The Prize (15 page)

Andrew Craig had passed out.

10

ASeach new day brought the climactic occasion of the Nobel Ceremony closer, the lobby and restaurants of the Grand Hotel became more and more crowded with new arrivals, largely journalists and dignitaries, from every part of Scandinavia and every corner of the world.

Now, at the noon hour of December eighth, with the Ceremony only two days off, the immense Winter Garden of the Grand was filled nearly to capacity. When Andrew Craig, wearing a knit tie, tweed sport jacket, and slacks, and carrying a folded airmail edition of
The New York Times
under an arm, entered the noisy indoor Garden, he found it difficult to make himself heard. The
maître d’hôtel
checked his reservation, then bowed across his folded arm and said, ‘Right this way, Mr. Craig.’

Craig followed the dining-room steward past a table of cultural delegates from Ghana, past another where American and English newspapermen conversed and several of these waved to him, past two tables joined to hold eight members of the Italian Embassy staff, and past yet another white-covered table at which Konrad Evang was in deep discussion with several Swedish business types. The variety of foreigners, like the variegated shifting patterns of colour in a kaleidoscope, diverted Craig briefly from what had been uppermost in his mind, the scene with Leah just left behind and the scene with the Marceaus that lay immediately ahead.

The table that he had booked was on the carpeted higher level of the room, between two massive pillars. The
maître d’hôtel
removed the ‘Reserved’ sign, pulled out a cane chair, dusted it briefly with a napkin, and offered it to Craig.

When Craig was seated, the
maître d’hôtel
inquired, ‘Does Monsieur wish to have a drink or to order now?’

‘Neither one,’ said Craig. ‘I’d prefer to wait. I’m expecting guests.’

When the
maître d’hôtel
left, Craig drew his chair closer to the table and spread open the newspaper before him. He had not read a newspaper carefully in days, but today, because he had slept late and soberly, and his eyes were rested, and because he had recaptured some interest in his contemporaries, he intended to resume following the serial story of his time.

But when he bent over the front page, he told himself that the light was too poor to read by. Through the enormous latticed glass dome above, he could see that even at noon, the day was sunless and sombre. Then he realized that although the globular restaurant lamps on either side of him, and all about the room, were illuminated, the artificial lighting was diffused and yellow. Reading, he decided, would be a strain, and he knew that he was in no mood for it anyway. He closed his newspaper and slipped it under his chair. He tilted backwards, one hand fiddling absently with the table silver, and lost himself in thought.

In bed the night before, he had reviewed the astonishing encounter with M
ن
rta Norberg, had tried to remember what he could remember with emotional detachment, had sorted out one or two moments of it that he would have to relate to Lucius Mack once he was back in Miller’s Dam, and then he had recalled something said earlier that evening that he had almost forgotten. What he had recalled was Norberg’s bizarre revelation of Ragnar Hammarlund’s machinations—the secret recordings, the information on Claude Marceau’s affair with some mannequin, the plotting to snare the chemistry laureates into Hammarlund’s industrial web.

In bed, Craig had considered all of this detestable scheming. Generally, he did not concern himself with individual morality. Most often, he preferred to play the onlooker, to live and to let live all the earth’s cabbages and kings. Perhaps that had been his major defect as a human being. Last night, for once, he had determined to correct this defect in himself. He had detested Hammarlund for his cynicism, for his degrading of dignity by invasion of privacy. The Hammarlunds of the world, like the Sue Wileys of the world, he had told himself, must not go unchallenged. Moreover, Craig had identified himself not only with all victims of life, but, in this case, victims with whom he had a bond in common.

Somehow, he had seen that the Marceaus—like the hapless Garrett and distant Farelli and forever displaced Stratman—were, like himself, by chance, by circumstance, human targets. Through the prize, they had all become, with him, not only what Gottling had called democracy’s
élite
, but also democracy’s vulnerable ones. The six of them were, by birth and environment and interests, strangers before meeting in Stockholm, but with the awards, they had been pressed into eternal kinship. Forever after, they would be as one, the laureates of this year, and Craig had seen that if the Marceaus were harmed, so was he, and so were they all.

Once Craig had reasoned this out, and made his decision, he had acted. He had picked up the telephone and asked to speak to the Marceaus. There had been no answer in their room. This frustration had seemed to make the matter more imperative. Craig had left his bed, scrawled a note requesting Denise and Claude Marceau to meet him for lunch in the Winter Garden the next day, hinting at some private matter that would be of special interest to them, and had then summoned a page and sent the message down to their letterbox.

When he had awakened this morning, the luncheon invitation to the Marceaus had still seemed right, and he had not cancelled it. After dressing, he had taken his coffee in the living-room, alone, grateful that Leah had gone out earlier. After finishing the coffee, there had been more than an hour to spare before his date with the Marceaus. He had wanted to spend the time with Emily, and then remembered that she would be out, and that they were having dinner this evening. The anticipation of seeing Emily alone had heightened a desire, long dormant within him, to please and impress a member of the opposite sex. This had brought to mind a nagging duty—the formal acceptance speech that he was expected to deliver, after Ingrid P
ه
hl’s introduction of him, before the King and a large audience during the late afternoon Nobel Ceremony, in Concert Hall on the tenth.

Ordinarily, Jacobsson had previously explained, these laureate addresses were made following the Ceremony, in the evening, in the Golden Room of the Town Hall. But owing to the King’s departure from the country immediately after the Ceremony, it had been decided to change the schedule and move the speeches up to the afternoon, out of respect for His Royal Highness. Because these addresses were widely quoted and read, Jacobsson had tried to convey to Craig the necessity of careful preparation. As a gentle reminder, and perhaps for use as guideposts, Jacobsson had posted Craig several addresses made by earlier Nobel literary laureates. They had arrived the morning before, and Craig had merely glanced at them and thrown them aside, putting off the disagreeable task of composing a speech.

But this morning, after his coffee, thinking of Emily and of how she would be in the audience at the Ceremony and how much he wanted to command her respect, he had taken up the English copies of speeches by his predecessors and painstakingly read them through.

The Eugene O’Neill speech, prepared in 1936, Craig found interesting. A footnote explained that O’Neill, recuperating from a ruptured appendix, had been unable to attend the Ceremony in Stockholm, but had had his speech read for him. In it, O’Neill had given all credit for his career to the inspiration of August Strindberg. ‘If there is anything of lasting worth in my work,’ O’Neill had written, ‘it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then—to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose.’ The ring of sincerity was in this, Craig had believed. It could not have been a mere sop thrown the Swedes, since the Swedish Academy had ignored Strindberg and found his name an anathema to this day.

Next, Craig had studied the address made by Albert Camus in 1957. One paragraph he read and then read again. ‘Probably every generation sees itself as charged with remaking the world. Mine, however, knows that it will not remake the world. But its task is perhaps even greater, for it consists in keeping the world from destroying itself. As the heir of a corrupt history that blends blighted revolutions, misguided techniques, dead gods, and wornout ideologies in which second-rate powers can destroy everything today, but are unable to win anyone over, in which intelligence had stooped to becoming the servant of hatred and oppression, that generation, starting from nothing but its own negations, has had to re-establish both within and without itself a little of what constitutes the dignity of life and death. Faced with a world threatened with disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors may set up once and for all the kingdoms of death, that generation knows that, in a sort of mad race against time, it ought to reestablish among nations a peace not based on slavery, to reconcile labour and culture again, and to reconstruct with all men an Ark of the Covenant.’

From the realistic splendour of Camus’s phrases, Craig had turned to the courageous power of William Faulkner’s uncharacteristic optimism in Stockholm during 1949. ‘I decline to accept the end of man,’ Faulkner had announced in his formal speech. ‘It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom had clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. . . .’

Long after Craig had laid Faulkner’s speech aside, the majesty of his predecessor’s words rang in his ears. He had remained motionless, moved by one who had possessed the strength to raise and shake a fist at Fate. Finally, because it must be done and because Emily would be there to judge it, Craig had tried to prepare his own speech. ‘Your Royal Highnesses,’ he had written, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen.’ That he had written, and then he had written no more. What cramped his hand had not been the literary brilliance of Camus and Faulkner, although their words had, indeed, been inhibiting, but rather their assurance and their authority. For all the progress that he himself had made since his arrival in this place, Craig still had no sure understanding of his role, his value, and his integration in his time. He still had not fully escaped Camus’s ‘kingdoms of death’. He had still the suspicion, as Faulkner had not, that man would be lucky to endure, let alone prevail.

And then, as he had attempted to explore what he did truly believe, he had heard the door open and seen Leah, arms filled with parcels, come through it.

‘It’s about time you were up, Andrew,’ she had said, and had then stared at the pencil in his hand. ‘Don’t tell me—let me guess—you’re writing!’

He had thrown the pencil on the table and stretched. ‘Nothing like that. Just some notes.’

She had dropped her parcels in a chair. ‘I’ve got to rush, or I’ll be late.’ She had started for her bedroom. ‘M
ن
rta Norberg invited me to lunch.’

Immediately, Craig had been attentive. ‘Who? Did you say Norberg?’

‘Yes. What’s so unusual about that? She’s very plain and friendly if you get to know her.’

‘Where did you get to know her?’

Leah had shown exasperation with him. ‘My God, Andrew, what a memory you’ve got. The night before last at the Hammarlund dinner. I spent a good deal of time with her.’

‘Oh, yes.’ He had almost added, ‘She told me,’ but had held his tongue in time.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Leah had gone on, ‘we talked about you. She wanted to know what you were writing, and I mentioned the new book, and I think she’s very interested in it for a movie or play. You may be hearing from her.’

Craig had not replied to this. Instead, he had inquired, ‘When did she invite you to have lunch with her?’

‘When? Why, at Hammarlund’s. She said there’s a wonderful restaurant called—it’s a crazy name—Bacchi—Bacchi Wapen, and she wanted me to see it. I’m sure she really wants to talk about you. I think she’s very impressed with you. Isn’t it wonderful—all the excitement here—the people—’ She had peered at her watch. ‘My God, the time. I’ll be late. I wouldn’t dare keep
M
ن
rta Norberg
waiting.’