The Night of Wenceslas (2 page)

It was in this frame of mind that I first clapped eyes on the car, pointing her nose out of a second-hand lot.
£
130.
Nippy
.
Snip
, the whitewash said. I had
£
170. I was going to see a flat whose tenant wanted
£
120 for his furniture. I walked up to the corner and round it and stopped to light a cigarette, and then I walked slowly back.

A man in a dirty white coat nodded at me and smiled. ‘Saw you looking at her. Knew you’d be back. A beaut, ain’t she? Cock your leg over and sit in her.’

I cocked my leg over the low door and sat behind the wheel.

‘Grab hold. Tight as a drum.’

The steering was beautifully tight. (It did not, alas, remain so.)

‘There,’ he said. ‘Buzz off to China if you want now.’ He walked away and left me with the car, and I sat there looking
along the bonnet, and I was hooked. That tremulous moment before I was committed, when I knew I could afford the car or the flat but not both, was the most poignant of my life. I saw myself travelling light, sun-dappled roads, sea glitter, free, free as a bird; no young man of affairs with a valise as Maminka saw me; no young chair-wetter to be schooled in a little, dreary, bloody business; quite a new vision I had never seen before; another, pleasanter, very agreeable identity.

‘She’s taxed to the end of the year,’ the man said, coming back. ‘Souped up, of course. Take a decko if you like.’ He opened up the bonnet. A lethal-looking supercharger winked in the sun. ‘Goes like a bomb and steady as a train.’

I walked back to Paddington in a trance without looking at the flat, and took the train to Bournemouth, and leaned out of the window seeing the car all the way.

I bought it a week later, sick with relief at finding it still there.

In terms of hard cash it might not have been the keenest bargain of my life; in all other terms it was certainly so. It was still the chink in the grimy barriers building up round me; still, in a way, my defence against Maura. The thought of selling it made me feel sick.

I slowed at the corner and tooled along to number seventy-four rather slowly, listening to a peculiar sort of rattle from the clutch every time I changed gear. This was something new. I wondered if Ratface had been tinkering with it, whether he’d been tinkering with it all along so that he’d have to repair it, but after a moment of viciousness dismissed the idea. He wasn’t a bad Ratface at heart; this last was only one of a series of bills he had let me run up. By the sound of the clutch – a fiver’s worth, I thought – I’d be owing him a bit more soon.

I drew into the kerb, let myself into the house, walked up the three flights. There was a note stuck under the plant on the plush tablecloth. It was in Mrs Nolan’s indelible pencil and read:

Mr Whistler. Your young lady phoned. She said she phoned your
office at 5.30. Will you ring her at home when you get in. L. Nolan
.

I thought Maura could wait a bit. I hung up my mac and went out to the bathroom for a wash and came back and smoked a cigarette, sitting on the divan with my feet up on the edge of the coverlet. I wondered what I was going to tell Maura.

I had known her only for six months, but already, it seemed, for a lifetime. She was Irish, red-headed, and she had digs in a square off Gloucester Road, not far away. It was Maura who had given the Little Swine his soubriquet, and she who had manoeuvred me into today’s confrontation. Maura said the position was ridiculous. She said I was either a partner or I wasn’t. She said anyone with thirty per cent of the firm’s shares should count for something. She said the business must be making
some
profits, and where were they?

I had not even got round to that one with the Little Swine.

Even worse than her constant preoccupation with the Little Swine was her mania about my Uncle Bela. Bela was my mother’s brother. He had emigrated to Canada several years before the war and now lived in Vancouver. He had never married and on a trip to England to see Maminka after we had arrived from Czechoslovakia, he had told her I would be his heir.

Any family such as mine with European connections and relatives who have emigrated have figures such as Bela. I had a hazy recollection of a large asthmatic man always supposed by my father to be excessively mean. It was a fact mat he had never helped Maminka in any way, and the only present he had ever given her was a rather flashy zircon brooch which she never wore.

Bela’s name was seldom absent for long from my mother’s lips; she took it for granted that he would leave me at least a dollar millionaire, and her only hinted criticism was that he had not already settled the money on me.

It was probably because he had entered Maminka’s mythology more than anything else that made me regard Uncle Bela as a somewhat dubious prop. She wrote to him regularly and I knew that she managed to contrive some mention of me in every letter. As he seemed to take equal pains never to refer to me
in his infrequent and curiously uninformative replies, it seemed obvious he had regretted his earlier impulse. He operated a cannery and the only reference he ever made to his financial affairs was his annual comment that the fruit was very poor and very expensive.

Although Maura had never met my mother, she seemed equally credulous about Bela, and infinitely more annoying. She, moreover, knew the true state of my affairs, and regarded my reluctance to solicit his help as the sheerest idiocy. In self-defence I had had to turn Uncle Bela into a joke – the ship that was going to come in, the treble chance that was going to turn up one day. I had built him up into such an unlikely shadow that, maddeningly, I was beginning to share their superstitious belief in him.

The cigarette burned down and I stubbed it out and reluctantly left the divan and went downstairs to the phone. Maura answered instantly.

‘It’s Nicolas,’ I said.

‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’ I said irritated.

She made a little kiss down the phone and said, ‘What happened this afternoon? Did you see him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You left early. I wondered if you’d had a row.’

‘No row.’ Mrs Nolan came out of her lair behind me, and I thought I might as well put across the same news item to both parties, so I said quickly, ‘Look, Maura, I’ve had to pay a bill on the car and I haven’t a sausage left this week. I can’t afford to buy a bottle for tonight.’

‘Oh, Nicolas. You can bring a bottle of beer. They brought one to my party –’

‘I can’t even afford a bottle of beer,’ I said loudly. ‘I’m flat broke. I’ll have to do without lunches for a couple of days. I’d better not come tonight.’

Maura seemed to latch on that this was intended for another, for she said without concern, ‘Do you want me to leave five bob at the off-licence?’

‘No.’

‘All right. I’ll see you there. What did he say?’

‘All right, then. Goodbye.’ I hung up quickly. You had to be quick.

Mrs Nolan was standing behind me, listening.

‘I wonder that young lady wants to go out with you the way you treat her so sharply on the phone,’ she said.

I smiled at her wanly. ‘I’m worried about money, Mrs Nolan.’

‘No rent for me this week, I suppose,’ she said with her own curious tone of winsome aggressiveness.

I said stoutly, ‘You know I wouldn’t dream of letting you down with the rent, Mrs Nolan. I’ll just have to borrow it elsewhere.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind you, ducky,’ she said. ‘It’s the others. Don’t you mention it or they’ll all be going off to buy cars.’ She gave my arm a little push to show she meant no harm. ‘And you go off to that party tonight or someone else’ll be after your young lady, and then we shall be sad. I’ve got a bottle of port you can take.’

I followed her into the kitchen and accepted the bottle of British port she handed me from the fridge. She always kept one in this curious place.

‘Don’t you run off now,’ she said. ‘Dinner’s in ten minutes. A nice bit of fish for Friday, same as your mother’d give you.’

She said this every Friday. I had never understood what she meant by it.

I walked to the party to save petrol, still wondering what to tell Maura. I was twenty-four and she twenty-one; we had no claim on each other but increasingly in recent weeks the feeling had grown that if only I exerted myself with the Little Swine, or with Bela, or with the economic world at large – in a word began to make something of myself – we could have some claim on each other.

This had induced a feeling of profound inadequacy. To make up for it I pressed home my somewhat decorous and well-signalled
advances with great desperation. I seemed to be making some progress here.

I heard the gramophone thumping out and turned in at the gate. The, chap who was giving the party opened the door to me and cried, ‘It’s Nicky. Come in, you terror of the City.’ Nobody else called me Nicky, and I disliked it and him. His name was Val and he worked in a film publicity business and lived with an ageing model girl called Audrey. It always embarrassed me to be with them.

‘What’s this?’ he said, breaking into laughter as he examined the bottle I had been clutching grimly. ‘Port type wine, for God’s sake. You City barons! Can’t let it alone, can you? Bung it in the bowl, there’s a good lad. It’ll help out with the cup. In the kitchen,’ he said as the door bell rang again.

I did as he bade and returned to the drawing room as he was introducing the two newcomers. He stopped to call attention to me. ‘And this type slipped in while I wasn’t looking. Cheer up, Nicky. Boris Karloff will kick the bucket soon.’ He always called Uncle Bela by this name, and it was always good for a laugh. I had encouraged this, and did so now by crying in a cracked voice, ‘You’ll be glad you knew me yet.’

I could see Maura frowning at the other end of the room – she did not care for jokes about Uncle Bela – and I kept out of her way. By judicious shifting of position I was able to do so for most of the evening, and when we at last stood in the hall making our farewells she seemed needled.

Her lips were tight as I took her arm and cut through the dark squares to her digs.

‘So you didn’t get the rise?’ she said at last.

‘I’m seeing him again next week.’

‘That seems satisfactory to you, does it?’

The dark seat under the tree where, all being well, I should make continued progress, was fifty yards away. I said sombrely, ‘He wants to consider it. He agrees I’m in a special position. You’ve got to admit the prospects are good.’

‘Did you mention about the profits?’

‘Yes,’ I said doggedly.

The pale blur of her face turned to me in the dark, but she said nothing.

We were at the seat now. ‘Like to take the weight off?’ I said heavily.

‘Do you mind if we don’t, Nicolas. I’m terribly tired tonight.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ve had rather a headache all day – worrying about you. You don’t mind if I just go to bed?’

‘No. Yes,’ I said dully.

Her hand touched my face for a moment. ‘I’ll sit and smoke a cigarette with you if you like.’

‘No, you’d better go off to bed. I thought you were looking a bit washed out,’ I said.

‘Well, I am,’ she said tartly.

‘Right. I’ll see you to the gate.’

We walked the rest of the way in silence.

‘Good night, Nicolas,’ she said, when we got there.

‘Good night.’

‘On Sunday, then.’

‘Yes.’ If you’re lucky, I thought bravely, walking off right away. But I knew I’d be seeing her on Sunday.

I shoved the covers over the car when I got back and let myself in and went up the three flights and undressed and crawled in, more inadequate than I’d felt for weeks. I tried to imagine myself at the wheel of the car, sun-dappled roads, sea glitter, free as a bird, but it seemed to be a different person I was watching.

Uncle Bela
, I mouthed silently at the ceiling.
Why don’t you
just quietly die?
And presently he died on the ceiling in his big bed in Vancouver. The noisy asthmatic room grew silent, the smooth white sheets were still over the dome of his stomach. I bent over Uncle Bela and his pale jowl was slack in the moonlight, the mouth open like the fish on the draining board because it was Friday, and on Friday I had to see the Little Swine. The Little Swine’s face was calm on the pillow in the moonlight, but always dangerous and now pallid and rat-like as he said I couldn’t have it unless I paid half. So I paid him half, and
there were thousands more in the wallet because I’d filled it from the dome, and I sat in the seat and backed down the alley and turned in two cool and snappy movements and then I was there, there in long-breathing rhythmical movements, there on the sun-dappled road, caressing the wheel, so warm and smooth, so warm and smooth where the stocking ended.

When I awoke in the morning the first thing I thought of was how I’d willed Uncle Bela to die and I lay there, slightly sick. Not much lower now, I thought. I’d have to do something about myself; frittering away the weeks and the months and the years. I rolled out of bed and into a dressing gown and into the bathroom.

I couldn’t get it out of my head, however, about Uncle Bela, and my haunted look in the mirror frightened me. I had never been to Vancouver. I had never seen anyone die. And yet the details were horribly clear; the sudden cessation of the asthmatic breathing, the shape of the white sheets draped round his stomach; an entity of stillness and death. My eyes stared back at me superstitiously, and to banish the vision I began to scrub and towel with great vigour.

Saturday was eggs, and by saying ‘Eggs,
eggs
!’ to myself in varying tones of wonder as I dressed I was able to cry, ‘Ready, Mrs Nolan!’ with a fair counterfeit of enthusiasm as I filed briskly into the dining room.

I nodded briefly to the three others already eating, sorted out my newspaper and mail from the pile on the sideboard and took my seat, which was just as well.

The moment I clapped eyes on the long white envelope, a pang went through me. The postmark was sw1. I turned it this way and that, extraordinarily reluctant to open it. I had a desire to run with it into the kitchen and stuff it unopened in Mrs Nolan’s boiler.