A Man Over Forty (14 page)

‘There's no need to explain what's self-evident.'

‘But there is! You don't understand – oh, do be sensible, Louise! I mean, Nova! I've told you what to do – do what Father Dominic tells you to do – and now here's enough to pay the bill, and remember there's a lot of money to your credit at your bank in London —'

‘Money isn't everything!' she cried.

‘No, but it's a damned great help,' he said, and pushing off her restraining hands he put down two ten-dollar bills on the table, and shouted through the darkness of the tavern – against the dulcet accidence of the
Indian Love Lyrics
– ‘Polly! Wait for me, Polly!'

But Polly Newton had gone, and Balintore, stumbling against unseen tables, followed her through revolving doors on to the bitterness of 54th Street, battered now by a new fall of fiercely blown snow.

He could see her, a hundred yards ahead, and followed unhesitating, though without hat or overcoat. She was walking fast among a host of people that thickened and grew larger when she turned right on Fifth Avenue. From shops and offices a countless horde of clerks and accountants, stenographers, and assistant managers and junior executives, were hurrying in their homeward quest of cabs and buses and subway trains: muffled and rubber booted, heads down against the snow. The white storm whirled and eddied out of darkness into light, and swiftly glimmered in a curtained brightness before it settled as a cold mantle on narrow shoulders and broad backs. This way and that, the quick crowd divided – held now by scarlet lights at a corner, now released in a great wave by green – but Balintore still kept Polly in view, and pursued her recklessly, undeterred by jolting elbows or the menace of snow-shrouded taxi-cabs, the sleek rush of a dark Cadillac.

Polly fled like a startled doe, and as a running doe in autumn woods avoided contact, met no obstacles, but made her unerring way to her secret harbour. Her harbour, indeed, was a secret even from herself. She had no thought of where she was going, or where she wanted to go. Twice, looking back, she had seen that Balintore was following her, and indignation was enough to sustain her flight.

He had invited her to meet him – pleaded with her to come to the Golden Bowl – and how revolting was the scene she had witnessed! Balintore in the arms of a drunken woman, a woman with drunken tears channelling the artificial pallor of a mask-like face, and above her shoulder Balintore a caricature of consternation and vulgar appeal! Oh, it was insufferable, and as she hurried on – on towards Central Park, across 56th Street and 57th Street – she hardly felt the stinging slap of the snowflakes that fell upon her, but was moved only by desire to put behind her even the memory of so disgusting an encounter.

At Central Park, however, she staggered and was halted by a blast of wind and a blinding squall; and Balintore nearly caught her. She crossed to the west side of the Avenue, and still hurried north, beside the railings of the Park. Here there was no crowd, there was no one except herself, and her sudden loneliness unnerved her. She hesitated, stopped, and turned – and Balintore came towards her, hands held out, beseeching.

Her flight had tired her, and most of the anger which started it had evaporated as she spent her strength. What was left of it now vanished when she saw the ludicrous figure he showed.

His bare head was thatched with snow, and snow had crested his eyebrows. There were ridges of snow above the lapels of his double-breasted jacket, and a white clot at their intersection. His suit – of dark blue with a pin stripe – was spattered with clinging flakes, and darker than it had been. He was wet through and through, and though his breath came short, his expense of energy had engendered no heat. He was already beginning to shiver, and she started to laugh.

‘I owe you an explanation,' he said.

‘You certainly do.'

‘And when you've heard it, you'll realize that I wasn't to blame for that absurd situation in which you found me. The poor women who was crying – I wanted to help her —'

‘Why?'

‘She's in distress, she's in need of help.'

‘Why did she ask you for help, if that's what she was doing?'

‘She used to be my wife,' said Balintore, and sneezed with great violence.

‘Is that true?'

‘This isn't a suitable time, or a proper place, for fiction,' he said; and sneezed again.

‘How often do you meet ex-wives and let them cry on your shoulder?'

He ignored her question, and said, with a slight stammer in his voice, ‘It isn't the cold that's making me sneeze, it's a curious smell. Do you smell anything?'

‘Now that you mention it – yes.'

‘Wolves,' he said. ‘A feral smell. But no, not wolves, not carnivores. Elk or buffalo, or something wilder. Waterbuck. Kudu, perhaps? But why should I smell kudu?'

‘It could be yaks,' she said.

‘Yaks?'

‘This is Central Park,' she said. ‘There's a zoo here.'

‘O God!' he cried, ‘life's insufferable! Why should I be strung on a rack of pain between action painters and Tibetan cows? Help me, Polly. Take me somewhere and let me talk to you. I must talk to you before I get pneumonia.'

By now he was shivering convulsively, and Polly Newton, moved as much by a trained secretary's efficiency as by a woman's pity for male weakness, went to the edge of the pavement and waved commandingly to a passing taxi-cab.

The driver looked suspiciously at the drenched and shuddering figure of her companion, but was reassured by her explanation of his plight. ‘He's a visitor here. He's English.'

‘Did he swim?' he asked. ‘Well, get in, but it's another dollar for drying out the cab. Where to, lady?'

‘The Hotel Henry James.'

‘A b-b-bath,' said Balintore. ‘A hot b-b-bath, and then I can tell you what I want to tell you. Oh, I'm glad to see you again, P-P-P-Polly.'

‘Don't try to talk, just relax,' she said, and sat as far from him as she could, while he shook and shivered in his corner.

At the hotel she paid the cabman, and they were received with some bewilderment. In the elevator Balintore took a sodden dollar bill from his pocket and said to the goggle-eyed attendant, ‘Tell someone to bring up a bottle of Old Grand-dad as quick as he can.'

Palladis opened the door of their suite, and Balintore said, ‘Don't ask questions. Give Polly a drink, and bring me the bottle as soon as it comes.'

A few minutes later he lay in a white porcelain tub of water so hot that steam rose from it, and on the ledge of the bath nursed a tall glass of Bourbon, ice cubes, and water. Palladis came in again and said, ‘I've given her a drink, and now what am I to do?'

‘Keep her happy for a quarter of an hour, fill my glass again in five minutes, and I'll take over.'

Palladis found no difficulty in entertaining Polly Newton. He had helped her to take off her wet coat and hood, she had discarded her galoshes, and gone into his bedroom to brush her hair and repair her make-up. She had said yes to a Bloody Mary, and now, when he returned from Balintore's bathroom, she accepted another as if from childhood she had been accustomed to drinking vodka. She told him, with admiration and circumstantial detail, of the good qualities of her employer and the many kindnesses she had received from Mrs Evershrub. And now, she said, she was about to go back to London – and then to France and Italy – with Mr Evershrub.

‘When?' asked Palladis.

‘Tomorrow,' she said; and Balintore, flushed and hale from a hot bath and Old Grand-dad, came into the sitting-room.

‘What happens tomorrow?'

‘I'm going to London,' she said.

He had dressed, as if for a cocktail party in Jamaica, in trousers of yellow linen, a beach-shirt of tawny silk patterned with small red chrysanthemums, and a pink-spotted white scarf. The excessive warmth of the room did much to justify his costume, and it made him look conspicuously younger, healthier, and more attractive than the shivering, snowpatched pursuer who had been disconcerted by the smell of a yak. Polly Newton regarded him with a respectful interest when he said, ‘Well, that's a coincidence. So are we.'

He anticipated Palladis' question, and gave him no chance to speak, by laughing in a confident, low key and saying, ‘I owe both of you an apology for some very odd behaviour, and if you'll give me time – but you'll have to be patient – I can
explain everything that happened between the moment I went down to the Golden Bowl and my bedraggled reappearance here half an hour ago. You may find it an amusing story, and perhaps you won't be wrong; but to me – no, it was far from amusing. I've been involved in tragedy, and I've behaved like a clown: that's the pattern of the story. And if you want to hear it – well, we'd better have another drink before I start.'

He told it with considerable skill. He compelled sympathy for Louise – or Nova – and portrayed Ingo Pomador as a sinister mountebank who had played Svengali to an innocent girl whose misfortune it was to have a good figure and no faculty of judgement. As for his own part in the drama, he regretted the loss of sympathy which had ruined his marriage – he spoke as if he had been married only once – and frankly admitted his contributory faults.

‘I was selfish,' he said, ‘and insensitive. That I can't deny. And when I met her again in the Golden Bowl, quite unexpectedly, I was overwhelmed by remorse. That, Polly, is why you found me ludicrously embraced – hating what I submitted to, but submitting because I couldn't deny my own guilt – and when you turned and ran, revolted by what you saw, I followed you, driven by a new compulsion. I had to explain. I had to clear myself in your eyes. Because, in the vision of your eyes, I want to stand well. I want you to think well of me, and fondly of me.'

Both Palladis and Polly Newton appeared to find it difficult to comment on his final statement, but Balintore was unaffected by their silence and said cheerfully, ‘Now let's order dinner, just a simple meal, and we'll have it up here. A friendly, homely little party
à trois
, and Polly will tell us all about her adventures in New York. Call the restaurant, Guy, and no matter what we're going to eat, I think we ought to drink champagne.'

A waiter came with a yard-long menu-card, and Balintore insisted on prefacing their meal with oysters: oysters from Chesapeake Bay, a dozen each. He and Palladis chose shad roe and bacon, but Polly Newton asked for a tournedos steak; and when it came, showed an appetite that surprised them. Her steak, which was thick, was surrounded by french-fried
potatoes, string beans, spinach, and braised celery, and accompanied by a green salad: she cleared her plate, and afterwards ate a substantial wedge of strawberry short-cake. Nor did her generous meal prevent her from talking freely about her admirable employer and his wife.

Balintore looked at her with doting eyes – listened to everything she said with enchanted ears – but in the lassitude induced by several glasses of Old Grand-dad, and a generous share of two bottles of indifferent champagne, made no offer to go home with her.

‘Guy will take you home,' he said, ‘but we'll meet in London. Give me your address and telephone number —'

‘Brown's Hotel,' she said. ‘Mr Evershrub always goes there.'

‘Turn left when you come to Piccadilly,' he said, ‘and past Burlington House you'll find the entrance to Albany. That's where I'll be waiting for you.'

‘But I may not have time,' she said.

‘At your age,' he said, ‘there's time for everything.'

They Were able to get two lately cancelled seats in a Beoing 707 due to leave Idlewild the following evening, and Palladis insisted on devoting the day to sightseeing. ‘I am not too proud for simple pleasure,' he said, ‘nor so affected as to deny natural curiosity. I am going to see Rockefeller Center, the Empire State building, Greenwich Village, and the home of the United Nations.'

Balintore said he wanted a restful day, and went no farther than a bookshop on Fifth Avenue. His intention was to buy two or three novels, perhaps a new biography or book of travel, and possibly a volume of poetry.

The outer part of the shop, which was large and splendid, displayed nothing but expensive folios devoted to the arts of Umbria and the Etruscans, of Breughel and Kandinsky, of Vuillard and El Greco – opulent picture-books that illustrated the works of Dali, Botticelli, Picasso, Grandma Moses, Giotto,
da Vinci, George Bellows and a hundred others – or portrayed the art and artefacts of ancient worlds from the Lascaux caves to Yucatan, from Knossos to Peking. All this tended to induce in customers the uneasy belief that man from his earliest beginnings in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, in Thessaly and Honan, had been dominated by respect for the visual arts and found the ultimate expression of his genius in the quarries of Paros, the great cathedrals of Italy and Spain, and the ateliers – so clearly complementary – of the Renaissance and the Post-Impressionists.

For a few minutes Balintore himself succumbed to such a fancy, but shrugged it off as too extravagant, and was saved from any lingering suspicion that it might be true by what he found in the inner part of the shop.

There he saw shelf upon shelf – tall stacks of shelves – all filled with books entitled
Sex on the Campus, The Mating Habits of the American Male, Oestrus in the Suburbs, Sex in the Deep South, Sex in Latin America, How to Enjoy your Aberration
, and
Sex at Seventy
.

Against a ten-foot high picture of the Kremlin a new book entitled
Sex in Soviet Russia
was ostentatiously displayed, with the rubric in flaming red, ‘It's in its Infancy, say Anthropologists'. Shelves elsewhere held learned volumes on the orgiastic amusements of ancient Greeks and Romans, of Persians, Arabians, and Chinese; and picture-books reappeared to illustrate the erotic motif in Hindu Sculpture. But the major emphasis was on modern America's triumphant discovery and enthusiastic exploitation of the primal facts of life; and regional reports –
Anomalies in Arkansas, Fetishism in Fort Knox, The Sexual Symbol on Madison Avenue
– all contributed to a ringing declaration that sexual activity was recognized, not only as the paramount interest of the American people, but as the foundation of new and richly rewarding industries.