Throughout this Roger had been producing his pigskin case and taking a cigar from it with what he hoped was hypnotic deliberation. Certainly everybody but Macher was watching the process. ‘Are you charging me with insincerity, Mr Macher?’ Roger asked amiably.
‘Certainly not, Mr Micheldene, that would be most presumptuous of me. Not conscious insincerity, at any rate. How could I? Everything I know about the intentions behind what you say I derive from what you say. And what you say sounds to me like a performance. It’s a matter of the modes of speech you favour.’
‘Ah hell, Irv,’ the young man perhaps called Hirsch said, ‘Literary Criticism 332 – less of it, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Do you think, Mr Macher,’ Roger said, ‘that with your necessarily rather confined experience of the English language you’re entitled to pontificate about . . . what was that bit of jargon? Forms of speech?’
Macher did a longer laugh than usual. ‘Well, it’s true I haven’t had the chance of speaking any kind of language half as long as you have, sir, but with that reservation . . . As a native American in full possession of his faculties I can claim complete parity with you as a user of English. I could go a little further and just, uh, inform you that as regards the development of the language the USA is now central and England peripheral, but I don’t—’
‘Son of a bitch, Irv,’ Hirsch said, ‘Dr Bang’s linguistic preceptorial – it’s as if you can’t ever—’
‘You mean you don’t find the learned Doctor’s society rewarding, Ed?’ Macher asked. ‘Indirectly, in any event.’
‘God damn it, Irv, I didn’t say that, I just meant I was getting bugged by—’
‘Because I personally have no fault to find with him.’ Macher looked at Roger. ‘Most particularly not in regard to his taste in wives.’
All the other young men except one broke into yelping cries. ‘I should say not. Some doll. Jesus, is she stacked. Oh, murder. Boy, what a piece of ass. Could I use her. Wow.’
Roger, about to light his cigar, became motionless. If he had not been abruptly reminded – he had no idea how – of his Hallowe’en fiasco with Helene, or even if Macher had not gone on interestedly looking at him, he would probably not have said:
‘If I may just revert to what we were saying a moment ago, Mr Macher, I’d like to suggest that one reason why you were dissatisfied with what I was saying to Father Colgate might be that through no fault of your own you’re simply not qualified to appreciate the subtleties of a discussion between Christians.’
His tone rather than his words brought a momentary silence. Then Hirsch said: ‘I guess I’ll go eat’, and went. The youth possibly called Page had time to say: ‘Now look, sir, around here we don’t make hostile references to—’ before the one probably called Castlemaine broke in and said: ‘Excuse me, Mr Micheldene, but is it permissible to ask you a personal question?’
‘By all means.’
‘Thank you, sir. In that case I should very much like to know whether, as it appears, you propose to smoke that cigar while the band is still around it.’
‘The band?’
‘The circle of coloured paper, sir, near the smoking end.’
‘Oh, the ring. How dense of me. Yes, naturally I shall leave it there while I smoke,’ Roger said, starting to. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I know very little about these things, sir, having been raised in Philadelphia, but around there I’ve noticed that people who are about to smoke a cigar invariably remove the . . . the ring before lighting it. Would you say it was . . . wrong of them to do this?’
‘Oh no, not wrong, no no, that’s taking the thing far too seriously.’ Roger spoke with animation. Having scored his point against Macher he was not unwilling to pass to other spheres, especially since he was half aware that some judges might consider that point to have been scored at some sacrifice. Never call a Jew a Jew unless you can be sure of making him lose his temper by doing so – a sound rule which the memory of Helene had flustered him into breaking. For so far from having become angry, Macher was now looking at him with something oddly resembling friendliness.
Castlemaine seemed to be pondering. ‘Then perhaps . . . socially inept?’
‘Hardly that either. Removing the ring before lighting is just a fairly harmless modern affectation, as well as involving the risk of damaging the binder – the outside leaf, that is.’
‘I appreciate that point.’
‘By the time you’ve smoked a cigar down as far as the ring you’ll have had the best out of it anyway. It’s by way of being a little theory of mine that the position of the ring is a reminder to the smoker that he’s reached the stage of, let’s say, diminishing returns. But I can’t seem to find any support in cigar literature.’
‘How curious.’
‘Now I’m afraid that right here I must interrupt this interesting discussion and carry off our good friend Mr Micheldene in the direction of his speaking engagement for this evening.’ This was delivered more slowly than any other possessor of approximately normal speech organs would consider. But then Maynard Parrish always talked like that. Dressed in a bottle-green suit that shone – by design, it was plain, not through excessive wear – he had long finished arriving and nodding thoroughly to each undergraduate in turn by the time his voice finally died away.
It seemed as good a time as any. Roger offered a token farewell to Macher’s group, but was surprised to find some or all of it accompanying him and Parrish towards the entrance. On the way an opening door afforded a glimpse of a detachment of the US Cavalry charging across a television screen in full colour and half a dozen recumbent shapes grouped round. There was a lot of thick carpeting about in the hall, heavy leather upholstery and more dark panelling. This and the chromium-and-strip-lighting thing were about the only two styles they knew.
Roger picked up his briefcase from the unnecessarily elaborate cloakroom, felt momentary but active hatred for a group of men in knickerbockers and such whose photograph hung near the front door, and allowed himself to be led across the road to a similar building. Headlights and neon lit his path. Indoors again he dealt with a stair or so and some corridor, overcorrecting rather at the bends. Weak liquor was not an American shortcoming. Then he was in an anteroom affair with about twenty people. He was assured that one of them was the editor of the town newspaper and another the editor of the campus newspaper. That was to be expected, but what did Father Colgate think he was doing here? And who were all these women?
Nine
Roger was still pondering on the Colgate and women problems when he opened his briefcase to take out the material of his lecture. This he had compiled with some labour, promising himself that Helene (who had definitely undertaken to attend) should get her money’s worth of him in his role as man of affairs, understander of the way the world worked, unearther of significant facts and such. To this end he had equipped himself not only with detailed notes but with published material from which he proposed to read extracts. The whole thing formed a substantial sheaf of typescript and print, from which the single slim pamphlet-like affair which was all his briefcase now proved to contain could immediately be distinguished.
He found himself looking hard at what he took to be a child’s comic. On its cover was the garishly coloured caricature of a small boy with a more compulsively kickable face than any even Roger could have visualized unaided. The back of his neck went cold and his face hot. ‘Look at this,’ he managed to say to Parrish, who had time to gaze at it with senatorial benevolence and say: ‘Yes, a most—’ before Roger charged on with: ‘Can’t you understand? Somebody’s stolen my lecture notes and stuck this piece of . . . piece of . . .’
He raved more or less inarticulately for a time while the others milled about him, inquiring, sympathizing, exclaiming, soothing. But a part of his mind was clear. The child in the drawing had directed his thoughts to another whose odiousness was inward, or at any rate not primarily facial. Before leaving the Bangs’ house a couple of h
ours earlier he had put his briefcase on a table near the front door and Arthur had asked what was in it and Roger had told him it was his lecture. Then, he remembered in detail, he had gone back to his room to change his tie. The regimental one he had originally selected was on reflection too ordinary-looking at a distance and he had spent some time tying a green Paisley bow – quite long enough for that inventive miniature fiend to make the switch. But this realization, convincing as it was, failed to draw Roger’s anger away from those immediately round him. It was his habit in such situations to blaze away at any human target that might move across his sights, as many a London waiter, hotel servant and telephone operator could have testified. Shaking his fist for silence, he said:
‘I’d like somebody to go as soon as possible, please, and inform the audience that I shan’t be appearing before them.’
‘But surely—’
‘It isn’t fair to keep people hanging about.’
‘But there must be upward of a hundred and fifty—’
‘I don’t care if there’s a hundred thousand, they’ll simply have to do without me, I’m afraid.’
‘But you can’t just flatly refuse to—’
‘Can’t I? By what incapacity can I not? It isn’t my fault, is it? Be so good as to remember that. It isn’t my fault.’
‘Now, Roger, my old friend,’ Maynard Parrish said in the voice that had reduced so many stormy departmental meetings to universal undifferentiated apathy, ‘let’s just see if we can’t devise some means of salvaging something out of this admittedly most difficult and unfortunate situation. For my own part I undertake—’
‘There’s nothing to be done. I’m not talking and that’s that.’
‘Roger, please, one moment. You – and I say this, believe me, in no spirit of flattery – you are one of the most articulate and verbally resourceful men it has ever been my good fortune to hold converse with. Surely it cannot be beyond the powers of one such as you to improvise a—’
‘If you think I’m going out there to give those people a fifty-minute impromptu chat you’re doomed to disappointment. They might not be able to tell the difference between that and a serious lecture but I can. I won’t do it.’
‘If I were to announce a half hour delay, during which period you could set your thoughts in—’
‘No.’
Roger said this so ardently that there was a sudden silence in the room and even, possibly, in the auditorium that lay on the far side of a pair of manorial swing doors. Parrish, Macher and a couple of his friends, the two editors, half a dozen women in their fifties who looked as if they could have slogged it out blow for blow with Roger over any number of rounds he cared to name, Father Colgate, all watched him as he made to hurl the comic book to the floor, then changed his mind and stuffed it into his briefcase.
‘I hope you’ll dine with me, Roger?’ Parrish said.
‘Don’t count on it. I’ll telephone you. And now, if you’ll all excuse me, I really must be going.’
In the entrance hall Roger became aware that somebody had hurried after him from the ante-room. It was Father Colgate, who said urgently to him: ‘I must say something urgently to you.’
‘I doubt whether it would strike me as urgent, Father, but whatever it is it’ll have to—’
‘In my calling one very quickly develops what might almost be called an instinct whereby he comes to detect infallibly the signs of a soul at variance with God. You, my son, are very gravely disturbed. You are in acute spiritual pain – the infallible sign of a soul at variance with God. I detected this from your very violent and distraught words to me back in the fraternity house and I obtained the clearest possible confirmation from the way you behaved a moment ago. A man doesn’t act like a child unless his soul is hurting him. Your soul is hurting you, Mr Micheldene. Won’t you allow me to hear your confession, my son? Soon. The sooner the better.’
What had kept Roger quiet through this was a series of inner debates about how hard, where and how soon he ought to strike the speaker. But now the pause tempted him into speech. ‘I’m not your son, you dog-collared buffoon,’ he said confidently, ‘and I wouldn’t confess to you if I had a rope round my neck. Now unless you want to be martyred in the next five seconds you get out of my way.’
‘Resistance to the will of God is the surest—’
‘It’s the will of God that I have a large strong drink immediately and nobody had better resist that. Good evening to you. Oh, and pray for me, won’t you, Father? It’ll do you good.’
Roger had three large strong drinks sitting up at the counter in a place along the street. ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’ the barman asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I was in England during the war. You know Southampton?’
‘No.’
‘So I talk too much already. Go ahead, commune with yourself.’
Roger’s self-communion brought him the unhelpful thought that by delivering an impromptu talk, not for him a very difficult task, he might have impressed Helene more than by lecturing as planned – assuming, he added to himself gloomily, that he was capable of impressing her at all by that sort of thing, or any sort of thing. Then he meditated upon Arthur. The briefcase coup had called for a combination of inventiveness, malignity and daring surprising in one so young. Or was it surprising? An arch-criminal on the scale Arthur was destined to attain must surely reveal himself early. Galileo, Columbus, Clement Attlee, Caxton, had all had childhoods. It suddenly occurred to him to be astonished at the magnitude of his love for Helene. If she left Ernst and came to him she would presumably bring Arthur with her, and here he was still trying to persuade her. But this, for some reason, turned out to be another unwelcome line of thought.
He finished his drink with a silent toast to Herod, then telephoned for a taxi. The promptitude with which he was connected and promised service and given it nettled him vaguely, but he could think of no more acceptable alternative. ‘Good night, Claud,’ the barman said.
Back at the Bangs’ he found Helene sitting reading a women’s magazine by a small log fire, a cup of coffee at her elbow. She was wearing sandals with gilt straps, striped slacks, and a lemon-coloured cardigan of coarse wool that offered hints about her figure, as opposed to the forthright statements of fact set out by her usual sweaters and blouses. Her cheeks were pink, her expression as sleepily cheerful as ever. She turned a page and said: ‘Hallo, you’re back early. How did it go?’
‘How did it go? You weren’t there?’
‘No, I’m terribly sorry, I did try, but our regular baby-sitter had a paper to finish in the library and I couldn’t get hold of anybody else that late. I did try. How’d it go, anyhow?’
‘Go? It didn’t go. There was no lecture.’
Ernst, a disassembled mechanical toy in his hand, came through the doorway from the kitchen in time to hear this. He seemed surprised. Helene put her magazine down and looked for a cigarette. ‘Why not? Are you sick or something? What happened?’
‘No, I’m perfectly all right,’ Roger said. In fact he felt dashed by Helene’s evident unconcern to attend his talk (what would have prevented Ernst from baby-sitting, for instance?), but he was not really surprised by it. And he was confident of being able to get the maximum anti-Arthur value out of his impending revelations without loss of composure. Rage was always fun, true, but it had been known to lower efficiency and, in particular, parents tended on the whole to resent its being directed against their children by outsiders.
While Ernst and Helene first exchanged a glance and then watched him, he proceeded with due pomp to the cobbler’s bench, set his briefcase down there and opened it. Slowly he drew from it the comic book, which he held up so that his audience could see it clearly, then cleared his throat as if really about to lecture. ‘This,’ he said – ‘this was what I found when I went to take out my notes and so forth before I went on to the platform this evening. The notes had disappeared – though I’m pretty sure I know roughly where th
ey are. We’ll go into that in a minute. At any rate, it thereupon became obviously impossible for me to appear, I said as much to that old nitwit Parrish, went and had a couple of drinks in some bar or other and made my way back here. I told Parrish I might dine with him later as arranged but I don’t really feel like it.’
Helene said diffidently: ‘But couldn’t you have just gone on and said something off the cuff? It was to be about publishing, wasn’t it? Well, surely you must have a lot of that right at your fingertips – quite enough for a—’
‘No, Helene,’ Ernst said, ‘Roger is completely right here. One’s method of preparation in each case is entirely different. If one has organized one’s material into a formal script of some kind, one has an attitude to it which—’
‘But all those people who’d come along, they were expecting—’
‘—possibility of talking informally, which of course with due warning—’
‘—not all that critical, they’d have been quite content with—’
‘—actually militates against any kind of improvised—’
One Fat Englishman Page 10
