PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner

by Players At The Game Of People (v5. 5) (html)

  “I didn’t,” Godwin said softly. “But I’m listening anyhow.”

  “Thank God someone is.” She gulped down half the Scotch he had poured her as though it were necessary medicine but foul. “Greer— Oh, shit! You know, you must bloody know!”

  Godwin considered, comparing his predicament with hers, and reached a conclusion.

  “You set out to try and be her and didn’t make it. Why?”

  “Right in one!” she crowed, and finding he had settled down on the floor beside her again, ruffled his hair with casual fingers. “And for the silliest of all possible reasons…”

  He waited.

  “The first time I was ever taken to the pictures,” she resumed finally. “That’s when she was born. Because of Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver.”

  “I saw that!”

  She looked down at him curiously. “Mm-hm? At the National Film Theatre? On television?”

  “No! I—”

  But it was too complex to explain how it all happened. He urged, “Go on!”

  “Well, at least if you’ve seen it you can imagine the impact it made on a susceptible eight-year-old in the middle of the war, when half the street leading to the cinema was roped off because of bomb damage.” For a brief while her voice had been slurred owing to the drink she had taken; now it was formal, almost stately, and she negotiated words like “susceptible” without the slightest hint of a sh.

  “That was when I made up my mind. When I grew up I was going to be a lady, I was going to be beautiful and capable and indestructible. I was going to be someone other than Barbara—I’d already been told by a cruel schoolteacher that my name meant ‘wild woman’ or ‘savage,’ and I was afraid of what it would do to me and I began to hate my mother because of it.”

  Listening. Godwin thought of Ambrose and what delight he would take in such a fulfillment of his declared beliefs.

  “And because I didn’t know anybody called Greer, the name took on magical associations. If I could be Greer, I could live a calm, beautiful sort of life, and when Hitler started mucking it about, instead of just running to the shelter or the tube and hiding, peeing myself with terror as the bombs rained down, I could send my handsome husband to rescue Allied soldiers and get a medal and maybe a knighthood— Oh, God, do I have to go on?” Her voice altered on the instant and she was sourly resigned. “I buried all those dreams of being a Lady when I was in the home where they sent me after Gran died. I looked at the other kids and I realized: this is where I’ve been filed—you get me?—in the grand national filing cabinet. I’m down here with the kids who earned more than their mothers off the servicemen during the Blitz, and copped a dose and it wasn’t cured before they were sterilized by it. I’m down here with the kids who robbed the corpses they were picking out of the bombed buildings. A wedding ring could be eighteen-carat gold, or even twenty-one! And there were gold fillings in teeth, too… I read about the concentration camps in Germany after the war, and I wasn’t shocked. I saw just as bad. Knew a boy worked with a gang that had a line into the Fire Service headquarters; every time a raid came on, or a flying bomb or a V-2, they were there, going through the purses, and sometimes the mouths and hands. Had to cut a woman’s finger off once, he said, to get an emerald ring, only it turned out to be paste. But he never knocked out teeth, though his mates did. Used to carry a proper dental kit…

  “Well, that was already post-war. My gran was dead, and you know my mother and brother and sisters—the lot—they all got killed by that V-1. So there I was trying to be Greer. Never made it. Tried. Went on trying. All the smart things, like marrying a ‘member of the officer class’”—the irony rang in her words like a funeral bell—“and he turned out to be an unmitigated bastard! I met him when I was eighteen and I thought he was wonderful. I’d set out to live down my background, got myself enough of an education and enough of a BBC accent to pass muster, and realized that my looks and my body were what were needed to get me the rest of the way. Only Greer was already dead, and I hadn’t noticed. I still thought I stood a chance of turning into her…”

  She sipped her drink, eyes focused on the past.

  “Still, the way that bastard treated me taught me one useful lesson: how to make up to an upper-class twit. One condition of the divorce was that I stop using his name. That suited me fine. Before the ink was dry on the decree absolute I was in the only business I felt I could make a fortune out of. Starting with his friends, I built up a very distinguished circle of contacts, including businessmen and bankers and a couple of MPs and some writers and artists, the kind who get patronized by big corporations. I was never actually a prostitute, in spite of what I sometimes say when I’m in a mood to hate myself. I was—oh—the available partner for an important dinner. I was the emergency hostess who could be trusted to sleep with the host afterwards. I was the person with a flat where a secret business meeting could be arranged, and after the deal was concluded I could be relied on to produce suitable entertainment by way of celebration. I was the person who could be asked to show a distinguished foreign diplomat or businessman around London, and keep him company overnight and allow him to think it had been his personal charm which swung the deal, instead of a hundred pounds from an unaudited account at ICI or the Foreign Office. I got very good at the job. I often thought about trying for the stage. I had the makings of an actress. Everybody said so. And the looks.

  “And then I did the extremely damn stupidest thing I ever did. I fell in love and wrecked everything. Oh, I don’t mean all my friends abandoned me—some did, but several didn’t, and if I had the money to throw a party tomorrow I swear some very famous names could be on the guest list. But I couldn’t carry on the way I had. Trouble was, the son-of-a-bitch was married and wouldn’t divorce his wife. I did everything to force him, up to and including getting pregnant. That’s Dora’s father I’m talking about, you understand. I gave her his surname instead of mine. I called her Theodora because it meant ‘God’s gift,’ but by then I was beginning to wonder whether God’s gift to me hadn’t been stupidity. I stopped using the Theo bit almost at once, but Dora was my mother’s name, so…

  “Anyhow, he made a settlement on her and put some money in trust for her at twenty-one, and got a court injunction to stop me bothering him again. So there I was. What the hell could I do?

  “One guy who stood by me said I ought to try writing. I thought he was crazy, but when I got desperate I did it, just poured out on paper what was boiling in my head, how much I hated the man who’d betrayed me—nothing of the sort, of course, because it was entirely my fault from start to finish—and he told me it reeked of sentimentality and persuaded me to write a romantic novel. It had just the right touch of authenticity compared with most of its kind, because most women who write that kind of thing have never been in an MP’s office at the House, or them D’s office at a world-famous company’s headquarters, or whatever. I’ve been there—the Lord Mayor’s banquet, and all the rest…”

  While she was reciting this account of her life in a voice that came closer and closer to a droning monotone, Godwin mentally checked off the points where it agreed and disagreed with the story Gorse had told him. He concluded that, as he had originally suspected, her version was distorted: partly by LSD and partly by detestation of her mother’s background.

  Shame. Viewed from another angle, it could have been regarded as romantic.

  But then so could his own, and it wasn’t. He went on listening.

  “But of course you’ve never heard of me even though I have written a book a year since this new career was wished on me fifteen years ago. I never put my own name on one of them. Not one turned into a best-seller. Not one sold to films or television, though this time I did really hope— Oh, never mind. They paid for my trip to California, at least. I couldn’t have afforded it myself. What I earn pays for a three-room flat, food and drink, and enough clothes for me to dare show my face at my agent’s office or Dora’s school without being written off as a has-b
een.”

  “The school fees?”

  “Come out of the money her father settled on her, of course.” She drained her glass and set it by. “Got a cigarette?”

  He started to offer a cigar, and then recollected himself; despite the view of London, this was an activated version of his home. He looked around, and spotted a polished wooden box with brass hinges. It contained a mixture of Players and Gauloises.

  “Oh, very U!” she said mockingly as she took a Players. “Where did you learn your style, you alcoholic orphan?”

  “Tried things till I decided what I liked.”

  For the first time he seemed to have made a genuine impression on her. She studied him narrow-eyed for several seconds before speaking again in a flip and casual tone.

  “And I suppose there was no limit to what you were able to try?”

  “None that I’ve yet found.”

  “Lucky devil, aren’t you?”

  “No luckier than your daughter. She can have precisely the same. Or whatever else she prefers.”

  “You keep saying that!” she snapped. “So why don’t you take me where she is, show her to me, prove it?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You keep saying that, too…” Sighing, she glanced around the room for the latest of many times. “If it weren’t still raining I think I’d get up and go. But it is, isn’t it? Or is it just another of your tricks that makes the windows wet?”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s real. Everything’s real. Or as real as anything ever is.”

  “Hmm! Getting all philosophical now, are we? Well, I don’t mind very much. It’s seldom enough that I get a taste of high-class living, so I might as well make the most of it.”

  And she added spitefully, “Especially since Dora isn’t likely to ask me to share hers! What the hell have you done with her—added her to the string kept by some oil-rich Arab like the ones you had a fight with outside the Global?”

  That wasn’t worth rebutting. Godwin said, “I suppose Jackson told you about that?”

  “Who?”

  “The commissionaire I saw you talking to.”

  “Oh, my! Aren’t we grand? To me he was Tim. I didn’t think of calling him Jackson!”

  About to take another drag on her cigarette, she changed her mind and stubbed it.

  “Got anything to eat? I’m bloody starving.”

  “Whatever you like,” Godwin murmured, deducing that she was starting to feel drunk-drunk and needed food to settle it.

  “Christ, we’re back to guessing games. All right, then!” She sat upright, looking into space. “Ah… I fancy awabi, and some beer-fed beef, and a dish of mixed vegetables, including plenty of bok choy and bean sprouts, and saké and Kirin beer and banana fritters to wind up with.”

  “Then we’ll go to Della Silveira’s in Hawaii. It has a great advantage: it’s part of the United States, so they aren’t forever asking for your passport. I’ll take mine along just in case, but if by some mischance they do want yours, they’ll always believe you left it at the hotel. The best hotel to mention is the Kilau Alea.”

  The sight and sound of London in the rain died. The smells changed, becoming oceanic again like those of Bali, but there was a subtle difference; these were tinged with smoke, car exhausts, and the odors of a densely populated city. Also the cloud patterns in the sky altered, as though a pavement artist very swiftly wiped out old chalk marks and substituted new. Then came the lingering tones of a steel guitar, and everything shifted ever so slightly, suggesting some cosmic removal-man had grown weary when within a millimeter of precision. And there was Honolulu.

  “There are active volcanoes here,” Godwin said. “I don’t call on Della very often nowadays. Too much stink of sulfur. Be better after the next major eruption.”

  He added, “Take off that jacket, by the way. Nobody will give a damn how you’re dressed, but the weather’s far too warm for such heavy gear.”

  Slowly, moving as in a dream, she obeyed. Under the jacket she wore a T-shirt, dingy pink that had once been red, and no bra. Her breasts were remarkably well-shaped. In fact she had an extremely good figure in all respects, one which many women half her age would have envied, and now he had recovered from the original shock of seeing her as a mature woman, Godwin was able to look her over appraisingly and even feel a faint stir of erotic interest, the remote echo of that impact which her ten-year-old self—

  No.

  No, that was nonsense. There must be another explanation for his imagined acquaintance with her, and he was groping toward it with half his mind. But it was too soon for him to think seriously about the problem.

  Nonetheless, as he took her hand and urged her toward the window, from which here also steps led down but this time into a courtyard shaded by reed awnings where half a dozen groups of people sat laughing and eating at small tables, he found himself wondering whether means might be found to persuade the owners…

  Probably not. There never had been; why should there be now?

  But it was a shame, anyway.

  “Why, God!” exclaimed the proprietress of the restaurant as she bustled out from her kitchens. She was a plump, small woman with a marked oriental cast to her features despite her Portuguese surname; there were historical reasons for that. “It’s been far too long! Were you waiting for a particularly auspicious day?”

  There were likewise historical reasons why she should put an oriental question in a strong American accent. But she didn’t wait for an answer; she kissed him smackingly on the cheek and seized Barbara’s hand in both of hers.

  “How good that for the first time ever God brought a lady friend! Be seated, please, wherever you like! What do you care for?”

  “Awabi, beer-fed beef, mixed vegetables with plenty of bok choy and beansprouts, saké, Kirin beer, and banana fritters to follow,” Godwin said with a malicious glance at Barbara.

  “It shall be done!” Della clapped her hands and spun around, her broad bottom waggling in a pair of unsuitable Bermuda shorts cut from something resembling brocade.

  A little faintly Barbara said, as she touched their table, then her chair, as though afraid they would prove insubstantial, “She’s the owner?”

  “Oh, sure, but this is just a hobby for her. She’s one of the highest-paid astrologers in the world. Very few of them understand both the European and the oriental traditions. She does. It was what she wanted, so she does.” Godwin dropped into his own chair and leaned back, trying not to yawn.

  Barbara pondered a while, then posed a question which startled him out of his heat-induced lethargy.

  “What does Dora want—I mean Gorse? What has she been offered?”

  “Success as a designer” was Godwin’s prompt reply.

  “I see. I don’t suppose she told you she has no talent to speak of? No? Oh, well: that’s typical. But in a case like that, is the talent somehow—uh—supplied? And if so, how?”

  It wasn’t the first time this extraordinary woman had disconcerted him, but this time the shock was more severe. Why not? He knew what Bill had wanted, Irma, Hermann, Luke, and the rest. He knew what Wilf and Della and Maud and André had asked for and got. He knew what Ambrose had desired, and he seemed well pleased…

  But he had never wondered what would happen if somebody wanted something he or she was unequipped for.

  And, hovering on the edge of awareness, here came the implicit question which he dared not face.

  I have what I asked for; is it all I was fit for…?

  But Barbara had dismissed the point with a shrug, and was looking about her curiously.

  “Could we walk out of here and find ourselves in a real street? Could we go down it to a real Hawaiian beach and watch the surfers?”

  “Why not?” Godwin answered.

  “I see. ‘Everything is as real as anything else.’” She fumbled a cigarette from the pocket of her shirt. As she set it to her lips one of Della’s prompt waiters arrived bearing their saké and an appetizer
of fried seaweed with the compliments of the house. He lit it for her with a flourish and departed smiling.

  So she stubbed it out at once and ate the crisp seaweed—correctly, with her fingers. Still glancing around, she pursued, “Those steps we came down.”

  “What about them?”

  “Suppose someone else walked up them. What would they find at the top?”

  “Nobody ever does.”

  “But—”

  “Nobody ever does,” he repeated firmly. “That’s—well, it’s built in.”

  “Built into what? The deal you made?”

  “I… Yes, I suppose you could say that.” Uncomfortably, because he didn’t like the tone she used to say “deal.”

  “Then why isn’t immunity from the police asking to see a passport built in, too?”

  “Because—”

  But he bit the words off short. He thought he understood why. He was ninety percent certain he did. He was also fairly sure he could explain the reason in terms that at least some people—Barbara, for example—could understand. Most wouldn’t; they were the exceptions.

  If he were to try, though…

  He remembered Hamish Kemp tearing his body to bloody ruin.

  He was therefore infinitely grateful when the waiter returned with their main course and their bottles of Japanese beer.

  “You know something?” Barbara said thoughtfully. “I’m taking this experience seriously because—you know why?”

  “Yes.”

  She stared at him, affronted. “Well, then—why?” she snapped.

  “Because it’s making you drunk.”

  “How the hell did you know what I was going to say?” Her voice peaked to a volume which attracted the attention of people at other tables; she caught herself and repeated the question in a fierce whisper.