Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  Magnus gives his hat and umbrella to the waiter, who bows to see such a patron. “My dear George,” Magnus says, coming forwards. “What an age!” Gog does not know whether Magnus is referring to the long time since they have met or the bad time which they both endure. So he parrots, “What an age,” as his half-brother sits opposite him.

  “There’s no need to drink that bog water,” Magnus says, looking with distaste at Gog’s glass of beer. “Surely I can arrange something better. Waiter, two doubles from the Black and White you keep for me. And rare steak and haricots verts. Green beans.” The waiter notes the order, too overawed to say no, as though Magnus alone had the power to call forth good food from dearth and rationing. “You’ll have the same, George, I hope?” Gog nods.

  “There’s not much choice, but at least, they know me here, and I’ve always had a faiblesse for English cooking at its simplest and least execrable. And sauce moutarde, mustard sauce. I shouldn’t have to translate, I know, but no one seems able to speak French any more, even the waiters. The war may have encouraged the biggest foreign invasion since the Normans, but paradoxically, it seems to have made us more irredeemably and rightly insular than ever.”

  Gog looks at the ageless face of his young half-brother, assured and prattling in his decisive tone. There are no wrinkles on Magnus’s pointed face except for three lines on his forehead, the one place where significant furrows give the illusion of thought.

  “Merci, m’sieu,” the waiter says in the voice of an aggrieved Parisian and stalks away, while Magnus gives a delighted chuckle at his back. “Why, those are the only two words he knows, and he simply had to show them off. Adorable!”

  Gog cringes inside, as he always does when a diner dares to insult a waiter because he knows that he has bought the privilege to do so and can redeem a meal of insults with one coin too many in the tip. “What sort of war did you have, Magnus?” Gog asks. “Adorable, too?”

  “Slightly more useful than yours, I imagine,” Magnus says with some asperity, answering Gog’s tone of irony. “Without organization, this country would have collapsed in ’forty. Sometimes we had to work night and day, night and day. You couldn’t imagine the strain. Ah, the whiskies.”

  As the waiter puts down the drinks, Gog feels his nerves leap like fishes at the arrogance of Magnus’s voice, at his assumption that the soldiers have done damn all except sun-bathe on the turrets of their tanks. But Gog controls himself, takes the whisky, downs it in one gulp, and says, “Another, please. Prove you’re the Great Organizer.”

  “Another,” Magnus says to the waiter, and as the waiter opens his mouth to protest, Magnus strikes him dumb by adding, “My friends in the Ministry suggest that the black market may even extend to places we patronize. Impossible, I say. There can be no investigation while I still patronize a restaurant.”

  The waiter goes off, and as he goes, Gog says, “Bring the bottle, while you’re about it, m’sieu. We have to celebrate, my brother and I.”

  Magnus looks furious and puts a thin finger to his lips. “Must you?” he hisses. “In public. You know I hate any reference . . .”

  “Why worry if you’re a bastard,” Gog says, “if you are?”

  “Will you be quiet?” Magnus commands in a whisper. “Quiet, I said. Or I shall leave. At once.”

  “What does it matter, Magnus? I mean, only one thing matters now. The war’s over and you’re alive. Lots of people aren’t.”

  “There are such things as decency,” Magnus says. “Of course, my origins don’t matter. This is a classless age, under our present government. In fact, I shall probably reveal my origins at the right time, if my antecedents seem to be a little too elegant for some of the hobbledehoy Ministers we find nowadays. I believe both Keir Hardie and Ramsay Macdonald were illegitimate; it’s quite a tradition for leaders of the Labour Party. But I will not have you maliciously spreading it around to all and sundry. There are truths which all should know and truths which only some should know and truths which should never be known by more than one.”

  “Yourself, presumably,” Gog says, as the waiter puts down the bottle of whisky on the table and leaves, sniffing. Gog pours Magnus another whisky just as Magnus covers his glass with his hand, so that the alcohol soaks Magnus’s kempt nails. “Sorry,” Gog says and pours himself half a glass of spirits and takes an explosive gulp, enough to begin the thaw of the cold reason of his mind and the melting of the logical wrath of his present state.

  “You seem to have become quite an old soak,” Magnus says. “They say that war improves no one. I had hoped you would prove the honourable exception.”

  “I’m never the exception,” Gog says. “I’m the rule. Or at least, I try to be. And you’re the ruler.” He grins at his little joke. “I saw Mother, you know. She trod on me with a horse.”

  “Will you be quiet?” Magnus insists. “Walls have ears.”

  “Poor things. What they must hear.”

  “It is a figure of speech,” Magnus says. “As you well know. A slogan I may take the credit for inventing, although I allowed my superior to take the official credit. More diplomatique, you know. I did not ask you here to get nostalgic and drunk about someone who was no real mother to me, but a mere conduit pipe into existence.”

  “Why did you ask me to lunch, then?”

  “Didn’t you know?” Magnus says, exaggerating even his air of accentuated surprise. “Maire asked me to see you. To straighten you out, she said. Knowing my influence over you, your envy of me and my career . . .”

  Gog opens his mouth, ready to loose a bellow of anger or laughter, but in the end he only gulps. “Envy? You? I couldn’t.”

  “But you always have, my dear George. Ever since the very beginning. Come, you must learn to admit the truth to yourself. You always wanted to get to the top, we all do. You wanted to be known for your intellectual powers. You wanted your place in society. Oh, I know, you liked to think of yourself as a rebel. But we all know what a rebel is, merely a man who wants to join those he rebels against on better terms. The moment you got your inheritance from that unlikely great-aunt of ours, who unfairly left me nothing as though I could have chosen the circumstances of my birth . . . the moment, I say, you got the money, you immediately began to behave exactly as I always knew you would. A large house, servants, respectability, a wife.”

  Gog laughs. “You could hardly call marrying Maire becoming respectable.”

  Magnus looks at Gog with astonishment and contempt. “What a caddish remark! How could a man speak of his own wife like that? Poor Maire. She really doesn’t deserve her fate. She told me you weren’t quite yourself, but I hadn’t imagined such a vicious lie. Maire’s often told me about her mother’s family in France, very well-connected in the Bordeaux area . . .”

  Here Gog does bellow with laughter. “Not the wine-barons of Bordeaux?” he roars. “Chateau Maire, bottled on the estate? They were really fishmongers.”

  “Will you stop it, George? I know Maire almost as well as I know you. We really became quite good friends while you were away. And if I had to rely on someone for an objective view of things, I know I couldn’t do better than Maire. You were damned lucky a good woman like that agreed to marry you out of pity, to try to save you from your follies. She’s often told me how she nearly gave you up when you insisted on keeping your inheritance, because people might think she was marrying you for your money. But she’d given you her word, and she felt she had to keep her promise. You don’t meet many like that in these sad times.”

  “You believe her?” Gog asks, incredulous. “You really believe her, when she’s playing the innocent slave of duty?”

  “Maire has no motive,” Magnus says, “to wish you anything but well. What she tells me of you coincides exactly with what I think of you.”

  “Doesn’t that make you suspicious?” Gog says. “That’s when you have to worry about your opinion of somebody, when you find another person agreeing with you too closely. Maire’s taking you, Magnus. Sh
e’s taking you like she’s taken me all these years.”

  “Taken me?” Magnus says, smiling. “Perhaps she has.”

  The waiter comes back with a wooden trolley. From it he dispenses plates and steaks and meat juice and green beans and a silver sauceboat full of white thick liquid. “And a bottle of Mouton Rothschild,” Magnus says. “I know you’ve only got one bottle left, I’ve kept account. But this is as good a day to drink it on as any.” The waiter goes off, grumbling darkly. “I hope you notice how much I am celebrating your safe return, George. I’m doing you so well you wouldn’t know there was a war on.”

  “There isn’t,” Gog says. “It’s nearly over.”

  “Oh, yes. I’d forgotten. It’s just about finished. Those marvellous bombs. Think of the millions of Allied lives they saved.”

  “Just like the two little white flowers of St. Francis,” Gog says. “Just like two little white flowers blooming up there among the clouds. I wonder if anyone got out. Even Lot got out of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  “Well, that’s the end of the Yellow Peril,” Magnus says. “Occasionally, one was worried. Singapore, you know. A damned bad show.”

  “I know a man,” Gog says, “who swears that London’s suddenly going to spring up in a little white flower just like that if you don’t build Jerusalem here. And give him the B.B.C. Magnus, you know about all these plans and things. What’s the future of London look like? Are you going to let St. Pancras and Kentish Town repose among golden pillars high?”

  Magnus looks at Gog with infinite patronage. “My dear George, I did hope that the war would at least cure your exquisite romanticism. Golden pillars high? Highways more likely, skyscrapers, blocks of flats. Of course, we have proposals. And frankly, we can only blame one person for not getting the London we want. Adolph Hitler! If only he’d kept on with his Junkers and V-2’s a bit longer, they’d have cleared a lot more land for us. But the trouble with the blitz was, it was so damned inefficient. We wanted open spaces for autobahns, and all we got was a few craters for children’s playgrounds. If only they’d knocked us flat like Rotterdam! Mark my words, that’ll be the great port of tomorrow, while the Thames docks will carry on slower and slower until they become the mudbank they once were. There’s only one way to build for the future, that’s on nothing. The Americans always knew that. They own the future because they never had a past to destroy. Let your friend bring about the entire destruction of London, I only wish he would. Then we could get on with doing a proper job of reconstruction, not a patchwork.”

  The waiter comes back with a webbed bottle of wine and the ritual of serving it is duly performed, the drawing of the cork, the wiping of the neck of the bottle, the laying of a tot in the bottom of the glass, the savoury sip, the nod of the head, the pouring of two glasses full, the cradling of the bottle on its bed of basketwork, the retiring of the waiter.

  “If London reverted to the marsh it used to be,” Gog says, “what would you build on it? Why start again? Ashes to ashes, marsh to marsh . . .”

  “And where else would we run Britain from? And the Empire? You’re a sentimentalist, George. You forget half the world is used to looking to these little buildings round these three small bends of a narrow English river. Habit makes them look here. And even if it were only a marsh again, habit would still make them look and expect orders from the marsh. Why do people still look to Rome? Not because of the ruins and the church there. Because of what was there. The strongest power in the world is the newest city on the most ancient site.”

  While Gog eats his meal and drinks the rest of the bottle of whisky and most of the bottle of wine, Magnus expounds on the London of the future. His voice is so assured that the new city seems almost to exist already, its elevated roads, its sunken garages,­ its columns of flats, its symbolic green spaces and belts, its shopping centres, its hub of offices and wheel of factories with the railway lines spoking out between them and the radial airports catapulting the aeroplanes round the surface of the globe. Precise as a proposition of Euclid, Magnus rehearses the Quod Est Demonstrandum of the New London, the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, a city of vertical and horizontal lines broken only by the arcs of great curves, a metropolis of men communicating without rest or stay, an urban geometry dedicated to movement without end and change without growth.

  “Hell,” Gog suddenly interrupts. “Hell, hell, hell, hell.” The alcohol has dissolved his new and precarious foothold on the icefloes of logic and analysis. He feels himself washed back, back into the unthinking sea of emotion and unconscious action, from which he first surfaced some weeks before. An ebb sucks at the healed wound on his right temple. The chophouse takes on a seaey motion, with the prints on its walls swirling and the tables bobbing and the napkins choppy as spume. The mouthing face of Magnus becomes as significant and unintelligible as the tolling bell of a strange metal buoy, warning of wreckage ahead but unmentioned on the charts.

  “What do you mean hell?” Magnus says. “We won’t get Utopia this way, but it’ll be damn near it. And it’ll be manageable. Run as smooth as a dynamo. We’ll have everything. Productivity, efficiency, hygiene.”

  “Hell,” Gog says. “You’re making a hell, Magog. That’s who you are. Magog.”

  “Will you stop calling me that? I won’t stand for nicknames, even if you will. Magog, indeed! You’re the only person who calls me that.”

  “Well, you are, aren’t you? Magog. Whitehall. Running us all. Shoving us around. Planners. You’re right. Adolph didn’t do a good job in the blitz. He didn’t hit the Ministry of Town and Country Planning.”

  “An envious heart procures mickle smart, as the peasants say on their Scotch reservations. You and your obsession with Gog and Magog, which I see even the war hasn’t cured. Mon vieux, don’t you realize why you got the obsession in the thirties? The moment you met me first, you saw how much more attractive and intelligent I was than you, the legitimate Griffin. So you made yourself out to be some sort of popular hero, which you weren’t. And you projected onto me all you secretly desired and hated in yourself, the Faustian drives to power and knowledge, the ability to organize and control. You ransacked and forged history to gild yourself and blacken me, because you couldn’t be me. I am the man you want to be, George, young and successful. In me, there is yourself realized. I am the Man of your Gog, your Magog. I am the worst thing that ever happened to you, the person you might have been, had heredity been on your side. What is a successful brother but a walking reminder of your own failure?”

  Gog looks at the thin face of his half-brother, the compressed version of his own that seems sharper in mind and tongue and face. And he feels his fists clench under the table in his urge to smash in the mocking caricature of himself that sits opposite him, his reflection in a fairground mirror of warped glass and iron rim.

  “Did you ever, Magnus,” he says at a tangent, “sleep with a Siamese twin called Rosa?”

  “I’m not you,” Magnus sneers. “I don’t want to figure in your baroque imagination.”

  “I’m not you, either,” Gog says, beginning to rap his knuckles softly on the underside of the table. “If I’d have been you, I’d be dead by now. Suicide. Your success I’d call failure. Power. Power corrupts. You know that. Look at yourself in a mirror. See yourself as I’m seeing you. Top civil servant. You look like the top of a barrel of new beer. The scum rises, you know, to the top.”

  Magnus puts up one finger in the air. “Waiter,” he calls, “the bill!” He considers Gog, dropping his finger. “I’ll tell Maire it’s useless trying to straighten you out. I might as well be talking to an ox. You’ll find Maire leaving you and then what will you do? You’re not really fit for society now, are you? Why don’t you go away for a bit, George? To the country you like so much. Take a rest. I’ll arrange it. Remember,” here Magnus leans forward and lays a consoling hand on Gog’s bicep, “everything I do for you is for your own good.”

  Gog stiffens his forearms under the table and rises suddenly, upsetti
ng the table onto Magnus’s lap. The plates slide their greasy juices onto the subtle stripes of Magnus’s jacket, the cloth shrouds his hands. “I’m so sorry,” Gog says, smiling.

  A flush makes a sudden rash across Magnus’s face, as he starts up, shoving the table to one side with a strength that seems strange, given the habitual languor of his movements. “Moron,” he snaps. “You meant that.”

  “Oh, yes,” Gog says. “I did. That’s why you envy me, don’t you, Magog? Because I do what you’d love to do. And you daren’t. I do it, you daren’t.” Gog laughs. “I don’t care about what people think. So I can do anything I like. Don’t you wish you could, Magog?”

  The waiter rushes forwards with a napkin and begins rubbing the mess on Magnus’s suit, merely scouring the grease more irremediably into the cloth, while Magnus speaks with the clipped and stabbing anger of the English gentleman, who prefers a sword-stick to a club.

  “You drunken oaf! I’ll have you committed for this. Maire says you’re mad, as it is. I’ll have you examined by a specialist. Two specialists. And Maire and I, we know you’re insane. We’ll sign the certificate. A few months in an institution. I think that’ll take care of your anti-social behaviour.”