‘I think I’ll start with some of that,’ Roger said, pointing at her.
He had some of that. It was really quite good, well matured but showing no untoward signs of age and with the consumer’s satisfaction borne very much in mind. The trouble was the talking. It ran in part:
‘Oh yes. Oh, it’s great, it’s so great, it’s wonderful. Oh, yes, yes. Oh, you’re so strong, so fine, so good, so good for me. Oh, what you do to me, darling. Oh, it’s so great. Oh, yes.’
He was not tempted to laugh – that had never been one of his troubles. Even when he glanced up and saw a tortoise under a fern a yard away watching them he kept a resolutely straight face. No: what this vocal accompaniment did was to distract him from that total absorption in his own sensations which he required from what he was now doing. He remembered for the first time that it had been the same down by the Derlangers’ swimming-pool. But, sensing that this was not the stage at which to tell the lady to belt up, he saw it through in grim silence to the end.
‘Would you like some of this now?’ Mollie asked, dropping ice-cubes into the jug.
‘Oh, thanks most awfully. Not too dry for me, if I may.’
She gazed at him as she stirred the drink and what must once have been a pair of dimples showed when she grinned. ‘Rog, old boy,’ she said, ‘I hate to say it, but you certainly are one fat Englishman. It was like fighting a grizzly bear. Not that I’m objecting, you understand. Just mentioning it as an interesting fact.’
Roger said crossly: ‘Yes yes, that’s all very well, but what about that tortoise that was hanging round here a minute ago? Look, there it is now. It is a tortoise, I suppose, is it? What’s it doing here, anyway? Is it someone’s pet or what? Good God, there’s another one. What’s going on?’
‘Oh, there are a lot of them around here. They just live here, I guess. They’re wild.’
‘I dare say they are,’ Roger went on, not appeased in the slightest, ‘but I’m by no means sure they’re tortoises at all. Black shell with yellow patches – I’ve never heard of a tortoise like that. No, that’s not a true tortoise. Must be some kind of—’
‘They’re called turtles,’ Mollie said mildly.
‘Well, whatever they may or may not be they’re clearly not that. A turtle lives in the sea and has sort of flipper things instead of proper feet. Quite a different kettle of fish.’
Roger accepted his drink without a word and brooded a moment. He was still nettled at the way these tortoises, or tortoise-like creatures, had been obtruded upon his environment, illegitimately foisted in.
‘I could find out all about them from somebody,’ Mollie said, ‘if it means that much to you.’
‘If two of them go by here within a couple of minutes of each other, then the wood must be absolutely crawling with the damn things. I seem to remember reading somewhere that dogs eat tortoises. Well, you’d have thought—’
‘I can see they’re eating at you, these turtles or tortoises or whatever they are. What would you have liked to happen?’
‘I don’t follow you, I’m afraid.’
‘Wait, I believe I know what it is. You think Washington ought to have consulted you before allowing packs of savage tortoises to roam around at will. In fact, though, I hear they’re pretty harmless, despite their formidable appearance. Never been known to attack man.’
‘Please try not to talk tripe.’
‘Well, don’t blame me, old boy, I didn’t bring them here. They just rolled along of their own free will. Anyway, can we get off tortoises now for a while? Drink that down and let me pour you another.’
Roger submitted. He was still dissatisfied with the tortoise situation but there was obviously no advantage in prolonging the discussion. Nevertheless it had put him a couple of points down conversationally and this must be redressed at once. ‘How’s my old friend Strode?’ he asked.
‘Now there I’m in the very fortunate position of complete and unassailable ignorance. I don’t have the remotest idea of how your old friend Strode is, I have no way of knowing and I’m not about to try to accumulate any information on the subject. I told you I like to know roughly where I stand with people in this sort of situation. I also like to let them know where they stand. Which includes telling them how I feel about my husband. When I first really got to find out what he was like, after we’d been married about six months, I hated him. Now that we’ve been married fourteen years and I have a much larger stock of information at my disposal, I hate him. There has been some change in my feelings, though. As of the last five or six years I also consider he’s a jerk.’
Roger was as little pleased with the turn the chat had taken as he had been when worsted over the tortoises. He said coldly: ‘It sounds as if you’ve a strong case for leaving him.’
‘Oh yes, very. But a slightly stronger case for staying around. I need to use money and I have no money and I have no trade or skill and nobody else has ever wanted to marry me.’
‘What about that shop affair of yours?’
‘Are you kidding? In a good year Miranda loses five thousand dollars. I’d think anybody who knew anything about money could see that as soon as he set eyes on it. Strode’s what one would call good about this. You probably think Miranda’s nonsense but I don’t. I get a big bang out of having all that stuff around and showing it to people and having them like it. I wouldn’t want not to have this. So I stay with Strode. He doesn’t notice how I feel about him. Or about anything else. Everybody he knows, everything he does, his whole life, you see, it’s all just a thing he does himself. What he’s not doing doesn’t exist.’
It was time, Roger considered, to restore perspectives. ‘Sounds to me like an old-fashioned case of egotism,’ he said in a dismissive tone. ‘There are plenty of—’
‘Sure, but even egotists like to make an effect on people, have them admire them or be afraid of them or something like this. Strode’s a stage further in. It isn’t even that he doesn’t care. He doesn’t notice.’
After not listening to rather a lot more of the same, Roger jack-knifed himself a good deal nearer on heels and buttocks, then did his smile with eye-crinkle. ‘Aren’t we talking rather a lot?’ he asked.
She looked away and patted her fringe. ‘I guess we are, I’m sorry. I should have told you you only get this the first time around. From here on in it’s strictly art movies and the World Series and moon shots, I promise. I’m sorry, Roger. Drink up now. Oh . . .’ She smiled suddenly and reached across to the hamper. ‘I almost forgot. I got this for you. I hope you like it.’
It was one of the fat fifty-cent horrors made of equal parts of Java reject and sawdust. ‘What made you think of that?’ he asked curiously.
‘Just at the Derlangers’ I noticed you seemed to go for cigars, cutting the end in a special way and all. Is it the right kind?’
Of the recognized procedures for dealing with unacceptable cigars Roger rejected his favourite, that of saying he hoped nobody would mind terribly if he cut it up and smoked it in his pipe. He was about to adopt the alternative and thrust the thing into his jacket pocket with a force obviously more than enough to fracture it. And then he found himself laying it carefully down at the edge of the blanket and saying: ‘Do you mind if I leave it till later?’
‘Take your own time, sir.’
He could not remember at all clearly now just how bad the talking had been before they had their first drink. If it was really bad in future he would tell her – afterwards, naturally – not to do it any more. But this might well entail tact and patience, an unfavourable sign at such an early stage. He congratulated himself on his foresight in constructing that dipsomaniacal son for the friend who was putting him up in New York. Letting them enter one’s base of operations was to be avoided whenever possible. And if the occasion did arise urgently he could always dismantle the son, send him to an alcoholics’ institution, draft him into the Navy, hospitalize him after a brawl.
‘I’d like some more of that now,’ he said.
Eight
‘This is Father Colgate.’
Oh, what nonsense, how can it be? was Roger’s thought as a flamboyantly handsome and muscular man of thirty, dressed up for some unfathomable reason of his own in strict but well-tailored clerical garb, shook his hand and told him he was very glad to know him. And how could he know him after five seconds’ acquaintance? Still, by the same token Roger could not very well accuse the fellow immediately of masquerading, and until he knew more he decided to follow his usual policy towards actual priests, a show of cordial respect and interest. The normal response to a few minutes of this was the query whether Roger himself was not of the faith. Roger would say yes, with the silent qualification that he was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic, and would go on to be fairly daring and original about Arianism. It was intrinsically worth while to be seen to be in with the priesthood, as well as going down well with the women he always saw to it were about. Even so, he could not help leaning sarcastically on the last word when he now asked: ‘Are your duties connected with the College, Father?’
‘No, they are not,’ the man replied with a touch of impatience, as if rebuking some wearisomely common doctrinal confusion. ‘Budweiser is a Protestant foundation, as might be expected in this part of the country. There was no substantial number of communicants here until ten or fifteen years ago.’
‘And now?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘The number of communicants nowadays?’
‘Substantial,’ the supposed divine said, and inhaled his cigarette in such a way as to cause a ball of smoke to come into being for an instant above the back of his tongue before vanishing with a hiss. ‘Substantial,’ he added, nodding.
‘Oh, how frightfully agreeable.’
‘Yes, right now there’s plenty of God’s grace around in these parts.’
This was unsatisfactory. Even an impersonator should be able to do better. ‘Do you really think so?’ Roger asked incredulously.
‘These are happy people. Certainly they have their problems – who doesn’t? – but they do their best to help one another with them and they have charity. If that’s not a heavenly gift I’d like to know what is. Are you yourself of any religious communion, sir?’
Now this, again, had come too soon to be altogether welcome. ‘It so happens that I am – of the Roman Catholic Church, actually.’
‘Uh-huh.’ The ecclesiastic showed no interest or even evidence of recognition, let alone pleasure. Perhaps he belonged to some appalling sort of local High Anglican thing. Just as likely he had been christened Father, did football-stadium revivalism and enjoyed dressing-up. Well, as far as the last part went he would be squarely in the line of Church tradition. One of Roger’s chronic difficulties was reconciling his belief in the importance of priests and the Church with his antipathy towards most of the former and aversion from most of the doctrines and practices of the latter, a conflict also to be seen in his relations with the Omnipotent. Accepting a fresh drink from an anonymous hand, he tried to suppress all that for the moment and give this black-clad clown his last fair chance by listening to some of what he was saying.
There was plenty of it. Father Colgate described himself as an optimist and personally had no fault to find with such a condition, or so he said. The Deity’s steady rise in grace-output over the years, he explained, stood in direct ratio to the increase, both qualitative and quantitative, in the love which human beings lavished upon their Maker whether they knew it or not. ‘Ever since I attained a condition in which I was able to take stock of the evidence of this,’ he went on and on and on, ‘I have been more forcibly struck every day by its profusion and variety. People are kinder to one another than they were. They have forethought: they attempt to gauge in advance the probable or likely effects on those around them of the course of action they have a mind to pursue. They say to themselves, I intend to initiate a certain chain of events. What can I expect the results of this to be and what further chains of events will thereby be set in motion?’
While Roger waited for an opening he noticed that half a dozen young men and women were gathering round the pair of them as they stood by the window of the lofty, heavily-panelled room. For sophomores or seniors whatever the hell they were of Budweiser College, Pa., they seemed not hopelessly barbarous. None of them was chewing gum or smoking a ten-cent cigar or wearing a raccoon coat or drinking Coca-Cola or eating a hamburger or sniffing cocaine or watching television or mugging anyone or, perforce, driving a Cadillac. Quite a little minority culture group. It was true that some of them must voluntarily have joined the fraternity on whose premises and by whose hospitality he was now beginning to get drunk, but presumably they would not be here otherwise, and he wanted some sort of audience for what he was preparing to tell Father Colgate. One of their number, a blonde girl wearing a man’s shirt but in all other visible respects unmanly to the point of outright effeminacy, was looking at him. These Yank college girls were at it all the time, one heard. But anything like that was going to have to wait until after he had given his lecture and the party reassembled here or, preferably, in somebody’s private house. For the moment he must concentrate on showing this blonde, and any other relevant person within earshot, how marvellous he was at dealing with chaps like Father Colgate.
That churchman had worked his way through forethought and was now on about responsibility. Both qualities involved the use of reason, he said. Roger waited until the other had finished explaining the first of two alternative definitions of the word – a perfect breaking-in point – and then said fast and loud:
‘I honestly don’t know which staggers me more, Father, your affection for the obvious or your half-baked humanitarianism. To hear you talk one would imagine God to be some sort of corporation president with strong views on group morale and togetherness and all that tomfoolery. Getting a good healthy creative atmosphere going. Loyalty up and loyalty down and loyalty all round. Nailing up those idiotic notices saying Think. One big happy family with every member a success. Religion as what I gather you people call a bull session – rather a good phrase in one sense, actually. White-haired old man up on the top floor who knows what’s going on in every corner of the organization and never too busy to listen to anybody’s problems even if all they do is sweep the floors or work the lift. Superhuman only in scale.’
Without pausing or altering the direction of his gaze Roger lunged with both hands at a loaded tray being carried past by a black girl in a white dress. Of the two drinks thus secured he held one at the ready and put the other on a nearby shelf for not much later, continuing: ‘Is your imagination so puny that the vast terror and horror of the mystery simply passes you by altogether? Has it never occurred to you that we’re bound to God by ties of fear and anger and resentment as well as love? And do you know what despair is like? And what makes you think you know anything at all about what he feels about us? I don’t say it isn’t love, I don’t know either, but if it is it’s a pretty odd kind of love, isn’t it? Pretty odd. But I suppose one couldn’t expect you to have noticed that. No, your sensibility’s been packaged and air-conditioned and refrigerated out of existence. Nobody could say you’re not in touch with the modern world, Father, I’ll give you that. I rather envy you, I must confess, with your Fifth Avenue vestments and your commuter communicants and your neon Christ and your hungover penitents – what do you give them, a Hail Mary for every martini after the first three? Yes, it must be quite fun. The only thing is, you will insist on calling it religion. Or has that gone, too?’
A new voice now spoke. It was not very familiar to Roger, but it was much more familiar than he wanted it to be. It belonged to Irving Macher, who had arrived unnoticed at Roger’s side. It said: ‘Pretty competent, sir, but overly scripted, wouldn’t you say? A little lacking in spontaneity?’
‘What the devil are you doing here?’ Roger asked in genuine surprise.
‘Well, being a member of R
ho Ep and – I’m sorry, Mr Micheldene, you see I belong to the fraternity that owns this house, and so when I heard you were being entertained here I naturally came over to renew acquaintance. I’d like to have you meet some of my friends. —You remember my telling you about Mr Micheldene from England? Well, this is he. —And this is Tom Shumway, Mr Micheldene, and Prince Castlemaine, who runs the radio station, and Ed Hirsch our star quarter-back – that’s a position in the kind of football we play over here, Mr Micheldene – and John Page and Pitt Hubler. Tell me, sir, will you be doing us the honour of dining with us here tonight?’
‘Good God no. They told me I had the alternative of eating at six or at six forty-five and I’ve roughed it a bit in my time but I’m afraid I rather draw the line at sitting down to a knife-and-fork tea after an hour’s drinking. No no, I’ll be dining later with Professor Parrish and a few people he wants me to meet.’
Roger was aware he was being sidetracked, physically as well as verbally, for moving to face Macher’s group had taken him away from his previous circle of listeners, including the girl with the shirt and the man of God. Colgate had reacted fairly satisfactorily to being told how he stood, doing nothing beyond staring photogenically back at Roger and shaking his head slowly and slightly from time to time. It would have been suitable if he had tried to come back with some feeble denial or deprecation and thus earned a definite pulping, but by and large he had been adequately seen off. In any case, the task now was to engineer the punishment of Macher for his interruption.
‘I know I sometimes strike you as a trifle slow on the uptake, Mr Macher,’ Roger said, taking a pinch of George IV from his silver snuff-box, ‘but I’d like to take you up, if I may, on what you were saying just now. Would you care to amplify it, perhaps? Do forgive me for liking things to be made what may seem to you excessively clear – it’s a little weakness of mine, I’m afraid.’
In Macher’s shoes Roger would have countered this by pretending to have forgotten what he had said, but Macher said at once: ‘Of course. It’s not that you and I differ very much, in our basic views, that is. Or rather – I’m not putting this too well – some of the ideas you were propounding just now come pretty close to the way I feel. My objection was you gave the whole thing too much production. Sounded rehearsed. And that means it probably was rehearsed. Like a lot of things you do, Mr Micheldene, speaking with all respect. Now I don’t regard it as a crime for people to be different than me; I’d say I’m at least as tolerant as you. It’s just that I like people to behave naturally, without looking to the effect all the time. To me that’s behaving like a human being, living by impulse. And – again you’ll have to forgive my presumption – I don’t think you do that often enough. You weren’t really sore with that clergyman at all; you were just doing your stuff. And the sort of stuff it was Graham Greene does a whole sight better.’
One Fat Englishman Page 9
