The Great and the Good

by Michel Déon

  ‘You’re soaked!’

  ‘I walked part of the way back with Concannon. It’s snowing.’

  ‘Excuse me … I did knock. There was no answer. I took my hip flask. We haven’t got anything to drink. It’s an amazing game.’

  Arthur would have given much to see Getulio’s face. ‘An amazing game!’ – the expression was so unlike him that Arthur was instantly sure he had seen the photo on his table and possibly the short message from his sister too. Sliding his hand along the wall, he eventually found the light switch. Getulio, already several steps away, turned round.

  ‘I also came to tell you that Elizabeth and Augusta will be coming to Beresford for the Thanksgiving dinner and ball. But you almost certainly knew that already from Augusta.’

  He vanished into the darkness along the landing. Lost for words, Arthur went back to his room. Augusta’s letter lay unfolded on the table, as he had left it, face down. Unless he had shown rare perceptiveness or had an unlikely hunch, Getulio would not have distinguished it from the other sheets of paper lying next to a spiral-bound notebook open at a page half covered in notes. But even allowing for his affected distraction and scorn for everything that did not directly concern him and, by extension, Augusta, his eyes could not have missed the photo leaning against the framed snapshot of the young Morgans on honeymoon in Venice. In the days that followed, he was unable to detect any change in Getulio’s attitude towards him.

  Protected by the special providence enjoyed by alcoholics, Concannon had not passed out in the snow. His excellent idea of walking barefoot had produced a positive effect on his exhausted body. He got away with nothing worse than painful chilblains, and a couple of days later gave his class with his feet swaddled in straw and newspaper, the most effective remedy, as he explained, discovered by German soldiers pinned down at the siege of Stalingrad. Rumour still had it that his contract would not be renewed the following year, even if he held out till then, which was looking increasingly unlikely, with his inability to stay on the straight and narrow testing the authorities to breaking point. They had so far only refrained from taking action because of his popularity among the students. When his chilblains started to blister and his feet became covered in ulcers, it took three students to lift him onto his chair. After the class, he caught sight of Arthur.

  ‘What a punishment! No ball for me this year. A great loss, as you’ll have heard a hundred times, not to have Beresford’s best dancer there.’

  ‘No one told me that.’

  ‘I’ll be a wallflower.’

  ‘Augusta will bring you glasses of orange juice.’

  Concannon rubbed his hand across his face to banish his tiredness. So quietly that Arthur could hardly hear him, he said, ‘That would be a dream come true.’

  Two hours before the ball, Arthur tried on his dinner jacket. It had been tight during the crossing. Now it looked even tighter.

  ‘My dear chap,’ Getulio said when he mentioned the problem, ‘it’s not your jacket that’s shrunk. It’s you who’ve been building yourself up with your 3,000-metre runs every morning. Not forgetting American food, obviously.’

  ‘I look like a removal man in his Sunday best.’

  ‘No big problem. Women love removal men … and lumberjacks. You know, with their famous moans and groans. I’m not joking. Now stop fussing: there’s a train full of girls arriving at six o’clock. We’ll just have time to meet them and see them to their hotel …’

  The ‘train full of girls’ was a slight exaggeration. Barely a dozen alighted, sisters, cousins and girlfriends who shrieked like parakeets and threw their arms around the necks of the young men who had come to meet them on the university shuttle bus. Arthur and Getulio picked up Elizabeth and Augusta’s suitcases and piled them into the Cord. They were sharing a room at the hotel. Getulio and Arthur followed them upstairs, ignoring the desk clerk’s protestations.

  ‘They’re our sisters, you goddamn pervert!’

  Within seconds of their arrival, a shambles reigned. They strewed the contents of their suitcases across two beds, scattering a dozen dresses, twenty sweaters, enough underwear for six months and enough shoes for ten years. Augusta, bursting into tears at a perfume bottle that had spilt in her toilet bag, wanted to ring for the housemaid. There was no housemaid. Augusta vowed on the head of every saint in Bahia that she would not go to the ball but catch the next train back to New York instead. When was the next train? Paying no attention to her, Getulio selected dresses, jewels and shoes for the evening. Inside a few minutes Arthur had learnt more about women than he had in his whole life up to that moment. He felt he was doing the right thing by looking away when they finally started undressing.

  ‘Are you offended?’ Augusta asked. ‘Or are you scared of girls?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Then please do me up.’

  There were still necklaces to be fastened and the red rose to be pinned on, but after its long train journey the rose showed clear signs of fatigue. Another storm of tears nearly followed when stocking seams were found to be awry.

  ‘My bra’s shrunk!’ Elizabeth wailed.

  ‘Like my dinner jacket.’

  ‘Darling, what do you expect with the breasts you’re developing?’ Augusta said.

  ‘I know. You have no such problem with your bee stings.’

  The bra flew into the air and was still hanging from the light fitting when they left to go back to New York. Getulio lolled in an armchair, reading a women’s magazine, indifferent in his superior way. Arthur would have liked to display the same offhandedness, but was enjoying himself too much as he learnt that frivolity was a woman’s consummate way of charming a man.

  The Thanksgiving Day ball was being held in a hall decorated with multicoloured streamers and photographs of the Beresford football team going back to the 1930s. The local police force supplied the band. Tall young men of athletic build – looking slightly less impressive, nevertheless, than in their Michelin Man-style padded football kit – spun their partners around or danced cheek to cheek in a revoltingly sentimental way. The loners pursued anything in a long dress. Without Elizabeth and Augusta’s presence the ball would have been unimaginably tedious. They were competed for relentlessly, but were not heartless and kept coming to find Arthur and force him to dance.

  ‘I’ve got two left feet … go and have fun.’

  But Elizabeth dragged him from his chair or the bar, which only served non-alcoholic drinks in a holier-than-thou way that fooled no one, and no one cared anyway, every man having equipped himself with a flask of bourbon or cognac.

  ‘Come on, Arthur, jump in … You’re scared of your own shadow. America’s for winners! You stamp on people’s feet, you don’t say sorry. Why didn’t Concannon come?’

  She pressed her cheek against his, and at the end of each dance planted a furtive kiss on his lips. As the night wore on, the majority of male students, by now seriously tipsy, held their consenting partners ever more closely. Augusta, however, kept Arthur at an unvarying distance. Getulio, hidden behind a potted palm, ran a clandestine bar: bourbon and Coca-Cola, beer, brandy. The band was running out of breath. The trumpeter, crimson in the face, paused in the middle of a number to down a rapid glass of Jack Daniel’s. They were only playing slows now. Oarsmen’s hands remained glued to the tops of their partners’ arched buttocks. Someone opened a French window and icy air gusted into the hall, blowing away the cigarette smoke and the smell of sweat that mingled with the dancers’ undistinguished perfumes. There was a brief altercation outside, a student came back with a split lip, and another who had passed out from drink on the stone steps was revived before he froze to death. Augusta gave the signal to leave.

  ‘Let’s kill this party, before it kills us.’

  ‘No! … Just a bit longer!’ Elizabeth pleaded, entwined with a sociologist who was also a champion swimmer. ‘I’m staying! He can see me back to the hotel.’

  The sociologist complained loudly that the capitalist sys
tem, caring only about profit, did not allow an intellectual to own an automobile.

  ‘You’re right!’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s disgusting. We’re going to change all that.’

  But Augusta thought their predicament was romantic.

  ‘You can walk back to the hotel with your arms around each other’s waists. At the entrance you’ll kiss for a long time, but no heavy sighs. Okay? By the light of the moon. I can already see the postcard: moonlight over young love.’

  ‘If you insist on ruining it, I’m going back too,’ Elizabeth said crossly. She had, in any case, no intention of finishing her evening with the sociologist.

  The band were putting away their instruments. For a few minutes there was an air of unreality, as the lights were switched off one by one. From outside there came the sound of old cars and motorcycles starting up. Getulio gave his leftover bottles of bourbon and brandy to the police band members. As they went outside, icy air clamped their faces like a steel hand, and guests let out ear-splitting shrieks. Getulio’s Cord fired up with a scornful rumble. Elizabeth sat next to him, with Augusta behind, next to Arthur, who hugged her to him. She was shivering.

  ‘Why don’t you come and spend Christmas week in New York with us? You’ll be awfully bored here all on your own.’

  In the darkness in the car he could hardly make out her face, but her eyes shone with a cat-like gleam, glinting in the glow of the streetlamps that lined the avenue. Arthur declared proudly that, as he had no money to go on holiday, he had arranged to spend a fortnight with a family in Boston whose son was learning French.

  ‘What?’ Augusta whispered. ‘Are you really as broke as that?’

  ‘Not quite broke … but nearly!’

  Elizabeth, her head on Getulio’s shoulder, was humming, ‘Oh sweet merry man, Don’t leave me …’ At reception they persuaded the porter to open the small lounge for them. Getulio pulled a flat silver flask engraved with his initials out of his hip pocket and passed it round. Elizabeth, sitting shamelessly cross-legged, Indian style, threw her head back.

  ‘How lugubrious!’ she said. ‘Every party ends in a funeral and every time I feel like shooting myself. And what a bunch of hicks! That sociologist wanted me to read Husserl … Getulio, swear you’ll never try and lure us into a trap like that again.’

  Getulio swore blind, nodding his head vehemently and smoking a fat Cuban cigar whose band he had left on, as Augusta pointed out to him.

  ‘Who do you think you are? Al Capone?’

  They had a short, acrimonious exchange in Portuguese. Elizabeth yawned. Arthur struggled to keep the images passing through his mind under control. Augusta was squatting in her armchair, but more modestly than her friend, with her bottom resting on her heels. He said, ‘I like your knees.’

  Getulio struggled to his feet, teetering, and leant against the mantelpiece beneath which a coal-effect fire was burning.

  ‘I forbid you to make such filthy remarks to my sister!’

  ‘They’re not filthy remarks. He likes my knees. Nobody’s ever noticed them before he did.’

  ‘Because they’re so obvious,’ Elizabeth murmured disgustedly.

  Getulio took a long swallow from his flask and hiccuped.

  ‘Don’t you find it horribly cold?’ he said. ‘What on earth are we doing here? Tomorrow I’m going to take you all to Rio in my private plane.’

  With an unexpected vivacity Augusta uncoiled herself and stood up, her arm outstretched, an accusing index finger pointed at her brother.

  ‘Getulio, you’re tight. You don’t have a private plane and we’re never going back to Rio, as you well know.’

  ‘All right, forget the plane, but why not an ordinary flight with ordinary people?’

  ‘I don’t mind you saying what you like when you’re drunk, but not that!’

  ‘I have the right to say I want to go back, if I do!’

  Augusta, her eyes bright and her mouth tight with anger, grabbed her brother by the lapels of his dinner jacket and shook him furiously before pushing him away. He slumped in an armchair, his head in his hands. Arthur wondered if he was crying.

  ‘This is so tedious!’ Elizabeth sighed.

  ‘Arthur, can you drive?’ Augusta said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Take him home and put him to bed, and if he resists, knock him out.’

  Arthur drove the Cord with a caution he did not know he possessed. Getulio slept with his head out of the car window, muttering to himself, buffeted by icy air. When they reached the fraternity house Arthur had to lift him, then carry him to the washroom and put him in front of a toilet bowl on his knees.

  ‘I don’t know how to be sick,’ Getulio protested.

  ‘It’s time you learnt! Put two fingers down your throat.’

  By a happy coincidence, at that moment a half-asleep student in flowery pyjamas arrived and sat in the next cubicle where he released several stinking farts and then defecated with an evident enjoyment which sounded so unrestrained as to be almost sexual. The drifting stench finally made Getulio throw up. The student left, pulling up his pyjama bottoms over his marbled buttocks, and Getulio, still unsteady, got to his feet and leant against Arthur’s shoulder.

  ‘Barbarians! We shall teach them to shit with proper shame … Arthur, a great mission awaits. We shall educate America. I’ll never forget what you did for me tonight.’

  ‘Yes, you will. I have no illusions about that.’

  Lying in his narrow bed, Arthur struggled to prevent images of Elizabeth and Augusta being displaced by the remembered spectacle of Getulio on his knees in front of the toilet bowl. What an emetic and scatological flourish to such a riotously unpredictable evening! Until then the whole thing had been a sort of tongue-in-cheek quadrille, lightened by Elizabeth and Augusta’s caprices and careless fancies. Thinking about the two girls, whispering their names to himself, drove away the gloom of Arthur’s first term at Beresford. Going back to France in three years’ time, clutching a degree that would open doors onto a world that he only understood very vaguely, was not the only thing that mattered, he realised. He felt strongly now just how much he lacked another sort of key, a knowledge that for some was intuitive, for others acquired, of a milieu that was world-weary, careless, and yet often lyrical, and which, if you were not born into it, you could only enter if you were adopted by the elect.

  At eight o’clock the next morning he walked into Getulio’s room. The Brazilian was still asleep, his complexion pasty, his face hollowed out, breathing shallowly, his dinner jacket in a heap on the floor underneath his underwear, socks and patent-leather shoes. It had all the elements of a realist painting, a still life entitled After the Party, down to the empty bottle of white wine next to a dirty toothglass. Arthur shook Getulio, who moaned, turned to the wall, and grumbled, ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘You asked me to wake you up. Elizabeth and Augusta are waiting for you.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  Arthur kept shaking him until he consented to have a cold shower, piled a heap of clothes together, and threw them into a suitcase.

  ‘I’ll never be able to drive. And we have to be in New York tonight.’

  ‘Elizabeth can drive.’

  ‘Are you trying to rub my nose in it?’

  ‘Yes, I am actually … and not just once but a hundred times over … so you learn how to drink.’

  Getulio mumbled something incomprehensible that Arthur, busy opening the window to disperse the ratty smell in the room, decided to ignore. It was snowing. Light flakes swirled in the northerly breeze, melting as soon as they hit the ground.

  ‘It’s getting too complicated,’ Getulio said. ‘The road will be like a skating rink and the girls will start yelling that I’m driving too fast. Come with us; you’ll keep them quiet.’

  Elizabeth and Augusta were not waiting in the lobby. When they drummed on their door, there was no answer. Augusta opened it eventually, dressed in a nightshirt with a towel wrapped around her head like a turban
.

  ‘What on earth’s the matter with you? It’s too common, being up so early!’

  Elizabeth hurled her pillow at them. Arthur pulled the sheet off her and discovered that she slept naked. Unembarrassed, she sat up, laughed and scratched her head.

  ‘Is there a fire?’

  ‘In one!’ Getulio said. ‘Can’t you hear the revolution? It’s on its way here now. Thousands of refugees are heading for New York, intending to spend Christmas eating caviar and drinking champagne.’

  ‘Pathetic,’ Augusta said, her nightshirt slipping to the floor. ‘I have a pretty back, don’t I?’ she said, not bothering to turn her head.

  ‘Very pretty,’ Arthur said, astonished at how free they both were, and almost as surprised that Getulio, who had been so annoyed at his sister showing her knees, was suddenly unconcerned at her showing a stranger her naked back and legs (strong, slightly gypsyish), which contrasted so strikingly with Elizabeth’s pale and slender figure.

  ‘Peeping Toms!’ Augusta cried, shutting the bathroom door behind her.