Earthly Powers (36 page)

       "Well, it's to her I write actually. Doris, our stepmother. I knew her, you know. Who would have dreamt? I didn't actually, you know, but I might have done had I not been so chaste." There was a Val-type intonation on that word, but Tom was, of course, now a professional stageman. "She said that Father doesn't particularly like being a grandfather, it's as though Hortense did it to spite him. She says he's well but tired, and we know what's causing the tiredness, don't we? Very advanced, she says he says, the dental work. He's had to get himself up to date, and that's tiring too. American style. They call themselves stomachologists or something. I don't see the connection."

       "Stomatologists. Stoma. The mouth. Don't you remember Father Dwyer? Too much stomulia going on here, me boyos."

       "He left just after you did. There was no more Greek then."

       "I want some coffee," Estella said truculently, "and a crme de menthe." Warlock or Heseltine could be heard clearly reciting what seemed to be a poem by Lawrence in a high parsonical voice. "Of course," she said, "you're both RCs, aren't you?"

       "John Milton," I told her, "wrote something about Roman Catholic being one of the Pope's bulls. Particular universal. You see that? And would you perhaps like some coffee? With a liqueur? Perhaps a crme de menthe or something?"

       "I already said I wanted precisely those two things. Nobody reads Milton any more. He's vieux jeu."

       "What terrible French vowels you have." I smiled. "Ant', for that matter, what terrible manners. Both could be put right, you know."

       "All right, Ken," my brother said. "Let it go, please. Don't let's spoil the evening."

       "It's the priests who cause that, isn't it?" Estella said. "They make you scared to death of going with a girl because that's the sin of fornication, so you do the other thing."

       "What other thing?" I smiled still.

       "Please, Ken," Tom said. "All right, Stell, enough."

       "Either nothing or the other thing. Tommy ought to be a priest himself. And we can all see what you are."

       I looked at Tom, who was blushing furiously. It seemed to me that our whole family was in something of a sexual mess. To Estella I said, "Dr. Freud would be most interested. And your dear gangling ganglionic Aldous. You ought to write an article about it. A new theory of homosexuality."

       "Please, Ken," and Tom started to cough. He coughed bitterly. "Damned smoke," he gasped, then drank off a glass of water. "Let's get the bill and get out of here."

       "I want my coffee," Estella said with governess clarity, "and," with an exaggeratedly correct French accent, "some crme de menthe."

       "Somewhere else," Tom still gasped. "Cafe Royal."

       I put a couple of pound notes on the table. "I have to go back to the hotel. A little rewriting. Rudyard Kipling told me I'd got some of my Indian facts wrong." This was a lie.

       "Kipling?" Estella said and put out a white tongue tip in a vomiting gesture. "Oh me Gawd. Wen yiou've eard ye beast acawwin." Her cockney was very accurate. She leaned back dangling her creamy spoon like a pendulum, and said, "Pansies for thoughts."

       "What is that meant to mean?"

       "Oh, go, Ken, for God's sake." Tom, white from his coughing, waved my two pound notes at a distant waiter.

       "Going," I said, and I went. I had to pass Warlock-Heseltine's table. He, with what looked like potato purée on his beard, was loudly ridiculing the opening of The Rainbow: "'For heaven and earth was teeming about them, and how should this cease?' Mark the Nottinghamshire miner's grammar, my bullies." Val twiddled his fingers at me and sweetly mouthed Tomorrow. It struck me that I had no friends.

       The next day I went to see my literary agent, Jack Birkbeck, whose office was on Maddox Street. The weather had turned chilly and he had his gasfire alight. "I envy you," he said, "getting away from all this. We haven't had a decent summer since the war."

       I knew his proleptic modes of speech and understood that he meant something other than my going back to the same chill June in Paris. He was about thirty and totally, one could say obscenely, bald; he had achieved, I understood, this state while only twenty and still at Cambridge and dreaming of becoming a great novelist. He had blistered meaty lips and a pronounced diastema, the top incisors inclining left and right, the consequence of thumbsucking as a child. The interdental gap accommodated a cigarette like a Panglossian holder; he tended, as now, to forget it was there, going damn and blast when his lips scorched. He wore a brown suit peppered with blue dots, suitable for the country. I waited. He threw papers around on his desk. "Famous Lasky," he said, "Paramount Pictures, you know, want to buy The Wounded."

       "Ah. How much?"

       "Oh, a thousand or so, quids that is. For Gibson Gowland. You know him? He's on at Leicester Square, one of these places. Now the next thing is a travel book. Becoming very popular with the world opening up again. Scribner's man Jeifreys was here, we had lunch, he paid of course, he was keen on that. That would be jest fahn ah gayess. He insisted on taking me to the Lucullus, Wembley. The British Empire, he was very struck with the British Empire. India, Ceylon, the Federated Malay States. Now then, here's my idea. You do that, and you also do some so to speak travel stories. Memsahibs committing adultery, planters' wives murdering their Chinese lovers, district officers going down with DTs."

       "A rather limited image of the British Empire."

       "Well, out east, you know. Eard the heast a-cawwin. You know Collier's? I don't mean those dirty poetic men in D. H. Lawrence, I mean the magazine. Thought you did. One thousand dollars per story. They'll arrange a contract for twenty stories, half and half for foreign rights, then perhaps another twenty if all goes well. Really short ones, two and a half of their pages with a big illustration—you know the sort of thing, the memsahib in her camisole threatening a leering muscular coolie with a broken gin bottle. Anyway, it's two birds. You end up with two books, one throwing harsh tropical light on the other. Toomey's East. Damn and blast." That was the cigarette.

       "Fifteen hundred dollars," I said. "Short stories are hard work."

       "Well, you'll have the book as well. Forty stories, about ninety thousand words all told, a fair size. Anyway, I'll do what I can. So you get yourself some nice tropical gear, including two nice white dinner jackets, American fashion but you could introduce it east of whatsit, and don't bother about a solar topee because those are out. I can get expenses out of Scribner's. Or perhaps they and Secker might share. Treat me to some lunch, I think I deserve it."

       I took him back to Claridge's, where I was staying, and there was steak and kidney pudding that day, welcome enough in the June cold, no salad weather. A bottle of purple Pommard. Strawberry flan with Devonshire cream. Brandy and coffee and a dish of friandises, all of which Jack Birkbeck ate. Like most literary agents, he had a good appetite. "I don't have anybody coming till five," he said. "We ought to go and see that picture with Gibson Gowland in it. Zasu Pitts. Done by Stroheim, an Austrian. It's called Greed," he said, taking the last two friandises.

       "I have to bow to the Clarences. That means sleep and a bath and slow dressing over a cocktail."

       "Sleep, yes. Bit heavy, wasn't it, the pudding? Well, you might as well get used to the tropical ziz, as they call it. All right, no movie. A Corona Corona perhaps and some more coffee and another drop of Rémy Martin." And then, as he tried to fit the cigar into the interdental holder and failed, "Why Paris?"

       "What do you mean why Paris?"

       "You're the sort of writer who ought to be here. Paris is for the international gang that laughs at commas and doesn't write jack with asterisks. It's not you.

       "You sound to me as though you're quoting somebody."

       "You don't read reviews, do you? Don't blame you really. Well, I wasn't exactly quoting. There was a long article in The Times Lit Supp. Paraphrasing call it."

       "About me?"

       "Nawwwwww, not about you. You're not the type. About what he called the Paris Expatriate School. Anon, of course, but everyone knows it was Robert Lynd, lit ed of the News Chron, or some other stay-at-home ess aitch one teabag. There was a sort of tail-end dig at Toomey pathetically trying to be in the Paris fashion with his stream of consciousness and a whole paragraph of upper case with no punctuation."

       "Well, he seems to have read Windfails anyway, that's something. Those were meant to be parodic and there wasn't much of it. The great unerudite public didn't complain."

       "You need this travel. You need the big winds blowing on you. Did you go to Proust's funeral?"

       "I wasn't invited."

       "Ingrown stuff, a big incestuous whatsit. That's what he left behind."

       "Ganglion?" A strange word, that, meaning either a bundle of nerves or a cystic lesion like a tumour. But to be a bundle of nerves was to be diseased. "Anglia or ganglia, take your choice, is that what you mean? Remember the British heritage and don't mess about with foreign muck. Tour the Empire and come back to London and meet Arnold Bennett for lunch at the club. I don't know what I want, Jack."

       "You want to take a P and O from Southampton. I'll ring up Cockspur Street for you if you like. Sooner the better."

       "Give me a day or two to think about it."

       I slept more heavily than was proper for a siesta. I dreamt that I was Putting on a new play whose title was something like Spicy Garlic Smells. There was genuine tropical foliage on the stage and I was there, naked, being made love to by a great naked black African under very hot spots and floods. The audience catcalled and I seemed to see Tom's girl friend Estella standing up in the stalls leading the jeers. Royalty was present in the royal box, and royalty, disgusted, stood up and then left. The little pit band started to play the National Anthem. I woke up dry and sweating and rang at once for tea.

       The Tumult and the Shouting went well that evening, and the Duke and Duchess of Clarence graciously congratulated us all, though the Duke seemed to think I was Jerry Comrie, who played the sandfly-fevered father. "Keep it up," he told Jerry, "very powerful, some of it, some damned good lines." Then I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue in tails and light overcoat, turned into Dean Street and looked among the filthy and sleazy for the Neptune Club. It was between a Continental news agent and a condom shop with the Works of Aristotle (the obstetrical monk, on the Stagyrite) on show. The club had an ordinary shop front with the glass mauve opaque. A shopbell tingled when I opened the door. A doorthing said, Yes dear? "I'm a guest of Mr Wrigley." Who, dear? Oh, him. Oh yes, like a worm, we know, don't we?

       It was pretty horrible inside. There was a marine motif of nets and ropes in paper cutouts all over the duckegg-blue walls. The bar, over which presided a very muscular man with a sort of corpse maquillage, the club owner, stern, addressed as Paul or Paulie or Pauliballs, had been carpentered into the likeness of a dead-white jollyboat. A boy with lank black hair played the cottage piano nonstop, while another boy fed him cigarettes. "Lady Be Good."

       "Felix Kept on Walking."

       "Stardust." No, not "Stardust" that year. And there sat Val, watching the dancing. Tom's coughing of the previous night had reminded me that Val was supposed to be tubercular. He did not seem so now. "How," I asked, "is the chest these days?" We were served light ale.

       "Money, you mean? Queer way of putting it. Oh, the other thing. The chest."

       And he pressed his chest with five spread fingers, trying to raise, but not succeeding, a cough. "Oh that was the Keatsian thing I used to be, old thing, used to frighten me sometimes, then I got sent off to this place in Switzerland, Aargau, Argovie, you know it? Very expensive, all that cold bright air, drink it in, do you good."

       "Who paid for it?"

       "Well, we know who didn't, don't we, old thing? Not your fault, of course. Still, we've both come a long way since then."

       "I didn't know there was any money in poetry."

       "Oh, there's not. It's the sidelines. Reviewing. I worked on Nancy Cunard's thing for a bit, Ivory and Ebony, then she kicked me off and put a fig in charge. Not much ivory left in it by the time she'd finished. I've done a couple of children's books, you know."

       "I didn't. So you're all right then, independent and so on?"

       "Yes," he sibilated, looking at me none too warmly. "Not kept, if that's what you mean. I've been felicitated on the authoritative virility of my verse. Dear Jack Squire, silly old fart. See, look, admire." He was wearing a kind of poacher's jacket over a cream silk shirt, tastefully teased out crimson neckerchief, and peagreen flannel trousers. From a big side pocket he pulled a thin book. Valentine Wrigley. Faber and, highly reputable. The title: A Feast of Cinders.

       "This is not for—"

       "No, it is not for. Nothing to do with Cinderella at the ball. Look, admire, take in."

       A glance or gander of this gandy dancer, Cane f gannet of mind I mean,        Takes in seasky's immensities, Black win gtips hid, see crass beak pincer        Thoughtfish, gulp, in a wavewhite preen On rock rests nor questions what rock is.

       "A long way from the thrush in the heart of Ealing."

       "Oh, that." A boy had started to sing If I were the only girl in the world and you were the only and two other boys were spitefully spoiling the act.

       "What's she doing?"

       "She is" (pause) "hinging."

       "You're staying in London long?" Val asked. "Are you considering even coming as it were," he asked, "home?"

       "Well," I said, "I have to confess that I wonder why I'm in Paris. But if I lived in London I'd have to wonder why I was here."

       "It's where your language is spoken, dear, your mother tongue."