‘—sending them home without even—’
‘—something one can’t simply—’
‘—tough on everybody.’
‘ – like television.’
Roger decided it was time he resumed control. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said, ‘what interests me most at the moment is who was responsible for this little . . . prank.’
‘Any theories, Mr District Attorney?’ Helene asked.
‘Yes, I have. I’m going to be quite blunt about this.’ Roger’s voice was gentle. He even smiled. ‘I connect children’s comics with children. As far as I know only one child had the chance to get at my briefcase after I put my script into it. Arthur.’
‘But he wouldn’t do a thing like this,’ Helene said with animation, and Ernst shook his head hard.
‘He asked me what was in here, and I said my lecture, and I left it unattended for a few minutes, and there you are.’
‘But why would he—?’ Helene began.
Ernst took over: ‘Now Roger, please consider this point. You told Arthur your briefcase contained your lecture, correct? Just reflect for a moment what the concept lecture means to a young child. If indeed he has that concept at all. A lecture to him is something that happens, something that his parents and people go to. Like a concert, let’s say. As adults we’re used to the abstract shift whereby a lecture as well as being an activity becomes an object, a number of pieces of paper that can be carried about or even printed and bound. This kind of semantic relocation is such a familiar feature of our language that its boldness no longer—’
‘Let me have a look at that thing,’ Helene said to Roger. ‘But this is Crazy magazine, not a comic book. Kids don’t read this – not kids of Arthur’s age. It’s way beyond them. Far too sophisticated.’
‘Arthur’s remarkably intelligent,’ Roger said. ‘We all agree on that.’
‘Not this intelligent. This stuff is satire.’
‘Oh, satire.’ Roger spoke as if of mentholated snuff or an African politician. ‘I thought they got that given away free with their teething rings these days. Anyway, there are pictures and monsters and things in this thing, aren’t there? Quite enough to interest a kid like—’
‘Well, you wouldn’t know about that, would you, Roger?’
‘May I see?’ Ernst asked. He began a careful study.
‘There’s one very simple way of settling all this,’ Roger said, still gently. ‘I’m still perfectly certain in my own mind that Arthur’s responsible, but I can see you and Ernst don’t agree. Let’s see what Arthur has to say about it, shall we?’
‘Oh, sure, I’ll mention it to him in the morning, but I can’t see—’
‘I don’t mean in the morning. I mean now.’
Helene’s elongated light-grey eyes had been looking at him with mild concern and a sort of neutral wonder. Now her gaze sharpened and she opened and shut her mouth. ‘Roger, he’s asleep. It’s late.’
‘Nonsense, it’s only . . . five-and-twenty to nine. If I’m wrong or we get nowhere then no very great harm will have been done. Whereas if I’m right, and I don’t think there’s any if about it, he’ll be taught a very valuable lesson. It’ll be impressed on his mind.’
She put her hand on his arm. ‘Now listen, I know you’re upset about this but you must see reason. I am not about to go and wake up that child and drag him on out here and have him accused of something he won’t even be able to understand. You won’t shift me on this one.’
Roger shook off her hand. He said nothing, but his expression made her turn violently away. Then Ernst, forgotten by both of them for the last minute, broke into a shout of laughter which he renewed at intervals.
‘Oh, just look at this,’ he said as best he could. ‘How excellent. Oh, this is really rich. The forensic laboratory failed to examine the evidence closely enough. Child suspect cleared. There, at the bottom.’
On the back page of the magazine, in smudged but legible blue lettering, were the words: Property of Rho Epsilon Chi Fraternity: not to be removed from reading room.
Roger’s facial muscles went out of control for a moment while Ernst continued laughing and Helene, after some hesitation, joined in. The lack of malice in their laughter made things worse. Soon abandoning the search for an utterance or (short of throwing himself through the picture window) an action large enough to express his feelings, Roger set about laughing too. The fluctuating bray which was all he could come up with at first evidently passed muster. Ernst put his arm round Helene and went on laughing and saying:
‘So the childish innocent was spared in the nick of time. Escaped being put to the sword. You were certainly breathing fire and slaughter when you came in, Roger. I honestly believe if we hadn’t been here Arthur would have paid the supreme penalty already. Oh, what a real yell.’
‘The laugh’s certainly on me,’ Roger said, keeping his mouth expanded and producing an aspirated grunt every half second or so.
Ernst now visibly pulled himself together, rolling his arms and shoulders and neck about. ‘But that’s enough of that. Joke over. This is a serious matter. Either you have an enemy or there’s a rather unbalanced practical joker around. Perhaps both. We must decide what’s to be done. Let’s all have a drink and talk about it.’
When Ernst had gone to the kitchen Roger said: ‘It was just that I couldn’t see how anybody else could have done it.’
‘Sure, I know.’
‘I didn’t mean I thought he was terribly wicked or anything like that.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Kids get up to all sorts of games, don’t they?’
‘Yeah.’
For the next minute Roger worked hard at convincing himself that now was not the time for a quick query about his chances of getting into bed with Helene over the weekend. Conversation stopped. Helene went and looked for her cigarettes. As soon as Ernst came back with the drinks, his face showing that he had done some hard thinking in the meantime, Roger realized he would not be able to stand three hours of careful speculation about the identity of the magazine-criminal.
What he got instead, after a speedy telephone call and another taxi, was five hours of Maynard Parrish and his guests. They had waited dinner for him, but all eleven other members of the company had time to drink a final cocktail and say something different about his non-lecture. Their puzzlement seemed inexhaustible in its profusion and variety. He sat between a female professor of international law and the French-speaking wife of a Turkish art historian. Then in the drawing-room the men got together and went carefully through the Administration’s farming policy, winding up with a brief fiscal survey.
Roger was feeling more tired than drunk as he stood in the Bangs’ drive and the man who had driven him there rolled his window down and said: ‘Your basic objection to Jack Kennedy appears to be that he’s an American. Don’t think I don’t sympathize, but unfortunately we have this law here that says the President of the United States has to be a citizen of the Republic. Unreasonable, I grant you, but there it is. Dura lex sed lex, old man, which is Iroquois for Why don’t you go back to your island and stay there. Good night.’
The sound of the car had perhaps awakened the Bangs, whose bedroom was next to Roger’s. At any rate, shiftings and murmurings could be heard. Not bothering to get on his knees, Roger made a few silent remarks to Jehovah on the events of the evening as he undressed and got into bed. He was nearly asleep when the sounds on the other side of the wooden wall took shape. They went on for some time. Putting his fingers in his ears helped surprisingly little. He found he could just about stand it while Helene’s voice came from closed lips. Certainly it was a good deal harder to bear whenever he heard her mouth open. He tried all he could, but in vain, to remember whether it had ever been like that when he was with her.
Lying on his stomach, he put one pillow each side of his head and pressed violently inward with his fists. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘As much as they like when I’m not here, but not now. Please.
’
Ten
The instant Roger woke up the next morning he remembered in exact detail what he had heard through his bedroom wall. The thought of it lay in his mind without moving, without generating other thoughts, simply there. The surrounding silence told him it was still early but, with his pocket watch unreachably far away in his jacket across the room, he had no way of knowing how early. What he could see through the window without raising his head told him nothing. The wire mesh of the screen gave the view a mealy, pointilliste quality, like a representation of what a dog sees.
He tried to doze. Each time he began to succeed he had the illusion that thin metal sheets were being gently pounded with some padded object nearby. The sound died away in a whisper as soon as he directed his attention to it. After a few goes of this he fell quite asleep again and dreamed vividly. Now and then the dreams took a turn which pushed him back into consciousness with no memory in his head, only incredulity that such a thing could ever have taken place in a human brain. This incredulity grew sharper at every awakening until at last he half sat up with a jerk, vainly trying to recall why.
He got out of bed and padded to the window. Viewed from here the scene looked different. It reflected a fair amount of sunlight but in a dull, uniform way, as if everything – neighbours’ houses, lawns scattered with fallen leaves, gravel roadway, thin evergreen copse – had been sprayed with a thin film of gelatin. There was nobody about.
A sensation stirred deep within his nose, half tickle, half prickle. He rubbed it cautiously, then rotated his facial muscles, wincing. A gradual probe with the little finger left no room for doubt. He was afflicted with double snuff-taker’s nostril, a malady that lined the nasal mucous membrane with hard, sharp, embedded particles of snot. The effect was of a pair of wasp-sized hedgehogs having crawled up his nose and decided to stay. They would hang about there, he knew from experience, for the next week at least. His tolerance must be diminishing – a sign, perhaps, of advancing age – because he had not taken all that much last night. Finding himself one down at Parrish’s place after a discussion of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent he had fought back by producing all his boxes in quick succession and, interest aroused or at any rate simulated, delivering his standard snuff lecture: historical sketch, method of manufacture, variety of blends, anecdote about accidental discovery of High Dry Toast process, etc. He had quelled a threatened interruption from a social scientist with information about oral snuff-taking on the Ohio riverboats by pressing on him a hefty pinch of Seville – ‘a good sharp sniff is what you need to get the best out of it’ – and throughout the man’s ensuing forty-minute sneezing fit had felt bound to demonstrate his own immunity by getting rid of about a saltspoonful twice a minute. Strong stuff, Seville. He dislodged some of the bulkier fragments now with his nail and pushed up each nostril a fat gout of the skinfood he sometimes remembered to smear round his eyes last thing at night.
His watch said eight o’clock. He dressed with torpid movements, becoming animated only when confronted by the clean shirt, a broad-striped lilac and white affair, he proposed to put on. This had been laundered with suspicious promptitude by a very small shop round the corner from his borrowed apartment, and its packaging stoutly resisted entry. Cardboard, several sorts of plastic, pins – he ripped and tugged and flung for a good minute, marvelling at the detachment whereby he was able to imagine the shouts and howls Joe Derlanger would produce in this situation. Roger found himself almost looking forward to seeing Joe at the monstrous party (oh, why did they have to keep having them? Why was going to parties the only thing any of them ever did?) that Ernst had fixed up for tonight. Joe had something of the child in him, a grave demerit, but he was a man of fair education, or what passed for that over here, and the speed with which he identified and combated any force retrograde to his own will was a mark of distinction. It was an experience to hear him resisting Grace’s proposed mealtimes and menus, never producing the same objection twice in an evening: too much too late at night, none of this fancy French stuff, not hamburgers again, perhaps after another couple of drinks, only with genuine veal-marrow stock. Going hungry for an hour or two during this was a penalty even Roger was prepared to pay.
He put on his Royal Windrush Yacht Club blazer and left the house, tiptoeing past Arthur’s bedroom, from which came yelps of an unidentified emotion and the sound of miniature wheeled vehicles. The sky was pale blue and the air already mild: this year’s Indian summer, so they all kept assuring him, was going to break records. Perhaps everybody would not, as he half hoped they would, freeze to death after all on this barge that was to provide the venue for this evening’s romp. Barge? With a concept like that, of course, they might jump in either of their two favourite opposite directions. Would the barge turn out to be some funnelless yacht boasting a uniformed crew and two or three bars hung with abstract expressionist paintings? Rather more likely he would find middle-aged men in jeans and leather jackets doling out martinis from the middle of a waterlogged raft, an authentic Mississippi relic transported in sections across a thousand miles of land for the occasion. Could they never do things except by two-and-a-halves?
Before these riddles could be answered there was the rest of the day to be got through. Breakfast à quatre, featuring Arthur Bang, monologuist and domestic acrobat, would be the first ordeal. As soon as possible thereafter Roger planned to retreat to his bedroom and stay there until as soon as possible before lunch. He had work to do, he had said, and had noticed on his return last night that someone had carried in there for the purpose a small desk battered into seeming antiquity. He had indeed a few proof copies to look through, but the main business of his morning was going to be the composition of a long letter to his current wife, Pamela, saying among other things that he saw no objection to taking her out to dinner and talking matters over with her when he returned to England.
There was a good deal to be said against Pamela, as nobody knew better than he. He remembered her mother warning him, that day at Ascot, how highly strung the girl was, how difficult to deal with. She was a great one for imaginary slights, bursting into tears if he should as much as venture to correct her grammar or point out that her reading an occasional manuscript for him when he was too busy was no excuse for skimping the sauce vinaigrette when they gave one of their dinner parties. She had even complained – once – that he was selfish in bed. On the other hand, she was decorative, knew a lot of people and could carry on a serious discussion in the intervals of mistaking differences of opinion for him being beastly to her. The real trouble was that times like the present, when, for some reason he could not pin down, he rather fancied the idea of a reconciliation, tended to coincide with the times when, just as unaccountably, he rather fancied the idea of getting on terms with the Church again. And the Church, when consulted, had always said that according to it he was still married to his first wife, Marigold. And knowing the Church was wrong, emotionally wrong, wrong by any standard but the most literal and obscurantist, somehow did not help.
Well, anyway, reading and writing would keep him going until well after the start of the midday drinks session, at which he was going to be able, should he feel like it, to further his acquaintance with the Fraschini-Sullivan-Selby-Green group. Later there would be a serve-yourself meal, after which they would all try to get him to go with them to the afternoon’s football game, Budweiser vs. Ballantine – not such an important event, they would explain, as next week’s Budweiser-Rheingold encounter, but none the less likely to be pretty damn interesting and surely he would not want to pass up the chance of seeing some real college football. (He had had all this several times over chez Rho Epsilon Chi the previous evening.) The next stage would be a sample, as protracted as he dared, of his favourite mock-indecision act, full of references to work, expected telephone calls and such. Finally he would regretfully decline and the football party, including Ernst, would move off. And then . . .
With the sun faintly warm on the back of his n
eck he strolled through long grass towards the spot where he had seen the deer earlier that week. This brought him to a small wooden hut with a red and green pennant saying BUDWEISER nailed above its door. He peered inside and saw evidence of childish occupancy: wet and tattered comic books, food fragments, a plastic belt and holster, a clock-work robot fifteen inches high. This last he picked up, noting that it seemed in good repair, and carried to an open space. From here, first glancing carefully up at the house, he hurled it with all his strength into a well-overgrown patch of woodland at the corner of the property. It disappeared with a rustle and a faint snapping of stems. That will teach little men to cheat their elders at tomfool word games, he thought to himself. Then he turned away and walked up towards the road.
As he went he kept his eyes open for flowers, which were one item in the external world he could honestly say he liked. But, as might have been expected, there were none about. People here only valued them as sex-cum-affluence tokens and sent girls orchids they had never seen and would barely recognize as such if they did. Nobody was interested in having flowers just growing round the place: who would bother to plant and tend a rose-bed when he could have a Cadillac delivered in an hour? Roger thought bitterly of the rose-garden behind Marrano, the house near Sevenoaks he and Pamela had lived in for five years – when she left him it had seemed (and, without her money, had in fact been) uneconomic to keep it up and he had had to sell it to a Jew who trafficked in ski-wear for women. What would a fellow like that see in the huge yellow Mermaids and heavy-scented Etoiles d’Hollande that would be out at this very moment, let alone the more distinguished summer shrubs, the Rosamundae, the white moss roses of which Bill Sussex had once remarked that he wished he had anything half so good of its kind in his own gardens? Roger visualized himself at Marrano now, in his hand the secateurs Wilkinsons had made for him, planning his buttonholes for next week or explaining the historical interest of certain old-fashioned varieties to a likely young woman.
One Fat Englishman Page 11
