The day started, like the first chapter of Genesis, on a note of novelty.
‘You have an old friend in town,’ observed Kate, with that lack of emphasis which characterised a lot of the things she said to me nowadays. She tapped the newspaper which lay by her breakfast tray. ‘But I suppose you know about it already.’
I had only called in to say goodbye on my way to work, and, already preoccupied with what lay ahead, I was paying no more attention than any other husband on thecommuting wing at ten o’clock in the morning. Straightening my tie before her mirror, I asked: ‘Who would that be?’
‘Father Shillingford.’
‘Well, well,’ I said, taken by surprise. ‘That is an old friend. Father Billingsgate. What’s he doing at this end of the tottering globe?’
‘He’s at the United Nations,’ she answered, in a short sort of voice. ‘He phoned last night. He’s appearing for South Africa.’
‘For South Africa?’
‘Oh, they didn’t ask him to … He was giving evidence before one of the committees, the one that’s trying to get South Africa expelled. He spoke against it. Didn’t you read about it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘The Times is terribly bad on foreign affairs, don’t you think?’
‘The Times is the best–’ she began energetically, and then broke off. ‘Don’t joke about it, Johnny. People like Father Shillingford are killing themselves, working to get some sense into the world. If you’re not interested, at least you might respect what they’re trying to do.’ She was frowning; it was a familiar pattern of disapproval. ‘Anyway, he’s here, and he’s coming to dinner.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at me carefully. ‘Please be here, Johnny. Don’t run away from it.’
‘I’m not running away from anything. I’m reviewing my social calendar. What’s for dinner?’
She smiled, having won. ‘Bread and water.’
‘Cut another slice.’
I had, I hoped, shown the necessary co-operation, but in fact it was not at all the sort of interruption I wanted, at this stage of the Safari production, in the last two weeks of rehearsal; and, skimming the solid print in The Times on my way down town, and later on at the theatre, I felt even less inclined to give it room for manoeuvre.
Father Shillingford was indeed in town. He had left South Africa a few days earlier, minus his passport, with a vague ‘travel document’ which was no guarantee of his return-entry; he had arrived at the UN, and there begged leave to appear before a committee, chiefly African and Asian, which seemed at the moment solely concentrated upon the expulsion of South Africa on the grounds of her racial discrimination.
Once accredited, he had promptly, and to everyone’s astonishment, brought all his skill and persuasion to pleading the cause of his country – the country which despised and rejected him. Don’t throw South Africa out of UN, had been his theme, in a passionate speech which had ‘visibly moved’ the delegates. Keep her inside, treat her like a misguided but not incorrigible friend, and try to persuade her to mend her ways.
As an example of ‘other cheek’ Christianity, it was memorably effective. The picture kept nagging me all day; I returned to thinking about it again and again, with foreboding, and with doubt about meeting him once more, and about dining in this elevated atmosphere. It got in the way throughout that day’s rehearsal, which was enough to try the patience of another kind of saint; and was an appropriate prelude to one of the most absurd and uneasy meals I had ever eaten.
If Lord Muddley had been a fat ghost from the past, Father Shillingford proved a veritable skeleton from a cupboard I had thought long walled up.
He was there when I got home, talking to Kate, and it was strange to see the two of them together – the extremely elegant woman and the pale shabby priest, sitting side by side in our gilded cage. He got up when I came in, and greeted me very warmly.
‘Jonathan! How very nice, after all these years! How are you?’
‘All the better for seeing you.’
It could hardly have been less true. Close to, he looked pathetic; shrunken, cruelly tested, pitifully spent; the energetic and rather tubby little man I remembered from six years earlier had been worn down, by God knew what pressures and pains, to a water-thin figure of exhaustion. His face had that look of bony dejection which one sometimes saw in pietistic carvings of Christ on the cross. Of course, he had fashioned his own cross, and chosen to suffer on it, and perhaps was glorified by his ordeal. But one look at him, one brief clasp of his meagre hand, was enough to send me to the bar, almost at a run.
Dinner was very awkward. He caught me unawares by bowing his head to say grace, just as I was taking my first swig of wine; I said ‘Cheers’, and he said ‘Benedictus benedicat’, at the same moment; as a chorus, it was ill-matched, and Kate’s face showed it vividly. We talked, of course, about South Africa; or rather, they talked, and I mostly drank. I was not really in on this party, and it needed no stage-direction to make the fact clear.
His old shanty-town of Teroka, he told us, had now vanished; the people had been dispossessed, the houses razed, the area given over to a neat white suburb called, it seemed sarcastically, Pleasantville. The former population had been pushed still farther out, and rehoused nearly twenty-five miles from the centre of Johannesburg, where they had to work.
‘Of course, the houses are a little better,’ he said quietly, ‘and there is running water. But it has become terribly overcrowded already, and lawless, and dirty. And now it means travelling almost fifty miles to and from work each day, in those wretched buses. Some of the men have to queue up at four in the morning, to be sure of getting to town by eight. And the same thing at night.’
‘That must mean a long journey for you, each day,’ said Kate.
‘About the same,’ he agreed. ‘I tried to move nearer to the mission, but I couldn’t find anywhere suitable. But–’ he smiled, ‘I have a motor scooter now! Very dashing. So I am not really badly off at all.’
The picture of Father Shillingford, his cassock swirling in the breeze, hitting forty miles an hour on a Vespa along the dusty Transvaal roads, amused me, and I made an effort to become one of the party. I said: ‘I’d like to see you riding that chariot … Of course, they’ve always had those queues for the buses, haven’t they? They must be pretty well resigned to it by now.’
‘They are certainly resigned,’ said Father Shillingford. His eyes, meeting mine across the candlelight, were unexpectedly searching, as if he were trying to discover my whole character at a single glance. I wished him luck, and sealed the wish with a libation. ‘But that doesn’t make these hardships any easier to bear.’
‘It’s wonderful what you can get used to.’
‘I think it is more sad than wonderful.’
Kate, with a frown for me which made me suspect that I might well finish the evening standing in a corner, guided us somewhere else.
‘I don’t think I saw any of the Black Sash people while I was there,’ she remarked, in a bright tone which seemed to invite, irresistibly, the label of Social Notes from All Over. ‘Are they still operating?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Father Shillingford. ‘But less than before, I suppose. Don’t forget that the movement had been going on for nearly fifteen years, and some of the women – well, I don’t wish to be ungallant, but they must now be well into their seventies. It takes a good deal of courage, and stamina as well, to engage in silent-protest picketing at that age. I don’t think they have had much success in gaining new recruits.’ He sighed, and his pale face seemed to go even further into mourning. ‘There is curiously little feeling for that kind of politics among the young people. They simply don’t want to be bothered. South Africa is very prosperous, the police are extremely efficient and energetic, so–’ he spread his hands, ‘–so life goes on quite agreeably, and very few white people want to change it. Particularly as it might cost them their liberty in the process.’
‘I think that’s one of the worst things,’ said Kate. ‘The way the police lay down the rules, and everyone just says “Yes” and does what they’re told.’
Julia came in with a fresh course, of chicken Kiev – dinner was really very good tonight, and it was a pity that one could not enjoy it in peace, instead of being driven inexorably to the bottle – and there was silence as we set to work. Presently Father Shillingford, who was eating with a sad kind of reluctance, as if food, though pleasurable, were an insult to the hungry, took up his tale again.
‘The police certainly lay down the rules,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there’s a single thing which a man could say or do in South Africa, which could not somehow be brought within today’s sedition laws. And once you become suspect, you have a police dossier and you can be hounded quite unmercifully.’ He smiled at Kate. ‘You found that out yourself, didn’t you? I remember reading about it, and wondering how a person of spirit would react to it.’
‘I reacted, right enough,’ said Kate. ‘I hadn’t been so angry for a long time. But that’s another thing. I didn’t worry, because I was safe, really. I was absolutely innocent, and so was Julia, and I had some influential friends to fall back on, and, I suppose, enough money to get the best kind of legal advice and protection. But what do other people do? What can they do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Father Shillingford flatly. ‘They are powerless. They are also permanently afraid, whether they are black or white.’ He brushed his hand across his forehead, wearily. ‘I have lived with this for so long, it is sometimes difficult to realise how strange it is. How wrong. How iniquitous!’ It was, for him, a very strong word, and he spoke it with extraordinary feeling. ‘It reaches its worst point in what they now call “house arrest”, which must be one of the most wicked forms of punishment ever devised by a so-called Minister of Justice. Imagine being told to stay at home, seeing no one, during all your free time. Imagine being ordered to travel straight to work, and straight back, and not to visit anyone on the way, except to report at the police station, and not to have friends in your own home, at any time. Imagine a whole weekend like that, when you may not move beyond your garden gate, nor talk to anyone except a policeman. Imagine that for the rest of your life!’
He was obviously distressed, and his voice as he recalled these details was trembling. I took a sip of my wine, not knowing quite how the ideal host should react to this sort of thing. A kindly word? A change of subject? Finally I said, in as reasonable a tone as I could muster: ‘I don’t think I should like house arrest.’
For some reason this innocuous statement did not seem to sit well with Kate. She gave me another of her formidable frowns, and then, as if to draw attention away from her unworthy spouse, said to Father Shillingford: ‘What I don’t understand is, what you’re really trying to do at UN. Why go to all that trouble, if you feel as you do? Surely South Africa doesn’t deserve to keep her membership.’
Father Shillingford, now more composed, shook his head. ‘If she were expelled – which is what they are trying to do – I believe it would be nothing short of disaster. There would then be no form of pressure or persuasion left, except the threat of war, which is unthinkable. The very people who most need our help would be the first to suffer. They would be left to the wolves.’ He looked from one to the other of us, seeking allies, seeking confirmation of his urgent hope. ‘I have thought about this for a long time, and I am sure I am right. South Africa in isolation would go her own way, and a sordid and terrible way it would be. But South Africa as a member of a world body might still listen to reason, and be brought to reform. The United Nations is now a very sophisticated and powerful body. All the members are subject, whether they know it or not, to a sort of group civilising influence. It’s far better for such a country to be a member, however unpopular, rather than an outcast. You cannot hope to reach a country, or a man, who has locked himself in.’
It was at that moment, faced with this barrage of marginal though lofty logic, that I was trapped by an uncontrollable fit of the gapes. At one moment I was sitting back in comparative ease, doing nothing except perhaps compare the flavour of our present company with the sharper tang of Rhein wine; at the next, a cavernous yawn split my face, just as Father Shillingford glanced in my direction. Kate also caught the tail end of it, and gave me a furious look. There could be no doubt that this was a social gaffe, and would be classed as such for a very long time to come.
I smiled at them, brave to the last. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve really been working very hard. I must have been saving that one up all day.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting you,’ said Father Shillingford, with a contrite air which was really very irritating indeed. ‘My trials and troubles must seem excessively dull … Tell me about your play.’
‘Well, it’s a musical,’ I began, readily enough, ‘and it’s funny, and it’s about–’ Suddenly, the words simply would no longer flow. It was not that I wanted to hide anything; it was just that I did not feel like another argument – and an argument it would become, as soon as the pair of them got busy on the suitability of certain themes for merriment. Why should I strip in this frosty climate? ‘Oh, you don’t want to hear all this,’ I said after a moment. ‘It’s only a play. Mass entertainment.’
‘About South Africa, I think I read. Based on that wonderful book of yours.’
‘About South Africa.’
‘I would not have thought,’ said Father Shillingford, ‘that there was a great deal of humour to be found in that particular subject.’
There it was, damn it, flat on the table in front of me, before I had a chance to dodge. I bunched my shoulders, not listening to his voice any longer. I did not want to talk about it. I did not want to talk to Father Shillingford. This inability to meet his mind, to face this strange little spectre of the past, might have shamed me; instead, it only goaded and irritated. It was a hateful reminder of Kate’s own crusade, and the role of low-class, scarcely mentionable target which had been assigned to me, throughout the last few months, the last few years.
I was fed up with playing that part; and when Father Shillingford ended his small homily with the words: ‘You should really be back there, you know, Jonathan,’ I suddenly found that I had had enough, and was going to tell him so.
‘I don’t agree,’ I said roughly. ‘I’m not interested in South Africa. I don’t want to go back there. In fact, I don’t even want to talk about it any more.’
‘Jonathan!’ said Kate, with a look which might have snuffed the candles. ‘That will do.’
‘You’re damned right it will do,’ I told her. I surveyed them both, first over the top of my wineglass, then through its stem, then through its empty shell. What was there to be afraid of? I had long forfeited my chances of a good conduct medal. Surely, in the company of my dear wife and my old and sanctified friends, I could speak my little piece … ‘OK, I’m selfish, I’m making a balls out of my entire life, and this is all part of Hate Steele Month. Sorry, Father,’ I threw across to him, ‘we’re raking over a few very old ashes tonight.’ Yet I was going to rake them, nonetheless, and not all the cassocks in holy church were going to stand in my way. ‘But the fact is, I’m fed up with being made to feel like a criminal, just because I want to work at one sort of book rather than another.’
Father Shillingford was looking at me with infuriating mildness. ‘Why should anyone hate you, Jonathan?’ he asked gently.
‘Because I’m trying to talk sense, and live sense!’ I turned from one pair of eyes to the other; his were inquiring, hers were steely and unforgiving, and I did not give a damn about either. ‘Come on, let’s cut out all the nonsense! What are you trying to do? What do you actually want for South Africa? How do you want her to change? You think the natives can take over and run the country? That’s complete rubbish, and you both know it.’
‘Johnny,’ said Kate, icily, ‘I think we’ll–’
‘Johnny, Johnny!’ I mimicked her, as savagely as I could. ‘You going to send me off to bed? I’ll try for a warmer one … Let’s hear some more about the great South African Negro republic! Who’s the black Oppenheimer? Who’s the new chairman of De Beers? What particular coloured boy from the Free State is taking over Gerald Thyssen’s job?’
‘You have a very fair point there,’ said Father Shillingford surprisingly. ‘And I would never presume to answer it, not for perhaps fifty years. There are no qualified natives in South Africa, fit to govern a modern industrial country. How could there be? But one day there will be, and we must make a start, perhaps a very slow start, on finding them and training them.’
‘You make a start,’ I told him. ‘I’m too damned busy making money.’
Kate rose. ‘Coffee, I think,’ she said, in her loftiest voice.
I glanced up at her. ‘I haven’t finished.’
Father Shillingford was also standing up, and now he looked across at me. He seemed to be facing the fact that we had moved far beyond all acceptable patterns, that this was already part of saying goodbye; and he met it with dignity.
‘You cannot deny the need,’ he said, much more firmly than he had spoken before. ‘If you do not wish to play a part in helping, that is your choice to make. But you should never discourage other people from doing their best. That is wrong. You know that there is misery. I am a priest, and I can do something – though a very little – to make it bearable. You know that there is political baseness and cruelty. You are a writer, and could do something to help in that area. Turn your back on it, if you want to. Deny your gifts. But don’t pretend that a thing does not exist, because you are not there in person to witness it.’ He smiled suddenly, an old worn-out smile, full of the compassion I had no use for. ‘God bless you,’ he said softly. ‘Jonathan, my son.’
I smiled back. Then, with matching softness, I brought the palms of my hands together, and apart, and together again, in a round of restrained applause which saw them both out of the room.
I stayed where I was, gradually tipping the last of the bottle. Julia came in, and looked at me, and left again, wordless. I heard Father Shillingford saying goodbye, and the door opening and closing. I wondered what Kate would do and say now. I did not have long to wait. She appeared in the doorway, and stood staring at me as I lolled very comfortably in my chair.
‘How could you, Johnny?’ she asked presently. There was cold astonishment in her voice.
‘Easily. Try me again.’
‘But he’s your friend.’
‘I never saw him before in my life.’
We were silent. She seemed to be waiting, listening, hoping. Eventually I sat up, and said: ‘You won’t hear it, Kate.’
‘What?’
‘That third cock-crow … Now leave me alone.’
She turned, with a face of stone, and walked out, leaving me indeed alone; alone with an empty table, and a full glass, and a perfect if subdued contentment with both.
I did not see Father Shillingford again – which could have come as no surprise, nor any great denial, to either side – but it seemed that I had not yet finished with Old Home Week. The pressure from the Good Guys was still upon me; for now Eumor was in town once more, en route from farthest Peru to uttermost South Africa. I supposed that this was an innocent reappearance, but in my present mood I could not be sure of it.
I had suspected Kate’s artful hand in the arrival of Father Shillingford, unscrupulously imported to put swinish Steele to shame; and now we had Eumor on the same stage in the same morality play. Perhaps he was making a chance landfall, like some wizened snow-goose; yet somehow he seemed part of this matching frieze of disapproval. His visit, at that particular moment, was probably unplanned, but – like any other coincidence – it did not feel so at all.
However, after a cagey introduction, we enjoyed ourselves – a surprise benevolence, like a sprig of mistletoe in hell; and we spent a curious truce-like evening, which recalled that other night, long ago and far away, when Kate and I first met, and all known patterns were suspended. It was now near Christmas, and so we walked the Christmas streets, a-glow and a-glitter under the black winter sky, raucous with the hard sell of our Saviour’s later disciples, yet beguiling and heartening at the same time.
Strolling, moving with the crowds or stemming their formidable advance, we munched hot roasted chestnuts from the street-corner barrows, and gave money to poor strangers, and talked to Salvation Army girls rattling their collecting boxes, and went into bars and stood drinks to down-at-heel customers who had had enough already, and window-shopped at Tiffany’s, and Bonwit Teller, and Doubledays, where a lone Pocket Book edition of Ex Afrika stood sentinel for global culture and my own solvency. Then it was time to eat, and eat we did, like happy, hungry humans who had no other care but appetite.
We chose Luchows, for a hearty Teutonic blow-out, and there we swam out upon a sea of Bismarck herrings and Sauerbraten and dumplings and Apfel Strudel, fit to stupefy Santa Klaus, however long and hard his journey. Suddenly we found it easy to be merry; neither envy, nor evil, nor deceit divided us – we were three friends whose concord had survived a long apprenticeship, and the world after all was warm and kindly, and hell! it was Christmas … We ate, we argued, we reminisced; we drank long draughts of Munich beer, bitter and sugary at the same time, and put on paper hats modelled upon the Pickelhauben of the Prussian corps d’élite, and presently we grew sure, without voicing it, that the ancient Christmas miracle had once again flowered into substance.
Fantastically, it seemed that, for this easy hour, a world of innocence and love was being born again, with tidings of comfort and joy for all concerned.
At one point, Eumor became bawdy, and drew us along with him. He had a short two hours before his plane for Lisbon, and he affected an ambition to make a last conquest in North America, before, as he put it, ‘unpacking the old bags of Johannesburg.’
‘Get me a calling girl,’ he commanded.
‘You mean a call-girl, Eumor,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Call-girl not grammatical. Calling girl, please.’
‘Six calling girls, five French hens,’ sang Kate – and since it was Luchows, and Christmas, no one minded her small contralto contribution.
‘I can give you a couple of numbers,’ I told him, sophisticated like.
‘Numbers? Do they not have names?’
‘They’re all called Lacy Faire,’ said Kate.
We made up some more suitably silly names: Belle Ring, Inna Circle, Annie Moore (an Irish devotee), Cosie Van Tootie. Eumor translated some of them into Greek; they sounded authoritative and vaguely frightening, like Homer at his most majestic. As usual, my friend was having a wonderful, tonic effect on both of us; but this time I feared that the effect would fade out swiftly, as soon as he did, and I was right.
We saw him off in his hired car, towards midnight, under the solemn, shabby portico. He embraced me à la française, without embarrassment, and then he kissed Kate with his usual fervour, and said: ‘See you before long,’ which, for me, struck a small cold note of warning. Then she and I were left to ourselves, and, content enough, we began to stroll back up town, hand in hand, heading for home.
It had been a happy evening, a dividend of our interwoven past. But the small cold note had been the true one. Next day, the axe fell.
I had left the house early, for another long day at Erwin Orwin’s salt-mine, and I did not get back till nearly seven. As I closed the front door behind me, and stood in the hall, I seemed to encounter a curious waiting silence; there was no music, no radio, no visitors’ chatter, no promising sounds from the kitchen, but simply a blank, as if I had stepped onto a bare stage into the wrong play. For a moment I thought that Kate had gone out; but then I saw her, standing by the fireplace, her back towards me and her hands clasped behind her head, staring at a vase of tall yellow roses.
They must have been newly delivered that day, and I came forward and said: ‘Who’s your admirer?’
‘Your friend,’ she answered, without turning. There was a sort of gritty enmity in her voice. ‘Your protective friend Eumor.’
I heard enough in her tone to warn me to keep silence, but I still had to query whatever situation this was. It would not go away, whether in silence or not.
‘Protective friend? Why protective?’
She turned at that, and I saw her face; and her face surprised me very much, being set in a mask of almost murderous determination. She looked as if she had waited a long time for this moment, and now that it had come she was going to play it like a pro.
‘The clue is the roses. So good for a girl’s morale … I suspect that you two boys are sharing a secret,’ she went on crisply. ‘One of those male secrets which has to be hidden from the staunch little woman at home … Does Eumor know anything that I don’t know?’
‘Lots, I should think.’ I wasn’t going to answer any such riddles this evening, nor any other evening. ‘You name something.’
‘It’s just a suspicion,’ she said, now almost savage. ‘Did you tell him about that girl?’
‘What girl?’ Then I realised that this sounded silly, and I said: ‘Yes, I mentioned her.’
‘I don’t want us to get these girls mixed,’ said Kate. ‘I mean, stunning old Susan Crompton, the girl you met in one of Erwin Orwin’s shows.’
‘That’s the one I meant, too.’ I was now making for the bar, and a little more protection than Eumor seemed to be giving me. When I turned, glass in hand, Kate had picked something up from the mantelpiece, and was staring at it with special, almost theatrical concentration. Before I could add anything to the general gaiety, she spoke, in the most brutally sarcastic voice I had ever heard her use: ‘I did so enjoy our stay at the Bon Soir Motel in Richmond, Virginia. What a lovely time that was!’
She was stretching out her hand towards me, commandingly, and with a slightly sick feeling I took what she held in it. It was an oversize postcard, ornate and glossy, from the motel she had named. ‘Happy Christmas!’ it said. ‘Come back real soon for another fine stay!’ It was addressed to ‘Mr and Mrs J Steele’.
I said the first thing that came into my mind. ‘They shouldn’t do that.’
Kate was watching me, very closely. ‘A lot of people shouldn’t do a lot of things.’
‘Oh, come on, Kate – you knew about Susan.’
‘Not from you, I didn’t … Of course I knew about her. Do you think I couldn’t smell her perfume on you, when you came back each evening? … But now it’s different. Now I know!’ Before I had time to sort out this piece of feminine logic, she burst out, in sudden furious onslaught: ‘You bloody liar!’ she stormed at me. ‘She wasn’t just a girl in one of Erwin’s shows! Richmond is on the way back from Florida! This must have started weeks earlier than you said! You must have met her in Barbados!’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘That’s the way it was.’
‘You took her there in the first place!’
‘No. She was there already.’
‘Waiting for the spring trade …’ But anger, which had boiled up so swiftly, now seemed to be ebbing, fading to a bitter mood of mourning. ‘Oh, Johnny, why, why, why? What’s this all about? Is it still going on?’
‘Well – you know.’
‘Jonathan!’
‘Now and then, yes.’
She had turned away again, back to the fireplace, back to the yellow roses which had given her so odd an extra jolt. From there she spoke, sad, disillusioned, taken unawares; but the basic question was the same.
‘I don’t understand. What does it all mean? Who is this girl?’
I took a fierce gulp of the drink I needed, and tried my best.
‘Kate, she’s a beautiful, uncomplicated, rather loving whore. I bought her. That’s all there is to it.’
Kate’s face in the mirror had now become expressionless; it was difficult to tell what she thought of this, or if she thought at all, or felt at all. Her only reaction seemed to be puzzlement.
‘But why should you want someone like that?’
‘For a change …’ And as this did not seem to register: ‘She’s sweet,’ I went on, ‘and no trouble at all. She wouldn’t ever be.’
‘Is that what you want? No trouble?’
‘Yes. Or I did then. The other thing–’ I did not want to hurt her, for all sorts of unaccountable reasons, but suddenly I was sick of the invasions and swampings of love, as well as the eternal pressure of its inquisition. ‘Oh God, Kate, I just couldn’t take the intensity any more! You never left me alone for a minute! At the beginning, it was like living in a Turkish bath, with hot Chanel instead of steam. And at the end–’
She had grown watchfully still. ‘At the end?’
‘You turned against me.’
‘I never did that, Johnny.’
‘Criticism. Whatever I was doing was wrong. You never left me alone there, either.’
‘But we didn’t get married just to leave each other alone.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
She sighed, a deep sigh of resignation. ‘I once told you that “forever” was a long word.’
‘The longest in the language.’
She went off on another, more immediate tangent. ‘I still don’t see what it is that I don’t give you, that this girl does.’
There must have been several words for it, but I could only find one – or rather, two. ‘Elbow-room.’
With a flash of the old Kate, she said: ‘Well, don’t wear out your elbows,’ and we both laughed, briefly and harshly, for the first and the last time of that exchange. From then onwards, the night divided us again, and grew bitter, and irritating, and utterly destructive.
Kate paused only long enough to switch subjects; then she was away once more, in full swing, and all I could do was fend her off, first with restraint, then with an answering toughness. It seemed that, having lost one strongpoint, she must straight away build another one, and sally forth from that, armoured for battle.
‘To hell with that girl!’ she said, with sudden vehemence, sudden crudity. ‘But that doesn’t mean to hell with us! It’s going to take more than your loving whore to screw up our lives, and that’s a promise, from me to you! … Johnny, now is the time, for a whole battery of reasons. Come back with me now. Break this all up, and come back.’
‘South Africa again?’
‘South Africa again. I must go. I have to. But I want you with me. It won’t make any sense, otherwise.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense, the way you suggest. What do I eat? How do I live? As a fake landowner? As a tame pensioner of the rich Mrs Steele?’
She had wandered to the windows, and was staring out of it, as if somewhere down in the caverns of 77th Street she could find answers to everything, even to me. ‘That wouldn’t matter,’ she said. ‘That sort of thing never does.’
‘Of course it wouldn’t matter, to you!’
She sounded as if she were smiling. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that?’
Her returning confidence irritated me. ‘It wouldn’t matter, because you’d have me back where you think I belong. Down in the cellar with a leg-iron on me. Your leg-iron. We’d be back to the same old round of high low.’
‘High low?’
‘It’s a zany kind of poker game,’ I said, ‘and a damned good way to lose all you have in the world.’ I splashed out another drink, spilling half of it, and a slice of lemon for luck, onto our expensive parquet flooring. But I let the mess lie where it was. Someone else could clean up the world tonight … ‘In this case, it would be you high, me low. Well, I’m not going back to those good old days, Kate. I’ve grown out of them, whether you like it or not. And you never did like it, did you?’
She had turned round, for an inspection which took in me, and a certain wildness in my look, and the sticky spread of gin and lemon on the floor. But for once she did not summon domestic aid, nor dart forward with an assuaging dishcloth. She had decided her priorities. ‘Honestly, Johnny, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh yes, you do! I have the limelight now, not you, and you’ve never been able to bear the idea. You want to change us round again, so that you’re back in the centre and I’m somewhere out on the rim. Hauling me back to South Africa is just the first step in that process. Then I suppose you’ll get to work in earnest. Well, it’s not going to happen!’
‘This is absurd.’
‘You’re damned right it’s absurd! That’s why I’m taking damned good care it doesn’t get started!’
‘What is it you’re afraid of?’ she asked, in apparent wonderment.
‘I’m not afraid of anything.’
‘Yes, you are. You’re scared to death of something. You won’t write a good book – you just turn out a trick musical. You back away from real things, real problems like South Africa, and choose to be a TV personality instead. Johnny, it’s not good enough for someone like you. You’re becoming a coward – a talented coward.’
‘Well, hooray!’ I said angrily. ‘I’ve found my niche at last.’
‘You’ve found a niche, and so do rabbits and mice … Niche is a very good word,’ she went on, with a calmness more than usually infuriating. ‘Perhaps you do need one, perhaps you need that kind of hideaway. But not all by yourself … If you won’t come out of it, why not let me in?’
‘It’s a small niche,’ I said, ‘and you’re a big girl now. But you’re not going to get any bigger.’
‘Can I have a drink?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Like me.’
‘Just like you.’
‘OK.’
I poured out her customary modest martini, and passed it over to her. Our hands touched; it was the closest we had been to each other, all that day. But it still wasn’t going to be any good; we were now both fully armed, and not for one second was I going to let down my guard.
Sipping her drink, wearing her most reasonable air, she said: ‘Johnny, you’re a clever man. Tell me what happened to us.’
‘We evaporated,’ I said, as curtly as I could.
‘How could we evaporate? We had too much, just for it to disappear.’
‘Maybe the sun was too hot.’
‘What sun?’
‘Oh, God, what does it matter?’ I asked irritably. ‘That was a silly metaphor, anyway.’
‘All right,’ she said, equable to an alarming degree. ‘Something evaporated, and it isn’t there any more. But everything else hasn’t disappeared with it. That couldn’t be possible. Not with us.’ She was looking at me with serious, solemn eyes; it was a moment for extreme caution. ‘We both have our faults,’ she said. ‘We’re still human, thank God. You are perpetually afraid of something – of testing yourself against some really great measurement, maybe. And you are vain – you have to be loved, one hundred per cent, all the time. You react to criticism like you react to violence – you think it’s simply illegal. And you drink too much. But then there’s me. I know the worst of my faults, and I give it to you on any kind of silver platter you choose. I am proud.’
I waited, but that seemed to be the end of this not too extensive catalogue. ‘Well, that’s just wonderful,’ I said. ‘I have three big faults, you have one little one. Three to one. That’s quite a proportion. It makes a lousy martini, but as long as it makes you happy–’
‘Pride is the fault,’ she interrupted. ‘It’s at the very top of those seven deadly sins. Terrible things spring from it. Look it up, if you want to, if you need to. It’s the worst sin there is, and I have it, and I’m sorry, and if it’s contributed anything to the sort of mess we’re in, I’m sorry ten times over.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I said again. My dialogue was not growing any more deft, but I could not help that particular shortfall, either. ‘A becoming humility is just what we need, at this moment.’
‘It’s on the list of things we need,’ she answered. She was in much better shape than I was, and the contrast was beginning to show. ‘And because I love you – really love you, and want you – I don’t mind listing it. But that’s not really what we’re talking about.’ She gathered herself for a summation, for a flourish of feminine skills; and it was interesting, especially for a writer, and daunting, especially for me, to watch her doing it. ‘Please come back home with me. Back to Maraisgezicht. We can work this all out there. But I have to go, Johnny. My people need me.’
‘For Christ’s sake, shut up about your people! You sound like Catherine of Russia.’
‘That’s not how I feel … Pride again, perhaps … But they do need me, and I need you.’ It was the first time she had ever said it, since the wild old days when she had needed me in a different way; more than ever, I mistrusted it. ‘You taught me such a lot, at the beginning,’ she went on, ‘when you were – well, when you were a good man. It wasn’t on purpose, I don’t think; it came from just listening to you, watching you, living with you … I would never have asked Father Shillingford here, if it hadn’t been for you. I used to think that kind of man was just a bloody nuisance. Now I don’t. I know he is a saint. I owe you that, too … Please stay with me now.’
‘Or what?’ I asked after a moment.
‘Or?’
‘There’s always an “or” to these things. Take a look at the handbook … I won’t go back with you, and get submerged and rehabilitated and generally castrated.’ I had difficulty with the last word, which had never been one of my favourites, and I took another giant swallow to smooth things out. ‘So what’s the alternative?’
She said: ‘We say goodbye.’
There was always a point in every nightmare when one felt: This is all wrong; things don’t happen like this; and it came as a vile shock that I seemed to have reached it now. I reacted very quickly, on crude impulse. It was all wrong, but I couldn’t cure it, and it seemed that Kate did not want to. I downed the last of my drink at a gulp, angry with her, angry with myself for feeling a perceptible twinge of fear. Fear was exclusively for other people … Then I said: ‘If that’s the way it is, we’d better start practising. Goodbye!’
Then I gave her a wave, and walked out.
She called after me: ‘Where are you going?’ but I would not have answered, even if I had known. In fact, I did not know. I didn’t even know exactly where I was. I seemed to be nowhere special, or – as in a nightmare – lost in a forest which might have been hell, and running furiously in order to keep up with the trees.
Kate was getting me down at last, and the sooner I was really drunk, the better.
Actually, I spent the night with Susan, and it was a flop, from beginning to end. Worst of all, it was a sexual flop.
When finally I shambled my way up to her apartment, in search of some sort of refuge, I found that I did not particularly like anything I found there. The place was in a detestable mess – untidy, dusty, totally uncared for; the bathroom was festooned with washing, almost impossible to negotiate, the kitchen piled with grimy plates and encrusted saucepans. I did not even like the look of Susan herself.
She had gone back to allowing people to fool around with her hair, and the result of what was probably a recent, three-hour session with some mincing young professor of the coiffe was a positive bird’s-nest of loops, twists, streaks and kiss curls, framing her head as if with a lunatic halo. She looked like a film company starlet who wanted to look like Brigitte Bardot; her aim, whether laudable or not, could scarcely have been wilder.
I complained instantly, and the move was far from popular.
‘I have to do things with it,’ she answered, in a not too friendly tone. ‘Everyone does.’
‘That’s a damned good reason for leaving it as it is.’
‘I can’t. I’m on the stage!’
‘That sort of hairdo won’t make you a better actress.’ I sat down with a thump on the cluttered sofa; a sharp cracking sound indicated that I had landed squarely on a concealed gramophone record. ‘Well done, Steele,’ I said. ‘You’ve broken another record.’
‘Oh Johnny,’ she wailed, ‘it’s my Yves Montand.’
‘More good news.’ I looked about me, with a wobbling gaze. ‘Why do you live in such a terrible mess?’
‘It isn’t a mess. It’s comfortable.’
‘It’s an absolute pigsty,’ I said, ‘and don’t argue … Well, come on, what do we do now? Entertain me.’
She was staring at me doubtfully. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘I would like another drink. You can cut out the diplomacy.’
She poured out something which I hoped was Scotch and soda, and I drank some of it, though cautiously. I knew that I was raggedly drunk already, and that drink was doing nothing for me; probably it was taking something away – my nerves seemed to be yelping for a respite which they could not find. Susan started up the record player, with an insipid tune, a man playing the piano as if he had been scared by it when young, and then she began to talk, in a bright voice, about something terrible which had happened backstage that morning, while I stared ahead, not hearing what she said.
The moment seemed to mark a very low ebb indeed – my wife out of love, my mistress out of wits; an old-fashioned domestic dilemma indeed, not to be solved in any way that I could see.
Presently Susan finished a long, involved sentence with the words ‘awful’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘hilarious’ in it, and then asked: ‘Honestly, what do you think?’
‘Christ!’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.’
‘But I was telling you!’
‘I never listen to theatrical chatter.’
‘But it’s important!’
‘It’s not. It’s the dullest topic in the world. It’s like–’ I searched for a parallel, ‘–it’s like local politics, and the awful thing the Mayor said to Councillor O’Toole about the sewage disposal plant. It’s like the eight different ways of making a mint julep. It’s like TV in the morning! Who cares?’
Susan picked out a simple, wounding word. ‘Does that mean I’m dull?’
I considered, since it seemed to deserve a sensible answer. ‘Yes, you’re pretty dull.’
She switched off the music abruptly, and turned, and asked: ‘Johnny, what’s happened to us?’
The familiar ring of the question was not the most comforting sound in the world. ‘You’re stealing dialogue,’ I told her after a moment.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said unhappily. ‘I never understand you nowadays.’
‘Nothing’s happened to us. We’re as good as new.’
‘We’re not.’ She was standing over me now, looking down at me, considering – to the best of her ability – the problem of a drunken man who did not seem to love her any more. ‘It’s not the same now. It hasn’t been the same, for a long time. And we must do something about it, before it’s all spoiled.’
I squinted up at her. ‘Tell me more,’ I said. ‘What do we do, to revive this magic memory?’
She was more determined, more prepared, than I had expected. ‘We don’t revive it,’ she said.
‘Farewell for ever? Well, well … Strong stuff, Susan, old girl. I must remember that, for my next work of art.’
But the parallel with another recent interview was growing oddly close; a young man need never have left home. Sooner or later – whichever way I could manage it – I would have to start taking all this goodbye stuff seriously.
Her next words pointed up the fact.
‘Be nice to me,’ she said, ‘and please listen. Don’t let’s pretend any more, Johnny. Things aren’t the same, and we both know it. It was a lot of fun in Barbados, and fun for a little while here, specially when you were helping me so much. But it hasn’t been fun for a long time, has it?’
‘Some of it has been highly enjoyable.’
‘Oh, that part’s all right, when it happens. But I mean, the serious things, the being friends … We don’t seem to have anything left.’
‘What serious things did we have before?’
She was still staring down at me, her face wearing a rare look of unhappiness and confusion. ‘You know what we had,’ she said after a moment. ‘At least, you know what you said … So it’s silly to go on meeting, when there’s nothing left any more except going to bed now and then.’
I sipped my drink. ‘The practice is still well spoken of.’
‘But if it’s only that … It’s such a silly reason for–’
‘For what?’
She said: ‘I don’t want to break up your marriage.’
I stared back at her, genuinely surprised. ‘You couldn’t,’ I told her. Then I felt that I might soften this. ‘I mean, it’s not that kind of–’
‘I know what you meant,’ she said, interrupting me for perhaps the very first time since I met her. ‘But even if I couldn’t break it up, this sort of situation could. And it’s not worth it. I know. That kind of thing never is.’
‘Not worth what?’ It seemed a good moment to be obtuse, and the effort involved was negligible.
‘Not worth breaking up a marriage like yours.’
‘Do tell me more.’
‘I wish you’d help me,’ she said, ‘instead of joking and pretending.’
I had to resist this impertinence. ‘I’m not doing either,’ I said roughly. ‘Not that you could tell the difference … What do you mean, a marriage like mine?’
‘I mean,’ said Susan, serious and intent, ‘that you still love her very much. There’s not such a lot of that around. You should never throw it away.’
I had to think about that for a bit, before deciding how to answer it. For some reason, it seemed first and foremost a blatant intrusion; Susan simply was not licensed to operate in this area; her expertise was confined to smaller matters altogether. It would be better, I thought presently, to work her back towards her own ground; I wasn’t equipped, neither on this evening nor on any average evening during my present lousy half-life of pressure and counter-pressure, to deal with inquisitive fingers from the nursery-wing of affairs.
But before I shoved her back into bed, a smart slap on her shapely ego would not do either of us any harm … I lay back, and looked at her over the rim of my glass, and asked: ‘How did you arrive at that acute analysis?’
She met my glance, rather hopelessly, and said: ‘I knew this wasn’t any good.’
‘You’re god-damned right it’s not any good! I’ve never heard such a load of crap in all my life.’ It was not a moment for delicacy. ‘Love has nothing to do with anything we’re talking about. There isn’t any love in the whole world. There’s sex, and there’s habit, and there’s phoney emotion, and there’s greed, and these are the ties that bind …’ I pointed my finger at her, not too badly aimed. ‘Now you want us to stop, because of–’ I had almost forgotten, ‘–because of what?’
‘Because you’re still in love with your wife.’ She had never said ‘Kate’, nor, come to think of it, had I. ‘It’s too good to be spoilt.’
‘Just how did you work that out?’
She was being rather brave – the most annoying trait in any woman. ‘It’s obvious, in everything you do these days.’
‘It won’t be obvious, in the next thing I do.’ I set my glass down, with no more than a minor crash, and levered myself off the sofa. ‘Come on – let’s go to bed.’
‘Go to bed?’ She sounded more surprised than I had ever heard her.
‘Go to bed,’ I mimicked. ‘It’s the thing people do when they want to insert object A into object B, in the interests of cementing their sacred union.’ I had brought this intricate sentence out at a stumbling rush, afraid of pausing. Now I said, more relaxed: ‘Come on, Susan. I’m tired. Let’s get laid.’
She shook her head. ‘No, Johnny. Not tonight. It’s wrong.’
‘What do you mean, wrong?’ I was near to her now, for what I hoped would be a brief stop on the smooth, well-worn pathway to the semi-conjugal mattress. Except for the overcooked hair, she still looked beautiful. I was sure that I could manage it.
‘It’s wrong when people are quarrelling.’
‘We’re not quarrelling. We’re reviewing current topics.’
‘It would be wrong, all the same.’
I started to argue, then to wrestle, which was ineffective, then to argue again. Sometimes, in the past, it had been her availability which had vaguely annoyed me. (‘Just pour hot water on that girl,’ I had thought once, in Barbados, when she was briefly under the shower before our fourth bout of the day, ‘and you get Instant Screw.’) Now it was her refusal, perverse, unaccountable, against all accepted regulations. By God, one might have supposed that she had a mind of her own … And what had happened to gratitude?
The wrestling match, verbal and physical, took some time and covered all sorts of territory, from the sofa in the sitting room to the very front doorstep of love; but in the end she said yes, and stripped and bathed, as I did, and lay down upon our long-established workbench, dutifully composed, undeniably good to look at.
It seemed that I had won my argument which, in these hard times, was quite a change. But it turned out that I might as well have saved my breath.
Long ago, Eumor, an older man, used to use the words: ‘It won’t travel,’ or some such phrase, to indicate a sad decline of his potency, in any pause between impetuous wooing and actual achievement. ‘Sometimes I fear even to get out of the car,’ he had once said, posing a serious problem in logistics. ‘And if she keeps me waiting in the bathroom …’ I had sympathised, though feeling superior; but now, for the first time, it was happening to me, and I was not superior any longer. I was livid.
I did my best, as a man must, but there seemed to be too many things against me. Drink had taken its toll; I had spent too much time and energy arguing; I had had a period of disliking her, and the sudden switch to amorous intent failed to pull the rest of the equipment with it. My body lagged, even as I tried to whip it into some kind of shape.
Susan did her best for me, and she was as beautiful and alive as ever. But something beyond lively beauty was betraying me. For all the talk, I did not want her enough to be able to take her.
Sweating, impotent – the gross and wounding word had to be used – I lay back in the tumbled bed, and thought of ways and means. There were none. Something really had gone wrong. Perhaps it was the bed itself, which seemed grubby and stale, the sour graveyard of a battle never joined, recalling too clearly the rank disorder of our lives. Perhaps it was something I deserved.
Perhaps this was, as she had said, the end of the line.
I did not like that thought at all, and I tried once more, with a desperate, bruising intensity which made no gain of any sort. The times were out of joint, and a lot else besides. Have you prayed tonight, Desdemona? I thought, as I sought entrance to that ravishing body; and did you pray for this – and where is this, for God’s sake?
Gone to graveyards everywhere.
‘Why not just go to sleep?’ Susan said presently. ‘You’re tired.’
‘I’m not tired,’ I mumbled, face in the pillow. ‘I’m just no good tonight, that’s all. I must have trod on a bad oyster.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It should.’
Perhaps there was a term to adultery, as there was a term to marriage, and it was shorter, and I had found it. Our affair had been fun, as she had said; but now it had become nothing – it was the garbage of love, which had started to smell before it started to evaporate.
Between drowsing and thinking, between feeling sad and feeling a damned fool, between wanting another drink and wanting to throw up, I felt her stirring beside me. I wondered how it had been for her, pestered and sought after one minute, left vacant the next. If I were cast down, she was presumably still up in the air. There wasn’t a thing I could do about that, either.
Of course, I might joke it up a little.
‘The Sultan had nine wives,’ I said, in the same anonymous mumble, ‘and eight of them had it pretty soft.’
‘All right, Johnny,’ she said, in a small, cool voice. ‘Let’s say good night. I have to work in the morning.’
‘I’ll say good night,’ I said, ‘and I’ll sing the lullaby too. Let me tell you some more bad jokes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been wanting to use them for a long time, but I don’t get many chances, so I store them up on the last page of my manuscript book … They’re the writer’s end product, and you know what that is … Do you know who was the most elastic man in the Bible? Ananias – he tied his ass to a tree, and walked into Jerusalem … I heard that one at school,’ I said, ‘and it was terribly daring even then … And did you know how they found out about Oscar Wilde? It was at a party, and someone asked where he was, and the butler said: “He’s upstairs, feeling a little queer.” And did you hear about the blind prostitute? You’ve got to hand it to her.’
‘Time to go to sleep, Johnny,’ said Susan.
‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,’ I said. ‘Sleep, twin brother of death … There’s another rather funny story about Oscar Wilde. It happened at his trial. He produced a character witness, an officer in some regiment or other. And the officer, who wasn’t too bright, said, absolutely straight-faced: “I am convinced that Mr Wilde is a man of honour and integrity. Why, I would trust him with my own sister!”’
‘So?’ said Susan.
‘So nothing! It’s just a story. And don’t think I’m anti-Wilde. I don’t mind what he did. He could poke a canary to make it sing, as far as I’m concerned. He was a man of enormous talent, and that pays for everything. Like Maria Callas.’
‘Maria Callas?’
‘Maria Callas. The other kind of canary. Charged by many observers with much too much prima donna activity. What on earth does it matter, as long as she sings like an angel. Which she does, unfailingly … You’ve got to make allowances for people who have it.’
‘Have what?’
‘The spark … Sometimes I wish … I’m starting a new book tomorrow,’ I told her, in all drunken seriousness. ‘Something for the kiddies. It’s called A Child’s Garden of Thalidomide. Or else I’m going to start a new magazine. It’s aimed at where all the heavy money is, so it’s got to be called Modern Widow … Sometimes you can make up good names for new firms. There ought to be an ambulance business called the Sick Transit Company. And then there’s my new marina, to bring in the LP set. Let’s see if I can pronounce it properly. It’s called the Ludwig Vann Boat Haven. Very difficult, very classical …’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Susan.
‘Forgive us,’ I said. ‘We are of humble origin.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Christ, don’t you know anything?’ I was sick of people who didn’t know anything; they were worse than the ones who knew everything. ‘It’s in The Brothers Karamazov, or maybe Crime and Punishment. Those are books … Therewas this captain – Captain Popoff, or Captain Pullizpantsoff, or something. He was a ranker, and he married a peasant woman who was always dropping social clangers, or spilling the samovar, or making idiotic remarks at parties. So whenever she did something particularly stupid, the captain would say: “Forgive us, we are of humble origin.” Thus putting everyone at their ease.’
‘Goodnight, Johnny,’ said Susan.
‘Lucky you,’ I said. ‘Nothing on your mind … I was a drop-out for the FBI … Actually, when I was your age, I had a wonderful job. Stud groom at an elephant farm. The pay was lousy, but the tips were terrific.’
‘Johnny, I’ve got to sleep.’
‘People miss the point all the time. Like Oscar Wilde’s character witness. Do you remember Lee Bum Suk?’
‘Johnny,’ said Susan. ‘For heaven’s sake?’
‘Oh, he was a real man. Foreign Minister of North Korea, or something like that. But you’ve got to agree that it’s an odd name. And we – that’s the good guys – felt we had to point the fact out. Lee Bum Suk, we said. Ha, ha, ha! Not so! said the Chinese newspapers. This is a foul capitalist slander, a typical revisionist lie. As all the civilised world knows, his name is actually Bum Suk Lee.’
‘Sleep, Johnny,’ she said. ‘Sleep, sleep. Please!’
I also was sleepy now, drowning out on a muddy, fouled-up stream-of-consciousness routine which, as they used to say on the music-halls when the tuba blew a rude note, was better out than in. But I still had a few left, with a little dredging. I might be no good to her, but, like the man in the hardware store, I could still talk a good screw, any day of the night.
‘The motto of the Gordon Highlanders in France,’ I said, ‘was “Up kilts and at ’em!” And let me take you to the land of the nursery rhyme.’ I gave it the light tenor treatment:
‘Oh, have you met my daughter, sir?
She can’t control her water, sir;
And every time she laughs, she pees –
Don’t make her laugh, sir, please sir, please!
Oh damn you, there it goes again,
A-trickling down her knees.’
‘Johnny,’ said Susan, ‘just give it a rest.’
‘Shall I sing you an old German raping song?’
‘No.’
‘Or my latest twelve-tone composition ‘Ecstatic Variations on a Theme by Me?’
‘No. Go to sleep. Or go away.’
‘Spoken like a true virgin. Oh yes, virginity. Virginity is the only realm where a girl will boast of her ignorance. Well, that used to be true. Now they seem to have taken the bit between their legs … Drives women mad – smells like money – that’s my aftershave lotion … And I’ve just remembered a story about a public lavatory in England. The chaps had been behaving very badly there – boring holes in the partitions, doing all sorts of naughty things to each other, committing sodomy every time they pulled the chain. So the authorities raided the place, and the policeman giving evidence said to the magistrate: “There were some absolutely filthy things going on, sir. In fact, when someone came in for a good honest crap, it was like a breath of fresh air.” That’s a true story.’
Susan didn’t like true stories, presumably, because I didn’t get any answer to this last contribution. My head had started to ache, and my mouth felt dry, which was a funny thing for it to feel after so much had been poured down it. There seemed to be a lot of traffic down on 54th Street; car doors slamming, and once someone running, like me. The rumpled bed felt like a corrugated sweat-box. I was going to have a hard time getting to sleep.
‘Captain Snegiryov,’ I said, after a long long silence; and then louder: ‘Of course! Captain Snegiryov!’
‘Who?’ asked Susan sleepily. ‘What?’
‘Captain Snegiryov. The man who said “Forgive us, we are of humble origin!”’
‘God damn you!’ said Susan. ‘I’m not interested.’
At the very same moment, I wasn’t interested either. Not in her, not in anything in the world.
‘Then I surrender, dear,’ I said. ‘I’m a talented coward. It’s the only kind to be.’
Not speaking anymore, a talented coward to the last, I turned away from her, and thought secretly, scarily: This had better be the last time.
I walked back, on a damned cold December morning, nursing an imperial hangover, trying not to dwell on the phoney symbolism involved in my long zigzag retreat up town, from West 54th Street to East 77th. I suppose I must have looked a bit wild, judging by the stares of passers-by; but God bless us every one! had these early-shopping matrons never seen a returning reveller with a creased suit, yesterday’s stubble of beard, and two well-earned circles under his eyes? Just how insulated can you get?
Of course I was pale and wan, and a little rocky when it came to walking a straight line. What did they expect me to be? It was ten o’clock in the morning – a gentleman’s dawn, having no connection with the sunrise. I had my rights, the same as any other card-carrying wino.
High as a kite, low as a flat heel, blinking like a lighthouse, feeling like hell, I plodded my way north-eastwards, towards home and beauty. Policemen gave me cold looks and a measured swing of the night-stick. Women averted their well-bred gaze. Dogs relieved themselves pointedly – especially poodles. Home was the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill he never climbed.
Kate – up early, like any percipient wife – said not a word when I got back. Obviously she was not fighting; if she were going to win at all, it was not by fighting. Though this was a change, it was not the most welcome change in the world. The least you could say to a returning dog was ‘Bad dog!’ and to a man, ‘For God’s sake wipe your feet.’ All I got was silence, and a face of purest marble, and music, music, music. The guitar had started again, and its sad and searching loveliness plucked at the air, and at all defenceless things, and at me.
Pursued by several kinds of taunting ghost, head aching, feet as sore as sandpaper, I went upstairs.
I went upstairs, to be taken, in solitude, by a drenching despair which would not leave me, nor yield to the half-bottle of champagne I had to have, nor relent in any way. This really was all wrong, and I was beginning to know it … If it needed a sickening hangover to tell me that I had been wandering a sordid by-path, then a hangover might well be part of every man’s first aid kit … Susan was a dear girl, and a lovely one, but I must not go to that tainted well again.
Suddenly I began to need Kate, with all the old hunger; I began to feel the conviction, deeply disquieting, almost terrorizing, that in spite of the rough edges and the smooth invigilation, I would never be happy with any other person. It was a totally confusing thought, and crossed up by a drinking man’s morning miseries, and a fornicating man’s remembered impotence, and the backlash of a glass of champagne which was not doing its appointed work; but in essence I could see that it came down to marital politics, which were the same as any other brand – the art of the possible.
If what we had got was not perfect, if the terms were tough and the prospects wounding, then the thing might be renegotiated. But it must not be abandoned, while life was still in it.
In love and war, it seemed, you did best – or at least you were not disgraced – if you took all the ground you could get, but gave all you had to give in payment. And if panic were persuading me to this, then panic could have the credit. I wasn’t using any credit cards that morning.
I was on the point of going downstairs to give Kate a very cautious slice of this, as a matter of concealed urgency, in the most guarded terms available to a man feeling his way from one pitch dark vault to another lit by a single candle, when the phone rang in my dressing room. It was Erwin Orwin.
‘What happened to you, Johnny?’ he asked immediately.
‘I’m sorry, Erwin,’ I told him. ‘I’ll be along soon.’
‘You got held up?’
‘No. I had a hangover.’
‘That’s what I like about the British,’ said Erwin. But whether he meant their hangovers or their transparent honesty, I did not know, and there was no time to inquire. ‘Now listen,’ he said forcefully. ‘Are you happy with Safari?’
It was a startling word, one I had not thought to hear that morning. ‘Happy?’ I said. ‘Yes, I think so. Why?’
‘Here’s why,’ he said. ‘Things have been happening to a couple of other shows. You don’t need the details, but one of them wants longer on the road, and Josephine is starting to sag, here in town. What I aim to do is cancel the out-of-town tour of Safari, and open it cold in New York.’
‘When?’
‘About five weeks.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said, though with an alarming sense of misgiving which was not related to the show. ‘We’ve done our best with it. I think it’s about ready to go, whether you put it on in Boston or here.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Erwin. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be taking this sort of chance. But it won’t be easy. We’ll have to work like crazy.’
‘OK.’
‘No more hangovers.’
‘Oh, come on, Erwin – this was the first one.’
‘It’s the first one that got into the record books. I’ll want you all the time, Johnny. How soon can you get down?’
‘Half an hour.’
‘I’ll be looking for you.’
I put the phone back, with a feeling that something beyond price – some healthy limb, some conviction of piety – had been ripped from me while I was off-guard. God, how did a man ward these things off, and still get a little sleep … For now I had my urgent assignment, and it wasn’t going to be Kate after all. Erwin’s call had seen to that.
Now I was foul-hooked elsewhere, and I had no choice save to follow the wrenching drag of the line. For a thousand reasons, The Pink Safari had to have all the priority; I was doomed to give Kate second place again, and in our present wasteland the demotion might be fatal. This was the one priority she would never recognise.
But there could be nothing else on the list, till the show was mounted. And if, after that, there were no list left to turn to, I might be foul-hooked forever.