The Old Man and Me (25 page)

I watched C. D. stroking Dody’s hair. He twirled a soft brown feathery curl idly over his thumb. It was so domestic. Father and Daughter. Family Portrait. A thought struck me for the first time: he would have made a wonderful father, miserable wretch. Now, I know at this point the brightest boy in the class is going to jump up—that is if he hasn’t already—and yell Oedipus at me. But he wasn’t anything like my father. My father was fair-minded, just, stern, and unforgiving; dignified and austere. Seedy was prejudiced, rollicking, monumentally greedy (and covetous and avaricious and eager and hungry).

Oh.

Or isn’t that what they mean?

C. D. sighed, looking at us three, and said, “Mes enfants. Mes enfants du Paradis. What shall we do tonight?”

Dody stretched and yawned. “It feels like that play that
always
takes place in a cottage on the moors with a stranger coming in from the fog.” She yawned again.

“Let’s go see if there’s one on,” said Jimbo without moving.

I leapt to my feet. My legs were throbbing with pain. “Shouldn’t we phone them first?”

“My dear girl,” said C. D. “You wouldn’t have heard about it of course but our London theatres remained open during the entire last German attack. You don’t think we’d allow anything as usual as fog to close them up, now do you?”

“I meant of course,” I replied sweetly, “that maybe they won’t have any seats.”

“That is not what you meant. Don’t attempt irony. It doesn’t become you.”

“What does?”

C. D. shifted his eyes from their vagueness and focused them on me for a long moment. “Naïveté,” he said finally, deep out of his old man’s wisdom. That is exactly what he said. I remember it now. Was he warning me? I remember making the mental note: Yah, you wait, C. D. old Seaweed. I won’t seem so naïve when you finally find out what I— But I anticipate.

“If we are going to the theatre I want to see the one with all the Dames in it,” said Dody suddenly. “At the Haymarket. What’s its name again?”

But C. D. didn’t know. And C. D. didn’t care. For C. D., bless his proper heart, subscribed to the notion that the upper classes attend theatre only to see American musicals. And though, as an Intellectual as well, he might be allowed to “send” himself off from time to time to the various Art Theatres to “report back” on these events to his non-theatre-going friends, he never under any conditions referred to—or even knew—the actors by their actual names. He was, nevertheless, most generous in his praise of them: “That awfully good chap plays the father. You know, the one we’re always seeing in the cinema.”

So he sent for that inveterate theatre-goer, his man Blake. “We want to go to the theatre, Blake. The play with all the Dames. What did you think of it?”

“Oh very good, sir. Excellent. Very well spoken, if I may say so, to my way of thinking. Of course it’s a
British
play—begging your pardon, Miss—so it was a bit easier for me to follow than most of what we see nowadays. Of course it’s not a musical.”

“We didn’t expect it to be.”

“Ah, then you won’t be disappointed, sir.”

“Well, go on.”

“I hardly know what else to say, sir. When the curtain rises Dame Edith Evans and Sir Ralph Richardson come down from town looking very discouraged—”

“Who the devil are they?”

“Those are the leading actors, sir.”

“I supposed they were but who are they as characters?”

“I don’t rightly recall their names.”

“I mean what do they do?”

“Why they’re the Duke and Duchess. They live in the country somewhere. Great Missenden, I believe—Yes,” said Blake brightening, “there’re several very good jokes about that. They’ve been complaining about taxes and having to sell”—he broke off laughing reminiscently—“that’s a very funny bit there. When—”

“I’m sure you don’t want to spoil it for us,” said C. D.

“And then, sir, Dame Peggy Ashcroft—I beg your pardon, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten her name in the play too—she’s Her Grace’s sister been away for ten years in some sort of trouble, you see.”

“What did she do?”

“I’m not quite sure, sir. They talked about it but they kept going round in a circle, if I make my meaning clear. I mean, sir, they don’t come right out and say what it actually was. They keep being interrupted by the housekeeper whose daughter—that’s Dame Sybil Thorndike—(the housekeeper, I mean, not the daughter)—anyway, the daughter has become a film star. She returns in the nick of time—you know what film-stars’ salaries are and—oh—there’s a very sad part where she’s supposed to marry Sir John Gielgud—he’s the visiting diplomat and they’ve become engaged during the play—but nothing comes of it. She breaks it off.”

“Thank you, Blake,” said C. D. dismissing him. “It all sounds very distinguished, I’m sure.”

And out we surged into the night.

I had expected from Blake’s description to be positively
dazzled by the display of osprey feathers and satins and tiaras. I was completely unprepared for a stage set of unparalleled dowd upon which a succession of actors and actresses dressed in muted monotones appeared to be vying with each other in bleakness. “Where be your English love of pomp and circumstance now?” I whispered to C. D., who told me to shut up. And at that moment the fog rolled on to the stage obscuring them entirely.

“Very well spoken” had been Blake’s verdict, and as the players dimmed I began to appreciate the judgment for I could still hear their tones, clear bells piercing the gloom, though I was not always sure from whose mouth they were coming; beautiful sounds, comforting sounds—sea-bells tolling us safely to shore. The fog rolled on into the audience. The fog bound them together. And I felt my foreignness all over again. The people in the audience—except that they were slightly better dressed—looked exactly like the people on stage. C. D. was sitting there rapt. It upset me.

“Really for me it was like seeing a Chinese play,” I said angrily later. “Beautifully done,
ex
quisitely done, but goodness, they’re all so
stylized
. Don’t tell me people are really like that.”

“Perhaps they are,” snapped C. D. “Perhaps some people are what you’d call stylized. Civilized people.”

“C. D., you loved that silly play. You adored it. Admit it. You found it positively r-r-rrripping!”

“I thought the actors behaved quite accurately. I thought the observation was exact. Yes, I was impressed. Where do you suppose they learned it all? Don’t they all go home to their bed-sits in Paddington and cook over gas-rings and that sort of thing? I hardly suppose the grand ones do nowadays but didn’t they when they first began? Touring the provinces and living in digs.

“What did you think of it?” C. D. asked Jim.

Jimbo thought for a moment. “Jejune,” he said suddenly. “Je-june in January,” he sang. And then he thought it over some more. “On the one hand Sir Ralph’s toupee the frowsiest yet, on the
other
Dame Edith had more patches on her gardening jacket.”

“But Dame Sybil’s was the baggiest—”

“And Sir John had the oldest tobacco pouch.”

“Where shall we go?” said C. D., giving us up. “Not too far, I’d like to get some sleep for a change.” There was no doubt. The play had stirred the England, My England! in his bones.

But I had another worry. A big one. The fog to my horror was lifting. Why couldn’t the four of us have stayed as we were alone in our crater of the moon?

“Want to fall by Ronnie Scott’s?” said Jimbo.

“No,” said C. D.

“What was the name of the new one we heard about last night?”

“The Zazou.”

“How far is it?” asked C. D. yawning. “Can we see our way to walking there?”

Then they all noticed it too.

“The fog is lifting,” I said. “We can see our way everywhere.” And sadly I watched the Haymarket emerge, buildings solidify themselves by our side, pavements redefined. At Piccadilly Circus the traitor Eros reappeared. I saw the atmosphere thinning out, breaking up into long kites of smoke and rise rushing high into the sky, wantonly deserting me. Satan had other fish to fry.

“I think this is it,” said C. D. suddenly and stopped and I positively jumped. No, it’s not hindsight—I really thought then that he was on to me. My nerviness I suppose that night was not solely caused by premonition, but by his increasing irritability. But he only meant the street that the club Zazou was in.

A new place. Not only to us but to itself, as I sensed instantly upon entering by its hopeful air: it still held its head high. It could still be excited by the idea of itself. Emptiness, cynicism, bounced cheques, the book accounts, the protection racket, run-ins with English licensing laws hadn’t yet set in. A French proprietor. Downstairs in a cellar. Halfway down the stairs I paused and looked into the faces. Young people. I didn’t know any of them or their faces or their type. They were neither bums nor poets nor beat-bunnies. “Come along,” said C. D. crisply, pulling at my arm. “They’re French, that’s all. A lost colony of French students.” So that’s what all the noise was—French. And the behaviour too—French.

“The weather hasn’t dampened their spirits,” Jimbo noted.

“Three hundred exhibitionists and not one voyeur,” said C. D. uninterestedly. “It’s damp,” he added complainingly. He was rallying all right. My ear perked up. This was the old C. D. clamour. This was not the docile fossil I’d been leading around by the nose, any more.

The place was damp, though. That was the main thing. And the dampness of the cellar produced a nice thick muggy throat-catching atmosphere almost as good as fog that made everything cling and clog and get stuck to everything else. The smoke we poured out of our mouths poured itself back into our hair and clothes; in our ears and up our nostrils. Our eyes stung so much that after five minutes tears rolled down our cheeks whenever we opened them. In addition, they’d given us a tiny table in the corner under the staircase where we sat jammed stuck together on a bench with about a quarter of an inch of seat apiece, dripping with sweat and drinking fast to make up for the liquid we were losing. C. D. for good measure was squashed directly into an airless hole formed by the overhanging staircase. It was a good strong crowd there that night, I noticed professionally, through my tears. These healthy French students had plenty of staying power. The ones that weren’t going to bed together at their tables were going to bed together on the dance floor where they stood writhing and swaying to the not very good jazz combo; a tightly packed herd whose docility would have been the envy of any sinking submarine’s commander (such was the claustrophobic thought gripping me as I noticed we were windowless, sinking fathoms deep into the sea). I took three quick swallows of my drink and rubbed my leg against C. D. for reassurance. He was not enjoying himself. Zazou, zazou, I said to myself until it clicked. Jazz. French for hip. The few that were really dancing were putting on a display of squaredom you don’t often see nowadays—jitterbugging and jigging and flinging themselves violently against each other in the most outlandish way. “Ils ne sont pas très zazou.” That’s what I would say to C. D. I rehearsed it in my mind for a while for my French had been very good in school and he liked me to have these little accomplishments.

“Ils ne sont pas très zazou,” I finally said.

“Za-
zoo
, za-
zoo
—not za-zeuh!” he flung back at me in a rage. “Where did you get that frightful pansy French accent?” It was the last thing he said before it happened. But there was that in the tone sufficient to make me think to myself that my Odette days were possibly numbered, n-u-m-b-e-r-e-d. And then the lights went out and a floor show began that simply wiped that and everything else from my mind. A man was hypnotizing a chicken. It’s relative of course. It’s a matter of degrees of unreality. First there was the unreality of us four together in the unreal London fog in a French night-club. That would be painted on the canvas: C. D. and I crunched together down in the right-hand corner of the painting, Jimbo and Dody on the left, peering round people’s heads at the floor show. Now, punch a hole in the middle of the canvas and behind that hole we have the real unreality: the man hypnotizing the chicken.

Always alarmed by the presence of unexpected animals in unexpected places as, for example, a seal in the bathtub, I was literally hypnotized with fear by the man hypnotizing the chicken. The man was pale, more than middle-aged, and looked as if the act wasn’t often in demand. I wondered how he’d gotten into it in the first place. And what had made them book it in there? And where they ate and slept, the man and the chicken? Together? Most certainly.

It is the only animal act of which I remember every searing second. First, the man hypnotized the chicken (I suppose we must take his word for it), then he made it walk around in a circle. Then a figure eight. Then he blindfolded it, turned it around several times, drew a straight chalk line and made it walk it. That was the worst—probably the hardest too. Then, as a climax, he lifted the stiff chicken on to a table and said he would hypnotize it into thinking it was dead. The chicken keeled over and lay flat on his back, feet in the air. At that very moment C. D. doubled up into his sweathole under the staircase, erupted with a strangled rasp and toppled over too, his heavy frame falling on top of the table, on top of the ashtrays and glasses, sending cigarette-butt sparks flying, rolling the drinks over plop into our laps.

My first thought—my thoughts pulling themselves reluctantly away from the chicken—my first thought was that it was C. D.’s idea of a joke to keel over when the chicken did. My second thought—how slow the mind works in an emergency—was to discount the first because—get this—because, I told myself, that would have been too American a joke. The wetness of the drink in my lap at last forced me into contact with reality and I had my third thought: C. D.’s stroke.

It had finally happened.

I let out a scream splintering the air around me. I heard the scream dying far away into the hush and then saw, like waves, questioning faces surging up towards me. I screamed again. I couldn’t find the words until “Stroke!” I howled, “stroke, stroke, he’s dying. Move him, move him, MOVE HIM, get him out of here. He mustn’t die in here. He mustn’t die.” My voice screaming and screaming, calling for an ambulance over and over again.