As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  Beautiful Willow-Bamboo bent down and kissed the slobbering lips amid the bristle. “Good Papa san,” he said, and led him from the room.

  A voice near Hamo woke him from his astonishment.

  “And was that a bad moment for the White Whale?”

  The voice, rasping yet comfortable, made him think at once of the whisky sours, so revolting in name, so delicious in taste, that had been one of his many happy American discoveries. It brought back visual memories of smartly dressed, sophisticated elderly New York ladies at parties he had been taken to, frightening yet friendly, all cigarette smoke and elaborate white hair, young smooth cheeks and old stretched necks. He looked up and there was just one such seating herself at the bar next to the Geisha youth. The long cigarette holder preceded the rasping drawl . . . when Hamo, looking at the sexy brown eyes, the snub nose, the wide mouth and long jaw, the little bow tie, was reminded suddenly of a famous cinema star of the thirties, so beloved by Erroll, one whose photographs from magazines so often festooned the lab at infuriating times, that famous star who always danced. Below the white hair was a little boy’s face, stretched tight, and, below that, an old, old, old sagging neck, older than time. The very old man, now sitting, his long legs crossed, on the high bar stool, spoke to Hamo with a shrug of one shoulder.

  “Don’t look at me, dawling. If it’s Ahab’s curse that’s worrying you, forget it. He takes it with him.”

  But any further such alarming addresses were cut off by the sound of another voice coming out of the darkness, and another old man, certainly in his seventies, although beside the smart ladylike one he seemed quite young, appeared at the stool by the side of the Rice Youth. He was buttoning up his flies.

  “Yeah, like I was tellin’ you,” and his voice was near to tears, but not sobbing, “I guess I was twelve and some. We’d been out cuttin’ the corn all day, the old man and me. Some days he’d talk. Pretty wise talk too. ’Course I couldn’t every time figure out what he was aimin’ at. But mostly I learned. That day he hadn’t said nothin’. No sir, nothin’! When right out of the blue he makes an awful sound, kind of a gulp like the end of time it was—somethin’ near between the mewin’ of a buzzard and the rattle of a sneaky snake. Next thing he was lyin’ there, like he was measurin’ himself. It was just like he was asleep.”

  Down the fat, creased, grey, grey, old cheeks and the creased grey, grey double chins the tears ran. Sturdy Little Rice Shoot (no lodger he) stretched over the bar, found a hot towel and wiped the old man’s neck and his huge, flabby, dry-skinned face and right up his great creased forehead to the line of his grey crew-cut. This old man was quicker off the mark. His hand went straight and deep.

  “Yeah. That was the day I left my boyhood behind. ’Course I stood up and was counted as a man. But I hadn’t really figured it out. Couldn’t do. Guess I wasn’t more than twelve and some. Standin’ out there in the corn, with the sun blazing down and the buzzards flyin’ way up over my head. The day my old man finally died on me.” He paused, then he added with a sob, “And I guess I haven’t properly figured it out yet.” Rice Shoot patted his cheek.

  “Poor Papa san,” he said, and he led the lumbering old bear from the room.

  The fairy Huck Finn and her Japanese Jim,” said the elegant, “of all the phoneys . . . Dear God! no, not of all the phonies. Here she comes, the phoniest of them all! Lorelei of Little Rock. And is her rock little!”

  The petite little old man with a blond dyed quiff of hair and the little old, old baby-pouting face, dressed so neatly in a dove-grey suit with a dove-grey stock, his little plump but blotched white hands glistening with rings, hoisted himself like an arthritic kitten onto the stool next to Calligraphy.

  “Shush yo’ noise, honey,” he said to Elegance. “Yo’ sure is the most embarrassin’ person I’ve known since I lost my po’ cousin to self-destruction a while back. Where you from, honey?” he asked Hamo.

  “I am from England.”

  “A British gentleman. Why I just love the British. They’re so refined. What you all doin’ here? Well, we know that. But I mean what’s yo’ business?”

  “I am concerned with rice breeding.”

  “Rice breeding,” said New York elegant, “Why you two girls just talk away. Lorelei there’s the wild hyacinth itself.”

  Hamo murmured “eichornia crassipes”.

  “Is that so? You may well be right. She was born and bred in rice country. She was irrigated before she was knee-high. She’s from Arkansas.”

  Hamo looked wildly round for Mr. Takahashi, then sought desperately to hold the conversation at a tolerable level.

  “I can’t say how much I regret missing Arkansas.”

  “Well now, honey, that’s the nicest thing I heard anyone say in a long, long while. British gentlemen always have the finest manners . . .”

  “Aren’t you singing your siren song up the wrong creek, darling?”

  But Lorelei was up to all Elegance’s jibes. “Yo’ look a mite pale, honey. I hope you’re not sufferin’ from irregularity. You’re such a nice, nice person. My, how these stools crowd one . . .”

  “But I found Louisiana very rewarding too.”

  “Well, honey, don’t say that to all Arkansas boys, but it so happens that I know that country too. Oh, just talkin’ about it makes me so sad.” He took out a small lace-edged handkerchief, and dabbed at the red rims around his faded, surprised, big baby-blue eyes. “I was rose in rice. That’s where my Daddy was at. One time he sent me down to the Bayou country to see what they all was doin’ down there to control that beautiful weed Madam there just mentioned. That is one thing we know in the South and one lesson I learned then, honey. If it’s beautiful, it’s sure gonna up and leave you. Like the beauty of the South. All those miles and miles of just lovely purple swamp. But it had to go, it was killin’ the rice.”

  Mascaraed tears were running down his cheeks. Calligraphy (the more sombre the dresser the bolder the action) stuck out his little coral tongue and licked the tears away.

  “Thank you, chiley,” said Lorelei and his little jewelled claw went quickly round to the back of the stool and dug into Calligraphy’s buttocks. “I sure grew up that time. Just guess what they’d done to keep those lovely flowers down. They’d brought in manatees from way down in the tropics, up from the Gulf. I’m just wondering if you all know what manatees are?”

  “Well, yes,” said Hamo, “they’re a sort of vegetarian seal.”

  “Vegetarian seal! My, that’s kind of nice and zany. You British wear your education with such a lovely humour. I tell you honey, they’re the nicest lil’ ol’ creatures that ever were, just browsin’ around, with wide open eyes, eatin’ seaweed and hurtin’ nobody and nothin’. Sea cows they call them. Well those poor sea cows couldn’t eat that lovely purple weed fast enough, so some Yankee scientist came down with his big ideas and chemical spray. And they shot those sea cows and they sprayed all that lovely purple hyacinth right clean away. I sat just right there and told myself ‘Get off by yourself and play, baby, ’cos that’s the way it’s always gonna be in the South, no more beauty, just the blues!’ And that’s when I left for Europe.”

  Calligraphy’s tongue was having to work so fast to catch the tears that flowed now, that he clearly decided that a climax was coming and, putting his arm around the ancient slender waist, “Silly Papa san,” he said, and led the little frail old porcelain Southern gentleman from the room.

  “Well, there they go, the whole Easter parade! Fairy Huck Finn, and Uncle Ahab and Little Rock Lorelei . . .”

  “They were rather drunk, I’m afraid. Frankly, I was surprised . . . Well I mean they’re not awfully cosmopolitan . . . I mean I could hardly understand what they were saying, and how those boys . . .”

  “Oh, they don’t understand. They’re just yen-minded. Anyway all those tears and all those stories! They were just turning on, dawling. They’ve bummed around, all of them, long, long lives in every gay bar from Sydney to San Diego but they
still have to find the Great American Excuse—Broken Marriage, Death of Daddy, The Spring Seed. Shall I tell you the tale of what my Momma did to me? No? Okay, we’ll skip it. But don’t believe those bums. Why, all those accents! Dawling, they haven’t been back home in fifty years. Well, who does Fairy Finn remind you of, that Roman Imperial frown and hair-do? Gertrude Stein, no less. And that’s just around when he made the Montparnasse gay scene. Two Oakland Girls together they were. With Isadora Duncan, three little maids. But Fairy Finn’s too tough to get his scarf caught in an automobile wheel. Well, away idle gossip. What in the hell’s a kid like you looking for here?”

  Before Hamo could answer there was a loud rustling in the darkest corner of the room and a young man stumbled towards him—a beautifully shaped white youth, with a lovely face but of such intense pallor, eyelids of such translucent violet, and with so pink-rimmed a nose sniffing so vilely and such pale lips twitching so sharply, that Hamo was shocked by this vision of beauty damned. The young man stood by Hamo and stammered something at him incoherently. Elegance reacted with a fierceness that equally shocked Hamo.

  “Go on, piss off, you misery faggot, or I’ll turn you over to the M.P.s.”

  The youth looked vacantly about him and then stumbled from the room.

  “Filthy little hustler! An American, too! She’s on a trip. Well, I just hope it’s a bad one. She’s a deserter. I must tell Sunarko to keep her out of here or I shall have to take myself to the Embassy. God! how I hate the young. Not you, darling,” and he patted the Geisha’s painted cheek. “Well,” he said, “what’s it to be? I don’t know what you British like. Is it a gang bang? You tear off one wing, I’ll tear off the other. Could be fun to hear those little mandarin butterfly cries. No? Well . . .” And twisting the youth’s arm sharply, he propelled him from the stool. “Give my love to Piccadilly. Now that’s one place you can be really sure of an un-hygienic hustler. Genuine Victorian crotches. The British like their meat really high. Come on.”

  The youth, his eyes staring out in a wild way from the riot of silver and red paint, said, “I come, Grandpappa san.” And they were gone.

  Hamo sat a long time, sipping at his warming beer, waiting for Mr. Takahashi, for the dawn, for death. The scenes of the last half hour had given him the horrors, but as well—and this was the top horror—the horn. He felt a hand on his shoulder and there was the elderly proprietress who he saw now was in fact an elderly man in Japanese drag.

  “Come please.” And the man led Hamo down a corridor and into a room at the end, empty but for a bidet and a pile of mattresses on the floor. On the mattress lay the deserter, naked, on his stomach; with his desolate lovely face hidden in the pillows. Hamo looked, and his mouth became dry as his heart beat fast with randiness.

  “American ass,” said the proprietor in a friendly, informative tone, “English arse, Japanese not have.” Before he went from the room, he said, “No need to leave yen, please. Kobayashi Shigeru pay all. Very rich. New client.” He was delightedly proud.

  The youth hardly stirred, but, at the culmination, a wild stuttering flow of words came from his mouth; or rather, as it seemed to Hamo, one word only—“yellow”, repeated about twenty times.

  He washed thoroughly, but the youth lay quite still. Before he went out of the room he tucked a pile of yen under the boy’s shoulder. He remembered his father saying (and it seemed that he had had it from his father) that, in his heart of hearts, every soldier and officer knows that, next to bravery in the front line, it takes most courage of all to desert.

  As the Rolls swept smoothly through the now almost empty Tokyo lanes, Mr. Takahashi spoke volubly at his delight in meeting the proprietor.

  “Sugemoto Sunarko san very interesting man. I remember everyone talk of him when I am little child. Was once great Kabuki actor. Play women parts. All Tokyo. All Japan. This evening he tells me all movements, singing, dance, all traditions. Very interesting. I like traditions.”

  Hamo was determined to be casual. “You’ve never met him before, then?”

  “Oh, no. You are first homosexual gentleman Mr. Kobayashi ask me to arrange.”

  Hamo made no comment. He said only, “I saw no Japanese people there.”

  “Oh, no, Japanese people like only girls.”

  “I can’t quite believe that.”

  “Oh, yes. Maybe Kabuki actor sometimes like men. Or in Shogun times. Or with Samurai. Now only girls.” Then he added, “I hear once a very rich man, a banker likes boys. But such rich man will go to hot springs. Japanese people like to make love only with—I don’t know what you say—girls who can sing and speak poems and talk beautiful love. Hostesses in hot springs. No foreigners there. Same I think for this rich gentleman who like boys. This kind of bar is for shayo-zoku—what do you say? expenses accounts—for tourists and foreign customers.” He bowed a little to express the inferiority of such a place.

  Hamo had nothing to say to this. Mr. Takahashi covered his nervous giggle with his hand and plunged on.

  “Mr. Sugemoto say to me these boys like very old gentlemen, I think. All Japanese people respect greatly old age.”

  “Yes. I noticed that.”

  Giggling wildly, Mr. Takahashi said, “Mr. Kobayashi pays you great compliment. He thinks you very old man, may be. Arrange this bar. But all is good, I think. American boy is very pleased. Poor deserter. No money.”

  Hamo wanted to ignore all this, but he found himself replying, “He didn’t say anything except ‘yellow’ about one hundred times. I can’t think what it meant.”

  “He is dreaming of beautiful blonde girl, may be. I also like very much blonde girls.”

  “Well, whatever he was dreaming of, when he wakes up, I shan’t be part of his dream.”

  Mr. Takahashi was puzzled. “Oh, I see.”

  And now, at last, they had arrived at the hotel.

  The next morning as they drove to the airport, Erroll told him of the splendid dinner that his English girl-friend had made for him.

  “Proper sukiyaki. Nippon style. But with a spot of brown sauce straight from old Harold at Number Ten to give it a bit of a relish.”

  *

  Very old Sir Thomas Needham helped himself, despite his wife’s remonstrating frown, to another dollop of Stilton.

  “Yes, yes,” he said, “I know. But this cheese scoop is half the size of a normal one. I don’t know where you got the thing.”

  Alexandra sat, as it seemed to her, impenetrably shut in by a forest of wine-glasses and finger-bowls and cutlery and jugs of thick-bloomed, heavily scented lilacs, all of which profuse elegance, vestigial and irrelevant though it was to the frugal life the old couple now lived, appeared to make her inelegant problems even more unbroachable.

  Sir Thomas perhaps sensed her feeling. He said, “We haven’t forgotten you, my dear. Don’t think that. I’m turning your business over in my mind, such as it still is. We had an inkling from Zoe, and we guessed the rest. But I’m only allowed half a glass of claret with my luncheon nowadays. And I keep it to the end. To savour it. Until that’s done, I like to steer away from serious topics. Anything that might upset the digestion. Old people are like that. Selfish maybe. Or not having a lot of time to waste. But to put your mind at rest, I’ll say that I think you’ve done very wisely to come and talk it over with us. We’re old, you know, really old. Too old to have any idea of what’s the conventional thing we should think, or to care about knowing it. Not that I was ever un-conventional. Civil servants can’t be. Not if they’re going to do their job properly. People think differently, because of men like Eddie Marsh who got into the public eye. Or Humbert Wolfe. But they were never taken seriously in the service. Eddie March suited Winston in the First World War because he did what he was told.”

  “My dear, Alexandra hasn’t the least idea who Eddie Marsh was.”

  “She’s not alone in that, Lucy. A most forgettable chap. No, that’s not quite fair. He helped a lot of people, poets and painters. But helping people is the last
thing to make you remembered. Too embarrassing for them. Forgotten as quickly as possible.”

  He gave a short bitter laugh which appeared to conjure an equally bitter wind into the room.

  All the windows were open, for, as her great-grandfather had explained, “I have to have plenty of air, I get such a lot of these hot flushes.” Despite the sunny last days of April, a cold northerly draught blew directly into the carefully sited dining-room. Alexandra felt shivery, but then nerves and body had become so inextricably muddled in their effect upon her that she disregarded all sensations, save for short periods when she thought even a stiff neck a precursor of death. She was far more concerned, if it were possible, to stand away and sort out the nerves from possible real insanity.

  Her great-grandmother, so paper-thin, so tiny, huddled herself into her stole. She made a small grimace to Alexandra which might have counselled patience or might have been just a charming intimate signal, for Lady Needham in her hostess prime had depended greatly upon facial gestures for her communication with others, or it might now, as Alexandra realized during only an hour’s stay, be involuntary.

  This very old lady said in a half whisper, “Remind me to talk to you about the label aspect of it all. I think that’s so important. But Tom doesn’t want any of it discussed now. Shall I tell Harriet to serve coffee in the library, Tom?”

  “Good God, no! I have to remind you, Lucy, that those photostats of Cabinet papers are on loan. She’s a splendid housekeeper and hostess and all that, but it’s taking a long time to train her as a secretary, Alexandra. She types after a fashion with two fingers and keeps the papers in good order, but she asks all these ghastly people from around here, who keep calling, God knows why, into my library. The results are disastrous: ‘Oh, Sir Thomas, are those your memoirs? Am I in them?’ ‘Not on your nelly, Madam.’ ”