by Neil Rowland
After taking that emotional bruising I attach myself to the group, clutching my beer, catching up with other people’s gossip. I’m content if nobody takes a blind bit of notice. I breathe easily when their eyes pass over me without delay. I’ve become a bit of a sight. What would my teenage incarnation say about that?
We all go on a youthful ego trip, which lasts about a decade. Everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes, according to Warhol. Every radical kid would have his day in the water cannon. This was the stuff of idealism or just optimism: which is much better than the alternatives.
We discoursed about the inevitable decline of late capitalism, the transformation of western society. We couldn’t foresee how chance would shape us too, as representatives of the individual. We knew we were part of Life, this bigger thing. But we didn’t talk about our futures, the terrible surprises. We got high. Fearlessly we gave our utopia to the world. You can look back on history. But we upped the ante - and the anti.
I lost my father when I was eight years old. Lizzie and I lost our closest old university friend when he was just twenty three. Those experiences of loss have always been at the back of that big Life thing. That was going on, even during our wildly happy, free wheelin’ days.
Later in the evening Bob and Susan cut into their anniversary or birthday cake. In the contemporary era this cake is a proper expensive model, in commemoration of the Las Vegas original, which was two pancakes in cream and blueberry sauce. The Sheer wedding cake was a leaning tower of Pisa, with replicas of Liz and I on the roof. Lizzie’s stomach was too delicate for her to blow out the candles on her birthday cake that year. So I queasily recall.
The Huntingdons press the knife again. The guests are noisily appreciative. My friends can’t help blushing and stumbling, with all guests’ eyes turned on them. Why do they put themselves through this matrimonial ordeal? They must find some good radiation out of this somewhere.
Bottles of champagne crack open, froth, pour, flow into pyramids of fluted glasses, before the sparkly is passed around, and the structure is steadily, carefully dismantled.
The Huntingdon’s living room has the mood of a crowded country inn at harvest time. The atmosphere is close and claustrophobic under reduced lights. Yet this is a happy and united family, under the same roof, and what’s the price of that? A toast is proposed and everybody teeters into a few verses of Happy Birthday, watching each other’s merrily frightened eyes with merrily frightened eyes. Their party is proving a great success again this year, although it isn’t the wildest happening since Keith Richards last came to town.
Nuptial rituals complete, we disperse back around the house: we return to our previous conversations. There wouldn’t be a lack of audience to hear about my holiday experiences. Shrewdly I’m not sharing my memories around. I’m keeping that particular box of confetti in my jacket pocket. They don’t entirely understand what private nightmare they could stumble into. It was a kind of garbage dump at the side of a luxury new hotel. Not since that guy decided on a day trip to Pompeii, has any holiday plan so badly backfired. They believe that the Cretan vacation has ended all my romantic inspirations. I got my comeuppance with a clownish pratfall. I’m ready to play along with their views. I don’t offer any latest twists.
As I continue to roustabout I find Rupert Lloyd. I haven’t seen this guy for, oh, five years, since he’s been living in east Africa. Now he’s got himself hitched rather than ditched.
A sculpturally featured Kenyan girl, slim, elegant, bosomy. A smile sweeter than a boat of ice-cream. Rupert’s another of these well-travelled guys. His wide experience of the world leaves me far behind. Not including my one lost weekend in Japan, when I was hunting for fish and chips around downtown Tokyo. They had my guts for sushi.
I’m afraid that he’ll be shocked to recognise me again. What can I tell you about Rupert? He was another fellow student of ours, part of the Students’ Union. He was a high-prestige Marxist intellectual, big league public speaker and formidable agitator. During the first year we admired mutually, agitated together. But we soon began to eat each other, with more relish than the brothers Grimm.
We disguised a radical personality clash with political fall outs. He was in favour of direct political action, whereas I was opposed. Studies disrupted, we soon began to fall out. Antipathy and argument got us, like a Stalinist meeting with one chair short on the platform for the politburo. Rupert didn’t approve of my lecture room demo against the arms trade, without asking his permission. When the university tried to expel me and fellow students prevented this, Rupert was envious. For a serious finger pointer, he didn’t raise one to save me.
The situationist antics of our friend, Stuart Maybridge, particularly annoyed him. He was glad when security guards escorted Stuart from the premises. The rumour had it that Rupert had given the Chancellor’s office a tip off. There were emergency meetings and motions all over the campus. Lloyd was deeply resentful and contemptuous of Stuart’s madcap strategy. All right, the grim reaper got the last laugh there, although a hollow one.
The chicks at Bristol were not misty eyed. They were not excited by Rup’s brand of visionary dialectic. Apparently Rup’s become more attractive in maturity; which is the opposite of my own experience. You could grate a policeman’s baton on those high cheekbones of his. His fiery politics put off the most hep university females. From his angle I was merely an attention seeker and an irremediable skirt chaser. I was the guy who refused to throw a petrol bomb into the science lab. I was the inauthentic man, having a good time out of the protest movement. Looking back he wasn’t too far off the mark. What’s the point of arguing?
When Lizzie and I became a regular fixture, he resented it. He went so far as to denounce Bob Dylan in front of fellow students. This was long after Dylan had recovered his blues roots and went on electric tours with the Hawks. But Rupert had a long memory in music, as in politics and romantic rivalry. At a committee meeting he denounced our hero as a traitor to the movement. He described Zimmerman as a “cultural dandy and parvenu”. Who can forget a description like that? To this day I hear him shouting out in a cracked voice across the canteen. I’m sure that I was his true target, stood right behind our hero, too much of a straw man in Rup’s eyes to be named. He truly despised Liz for going out with me, when I was clearly not worth the trouble. He never forgave her for falling in love with me, then deciding to have my child and get married; even though Lizzie and I had known each other for years, since school. Dylan wasn’t there to defend himself.
One day we came to blows. We had to be physically separated by a student mob. This fight happened in the humanities coffee bar one lazy afternoon. He threw himself at me across the table, from nowhere. I must have said something off that he disapproved of. Like “I love my girlfriend and I believe that killing anybody is wrong.” He launched himself, grabbing a weapon along the way, which happened to be a bottle of tomato sauce. The tomato was an embarrassing mess, but it was the glass bottle that was most dangerous.
Maybe the tomato sauce bottle was the ultimate proletarian weapon. Obviously from Rup’s background it was borrowed and symbolic. I couldn’t tell if he was for the masses or against them, in this particular battle. My mother had worked in a factory canteen, so I had to be in the working class corner, don’t you think? Quickly there was sauce all over my face. The sight caused instant panic among fellow students. I’ve never like the taste, surprisingly enough. Luckily Rup didn’t succeed in smashing the bottle across my temple. That’s what he intended to do.
The battle had more to do with testosterone than ideology. His step would falter, and he’d look away, redder than red, whenever Lizzie and I walked along the corridor to pass. Plenty of testosterone has ebbed and flowed since those days. Man, some events are too painful and embarrassing to remember.
“You’re back in circulation, Noah?” he remarks. A different kind of party has brought us back
together. “How are you?”
So I make my excuses again, give hint of the scars. Rupert may be older and wiser too, as he doesn’t take my new look too badly.
“Nobody gave me any clue about your health problems,” he explains. “What a dreadful surprise. So are you on the mend?”
I make some positive noises.
“I can see you’ve been through some traumatic experiences.”
Not nearly as traumatic as being assailed by a ketchup bottle.
“How’s business, Noah?”
Another sore topic. “Keeping my head up above the crowds,” I say.
“Right, glad to hear that. You still think that barrage balloons can still be the first choice for commuters? Is that going to happen any time soon?” he recalls.
“Still not beyond the realms of imagination,” I claim.
“You’re still clinging on to the imagination?”
“I haven’t given up my youthful hopes and ideas,” I assure him.
Rupert smiles ironically at me. His ruddy visage is marked by characterful cracks and creases. He’s aged as nicely as a Puritan cottage. “I’ve been searching for new ideas, based on respect for values and traditions,” he suggests. “What we singularly lacked as young men.”
“I haven’t entirely given up on the young men we were.”
“You still dare to dream of peace and equality, Noah? Still putting up your utopian slogans around the Sorbonne?”
“That’s your territory,” I remind him.
“Used to be.”
“Anyway, I gave up on all that guff years ago. It makes me squirm when I think about it. When we thought that Bob Dylan was a talented musician,” he echoes. His claret drinker’s eyes take in my dress sense. I’m glad if he thinks that’s the only wrong aspect about me.
The infamous coffee bar assault was still running at the back of my mind. Apparently Rup had wiped that from his memory, along with everything else.
“If you ask me the whole period was shameful. Our radical left student years. Looking back I hardly recognise myself. And I don’t want to even try.”
“So you don’t hold anything against me, any more?” I wonder.
“Why should I, Noah?” He puts his mind through reverse gears. “We failed to agree, but it was never personal.”
“Not even when we were on first name terms?” I say.
He squints a bit at me and laughs. “No, no, certainly not. All right, I admit a few errors of judgement as a young man. Didn’t you make any mistakes yourself?”
“Best to keep them to myself,” I reply.
He exchanges a look with his wife. She smiles back ironically, leaving this to us. “I heard you’ve got a few business troubles at the moment. Anything in those rumours, Noah?”
“You’re still got your ear to the ground, Rupert. There are the usual pains...interest rates, regulation, late payment from clients...that kind of stuff.”
“When are we going to have a positive business climate in this country?”
I rifle the retrospective files of my mind. But he’s got me on that one.
I’m curious about his aloof girlfriend. She’s the kind of lady to cause a nuclear reaction at a party. In our youthful years black people were less familiar, despite the terrible epochs of Bristol’s history in slavery and capitalism. We had a patronisingly provincial view during those decades. Rupert’s outfitted in a yellow African trouser suit himself. My bohemian peacock look is mundane by comparison. He’s in great shape and as imposing as an African prince. I raise my hand to smooth a phantom quiff. Some roads are rougher than others, as Robert Johnson would attest. You just don’t understand how rough, when you first set off.
“Excuse me, I didn’t introduce my wife, Sheila,” he says.
“Your wife? No! Hi!” I crumple. Looks as if the Cuban heel is on the other foot. Of course I’m now barefoot, doing penance over a hot gritted beach.
“I’m so delighted to meet you, Noah. Heard so much about you.”
She holds out a long delicate arm to shake my hand.
“Not all that bad, thanks,” I reply.
My health has faded like the wedding day carnation I still keep pressed between the pages of On the Road.
“Your attire is distinctive,” she tells me.
“Do you really think so?” I goof.
“Do you mean that as a compliment though, darling?” Rupert laughs.
“Can you tell me if all these garments belong to you?” she asks, earnestly.
“They’ve been in the wardrobe for years,” I admit.
“I heard people saying that you’re divorced from Elizabeth,” Rup says.
“Gossip never wears out,” I remark.
“At least not gossip then,” he replies.
“Tho’ it can get a bit thin, after constant repetition and white washes,” I suggest.
“There’s no sign of her this evening. Has she come to the party? Wasn’t she invited?”
“No and yes,” I say.
“To be honest it’s hard to believe that you’re divorced.”
“Don’t worry Rupert, it isn’t a fresh wound.” But the first cut is the deepest.
“Such a beautiful girl.” He’s half addressing his wife. “I remember when I first saw her at university. Such a vivid memory for me.” Should I thank him for the compliment?
“I still think about her,” I admit.
“How could we ever forget her?” he tells me.
Maybe he’d really forgiven and forgotten our bad experiences. He’d been through a succession of failed relationships, bad relationships, during his twenties and thirties. He was sending off for prospectuses from the best monasteries. He was engaged to a female racing stable owner once; a kind of horse trainer of the revolutionary left. It’s amazing that such people can exist. She kicked him out eventually. Maturity suits Rupert. He’s taken a hard ride since his university days.
Lately he runs an import and export business in African goods. He started out with a small shop in Bristol but has moved on to bigger premises.
“Sheila and I met at a party in Mombasa,” Rupert explains.
“A bit different to this one, then,” I assume.
“I suppose so,” he admits, gracefully.
“We’ve always enjoyed a good party,” Sheila teases.
“We did all the social rounds together in Mombasa, didn’t we darling. Eventually I found the courage to pop the question, during drinks at the Ambassador’s reception.”
“Good for you,” I say.
“He was shouting at me over the band,” Sheila recalls.
“Well, well, you’re putting on a brave face,” he observes.
“Do you really think so?” The idea disconcerts me, as I picture covering my real face with a ritual African mask. Are the spirits about to depart in wrath?
“Sheila’s the perfect woman for me, Noah. Really she’s perfect.”
“The second time around for Rupert,” she reminds us.
“Took me long enough, didn’t it,” he admits.
“There could be hope for you yet, Noah,” she says.
“I could never have predicted Sheila coming into my life.”
“We don’t succeed in many predictions,” I agree.
Who am I talking to? I think about Bob Huntingdon and our earlier conversation. Or is it all just another simple twist of fate? Like a freight train!
“Our wedding was one of the social occasions of the year. We were in all the magazines there...on television...everywhere.”
“Rupert had to leave me in Kenya, shortly after our honeymoon, to return to England. What do you think about that?”
“Of course we kept in touch, but it was frustrating. I began to wonder if we
’d ever live together as man and wife. I had reason not to believe my good fortune.”
“My youngest brother was sent back to Nairobi from Heathrow airport you know. The immigration officers decided that his papers were not in order.”
“Officially Sheila remains on a tourist visa to this country. It’s all a dreadful headache.”
“Caught up in a heartless bureaucratic machine,” I suggest.
“Ah ha. Exactly. They certainly lack any sentiment.” This time the smile is more like a grimace.
“I must return home, when my permit runs out. Rupert is going to join me in October and we will stay in Mombasa until further notice.”
“So you’re about to emigrate, Rupert!”
“Yes, it could be. I shall come back here on business.”
“We may not meet again.”
“Don’t say you’re going to miss me,” he remarks.
You would think I was sorry about it.
“My family is doing everything they can for us,” Sheila tells me.
“You should visit us in Kenya one day, Noah. To actually see the country for yourself. I’m tremendously moved and impressed by the people there,” he tells me.
“Not sure that I will ever get the chance,” I inform him.
“You’re not one for travel?”
“Not for the long haul.”
He’s looking around the room again, restless. They want to move politely on. “Why don’t you call round the house one evening? We’ve got a dinner party in a few weeks. Join us. Wish us bon voyage, while we’re still here in Bristol,” he suggests.
“Why not?” Social invitations haven’t exactly been racking up.
“Excellent, Noah. Then, if we don’t catch you later, we’ll be in touch.”
Even the recollection of a fire bombing in the science block has cooled. I almost vanished from sight altogether, back there in the student refectory. He left me with tomato sauce on my face. But I still got the girl.
