Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  XXVII

  ANOTHER reason Charlie had never written about her was that she meant something to him. He didn’t know what.

  He didn’t want to know what.

  Though they had known each other in their Berlin days, they had not really met until that stay in Beverly Hills. That was a pity. If they had met sooner, something might have been possible. Perhaps it was better this way. This way he found solace when he needed soothing. The other way, he would not have.

  A Boy Scout, thought Charlie, looking at her, is loyal, trustworthy, tender, and inexorable. But he was grateful, all the same.

  Why cannot we lie in a bed as other people do? I suppose because we do not want to. Besides, other people don’t. Yet one would have been grateful for that warmth, which did not exist, and yet between them, because it was impossible, it did. Because it was impossible, that was why.

  And a very good thing, too.

  XXVIII

  THERE was just one thing Charlie liked about women, physically. That was the wonderful blind vulnerability of their shaved armpits, when they raised their arms and you could see every sinew, every muscle, every line taut. At the moment Unne smelled of dried mushrooms. That must be the effect of Lotte’s perfume on a younger body.

  When lunch came round (silent testimony), he ordered merlan with plenty of champignons. The most complimentary things one has to tell any woman are the things one can’t tell them, because they might be shocked. But still, what with Unne’s armpits and all, he did decide that he wanted to taste the smell.

  XXIX

  UNNE came into the sitting room, wriggling herself into tight white kid gloves, of a sort too old for her. It seemed an odd lapse. People of Unne’s youth and status wear white only at their confirmation.

  “Would you like to come over to the Casino with me?” asked Lotte, tentatively.

  Unne made a face. “I’m going out. Do you mind?”

  “No, of course not,” said Lotte, because of course she slightly did. She wondered why. She always did and always wondered why.

  XXX

  TURNING to Unne, Paul said, “Lotte, did you …” and blushed and corrected himself.

  My God, thought Lotte, is that why?

  Charlie pounced on it at once.

  He recited:

  Choose thou whatever suits the line,

  Call me Sappho, call me Chloris,

  Call me Lalage or Doris,

  Only, only call me thine.

  Then he beamed at them. He’d probably been saving that quotation for years, as an emetic. He never would have been able to work it into a conversation himself. And now, what a relief, he had gotten rid of it.

  “Coleridge,” he said.

  Unne blushed.

  That pleased Charlie even more. In addition to quotations to get rid of, he had a small stock of quotations he liked to keep by him, privately, such as:

  “An everlasting regiment of women”—John Knox.

  “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan—and on and on and on,” Or:

  The husbands and the wives

  Of this select society

  Lived independent lives

  Of infinite variety …

  which was helpful at parties, if you knew more about the guests than they admitted to.

  He hadn’t seen a thing, then. She was sure now. Later, when he did, perhaps she could deal with him.

  She doubted it, though. She knew Charlie. When he really blew his top, there was very little left in the bottle afterwards, and so not much to work on until the pressure built up again. And that meant a new top.

  At the moment she seemed to have a surrogate brother, a surrogate daughter, and, she supposed, a surrogate son. People, if they have lost their own, tend to acquire surrogate families. But she couldn’t say she expected much of any of them. Hoping for the best was not part of her philosophy. It usually led to disappointment. Whereas if one expected the worst, one was sometimes pleasantly surprised.

  She hoped so, anyhow.

  XXXI

  WHAT happens to us doesn’t greatly matter. But to be reminded of what has happened to other people is not agreeable.

  That night there was a substitute entry at the last minute, the Russians having, as might have been expected, withdrawn their entry. Charlie was sorry. The Russian entry was an adaptation of Gogol’s The Carriage, and he was fond of Gogol. He was even sorrier when the house lights went down and he saw what he was up against instead.

  It was a piece of Swedish historical wick-trimming entitled Mein Kampf. It had been a smash hit in Paris, but then the French will queue up for anything which shows them that, as they suspect, the outside world is inhabited by helots exclusively. It would be a smash hit everywhere.

  He sat there angrily and did not flinch. One has to get through these things. Just because we have to do our dancing on top of a volcano is no reason why the serious-minded should present us with an incessant rehash of the previous eruption. Liberals are like the fat boy. It is done with the best of motives, but they always want to make your flesh creep. Now that Mr. Chadband has turned producer, you never know what to expect. No doubt an interest in politics is an acceptable substitute for doing one’s own thinking, in our day and age, but no amount of thinking about it will change the fact that politics is an empiric matter, unamenable to theory.

  Nonetheless, here was Hitler, dancing on our grave, the whole thing all over again, down to the last hysterical applauding housewife with a face like a crumpled moon, and Heydrich, with the manners of a rejected rat, looking dapper in overpolished boots, if a rat can look dapper. “Let them resemble cartoons by Goya.”

  The ghetto in Warsaw was cleaned out. Eva Braun sunbathed, like a piece of rain-soaked calendar art. Goebbels was Goebbels. Goering was Goering. Hess was mad. The day before the death in the bunker, Hitler pinned a medal on a fourteen-year-old, our oldest living veteran. Hindenburg looked like a badly canceled postage stamp; von Papen, like the devil on two sticks. At a railway siding in the woods at Compiègne, the Führer did his little victory dance, like a child’s puppet jogged up and down by a string connecting the groin through a hole in the head. The waist wobbles, but the feet flop up and down against the ground. That was the way he danced. A goose-stepping collegiate multitude went by, to vanish face downward into an invisible duckpond and so drown. A tank stalled. Berlin disintegrated. It was delightful to be in Paris, but where were the Parisians? Mussolini arrived at the Brenner Pass. A man was shot against a wall. The uniforms were badly cut.

  There was nothing to say, nothing at all to say. The man who had been shot against the wall described a bound gavotte, and fell.

  … And then those endless shots of the horse-knacker’s yards at Auschwitz, with everything piled up tidily, the middle-class lady guards clomping out in their jackboots, in squad formation, to get their come-uppance from some Americans who simply didn’t understand.

  Hitler had the Berlin metro tubes flooded to get a little more time, and hold the Russians back. An old lady put her hand up before her face. The waters covered the hand. Heads bobbed along the surface of the rising water, near the roof, like pippins in an apple grader. He may have felt he was about to become a God, but if so, he had been in no hurry.

  It didn’t mean anything. The producer had trouble to give his ending significance. That wasn’t surprising. It had had none. It wasn’t a film about the past, it was a prediction of what we will have to live through all over again, and the future has no significance. The future in our day has a curiously old-fashioned look. We have been through it before. We don’t mind that. It is the thought of going through it again that breaks us.

  The night before Waterloo, so Vanity Fair informs us, they held a big dance. And so do we. But the streamers in the air look remarkably like ropes, the colored balloons are too globular, and who is to know when the floor may give way like a trap, under the pressure of all that deliberate joy?

  Therefore we must pretend. Otherwise we could not be joyous
. There is nothing to worry about. We are enjoying ourselves, just as we used to do before the war.

  But before the war is a movable feast. The film was over. They came out cowed.

  There was nothing to say. We pick up the threads again. Each time they break they get a little shorter, the ends are worse frayed, it is harder to spin them together again, and so the tightrope gets tighter and tighter. But one tries. One has a duty to be entertaining, even if the house is thin. Someone may put in a good word for us. Perhaps we will get the audience back again.

  XXXII

  CHARLIE went to his room and tried to write. It was what he always did when he was tired of living, but he found it difficult. Each novelist has his own cast, that film had killed the life in his, and it is not easy to go on writing about people who don’t exist any more. However, if nothing else is possible, and he did not believe anything else was, there is a great deal to be said for the imitation of life. It is a far far better thing than no life at all.

  He was bored. Paul bored him. He bored himself. True, boredom is part of pleasure as well as of beauty, as he often said. But he was tired of pretending that because he was bored, therefore, automatically, he must be pleased. People fail. Only things are dependable. Besides, a thoughtful person needs to be alone a lot, the way a man who works physically needs sleep. The consummate artist has nothing to learn but more. Charlie was not a consummate artist. He was tired of learning, and always the same things, at that. That film had upset him too much. Of one thing he was certain: it would not, over his dead body, get a prize.

  He had enough of film people for the time being. They lack self-respect, and the people in this world you must avoid are the people without respect. Outwardly they seem decent enough. They are often kind. But when it comes to a moral decision or a physical crisis, you discover that nothing means anything to them. They only go through the motions. Always with them, if you are sensitive, you are aware of something not there, and what is not there is what you need. Their attention can never be held for long. Standing inside the world’s pastry shop, you can see them outside with their noses pressed up to the glass, like groupers. If you are even remotely creative, if you really enjoy anything, you must avoid them, for they will suck you dry if they can. They exist to discourage cooks. They don’t want that little omelette that takes ten minutes and a lifetime’s skill. What they want is something that looks nice, that the kitchen boy could have done as well, and usually does better, with an icing cone over a cardboard shape. They are accustomed to the taste of cardboard. It is what they prefer. They want their trout out of a deep freezer, not a river, and certainly not a stream. If a thing has flavor, they complain of the taste. Unless you can ignore them, you will surely die.

  Lotte had lived in this world as long as he had, to which now he was only a purveyor. How had she managed to survive? Was it by protective mimicry, which women do better than we do, or by some other aptitude he did not have?

  Paul had rocked him badly, months ago, by one remark. He should have pulled out then. But Charlie never left any ship until it sank, out of a sort of spiritual laziness, he supposed, or perhaps it was a horror of rats.

  One thing Charlie, like most creative people, knew was that the thing being created, as soon as it is evoked, has the power to exclude from itself anything that does not belong to it, no matter what the creator may want. It is the same with people of character, from the moment of their birth. Teach them what you will, they will learn only what they need to know.

  So when Paul said, “You must remember, I haven’t finished my character yet,” Charlie just stared. If we are not what we are, nothing we do will be anything either. One hates to be taken in by jobbery, when what one wants is solid wood.

  He had no time for these young people any more. Really to love somebody fills twenty-four hours a day. While we are young and have time on our hands, no doubt that is amusing, but when we are older and have better things in the world to do, it gets to be a drag. So Charlie never did.

  Such, at any rate, was the way in which he explained those trivial affairs which never lasted, no matter how long they lasted, for so long as they laid him out afterwards. He maintained they were trivial, even so. For though Charlie was sophisticated about the world, he was naïve about himself. On a good day, he found himself farcical, but only as somebody laughs in the theatre, who gets the point of the joke only because somebody else laughed first.

  He knew perfectly well what life should be. It should be bitter like a lemon, and sweet like an orange, a blood orange, from Valencia, which in cross-section looks like a stained-glass window, not that other navel kind, fat, plump, and tasteless, from America. The latter is only good for you. The former is good to be with.

  One awful winter, when he couldn’t stand the cold any more, he had fled to Morocco, which he hadn’t liked. But he had not yet forgotten the scent of jasmine, that other orange blossom, from the trees behind a wall near the airport, and he never would. Jasmine smells the way winter ought to look.

  So yes, he had to keep Paul.

  XXXIII

  THURSDAY morning the clowns arrived, and high time, too, motoring down from Brussels, with three wardrobe trunks, under the direction of Miss Campendonck.

  Though they had been together now for over twenty-five years, Lotte never would be able to understand Miss Campendonck. The woman had marched in one day in 1934, wearing a fur coat two sizes and at least a thousand dollars too big for her, and had taken over at once. What she got out of it, apart from a whopping salary, which she was worth, Lotte had no idea, but when Miss Campendonck said yes, or Miss Campendonck said no, Lotte had learned to swallow hard and say yes, ma’am, and from thenceforward, be a good little girl until the next time.

  It was a symbiotic arrangement. Having none of her own, Miss Campendonck needed a life to manage. Without management, Lotte could not have lived at all. Together, they had survived blackmail, theft, scandal, boredom, success, a world war, a bout of poison at the box office which had very nearly proved fatal to them both, and, this last eight years, a new career.

  Miss Campendonck was a sensible woman. She had no patience with failure. It was something she refused to allow. And she hated Charlie, simply and fervently, with the full force of a blocked emotion which had at last discovered this one autumnal outlet. They never quarreled. But they underwent a good many tight-lipped silences together. Despite her name, Miss Campendonck was not only a New Englander but a Herring Choker on her mother’s side. There was nothing she did not know about the full moral force of knuckle-gazing and a tightened lip. It was jealousy, of course. To Lotte, it was proof positive that one other person in the world, at any rate, must truly be fond of her.

  But if New England is forbidding, Newfoundland is infinitely worse.

  Charlie liked her. He always looked forward to meeting her with the complaisance of a tame house cat with a catnip mouse. That the mouse in this case had enormous fangs bothered him not at all. So had he.

  Miss Campendonck never announced her arrival. She made all arrangements two years in advance, down to the date and day, and expected other people to do the same. It is human to believe that if people are driving from Brussels to Mondorf they will arrive ten minutes late or ten minutes early. Miss Campendonck was not human in that way. So she marched out on to the swimming pool terrace, where they were sitting, an hour before they had any reason to expect her to appear.

  Charlie came out of the doldrums at once.

  “You’re late,” he said. “Have a drink.”

  Miss Campendonck looked at the empty glasses on the table and pursed her lips. “Thank you,” she said. “I shall have one.”

  What can you do with a woman who’s been brought up on McGuffy’s Reader and a reprint of the Bay Psalm Book? In all the years Charlie had known her, he had never been able to collect his wits sufficiently to remember not to explain.

  “There’re four of us,” he said.

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Miss Ca
mpendonck. She paid him no mind. “But that one,” she said, “I’ll have strong. It was a very bad trip. A very bad trip considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering what we paid the driver,” said Miss Campendonck, looking at the waiter without favor. “Bring me the bottle, young man.”

  He brought her the bottle. She dumped it into her glass.

  “That, young man, is what is meant by a double jigger,” she told the waiter. That he didn’t speak English did not bother her. If the world is a kindergarten, naturally we teach by example. She picked up her glass. To watch Miss Campendonck imbibe alcohol was always entertaining. First, she did not drink it, she did definitely imbibe it. Second, she imbibed it in exactly the manner in which she imbibed milk. It was a miracle in a way. Even the stiffest drink turned white when she touched it. As an illusionist, Miss Campendonck had much to teach.

  “We almost lost your hairdresser at Orly,” she said. “The new airport, you know. Besides she’s a silly creature. I never fly French if I can help it. Do you realize they lose three passengers a day in that chromium-plated labyrinth? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they weren’t all hijacked to Algeria. They’ll lose Algeria, of course. They deserve to. Otherwise, it was a close thing.”

  “How’s Bill?”

  “Bill,” said Miss Campendonck decorously, “has been in Amsterdam. However, he knows how to keep his head. He will be quite all right by Saturday evening, I expect, but you can’t expect too much during rehearsal.”

  It was the Beverly Hills routine back again. Charlie felt right at home.

  “You have to be at the studio at six,” Miss Campendonck used to say then, when they came in late. “That means you have to be in bed by nine, and no distractions, though it is all right for you to read. Otherwise they have to use too much makeup round the eyes, and you know how you hate that. It weighs you down. You can’t emote.”