“I shall always treasure that little gallantry,” murmured Marnie Stark.
I smiled. “I didn’t mean to imply that yours was the voice of the Ancient Mariner. Just of maturity and wisdom. And surely you’d rather be the spokeswoman for maturity and wisdom than for callow adolescence? Come on—admit it.”
She winked at Oliver. “I must say he extricates himself with aplomb. I have so little finesse it makes me appreciative when I meet it in others. It’s quite a charmer you’ve got there.”
“Yes, he’s not bad, is he? I mean … for a callow adolescent.”
I said: “Did your parents never tell either of you that it’s rude to discuss somebody in the third person as though he weren’t present?”
“Ollie, I have but one piece of advice,” continued Marnie Stark, paying no attention to this interruption. “Just you make the most of your young Johnny Rarebird there before he flits away. There’ll be plenty of others in pursuit of that honeypot.”
It was a strange thing to say, even a hurtful one, and her tone sounded only mildly humorous. But we were in the midst of a good meal, we’d already drunk lots of wine and it was easy to laugh and pretend it was merely a joke which had misfired. And, on reflection, I decided that’s exactly what it was. She must have known Oliver would scarcely thank her for a warning and that my own possible resentment of it could easily make trouble. Everyone said things on occasion which came out sounding wrong.
Yet nonetheless I was prompted to reach round the table and momentarily take Oliver’s hand. I was suddenly conscious of a strong upsurge of affection for him—a wish to look after him and make him happy.
I didn’t know if Mrs Stark had noticed this movement. I hoped not. It wasn’t meant for show.
8
We went to San Sebastian. We drove to the top of a high hill and looked down over a natural harbour which made me think of South America. I felt gratified when Oliver said yes it was like a miniature of the view one enjoyed at Rio de Janeiro. But I eventually realized he was lingering some six feet behind me—behind me and of course the parapet—and for a moment I forgot all the splendours of the panorama. “Oliver, you’re not scared of heights, are you? No! That’s absurd. You can’t be.”
He smiled. “Oh, damn you—yes, I can be. I hoped you wouldn’t notice. I suppose I might have known.”
“But that isn’t logical. You were a pilot in the Battle of Britain.”
“I agree. It isn’t logical. Yet being inside a plane gives you a sense of protection from the drop. As being inside a car does, driving on a mountain road.”
“And here you have a good strong wall which reaches to your waist.”
“I assure you that it’s not the same.”
“Poor Oliver. I don’t understand it, but I’m sure it must be awful.”
He shrugged. “Oh, it’s liveable with. I’ve never had the least desire to be a window-cleaner or a steeplejack. It does mean that, if I walk across the Thames, I inevitably feel I’m being pulled towards the parapet—and it also means I don’t much care for platforms on the London Underground. But as I haven’t walked across the Thames since childhood, and as it must be at least five years since I travelled anywhere by tube, you can see these problems aren’t exactly insurmountable.”
“Yet it seems so silly. Why don’t you just come here a moment? I’d hold on to you, I promise you I would!”
But he only shook his head. “No thank you. Even with an inducement of that sort, I think I’ll remain where I am.”
I certainly didn’t believe people should give in to their phobias but I didn’t press it and a minute or so later—after a bit of clowning to do with the wall beginning to crumble and the commencement of a landslide—we returned to the car.
We drove for a while, then had some tea and looked at the shops. When it grew dark I was surprised by two other things: first, by the dingy quality of the lighting, even in the busy centre of a town where the shops were all excessively smart—Oliver said the dimness reminded him of post-war London—and, later on, by the numbers still out on the streets at nine o’clock, ten o’clock, beyond: the liveliness, the gaiety, the air of relaxation, even of carnival: the crowded taverns, the children chasing round the squares (many in grotesque animal masks)—above all, by the good-natured tolerance of their elders.
Folkestone High Street had never been like this! Nor yet Gloucester Place. It was exhilarating.
Exhilarating also was the ride back to Biarritz; or some of it, anyway. Because, that night, we became involved in the smuggling trade.
Drink was so incredibly cheap in Spain. During the afternoon we had concealed in various parts of the car some Benedictine, Cointreau, Marie Brizard, sherry, Armagnac (“You see?” said Oliver. “You can never say I don’t remember!”) and two bottles of Rémy Martin; in short, a little more than our allowance. And that still left us with two bottles apiece for which there wasn’t any hiding place.
As we drew closer to the frontier Oliver suggested we tuck these inside our coats, clamped against our sides. “But for heaven’s sake,” he smiled, “if we’re made to get out of the car don’t forget they’re there!”
“Do you think we shall be made to?”
“Always possible.”
“Christ.” As we approached the barrier I could feel my heart thumping and my upper lip beginning to sweat. Despite the fact that I wasn’t alone.
He said, “Don’t worry too much. It’s not important.” He laid a hand briefly on my knee—his bottles seemed scarcely to impede him.
“Who’s worried?” I asked. “This is fun.”
He glanced at me.
“Or perhaps we ought to declare them all?” He brought the car to a gradual halt.
“No!”
I almost shouted the word. His tone had held no trace of “Chicken!” yet from the strength of my reaction the accusation could certainly have been implicit.
“No,” I said, more quietly. “Please don’t. You mustn’t. This is fun.”
“Okay.”
The first part of our inspection made total nonsense of that little drama. The Spanish customs official, without coming out of his box, gave a shrug and waved us through.
“It’s a fairly cold night,” said Oliver, as we drove on a short distance, “and that might well be our salvation.”
But the French were possibly a hardier breed. A large-nosed man with a moustache regarded us first from his little window and then indicated that he was coming out to speak to us. “Perhaps he doesn’t consider we have honest faces,” whispered Oliver, with a smile, in the brief period we had to wait. “What a frog! What impertinence! But never mind. Hold on to your bottles, remember you’re British, and say a couple of Hail Marys—to the mother we’re now quite eager to get back to! Besides, think what a good story it’ll one day make.” I didn’t know if he meant around the dinner table or between the covers of a book.
As the douanier came towards us we saw he was a short man—‘a miniature de Gaulle,’ I thought. I didn’t follow everything he said but after about a minute he asked us to get out of the car and from the looks of him he meant to stick to procedure. The vehicle would be searched; we would be frisked. I felt practically clammy with apprehension. The telephone that suddenly rang inside the office seemed like the bell that called the contestants out of their corners: us, in the role of knock-kneed little Charlie; him, the swaggering bearlike champ. I reached out to open the door—already not a simple movement, with one’s elbows not allowed to leave one’s sides—and thought how ironic we should so recently have been talking about prison. (Though at least we’d be together; they surely wouldn’t split us up!) At the same time a colleague inside the office, holding up the phone receiver, spoke urgently to de Gaulle through the window hatch … whereupon our fellow abruptly appeared to lose interest in us and waved us on with a quick, imperious gesture. It was nearly enough to make me think our Hail Marys had worked; or, rather, the mere mention of our saying some. Oliver drove off sw
iftly and we neither of us said a word for at least thirty seconds. We both removed our bottles in silence. Then finally he looked at me and gave his forehead an exaggerated wipe with the back of his hand. “Phew!” he said. “How do you feel, Dr Syn?”
“Oh, thoroughly cock-a-hoop—now,” I assured him.
“Well, don’t be too cock-a-hoop,” he warned. “They could yet come after us. They have the right to do so while we’re still within a reasonable distance of the border.”
“But is it likely?” I half expected wailing police sirens, a squad of armoured cars. I looked to him for reassurance.
“No. Nothing would surprise me more.” Then he laughed. “I don’t feel either of us was cut out for this life of crime.”
“It seems not. Solid citizens—that’s us. Respectable and law-abiding.”
“Well,” he answered, doubtfully. “As Professor Joad might have said, it depends on what you mean by law-abiding. But I’ll tell you one thing. I vote that when we return to England we declare it.”
“All of it?”
He nodded.
“Well,” I said, “if not actually all of it … definitely most?”
“Some?” he suggested.
“A bottle or two.”
“You mean, if we have to?”
All this reminded me of Jane Austen: was it ‘Persuasion’? “Oliver, I’m sorry that I was such a scaredy-cat.”
Again, he put his hand on my knee, though only for an instant. “In fact, I found it quite endearing.”
“One learns about oneself.”
“With any luck.”
But I felt uncomfortable—remembering his mother saying that he had never learned. I remarked quickly: “Oh, I think it must be something similar to childbirth!”
“You do?”
“Well, they claim that if a woman didn’t forget what that was like she’d never agree to have a second baby.”
“And Nature gave the same merciful dispensation to liquor smugglers? That was certainly thoughtful of her. You,” he said, “are most obviously pregnant again.”
“Yes—and blooming with it!” A minute or so later I was singing as lustily as if I’d been in the midst of my morning ablutions.
“My goodness,” he exclaimed. “A touch of the Charles Coborns, too! Is there no end to your accomplishments?”
“None whatever. But why Charles Coburn?” I thought he meant the American film actor.
“Well, wasn’t he the man who made that song famous?”
“Was he? Still, I’d rather have a touch of the Howard Keels. But it’s true: I really do feel as if I’d just broken the bank at Monte Carlo!”
“I’m glad. So do I.”
As we drove on, he began to sing as well—we made a harmonious team! We sang for the rest of the way back to Biarritz and featured songs far more contemporary than the one I had begun with.
“Oh, she wears red feathers and a hula-hula skirt…”
“Open the door, Richard!…”
“She was afraid to go in to the water…”
It was quite a revelation to hear him give expression to such models of esoteric sophistication. I wondered how his mum would feel if she could see him now.
Happy … maybe?
9
Our only proper row had to do with my flat. Oliver wanted me to give it up but I saw it as a symbol of my independence: something I could proudly point to as my own, wholly and utterly my own, not a by-product of Oliver’s generosity or of anybody else’s (other than for the small bequest made to me by my father): a refuge I could always retire to when I felt the need to reassert my own personality or—more accurately, perhaps—rediscover it.
It was a Friday morning and, unusually, neither of us was working. We’d been lounging around with the papers when—apparently apropos of nothing—Oliver had brought up the subject. “But supposing we were to separate?” I asked.
“We won’t.”
“Supposing?”
“Good God! I thought you said you loved me.”
“Well?”
And I had said it, too: on the evening we had seen ‘Nabucco’. The opera was interminable. My only interest had been in the splendour of the opera-house, the novelty of the opening scenes, and the rousing quality of ‘The Slaves’ Chorus’—otherwise, I had felt bored. And what had made it especially difficult, afterwards, to keep up the pretence of having had a good time was my discovery that actually Oliver was none too keen on this particular work and had only booked for it because there was nothing else available. But he didn’t admit this until considerably later, when we were sitting over dinner in a small out-of-the-way restaurant; and, as with our very first encounter, I knew he would think less of me if I retracted … or, anyway, never again be sure he could trust my initially expressed verdict. Besides, on this occasion, it would seriously have diminished the gratification my lie had given him—entirely defeating, of course, much of the original motivation of that lie. (I had also not wanted him to think I could appreciate only American musicals.)
“So this evening,” I had teased him, “was all in the nature of a noble sacrifice?”
“Not at all. It gives me enormous satisfaction to introduce you to new pleasures.”
“Brings a touch of freshness into an otherwise totally sated existence?”
“Precisely.”
He smiled at me and I didn’t know what it was: it could have been his habitual niceness or the attractiveness of his smile (which invariably made him look so handsome), it could have been the ease and contentment I always experienced in his company. But I said something which I’d had no intention of saying and which had somehow been surprised out of me by the sheer enjoyment of the moment. I said: “I love you, Oliver.” And the instant I’d done so I fervently wished I hadn’t.
He stared at me for several seconds. Then:
“My God,” he exclaimed softly. “Am I imagining things?”
Well, what could you reply to that? I felt trapped—committed—helpless. The look in his eyes was nearly enough to light the restaurant. He said, “Naturally you’re aware of how I feel about you—and have done almost from that very first weekend? But somehow I couldn’t believe…”
“Why not?” After all, I had to say something.
But he didn’t tell me. “No. It doesn’t matter. I think I must be the happiest man on earth at this moment.”
He said now, in the sitting room at the Embankment:
“Well, if you love me there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be happy together for the rest of our lives. Other people seem to manage it.”
I should have liked to ask how many of those were unmarried.
I should have liked to remind him that he was twenty years older than me.
I should have liked to say that I didn’t believe I was homosexual. Nor regard our liaison as anything but the very pleasantest of prologues to my one day getting married and having children. You had to be realistic. In the past I had often wondered about the type of girl whom I would fall in love with. It seemed to me odd that at the moment I should know absolutely nothing about her: what she was doing, whether she was presently in London—even in England—whether she felt contented with her situation or alone and faced with overriding problems. I didn’t like to think of her as unhappy. Later she’d be the most important person in my life.
But, clearly, I couldn’t say any of these things. I shrugged.
“And what does that mean?” he asked.
I gave no answer.
“Look,” he said. “I didn’t think the young were supposed to care that much about security. But I make you a promise. Here and now. If ever we do split up I’ll see to it that you’re not left homeless.”
“Oh, that’s nice. You think, then, if we do split up, I’ll be in the right frame of mind to accept your charity? You know, other people besides you—though I realize this may come as something of a shock, I’m glad you’re sitting down!—other people besides you may sometimes have their pride.”<
br />
“Ah, really? There—I must admit—you do surprise me.”
“And what does that mean, exactly?”
“That means, exactly…” He gazed at me for a moment but then his expression softened. “Do you realize you’ve just stolen one of my lines?”
He must have seen my perplexity. He enlightened me.
“I said ‘And what does that mean?’ about half a minute before you did.”
“Oh, is that so? I’m afraid I don’t keep check. And I suppose you feel you own the copyright?”
Then his expression softened still more: he actually smiled. “Regarding copyright? Did you ever hear what Groucho Marx said to the Warner Brothers?”
I had thought about Groucho Marx while I’d been talking to his mother (though how often, in the normal way, did I think about Groucho Marx?) and the fact that he should now reappear like this was perhaps a feeble attempt on the part of providence to remind me of life’s basic absurdity.
But I was hardly in the proper mood to speculate on life’s basic absurdity, or on the meaning of trifling coincidence—and, after all, although it didn’t feel like it, that had been several weeks before.
“Oliver, I do wish you wouldn’t try to change the subject! I want to know—”
“Apparently Warner Brothers were threatening to go to law over ‘A Night in Casablanca’, claiming that it parodied their own title. Would you believe it? They actually hoped to copyright a place-name!”
“Oliver, can’t you please, please, stick to the point?”
“Well, there was a meeting between Groucho and Jack Warner. It seems that Groucho chewed on his cigar a bit. ‘And talking of copyright, Jack, isn’t there one word you yourselves make pretty free with?’
“‘Yeah? What’s that?’
“‘Moreover, we’ve consulted lawyers—Chico, Harpo, Zeppo and I—and been advised we have grounds for a counterclaim. Pretty foolproof grounds, too!’
“‘Jeepers! What fucking word you talking about?’
The Man on the Bridge Page 6
