Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (28 page)

Gerald sought for words. 'I meant,' he said slowly, 'that I've never been very close to my family and therefore I'm not used to confidences about them. What they do is their own concern. I hope you and Robin are happy, and, for the rest, I have nothing to say.'

Elvira stubbed out her cigarette angrily on a plate. 'I think all that's rather awful, really. That sort of outdated modern thing about parents and children not being connected. I don't see any point in a family if you go on like that.' She paused for a moment, then added, 'I suppose if I really cared about families I should think of Robin's. I would, I believe, if Marie Hélène was a real person, but, thank God, she isn't. But as to being happy, if you mean it as a portmanteau word for all sorts of "goods", then, thank you, yes, we are very happy.'

Gerald, looking at her profile, could not discern much of this emotion in her tense mouth and the strained look about her rather hysterical blue eyes. He felt that to remain silent would be less friendly than to risk impertinence, though the information had left him with a certain repugnance which he preferred not to define. 'You've met my daughter-in-law, then?'  he asked.

'Oh God! yes. Before I met Robin. She's the most awful lion-huntress, you know; so she was always trying to get Johnnie to her parties, but he saw pretty soon that they were no use to him and then she tried to suck up to me. The woman in Johnnie's life! She's crassly stupid, you see. Actually, poor thing, she's probably quite a good ordinary French bourgeoise, only like all of them she's a colossal snob and money's gone to her head. She gives these ghastly parties and poor Robin has to tag along - British Council people and the most minor politicians and all the bad writers and painters who aren't even best-sellers. She thinks she's a sort of cultural link between England and France, and every now and again she gets hold of some French writer whom nobody would
touch
over there and does an enormous thing about him. Actually she's just about heard of Montherlant. I do hope you don't
like
her, but I can't imagine anyone would bother to think about her unless they happened to be in love with her husband. I don't like her at all.'

Gerald laughed. 'I realized that,' he said.

'Well, would
you
in my position?'  Elvira cried.

'No, certainly not,' Gerald replied. 'Robin's very intelligent,' he added.

'Yes, I suppose he
is
in a way,' said Elvira, 'only he's awfully badly educated and doesn't know anything about anything worth knowing about. Anyhow, that's not why I'm in love with him, but I think we won't discuss that. The awful thing is that he's so sensible, and with Marie Hélène being a Catholic and a bitch and refusing to divorce him,
we
have to be sensible. I'm not
really
very good at it. Because Robin thinks he has a duty to Timothy, and, of course, he's right. So we only meet four evenings in the week and Marie Hélène has to know and give her tacit consent, which means that she can't do anything about it, but one feels she's there all the time. And then what's so awful about me is that when I know it's an evening to be with Robin, I feel I want to do something else; and when it's like tonight and I can't see him, I have the most hellish pain in my stomach and want him awfully. But still that's part of being in love and the price one pays for being so madly happy and so on, isn't it?'

Gerald looked at her to see if she was speaking ironically, but she was completely serious. He wondered if it was fanciful to hear Dollie's voice once more through all the years in this. Fanciful or not, he decided, it really was his duty to try to help for once. 'I think, you know,' he said, 'that you should tell Robin all this. These sensible arrangements can upset things badly and they can always be rearranged if they have to be. I know something about it because the serious love of my life came to me after
I
married and it was broken up by things of this sort.'

'Thank you,' said Elvira, 'but I don't really want any advice. Besides, I've heard about your girl-friend. She was a tennis player, wasn't she? So it's hardly the same thing.'

Gerald smiled. 'I doubt if such distinctions matter much in love affairs.'

Elvira gulped down her coffee. 'Oh no, not in the absolute basic part of it, of course,' she cried, 'but it must matter whether you're a person with any
real
relationship to life or not.' Gerald felt angry at her tone of superiority. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I don't mean to be superior. And anyhow, even if I don't want advice, I do really want a father figure, however English and awful it is of one to do so. What I should like is if Robin and I could visit you sometimes.'

Gerald was appalled at the prospect. However, 'I should be delighted,' he said. 'I doubt if Robin will care for the idea much, though; we've never been on very easy terms.'

Elvira rather inexpertly brushed some crumbs off her skirt. 'Oh!
that!'
she said. 'I think all that's rather silly.'

It seemed to Gerald that he heard a voice condemning the whole complicated machinery of his past life without seeing even the remotest necessity for examining its structure. Nonsense of this sort from an attractive girl had at least the merit of making one try to defend the indefensible.

Any defence of his conduct as a parent that he intended to make was prevented by Elvira. 'I must go now and get on with the new Compton Burnett,' she said. 'But before I go, since we've got on to this confessional basis, I think I'd better say something about Johnnie. I couldn't go on working for him, you know, because he's got so impossible and bogus, but I
am
very fond of him. Oh! not,' she added, waving her cigarette in the air, 'because he's a queer. I'm not that sort of a girl. ...' She stopped and looked at Gerald in alarm. 'Oh, my God! You didn't even know that. Well, it's time you did. He is,' she said savagely.

Gerald stirred uneasily in his chair. 'I'm not quite sure if I know what you mean,' he said.

'He's homosexual,' Elvira went on in the same angry voice. 'That's what "queer" means. I hope you're not going to be stuffy and difficult about it.'

Gerald answered slowly. 'I didn't know that John was a homosexual,' he said. 'I know very little about him really, and even less about the subject we're discussing. I've only come across it three or four times in my life, among people I actually knew, that is. It revolts me rather, I think, but I'm not violent about the subject. I'm just not interested.'

'Well, you should be,' said Elvira, 'or at least, I don't know. Perhaps not. I'm bored stiff with it myself, but that's another matter. Anyhow, I don't want you to think I'm a queer's woman. I don't like a lot of them - all that cosiness and being martyred. But I
was
very fond of Johnnie. He used to be so discreet - he's that secret kind, you know - but since all this awful publicity-seeking has taken hold of him, he seems to have lost all his sense. His new boy-friend Larrie is the most awful little crook, I'm sure, and I'm worried about it. I think you should do something about it.'

Gerald raised his eyebrows. 'You have very exacting views of a father's functions,' he said.

'I suppose I have,' Elvira replied. 'My own father was a very responsible person.'

'I see,' Gerald observed, 'but I doubt if I can do much. John is hardly likely to listen to me on any subject. And on this one, as you've already heard, I'm ill-equipped to speak. His mother is far closer to him than I am.'

'Oh her!' Elvira snorted.

'You know my wife?'

'No,' said Elvira, 'but I've heard enough about her from Johnnie and Robin. Besides, she's having this awful boy down to her
house.
He's Irish and he's probably blarneyed her or whatever they call it.' Gerald raised his eyebrows. 'It's no good doing
that,'
said Elvira; 'you must do something about it.' Her tone was quite governessy. Even later, when he dropped her at her Hampstead flat and, tired, refused the drink she offered, he heard her last words shouted after his departing taxi - 'Promise you'll deal with that Larrie business.'

That same night was the last that Larrie was to spend at Frank Rammage's before moving to the flat over the stables at Marlow. He was entertaining Frank and Vin Salad now in Frank's large room. As he talked he moved restlessly about, stubbing out half-smoked cigarettes, whittling a piece of wood with a penknife. Someone had once told Larrie that 'his Irish soul danced through life', and with his histrionic temperament he believed that his restlessness and his untidiness were part of this dance.

'If it's dreams and visions that could make an artist,' he would say, 'I'd be the greatest poet of them all. But I never had the education ...' and then he would launch into one of the many versions of his 'hard' childhood to which most of his conversation ultimately led. His roguish look, his ever so Irish dancing eyes would change to a sad little urchin look, and then, if the audience proved unreceptive, would settle into the sullen, depressed look which was his natural expression in repose.

But this evening he was not putting over a story to an untried audience, and his mood, though hectic, was in a different key. For Frank he was defiant, the boy who was blazing a trail through life, his cheeks aflame, his blue eyes glowing at the future before him. But for Vin, there were winks and the tongue stuck in the cheek, the wide boy who wasn't to be taken for a ride by anyone, the boy who knew all the answers and was going places that Mr Vin Salad would only see at the pictures.

'It's a wonderful house, Frank,' he said, and his nicotine-stained fingers made gestures to try to describe its limitless size and wealth, 'with great gardens ablaze with all the colours in the rainbow.'

'That's not likely in dead of winter,' said Frank, and his little mouth pursed tightly.

'Conservatory flowers that come from all the parts of the earth, from Asia,' Larrie said, warming to his subject, 'and Africa and China too. It's a beautiful house for a grand old lady. She's like a queen as she moves about the great rooms, and she treats me like a prince. Nothing's good enough for Johnnie's friend. It's peaches they must bring in and grapes, and if I don't like them, then it's something else. All for little Larrie. There'll be maids to wait on us, and nice little bits of skirt they are, I'll tell you. But I'm not to notice, for I'm the guest in the house. "Get Mr Rourke this and get Mr Rourke that" it is all the time. She's the grand lady all right and speaks to them as if they were no better than the muck in the stables.'

Inge would have been disconcerted to hear this description of her careful social democratic treatment of her maids, but Larrie was not concerned with fact or observation in life.

Vin Salad lay back on the divan and looked at his ornate wrist watch. 'She sounds a proper cow,' he drawled.

Larrie winked at Vin. 'That's right,' he said aside, 'but the old bitch doesn't see that there'll be someone else to play the grand lady now.' He flashed a grin of his white teeth.

Vin raised a manicured hand to his mouth and yawned. 'Get you,' he said.

Going straight was getting Vin down a little. He was a good waiter and kept his job, but regular hours and hard work gave him no reward but a sense of self-righteousness. A vinegary, spinsterish note had already crept into his lazy drawl. 'I notice,' he said, 'that you're not sleeping in the palace. It's the stables for you, isn't it? You may be the great Johnnie's new little friend but that doesn't mean they're having any common little slut smelling their grand house out.' Vin's idea of abuse was that of his grandmother. Larrie's departure from the house laid the way open for him to rule over Frank's little island of washed-up flotsam, to assuage his discontent on the other, less favoured, less quick-tongued lodgers; nevertheless he was jealous. Larrie knew this, of course; he did not answer Vin's abuse.

'I was telling Johnnie,' he smiled, 'that we must come to Giacometti's. He's not forgotten his meeting with you, Vin. I'll see that he leaves you a proper good tip.' Very slowly he began to walk across the room, his handkerchief over his arm, his legs bowed, his feet hitting the floor flatly. He was in a minute the image of a depressed, worn-out old waiter.

Frank pointed a fat little hand towards a chair. 'Sit down, ducks,' he said. 'That would be better if you were to work hard and earn an honest wage like Vin.' He turned towards the elegant lolling figure on the divan, but even he found Vin Salad's epicene languor an impossible example of simple thrift, and his sermon ended in mid-air.

Larrie was at once all boyish fervour. 'But it's just that I'm going to do, Frank,' he cried, his eyes ashine; 'I'm to drive the car and work in the garden. Oh, it'll be a fine life, a decent man's life. I know you meant it for the best, Frank, getting me that job in the pub, but it was killing me, Frank, honest it was, the smoke and the smell of it. It's the fine, clear air I need and the early rising.' He ran his hands through his scurfy, brilliantined hair in the excitement of the picture he was forming of himself. 'I've not had much education and I don't know much about things, but it seems to me a fine thing when people believe in you. I've been no good, Frank, I know that. Lying and fiddling, that's all I've been good for, it's all I was brought up to.' The little urchin face was near to tears at the thought of all the injustice. 'But I know this, Frank: it's grand when people believe in you like Johnnie and the old lady believe in me. You've been good to me, but you've never done that, Frank, never believed in me, and a bit of trust is worth all the sermons that ever were from the beginning of the world.'

Vin Salad stirred for a moment in his reptilian stillness, his long, dark eyes flickered. 'I believe in you,' he said; 'bloody crap.' He rose slowly from the couch and settled his coat around his hips, then he looked Larrie over very slowly, taking in the dirty, crumpled suit, the scruffy hair, and stained fingers. When he spoke again it was not in his usual cockney, but in his occasional Kensington drawl. 'I should think these Middletons could be very elegant people,' he said, and then he added, 'But of course I forgot, living among all those lovely flowers, they probably can't recognize the smell of shit any more.'