Earthly Powers (70 page)

       "My father, a little. Once I speaked it good."

       "Well, you mean. You spoke it well."

       "Once I spoke it very well."

       "Good, that's very good."

       I carried his bags, which he seemed to expect, but I left the racquets to him. He looked at himself before looking at the room: there was, just within, a cheval glass, a fine old spotty one I had picked up at the sale of Lady Huntingdon's Belgravia effects. Then he tested the bed, its sheets newly changed after a visit from the American producer Jack Rappaport, and bounced his arse on it for resilience. "Well," he said, "very well. So here I sleep." At least he did not ogle me from that position. Rather he ogled himself anew in the dressing-table mirror, admiring the sit of the fawn jacket with its skimpy Central European cut and the blue tie with its horrid design of golden leaping hares. "We will go to the Café Royal and there drink a cocktail and then eat lunch and discuss your future."

       "Bitte? Please?"

       "Deine Zukunft." He simpered at my unthinking use of the familiar form. Then he bounced up, opened one of his suitcases, and began to change his clothes. No pudeur, of course, no Schamhaftigkeit. I was expected to watch, so I watched. He encouraged me to note that he was not circumcised. The rest of the body was a hard golden almost textbook model of Aryan male comeliness. He put on what he must have thought of as his British suit: drab grey but still skimpy. He hummed Trink, trink, BrŸderlein, trink as he redressed. That had been, at the time of the 1934 massacre, an SA favourite.

       We were looked at knowingly in the Café Royal upstairs bar. Middle-aged Toomey, tastes often guessed at, tastes now blatantly advertised. Heinz drank three martinis and smacked his lips after sipping. I took him down to lunch and he tucked in to a large hors d'oeuvre, poached turbot, roast beef with horseradish, Stilton, and a double helping of chocolate mousse. "Das schmeckt gut," he said often, and once, "Die gute Englische Kochkunst." We had two bottles of chilled Wachauer Schiuck in memory of dead Austria. We talked. My father said that you would see to everything. He spoke of your becoming my Pflegevater and of British papers of Annahame or adoption. Is your father mad? It is all too possible, to me he has always seemed mad. You do not like your father? I like him when he is away in the house near Gerasdorf and I am in Vienna or he is in Vienna and I am in the house near Gerasdorf, though I do not like the house near Gerasdorf, it is too far from Gerasdorf and besides there is nothing to do, not even in Gerasdorf. I should be glad of another father. Oh my God. No, I cannot be your father. If you can get work in England then a work permit can be arranged and you can be your own master, I can look into that, but you cannot, God help us, assume so serious and binding an enactment as adoption. Out of devotion to your father's work I will do everything possible for you, but there are, you understand, limits. He seemed to regard devotion to his father's work as a demented foible, not less demented for his having met it often and seen it sanctified by the Swedes, but he considered his father's work to be oldfashioned, boring and pretentious. Himself he preferred a good Jack London or a Kriminalro, nan. Or the cinema, he was mad about the cinema. How many cinemas gave there in London?

       A well-known sodomite, James Agate the theatre critic, came in and looked hard at Heinz, making signals with his puffed and englowed cigar spunk. Heinz twinkled at him and moved his shoulders. I told Heinz that the situation as regards employment might shortly ease for the incoming Jews, the trade unions relaxing their strictures. Jews? Jews? Heinz said he had no time for the Jews, a grasping and puffed-up race. Yids, sheenies. But damn it, man, you yourself are a Jew. Ah no, I am not because my mother was not, that was made very clear to me by a Jewish rabbi who visited my father, but the Nazis do not always understand what it is to be a Jew. God, man, your father is a Jew and a very distinguished one, isn't that enough to make you a Jew? Isn't the fact that you were liable to be persecuted as a Jew enough to make you feel solidarity with that suffering race? Never: me they would not persecute; me they wanted to feature on a poster persuading young men to join the army and serve the Fatherland. The Jews are getting now what has been coming to them for a long time. Oh my God.

       What jobs have you had, what trade or profession were you reared in? I have done many things but I liked none of them. I worked once in an insurance office but they dismissed me on a false charge of peculation. I played the drums for a week in the orchestra of the Gestiefelte Kater or Puss In Boots cabaret. I acted a silent soldier in a play by Schiller or Schilling or somebody. I have had friends, both male and female, who have looked after me but they always ended the association by becoming unreasonable. My father sometimes gave me money, sometimes not. He gave me money for this journey but it was not enough, I spent much of it in Paris and what was left in Dover where I stayed last night. There was not much in Dover to spend money on but I spent it. I think a man in a Bierstube robbed me of some but I cannot well remember. The fact is that now I have no money.

       We had coffee and cognac. Heinz asked for whipped cream with his coffee, an old Viennese self-indulgence, Oedipal, Freud had said in his autobiography, and when I took out my wallet to pay the bill he made whistling noises and come boy to me gestures as to a dog. He meant that he required some of the banknotes in that wallet. I sighed and gave him five pounds. His eagerness to be off to spend them was of the writhing kind of one merely anxious to spend a penny. You give me the key also? Ah no, ah no, no key. You ring the bell like everybody else. He made a moue or schiefes Gesichg. I went out with him through the stares of the lubricious and watched him hare off toward Piccadilly Circus.

       I had an article to write for the Daily Express about women who painted their toenails and what this signified in terms of the decline of our civilization. I went out to dinner with John Boynton Priestley, the Yorkshire novelist. When I got back to Albany at just after ten Heinz had not yet returned. I put on pyjamas and dressing gown and waited. I tried to read the literary essays of his great father and saw for the first time that their pomposity was a mockery of Pomposity. I must not be pompous with young Heinz.

       Well after midnight he came back, not too drunk though tieless. Two giggling girls were with him, slobbermouthed and coarse but not prostitutes, at least not yet: they had arrived that evening at King's Cross from Jack Priestley's county. They had met Heinz, whom they called Baked Beans, in a pub in Leicester Square and he'd stood them port and lemons and said they did not have to worry about where to spend the night, they understood him all right though he talked funny, but that was because he was a foreigner, he had this old man that was his friend and he had plenty of room in his posh place. I'm Elsie and this is Doreen, pleased to meet you. They wore low-cut summer frocks and artificial silk stockings, were inexpertly made up (caked powder, greasy lipstick) and had overdeveloped busts. Out, I said, out out, ladies, this is not a dosshouse. I was mean, that's what I was, where was they to go at this time of night, and Heinz said they was his friends, they had started to give him English lessons. That's right, Elsie or Doreen said, we had sausage and chips in one of them corner houses and he said he wants us to learn him to talk proper. Out, both of you, and I slippered sternly toward the telephone. Oh all right then if that's the way it is, but you're proper mean. And Doreen, or else Elsie, feinted a punch in my balls as I showed them out. Ta-ta, Baked Beans, see you tomorrow. Then I confronted Heinz, who muttered things at me with Scheiss in them.

       What he seemed to wish to do, seeing my anger, was to increase that anger and convert it into lust. I would take him by force, something I could see he was used to. He needed, in fact, a good punitive buggering but he was not going to get it from me, at least not yet. I ordered him to his room, but he said he wanted to go out to a nightclub and would I give him some more Pinke. He had spent all of the five pounds, a lot of money in those days. To bed, sir, we're going to have a serious talk in the morning. He scheissed off, snarling. During the night I half woke to find him proposing to get into bed with me, hot and naked. I slapped out at him and he spoke words I could not understand, something that had been Primitive High German but had now turned to street dirt. He sulked and cursed back off to his room and I heard him fist his bed like an enemy before getting into it. This would not do.

       He did not get up the next day till after eleven. He came yawning and tousled, also naked, into my study and said he wanted breakfast. Make it yourself: there, see, is the kitchen. And then, oh, let me do it, you're certain to break the crockery. So he sat with coffee and fried eggs, trousered and shirted but barefooted, while I spoke sternly to him. He must learn to behave. These apartments, which were once a single mansion owned by the Duke of York, whose second title was Albany, had been turned into bachelor chambers at the end of the eighteenth century and had accommodated great men like Lord Byron, Macaulay, George Canning and Bulwer-Lytton. They were very particular about whom they had here, and there were strict rules of decorum to be observed. Did he understand? Ja ja. He must not bring home drabs in the small hours, he must learn to behave like a gentleman. Ja ja ja. I would send him, I said, to the Berlitz School to learn English. Then I would see about finding him work somewhere. He pouted. Time was short for us all, he said prophetically, it was necessary to live a little before the bombs dropped and the poison gas circulated. Nonsense, I told him, there was not going to be any war. Here is a ten-shilling note, it is plenty of money. It will buy you lunch and dinner. Today I myself lunch and dine with friends. Go to see the wonders of the National Gallery and the British Museum, take a boat to Greenwich, enjoy yourself quietly and soberly. And do not come home later than eleven tonight. Come home, moreover, unaccompanied.

       He did not come home unaccompanied. He came, somewhat chastened, in the company of two plainclothesmen, both with moustaches. "This is the address he gave us, sir," said the one of senior rank. "The name he gave is this, sir. Is that right? And this name is yours, sir?" He had a bit of paper with that basic information on it.

       I said, "You'd better sit down. I take it you're on duty, but I don't suppose you'd say no to a drink. I certainly won't." I began to pour whisky at once and lavishly into the Heinrich Wilhelm Stiegel glasses I had brought back from America.

       "Soda for him, for me straight," the senior man said as they sat. "I take it you know what he was doing, sir?"

       "I can guess. Don't ask any more questions for the moment. Let me tell you all." I told them.

       "Doesn't look much to me like a Jew, sir," said the junior one. "More of a real Nazzy type. One of them storm troopers like you see on the newsreels."

       "Just like that?" the other said. "Just dumped on you like that?"

       "There are a lot of refugees that are going to be dumped on us," I said. "Hitler's going to slaughter all the Jews he can lay his hands on. We're going to have to make some adjustments. Morally, socially, everything."

       "The fact is, sir," said the senior man, "that he was picked up by us on Goodge Street openly soliciting. The law's the law, and we can't make adjustments to use your words for them who don't know the law. They have to learn it, and that might mean the hard way. For him there it may have to mean deportation, sir. If he tries it again, that is, and he looks to me the type that will." Heinz sat deep in an armchair, sulkily and loudly smoking some ghastly brand of cigarette he had discovered somewhere that smelt like a Mexican twitchfire.

       "You mean back to the Third Reich and the concentration camps."

       "Our streets have got to be kept clean, sir," the junior said.

       "That's Hitler's idea, too."

       "We can't speak for him, sir," said the senior, "though there may be something in what he's doing. We can only speak for our job which is the law. Give him a good talking to in his own lingo, which he says you speak like a native. Why would that be, sir?"

       "Suspicious, aren't you? Is there some law against an Englishman getting his German grammar book out and doing some hard study?"

       "No offence, sir, I was just interested. I thought there might be some tie-up you didn't tell us about."

       "I've told you the situation as clearly as I could. I take it you've never heard of Strehier, who got the Nobel Prize for Literature. I take it you've never heard of me."

       "We don't have much time for reading, sir." To Heinz, "You were lucky tonight, young fellermelad. You won't be so lucky next time. Say that to him in his own language, would you, sir?" I said it. The two listened like phoneticians. "Very nicely put, if I may say so, sir, not that I understood a dickybird."

       "Thank you for your forbearance and discretion. I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. Another whisky?"

       "A short one for the road, sir. Plenty of soda in his."

       There seemed no point that night in raving at Heinz. He was, anyway, somewhat shaken at the prospect of being sent back to the Nazis with a docket saying Jude. The following morning I took him to Harrod's and, in the appropriate department, bought for him a rucksack with steel frame, shorts, boots, sleeping bag, and a youth hostel membership card. I was going to turn him into a bloody Wandervo gel. In Harrod's travel department I bought him a second class one-way ticket to Glasgow. There was a nonstop train leaving King's Cross the following morning at 7:40 A.M. He could see the beauties of bonny Scotland and sleep in the heather and catch cold and die. I gave him lunch in Harrod's restaurant—steak and kidney pudding and plum duff, a meal sufficiently stultifying—and bought cold provisions in their food department for that night's dinner—a roast chicken, half a ham, potato salad, Mrs Goodber's cherry cake, genuine Viennese Schlagobers for his coffee. I took him home and supervised his packing. He was still docile. He even said that he quite looked forward to seeing the beauties of Schottland and how much money was I going to give him? Ten pounds, I said, ten bloody pounds and no more, he must see how long he could last on ten quid. If he lasted as long as six weeks, then I would give him a reward of a flyer. I got him into bed at ten and quietly locked his door after ensuring that he first evacuated his body thoroughly. I set my alarm clock for 6:15 and dragged him out of bed and into a taxi and to the station. He looked very delectable as a backpacked blond Wandervo gel. I saw him onto the train and waved him off with joy. Gate Reise.