouth; we planned to cross the Channel from there to Roscoff on the Brittany coast.
Totnes was the last turnoff from the highway before the docks. Without a word, he veered onto the slip road and headed west towards the town. We spent the night at the Seven Stars Hotel in the Plains, and the next day we began looking at houses. What the hell, we could eat and drink well in England too. The Hermitage on South Street had a little of the quality of a New York townhouse, long and narrow, walled garden, nice old features, garage closing it off from the street. We bought it. England was cheap back then. The moment we had possession, we went to work with sledgehammers and opened up five tiny rooms to make a large open area that included living room, dining room and kitchen, all rolled into one.
In the autumn of our first year in The Hermitage, Dexter’s cousin Marcia came to visit with her husband. Dexter was very fond of her; he said she looked like Anna Karenina, a honey blonde, regular features, full mouth, large eyes, tall. I liked her too – except for Freud. Marcia wasn’t just a Freudian; she was one of the faithful, a fundamentalist. She and I had gone to lunch in New York once, just the two of us, and over her ravioli, she’d said to me, “You know, Joanie, I have it.”
“What?”
“Penis envy.”
In those days everybody had an opinion about Freud and psychoanalysis and what women wanted: Freud said it was a penis. “Handy on a picnic?” I suggested.
“I’m not joking.”
“You wish you were a man?”
She shook her head again. “I just want a penis.”
Meanwhile, she married eminent philosophers. The first was a Harvard professor whose specialty was the General Theory of Value. I don’t have any idea what that is, despite my years at Columbia. I think there was a second one. Then came Donald Davidson, the one she brought to Totnes. I’d never heard of him. Even so, the evening in Totnes started well. Conversation was easy until we strayed onto the subject of truth. Since I didn’t know who Donald was, I didn’t realize that he was really important on the subject.
I told him that I’d decided the fashionable view was close to right: there was no truth. The only certainty is my version of events. Not yours. Not Plato’s. Not Einstein’s. Mine. Even so, I wasn’t happy with it. Here was this concept that people had been worrying for millennia. It had to mean something more than that. All I’d learned from philosophers at Columbia was to dismiss it as “trivial”. I told him so. I also told him I’d just read that the great physicist Richard Feynman thought philosophy was a “dippy subject”. I quite liked that.
Donald’s face got red. “You want to know what truth is?”
“Sure,” I said. “You got an answer?”
“Is it raining?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if I say it’s raining, and you go outside and find that it is in fact raining, that’s truth.”
I was a little taken aback. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“If that’s all it is, I’m not interested.”
Donald face got redder. He stood up. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “Are you coming, Marcia?”
She scuttled out after him.
The reason for this story is that it ended up provoking Alger into the second and last time I saw him lose his temper.
He and Isabel were coming to Totnes for Christmas that year. Another old friend of Dexter’s was coming too, Harold Schonberg, who was music critic of the Times back then; he’d just lost his much beloved wife, and he didn’t want to spend Christmas alone.
We had no room for anybody to stay in the house. We found places for the three of them in local bed and breakfasts.
Harold flew over first class. Alger and Isabel came the way most of us do, except that they came on separate flights. Alger wasn’t just a convicted felon; his was a life full of legal tripwires: moral turpitude, adultery, whatever some cop or customs officer might dream up on the spot. Then there were the constant threats of violence from the public. The danger was just as great for Isabel if she travelled with him. The solution was two night flights, a day apart, Isabel first.
Alger admired the UK, thought the English the most civilized people on earth, the only other country he’d be prepared to live in. British customs officers took away his coat, jacket, shoes, tie and kept him for six hours in a freezing room, nothing to eat, nothing to drink. They wouldn’t let him telephone Isabel to tell her where he was; she waited with no idea of what was happening to him. Officers questioned him in rotating teams, left him alone, questioned him again. None of it was friendly. They brought in a separate trio of officers to perform a strip search.
They let him go with barely enough time to meet Isabel and Harold for the Christmas Eve train to Devon, afternoon, the last service before the holiday, packed, standing room only, a four-and-a-half hour journey in those days. Isabel often had ailments. Hypoglycaemia – too low a blood sugar content and usually something only diabetics have to worry about – was all the rage in New York. Everybody who was anybody had it. Isabel had it too. Half way through the journey to Devon, she said she was going to faint unless she had something to eat. Harold told us later that Alger looked too exhausted to move, so he’d gone in search of food himself. He struggled to the buffet car, only to find it was no longer serving, then spotted a child with a sandwich only half eaten. So he stood and stared at her until she noticed him.
“Are you hungry, poor little man?” she said.
Harold licked his lips.
“Would you like half of my sandwich?”
The story amused Harold, but his irritation with Isabel soured the air. Soon after Christmas Eve supper, he left for his B&B. Dexter was tired. Toby was in bed. I had a Christmas dinner to make the next day. We knew nothing about Alger’s ordeal with British customs or Isabel’s long, painful, uncertain wait; but anybody could see that his consummate tact had deserted him. A decided lull in the conversation failed to push them out the door. I ended up telling my story about Marcia and Donald Davidson to fill the gap.
Alger was snappish at once. He said there was clearly such a thing as truth. What was the matter with me? How could I deny it?
I told him that my father had once posed the question for his students. “Well, I can’t answer that,” the student said, “but at least I know right from wrong.”
“Then hurry home,” my father said to him, “You’ve just solved the enigma that’s plagued mankind since the beginning of history.”
Alger wasn’t amused. “Don’t you think some things are right and some are wrong?”
I said I didn’t know. Probably not.
“People die for truth.” Alger was starting to tremble as he had at the restaurant with Niels.
I couldn’t figure out what I was saying that upset him. “That doesn’t mean it exists. What about Christ? What did he die for?”
“Perhaps because he knew he was right.”
“About what?”
I’ve only once before blanked out completely, and I did again that night. It wasn’t drink. It was Alger. He was shaking with anger by this time. God knows what he said next. I remember being aware only that I’d provoked something out of control and that he was bent on tearing me apart because of it.
Even the cat ran away and hid.
Maybe Donald had had to leave the room last time. This time it was me. The interior stairs to the upper floor in the Hermitage rose out of that large room Dexter and I had made; I got half way up the flight before I even realized I’d bolted. I turned then, getting a belated glimpse of what this had been all about. “Alger I really am talking about truth,” I said. “You know, abstract truth. Like in books, like Feynman’s ‘dippy subject’. And here you are talking about your case.”
He and Isabel left shortly after that.
Dexter had great difficulty calming me. He made us a milk punch: brandy, rum, hot milk, nutmeg. Then he made another. Then another. I have no idea how many it took before I could sleep, but it had to have been close to four in the morning when I did.
An hour later, six-year-old Toby was poised at the top of the stairs, a manic grin on his face. “Christmas!” he screamed and dashed down the stairs.
That was only the beginning. I’d planned to serve two ducks and braised chestnuts for Christmas dinner. I’d plucked the ducks and shelled the chestnuts, a slow job since chestnuts have to stay whole for the dish to cook evenly. There was so much food with six people to feed over several days – shops stayed shut for the entire holiday back then – that our tiny English refrigerator was stuffed, crammed. Not a single thing extra could go into it, certainly not ducks and a flat casserole of shelled chestnuts.
A disused, unheated stairwell separated our house from the back of a High Street shop; we’d turned it into a laundry room and store for garden and carpentry tools. I’d hung the ducks from the ceiling there and stored the chestnuts on top of the clothes drier, covered in aluminium foil.
On Christmas morning, I dragged myself out to bring the ducks inside so they would be at room temperature to cook.
Disaster. I’d forgotten to secure the door, and the cat had spent the entire night balancing on the chestnuts to leap at the ducks. He’d only caught them in a couple of places – a few claw tears here and there – but the chestnuts were partly spilled out on the floor. The rest were covered in cat hair.
Dexter and I held a consultation. I had to be alone. I really did. Most of all I had to make sure I didn’t see Alger until I had myself – and my kitchen – under some control. Dexter said he’d take Alger, Isabel, Harold and Toby off to Dartmoor while I rested and prepared some more chestnuts. The Riley was a pleasure to ride in. Harold agreed at once. Isabel did too. Toby jumped up and down with glee.
“Thank you, no,” Alger said. “I’ll stay here with Joanie.”
There was an awkward pause.
Somebody once said that if Alger were standing at the bar with an ambassador and a message came in for the ambassador, the pageboy would hand it over to Alger without a second thought. The others left quietly. I was as hung over as I have ever been in my life; I sat, bleary with nausea, chestnuts on my lap, this most elegant of human beings opposite me. He talked about his son, his brother, his growing up, Harvard, his admiration for Justice Holmes. He told me that his sister had taught President Johnson’s wife to play tennis. I hadn’t known anything about a sister before that. He told me how Isabel planted summer vegetables in the garden of their Long Island cottage. Nothing about British customs or strip searches or the myriad humiliations that had become part of his daily life. No hint of the tormented beast with bandarillos stuck in its back. Not a single excuse.
But shortly before Dexter and the others returned, he smiled and summed up what he’d been saying. “You know, Joanie, I’ve led a happy life.”
The citizen’s apology to an equal he’d offended? That came later. The rooms Dexter and I had knocked together meant that the kitchen and the dining room were separated only part way by a waist-high counter. The cook was somewhat in the position of performer, and I was shaky as well as queasy by the time I was serving dinner.
Harold bragged that he could carve any beast on earth, and Dexter countered that he couldn’t carve a single one.
I said, “I do the carving in this house.”
This brought on a mild discussion of male versus female carving that occupied the table while I went to get the ducks. I’d roasted them together on a platter, but the oven shelf was a typical British cock-up of a design. It slipped as I took them out. Splat! Splat! Two ducks on a stone floor, duck juice everywhere. I glanced up.
The only person who’d witnessed this disaster was Alger.
“Might I assist your carving out here?” he said, standing so that his body hid my scrambling around on the floor from the others. “The table’s a bit crowded, don’t you think?”