As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  It was at the top of Gower Street in that new world of underpass and flyover that Alexandra felt, not tired, but as so often now, the need to pee.

  “All right, you go to the ladies, love. And not to waste time, I’ll phone the doctor. And we’ll meet back here.”

  When Alexandra emerged four minutes later she could not see the Little Mam anywhere. She gave her five minutes but then she became alarmed. Perhaps, after all, this had only been a ruse to try out whether she could manage on her own. To force her to admit dependence. All right, she would show them. She had come up from the underground by the Euston Road exit. She stood for a moment at the entrance in a world of thunderous emptiness. High above towered the great glass and concrete monsters, swaying down upon her as the clouds scudded by them; and she poor feeble insect on the pavement below. Not to look up then. But ahead. And there, whoosh, whoosh, cars, taxis, lorries, buses by some secret timing, by an indicator hidden from the pedestrians, known only to the cold metal brontosauruses that were hunting her down in the concrete wastes. And ahead was waste land, half destroyed houses, hoardings with torn bills that flapped in the great sunlit dusty gale that was sweeping through this world and clearing it of all the human rubbish that was blown before it.

  And she was following others, for that was how it worked—never get out of step—she saw where to go and when the lull was and why the crossing exactly there.

  It was only when she arrived at the other side of Euston Road that, looking back to that alien land from which she had escaped, she noticed a little figure, legs shapely enough for its scarlet mini-skirt, but body too fat and heavy, and then above that, a face of a terrified pet animal. There she was—the Little Mam, at the wrong tapered end of the long central island that divided the throughway, standing on a narrow concrete edge, behind her a forest of landscaped shrubs, before her, within inches, a Birnam Wood of speeding traffic. A brave little vanishing species of chirpy robin in the concrete jungle. Alexandra watched with agony to see in her some stranger, all sturdy good sense, all sexy ease, all good fellowship, fun and irrepressible cheek gone, a little, oldish, frightened made-up woman lost. It was unbearable to see her so, to sense a panic imminent, more genuine than any she herself had probably ever known. To enable her to reach her grandmother, there came, piercing through the clouds of anxiety that swam through her brain, a quick, accurate intelligence she had forgotten that she possessed. With it her eye made out in a second the way to join this little shipwrecked sailing-boat—arrangements are not made for those who lose their moorings—and in seconds her more youthful legs brought her to her grandmother’s side.

  The Little Mam said nothing, but she was trembling. It took, in the centre of those rushing unending streams of traffic—people want to get there, get home, get away, get stoned, get stuffed—what Alexandra felt to be for ever to find a taxi, to attract the driver’s attention, to secure his acknowledgement, to find a stopping place, to be on their way home. And by then the Little Mam’s trembling had given way to tears (the age of stiff upper lips has given place once more to the age of sentiment, men are wearing their hair long again, an Empire has been lost).

  In the taxi, with all the weapons of her time, compact and mirror and powder-puff and lipstick, the Little Mam set to to repair the ravages of her fright, the vestiges of shame.

  “It was the telephoning that did it, duck. I just can’t cope with the new public boxes and that’s honest. As soon as I got on to the receptionist at the doctor’s, I lost her over and over again, then those pips and I dropped all the money on the floor. But it’s all right—I did what I said I’d do for you. And then, coming out, I got lost.”

  Alexandra had taken her grandmother’s hand, nor did the Little Mam remove it. After a long silence—indeed as Camden Town came into sight—she said: “There was three men altogether that saw me standing there. I mean, you know, real men. Smart and all. And they looked away. Babies, bringing up children, money worries, hard labour, don’t let them worry you with that stuff, Ally Pally. It’s all in a day’s work. Any woman can do that so long as there’s men around to show interest. And I always had that. Plenty of men to pass the time of day with. Good lookers, too. Fun to be with, some of them. Now in the restaurant it’s all women and women’s talk. Or foreigners and the waiters—Arabs, Portuguese and such. It makes it hard to find a reason for going on.”

  She took her hand out of her grand-daughter’s. They were home, though, so it was the natural thing to do. Nevertheless, it was done, not as an automatic movement, but as a deliberate gesture.

  *

  Ah! the rorty little things! . . . how they

  tousled them, and mousled them!

  The great pink and white iced cake with its intricate tiers and columns was an edifice equally fit for a curious pantheon or for the Shrine of Kali—although to the uncles, especially the Northern uncles, it spoke also of half-forgotten nursery tales, of Grimm and of Perrault, of the Christmas Carol and of Andersen. Its fourteen candles of pink and white wax flamed and smoked, filling the room with a mysterious haze. The long chain of rose and white frangipani flowers running across the centre of the table could have been a scented molten stream of deliquescing candle wax. Even to Hamo’s rational sensibility, the whole perfumed, steamy, murky atmosphere brought overtones of exotic and arcane mystery, initiation and rite.

  Jonkheer Kerkelyk van Enkhuijsen rose to his full six foot height at the head of the table, turned his back upon the assembled company, let down his trousers and underpants: and from his enormous hairy arse emitted in rapid cannonade fourteen farts that resounded across the delicious cake, putting out the candles, giving an acrid turn to the cloying flower scent. A rouroulade of fourteen farts so consistently sustained in both force and note was an achievement that roused excited clapping from the boys and a warm shower of compliments even from the sophisticated grown-ups. Little Ian Wong, in whose honour the feat had been performed, buried his smooth saffron face in his white shirt to hide his delighted blushes and giggles at so signal a tribute to a mere boy from the greatest of all the uncles, the Dutch uncle himself.

  The French uncle, Armand Leroux, apprehensive no doubt of English concern for the social aspect of events, said to Hamo: “No. But really. This is quite extraordinary. One so easily forgets the deeply traditional quality of the Dutch noblesse. The cheap Paris-Match image of the house of Orange has obscured it. Something of this kind must have been the customary honouring of a favourite page by the Jonkheer’s ancestors of the fifteenth or even, one may venture, the fourteenth century. We have nothing here to do with the vulgarities of Frans Hals’s burghers of the dyke lands. No, this is the petite noblesse of Louvain and Brabant at its best—what in France we call the hobereaux. An aristocratic franchise that found an easy response in the mœurs of its own peasantry, in those broad-cheeked arses of the merry-eyed skaters and drinkers of Breughel or Jan Steen. No! No, really—such a lack of bourgeois pudeur is completely delightful.”

  But the Jonkheer, his clothing and posture as host both resumed, gazed out of his great grey-skinned, sensual, flabby face with his usual empty, yet unyielding stare.

  “Well, boys, cut away,” he cried, “but don’t forget, any chap who stuffs himself sick earns a stuffing of another kind.” He purred at his English punning, for all the uncles prided themselves on their wide linguistic powers. Then he added, titillating himself and others by a little self-conscious brutality, “As if they won’t all be stuffed before the party finishes.” And he roared in gargantuan ancestral laughter. But perhaps its very robustness put him into an eheu fugaces mood, for he said sombrely, “Yes, yes, cut away. Is that a possible play on words, Mr. Langmuir? But there should be no need for knives. My grandfather would have blasted that cake into pieces.”

  The Dutch uncle was a great man—doyen, leader and organizer of this international club, and the elder English uncle, Commander Ensworthy, hastened obliquely to reassure him.

  “I think, Langmuir, you know,” he said,
“that we’ve been privileged to hear the authentic thunderous note that put the wind up Charles the Second and his roistering pals at Whitehall when the Dutch came up the Medway.”

  He frowned and coughed in tactful remonstrance when Hamo refused his large “dollop” of birthday cake. He was frankly a good deal worried by Hamo’s presence at this great triennial rendezvous of the uncles (made each three years in a different Asian land to coincide with a favoured boy’s birthday). Not only because he felt responsible for Hamo’s behaviour as a visiting Englishman, but because the younger English uncle (by a long way the youngest of the uncles, not yet forty years of age) had introduced this travelling scientist on a very inadequate knowledge of his tastes, finding indeed (so he had anxiously informed the Commander), only unfortunately too late, during the car journey up to the rendezvous, that the man’s tastes were schismatic, if not indeed heretical. “I say, I’m rather worried. He seemed to be one of the holy brethren when we got talking at the club. But now it appears that he’s looking for milk that’s gone off the boil. Coming up, we stopped at the rest-house and he started showing an interest in the house-boy, a great hairy chap of twenty. I didn’t know where to look.” “Well, for God’s sake, keep him away from von Langenbeck and Poulsen,” was all that the Commander could advise on the spur of the moment, for the German and Danish uncles were notoriously strict in their practice. Hamo, however, showed no response to decent hinting.

  “I’m afraid you must excuse me. My days of cake-eating are over,” he said primly. To mitigate any apparent stand-offishness, particularly to the junior part of the company, with whom he felt particularly ill at ease, he addressed himself to the huddle of boyish faces of varying shades of yellow and brown, from very light ivory to rich dark chocolate, which looked eagerly, with a suitable mixture of respect and impudence, towards the uncles’ end of the table. “There’ll be all the more for you boys,” he said, hoping that his voice did not suggest the embarrassment he felt at the words he had chosen. Not to appear wholly unsusceptible to these disgustingly immature charms, he searched among them, and, finding a taller heavier boy, who might have been an undersized seventeen, he spoke to him particularly. “You have my slice.” Then he dreaded what might be the outcome of such particularity.

  He need not have feared. The uncles exacted a pre-1914 good manners from their various protégés, who, in any case, as the French uncle explained to him, came from “the old Asian European-trained clerisy, brought up in the traditions of the grammar school and the lycée, very conscious of the advantages to their sons of association with European gentlemen”. As indeed were the boys themselves, each of whom now vied with the other in welcoming this new, elegant and probably rich English uncle. What greeted him from this display of shorts and open white shirts and crest-pocketed blazers was a barrage of boyish welcome that came from the pages of some shabby volumes lying half-forgotten on the shelves of his prep-school library.

  “Please, Sir, have my piece.”

  “Have my piece, Sir, have mine.”

  “Don’t bother with his rotten old bit, Sir.”

  “Oh, don’t encourage him, Sir. He’s a frightful pig already.” This last from Master Singapore 1968.

  And another, blowing out his cheeks in imitation of the rather fat-faced boy to whom Hamo had spoken, cried, “Voyez vous, monsieur, comme il est déjà joufflu.” This from Master Cambodia 1967.

  Quick interchange from English to French and back again among the boys. But it was clear from the victim’s blushes and his uncomprehending eyes that he had no lingua franca at his command.

  The German uncle, in fluent Burmese, came to his protégé’s rescue. It was a feat in these days to be the lover of Master Burma at all, as the Commander explained to Hamo. To have brought him out of that self-quarantined country solely for the birthday celebrations of Master Hong Kong was something worthy of Richard Hannay, Percy Blakeney, Bulldog Drummond or James Bond. Did Langmuir like good yarns as much as he, the Commander, did? Strange that the perfect playing of such a role should fall to a Hun; but strange really only if you forgot the knight errantry of Rudolf Rassendyll, in that finest of all yarns, Rupert of Hentzau. Langenbeck’s bringing of his Burmese boy to this great occasion was the exploit which all there would have admiringly discussed, had there not lingered in the topic some flavour of criticism of the great Dutch uncle himself. As the Commander whispered, it was in some ways a prickly subject. After all, the Jonkheer, in providing Master Hong Kong as the hero of the day, was in that very offering, despite all his perfect Mandarin, Cantonese and a dozen North Chinese dialects, underlining the absence of Master Peking for whose Final Coming all the Uncles (as indeed all good South-East Asian Europeans) ever looked. But short of such a return to civilization, Herr von Langenbeck’s Burmese exploit had something in it of the chivalry of the good old days.

  The sense of a lost age first adumbrated in the Jonkheer’s nostalgic reference to his grandfather’s farting prowess, and un-spokenly present in the thought of the imaginary Master Peking, lovely peony imprisoned in the Eternal City of Pax Sinica and civilization, year by year appearing more lost to them for ever, was reinforced by Master Burma’s total lack of European tongues in which he was almost equalled by the Danish uncle’s Master Ceylon—could it be some horrible portent of an alien iron-curtained Asia of the future? It was the American uncle, as much spokesman for modern political matters among the uncles as Armand Leroux was for social matters, who explained this to Hamo.

  “Jesus! Do you hear that? Can you believe that a nation can be so dumb? The boy’s going to be an engineer and this God-damned Burmese government doesn’t teach him English. What can you do for these people?”

  And the Danish uncle added that since Mrs. Bandaranaike, his own lovely Laksman had to pick up most of his English from himself.

  “I am afraid he will be practising Viking medicine.” His jokes were very simple. “My English is not so perfect, you know. Also in the wholesale marketing of plastic buckets to improve the domestic conditions of Asian villagers, I don’t think I employ so many medical terms.” As his lilting Welsh English ran on it was hard not to believe that he had taught English to all the youth of Ceylon and India.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t worry, Poulsen, if Mrs. B. gets back a second time, it won’t just be this ‘neglect of English’ nonsense. The boy’ll be learning Ayurvedic medicine—eye of newt and toe of frog.” Commander Ensworthy, however, seemed more friendly to the reaction than the American uncle, for, fixing Hamo with a far-away occult look in his frank British blue eye, he added, “I don’t suppose that Langmuir here will agree but it may not be half a bad thing. Eye of newt and toe of frog it is in their minds and the mind creates the body’s expectancies. I doubt if any Asian body expects or can be satisfied with the latest Western antibiotic.” He added something further, unintelligible to Hamo, which he addressed to his pouting-mouthed, drowsy-eyed Indian boy. The boy instantly replied very solemnly in equally unintelligible words. “There you are, you see, the lad knows all right. I started the Tantric spell against the piles he gets in his dear little passage to heaven and he completed it at once. Their language, their beautiful little bodies and, I’m inclined to believe, their medicine to go along with them—that’s how it should be.” Looking infinitely melancholy, the Commander stared across the room, and said in a sort of chant, The boy across the river has a bottom like a peach, but, alas, I cannot swim. Ah, well!”

  This was not the way to bring Asia, however screaming (and a few screams were surely a reasonable gratification), by its heels into the twentieth century. On the faces of the others—all agri-business salesmen, advertisers, development men, technological advisers, import-export experts—there could be seen that combination of irritation and impatience with which the rest of the world so often nowadays hears the voice of Britain. The Jonkheer spoke for them all when, with his usual courtesy, he addressed the senior English uncle.

  “My dear Commander, let me congratulate you on your G
ujarati and,” bowing to Master India, Banadakrishna Ghosha, upon the delicious partner whom you have chosen in which to exchange its poetry, but if this foolish nationalism really succeeds in reducing our singing birds to nothing but their native song, I must remind you that much of the fellowship, and most of the verbal delights, of our meetings would be lost to us. No, what pleasure will there be if we have to propose our traditional jolly British toast ‘Bottoms Up!’ in ten or so different tongues before our charming guests realize what is expected of them?”

  The laughter against the Commander was immediate, and he took it in good part, but unfortunately the second English uncle, Mr. Derek Lacey, perhaps in defence of his countryman, but with real wistfulness said: “I suppose it might mean that we could open our membership to some of the meaner beauties of the bazaars and the estates and the paddy-fields.”

  Even Hamo (bored, when not perspiringly embarrassed, and always with a distaste for conscious social snobbery) could sense that this was a gaffe more serious than appeared on the surface of the words. The French uncle clearly found it a socially unpleasant suggestion, but it was towards the great Dutch uncle that everyone looked in anxiety; and indeed his heavy brow was thunderous, but no storm broke. Ostensibly to change the conversation, but perhaps with malicious desire to push home this rout of the English, perhaps from some jealousy at Hamo’s particularization of his Burmese boy, the German uncle said: “Mr. Chairman, I really think I must protest that our distinguished British visitor does not forgo his puritan refusal of the sweets of life, at least in honour of the delicious Chinese sweetmeat you have so generously brought to our tea-table. Mr. Langmuir, you must have some of the torte or you will hurt the feelings of our beautiful Ian Wong.”