Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  Our delivery man was out on a job, so I humped the crates out to the limousine waiting on Park Avenue and stacked them in its trunk myself. ‘I need the boy to unload,’ the stout woman said to old Haas, who told me to accompany them.

  I got into the limo and sat on the jump seat facing the two women. We pulled out, heading uptown. No one spoke and the silence grew oppressive. ‘Well, you old girls are throwing quite a bash,’ I remarked cheerfully, though not quite in those words. Helen Keller beamed serenely, her minder glared at me coldly without replying.

  We stopped outside a brownstone townhouse on the Upper East Side. The chauffeur opened the rear door for the two women to get out then resumed his place behind the wheel, leaving me to unload the drink. Removing a case of a dozen bottles from the trunk, I trotted up the front steps after the women. The front door was open; I was stepping through it when the stout woman stopped me. ‘Deliver it by the service door,’ she ordered.

  I halted, the heavy crate awkward in my arms. ‘Down there, boy, and get a move on,’ she instructed, pointing to the basement. Helen Keller gave me a blind sweet smile; they passed inside shutting the door in my face.

  Unloading the limo, I lugged the cases of liquor downstairs as directed. I walked the seven blocks back to Lehman’s thoughtfully. The following afternoon in my lunch hour I went to the office of the United States Line on Fifth Avenue and booked myself first-class passage on the SS America sailing for Europe in two days’ time. I mentioned to no one in Lehman’s that I was leaving. Next morning in the store I spent a half hour selecting a mixed crate of twelve bottles from our superior stock. My knowledge of crus and vintages came in handy as I put together a case consisting of two bottles of Château Haut Brion ’47, six of Krug ’52, a bottle of vintage port, Napoleon brandy and a quart of sour-mash bourbon for good measure. Gift wrapping the case myself, I addressed it to my cabin on the SS America and took it to Despatch for delivery. I charged it to the account of the Helen Keller Foundation.

  The day after, instead of going to work I caught a taxi to the West Side pier where the SS America awaited me. Shown to a spacious stateroom, I explored my quarters with delight while the steward went off to fetch an ice bucket. The gift-wrapped case of Lehman’s best stood waiting. I read the charming card enclosed, wishing myself Bon Voyage from the Foundation, and set a bottle of champagne to chill while I unpacked.

  An hour later, glass in hand, I stood in a happy glow on the liner’s stern deck watching the Manhattan skyline recede behind us. Lounging against the rail, I raised my glass to the Statue of Liberty sinking in our wake. I’d be back, I knew, but now I was embarking on my own Grand Tour, on my way to Europe to capture an American heiress. I was ‘off to wife it wealthily in Padua …’ as Howard Keel sang so lustily. Or rather – via London – Florence.

  12

  Vienna

  ‘David, darling,’ Mother cried. ‘It’s an age since I’ve seen you, where have you been?’

  ‘Jeremy,’ I corrected her. She’d always had difficulty remembering our names. ‘America – but you knew that, you sent me a birthday present.’

  ‘Yes, of course you have, darling. Frightfully enterprising of you, just like Christopher Columbus. Are you staying to dinner? I don’t think there’s anything to eat.’

  I’d sent a cable to say that I was arriving, though she could not recall if she’d received it. I hadn’t exactly expected the fatted-calf reception, but the prodigal son had been gone over a year and a half. A little later we sat in the chilly living room at Gilston Road nursing a small glass of South African sherry apiece. The house was as I remembered it, cluttered and threadbare, though I hadn’t recalled it quite so distressed as this. I was sorry to see Mother looking distressed herself. Her hair was uncombed and she had on a knitted waistcoat, the hem of which had completely frayed away. At times in the past she’d been distracted and agitated. She was the same now but worse, so preoccupied by whatever was troubling her that nothing I said held her attention for longer than moments.

  ‘Father’s not here?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he’s not,’ she said. There followed a long pause. ‘Actually, he left some time ago,’ she added. Six months or more, it transpired, though she wasn’t certain of the exact date he’d finally quit the family home. He’d strode off after breakfast one morning as usual, wearing his rucksack, and not returned. Apart from books, he’d never owned anything except a razor and a toothbrush, and so slight was his impact upon the household that several days had gone by before she’d registered his absence.

  ‘Any idea where he is?’ I enquired.

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ she answered. Obviously she didn’t want to pursue the subject and we sat conserving our sherries in rather awkward silence until the door opened and Nanny came in.

  ‘Is Jeremy to sleep in the cold room or the wet room?’ she asked.

  Next morning in daylight the dismaying state of the house was revealed. It had been in poor shape when I’d left for America and since then no effort had been made to arrest its decline. Streaks of damp stained the ceiling and discoloured the wallpaper. I was sitting on the collapsed sofa after breakfast staring gloomily around the once-elegant drawing room when Nanny brought me a cup of weak Nescafé on a tray. ‘Where’s Mother, is she up?’ I asked.

  ‘Your mother’s in the bathroom washing her money,’ Nanny informed me.

  It was said in the most matter-of-fact tone, yet clearly all was not well. I’d been accustomed to Mother’s odd behaviour my whole life, but it had become more than usually bizarre. A pair of beautifully decorated Regency chairs in her bedroom and a marquetry table had been given a coat of green distemper, slapped on roughly with a brush. Questioning Nanny, I learned that Mother had ceased giving her money for shopping; she’d been using her own savings to buy the household’s food. Unable to discuss the problem with my siblings, I telephoned Mother’s brother, Uncle Tony, who’d always been good to me and whom I liked a lot.

  ‘Oh dear, is she going batty again?’ he asked. I told him how things looked. ‘We’d better get her into a loony bin,’ he said. It sounds facetious, it was facetious, but it was not uncaring. They were close; they’d been together while their father absconded, their mother killed herself, and Gino died.

  Throughout the course of the next few days, during which he saw doctors and tried to resolve the problem, Uncle Tony’s manner and tone of voice remained the same. And so did mine. It was the way I was used to, the way my family dealt with everything. Nothing was allowed to be serious and nobody in any circumstance ever showed emotion.

  Nowadays this is not considered to be a desirable approach to crisis, but it does have one compelling advantage. Detached from the event, one is more efficient in handling it. In achieving what had to be done, Tony was pragmatic and effective – and this did not surprise me. When I was a child I’d heard him relate to Mother the experience he’d had in Germany the year before. A lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, he’d been leading his troop of tanks in pursuit of the retreating German army. Late one afternoon they had surprised an enemy platoon, who surrendered. A tank troop has no facility for keeping prisoners and, even disarmed, these represented a threat, for Tony’s troop would shortly be obliged to laager for the night and the Germans could betray their position to the nearby enemy. The soldiers of the surrendered platoon were thoroughly demoralised and no danger, Tony explained, but their young officer was a Nazi and still defiant. Tony told him that he’d release the platoon if he’d give his word to lead his men back to the British lines and give themselves up. But the German officer refused to do so, instead drawing himself erect to say, ‘Heil Hitler!’ So Tony shot him.

  ‘Oh, darling, how awful,’ Mother said. ‘That must have been terribly upsetting for you.’

  ‘Not really,’ Tony told her. He’d been much more upset when he’d had to shoot Jeff, his bull terrier.

  Mother went to stay at a private nursing home overlooking Regent’s Park, in the care of a psychi
atrist who seemed to understand her illness and appeared kindly. Nevertheless, it was saddening; the shadow of the experience lay over me as I travelled to Florence to meet Posy. Together we caught the night train to Vienna, where we took a double room in the Hotel Bristol.

  She was a tall, good-looking girl with an independent mind, long dark hair and a loose-limbed American stride. Her father had been arrested for driving an open convertible into a bank in Hertford, Connecticut, while stark naked and drunk, and had played little part in raising her. The coal mines and the money belonged to her mother, who had brought her up.

  In contrast to my own minimal luggage, Posy arrived in Vienna with three suitcases of clothes bought in Saks, Bloomingdale’s and, more recently, Florence. She’d enjoyed a privileged upbringing and – unlike myself – was long familiar with grand hotels.

  ‘Hey, this is OK,’ she said, looking around our sumptuous room with approval. ‘Europe’s kind of cute, I guess, but it’s real dirty in places.’

  To her Vienna meant Beethoven and Mozart; for me it was the wildly romantic black and white city of Harry Lime and Orson Welles. For both of us it was sacher torte and smoky bars – every one of which had a zither player. I had the best part of $500 with me, the wages I’d saved in New York. It was a fair amount of money at the time, especially when converted into Austrian schillings. I set about spending it with gusto after the long winter of austerity. We went to the opera, to good restaurants and to cabarets. Posy shopped at Herzmansky and the flea market. Spring had come, the chestnut trees were in leaf in the gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace. I basked in the sensuous pleasure of the city, and the opulence of our hotel with its muffled hush and lofty public rooms. Above all in the company of an amusing pretty woman and the fun of doing things together, both in and out of bed.

  We’d been in Vienna several days before Posy remarked casually over dinner one night, ‘Ma has had a man take photographs of your house in London.’

  ‘Of Gilston Road? Why?’ I asked, astonished.

  ‘She wants to find out about you.’

  ‘What do you mean? There’s nothing to find out.’

  ‘Sure,’ Posy answered calmly, ‘But she’s like that. She says only flits wear suede shoes.’

  We didn’t discuss it further, but I found the idea of a private detective making enquiries of our London neighbours unsettling. There was some information I’d prefer not to be set out in a report to Posy’s mother. I could see that she might think a penniless, unemployed English adventurer, whose family house was falling down, whose father’s whereabouts were unknown, and whose mother was locked away in a lunatic asylum, was not the ideal suitor for her daughter’s hand.

  A month later I was back in London with Posy, sharing a flat in Ovington Square off Knightsbridge. Posy was paying the rent from her allowance – she’d told her mother she was doing an art course at the Slade. Three weeks of European travel, good hotels, room service and romance had exhausted everything I’d saved.

  Again I was going to interviews and searching for a job but for once luck was on my side. A couple of weeks after our return, I was offered work in a small company producing advertising spots for commercial TV, which had just started in Britain.

  I took Posy out to dinner that night. I couldn’t wait to tell her my news, but she was far from thrilled. ‘Five pounds a week?’ she repeated. ‘How can we possibly live on that?’

  We could use her money, I suggested.

  ‘Why don’t you come and work in the corporation in Philadelphia?’ she asked. ‘Then we could get married.’

  I’d thought about it a lot. The Julian English role in O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra rather appealed to me. We’d live in a large clapboard house with a devoted Dutch couple for staff and I’d wear a Brooks Brothers suit, drive a Cadillac, drink heavily and behave increasingly unpredictably in the country club. This had been my ambition until recently but now, faced with its realisation, the appeal quite drained away. In the last few hours another dream had supplanted it: I wanted to go into the film business and make movies.

  ‘Well, do as you wish,’ said Posy, ‘But I’m going home.’

  The film industry, which had boomed in Britain after the war, was now doing less well and the old guard who had held well-padded jobs as directors, art directors, camera technicians and editors found themselves without work. For them, and for many others, the start of commercial TV and production of advertising spots came as the most opportune of lifeboats.

  Production, together with the studios and processing laboratories, was rigidly controlled by the ACTT, which demanded a camera crew of five before a frame of film could be exposed. Women were excluded, except in the fields of hairdressing, make-up, wardrobe and continuity. The union would accept no new applicants while a single one of its members remained without work, and the rule had successfully prevented new talent from entering the industry for many years. Film technicians were middle-aged or old, slavishly union minded and, I was disappointed to see, uniformly drab and badly dressed.

  The feature-film and documentary business and the new TV companies which had just opened were all located in Soho – a ghetto they shared with restaurants, homosexual and luvvie clubs, a street market and a lively white-slave traffic flourishing under the protection of West End Central police station.

  TVA, the company I worked for, occupied a house in Greek Street. I shared a room with the company’s three women producers. These days ‘advertising’ enjoys a stylish high tone; the décor of its offices and appearance of its staff reflect its glossy image. Then it was not the case. Joan, one of the producers whose Brillo-blonde hair was tinged by the fags she smoked without removing from her lips, called her clients ‘dear’ and knitted baby garments while speaking to them on the telephone.

  As assistant to the producers I ran errands, hung out on the studio floor ‘making-a-busy’, as Milton the Nark had showed me at Lehman’s, attended planning meetings with our adagency clients (and the excellent lunches they were taken to in the course of production). I found it astonishing I was being paid to do something I enjoyed so much.

  I was in at the start of a completely new business; one in which image and fashion, youth and new ideas, are of the essence – and it was not long before the first signs of this showed at TVA. At a stroke all three women producers were fired and a new man brought in to run production. Jim Garrett was a dynamic Welshman of twenty-eight whose father had been the authoritarian headmaster of a small private school. With him came a couple of younger directors who replaced the old feature-film gaffers TVA had been using.

  One of these was Norman Prouting. Witty, good-looking and dressed in trousers even tighter than my own, he was a self-made homosexual from Yorkshire who moved in a world of fashionable faggotry and crossed class barriers easily and most nights of the week. One morning he said to me, ‘I won’t be here next week, I’ve had the most mouth-watering invitation to stay in a huge, fearfully grand villa on Cap Ferrat.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ I remarked a little wistfully.

  ‘Oh dear! Too, too tactless of me to mention it. But you can have my flat in Chelsea while I’m away, if you want,’ he offered. It was a generous suggestion and I jumped at it. During Mother’s continuing absence in the asylum I was living at Gilston Road, but fornication was impossible in the house with Nanny there.

  Norman’s apartment was the basement of an attractively furnished house belonging to a middle-aged European refugee with a loud voice and theatrical manner. I’d hardly got back on my second evening there when she burst into the flat in a high state of excitement, waving a copy of the evening paper. ‘It is war!’ she announced dramatically.

  In the wider world which lay outside my own narrow concerns, history was in the making. A short while before, President Nasser of Egypt had seized control of the Suez Canal, nationalising British and French assets in his country. The headline of the Evening Standard gripped in my landlady’s fist announced that the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, ha
d sent British forces into Egypt to regain the Canal.

  Only hours earlier I’d been wholly involved in the fun and fantasy of making TV ads. Now, abruptly, another scenario replaced this. Following National Service I was still in the Reserve. The regiment was the obvious reinforcement to send to the Canal Zone, I would be called up. It was disconcerting.

  Next morning brought the news that British forces were engaged in street fighting in Port Said. Rodney called me. In the end he’d decided to stay on in the regiment. He was in high spirits. ‘Well, we’ll be back there next week,’ he predicted gleefully. ‘Better start getting your kit together, I’d say.’

  I telephoned Nanny and after work that day I went over to Gilston Road. She had already unearthed my uniforms from the attic, pressed them and polished the brass and chain mail. ‘Your sword’s gone rusty, I can’t do a thing with it. I’ll have to take it to the ironmonger and see what he can manage. Really, Jeremy, you don’t look after your things at all,’ she told me crossly.

  It wasn’t so. My Colt .45 and .22 revolver hidden in her trunk together with several hundred rounds of ammunition were in perfect condition. On the frayed carpet in Nanny’s room I dismantled them lovingly, cleaning off the heavy grease I’d packed them in before going to America. I’d forgotten what a pleasure it was to handle them. My best toys, they’d shored up my schooldays; it was like meeting old friends. And my uniforms with the buttons and chain mail shined up by Nanny were in immaculate condition. Their narrow trousers which had excited such ridicule in the regiment were now the height of current fashion. Everyone else on the battlefield was going to look pretty silly wearing wide ones, I thought.

  My dreams of glory proved short-lived. My sword remained within its scabbard, still slightly stained by rust. The operation foundered; within days the shooting ended and British and French forces slunk out of Egypt, tails between their legs, to ribald catcalls and rude gestures from the triumphant Arabs. The whole bungled venture ended in an ignominious climb-down and withdrawal. It emerged later from political memoirs that Eden was heavily into amphetamines, and, in time, I would discover myself how speed plays with the head. Eden may have invaded Egypt, but one can’t be too censorious, everybody gets a bit silly when they’re stoned.