In the King's Arms (4 page)

Dogged effort had led him to small parts, in which he’d gained reassurance. He was a spear-carrier (literally), a delivery boy, scenery (the setting sun, a stone wall), a corpse, that sort of thing. He got used to the stage, he went out to the pub with the Rolands and the Cordelias, and he effortlessly began remembering the plum roles by hearing them repeated, unchangingly, night after night. He smelled the musty costumes and listened to the jungle din of spectators’ giggles and coughs and big roars. There he was, bellowing “WAR!!” when the placid old world thought it was at peace. There he was, delivering the crucial missive to the King, an insolent grin on his lips like the subject sensing the King’s mortality, like a bit-player on the rise sensing the star’s mediocrity.

Soon he hungered for greater parts. Meaty ones. He was often summoned to second auditions now, but inevitably he ended up with conciliatory bit parts. One problem he had was fluency with accents. There was only one kind of speech that Peter was master of: English, Upper Class. He could not spit out a syllable of Cockney, Scouse or Geordie, let alone dialects more obscure. For this reason he’d recently lost a role in a play he adored,
Look Back in Anger
.

“Don’t sound angry enough to me, lad,” said the director, patting him on the shoulder as he grabbed back the script. Still, there were many good parts available for his Oxbridge tones. It was just a matter of making the right connections and not losing heart.

Shelagh Eveline Fanning was there, just as he’d hoped. She was famous, an English tutor at Wadham, with amazing connections to the theatre. Behind-the-scenes connections: she knew everyone by nickname, by proclivity. She was like the Mother of them all: huge, massive, laughing. Her largeness lay not so much in her flesh as in her bones; she seemed hewn from stone, a Maillol. Her feet, though, were tiny and delicate; she took little steps to the right and to the left as she spoke, giving true meaning to the word “patter,” belying the sonorous sounds she produced from her enormous chest. She wore a heavy, leaf-green cape. She was surrounded. Peter edged near.

Lily saw Peter nodding his head slowly, eyes planted loyally on Fanning’s moving mouth. Fanning seemed unaware of him. She began to declaim. A hush fell over the room.

“Acting,” she said, “acting!”

Lily started to giggle, and everyone shot her such dirty looks that she left the room and sat in the bathroom for a while (on a toilet with the lid down). Ever since she’d met Julian, she was slightly short on control.

“Acting,” repeated Fanning, once more. “It is nothing but release. You are tight-faced, you English.”

Fanning was of course Irish. “You
need
to be released. But acting is quintessentially English as well. A paradox. An extreme, wedded to its opposite.

“For acting,” she continued, “is your tradition. Old and rich. You British actors” (they thrilled to be called “you British actors”)
“share a cozy, familial kinship. You’re very clubby. Well and good.

“It is lunatic, it is wild, but acting is bounded and controlled, a means of insulation.
Coitus interruptus
. It tames and domesticates the furies. Mad, mad as an Irishwoman whose drink has not been refreshed—yes, that’s better, thank you—but never exceeding the bounds of time and space. All fights end to applause—we hope. Empires carted off by curtain fall. Avowals of undying love, confessions of faith—all limited, all lies! All eternal TRUTHS!!!!”

Lily came back to hear these last words and fell victim to giggling again. Sabina, as it happened, was just behind her, and gave her a sharp smack on the back of her head. Lily turned around, and Sabina quickly said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else.”

Sure, thought Lily. And you are Marie of Rumania. She suddenly realized that Julian might be there, too, by some miracle of free association. But he wasn’t.

The evening went very quickly just the same. Lily forgave Peter for ignoring her. She was even happy, towards the end, to see Shelagh Eveline Fanning accept her millionth drink from Peter’s hand.

B
Y SIXTH WEEK (each term had eight), Lily began to worry about the Christmas “vac.” Term would end. Everyone would travel home to gurgling kettle, warm faded downy, and Christmas stocking stuffed with tangerines. Tangerines had already become available in Hall, a luxurious alternative to the perennial dull orange and dented apple. Tangerines; perhaps the name implied they came from Tangiers? She’d never thought about it before, but now she noticed the distances all things travelled to be in stately Britain. Portugal lent its port, and Jerez, its cream of Sherries. Pass the Madeira, Quentin, there’s a dear. And everyone smoked imported cigarettes: Italian, Russian, French (oh, Julian!). Summoned with a careless match-flick, and a shallow suck.

Tangerines. The one on Lily’s tray rolled languidly over on its side, revealing a voluptuous dimple. They called raisins “sultanas” here. A thousand and one sensual nights, dancing for the Sultan. Lily’s room had been transformed in recent weeks. Wild bunches of anemones sprouted, dilated in fields of red and mad purple, whirling on furry axes, reeling into blackness. She lit dozens of candles every night, and watched them wildly climb the wall with flame-shadows. Dizzy songbirds spun round and round on her stereo’s glinting stick, pierced through their core, cascading in sobs. Piaf, Holiday, Garland. . . . The world rolled in their throated hearts, poured forth in sultry threnody:

Fragrant smoke rose, spiraling, like wails from minarets. She was dreaming, delirious. She saw herself breathing into the Boy’s open mouth, their limbs entwined like wet, tropical vines. Who cared whose lips were whose, whose heart, whose dank tangled hair?

Often she awoke to the sounds of sheets of rain, dreaming of boiling tea, of tossing on an erotic sea, drunken and deluged, with the Boy.

Some nights, to anesthetize herself, she went into the Common Room and stared at the T.V. for hours and hours. In the Common Room, a muttonhead could sit undisturbed yet un-alone, until midnight, flanked by his fellows, drinking tea with a square of dusty chocolate. There, jolly images flashed on the screen like party streamers, providing the gracious excuse for warm bodies to clump together.

On this particular night, only two or three people were actually watching the program. That was enough, though. Lily pulled up an armchair, then went to make herself a cup of tea. She saw a copy of
Punch
lying on the counter and flipped through it as the water
heated to a boil. She didn’t get most of the jokes. She made her tea, bought a “Fiesta” bar from the vending machine, and sat down, smoothing her skirt.

Lily enjoyed the institutional clatter of the cup and saucer on her knees. Her chocolate had to last, so she played with it, sucking it, letting it melt on her tongue and slide down with the soothing tea. Once in a while, something jostled her funny bone. Then she squalled with laughter, slapping her knee: HAR! HAR! HAR! Like a seasoned bawd at the fair.

Was she going nuts? Another chockie lozenge and another cuppa tea. A-HAH HAH! A-HAH HAH! A slap and a slap! Then a program came on that really drew her in. It was about a Catholic girl, Geraldine, and her Jewish boyfriend, Samuel (according to English telly, all Jews had solemn Biblical names), and they were in love, and about to be hitched, but everyone thought the notion quite shocking. The Rabbi was paler than usual; the Priest, redder. So they decided to get together to hatch a scheme.

New Problem: the Priest’s Cook didn’t know what Rabbis ate.

“What shall I feed dear Brother Abraham?” Cook asked the Priest.

He replied in his funny, crusty way.

“Well, let me see, I’m giving it some thought, um—” said the Priest, scratching nervously under his clerical collar. He acted sort of the way old bachelors do on television when they have to diaper a baby. “No pigs, of course, or—”pause—“horses, camels, marmosets, corgis or yaks!”

Big guffaws.

“Do they eat fish,” asked Cook, “of a Friday?”

The Priest knowingly replied, “Only if it’s got fins and scales.” The laugh track roared like the mobs on Bastille Day. But it was
true, thought Lily. It was in Deuteronomy. “
Snapir v’Kaskeset
.” What was so funny? Was God funny? She wanted to laugh, too (as teachers used to say when kids passed notes, snickering: “Kindly share your joke”).

Sam and Gerry got married after all. Love conquers Religion; simple, snap, all solved in under thirty minutes.

It was about a quarter to eleven. Late enough to think of bedtime. Lily retreated into her room, stored her tangerine deep in the toe of a sweat sock, and hung it over the electric fire. Sanctuary, tangerine. She felt overwrought and lonely.

A loud rap on the door shook her up.

“Let me in, moo-cow!”

She pulled open the door and watched Peter sail into her armchair. He was too tall for it and sprawled, marking time with a heel.

“Be nice to me,” he said, charmingly, and demanded a drink. They settled down to listen to Mahler together (he had bought her the tape). The music made Lily realize how sad she sometimes felt. Some deep potential in the changing chords made her feel abandoned. They marched inexorably, like strong and handsome troops, doomed to a fate that made her own seem thin and trivial. Being left behind, the ebb tide of noble causes.

Peter stirred in the chair. She suddenly found him intrusive, annoying. Was he going to react to the music by saying, “Oh, capital!” and flapping his bony hands? She raised the volume possessively, as though to anticipate drowning him out. He asked for more whisky and she swung the whole bottle at him. A late fall gusti-ness rattled her windows and made willows sigh large arcs behind Peter’s head. This is homesickness, she thought. Whither thou goest, I shall go. Is anyone going anywhere that I can go? There was Peter, jabbering in a strange tone of voice. He was so pink and
beaky; she could hardly take in a word he said when her ears felt so tight from the tears in her throat. Pink, pink, pink, like a baby put outdoors, screaming silently into the night. That was how she felt sometimes—her real heart, unheard in the din of her parents’ pain.

“Hey, Miss!” she suddenly heard him say.

He gave her a huge pinch on the arm.

“What?”

“Don’t you answer questions anymore? You look insane, by the way.”

“You’ve made me black and bloody blue, Peter, you moron.”

“Well, then, answer me.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Deaf. I said, what are you doing over the Christmas vac?”

She turned the volume down. “Oh. I dunno.”

“Look,” said Peter quietly. “You simply can’t stay here. If that’s what you’re planning. You’ll be the only one around, and you’re not even fully well.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“So I would like it very much if you’d impose on my ancestral home.”

“You would?”

“Grace it with your unique form of barbarity.”

“REALLY??” She was surprised to feel such deep relief. “Are you sure? Do you mean it? You’ve thought about it? You want me to come?” Lily did not give Peter the chance to respond. She grabbed his thin arm and danced him around the room at top speed; they made an exhausted, sloppy finish on the floor. God: Peter prickled with snideness, but really he was as softhearted as a moon cactus. He was smiling a smile that the upper class rarely achieves: his eyebrows had flown up, and his face looked naked and unusual.

Just then, she thought about Julian. He’d be there. She’d be in his home. The blood rushed from her head with one massive heartbeat. And Peter, amazingly, was saying, “The only problem will be my brother, whom you’ll doubtless try to seduce. Don’t. He is my mother’s son. She feels he should be opened like a rose; doesn’t seem to realize he’s been pollinating for years. She won’t appreciate it if you slaver on her Princeling.”

“Oh, don’t you worry,” said Lily, choking on her own saliva.

“And you’ll have to fit in,” he said gruffly. “We don’t coddle Yanks.” He sat down and folded his fingers. “Mum’s quite horsey. Kerchief tied under the chin, Wellies, walking stick, you know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, sure, I’ve seen television programs about the Queen.” She paused. “Listen, Peter. Why is it that I don’t see your brother in Oxford? Why was he in The King’s Arms that one time, but never again?”

“Lily. Lily. You must be more discreet. You are making a lewd display of your vulgar, or should I say
vulvar,
thoughts. I won’t have it. But since you ask, I am glad to tell you that Julian is not a student at Oxford, because, because . . . well, shall I say that one of us is tall, dark and handsome, perhaps, but one of us is not very clever? Julian may visit sometimes, but is not ‘in’ as you and I are.”

“Oh, I see.” This information failed to diminish Julian. Her own hyper-intellectual studies sometimes bored her stupid.

“Too bad you won’t meet our real Dad. Julian looks just like him. Mum’s remarried to a fat old accountant, with high scruples or something like that. He is a total prig. A few years ago, the two of them banded together and produced a round-headed, bald little half-brother—half-breed, I prefer to say—for Julian and for me. By now the little tyke smells just like dull, fusty step-dad looks.
They are inseparable. They listen to
Peter and the Wolf
together; they both know every fucking word. Archibald’s a music snob. Knows all the
Köchel
numbers. He’s criminally boring. Uses maps and dusty almanacs to answer questions, like that. Collects butterflies.”

“Tell me about your ‘real’ father.”