An Artist and a Magician

by Hugh Fleetwood

  So much for his siesta, and his working from five to seven….

  ‘Yes of course my dear. I’d love to.’

  Her point won—not that it could have been contested, and she knew it—Pam relaxed. ‘The garden is so lovely now. And it’s so peaceful. Everyone’s away. And—could you come at four-thirty?’

  ‘Yes of course my dear.’

  ‘Oh good, see you then, then,’ Pam said—and hung up.

  What, Wilbur wondered, as he looked at the page he was working on, could she want to talk to him about? Nothing very much, presumably. Perhaps one of the neighbours’ children had come into her garden to retrieve a ball, and she would want to know if he thought she should set up a man-trap to discourage further intrusions. He would, on the whole, advise against…. However, he told himself, since he was going to see her, and she had so upset his planned schedule, perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to take this opportunity of asking her for her yearly contribution. After all—it was her turn. And while he wasn’t absolutely desperate yet, it was always as well to have a little in hand, rather than wait for the actual day when one simply didn’t have enough in the bank to buy a single bottle of decent red wine….

  If Pam’s call and invitation to tea had upset his plans for the day—which upset, however, though irritating, wouldn’t be entirely without compensation—what happened next was altogether more serious, and didn’t just upset his plans for the day, but destroyed them completely. And it was that when Irish Lillian arrived at ten o’clock, bringing his mail with her that she had picked up from the porter downstairs, there was, along with thank-you notes, we’re-coming-to-Rome-shortly notes, wish-you-were-here cards, and a brochure from the Royal Horticultural Society of London, a large official-looking letter from the Italian Tax Department, which said that he owed the sum of six million lire for—

  He couldn’t go on, and sat back in his chair, feeling sick. He handed the letter to Lillian. ‘Read it,’ he said. ‘I can’t. I don’t understand.’

  Lillian read it and nodded, then looked up at him and smiled. She was very good natured.

  ‘You owe the tax department six million lire.’

  How soft and gentle her voice was. How infuriating.

  ‘I can read,’ he snapped. ‘What does it mean? I don’t understand.’

  Lillian looked at the letter again. She had light brown wavy hair, pale skin and grey eyes, and was wearing a simple grey cotton shift with yellow sandals. She also wore a wedding ring on her finger though she wasn’t married—she felt married, she said; to a Chinese boy—and a small gold crucifix round her neck; though she hadn’t been a Catholic for years, she said. She was twenty-nine years old and—

  ‘It’s a value-added tax on all the translations you’ve been paid for over the last few years,’ she murmured pleasantly, interrupting his attempts to calm himself by cataloguing her.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he repeated.

  Nor, he guessed, did Lillian; but she made the effort he was unable to.

  ‘All the translations you’ve done. You’ve been paid for them. When you charged for them you were supposed to add a percentage that you were then meant to pass on to the tax people. It’s a value-added tax,’ she said again.

  ‘But I’ve always paid taxes,’ Wilbur wailed. ‘Here, in America, in England. Everywhere I’ve ever published a book, or made a film, or had an exhibition. In France, Germany, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Egypt, Switzerland.’ His mind reeled as he paused for breath, and tried to remember all the other countries in the world. ‘Luxembourg, Brazil, Argentina—Ireland,’ he gasped, in case Lillian should feel left out or offended. ‘Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden—’ he stopped, realizing he was getting hysterical. ‘Get me a brandy,’ he ordered.

  Lillian did, and he felt ashamed of himself for being so rude.

  ‘Have one yourself, dear child.’

  Lillian smiled, and said no.

  ‘I haven’t got six million lire,’ he said sulkily as he drank the brandy—which was in a wine glass filled to the brim. He wondered if he should explain to Lillian. But then he thought that perhaps she had done it on purpose. In which case, she was right. He could have drunk a pint.

  ‘I haven’t got six hundred thousand lire.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Give me the letter.’

  Lillian handed it to him, and he stared at the offending and offensive sheet of paper, with its nasty little figures. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t want to.

  ‘It’s a plot.’ he said. ‘They’re trying to drive me out of Italy. It’s the communists.’

  ‘Everyone pays this. On everything.’

  ‘Not six million lire. Not just like that.’

  ‘You should have been charging the film companies when you sent them the scripts back.’

  ‘No one told me.’

  ‘You’re supposed to know.’

  ‘Did you know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I thought you knew. And you always did the bills.’

  That was true.

  ‘I haven’t got six million lire,’ he repeated.

  Lillian nodded sympathetically, and he tried another tack.

  ‘How dare they!’ he shouted, picking up the piles of scripts waiting to be translated and throwing them dramatically on the floor. ‘They send me this rubbish, these cheap westerns, fourth-rate thrillers, pretentious political stories, things that no one would ever want to make or invest money in, and I translate them and add a bit of magic even to the dullest, the worst of them, so that some banker in New York or Berlin will read them and like them in spite of himself and—and—without me not one of them would be made, and thanks to me nearly all of them are. They get good actors who jump at parts I’ve translated they wouldn’t do if paid a million dollars otherwise. They get good directors who see possibilities, poetry, they’d never have seen if it hadn’t been for me. They couldn’t have seen them, because they weren’t there. I turn dross into gold, I—I give value, I don’t add it. And they want to tax me! The film companies should pay. They should pay me. Six hundred million. For all the money I’ve made them. If they’d given them to some hack they’d never have made a penny. And they give them to me just because they know I’m a poet, I can touch things with magic, give value to them. They should pay me,’ he said once more, wearily; and came to the end of his aria.

  Lillian, who had heard this music before, though never quite so passionately sung, and in any case was busy picking up the hundreds of scattered sheets from the floor, murmured gently, ‘They did pay you. All you had to do was forward the percentage that was for the value-added tax to the tax people.’

  ‘Yes I know,’ Wilbur sighed as he got down on his baggy knees beside her, to help her gather up the sheets. ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘Well,’ Lillian said, her own soft Irish voice suddenly infused with poetry, ‘you could ask for a loan from Pam. Or someone,’ she added, as a precaution.

  Did she know about Pam’s loans? And those of Jim and Betty and Bernard? Presumably. They all loved her—or said they did—and often invited her to tea or drinks. But whether it was because they did love her, or whether simply that they were checking up on their protégé, he wasn’t sure. Possibly a bit of both.

  ‘But not six million.’

  ‘One and a half from each,’ Lillian said quickly, revealing that indeed she did know, and not wanting, in this hour of crisis, to be coy about it. But her grasp of mathematics was remarkable sometimes….

  Yes. Probably if he explained how great an emergency this was, the four would respond. On the other hand, if they did, it would mean that he couldn’t borrow anything else for a while, from any of them. And how would he live in the meantime? It might take a year or more before he could decently establish his pattern of Pam in August, Jim in November, Betty in February and Bernard in May. His mind fluttered helplessly round trying to fin
d some different branch to land on. But Pam and Jim and Betty and Bernard were the only branches he knew of solid gold; the only ones who could bear his weight. So—there was nothing else for it. He would have to throw himself on their mercy, and worry about how to get through the rest of the year later.

  ‘Where are they all?’

  ‘Pam’s here—’

  ‘I know. I’m having tea with her this afternoon.’

  ‘Betty’s in Switzerland seeing her lawyers—’

  ‘And having her face lifted,’ Wilbur interrupted with unnecessary nastiness. But suddenly he felt terribly resentful of all the money she was throwing away on what was, frankly, a completely useless operation. One couldn’t restore a ruin in a few hours….

  ‘Jim’s in Morocco—’

  Spending a fortune on wretched little Arab boys, Wilbur nearly said, but didn’t—

  ‘And Bernard’s in California.’

  Distributing his wealth amongst his hundreds of children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, all of whom were indecently rich already, and none of whom he liked.

  ‘But they all should be back round the beginning of September.’

  ‘When do we have to pay this wretched thing by?’

  ‘Oh, not for a while yet,’ Lillian lilted soothingly. ‘It can wait until September.’

  By the time the various scripts were back on his desk, and more or less in order—not that it would make a blind bit of difference if the odd fight in a western saloon got mixed up with some Italian policeman shooting down criminals, or two students making love while they discussed marxism got involved with a fat Sicilian lady swearing at her impotent husband—Wilbur was feeling calmer. He was still, as they finished sorting out the pages, muttering that it was a communist plot to drive him out of Italy, and that the government, yes the government and not the film companies, should pay him for the inestimable value he conferred on their more trashy national products, but the fire had gone out of the words now, and they were only a gentle refrain being sung behind the main vocal line—which was ‘upwards and onwards dear child. Upwards and onwards. These are the crosses we have to bear.’

  ‘Things could be worse.’

  ‘Yes indeed they could. My God, Philip could be sick, or a hail storm might have ruined the flowers, or—something dreadful. No. These things are just sent to try us, but they are not really serious. Anyway—upwards and onwards dear child, upwards and onwards.’

  And upwards and onwards they went, with Lillian straightening out bits of silver paper from chocolates, that could be used later to make collages, and Wilbur doing some weeding on the terrace. For the idea of work, after such alarms and upsets, was obviously out of the question.

  TWO

  Pam lived in a small 1890s villa on the outskirts of town. She lived there, in spite of her great age, great wealth, and various infirmities, alone, having only a cleaning woman come in the mornings, a nurse come to bathe her four times a week, and a gardener to tend her small and overgrown garden.

  ‘How are you my dear?’ Wilbur asked her, as he had on the phone earlier, when he arrived that afternoon; and Pam, as she stood waveringly under the art-nouveau lintel of her front door, said, as she had on the phone earlier, ‘Oh, not very well.’

  The reasons she gave this afternoon were different, however.

  ‘My cleaning woman’s on holiday, my nurse is on holiday, and my gardener’s on holiday. I’ve been quite abandoned.’

  ‘Oh Pamela,’ Wilbur murmured, and stretched up to give her a quick kiss on the cheek.

  He had to stretch up because Pam was immensely tall—almost seven foot—and he only gave her a quick kiss because there was something slightly blasphemous, or at least disrespectful, about actually touching someone as imposing, and awe-ful, as this towering old Englishwoman.

  ‘You should have told me. I would have found someone to come.’

  ‘Oh it doesn’t matter,’ Pam wailed piteously. ‘It’s only till Tuesday. It doesn’t matter if I don’t eat or wash for four days.’

  She was perfectly capable of preparing her own food, of which there was always a vast quantity in the house, and Wilbur suspected she was also perfectly capable of washing herself. She certainly looked and smelled clean enough, with her thin pale hair curling lightly round her white powdered face, her long tube of a body enclosed in a freshly pressed yellow flowered dress, and her air of eau-de-cologne and talc.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, and gave the front door a shove with the end of her walking stick as Wilbur moved forward. ‘If you would be so kind as to carry the tea things into the garden, I thought we could have tea outside. It’s quite shady out there, and cool.’

  Wilbur doubted that; it was a terribly hot afternoon, he could see sweat on his nose, and his flapping unironed shirt and baggy once-white trousers were wet and clinging to him. He felt, indeed, quite wretched; and after last night’s lack of sleep, the dramas of the morning, and a fairly winy if solitary lunch, he would have given anything to be siestaing at this moment. Especially since the tea Pam made was some exotic brand that always upset his stomach, and made him break out on the coldest winter’s day. Still, he told himself as he went towards the kitchen, one did have a duty to one’s friends, and if, after all, Pam was alone out here, it couldn’t be too pleasant for her.

  ‘Everything’s ready on the tray,’ Pam fluted down the corridor. ‘I shall make my way slowly outside.’

  Everything was ready; a silver tea pot, a silver water jug, two tea cups, sugar, milk, lemon, cream, a plate of English biscuits, two bowls of strawberries, and two lace napkins; but before Wilbur could pick up the tray, he had to scoop a number of ants from the cream, and remove one or two of the more obviously wormy strawberries. Pam had a great respect for life, and a great aversion to insecticides. Which was all very well, but for the fact that as a result her kitchen, and most of the house, was in a state of perpetual motion—particularly in the summer. And ants and worms weren’t the half of it. The biscuits, if one looked closely, would be full of weevils, the floor alive with cockroaches, and every angle dark with mouse droppings. Not to mention the occasional scorpion and rat, and the clouds of gorged flies which were so fat they could hardly fly. The cleaning woman just about kept anarchy under control, though she was very short-sighted, extremely well-paid, and anyway under strict instructions never to kill anything; but whenever she was away, even for a few days, nature went wild. Wilbur remembered one other weekend in August, a few years ago, when he had come out to have tea with Pam. There had been a viper in her bedroom. ‘Oh I adore grass-snakes,’ Pam had hooted, as Wilbur had pointed the creature out to her, and she had surveyed it from her great height. Which was probably true, but neither here nor there, as Wilbur had felt obliged to remark. ‘Well I don’t know what I’m supposed to do even if it is a viper,’ Pam had said huffily. And then: ‘But do stop fussing Wilbur. You’re turning into an old maid.’

  Presumably, Wilbur thought as he lifted the now more or less lifeless silver tray and made his way through the kitchen door out into the garden, the snake had eventually gone away of its own accord. Though with Pam one never knew; she might, just, be keeping it somewhere; going to it at night and whispering to it in her high British voice; having it eat from her fingers….

  ‘Over here,’ Pam commanded; and Wilbur went towards a corner of the garden where a wicker table and two wicker chairs were set under a weeping willow, by the side of a mossy green fountain into which a cherub peed continually, and in which lily pads, frogs and goldfish fought each other for the limited space available.

  ‘Will you pour please,’ Pam said, as she stood and watched Wilbur set the tray down. ‘And I shall lower myself into a chair. Did I tell you about my accident the other day?’

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ Wilbur murmured; but Pam pretended not to hear him.

  ‘I came out here by myself to have some tea, and I was taking great care to sit down slowly. But the chair must have been on a pebble or something, because as I lo
wered myself into it it slipped backwards, and I went crashing to the ground. And there I was, absolutely immobile, because you know that once I’m over, I simply cannot move. I’m like a tortoise on its back, with all my little legs waving in the air. Or like that beastly insect in that story you lent me. It was really most amusing. Luckily there was a young man in the garden at the back here, and I called out to him and he came round and tried to pull me up. But you know when I’m like that I’m a dead weight, and though everyone thinks I’m just being tiresome, I simply cannot do a thing to help myself. Well the result was that this young man tugged on my arms once, twice, and then three times—and then fell over right on top of me.’ Pam chuckled damply at the memory, and Wilbur wondered what psychiatrists would say about her little accident. Doubtlessly she had checked to see that there was a young man in the garden behind before sitting down so carefully in her unbalanced chair.

  ‘Anyway, finally he did manage to pull me up, but I can tell you, it was quite a battle.’

  Wilbur smiled encouragingly, and wondered how many more times he would hear this story. Several, probably. He looked up after he had poured Pam’s tea to make sure she had made it safely into a sitting position today. But possibly because she didn’t trust a fat sweating Wilbur to be as effective as a young Italian, she had managed quite successfully.

  ‘Here, my dear,’ he said, as he put her cup on the table between them—and as Pam added a coda to her tale. ‘I’m all right as long as I’m absolutely vertical, and I’m all right getting out of bed, because I can push myself into a sitting position and then get to my feet. But once I’m horizontal, that’s the end.’

  ‘How did you manage last night?’

  ‘I waited till seven-thirty and then phoned the green-grocer. He’s done it before, and he knows how to come round the back and let himself in. But I shall have to be most careful over this weekend, because even he’s gone away for three days. He said I was very lucky to catch him—he was just going out of the house. And everyone else round here is away. It’s so pleasant and peaceful.’