I'm Dying Laughing (62 page)

‘Don’t you take anything?’ asked Violet.

‘Go and open the top drawer in that dressing-table,’ said Emily.

Violet did so. Emily said with gay, vain eyes, ‘Well, what do you see?’

‘Some pills.’

‘Yes, they are the ones. I take them. I’m told not to take so many. But I take them all day long if I want to. I must live, I must feel bright. I am not going to give in, get blue; and I’m not allowed to drink as much as I like, so there’s just that. Do you know what they are?’

‘They’re not the ones I take. Mine are very good. You ought to change perhaps. Sometimes they turn their backs on you; there’s a reaction.’

The two women discussed that pills and gave relief and happiness and the expense of this treatment. Emily said she had to get extra supplies of her own on the sly, for Stephen, as with all things, supervised her, kept her tethered. ‘I am like a goat we once had. She was a clever goat, goatess, though. She always got away. Stephen treats me like a child. I make all this money—he never made any—and I am still in baby’s harness for him. A poor, wretched woman without brains or talent, who needs his guidance.’

They talked over their troubles with their men and presently Violet offered to introduce Emily to a medical friend of hers, a society doctor who had a distinguished clientele of rich women, some titled, some famous actresses, journalists and women from the best families.

‘The strain has been enormous, during the occupation and now with the people so unruly and restless, that no one knows what is going to happen. They are so unhappy, they are very grateful to Dr Kley.’

‘Dr Kley?’

‘We all call him that; it’s a pet name, an abbreviation. The women rave about him. He will see anyone; and if he likes you, he will prescribe for you. He has helped so many people. All women. He prefers women; though I believe there are one or two men. He will see you. But you will have to get dressed, Emily, he won’t come here. He has a big apartment, splendid, in the rue de Miromesnil. I’ll give you the address as soon as you like. I’ll take you myself. He prefers an introduction. He kept this magnificent apartment all through the occupation and I suppose he helped the Germans too; but it is all medicine isn’t it? Everyone can get ill and need help. He kept in with them and now he can help us; that is the way I look at it. I don’t know what I’d do without Dr Kley. And you will be grateful to him too. I know he can help you. See, Emily, all we women are unhappy. It doesn’t work out well for us. Our men are selfish, going their own way; they only want to make money and don’t think of our happiness. Now Dr Kley knows all this and he does all he can to give women happiness. All. You don’t know what I mean by that; but you will find out if he likes you. And why shouldn’t you be happy too? You are a really nice, clever woman. You’re an original. It’s a shame you should suffer.’

Emily was excited, expectant. She could not wait to meet the zealous doctor. But it came out that since he had such a rich and well-placed clientele and since his services were so personal, his fees were high.

Now that they had become more intimate, Violet came quite often to see Emily and ate with her. Emily was delighted. She and Violet ate very good food. Afterwards they drank coffee and brandy and discussed their troubles. As for the money needed for Dr Kley’s treatment, Emily’s bank account being empty and an overdraft spent, Violet said she could easily get a friend of hers, who helped her, to help Emily. Emily was a very good risk. ‘Of course he’s a Shylock,’ said Violet, ‘but we don’t care, do we? Let’s be happy, if we can. Life is short. I couldn’t face life with Johnny if I didn’t have help and—I don’t know how it is with you and Stephen, it’s better with you I think—but you see Doctor anyway and life will be simply heaven. You won’t cry, you won’t be unhappy: you’ll be able to smile at Stephen when he returns. Even if he did say he’d divorce you. Men say that. But he can’t, can he? You haven’t done a thing.’

‘No. Tough luck. Very tough luck. Though I don’t want him to divorce me,’ said Emily laughing.

With Violet’s help, she borrowed a sum of money from Violet’s friend, a man named Verrai, or so Emily thought, and was promised further accommodation later on. With the money she put on her altered suit, a beautiful hound’s-tooth silk, and went with Violet to see Dr Kley.

Dr Kley, a Hungarian (some said a Romanian) was a medium-sized, fair man with a smooth manner, which sat patchily on his wary, irritable, small face. Violet had a few words with him and then Emily went in alone to explain that she slept badly and found it impossible to reduce. She wanted some pills.

‘What pills have you been taking?’

He made her lie naked on a low, broad couch he had and stood for some moments looking at her fixedly, with a strange expression. Then he prescribed for her a course of treatment, six medicines to take in turn during six weeks and with them some pills which would help her to reduce. She paid him his fee in cash as she had been told to and went out to Violet, who eagerly examined the prescriptions, She said, Yes, those were her pills; she was very glad; Emily would soon feel the benefit.

At first Emily did feel better, though she laughed at her ‘faith cure’ and she began to plan something that would enable them to sail dry-foot over their ocean of debts. She wanted a French or European subject so that she and Stephen could work on it there without too much trouble. What subject? The French Revolution? Treated as Dickens had done it, for she felt herself sometimes another Dickens, with the humane, humorous and pathetic touch, not going too deeply into the social questions he understood very well, serving things up palatably for the kind of people who were her readers.

‘No one will accept a re-evaluation of the French Revolution except in scholarly works which are expensive and hidden away in bookshops with old men with a stoop and spectacles to guard them. But any popular treatment of the French Revolution need not be—of course—filled with women shrieking and throwing petrol and working the bloody heads into their knitting—but I can’t have a mob hero either.’

She discussed it with Violet who made a few suggestions but none helpful, except perhaps, ‘You must have mob scenes, darling, and tumbrils and the dreadful Robespierre at the guillotine; that is what people want. And of course, Marie-Antoinette. You can have some new things in it, for your own sake, but people want to see the real things, the things that make their hair stand on end. After all, no one really trusts the French ever, do they? They remember the revolution and we must remember that they remember.’

‘That’s very true, Violet; that is what we in our hearts think of the French.’

‘If I thought about it I’d be afraid to live here. We all think like that and we distrust them, and we hate them; for they aren’t sincere. They are bloody-minded; they’re cruel and relentless and they don’t understand the rest of Europe, except like Talleyrands, out for themselves, France first and last, and all the rest barbarians anyway. Their polite talk is the dry and cunning talk of diplomacy, and everyone of them a diplomat. I hate them, Emily; and they hate us. So give it to them. Don’t be sentimental when it comes to the French or the French Revolution. Wouldn’t they like to see that happen all over again?’

‘I sort of agree with you, but I’ve got to think it over. I’d like to have a project when Stephen comes back. We need it—and I need it. And good old Dr Kley—I believe he’s done me some good. I believe in myself again.’

But it was some time before Emily fixed on her subject. She knew that the traditional ‘French Revolution’, with scenes of mob violence and hissing hate of the aristocrats, the noble demeanour of the lost on their way to the scaffold, the scenes in prison, had their appeal, but weren’t they out of date? Besides she wanted to do something of her own that would make her name both in a book and in a historical movie, a blockbuster—and already she saw the great sets a-building, the troops of actors, the prison scenes, violence of the soldiers, flaring lights on the Seine. It would be done in Rome, where American movie-money now went. She became excited about it and began to sketch out scenes. But France had now affected her and she wanted too to do something that Vittorio would think well of. ‘I know people of the latest revolution, that to come; I can’t dishonour them, they’re my best friends; and now that I’m here, I have some respect for the people and the streets, the working people, the streets where people lived their daily lives even when the guillotine was working day and night.’

S
TEPHEN RETURNED SAYING THAT
he had won a big prize in the Swiss lottery; but he was not in a prize-winner’s mood. He was very angry with Christy, who had not written him a word during the six weeks; and at once telephoned him that he was to come over the next morning. Stephen complained of his internal pains and said that the worries of the past six weeks had aggravated his trouble. He would have to return to the States and go into hospital. Trefougar had assured him that neither French not British medicine was worthwhile, and he had not the money to be treated in Switzerland. When Emily asked him why he had travelled so fantastically, incessantly, it seemed, crossing the frontiers, he laughed bitterly, took a paper out of his pocket and threw it to Emily. On it was written in ink:

‘Well?’ she said, after glancing eagerly down the columns.

‘I’m in the gold business,’ he said sourly.

‘Oh, Stephen, wonderful! I always knew you could.’

He said something obscene.

‘Stephen!’

He took back the paper, ‘And shut up about it. I’m making money for us to throw out the window. I’m in international finance. That’s a laugh. I’m a free-booter, smuggler. Tell Jacqueline to run us up a little flag with the skull-and-crossbones, so that everyone can see our disgusting thinking and can know how low we have-sunk.’

‘Stephen, you’re boorish.’

‘I’m ill, for one thing. I’ll go to bed. This travelling about, all the anxiety over the customs, Trefougar lying and bluffing his way everywhere, leaving without our hotel bills paid—oh, I hate it, it makes my blood run cold, cold with bitterness, not with fear. I’m a coward, but not that kind. To look those petty, mean men in the face and know that they have a right to suspect me. But what do I really care? Can’t they be bribed, isn’t there one among them who can be bribed, or for all I know, has been bribed? To look at the men in the bank and think, Which one is a spotter? And have the spotter come to you and say, “I know where you can get rid of the swag” and split with him and go to the bank and have the officials there know you’re what you are; a lowdown rascal, a vile black-marketeer, like the Italian boys in the streets, selling chocolate and butter and stolen bicycles. That’s what Europe has brought me to, me the proud heir of the Howards!’

‘Oh, Stephen. And did you make money?’

‘I made enough. Though it won’t last us long. I must go on and on with this if I’m to keep the house going. And now my scamp of a nephew has decamped, he’s over there reading diatribes against me, against us, from his friends in the States, from Florence, keeping his pockets sewed up, learning that we’re plotting to live on him, to filch the sweat from his greasy banknotes, to scrape a percentage off his laundry bills, to take a little of the food he pays for, poor relatives living off the rich young gentleman, officious beggars,
schnorrers
stabbing with dirty fingers at the full pocket.’

He went to bed, without telling Emily anything else about his travels. She was anxious to tell him about her new project, the French Revolution novel, featuring perhaps Danton, Marie-Antoinette, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins—she was not sure yet, and she thought it would take some time to get the right angle—an angle to please serious readers, to present something new and yet old for Hollywood, to attract the romantic women who loved court dress and wept for those who died for it and yet to exhibit to their one time companions, to those who had not got off yet from ‘the slow train down from the Finland station’, that they had the insight of Marxism, still had that discipline. Turning the subject over and over in her hands, eagerly, Emily thought it could be done; but Stephen was the scholar, apter and stricter than herself—he was the one to trim the ship for her.

Stephen had taken to bed with him the accumulated mail. Emily, after a quarrel with her cook and a long discussion with Suzanne about Christy’s freedom, immaturity in sex, sat down with a book in her hand meaning to read, but overwhelmed by her strange feelings about Christy, the anxieties and jealousies he caused her. ‘I don’t love him except as a son.’ Jacqueline, the seamstress, was in the living-room making a quantity of French curtains for their windows, filmy net with deep borders and insets of real lace. Emily sighed and opened the great American novel, Dreiser’s An
American Tragedy,
brought up again to notice, perhaps because the novelist was dead. She looked at it and sighed thinking of the enormous amount of work and the time—a year, two years?—that separated her from her French Revolution book in print. They might get an advance, probably could—but the big money would not come in till it was printed, a success, and attractive to Hollywood. Emily had never had an ‘A’ picture and this time she wanted to clean up, have not merely an ‘A’ picture but a giant phenomenon of the Cecil B. De Mille sort, a blockbuster. That would solve their problems. They could live decently, pay their debts, if necessary, move to a better house than this, though perhaps smaller, Christy being gone and Olivia no doubt going; and lead a quiet, pleasant, luxurious life, all peace and production. She sighed and fingered the novel. Certainly Dreiser had not waited for all that; but she was different, the idea of working in poverty, waiting long years, made her restless and angry. She was a money-maker, no need for her to crawl on all fours after the chariot of fortune. She would drive it. ‘Pouf! the patient waiters, the cap-in-hands at the gate of life, it won’t serve me to only stand and wait. Life, life itself—what is life? Not pulsing and puking and waiting.’