The collected stories (80 page)

I was sure they would wind up in San Francisco, overstay their visas, and go to ground. Many Europeans did these days - it was only Arabs who had the confidence to head home when their visas expired. I had met the two men in early January. In late February, the security man at the main entrance phoned me and said, 'A Mr Cary and friend down here, sir. Doesn't have an appointment -name's not in the book — but he says he wants to talk to you. What shall I tell him, sir?'

A Mr Cary and friend: they were back!

'Send them up,' I said.

But Lamb was not the friend, and I barely recognized Cary. He was thinner, he had grown a beard, and he was dressed like a man in the English Department bucking for a promotion - tweed sports jacket, leather tie, corduroy trousers, argyle socks, and shiny shoes. He was a far cry from the junk dealer in the ragged scarf and flat cap and greasy raincoat of six weeks ago. Some people look worse, much stranger, even crooked, when they dress stylishly. That was how Cary seemed to me - as if he were trying to pull a fast one on me. He was frowning, pushing out his lips, jerking his beard with his cheeks.

And the friend was a girl with a big soft face, who chewed gum

GONE WEST

with her mouth open. She wore a man's pea jacket and a woolly hat. Cary introduced her to me as 'Honey.'

There are some nicknames that are obstacles to friendship. 'Honey' is one of them. At first it seems overaffectionate, and then it seems like mockery, and finally it sounds like a word of abuse.

Cary was holding her hand. He did not let go of it, even to smoke. He shook out a cigarette, put it to his lips, and lit it, all with one busy hand. In itself his hand-holding was not strange, but he had never once touched Lamb.

I said, 'I'm glad you kept your word about giving me a report.'

Cary didn't smile. He sat stiffly in his chair with a look of vague incomprehension on his face.

'Just stopped in to say hello,' he said. 'And to introduce you to Honey.'

The girl snapped her gum at me and said, 'Cary told me how you helped him' - she was American - 'and he really appreciated it. Usually Embassy people are such assholes. I remember once when I was in Mexico.'

Cary coughed and said, 'You must be busy.' He looked as if, already, he wanted to go.

'Tell me about the trip,' I said.

'There's so much to tell.'

'The crossing,' I said. 'What was the ship like?'

'I was seasick most of the time. It was a Polish freighter, full of butch sailors. The food was dreadful - turnips, swedes, boiled cabbage, stews of rancid mince. It was a week of misery. I stayed in my bunk the whole time.'

'What about your friend?'

'Pardon?'

'Lamb,' I said.

'Oh, him. He started acting strange. He'd disappear for hours and then when I asked where he'd been he'd say, "In the bowels of the ship." He thought he was being incredibly funny.'

I smiled, remembering Lamb, imagining how he would have said that. Where was the little old comedian? Where was the old Cary, for that matter? This one was entirely new - disapproving and full of seriousness. He was grave, but what was the point?

'It wasn't funny,' Cary said. 'He was always cracking jokes. When people who aren't funny start to make jokes it sounds stupid.'

His accent was gone, too.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

I said, 'New York must have been quite a surprise.'

Cary shrugged. 'Lamb met a chap in a bar and got very excited. "He's giving us a place to kip - he's got bags of room!'" It was a flash of the old Cary - he did Lamb's effeminate voice very well, and it reminded me of how his own voice had deepened. He glanced at the girl whose hand he was holding and said, 'The chap was into S and M. Well, S really. Very keen on spanking. "How do you know you don't like it if you've never tried it?"'

'How did you get out of that one?' I asked.

'A cobbler's bench and a lot of pleading. I reckon he's cobbling someone on it right this minute.' He weighed the girl's hand in his own, lifting it and considering it. 'Hungry?'

Honey squeezed her face into an expression that said, Sorta, and Cary said to me, 'We have to go. I promised to show Honey around the neighborhood where I grew up - Stepney Green.'

'But what about your scheme?' I asked. 'What about the trip?'

'Don't ask. The lorry broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike. Turnpike! Why is it that the most horrid places in the States have the prettiest names?'

'Like Stepney Green - the jewel of East London?'

Cary did not respond to that. He said, 'We were towed to a garage. It seemed we needed a water pump. Two hundred for the tow, another two hundred for the pump. Nice round figures. We hadn't a penny.'

'How did you pay?'

'A refectory table, lovely it was, from a boys' school in Eastbourne. It was covered with carved initials, some of them going back to the eighteenth century. Just the thing for a garage mechanic in New Jersey.'

I had the strong sense that I did not know this man at all; that we were talking about nothing; that he did not know me.

'The radiator packed up in Virginia, on something called the Skyline Drive - Lamb loved the name. The radiator cost us a beautiful Victorian chest - two drawers, brass fittings, lots of carvings.' He looked at Honey again and waggled her hand and said, 'Hi.'

'Hi,' she said.

'Bored?'

She snorted a little air.

GONE WEST

He kissed her. I felt I was watching someone taking a bite of candy. He licked his mouth when he finished kissing her.

'Let's go,' she said.

'So you didn't make it to California?' I said.

'We did, after a fashion. By the time we got to Missouri we'd traded most of the big pieces. And over the next three weeks, the rest of it went, to buy petrol and food. We slept in the lorry. It was getting emptier and emptier. Pretty soon, all the best pieces were gone. We'd turned them into cheeseburgers.'

'Not all of them,' Honey said. She surprised me. Her voice was brighter than Cary's, and a little malicious and lively.

'Where are you from?' I asked.

'Pomona?' She made it a polite question, as some uncertain Americans do when they give information. 'I go outside one morning and who do I see in the front yard but these two English guys.'

'So you met Mr Lamb,' I said.

'And his friend,' she said.

'Not me,' Cary said in a disgusted way. 'It was a chicken he found in Arizona. A hitchhiker. "Oh, let's pick him up - he looks lost!'" Cary squinted at me, giving me a powerful look of indignation, and he said, 'Lamb was really beastly to that kid. It was a revelation to me.'

Honey said, 'They were fags.'

Cary swallowed and said, 'I think he's sick. I think he's strange. I think he lost his bottle.'

Now Honey was smirking. 'My first husband is into English antiques. They really hit it off.' She uttered a coarse laugh and dragged Cary's hand off her lap and said, 'Let's go, sailor; we're wasting this man's valuable time.'

'We're looking for a flat,' Cary said. 'I'm not going to live over the shop anymore - especially after I've seen the way they live in America.'

'We've got this grubby little room,' Honey said, 'in a dump called Kilburn!'

'We'll find something,' Cary said in a solicitous voice.

'What about Lamb?' I said.

Cary pretended not to recognize the name for a moment, and then he said, 'We were really shocked. It opened my eyes. Lamb's a corrupter. That's where he belongs - Pomona.'

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

'Shut up about Pomona,' Honey said. 'It's a hundred times better than this dump. Hey, are we going or aren't we?'

So they left. What had gone wrong on the ideal trip, I could not say. But what worried me was that in a half-hour of talking, in the presence of a woman he obviously loved, this very funny man had not smiled once.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (II): THE LONDON EMBASSY

'Oh, God, I'm sorry,' I said. Til be right down.'

He was older than I had guessed he would be, but his frailty was partly grief. The strain was on his face, in his sideways glance, and his odd, bereaved smile. He was a tough man who had been stricken with sorrow. His hair, raked into gray and white strands, was as dull as metal. His face was shadowy; there was no light behind the skin. It is that light which can make a person seem old or young.

Now that I was with him I was less anxious. He was just over sixty - I knew him to be sixty-one - not elderly, but rather old to be the husband of a Chinese girl in her mid-twenties. He had the shaky gaze of a widower. I could not match him to Mei-lan. He looked a little wild.

I had greeted him. I was still talking, commiserating, and walking much too fast. He replied in a breathless way. He followed me outside and down the Embassy steps. He seemed to be chasing me. I stayed just ahead of the flap of his footsoles, one stride away from him.

He said, 'I'm at the Connaught. Shall we go there?'

That was a bad moment. I said, 'The Connaught,' and made it an idiot's echo.

'I'm sorry to have interrupted your work.'

Was this irony? Mei-lan was dead! We were heading across the square for Carlos Place.

'It's perfectly all right. I hadn't understood. I should have asked.'

'I didn't want to tell you on the phone. I find it hard to talk about. It's only been a month. The odor of her scent is still in the house. Flammette. It's very upsetting.'

He said no more until we reached the Connaught Hotel. The doorman saluted us. James Whiting raised his head and showed the man his bereaved smile, and we went inside. In the little lobby of armchairs and engravings, he said, 'Wouldn't we be more comfortable upstairs?'

He scratched the air with his hands, pointing the way.

'Right here is perfect,' 1 said. I sat down to show him I was satisfied and would not go farther. I hoped he would sit down.

I felt verv young then, and sad and swindled, not just visited but haunted. This man had seemed to materialize in London with terrible news, and he looked terrible - the menace was a shadow

A LITTLE FLAME

on his face. I did not want to go upstairs. I did not want a white door to close behind me, in a room smelling of burning lavender, with a blue ceiling and the purifying light from tall windows.

He frowned at the chair across from mine. He blew out his cheeks in anger - but it may have been only impatience. He sat down in that chair, he sighed, he blinked at me, he tried to start.

'She stayed here, you know,' he said.

They say it's a lovely hotel.'

'This is where she said she was happiest in London, when she came in October for her tests. That's why I'm staying here.'

'Those tests. I thought she was taking exams. She mentioned she was studying law.'

'To take her mind off it. She was trying to overcome it by means of will power. She had so many tests! She didn't believe them. The best hospitals. The findings were always the same, even the same words - "the Black Spot," she said, when she got the reports. When she was too weak to travel - bedridden - she seemed to accept it. They gave her heroin injections. "Heroin for the heroine" - that was her joke. It was wonderful stuff. It made her death almost peaceful.'

I said, 'Please don't feel you have to talk about it.'

'I think it does me good.' He wore a look of wonderment for a few seconds. It lighted his face briefly; it made him look selfish and a little wild once more. Then it was gone, and with a kind of grumpy deference he said, 'Unless you'd rather I didn't.'

'It's painful,' I said. 'I find it painful.'

'You young people.' He raised his head at me. 'When you get cancer it goes right through you. You burn up very fast. It's usually a matter of weeks, not months. Days, sometimes. You just burn.'

'Please.'

He said, 'She was very fond of you.'

'I knew her father. I was the US Consul in Ayer Hitam. What a home town for someone like Mei-lan!'

'You don't have to tell me anything. I know about you. She spoke about you a great deal. What are you looking at?'

The waiter had slipped behind Whiting to inquire whether there was anything we wanted.

'Nothing for me,' I said.

Whiting exercised his right as a guest of the hotel and ordered a whiskey - it was after three-thirty. He did not speak again until

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

it arrived, and then he merely held the glass, sometimes lifting and inhaling its fumes, but not drinking. It seemed to allow him to hide his glance in an innocent gesture. His eyes seldom left me and they scorched me with aching heat wherever they rested. They were deceptively dangerous, like dull metal that looks the same hot or cold.

'She greatly enjoyed her time in London.'

'The old man's customers were British - always talking about London. It was home for those colonials. Sentiment can be catching. People had so little to be sentimental about in Malaysia. I mean the Chinese. He wanted Mei-lan to come to London.'

'It wasn't London - it was you.'

Whiting, a banker, did not have the heavy-faced and chair-bound look of a banker. No paunch, no watch chain, no money-moralizing, nor any apologies that were in reality sneers. He had a lawyer's alertness showing through his bony face of grief. He had watchful eyes, the pretense of repose, the pounce ('It wasn't London-'). Bankers are bullfrogs; lawyers are lizards. And his tongue was quick for a grieving man.

He said, 'We were in London together when we first got married. It seems like yesterday. It was yesterday. Two years ago. Funny' - he didn't smile - 'she didn't mention you then.'

'The old man liked me to keep an eye on her. He was my first friend out there. He worried about her.'

'You call him the old man,' Whiting said, and raised his glass and looked at me over its rim. 'He and I are the same age.'

I said, 'We did some business with him. We were winding up the Consulate. I needed office equipment. It would have been expensive for me to buy things outright and sell them two years later. He leased everything to me, at a fair rate. He was one of the first in that part of Malaysia to go in for leasing in a big way. He was progressive. So were his children. Very modern-thinking. They were stifled there.'