First I had to console Kate.
I was so very sorry to hear about your father (I wrote). It must have been a horrible shock for you, even though you had some warning, and a little time to start to live with the idea. These can only be desolate days for you, and I hope you have some good friends at hand to help you. But I know how close you always were to him, and how he thought and felt about you, and nothing you get from other people is going to take the place of that.
I’ve never found out if these letters of sympathy do any good; I would doubt it myself. Anyway, husbands don’t send wives letters of sympathy; they send their dearest love, which is what I do now.
You don’t need me to say, stay as long as you feel you have to. There are bound to be a thousand things to do at Maraisgezicht, and you are the obvious and probably the only person to deal with them. I suppose you will be selling the place itself. Anyway, all that sort of thing can wait its turn.
New York is full, and busy, and I am working very hard, living at the Pierre as you see, and occasionally sallying out for sessions with Teller and Wallace. Teller is the tall one, Wallace the small; I was never quite sure of this till now. They are fantastic people to work with, quick like foxes. Erwin Orwin’s wife calls him ‘lover’. When I got back to NY, everyone said: ‘Haven’t seen you on TV lately,’ and that was about all they did say.
Now it is time to drop this twelve floors down the letter shute, into the hands of the tiny postman who waits to catch it. They say he has never missed a single letter, in forty years. (He has a younger brother, who switches off the lights inside refrigerators.) My love again, and call me here if there is anything you want or anything I can do.
Teller was the big one, and wrote the words; Wallace was the small, and wrote the music. Together they made up a team which knew exactly where it was going, and the quickest way to get there. They had done four shows together, and in planning this, their fifth, they thought and talked a kind of shorthand which often spanned chasms of question marks and produced the identical right answer at the same moment. They were, as Jack Taggart had warned me earlier, a very hard pair to keep up with.
When I met them in New York, I had only just made my first minimum contribution to The Pink Safari. So far, it had been easy – perhaps too easy; I felt there was bound to be something much harder for me to do, and I was not disappointed. All I had achieved at this stage was to produce a bare blueprint of the linking material for the music and songs of the experts. This was, as they speedily showed me, only a dot on a chart, a point of departure.
What I had done with Ex Afrika – and it was not by accident – was to simplify it, trim it down, switch on a few extra lights, and give it a transfusion of cheerfulness in place of foreboding.
It was still the story of white South Africans having fun on top of their volcano, and Negroes, even in degradation, having fun in mockery of the whites. But this schism was not the end of the world for either – my picture was of two contrasting cultures, two kinds of life, which, when they met and touched, did not inevitably blast off into a dark orbit of hatred and contempt.
The storyline was sad in parts, like life, and funny too; people struck noble attitudes and flourished weapons, but they also tripped over their own togas, and sometimes discovered that their weapons were toys from the wrong catalogue. Boy met girl, and made the most of it; and if, somewhere offstage, something sinister was smouldering, the smoke was not too acrid, the smell not too noisome.
Life went on, for man, woman and dog, and it was never entirely futile, nor disgraceful, nor unbearable, at any level.
‘Keep it light,’ Erwin Orwin had cautioned, when we said goodbye after our first lunch. ‘We’re not solving any problems with this one. We’re setting them to music.’ I had stuck to this directive, and he liked what I had done so far. But it was only the beginning. From now on, I had to be on call, ready with the vast improvements which everyone seemed to take for granted.
I enjoyed every moment of it, not least because – after many weeks of dolce far niente – it was just the sort of wit-sharpening process of which I stood most in need. We worked in a colossal barn of a studio, tacked onto the back of one of Erwin Orwin’s run-down, off-Broadway theatres; and, at this stage, everything to do with the production was centred upon this echoing foundry.
There, Teller scribbled the lyrics, while Wallace hummed the tunes in a thin nasal baritone; a tireless man at a piano (he was actually Teller’s mother’s cousin) transcribed the result, and hammered it out for size. I was there myself, enjoying it all immensely, admiring the way these people could worry away at a bone until it was clean-picked and ready for inspection; but I was also there to be shot at, by anyone with my kind of gun.
Sometimes Teller would say: ‘We want some diddle-diddle music in there,’ and Wallace, almost before the words were out of his partner’s mouth, would go ‘Diddle diddle diddle,’ mimicking a violin, and the man at the piano would jot it down, and stick in a few grace-notes and arpeggios, and incorporate it into the score.
Sometimes, more alarmingly, they would both turn to me, and say: ‘Hold it! That needs two more lines, and a joke about the spear, and a song-cue for My Mother Bids Me Bare My Breast,’ and then they would wait, as everyone in the room would wait, from Erwin Orwin’s secretary to the man who had come to look at the humidifier, until I produced the right answer. There was never any question of my saying: ‘Let me think about it.’ People didn’t use that phrase any more.
Erwin Orwin spent a great deal of time at the studio, stamping and wheezing his way in, manoeuvring his vast bulk behind a corner desk, and sitting down like an enormous spider come to inspect one of his chain of webs. I would have thought that Teller and Wallace might have objected to this invasion, but it seemed that they were used to it, and that this was the way an Erwin Orwin musical was always evolved, at this particular stage.
There was no nonsense about the isolation of the artist, or the paramount necessity for cerebration in an ivory tower; we were producing a public spectacle, soon to be dissected by a thousand probing eyes, and it was taken for granted that the more people who crowded in at this formative moment, the better were our chances of shredding out the rubbish.
If any other team worked like this, I had never heard of it. But that didn’t make any difference. These were the rules in this particular establishment, and anyone who objected to them was free to join another circus. Erwin Orwin did it this way, and so did Teller and Wallace, and so, at the tail-end of the comet, did I.
Orwin came to see us; people came to see him. Stage designers arrived with miniature sets; dress-designers brought sketches, and slapped them down on the table in a petulant act of salesmanship. Agents bounced in, bearing fabulous package deals involving one girl-acrobat, one husband who played the bassoon like an angel, and one TV commitment which could be fixed. Mothers brought children, who stumbled through their tap-dance routines and were then hustled out again, to the sound of offstage slaps and wails. Men came, and took off their ties, and sang; girls came, and shed their furs like snakes in spring, and danced.
The men would glower and flash their eyes, intent on projecting an image of the menace which a show such as this must surely demand; the girls, more realistic, darted fiery glances at Erwin Orwin, at Teller and Wallace, and even, as a last forlorn resort, at me. Men and women alike arrived in all shapes, sizes, and colours, since one half of the cast was to be Negro. But they all had one thing in common. They wanted to be in The Pink Safari.
That fact itself would have been flattering, if I had had any time at all to be flattered. But I was low man on this totem, and working, harder than I had worked for many a long year, at an entirely new job which fascinated me. It was earn-while-you-learn at its most compelling; and as long as the day lasted, I could bear nothing else in mind, and did not want to.
Gradually the show began to take shape, which made us all happy, and vaguely suspicious of our luck. But I could be happy in another way, without suspicion, since I had a dividend declared to no one else. When our work came to a weary stop, at each nightfall, and the team cast its slightly withered petals, I still had Susan Crompton.
Like all intent romantics, we had settled down to the routine of our choice. Between six and eight each evening, depending on theatrical pressures, Susan would meet me, not too far from the studio, at a bar on 44th Street. There I would down the first recuperative drink of the day, and we would sit and hold hands, re-establishing the world of sensual contact. From then on, we would take the town for all it was worth.
The things I liked to do, in these off-hours, were luckily the same as hers – or, if they were not, if she were ever tagging along in mutiny and despair, it never showed. We both enjoyed eating, and New York was made for such a hobby; there was better French, Italian, or German cooking to be discovered here, than in large tracts of the respective homelands.
Of course, the sources needed tracing, but we were never in any hurry. We could afford to shop around, and we liked to wander.
Our range of choice was fantastic, enough to enliven any conceivable mood, though we had our favourites, and they also became traditional. If we were monumentally hungry, we went downtown to Luchows, and gorged ourselves, like any Bavarian trencherman and his frau, on heavy slices of everything in sight, washed down by treacly draughts of Loewenbrau.
If we were feeling elegant and Gallic, the Maison Basque or Maude Chez Elle stood with open doors, ready with anything to be found anywhere within the Dictionnaire Gastronomique of Larousse. If we felt – or wished to feel – like bulgy Italian peasants on the spree, we would dive into Romeo Salta’s, and there dive into the pasta.
The kind of uninhibited lobster-gorge which called for a bib and a succession of finger-bowls was all ready for us, down at the King of the Sea. If we wanted food cooked by blowtorch, or Chinese mounds of this and that; or the roast beef of Old England (via Argentina), or goulash, or bouillabaisse, or clams steamed in Hawaiian seaweed, there were places for these, too. If we were lazy, or didn’t care much either way, we stayed where we were, and nibbled hot pastrami and dill pickles, and looked forward to starting all over again, the following week, with renewed appetite and another seven different places to choose from.
Later we would be in the mood to listen, and to look on while other people sang the songs and made the jokes. I was anti-theatre at this time, or rather, I didn’t want anyone else’s dramatic ideas crossing up my own; we therefore kept away from other men’s masterpieces, and enjoyed the best trivia we could find.
Every night, there were dozens of such offerings waiting for our inspection; ‘club acts’ at the smart places, off-Broadway reviews, places like Upstairs at the Downstairs or The Establishment, where wit was irreverent, and guaranteed, and very funny. Or we would go in search of music – our kind of music, which was usually jazz; Dixieland at Eddie Condon’s, or wherever Wilbur de Paris might be ripping out with Wrought Iron Rag; or finding something cooler down in Greenwich Village, even if it was nothing more than a piano, a drum and a clarinet wandering up and down one’s spine, like an exploring hand; or meeting the edge of crudity on the edge of Harlem – a quartet of hopped-up Negroes singing That Chick’s Too Young To Fry; or watching George Shearing’s blind hands on any keyboard in town; or (by way of somersault) joining the operatic extroverts at the ‘singing tables’ of Chez Vito, where jazz gave way to the melodic line, and barber-shop to bel canto.
When the weather grew warmer, we used to walk a lot, particularly homeward bound at the end of our evenings, through the many villages which made up this huge city. Like London, New York was sliced into segments, endless in number, utterly different in character, and (if one wished) completely self-contained.
One need never leave the area of Sixth Avenue between 50th and 54th Streets; one could shop, eat, live and love in a narrow band of the East 70s; one could settle down in the Village below 14th Street, and never come up for any other kind of air. Crossing such boundaries on our way home was like wandering the length of Europe, through a succession of open frontiers.
We usually finished up with a non-buying session in front of the glittering windows of Fifth Avenue, where Cartier and Saks were, at this time of night, available to rich and poor alike; and then we would move a little way across town again, past the doorway where lurked the huge blind man in the khaki Balaclava helmet, and into our last dive of all, the downstairs room at ‘21’; a retreat which, in the small hours of the morning, was not all tourists – and not all celebrities, either.
Here, as in many other places all over town, I was unlikely to be anonymous, and Susan was enough to turn a score of heads anywhere she went. But I had grown careless, during all this time of love and dreaming and desire; I wanted this girl, I had her on a single string, and I did not give a damn who knew about it.
At ‘21’, give or take a few knowing stares, we would merge into the background, and sign off our last public appearance with a drink, and a gossip with anyone we knew, and, if still hungry, with the eggs Benedict or oysters Rockefeller which custom dictated; and then, at one or two or three, we would saunter out again, night owls going back to roost; down the echoing street, up the wide deserted highway of the Avenue, and gently homewards, hand in hand, to bed.
‘Home’ was on 54th Street, where I had installed her in a very small apartment in a tall, run-down house which, if the traffic on the stairs were anything to go by, was tacitly given over to such arrangements. (My hotel, of course, was out; and, for various semi-admirable reasons, my own apartment did not appeal.) Susan had settled happily into this nest, and organised the milk and the groceries and the newspapers and the dry cleaning, like any blinded bride. I had moved a few of my clothes in, and a work table for my typewriter, and I spent a lot of time there.
I was getting to know her much better. What had started as a cheerful fling in Barbados had developed, imperceptibly, into a liaison of a different sort. It had a continuing, almost domestic quality, and I thus had the time and the chance to observe her more closely. In the process, I was finding out much more about Susan, Susan in depth.
I had never before been at close quarters with a girl whose beauty was so remarkable that it put her into the professional category, and it was strange to watch her as she went about the business of preparing to face the public gaze. Bathing, dressing and make-up never took less than three hours, even if she were just going down the street to pick up a can of beans (which was her most likely local errand); her hair alone, although in the severe and simple style which I had voted for, and which she had continued, was good for half an hour of combing and patting, fingering and lacquering.
I remembered how surprised I had been, one morning, to walk into the bedroom and find her standing before the mirror, her whole head covered by an impenetrable gauze bag as she prepared to put on a mohair sweater.
‘Good God!’ I said, startled. ‘No one told me it was Hallowe’en. What on earth is that thing?’
Her head came slowly out of the neck of the sweater, like some nightmare cork, and then she removed the bag, very carefully, and there underneath was a sleek head of hair and a brand new make-up, all ready to go.
‘It’s my head bag,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you ever seen one before?’
‘No. Did you invent it?’
She shook her head. ‘Models use them. They protect your hair and make-up and everything.’
‘Why can’t you put on the make-up after you put on the sweater?’
‘It doesn’t work out so well.’
I examined the bag, which was made, it seemed, of old nylon stockings tacked into the shape of a pineapple. ‘Does everyone know about those things?’
‘Models do. But you can’t buy them. You have to make them yourself.’
‘I must get the concession.’
As with her hair, so with a lot of other things. There were professional ways of dealing with whatever might go wrong – dresses that wrinkled, stockings that sagged, girdles that bunched, straps that showed, mascara that caked, lamé that might tarnish, sequins that might shed, furs that might mat themselves into tufts; and she knew all the appropriate tricks, and could put them to work whenever necessary.
She managed everything which concerned her appearance with meticulous skill; it was the sort of narcissistic devotion which one could never quarrel with, nor grow impatient about, since the result, when at last she stepped out onto the street, or walked into a restaurant, or nestled into one’s arms, was feminine perfection.
But I could not help noticing that only this end result was shining clean and chic; the background from which it sprang was deplorable. Compared with Kate’s spotless, laundered elegance, Susan was grubby and disorganised; her flower-like appearance was rooted in a positive farmyard of untidiness, hit-or-miss housekeeping, and tawdry chaos.
The apartment – our warm and cosy little home – was like a neglected zoo. Lipsticked towels littered the bathroom floor; rubber instruments of hair-raising complexity and dubious application swung to and fro behind its doors. Soiled Kleenex decorated the dressing- table; cupboards or shelves unwarily probed might reveal anything – rejected underwear, torn brassières, exhausted deodorant sprays, miniature yet rusty razors, squeezed-out tubes of assorted lubricants; all the dirty jetsam of cherished femininity.
She made a bed in one swift movement; she left the bath just as it was, with a tidemark of scented bath oil clinging to it; the sitting-room was littered with every movable object – cushions, records, magazines, loaded ashtrays, used glasses. Neither bed nor bath nor sitting-room was ever more than fractionally mine.
She was a dear girl, and a wonderful one to sleep with; but I would have hated to share an apartment with her, on a long-term basis. She looked, in public, like a million dollars; but home was a real slum, and she was an adorable, highly decorative slut.
Wonderful in bed she certainly was; it made up for almost everything else, as, at Stages One and Two, it generally did. When I came to know more about her, this talent of hers was possibly more surprising than anything else.
My main discovery in this area was almost accidental, stemming not so much from research as from my own vanity – or, as the couch-concessionaires would put it, my need for potency reassurance. In bed, talking (as we sometimes did, without too much diffidence) of other men who had enjoyed these same favours, I asked her: ‘Who was best?’ and she had answered: ‘You, darling! You’re fantastic!’ so promptly that even a self-deluding male was bound to be suspicious.
Something in her answer had seemed automatic, and therefore odd; when I questioned her, in the loving-nagging way which women must often find unfair, she finally said: ‘Sorry, Johnny. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. But everyone asks that question.’
‘Do they?’
‘Sure.’ She was smoking a cigarette, lazily, propped high on the pillow, surveying the world from her own languorous slope of Olympus. ‘It’s usually the first thing they say, afterwards. Sometimes it’s the only thing they say, except “Look out!” or “Jesus!”’
I digested this, without too much appetite. ‘Who was best, then?’
‘My husband.’
Well, well, I thought: a fresh character; one learned something new every day. ‘I never knew you were married,’ I told her. ‘When did that happen?’
‘About two years ago. When I was eighteen, and miserable. But it worked out pretty well, for a time. Very well. He was a doll, in his own way.’
‘Mr Crompton?’
‘Mr Crompton.’
‘Who was he?’
‘Oh, just a little guy, a drummer in a lousy orchestra. “The Five Hotrods”. But he was all I had then. He was wonderful to me.’
‘How wonderful?’
‘He took all the trouble.’
‘Trouble?’
‘You know, preparation. And he used to talk all the time it was happening. Sort of dirty talk, but on purpose. It was the first I’d heard. It was very exciting.’ She blew a smoke-ring towards the shadowy ceiling, and went off at a tangent. ‘You know that joke about talking in bed? The psychiatrist says: “Do you talk to your wife during sexual intercourse?” and the man says: “Only if I can reach the phone.” That was one of his.’
‘But what happened to him? Are you divorced?’
‘I don’t think so … Oh, he just got fed up with everything. Like, the trouble was too much trouble. And he used to think it was his fault that it didn’t happen more easily.’
‘Whose fault was it?’
‘Mine.’
Then she told me all about it.
She had had a curious, even grotesque sexual history. She had been wild about sex, from the age of eleven; but it was sex pictorial, sex sniggering, sex self-practised. ‘I’ll beat the hell out of you,’ her father had warned, ‘if I ever see you within ten feet of a boy,’ and he had beaten the hell out of her, once, and she had feared him, and boys, and men, for years afterwards. She was left to her own devices, and the devices had proved ruinous.
Secretly ashamed, secretly delighted, frantic and then downcast, she had become her own lover. ‘It nearly drove me mad,’ she told me, her eyes wide. ‘But I had to do it, maybe ten times a day. I just couldn’t stop.’
It had had a sadder effect than driving her temporarily to distraction. Now, she could never ‘get anywhere’ with a man, unless this service were first provided for her; and even then there was no guarantee. It might take two hours or more, so deadening and abrasive had been that earlier process. What man had the patience? What man, especially, was going to pay for this dubious privilege?
And who cared, anyway? Girls were there to be used … It had been her final misfortune that her first true lover had been a textbook athlete who also concentrated on his own progress, and never gave a shadow of thought to hers. Others of the same kind had followed; a girl so beautiful positively invited swift conquest, and swifter disposal.
Her husband had been the only man who knew of her problems, and had loved her enough to try to solve it. But there were limits to love of this sort; he had lasted no longer than any other radical reformer who tired of trying to persuade a dull electorate to rally to the poll.
The result was with her now, as a permanent disability. Though in body co-operative and lively, she remained alone, and untouched by any spark of appetite. In the act of love, the important part of her lay back, isolated, dégagée, munching mental peanuts until the brief storm passed.
‘Men are so quick,’ she said, explaining some more of this, as if she had to justify her inability. ‘All that build-up, and then “Phtt!”, and it’s over.’
‘It’s sad,’ I said, and in truth I meant it.
‘Sad and silly. One misses the dwelling application of the soul.’ When she saw me staring at her she giggled and said: ‘It’s all right. I read that in a book.’
Amazingly, she was still cheerful and undefeated, in this and as far as I could see, all other respects. She was also vulnerable, and did not seem to care about that, either. One might have thought that this constructive frigidity of hers would have put her in a strong position, not a weak one; that she could have afforded to ration or withhold her gifts, in an area which meant so little to her.
But obviously she still liked men, and could not really do without them, and constantly invited a relationship which, in the carnal realm, amounted to no more than a cigarette, and much less than a square meal. It did not make much sense, but this only joined the long list of other things which, in the female world, did not make much sense, either.
She remained, when all was said, a wonderful person to make love with, and she was, for me at that moment, just right. Indeed, she was almost too available, posing no demands, requiring no effort. She was always there, always wide open and suggestible, always ready.
I suppose that, giving me thus nothing at all to measure up to, she was bad for me. But I felt I would survive such self-indulgence. This was all I really wanted: a girl who would lie down at the given signal, and was not the smallest trouble otherwise.
Even the ‘rescue operation’, which I had planned with such nobility of purpose down in Barbados, had been no particular problem. I found that I knew enough people in the middle reaches of TV to win her a re-entry of sorts, into that silly section of television which, for pretty girls, involved trotting out the prizes on give-away shows, and holding up audience cues on cards designed by some nameless actuary to leave the chest and legs as principal features of the landscape.
In pursuing this line of endeavour, she had modelled furs, and been chased across the screen by small agile comedians, and had pretended to faint when kissed by Dr Kildare, and been photographed winking at the late-night audience before composing herself for sleep. (She photographed very well, though she was really too big for the confinements of the 21-inch screen.) She had earned about $600, which delighted her, and spent it all on a nightdress and matching lace peignoir, which delighted me. It added up to a marginal living, the kind which gave her something to do, and kept her out of mischief. At least, so she assured me.
‘No passes?’ I asked her, when we were debating this aspect of her career.
‘Not really. Nothing desperate, anyway. The policy seems to be hands-off.’ She smiled across our dinner-table, which was in one of the darker corners of a restaurant known to the trade as the Almost Inn. ‘You’re really quite important, you know.’
There were implications there which I did not welcome, but I let them go. ‘So everything’s all right.’
‘Oh yes. I’m doing another of those quiz show things next week. But–’
‘But what?’
‘I really want to act.’
‘What sort of acting?’
‘You know. Real acting. On the stage. But I don’t know enough about it.’
‘You’d better go to school, then.’
‘Oh, Johnny!’ She was delighted, and showed it with a smile which, if there had been enough light, might have ravished the entire room. ‘Could I?’
‘Why not?’
She went to school, for three whole weeks, joining an establishment absolutely dedicated (according to its brochure) to the living theatre as an art form, an arm of the cultural crusade, and a fulfilling way of life. But three weeks was enough to determine that the omens here were not favourable.
‘It’s not for me,’ she reported, dispiritedly, when we met after one of her afternoon classes. ‘I’ll never be any good at Shakespeare.’
‘There are lots of other things.’
‘Oh, I know that. But I don’t think I’ll learn them at this place. The students are all so damned dramatic! And they’re such kids!’
‘But you could still learn something useful, all the same.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not for me,’ she said again. ‘The things I need to know, I know already. Let’s face it, I’m never going to be Katharine Cornell.’
‘So?’
‘What I want is a small part, now.’ She saw my face, which I suppose was disappointed, or preoccupied with the instability of the world of self-expression. ‘But don’t you worry, anyway. You’ve been so good to me already. I don’t want to be a nuisance. Something is sure to turn up.’
‘It’s not so easy.’
‘That’s why I don’t want you to worry about it.’
Of course, I did worry, a little. I hoped to make her happy, because she had made me so; and selfishly, because I did not want any frustrated actresses hanging round the foot of my bed, declaring that all they needed was one break – just one. I thought about the problem, on and off, for a day. Then I had a suitably unscrupulous idea.
Teller and Wallace and Steele were hard at work, at one of the things which was giving them trouble – a Johannesburg native location scene which had to steer a delicate course between the maudlin and the murderous – when Erwin Orwin came into the studio. He sat down in his corner, as usual, and busied himself with the pile-up of papers which, however large it grew, never snowed him under for more than an hour of any day.
Clearing for action, I strolled over, leaving Teller and Wallace to weave a few more of their spells round the piano.
‘Good morning, Erwin,’ I greeted him. We had progressed to this stage of familiarity, after a formal period unusual in theatre. ‘Is this your day for doing favours?’
He looked up, losing one enormous jowl in the process but not really altering his air of heavyweight consequence.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he growled. ‘You’ve got a girl who wants a part in a play.’
Though I was used to his displays of intuition, which had made him a very rich man in an area where, above all, hunches paid off handsomely, I thought this was a superior example of the art. I tried to take it in my stride.
‘Just that.’
‘I knew it.’ It was difficult to tell if he were in a good humour or not. ‘I should have put something about this in your contract … Well, let’s hear the worst.’
I told him about Susan, using certain significant and glowing adjectives from my own field of achievement. ‘I don’t want to make anything special out of it,’ I finished. ‘I know you get ten of these things a day. But if you could possibly fit her in somewhere–’
‘Can she sing?’
‘She’s sung at the Met.’
‘Oh, come on!’ he said. ‘You don’t have to overdo it.’
‘But it’s true. She was one of the gypsies in Carmen.’
‘I knew there was a bull involved somewhere … OK, Johnny. I’ll take a look at her, if that’ll keep you happy. I like happy authors, provided they don’t cost me too much.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m leaving for the coast in a couple of hours. Is she available now?’
‘In ten minutes,’ I told him. Susan was, in fact, waiting round the corner, in our bar on 44th Street.
‘Wheel her in, before I change my mind.’
It was funny to see Susan in the studio, and to watch, as a neutral observer, while she put on her act for someone else. She really did it very well, with the right amount of deference to the great Broadway producer, and the right show of leg for the man behind the label. When she had gone, with a wink to me and a smile for the general public so warm and lovely that even Teller’s mother’s cousin looked up from his piano, I closed in again to scout the prospects.
‘What do you think?’ I inquired of Erwin.
‘I wouldn’t ask that, if I were you … Pretty girl, all right. Too pretty – she’ll never be taken seriously. What do you want me to do for her? Something in a road company? I’ve got Greensleeves playing Chicago, and then going on west.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s not quite what I had in mind.’
‘OK, OK. She’s too delicate to travel. But there’s not much here in New York.’ He fingered the nearest of his chins. ‘There’s a bit part coming up in Josephine. The victory pageant scene. The girl who plays the Goddess of Plenty got herself pregnant again.’
‘That sounds wonderful.’
‘It’s not,’ he said, rather grumpily. ‘It’s a fill-in between Austerlitz and Waterloo … Hundred-twenty-five a week, then. Why should I pay your bills?’
‘Thank you so much, Erwin,’ I said formally. ‘It’s very good of you.’
‘I like happy authors,’ he said again. His face cleared, as if, against all likelihood, he really did prefer to make people happy. ‘Incidentally, when’s your wife coming back?’ he asked, and burst out into laughter so loud that Teller, who had heard the laughter but not the joke, looked up and called out: ‘My God, Erwin! Let’s keep that one in.’
I could have done without Erwin’s last comment, though it was not much of a price to pay for having this thing settled, so satisfactorily, with a small wave of the wand. But of course his question had the truth at its core. I did not want Kate to come back yet; and I knew, perfectly well, the reason why. It was not entirely the obvious reason.
Apart from her tremendous sensual appeal, Susan was giving me something else; along with the generous girl came freedom from that close, cool and penetrating inspection of love, which I could only sum up as Kate herself, and which had begun to unnerve me.
It was peace I really wanted; peace, and a long truce to the cold war which our marriage had in part become. With Susan, at last, I had established an uncomplicated, simple give-and-take, without deep engagement, without inquisition, without comment, without the cloying siege of love. With Susan, it was summertime, and the living was easy.
Once again, that was all I wanted; and if it was more than I deserved, that was my dividend.
We worked all through a hot mid-year, in a town full of tourists, Turkish-bath humidity, gasoline fumes and crabby cab drivers. By early September, The Pink Safari was finished, or as nearly finished as it would be before Erwin Orwin, that maddening perfectionist, started pulling it to pieces again on the stage; casting had begun in earnest, and rehearsals were due to start in about a month.
I had been paid my second $15,000, and had banked it, in the sense that it had been pushed through one bank-teller’s wicket and had started to leak out at another. Erwin had then asked me to stay on with him, on a salary basis, until the première. It was being forecast, with true theatrical vagueness, that the show might start its out-of-town try-outs in January, and open in New York some time in April.
The smaller partnership of Crompton and Steel continued, with unflagging energy, or (not to be too boastful) with the energy appropriate to an affair which had gone on for seven straight months. It seemed that she was happy, in bed and out of it; professionally, she was still with My Darling Josephine, and had been promoted from the Goddess of Plenty to the Spirit of Paris, whose décolletage was lower. I had stopped paying substantial sums of money for not using my suite at the Pierre, and divided the time between Susan’s modest lair, and occasionally camping out in the apartment.
I was beginning to wonder, at odd moments of the day, what was happening to Kate.
She had stayed where she was, down at Maraisgezicht in the Cape Province; regular letters arrived, saying how busy she was, how much there remained to be done in the settlement of her father’s estate, how impossible it was to come back to New York at the moment. I believed her, but I had a curious feeling that there was a loose end somewhere, some item unidentified and out of my control. Or perhaps it was just that we could not talk things over any more.
I began to speculate on what she was really thinking. One of her recent letters, at least, had brought some substantial news: ‘I have inherited, after taxes, about £600,000, but I still love you, just the same.’ I could credit at least half of this, and, perversely, wanted to believe the other half.
Then, in October, with rehearsals just starting, an unexpected courier arrived, bringing news.
I was at home – my home early one evening, wandering about the silent rooms in a dressing-gown, after a bath which had done nothing much to remove the scars of a sticky day, when the phone rang. I very nearly ignored it, being in that nineteenth-century mood which was prepared to dismiss the telephone as the damned intrusion it was; but it rang for a long time and finally I picked it up.
A voice said, very loudly: ‘Enfin!’ and then: ‘Is that Jonathan Steele, if you please? Is it?’ The rasping tone and fractured accent could only belong to one man. It was my old and wily Greek friend from darkest Johannesburg, Eumor Eumorphopulos.
‘Eumor!’ I shouted, unreasonably delighted. ‘What are you doing in New York?’
‘Trying to find you,’ he answered, promptly and sardonically. ‘Where you live these days?’
‘Here. But I was away last night.’
‘Ha!’
‘It’s not “Ha!” at all,’ I said. ‘I was sitting up with a sick manuscript. Where are you staying?’
‘At the Plaza. But I leave again tonight.’
‘Where to?’
‘Peruvia.’
‘That’s Peru, Eumor,’ I told him. ‘And it’s in the other direction. But hop into a cab and come on over.’
‘I bring bottle champagne?’
‘I have bottle champagne waiting. Hurry!’
After a six years’ interval, he really looked very odd – or perhaps I had forgotten how odd he had looked in the first place. He seemed smaller, older and greener than I ever remembered; under the kind of wide-brimmed black hat which George Raft wore on very late-night movies, his face was more creased, more crafty and more Balkan than ever. He advanced through the open door at a run, threw his arms round me with a cry of ‘My friend!’ and kissed me energetically on both cheeks. I was not at all put out. I had always had a soft spot for Eumor, who had proved himself so good a champion in Johannesburg, and had been, I remembered, the first non-publishing character to read Ex Afrika.
When our outlandish greetings were over, he wandered round the room, fingered the curtain material, and asked ‘How much?’ as if he really expected an answer. Then, across brimming glasses, we toasted each other, and the happy past, and set to work to bring it up to date.
He was going to Peru to do something about a bauxite mine. Was he buying it? I asked.
‘Or selling,’ he answered, between swallows. ‘These things very difficult. I have not yet made my mind. You know I am a millionaire again?’
‘So am I, Eumor. But I spent it all.’
‘Mon élève. You want some more money?’
‘No, but I’ll keep you in mind. What time does your plane leave?’
‘Middle night.’
‘We’ll have dinner, and I’ll drive you out to the airport. But can’t you stay any longer?’
He shook his head. ‘Have meetings in Peruvia. I stopped to see you. I promised Kate. But I come back in three, four weeks.’
‘How is Kate?’
‘Fabelhaft! Sends her love.’
‘What’s she doing, and when’s she coming back?’
He held out his glass for a refill before answering: ‘She is working hard. She doesn’t come back till work is finished.’
‘When will that be?’
He looked at me, his eyes calculating. ‘Perhaps never, Jonathan.’
‘Good God!’ I said, startled. ‘Why? What does she want to stay for? What is there to do?’
‘Plenty.’ He sat down, and began to speak more slowly and carefully. ‘You know she has Maraisgezicht to look after now. She is very busy with that. She feels she cannot leave yet, because of her people.’
‘But the place can run itself,’ I protested. ‘With a good agent. Or she could sell it.’
‘She does not want to sell it. She does not want to sell anything. She wants to stay. Because of that, and because of South Africa.’
‘Is that the real reason?’
‘I believe so.’
‘But what about South Africa?’
‘It is terrible, Jonathan. Such hatred, such bad laws, such division of peoples. You would not believe.’
‘I don’t see what that has to do with Kate.’
‘It has to do with everyone.’ He looked up suddenly. ‘It has to do with you.’
‘No, sir.’
He was silent, and I felt that we were in danger of parting almost before we had properly met. I tried to soften my last firm reply.
‘Of course it has to do with everyone, in a way. But you can’t go on tearing yourself to bits all your life … Be fair, Eumor. I did what I could about that sort of thing, with Ex Afrika.’
He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I agree. A very wonderful book. How I remember when I first read it! You write another one like that?’
‘No.’
‘Why not, Jonathan?’
‘Because I’ve done it once, and I’m not going to do it again. What do you want me to write this time? Son of Ex Afrika?’
‘You are son of Ex Afrika,’ he countered, with, for Eumor, a rather subtle twist of phrase. ‘Don’t turn your back on your father.’
I had to laugh, since I did not wish to get angry, nor sad either. I wanted to enjoy my friend’s company, and the grisly side of the grey world was going to wait till I had done so. I poured out some more champagne, and tried to convey my own mood of relaxation.
‘Come on, Eumor,’ I told him. ‘We’re not going to solve any of these problems tonight. I’m sorry if Kate’s getting really involved, and we’ll talk some more about that, but not just now. Hell, I haven’t seen you for six years! Tell me what’s been happening in the old home town. How’s Skip Shannon? How’s Fraternelli?’
We gossiped and drank for about an hour, touching nothing that hurt, enjoying a re-hash of South African wild life such as the tourists did not see. Eumor, who had been thoughtful, almost brooding, now seemed ready to join in this nonsense. Presently I looked at my watch, and at the two empty bottles, and said: ‘I’m meeting a girl for dinner, Eumor. Let’s pick her up, and then eat somewhere. She’s got to go to the theatre about nine, so we can come back to all this later.’
His corrugated olive face assumed a well-remembered air of appetite.
‘What girl is this?’
‘She’s beautiful, Eumor. You’ll love her.’
‘Tall?’
‘Huge.’
‘All right. She do for me. What about you?’
‘I like food. I’ll just watch.’
‘You voyeur now?’
‘Me voyeur. You Tarzan.’
As a compliment to the visiting potentate, we dined at a Greek restaurant, where Eumor, taking over completely – and who had a better right? – used the Grecian inside track to command one of the strangest meals I had ever eaten, seeming to consist of large, unrelated portions of things from different ends of the normal menu.
Among other items, we had stuffed vine leaves, and a moussaka of aubergines, and skewered lamb, and most of a sturgeon, and piles of those elegant long fritters, perfumed with rose-water, called Scaltsounia, and honey-cake, and a jar – an actual amphora with the classic tapered base – of white Retsina wine which tasted, most agreeably, of pine-tree gum.
In sum, it was a prodigious meal, and it made my friend Eumor very popular with Susan.
This seemed to be mutual. Eumor always behaved, towards any woman who was not seriously disfigured, with such alarming gallantry that it was difficult to gauge his private scale; but there could be no doubt that this time he thought he had moved into Elysian fields of beauty.
There was no doubt either, judging from his increasingly complicated jokes, that he was taking my relationship with Susan for granted; and indeed, since at one point she absent-mindedly said something about the laundry having ruined one of my shirts, not too much guesswork was needed.
We were a cheerful party, and when, at nine o’clock, Susan had to leave us, to make her triumphant second-act appearance as the Spirit of Paris, she was given a flourishing send-off, and Eumor kissed her hand so often and so hungrily that other diners cheered. But I did not make a date for her to meet us later. Eumor and I had left some important things unsaid, and I was now in the right mood of well-fed benevolence not to wish to shirk them.
Eumor came back from the door, whither his farewell enthusiasm had swept him, and sat down with gleaming eyes.
‘More wine!’ he said, and snapped his fingers, alerting the whole world of waiters. ‘What a girl! I meet her when I come back, yes?’
‘I’ll warn her about that,’ I assured him, and hoped it did not sound too ambiguous. ‘You really liked her, Eumor?’
Having nothing else to kiss, Eumor kissed the back of his own hand, in private homage. ‘I love her already!’ he exclaimed, and snatched his freshly-poured glass of Retsina, and gulped it as no doubt it was meant to be gulped. ‘How long has she been your friend?’
‘About seven months.’
‘Oh …’ He raised his eyebrows very high indeed. ‘I did not realise. That’s not good, Jonathan. That is too long a situation.’
I drank also. ‘Why too long? She’s a beautiful girl, and I’m very fond of her.’
‘But seven months,’ he said, and I felt he was ready to be serious again, and that we were moving to that part of the field from which I had coaxed him earlier. This time, it did not seem to matter. ‘It’s too long,’ he said again. ‘Too permanent. After all, she is only–’
‘Only what?’
‘Poule de luxe.’
I wasn’t going to lose my head over a point of protocol. ‘She’s more than that.’
‘Not for you, my friend.’
‘Why not for me?’
‘Because you have Kate.’
This was something else I was ready to talk about. ‘That’s been a long situation too, Eumor. Six years. Remember that joke you used to tell? About putting pennies in a bottle, and taking them out again?’
‘It was a joke.’
‘Jokes can be true.’
‘And now you are putting pennies into this bottle,’ he said, with sudden energy. ‘What does that prove? Even I could put pennies into that one. At my age! But it is not marriage. Not marriage like you have.’
‘Like I had,’ I corrected him. ‘It isn’t the same now. Why should it be? These things always fade out, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. Or to expect it. I honestly believe there’s a natural term for every marriage – five years, ten years, whatever it is – and after that it’s over, except as a matter of habit, of social convenience, to keep the kids in the station-wagon and the neighbours in the rumpus room.’ I could see from his face that he was not agreeing, but I pressed on with an argument which, at that moment, across that dinner-table, armed by that particular glass of wine, seemed crystal clear, and utterly logical. ‘It’s true, Eumor! Never shake thy gory locks at me! Marriage can be like that, a sort of hen-coop of togetherness. But because it comes to an end, that doesn’t mean it’s been a failure. It may have been wonderful, for its correct length of time, and then it finishes, at exactly the right moment.’
‘My poor Jonathan,’ he said, and there was real compassion in his voice. ‘Is this what you have been thinking, in your little tower of success? You cannot have changed so much! What you say is nonsense, and you know it. With Kate you have a wonderful marriage. With this girl–’ he jerked his head towards the street door, ‘–you have just a–’ he used a word, presumably Greek, which I did not understand, and which I took to be biological. ‘You cannot throw away someone like Kate, just because you do not wish to make love with her every day.’
‘Twice every day.’
He was not to be turned from his argument; flippancy would not stem this flood. ‘And now you have this girl twice every day, and you think it–’ he waved his hand irritably, searching for the word he wanted, ‘–you think it cancels Kate? You are mad! Have the girl all you want, until you are tired and don’t want her any more. Have her until you break the bed, or break something else! But do not leave Kate alone. Do not leave yourself alone. You and Kate need each other, and you have proved it.’
‘How, proved it?’
‘By being married six years, and missing her when she is gone.’
‘I never said anything about missing her.’
‘You do not have to. This girl is part of missing her.’
‘Oh, rubbish!’ I was sure this was not true. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Eumor. Susan isn’t a substitute for Kate. She’s her successor.’ I did not quite like this idea, and I corrected it. ‘I mean, she’s a complete change, the very opposite of Kate, and just what I need. She doesn’t give a damn what I–’ This was getting too complicated, and confused, and I broke it off. ‘Anyway, Kate’s OK,’ I said, after a moment. ‘Apparently she wants to stay and look after Maraisgezicht. And she’s got all this money. She can be perfectly happy by herself.’
‘She does not want to be by herself. That I can assure you.’
It suddenly struck me that this was really why Eumor was in New York; he had come here on purpose to say these last two sentences of his; he was carrying out an appointed mission, using the weapons of wine, and friendship, and the dedicated look which belonged to the honest go-between. Though he was not the sort of man I could ever be angry with, I was irritated nonetheless.
‘Perhaps I want to be by myself,’ I said, shortly.
‘You cannot afford to be, Jonathan.’ He really was very involved in this, very earnest, very intense. I could concede that it was good to have such friends, and that at any other time, in any other area, it would have been wonderful to have this paragon of a doctor on hand, ready with the splints and the acute diagnosis and the brisk tonic which would set a man on his feet again, in no time at all. But just at the moment, I wanted to stay in bed, sick as a dog, and loving it. ‘I tell you,’ Eumor the paragon continued, ‘you need her. And she still thinks it is a good marriage, in spite of everything.’
‘In spite of what, exactly? The girl?’
‘She does not know about the girl. And she will not hear her from me.’ He put his hand on my arm. ‘Anyway, the girl is not important, unless you choose to make her so. Don’t forget that. Girls in bed are cheap. In the end they are just like money, to be enjoyed, to be spent, to be forgotten. That is why they cost money … But they should not cost anything else.’
‘What did you mean, then, that Kate thinks our marriage is OK, in spite of everything?’
‘Because of how you have changed. You used to be serious. You used to care about such things as Africa, and write about them also. Now you do not.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘It is tragedy,’ said Eumor, and looked as if he meant it.
I decided that I did not want another mourner at the bedside of significant literature, and I did not want any more of this, either. Once again, I could not quarrel with Eumor, and particularly, not where Kate was concerned; he had been at our side on the first day we met, and on the night we fell in love, he was our godfather, our presiding angel; such men, such friends, were not expendable in any circumstances. But if this privileged, interior pressure went on any longer, the mould of concord was liable to break, and that would be the end of a lot of things I valued.
I said: ‘OK, Eumor. You’ve said your piece, and I’ve listened to it. Now let’s press the button on this.’ I looked up, at the clock on the wall behind his head. ‘We have exactly one hour before we have to drive out to the airport. What would you like to do?’
He opened his mouth to say something, and then, like the rare man he was, changed his mind, and with it his whole expression. He tossed off the last of his wine, and smiled wickedly, and said: ‘Strip-tease! What else?’
Afterwards I drove him out to Kennedy Airport, and saw him off on his plane to Caracas, which was the first leg of his journey, and went slowly back into town, meandering along the Grand Central Parkway and over the Triborough Bridge. The lights of the East River seemed to unravel as I moved smoothly south again, like an endless skein of yellow-white wool falling gently apart as a dark hand divided it, and I found myself wishing that a lot of other things would unravel half as easily.
I was ready to acknowledge that Eumor had done his best. As an emissary from Kate, bringing a salutary shock from the world outside my bed, he had made his mark and sounded his warning. The message was simple: when Kate returned, if Kate returned, I would have to straighten up and fly right, because she would be leaving something she wanted for something she could not be sure of.
She would be doing a basic favour for me, and I would be in honour bound to match it.
Eumor had given me a lot to think about. The fact that I did not want to think about it could not be held against the man, nor the message, nor anyone but myself.