Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  “Now it just happens that Farnaby has inherited a complete set of the Dr. Fu Manchu boooks and a few little Eighteenth Dynasty odds and ends from his grandmother, an intimate friend of the late Sir Flinders Petrie. They’re supposed to be quite good, though Farnaby never cared for them himself. But Clittering is downright rude about them, and this makes Farnaby mad, because he was fond of his grandmother, you know. I don’t blame him, either. I met her once. She was a fine woman. She and Farnaby had some wonderful times together.

  “Well, Farnaby decides to get even. This was back in ’26, when they found all that cheap costume jewelry and stage furniture in Tutankhamen’s tomb. One of Farnaby’s school-day chums is Maspero’s nephew, so Farnaby flies to Egypt in a hand-tooled biplane and has a chat. It turns out Maspero can’t stand Clittering either. Never could. Never will. So together they cook up a little plot.

  “Next year, when Clittering comes tippytoes out to his hush-hush digs, who does he find in the concession alongside but Farnaby, in a solar topee, surrounded by great strapping blacks, digging away at an excavation no bigger than a rabbit-hole.

  “‘A remarkable discovery being made here,’ says Farnaby. ‘Maspero’s coming up tomorrow for the opening. A pity there isn’t anything in yours,’ and he nods amiably toward Clittering’s exploratory trench.

  “Clittering has had one hell of a trip up the Nile.

  “‘Tell that to your grandmother!’ he shouts.

  “‘I shall remember that, sir,’ says Farnaby, tight-lipped as ever, his eyeglasses rimmed with sweat.

  “Sure enough, they get down to the entrance, and Maspero arrives in time to break the seals on the inner door to the tomb chamber. ‘Fabulous,’ he says. Then they go back to Farnaby’s tent and break the inner seals on a bottle of Vat 69. After a while Clittering comes nosing over.

  “‘Surprised to see you here, Maspero,’ says Clittering, ‘frittering away the best season we’ve had since ’26 on a mere amateur.’

  “‘This mere amateur,’ says Maspero, ‘has discovered the mummy of Tutatankatenamenasenapaa’tenatonamon. She’s the missing daughter. It appeares she didn’t die at Aketaten after all. To judge by her name she must have lived through at least three successive reigns. For one thing, it must have taken her at least that long to learn how to pronounce it.’

  “‘Egad!’ says Clittering. ‘If this be true, you may ask your own price, Farnaby. That’s the one I need to complete my set.’

  “‘I will have to examine it at Cairo,’ says Maspero, ‘but I assure you I believe it genuine. Of course the Egyptian government will have first nibs.’

  “Clittering snatches up a lantern and rushes into the excavation. The ushabtis are the real thing. The funeral furniture is the real thing. It is a virgin tomb. There isn’t even so much as a postdynastic dead mouse in there. Later that night, Farnaby is aware of a heavy body wriggling through his tent flap. For a moment, for he has been dreaming, he thinks it is his grandmother. Sir Flinders Petrie was quite a charmer, after all. But no. It is only Clittering.

  “‘I’ll need that mummy, Farnaby,’ says Clittering. ‘It would be wasted in Egypt. Think of it where it belongs, in suburban Connecticut, with the rest of the family, surrounded by cut leaf philodendron and stagshorn moss in the solarium.’ There are tears in his eyes. ‘I know we’ve never seen eye to eye, Farnaby, but for mercy’s sake, pity the predilections of an old man, and ask any price you want.’

  “Farnaby toys with him for a while for the sake of verisimilitude, but at last gives way. No sooner said than done. Clittering makes his escape in the night, with five porters sworn to secrecy, boats downstream, shoots the porters in the delta, and absconds, disguised as a coal barge, from the Rosetta Mouth.

  “In the sequel we are in Connecticut. ‘To think it is mine, all mine, for a mere 250,000 cash, the hunting lodge in Wisconsin, and a few paltry shares of Bethlehem Steel,’ says Clittering. He has asked a distinguished group of rival archaeologists for the official reception. It is the crowning moment of his life. In fact the crown, a modest seven-foot diadem containing a cake, will be served at the buffet, later.

  “Farnaby steps forward. ‘You are a fool, Clittering, an arrant fool,’ he says. ‘My grandmother always said so. Anyone could tell at a glance that that is not Tutatankatenamenasenapaa’tenatonamon at all, but a mere court hanger-on and cousin german, a nobody really, from an Outer Nome.’

  “‘Maspero says it is Tutatankatenamenasenapaa’tenatonamon,’ sneers Clittering. ‘I say so. And who are you to question Maspero?’

  “‘I forgot to add that, taking advantage of the courtesy extended on the engraved announcement card, I have been so bold as to bring along with me a distinguished guest,’ says Farnaby, and produces Maspero. ‘Maspero, is that Tutatankatenamenasenapaa’tenatonamon?’

  “Maspero strolls over, parts the staghorn moss, and adjusts his monocle. ‘Oh, dear me, no,’ he says. ‘I fear this is the reliquary of a mere commoner, though we shall have to confiscate it, of course, all the same. May I ask what you paid for it, my dear sir?’

  “Clittering groans. ‘250,000 cash, the hunting lodge in Wisconsin, and a few paltry, though invaluable, shares of Bethlehem Steel. Would I had not parted with them. They were an inheritance from my dear father, and had a sentimental value.’

  “Farnaby’s long-laid plans have eventuated, a word I can’t stand myself, in total success. ‘Ah, a fool and his mummy are soon parted, eh, Clittering?’ he says, and strides away.”

  Charlie paused.

  *

  “The point of the game, you see, is that they aren’t very good puns. And he has to go to all that trouble.”

  “I was beginning to get the point. How long have you known this man?”

  “Oh, about ten years. There are more, you know. That’s only the beginning.”

  “I feel better now, Charlie.”

  “I could tell you about bringing new castles to the Coles. That’s a good one. It involves finding a well-to-do family in Florida called Cole, who live in a Mizner house, but don’t like it much. And then the wife, who has been staying in the Scots border country with cousins, meets this architect, such a nice man, and she tells him about the Mizner house, and he says, he’s a terrible scrounge, you know…. No?”

  “I feel much better, Charlie,” said Lotte. “You are an absolutely abominable man, but sometimes you can be very, very nice. But definitely no, and let’s go home.”

  *

  On the way back she began to sing again.

  That pleased Charlie. Charlie was a man who liked things the way they were before, and they so very seldom were.

  XLVIII

  AS he did sometimes, just to make a change, Charlie went up to his room thinking about Lotte’s probable troubles instead of his own.

  It could not be denied: they were difficult to deal with. This is because though they ask to be understood, what they really want to be is believed. If you merely understand them, they always get contemptuous. It was his own belief that he understood them only too well. He had all those supernumerary wives (like the nipples on a warlock) to prove it. The trouble was that he had been backstage, and once you’ve done that, the illusion doesn’t work any more. That it doesn’t, gives you a comparative freedom to observe. They aren’t going to forgive you for that, either.

  But Lotte was different. He cared about Lotte. He thought he would have to screw his courage up and deliver his lecture. The lecture, which was one of his set pieces, went as follows:

  Romance? Who wants romance? Romance is for the young. Romance is something women invented about the time veils came in. Of these Ishtar had seven. When she discarded the last of these, from a romantic point of view, you could perceive that the truth was nothing but a naked lie, a threadbare theme by César Franck. And sex is a damn bore five minutes afterwards, and everybody stays too long. Friends are better. Besides, as the Analects inform us, a passion is not the conduct of a gentleman. What we want is company. So why preten
d that the one will lead to the other?

  And yet he always did pretend, each time he fell in love, not that he ever did fall in love, of course. It was just that he wanted company.

  He had once written a play with Lotte in mind. He was always trying to get her on a stage that way. Sometimes she said yes, but she always shied at the last moment, when you tried to ease her into the starting gate. She preferred movies. In movies you can control everything, and besides, since the scenes come out of sequence, they don’t matter. A stage made her shy. On stage you have to go right through the damn thing, night after night, you can’t correct your mistakes, and the audience is watching you every minute. That’s too much like life. Lotte could only face an audience afterwards, when the thing was done and no longer had anything to do with her, if it ever had. She couldn’t bear to have anyone watch her doing anything. In a night club it was different. In a night club all she had to do was sing, not feel. In a night club nobody can tell how anybody really looks, the lighting sees to that, so all they have to feel is entertained or, at the most, entertaining, which is sometimes easier.

  It was probably just as well. It wasn’t a very good play. But there was one scene in it he had liked. The actress is seated at her dressing table. Her young man is leaving her. He is being rude, and she has been so kind to him. She has been so patient. And he has been such a lot of trouble, such a lot of bother, a distraction and an increasingly unwelcome one.

  She is making up before her glass.

  “You’re too old,” he says, with the awful puerile arrogance of the young.

  “Perhaps,” she says. “But did it ever occur to you that you’re too damn young?”

  She doesn’t care. And she means it every word.

  Yes, it was a good scene.

  From below him, through his window, as he washed his hands to tie his tie, there came the most entrancing music, riding lushly on its orchestration like a bunch of artificially bedewed moss roses on a springy bed of fern, from the best, from the most expensive, from the old familiar specious shop.

  Tonight was award night. All have won, and all must have prizes. But the music, a medley from No No Nanette, or some such thing, suddenly reminded him of an actress named Anna Neagle. He had never cared for her much, but in her film musical she had had the most touching way of raising her rather thin arms, so you could see the shaved armpits clearly. There is something so moving when women raise their arms like that, to reach for an apple, or for a prize. It is rather like a groin gone wrong, the armpit. Now where had he had that image before?

  He was looking forward to being a judge, and to presenting prizes in the caucus race. In proper clothes, at the proper time, we really can feel as joyous as this sort of tune is designed to make us, for an hour or so. Following the sound, he trekked downstairs to trace the waters to their source.

  XLIX

  LOTTE was at her dressing table, preparing to sock ’em in the eye. It takes skill and time. It also takes concentration. So Miss Campendonck had been banished to her own room, while the goddess considered, with some professional attention, the exact reflection of her own moon. Between Diana and Narcissus there is not much to choose, but tonight, expecially tonight, I want to look even more immortal than usual. It is because I feel so old. It is also because they are so damn young. Though Sophia Loren is all right, and nobody has anything against Katina Paxinou. It’s the starlets who get on your nerves.

  The door opened and Unne came in, interrupting, in the mirror, the surgical hesitation of an eyebrow pencil. Paint me as I am, said Cromwell, but then Cromwell had had only one identity, and so had no choice but to be proud of it.

  “My goodness, you’re not even dressed yet. Where have you been all day?”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course you’re going.”

  Unne sat down on a chair, demure, and scared-looking. Or did that expression signify contrite awe?

  “I’ve married Paul,” she said.

  “Damn!” said Lotte, as the pencil slipped. She reached for the cold cream. “You’ve what?”

  “Married Paul.”

  “Does he know?” asked Lotte tartly.

  “Who?”

  Come to think of it, it was no time for wit. Besides, the young seldom understand. “Charlie.”

  “We’re going to run away.”

  Lotte frowned. “I don’t give a damn about that. I can tell you what you’re going to do right now.” (I must remember to be casual. So long as I remain casual, I will not have to take this seriously. One must always discipline one’s self never to take anything seriously. That way, one can usually manage to take it on its own terms. Remember that.) “You’re going to go into your own room and dress, and phone Paul, and tell him to dress, and for the rest of this evening, you’re going to behave yourselves. If you find that difficult, you can soothe yourself with the knowledge that it is for the last time. What you do later is your own business. I’m not going to have Charlie’s evening spoiled by two very foolish children.”

  “I’m not foolish.”

  “You realize he doesn’t have a penny, of course.”

  “I have some money. Besides, he likes to teach golf. There’s nothing wrong with teaching golf.”

  “I never said there was. But you know what he is, as well as I do.”

  “He doesn’t like it. He told me so himself, when we drove home from that horrible evening. He doesn’t like sophisticated people very much.”

  “Whether he likes them or not doesn’t have anything to do with it. We all have to do things we don’t like. And what’s more, we usually want to.”

  “He’s in love with me.”

  “Love, fiddlesticks!”

  “I’m twenty-three. I have to have somebody. And I like him.”

  Lotte was a world older than that. But there is nothing you can do. They do it all to themselves. The best you can do is speed them on their way. But she needed a moment, all the same, and when we need a moment, we scold or give advice.

  My God, she’s what I used to be, she thought. She let the expression on her face soften. She was furious, not with Unne, but with the world. It was such a shame. For some reason she remembered her own portrait, done as a bust by Renée Sintenis, in the best bronze, thirty years ago, with a firm chin and sun-swept hair. She turned back to her mirror and responsibility.

  “Unne?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make Paul go through with tonight. Just be there. Don’t tell Charlie anything. Tonight means a lot to him. Then run away if you like. I’ll tell him myself. But do this, please, for me.” So long as she worried about Charlie, she wouldn’t have to worry about herself.

  Unne looked stubborn.

  “I won’t pretend I like it, but I’ll see you through,” said Lotte.

  Shyly, Lotte could see her face in the mirror, Unne smiled, so Lotte smiled back.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Now go dress. There isn’t much time.”

  In the mirror she watched Unne get up and come over to her. The poor child looked like crying. Lotte shut her eyes, and felt on the back of her neck a kiss, one of the few sincere ones, she supposed. When she opened her eyes, Unne had gone.

  She had been so beautiful, and now the years might make her wan. Lotte hoped not. She stared at the empty mirror. She stared at the empty chair. And then she went on with what she had been doing. Fortunately coincidence provides us with these helpful tasks. There is no point in crying over spilt milk. It had always seemed to her a silly phrase. Try as she would, she could never imagine anyone ever having literally done so, except possibly at the Petit Hameau, in a tableau vivant.

  She finished, took the towel from around her neck, but did not get up immediately.

  There had been a very poor film a few years back, called The Golden Coach, one of those international efforts, with Anna Magnani, and directed by Renoir or Réné Clair, she couldn’t remember which. When the money comes from one country, the skill from a
nother, and the talent from a third, the result is seldom good. It had been about strolling eighteenth-century players in Peru. The color had been admired. Dennis King had been admired. Anna Magnani had been admired. On the whole it had been terrible.

  But at the end it suddenly became moving. Anna Magnani saw to that. She has lost her lover, or she has lost what she loved, it is all the same. She decides to go away. She is only a commedia dell’ arte figure. The show must go on.

  At the end of the performance, the curtain closes, she steps from behind it, and the Fenice disappears, the Lima opera house disappears, as she addresses the audience, and we are not in that opera house, after the comedy, but in some other comedy, played to no audience at all, in the Cosmic Opera House.

  She stands there, a battered, cheerful, and triumphant woman. She has been through entirely too much. But she is an entertainer, even if there is no audience any more, so she must entertain.

  “And do you miss him?” asks a voice offstage, probing like a water douser.

  “Perhaps,” she says, and shrugs. She makes a moue. She knows how she feels, but she needs a second to decide how much she is willing to feel it. “Perhaps a little.”

  It is the end of the film, but there is no applause. In the Cosmic Opera House there never is. But there is the right to say “perhaps.”

  Lotte gazed into the empty mirror. Yes, there she was. It had not touched her. Then she, too, went downstairs, but into no music, into nothing at all.

  It is impossible to make one’s heartbreak intelligible to those who have broken it, not by what they have done to us, but to themselves. We did so want to save them. But since they would not understand, we do the wiser to keep mum. It would be better, however, if they did not apologize for what they have done to us, instead. That only makes it worse.

  L