by Paul Ableman
The manager falls silent. Around us, but deadened and remote, is the chattering of machines. Up, up through the thicknesses of concrete, the filmy opacity of clouds, the turbulent air of the stratosphere, beyond the orbit of the moon, sits the Kingdom of Heaven like a floating bandstand and all around it dart little particles of hydrogen, like bees.
“That’s why,” concludes the manager, “I’m only his drunken manager and he’s the boss.”
“Are you drunken?” I ask.
“Pretty drunken.”
“You probably have a literary or artistic nature,” I advise. “I was quite carried away by what you were saying and thought, ‘This manager has an uncommon ability for evoking things. He must have a literary or artistic nature.’ That’s probably why you’re drunken.”
“Everyone’s drunken,” murmurs the manager. “The brain is a chunk of grey pudding but it works at high temperature. It has to be cooled with drink. Well—do you want to meet the men?”
“I’ve already met them,” I explain. “I was in the queue. At least I didn’t meet them all, but I don’t suppose they vary much do they?”
“Not much. Some are kinder, some crueler—but our arrangements are flexible enough now to accommodate the little individual variations and extract the requisite amount of labor from them all. We’ve no time to worry about idiosyncrasies and minor differences. Personality’s dead, deader than chivalry. Well, are you coming to the party?”
He pours himself a swift drink from a bottle in his desk drawer. An aide or assistant comes in with his new tinted suit from the further development. Lights hiss on and, beyond the stony eye, the flares blaze out above the geometry. I allow myself to be drawn along and, in a short time, we pull up outside a very different prospect. I begin to feel slight misgivings.
“I’m not used to this sort of affair,” I confide. “I don’t think I really belong. Besides, what will Arthur say?”
“I don’t know,” grumbles the manager. “I never know what anyone will say, not even myself. My notion at this sort of function is simply to raise the internal fluid level as rapidly as possible. And then maybe find a girl. But then I’m only a coarse manager, only tolerated by all these posturing, obsolete waxworks because they need me. They need us, my boy, remember that. And don’t be afraid of Arthur. I’ll tell him what a splendid day’s work you did. I’ll tell him you exceeded your quota. Do you smell drink?”
I sniff the evening air blowing amongst the cool, high elms, stirring the well-kept lawn with its few decorative leaves, but smell only an indistinct scummy smell as if a fetid pond had been drained.
“Only ooze,” I confess, “like tidal ooze.”
“There are tides flowing tonight,” mutters the manager but I am not sure what he means.
“Shall we follow those fire-flies?” I ask. “They might lead us to an earl, on the telephone or rehearsing a speech. You see those fire-flies, romancing with the leaves? Each fire-fly courts a single trembling leaf and they carry the first-born to the nearest earl or accountant. It sounds feudal, I know, but History coils and re-coils and we never know when we open our lids—”
“You’re talking rubbish,” complains the manager. “I wish I could see better.”
“It’s because I’m nervous,” I protest. “I’m trying to rehearse for the charming play of witty, allusive speech that we’re sure to encounter. That’s what happens at this sort of function. Everyone strolls under the ornamented marquees or congregates around some object and the air becomes full with a continual murmur of delicious banter, poor admittedly in philosophy, but how rich, how beguilingly rich—”
“Have you brought a compass?” asks the manager.
His tone is sober. All thought of banter leaves me as I gaze, with sudden foreboding, around the festive and yet somehow ambiguous scene. It is hard to clarify the celebrants. They can be descried all right: the shimmering gowns of the women haunting their nakedness as they drift amongst the apertures and ramps, the grave bondage of the men as they roll boulders or tread boulders— They can be descried, but neither I nor the manager, if sympathy does, in fact, link our understanding, can apprehend the exact, the clearly defined sector of their activities.
“What period?” asks the manager.
“Neo-Cretan,” I suggest. “Neo-Neolithic. The gongs are suggestive.”
“And the hair styles?”
“Ah, I wondered if you’d notice the hair styles. Would it be ludicrous to detect a marine or sea-spray influence? There’s a net motif—and surely that’s ribbing, or keel? The hair styles are lovely, fluffing up the human strands, binding the unruly moss, the reeds—but the period? Manorial, I think, or modern?”
“A weeny period,” smiles the manager. “A mere flicker on the screen, a dancing point—I’m glad to see they have nuts.”
He bends down for a handful of the green husks, peels away the thick, blackening integuments and munches the fodder, chewing it until it ferments and then inhaling the giddy fumes.
“Shan’t we go anywhere?” I ask. “I mean—we haven’t met anyone yet.”
“Do you want to meet people? There may be no one here that interests you. There’ll be no one here that interests me. There couldn’t be. Bits of people are different—of one sex that is. Still—let’s see—I had a list of names, guests’ names; my secretary punched it out this afternoon on some development, some new development or another. It was a speaking list, a flashing, semaphore list, but I seem to have lost it. The human element you see.”
“Perhaps,” I suggest. “In that case, we’d better just mingle, just stroll around and—”
“It’s a large area,” cautions the manager. “I’m no good at trekking until I’ve had a drink, a real drink that is, not these unsophisticated nuts.”
“Well then,” I urge, feeling that for some reason, not unconnected with an immense sadness, the manager is going to take no crisp decisions this evening, no deliberate strides or motions towards, “let’s go and find a drink. There are none here.”
“There are owls here,” murmurs the manager. “Owls and bats—uninvited guests, hooting at the feast. Do you read the Bible?”
“No,” I say, interested and detained, in spite of my anxiety to penetrate closer to the center of the festivities, by the prospect of a literary discussion, “but it was explained to me this afternoon, how it goes too slowly, how it fails to plunge from the heavens, how things go on mingling and tingling—”
“So they do,” agrees the manager. “You can’t get at a tenth, not a millionth of them. I’ve read bits of the Bible myself, the bit about Abraham and something about donkeys and it’s quite true, I could sense even as I read them that other thoughts were being prepared for me. The manager’s night out. The drunken manager.”
“Could you write books?” I ask him. “I mean adventure books—and so on.”
“I suppose so. Anyone could. What’s the point? Clara loved Bill and they got married. There’s a book. Or they didn’t get married. There’s another one. Or there were some other people as well, all doing different things. There’s a hundred books. What’s the point? I don’t read them and I’m not going to write them. More pay, that’s my battle-cry. More pay, more booze, more women, more holidays, more life! Do you understand? More life, that’s what I want.”
He glares around at the dubious shapes, colored hazes, service tables, baroque alcoves, as if eager to detect a substantial portion of it that he can consume without further ado.
“There,” he says. “That bubble thing, that damned promenade place with the flagstaff or bust. Let’s blow in that quarter. Let’s find a green earth olive and poultice of gin. You depress me, friend, I don’t know why. I’m glad to have you. But you make a hammock of my spirits. Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” I confess. “People always affect each other in some way.”
The night is dark. It is the old, evil, dark night, and the festivities, though all round us, seem remote and hard to reach.
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nbsp; “There seems to be a path here,” pretends the manager, slashing irritably at some brambles with his stick. I follow him, at first staying as close to him as I can. Soon, however, an unexpected feeling of sympathy for the dark leaves and harsh vegetation dissolves my earlier trepidation and I fall back to look into the hollows and corridors of the wood and to sense the sudden, earthy life in the briars around my feet.
“This wood’s all right,” I tell the manager, but he is intent now on attaining more sophisticated sensations, and merely wades on as fast as he can. It does not take us long to reach the charming, paved courts, heavy with rhododendron, and the sunken gardens, moontraps holding the pale moonlight in the cups of lilies floating on the artificial ponds or sliding brightly in segments on the black, shining water itself. We pass old stone and balustrades, Diana, a knight or two, and finally reach the splendid display or novelty provided by the organizers. This is some wonderful thing, made of chemicals and electricity, that resembles a rainbow or balloon. The dancing couples, I notice, frequently pause to comment on the effect. I look anxiously around to see if Arthur is in the vicinty. Someone approaches and asks us if we want a drink.
“Or do you want introductions? I could probably get you a drink. The press is heavy as you can see. There are too few waiters and those there are keep drinking themselves or strolling about as if they were guests. Still, we haven’t been introduced. Perhaps I’ve been guilty of a gross discourtesy—not actually but conceptually as it were. I was thinking, ‘perhaps they’d like to meet some of the important people who abound here this evening.’ And now it occurs to me that you may be important people yourselves. You may be celebrities—”
“A manager and his mate—” begins the manager. “A thirsty manager.”
“Ah, a manager. I study managers. I’m a pretty cool number. Managers abound. I find them everywhere so mine’s a fortunate profession. I was bred for it amidst the hay and the bells. I thought of it when the bells were still audible. Acutally I invented it, and now I practice it. But you’re tired. You’ve had a long journey and you don’t want to be studied this evening. Unlike the bells, you’re not a bell—”
“I’ve brought the drinks,” announces a small, attractive princess arriving with colored flasks. She hands us the glowing vessels and then links arms familiarly with the student we have just encountered. “Do you play anything?” she asks. “Run things? Or form things? Don’t listen to Toby.”
“No, don’t listen to me,” urges Toby. “What could you learn from me? A drift of faces—a blizzard of faces.”
“He studies too many managers,” complains the princess. “He complains of faces—as he puts it, a drift of faces before the eyes. I tell him it’s nonsense and to sink down deeper into the upholstery or take a spin in the country but he drifts back to the pavements and his drift of faces. It makes me think of marrying an Italian.”
“Like Maria,” I can not help exclaiming.
“Like many girls, noble or plebeian. I’m one of the noble ones, though you’d never guess it from the company I keep.”
“Why not change?” leers the manager. “I don’t know you people, but I could rock this Toby with a blast of something.”
“Perhaps later,” agrees the girl. “Though you’re an ugly, sweating brute. We speak our minds, we aristocrats.”
“What, leave me?” asks Toby. He smiles vivaciously and then stupidly and reads a large announcement pasted near some pens. “Before our trip, or some incident that’s bound to come, a bandaging, a fleet glance when we’re laced with gleams, parallax? It takes some explaining. I should take her to task,” he informs the manager. He turns to me. “She’ll tell him of certain towers and roots, combs, counterpanes—I know her ways. Let’s leave them —for a night.”
“Do you want me to leave you?” I ask the manager, although from the eager way with which he is reaching, or seeming about to reach, for the princess and the cool and yielding way with which she awaits his reach, it seems unlikely that either of them will be displeased by our departure.
He does not answer and so I turn, conscious of an unexpected sadness, towards Toby.
“Perhaps you could introduce me to some interesting people?” I suggest. “Anyone but Arthur.”
“You needn’t worry about him,” Toby assures me. “He’s not arrived. I keep a pretty close check on that one—”
“Ah, Toby,” calls someone, although in the confusion I can not tell who. “Have you heard that the sabres are out?”
“They’re rattling the sabres,” says a different voice, hollow and ironic.
“The obsolete swords?” asks Toby.
“Yes, the sabres,” and a lively but somewhat disheveled chap appears from out of a knot or cluster of pretty women. “You’ll forgive me,” he apologizes to me, “I have to keep Toby abreast. I’m one of his sources.”
“Now don’t be dull,” call the girls. “Don’t be bores with your sabres.”
‘They’d rather we danced or gloried in their parts,” says the new arrival with a broad wink. “Still, I don’t see Toby every day. I thought you’d be interested.” He looks doubtful and anxious for a moment. “You are interested, old chap?”
“What are the circumstances?” asks Toby.
“Ah—well now—the circumstances. I was afraid of that. I almost didn’t mention it because I was afraid you’d ask me that. Circumstances are not my line, you know. I don’t pretend to understand things. If I see a cloud, I can say ‘there’s a cloud up there.’ But if you ask me the circumstances—still, I’ll do my best—after all, I know that in your line nothing’s any good if you don’t have the circumstances, but do they have to be real circumstances? All right, all right, Toby, don’t get cross —you know what I’m like, never serious if I can help it. Now then, the circumstances—”
He begins to recount the circumstances. At first they sound like a story, an adventure story, possibly an episode from a serial, but a bit later they begin to sound more like an official report or even memoirs. Then they sound briefly like a newspaper story, a small unimportant story in a vulgar paper. Then the darker note returns and events knit themselves into a huge conspiracy, a conspiracy having as its single aim the obscuring of the qualities of the narrator. Then life becomes a peck of feathers flung to the spring winds.
At first, I listen intently, feeling that something of importance may emerge. Toby, I observe, is taking notes in a little notebook. I try to notice the points at which he writes so that I can search the words for richer meanings. Not only, however, do I find it difficult to concentrate long on any one word or group of words, but the attempt to do so makes me lose the sequence. In addition, I find myself distracted by other things that are happening in the room and especially by a handsome, middle-aged woman standing on a small mound or elevation who, whenever my glance inadvertently moves in her direction, beckons and smiles towards me. As I debate with myself whether to assume she is signaling at me and, if so, whether to return the salute, an arresting sentence or evocative phrase seems to issue from the narrator but, by the time I have turned my mind to it, he is merely saying “nothing there that’s helpful, I’m afraid. Nothing there at all.” And when I try to recall what it was, I can only think of the words “the large front was like hipping.”
“Did you say ‘hipping’?” I ask uncertainly.
“I’m telling this chap about the sabres,” he points out. “I lead a pretty adventurous life and so he finds me useful as a source. Listen, by all means. Or keep the girls amused.”
“Yes, replace that adventurer,” calls one of the girls, an attractive but depraved-looking dark-haired girl in a diamond dress. “He came to our Saxon estate once. He revealed himself there. It was just after a war.”
“Well, I’m trying to listen,” I explain, stirred and flattered, in spite of myself, at being summoned by such an attractive girl. “He’s telling about the sabres.”
“Oh, about the sabres.”
“We’ve all heard about the sa
bres,” explains another girl, also dark-haired but not so depraved-looking as the other. She is also shorter and fuller and she wears a dark dress with a bright, diamond buckle. “That happened during a war. He brings the story up to date from time to time, changes the setting and retells it with the old dash and spirit. We girls are fond of him, not because of his silly sabres but because we please him so.”
“You’re probably wondering,” says another girl, a slim, crisp girl who seems to cultivate a blasé and ironic manner, “why Toby’s listening so intently, if the story is old and tedious. He’s not really listening at all. He’s taking the line of least resistance, which is to go on, as far as he can, behaving as if nothing had happened and he’s also trying to present a completely normal appearance. Really, he’s an empty shell. His princess has taken up with a manager and he’s heart-broken.”
“But he can’t deceive us,” enthuses the second girl. “We live for things like that and notice them at once. The tale has crackled amongst us ever since the incident happened. Some of us take Toby’s side and some the princess’s, although, naturally, we can’t help being malicious about the princess. She’s a wounded bird, poor thing, a war-blown bird that fluttered weakly into our midst. But she’s recovered now and flaunts her tropic plumes.”
