My goy’s wife, Jake thought, once the most feared left-winger on the Girton hockey field, twice mentioned in Jennifer’s Diary, drives him to his commuters’ train each morning, both of them fastened into their seat belts, and – Jake added – if he makes a telephone call from my house he will offer me four pence. If she has stunning breasts she would keep them decently bound and cashmered: similarly, if her bottom was ravishingly round it would be squared into a tweed skirt.
We’ll chat about politics, Jake thought, my goy and I, agreeing that while Harold Wilson was too clever by half and George Brown wasn’t the sort of chap you’d send to see the Queen, they were, after all, entitled to their innings. Jake’s solicitor would no more fiddle the tax inspector than cheat his mother at bezique; and what about the Times crossword? Yes, yes, of course he does it. Faithfully.
Perfect!
But where oh where, Jake wondered, consumed with ardor for his image, will I find such a limp prick? And then he remembered Ormsby-Fletcher. Stiff-collared, cherub-mouthed Ormsby-Fletcher, whom he had met at one of Luke’s parties, finding him as abandoned as an empty beer bottle in a corner of the living room. “I daresay,” Ormsby-Fletcher said, “I’m the only one here not connected with the arts. I’m Adele’s cousin, you see.”
So Jake located Ormsby-Fletcher and phoned him at his office. “Mr. Ormsby-Fletcher,” he said, “I’m afraid you won’t remember me. This is Jacob Hersh –”
“Indeed I do.”
“I’m in trouble.”
“I’m afraid I don’t handle divorces myself, but I’d be glad to refer –”
“What about, um, criminal law?”
“I see,” Ormsby-Fletcher said, faltering, retreating, already contriving excuses, Jake thought.
“Couldn’t we meet,” Jake cut in. “Informally, if you like.”
They met at a pub, Jake arriving first, showily carrying a Times and Punch. “I fancy a long drink myself,” Jake said, already tight. “What about you?” A gin, he said; and then Jake suffered chit-chat and fortified himself with uncounted doubles before he risked saying, “This is probably not your cup of tea, Mr. Ormsby-Fletcher. I shouldn’t have troubled you. You see, it’s a sex charge.”
The blood went from Ormsby-Fletcher’s strawberry-colored cheeks and he drew his long legs in from under the table tight as he could to his chair.
“Hold on. I’m not queer. It’s –”
“Perhaps if you began at the beginning.”
Brilliant. So Jake started to talk, circling close to repellent details, backpedaling furiously, hemming, hawing, hinting obliquely, retreating from the excruciating moment he would have to get down to concrete details, the crux, which would oblige him, just for openers, to use words such as penis and penetration … or, Jake wondered, hesitating again, was he expected to lapse into a gruffer idiom, something more forthrightly colonial? And then Ormsby-Fletcher, permanently endearing himself to Jake, volunteered, “I see. So then he led her into your room and, on her own initiative, she took hold of your roger …”
My roger of course. “Yes,” Jake said, igniting with drunken delight, “then the bitch took my roger in her hand …”
“But if that’s the case, Mr. Hersh –”
Jake clapped his hand on Ormsby-Fletcher’s shoulder and locked him in a manful heartfelt look. “Jake,” he said.
“Edward,” Ormsby-Fletcher responded without hesitation.
Unburdening himself now, Jake released the sewer gates. Careful not to incriminate Harry, he told all. Well, almost.
“I see.”
“Well, Edward?”
“Can’t promise anything, you understand, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Jake said, compromising him, he hoped.
“I suggest you come to our offices first thing tomorrow morning,” Ormsby-Fletcher said, and he called for a round-for-the-road.
“Sorry. No more for me,” Jake said, immensely pleased with himself. “I’m driving, you see.”
It was, as it turned out, the first of a seemingly endless run of conferences at offices, with ruinously expensive barristers, and at Jake’s house.
Jake, doting on Ormsby-Fletcher, came to anticipate his needs. Five sugars and milk heated hot enough to make a fatty skin for his coffee. Brandy, yes, but not an ostentatiously sloshed three fingersful into a snifter: rather, a splash, British style, sufficient to dampen the bottom of the glass. Ormsby-Fletcher liked to relax with a cigar and natter about this island now. “I daresay, to your way of looking, we are hopelessly inefficient …”
“But living here,” Jake protested, looking deep, “is so much more civilized than it is in America. After all, man doesn’t live by timemotion studies alone, does he?”
Encouraged, Ormsby-Fletcher asked, “Is it really true that corporations interview and grade executives’ wives?”
“It’s ghastly. Diabolical,” Jake said, shaking his head. “I simply wouldn’t know where to begin …”
Ormsby-Fletcher enjoyed sucking Smarties as he pondered his brief. Hooked on glitter, he liked to think Jake was on intimate terms with the stars, and Jake, lying outrageously, cribbing gossip from Variety, more than obliged. “Bloody Marlon,” Jake began one evening, unaware that Nancy had just entered the room, “has done it again. He –”
“Marlon who?” Nancy asked.
“The baby’s crying.”
Suddenly Ormsby-Fletcher said, “If it doesn’t sound too dreary, I wonder, well, Pamela thought if you had nothing better on, perhaps you’d both drive out to our place for dinner on Saturday night?”
“Why, that would be absolutely super,” Jake said.
But he wakened ill-tempered, dubious, and he phoned Ormsby-Fletcher at his office. “Edward, about Saturday night –”
“You needn’t explain. Something’s come up.”
“No. Not at all. It’s, well – your wife – Pamela – does she know what I’m charged with?” Would I disgust her, he wanted to say.
“You mustn’t even think like that, Jake. We’ll expect you at eight.”
Wednesday morning a postcard came, written in the most ornate hand and signed Pamela Ormsby-Fletcher. Were there any foods that didn’t agree with either of them? Now there’s breeding for you, Jake thought, and he wrote back to say all foods agreed with them. The next morning Ormsby-Fletcher phoned. “It’s just, ah, well, are there any dietary laws …?” No, no, Jake said. Not to worry. But swinging out onto the Kingston by-pass on Saturday night, Nancy in the car beside him, he began to worry more than a little himself. “Let’s not have that smart-assed argument about pantos and homosexuality tonight, the principal boy being a girl …”
The Ormsby-Fletchers’ cottage, overlooking the common in an unspoiled village in Surrey, exceeded Jake’s fondest fantasies. It was Georgian, with magnificent windows and climbing red roses. Pulling into the driveway Jake braked immediately behind a black Humber with the license plate EOF 1, grateful that Nancy hadn’t noticed the plate, because he did not want to admit to her that Edward’s father, who had bought the original, had been called Ernest, and that Edward was so called because no other anything-OF 1 plate was available.
“Hullo, hullo,” Ormsby-Fletcher said, and he led them through the house into the garden.
Floribunda roses. Immense pink hydrangeas. Luscious dahlias … Pamela, a streaky blonde and very nice to look at, wore a Mary Quant sheath cut high above the knees and white crocheted stockings. There was another guest, a plump rumpled sybarite called Desmond – something in the City he was – waiting on the terrace, where drinks were served with cheese sticks and potato crisps. Suddenly a pale stammering boy called Edward was thrusting a book and pen at Jake. “What?” Jake asked, startled.
“It’s the guest book,” Nancy said. “You sign your name and birth date.”
The au pair girl fetched Ormsby-Fletcher’s other son, an unpleasant three-year-old called Eliot, to be kissed good night. This done, Pamela began to chat ab
out the theater: she was mad keen.
“But how do actors do it,” Desmond asked Jake, “going on night after night, doing the same bloody thing …?”
“They’re children, inspired children,” Jake said triumphantly.
Pamela jumped up. “Would anybody like to wash their hands?” she asked.
“What?”
Nancy kicked Jake in the ankle.
“Oh, yes. Sure.”
Pamela led Nancy to the downstairs toilet and Jake was directed upstairs. Passing Eliot’s bedroom, he discovered the boy squatting on his potty, whining. The au pair girl was with him. “Anything wrong?” Jake asked.
The au pair girl looked up, alarmed. Obviously, she had seen Jake’s picture in the newspapers. She knew the story. “He won’t go to sleep without his golliwog,” she said, “but he won’t tell me where he put it.”
Jake locked himself in the bathroom and immediately reached into his jacket pocket for the salami on rye Nancy had thoughtfully prepared for him. Munching his sandwich, he opened the medicine cabinet, but it yielded no secrets. Next he tried the laundry hamper. Shirts, socks, then at last, Pamela’s smalls. Intricately laced black panties, no more than a peekaboo web. A spidery black bra, almost all filigree. You naughty thing, he thought.
Dinner commenced with hard-boiled eggs, sliced in half. Paprika had been sprinkled over the eggs and then they had been heated under the grill to suck out whatever moisture they still retained. Pamela flitted from place to place, proffering damp, curling white bread toast to go with the eggs. Jake washed down his egg with a glass of warm, sickeningly sweet, white Yugoslav wine, watching gloomily as Pamela brought in three platters. One contained a gluey substance in which toenail-size chunks of meat and walnuts and bloated onions floated; the next, a heap of dry lukewarm potatoes; and the third, frozen peas, the color running. Pamela doled out the meat with two ice cream scoops of potatoes and an enormous spoonful of peas and then passed around the toast again.
“You are a clever thing,” Desmond said, tucking in.
Next the cheese board came out, a slab of British Railways cheddar, which looked uncannily like a cake of floor soap. There was dessert too. A running pink blob called raspberry fool.
Desmond did most of the talking. The Tories, he admitted, seemed all played out at the moment, but one of these days another leader with fire in his belly would emerge and then we should see the last of that faceless little man in Number 10.
“We’ll leave the men to their port now, shall we?” Pamela said, and, to Jake’s astonishment, she led Nancy out of the dining room.
There actually was port. And cigars. Desmond apologized for the absence of his wife. She was in the hospital, he said, adding, “It’s nothing. Just a plumbing job.”
Ormsby-Fletcher recalled that when he had done his national service with the Guards on the Rhine he had occasionally gone to Hamburg on leave. “A chance to dip the wick, don’t you know?”
Jake leaned back in his chair, aghast; Ormsby-Fletcher, he thought, you saucy fellow, dipping the wick on the Reeperbahn; and just as he was searching himself for an appropriate off-color story, Desmond rode to the rescue with the one about the Duchess of Newbury. “On her wedding night,” he said, “the Duke naturally decided to have a bash. The Duchess, it turned out, couldn’t get enough. ‘Is this what they call fucking?’ she asked at last. ‘Yes,’ the Duke said. ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘it’s too good for the working classes.’ ”
Ho ho ho. Time to join the ladies. Jake excused himself, going to the upstairs toilet, his stomach rumbling, but when he finally rose to pull the chain nothing happened. This didn’t surprise him at first, knowing British plumbing as well as he did, but again and again he pulled, and still nothing happened. Oh my God, Jake thought, a big fat stool staring him in the face. What to do? Ah, he thought, opening the toilet door softly. There was nobody in the hall. Jake slipped into the adjoining bathroom, found a plastic pail, filled it with water, tiptoed back to the toilet, and poured it into the bowl. Now the stool floated level with the toilet seat. Flood tide. Pig, Jake thought. Sensualist. Hirsute Jew.
Wait. Don’t panic, Jake thought, opening the toilet window wide. There’s a simple solution. Wrap the stool quickly in your underwear, lean back and heave it into the rose bushes. Yes, yes, Jake agreed, but how do I pick it up? It’s yours, isn’t it? Your very own bodily waste. Disgust for it is bourgeois. Yes, yes, but how do I pick it up? Sunshine soldier! Social democrat! Middle-brow! Unable to face life fully. Everything is holy, Jake. Holy holy. Yes, but how do I pick it up? With your underwear. Quickly. Zip, zoom. Then lean back and heave. The Hersh garbage ball, remember? Inimitable, unhitable. In an instant Jake stood resolutely over his stool, jockey shorts in hand, counting down: ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four —— three —— two —— one-and-a-half —— one! —— three-quarters —— WHOOA! Voices in the garden. Jake tottered backwards, relieved. I’m no bourgeois chicken though, he thought. Another second and I would have done it.
Jake lit a cigarillo. So, they’re all outside on the terrace again. Good, good, he thought, stepping into his underwear, sneaking out of the toilet, swiftly down the stairs, and then into the downstairs toilet. Baruch ato Adonoi, he said twice, before he pulled the chain. It flushed. Should I go upstairs again, fetch the stool, and …? No. Exhilarated, Jake flushed the toilet again, noisily, and then he began to pound on the door. Finally Ormsby-Fletcher came. “I seem to be locked in,” Jake shouted.
“Oh, dear.” Ormsby-Fletcher told Jake how to unlock the door and then he led him into the garden, where Pamela was exhibiting paintings. A landscape. A boat in the harbor. A portrait. All reminiscent of the jigsaw puzzles of Jake’s childhood. He made loud appreciative noises.
“Now nobody tell him.” Then Pamela, bursting with mischief, turned to Jake. “Would you say these pictures showed talent?”
“Absolutely.”
“But amateur?” she asked enticingly.
Jake glanced imploringly at Nancy but her face showed nothing. Bitch. He stepped closer to the picture on display. “Mn,” he said, gratefully accepting a brandy from Ormsby-Fletcher. “Professional. The brushwork,” he added. “Oh, yes. Professional, I’d say.”
Desmond clapped a pink hand to his mouth, stifling a laugh.
They’re hers, Jake thought. Afternoons, wearing her spidery black bra and nearly nothing panties, she –
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Ormsby-Fletcher said. “Tell him.”
Pamela waited, savoring the expectant silence. Finally, breathlessly, bosom heaving, she exclaimed, “All these pictures were executed by mouth and foot painting artists!”
Jake gaped; he turned pale.
“Didn’t guess,” Pamela said, shaking a finger at him, “did you?”
“… no …”
Ormsby-Fletcher explained with a certain pride that Pamela was a director of the Society for Mouth and Foot Painting Artists.
“And still finds time to make such sumptuous meals,” Desmond said. “Oh, you are clever.”
“This picture,” Pamela said, holding up a seascape, “was done by a boy of seventeen, holding the brush between his teeth.”
With trembling hand, Jake held out his brandy glass to Ormsby-Fletcher.
“He has been paralyzed for eight years.”
“Amazing,” Jake said weakly.
Desmond felt the group’s work should be publicized in America. Swinging London, decadence, and all that tosh. Here was a bunch of disabled people who refused to cadge on the welfare state. An example to all of us, especially the run-down-Britain brigade.
“This one,” Pamela said, holding up a portrait of General Montgomery, “is a foot painting. It’s one of a series done by a veteran of El Alamein.” Next she showed another mouth painting, a still life, done by a street accident victim.
Shamelessly holding out his glass for yet another brandy, Jake shouted, “I’ll buy it.”
Pamela’s mouth formed an enormous reproachful O. “N
ow you’ll go away thinking I’m frightful,” she said.
“But it’s for such a good cause,” Jake said.
Pamela’s enthusiasm ebbed. “You may only buy one if you really, really think it’s good.”
“Oh, but I do. I do.”
“You mustn’t condescend to disabled people,” she said sulkily.
Jake pleaded and Pamela, all forgiveness now, allowed him to have the Montgomery portrait for twenty-five guineas. Then, bosom heaving again, she added, “And I’ll tell you what I’m going to do for you. I’m going to take you to see the artist in his studio.”