Seven
Roger was not feeling very well when he came out of the station at Ammanford, Pa. and went in search of Miranda. The train, though fast and not barbarously uncomfortable, had been full of Americans. He had chosen his railway reading badly. And what he drank and ate in the bar car had not been good for his stomach. That organ was still striving to normalize itself after last night’s intake of a lot of things called French 75s. (Half an hour with the telephone and not really very much effrontery had finally got him to a party somewhere in Greenwich Village. Two of the three presentable girls at it had each been accompanied throughout by a separate bearded Australian painter talking about artistic integrity; the third had pleaded lesbianism.) Not caring what one drank unfortunately did not guarantee not caring what one had drunk. He wished he could recapitulate now some parts of the brief but varied belching recital he had given in the taxi from his hotel to Pennsylvania Station. No good, though.
The reading-matter business had been worse really. He ought to have remembered that the New York Times lived by the assumption that everybody needed to know everything about everything. Information doled out in sheer quantity – as might be expected. They should stick to what they were good at or at any rate had made their own – Time, Life and so on – instead of trying to ape the London Times. And then – worse yet – there was Blinkie Heaven. There had seemed no danger at all in bringing this along to share with the New York Times the task of distracting him from having to look out of the window (and from the attendant risks of noticing something of what was to be seen out there). His recent injunction to the Author of all things to see to it that this particular one of his works should turn out strikingly below par had been, he had fancied at the time, almost a matter of form, an agreeable courtesy whereby one said please for what was coming one’s way anyhow – like ordering a drink. Reading the first couple of chapters of Macher’s stuff had caused Roger several emotions, the most painful of which had been that of a man who finds that, quite out of the blue, he has not been given this day his daily bread.
It was not that the thing was a good novel. Macher’s nationality, and existence in the present century, guaranteed that. Even before Clarissa there had only been a few touches in Aphra Behn and Defoe (Colonel Jack, of course, not Crusoe or Moll Flanders), and what was there since? No, the sorry-no-daily-bread sign had been hung out when Roger saw that if his firm did not take it a dozen others would leap at it, and that it would be a success. He could have written out the follow-up advertisement there and then. ‘A profoundly disturbing and yet deeply compassionate vision of the human situation’ – Philip Toynbee. ‘Perhaps one of the four most poised and authoritative contributions of the New York neo-Gothic meta-fantasy school’ – Times Literary Supplement. ‘This searing, sizzling, lacerating ICBM of a book will pick you up, throw you down and trample on you—’ Daily Express. ‘Remarkable’ – Yorkshire Post.
It was tempting to turn it down notwithstanding and say in due course that there were some successes which a house of any integrity ought to be proud not to have published. That sort of stuff went down well as a rule in Roger’s firm. With a staff of readers as dead as theirs to even the most blatant selling quality, it had to. But Roger had recently rather weakened his authority as champion of art vs. profit by successfully fighting for the rejection of a first novel by a young West Indian on the grounds that it was in love with evil. Appearing soon afterwards under a rival imprint, the book had not only sold half a million copies in the first six months, been accepted for translation into all Europe’s major tongues with Japanese thrown in and broken a record or two with the sum paid for its film rights, but had won two international awards and unprovoked commendations from Sartre, Moravia and Graham Greene. None of this might have mattered but for the widespread feeling that the book had encountered early opposition less because it was in love with evil than because its author was very much not in love with Roger and even more so the other way round. A well-attended party in Maida Vale had been the scene of flat disagreement between black man and white man on the subject of the future of Africa’s new nations. Negro arguments had been effectively silenced when an Anglo-Saxon head (Roger’s) butted their proponent in the stomach.
What was in one way most galling to Roger about Blinkie Heaven was that it was not, as he had first suspected, entirely staffed by the kind of character America had made its primary fictional concern. There were blind people, true, and the odd Negro, but they were not backed up by the expected paraplegic necrophiles, hippoerotic jockeys, exhibitionistic castrates, coprophagic pig-farmers, armless flagellationists and the rest of the bunch. People like shopkeepers, pedestrians, New Englanders, neighbours, graduates, uncles, walked Macher’s pages. Events took place and the reader could determine what they were. There was spoken dialogue, appearing between quotation marks. Never mind: as Roger approached Miranda he was consoling himself with the thought of what acceptance by his firm would mean for this particular fiction in prose. Stinginess over advertising space and with proof copies, caution about the size of the first impression would ensure a sale at least 10,000 fewer than most rivals could manage. But why, oh why, he questioned the All-Merciful, must he fall back on that?
Miranda turned out to be a small double-fronted shop between a delicatessen and a booze emporium. That was all right as far as it went. He peered in past racks of hairy neckties and asymmetrical stands of shoes and sandals too ugly not to be hand-made. Glass and pottery rejects of various sizes and uncertain function stood on triangular shelves. Here and there on the rush mats that covered parts of the floor were groups of wrought-iron vessels in which the very industrious or the very apathetic might one day boil water or even make a soup. Although the day was overcast, the green and white sunblinds had been lowered and visibility inside was poor. Nevertheless, several unmistakable women could be made out in the distance.
Roger crossed Miranda’s threshold decisively, confident that Caliban, or perhaps better Stephano, was if not driving hard in his New York office then at any rate drunkenly asleep there. A girl of Oriental appearance, who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye-sockets as well as eyes, came forward and said: ‘Good afternoon, sir, and what can I show you this afternoon?’
Although relieved at not having to start on the wantee-speakee-missee drill he had been contemplating, Roger would have preferred something less impeccably American. However, he replied at once in what he thought of as a cool brisk tone: ‘Oh, good afternoon to you. I wonder if I could possibly have a word with Mrs Atkins. Would you kindly let her know that Mr Micheldene is here, please?’
The girl looked him up and down for about a second and a half before saying: ‘Sure, I’ll kindly let her know. One moment, please.’ Her earlier friendliness had largely abated. She looked again and went away.
Roger recognized this treatment. They thought that because you spoke like an Englishman you must be homosexual, which only testified to their deep doubts of their own masculinity. It was true that this girl was a girl, not a man, but the principle held.
A middle-aged Negro woman, six feet tall and pretty near as close to jet black as the human skin can get, pushed her way through a bead curtain and came towards him. His mouth opened a short distance. Surely . . . No, rubbish, of course not. Actually this sort of thing was proving a great help: race and colour as an unexpected extra variable to eke out his small stock of Mollie Atkins recognition-aids. Given a few Red Indians and Indians and a Bushman or two as the others present in the shop, he was sure of being easily able to pick out Mollie Atkins, about whom all he knew for certain at the moment was that she stood between 4 ft 6 ins and 6 ft 6 ins and was in the 25–55 age-group.
The coloured woman picked up a large potted plant with leaves like starched leather and carried it back towards the curtained aperture, through which there now appeared another female, of unmistakably Caucasian stock this time. Roger blinked and screwed up his eyes convulsively a few times to provide evidence of shor
t sight if necessary. Even while doing this he could see enough of the Caucasian female to make him invoke the Prince of Peace (secreto, or nearly) and wonder briefly how many gin and tonics he must have put down that evening at Joe Derlanger’s place.
Then they were face to face. At this range she looked a little better, but not much. A complexion that appeared to have been left out in a violent hailstorm for about ten years was her most signal drawback. There were others. However, she stood an excellent chance of being Mollie Atkins, and if she was she had one great overriding virtue.
The smile she gave him was cordial enough, though tinged with just a little more inquiry, he thought, than fitted someone who knew who he was. He gave a much better smile back, with more eye-work and a quiet hallo. This, born of long practice, was aimed at alleviating that continuous trouble over names and faces which besets sufferers from alcoholic amnesia. It could be taken either as a token of tremendous intimacy or as the routine greeting of a very nice, but not necessarily very heterosexual, man.
Anyway, it then became magically all right. Mollie Atkins declared herself sufficiently unmistakably as such by saying emphatically: ‘Hi.’
Roger did not really like this vocable, but recognized its role. ‘Very good to see you,’ he said, packing sincerity in.
‘I thought we might take off.’
‘That sounds like a perfectly splendid idea.’
‘Where would you like to go?’
‘Oh, anywhere, really.’
‘What sort of place?’
‘I leave it to you.’
‘I thought somewhere quiet.’
‘So did I.’
‘If Miss Hartogensis calls tell her it’ll be there tomorrow afternoon,’ Mollie said, but evidently not to Roger. The Japanese girl (what made her think she could ever pass unnoticed in a white man’s world, however hard she worked at her accent?) smiled and nodded in a submissive fashion. At this Roger experienced a sensation of strong approval and reassurance. There were obviously still quite a few white people about in the Administration and in allied spheres, probably enough to see him and other American clients out.
With no more said, Roger found himself outside. A large white car, with its name or some equally inflammatory slogan written more than once on it in gold script, was parked near by. He got into it and prepared to be driven away. It was one of his boasts that he never drove and saw no need to learn. Like dancing. As well as putting other men into the implied position of having to work like hell at ancillary skills in order just to stay level in the social and sexual race, this non-qualification of his could have more direct benefits. To make him feel that the universe was indeed ruled by and through a divinely appointed hierarchy (a decreasingly common experience of late), few experiences had ever worked better than an encounter featuring himself, a stock-broker’s wife who was much too proud of her lilac-and-cream Mercedes, and a policeman. The last-named had put his head into the bar they were having a quickie in and said: ‘Driver of car 923 DUW please,’ and Roger had smiled winsomely and said: ‘That’s you, isn’t it, sweetheart?’ before turning away and asking the barmaid, a girl with protruding teeth but memorable as the owner of the furthest-apart breasts he had ever seen, whether she would care to join him in a little gargle.
Mollie Atkins – if this woman was actually somebody else altogether it seemed to be making no great difference – said as she moved the car into thin traffic: ‘How’s my old friend Helene Bang?’
Annoyance visited Roger, slightly less at the content of this question than at its timing. Answering it, or rather meeting it with a properly vituperative counter-question, belonged far better to the period after, rather than before, the act he hoped to be performing in the near future. He said as lightly as he could manage: ‘Very well, as far as I know.’
‘That far’s fairly far, isn’t it?’
He brought his head round towards her an inch at a time. ‘I’m afraid I don’t altogether . . .’
‘Understand? I’ll have to see if I can’t put it more plainly. I don’t know whether you’ve been to bed with Helene or not but you obviously want to very much and as long as you do want to you’ll keep trying, being you. I was just asking how you’ve been making out recently.’
‘I fail to see how—’
‘Now quit this fail to see bit, old boy. If you really can’t see then try harder. I want to know where I stand with you, that’s all. I think that’s normal and reasonable. I know a lot already, believe me, but there’s a little more I’d like to know. Are you with me so far?’
‘So far, yes.’ Roger glanced coldly out of the window but his eye fell at once on a building that looked like selections from a concrete battleship, with masts and turrets and portholes. It had a chromium cross stuck on its maintop to denote its function. So he glanced back in again.
‘Are you in love with the fair Helene?’
He said immediately: ‘Yes. Very much. I have been for years.’ Without being strikingly bold this was a good, sound piece of play. So far from resenting an avowal of love directed elsewhere, they positively welcomed it (unless of course they were beginning to consider themselves candidates for such an avowal, which was not going to happen here). It was as if they thought even a mortgaged heart was better than none.
‘Any ambitions? Long-term, I mean?’
He shrugged his shoulders and tried to look dejected. ‘Oh, quite hopeless,’ he said, which was dictated by security considerations as well as being tactically correct.
‘So I should imagine. I think you’d probably have to wait for – what’s he called? Ernst? – to die, wouldn’t you? And that’s going to take longer than you can afford. You married?’
‘Legally, yes.’
‘Well, as to that one that’s all I need to know for now. And you go back to Europe when?’
‘I leave for England on Tuesday week.’
‘Twelve days. Oh well. We should last nicely. It’s a bit of a trip for you to make, though, all this way down here by rail. Don’t you drive?’
‘I’ve never learnt.’
‘No, I guess you never did. Maybe I’d better come up to New York some time to do a little shopping. About a half hour’s shopping. Do you have an apartment?’
‘I’m living in a flat that belongs to a friend of mine who’s away, but his son’s in and out of the place all the time and I can hardly bar the door on him.’
‘You can’t? I’d have thought that was just the type of stuff you’d be good at. Why can’t you bar the door on him?’
‘Well, for one thing unless I literally did that he’d probably come barging in regardless, and as likely as not with half a dozen chums. He doesn’t hold on to much of what you say to him. He’s nearly always frightfully tight, you see. And the way it often takes him, if I did really bolt the door he’s perfectly capable of smashing it down.’
‘How old is this kid?’
‘Oh, early twenties, I imagine.’
‘The young learn fast these days, don’t they? Well, I can see it might be difficult. I could probably fix something myself. We have this apartment of our own and Strode hardly ever uses it but I never know when he might. Anyhow, we can talk about that later. By the way, next time you come down here I may be able to find us somewhere indoors. It won’t be easy but I’ll try. We ought to be all right today, though. It’s a pity there isn’t any sun but the air’s still quite warm. Would you mind giving me a hand with this junk?’
The junk consisted of a blanket, two pillows and a wicker hamper. Mollie handed it out to Roger from the back of the now stationary car, then looked up in the direction of a large white house fifty yards away on the far side of the land where they had stopped. ‘I don’t suppose those people would mind if we parked here for a spell, do you?’ she muttered.
‘Why, they don’t usually, do they?’
She laughed a lot, showing rather good teeth, though not as good as Helene’s. ‘Holmes, this is amazing. How did you guess?’
?
??Nothing to it, my dear. Just the way you drove straight to this exact spot – the nearest suitable one, I presume. How long did it take us, five minutes? No more.’
‘Four and half from the shop is regular for the course. When I’m in love I can clip it back to a little over four. It’s nice it’s so handy. Yes sir, there’s quite a deal of wide open spaces still around in this man’s country.’
‘Do you come here often?’ Roger asked as, with a thick belt of trees and bushes between them and the road, they came to a small clearing and spread the blanket on top of fallen leaves and thin grass.
‘Not as often as I’d like, but still pretty often. I have this knack of making friends easily, you see, and a surprising number of them keep coming around between girl friends or when their wives go visiting their folks. Is the boss acting up? Do your teenage kids and their buddies make the house uninhabitable? Nothing on television worth a damn? Call up old trouble-free punctual Mollie and you’ll get that same Southern welcome whether you’ve been away a day or ten years. Oh, it’s really lovely here in the summer and so safe. You could hear people coming a long time before they could see you but there’s never anyone around. You can just relax and enjoy yourself.’
While she talked she had been unpacking the hamper. Next to her as she sat on the blanket there now lay a bottle of gin, a bottle of dry vermouth, a wooden ice-bucket with a copper lid, a slender glass jug, a glass stirring-rod and two glasses. ‘Which would you like to try first?’ she asked.