Cocksure (12 page)

This is not to say the regulars at The Eight Bells were not exceedingly nice to Mortimer, indeed they were, but they also were insultingly correct, as if – in their crafty woggish way – they could sense he didn’t have a big one.

Then one day Joyce phoned him at the office, her manner uncharacteristically flirtatious, and asked him to be sure and pick up a tube of vaginal jelly at the chemist’s before coming home. The promise of sex, even with Joyce again, was exhilarating, though it did mean he would have to wait while she went into the bathroom to hold her diaphragm up to the light to check against any rubber fatigue since last time. Afterwards she would insist that he bathe. The sheets would be changed. All the same, it might be fun.

Mortimer went to Rapani’s, two doors down from The Eight Bells. The old man wasn’t happy to see him. Taking him by the arm, he led Mortimer away from his biggest display counter, the one which featured roll upon roll of striptease films, as if even a glimpse of these small boxes might corrupt Mortimer. Hastily getting into his apothecary’s white jacket, straightening his tie as he stood pointedly under his framed graduation certificate, the unshaven Rapani rubbed his hands and asked, “And what can I do for you, Mr. Griffin?”, somehow suggesting that Mortimer’s needs couldn’t be more complicated than digestive tablets or perhaps razor blades.

Mortimer told Rapani what he wanted.

“I beg your pardon?”

Mortimer repeated his request and Rapani went to fetch the tube, his manner perplexed, as he wondered if Mortimer knew the stuff wasn’t any good for chapped lips.

“Thanks,” Mortimer said snidely.

Mortimer did not visit The Eight Bells for the rest of the week. On Monday evening he had no sooner entered the pub than Rapani was at his side. “Did it do the trick?”

The other regulars watched, one or two of them smirking. Mortimer had been found out. In spite of his furled umbrella, he
indulged in sexual sports from time to time. This, he thought angrily, is insolence indeed, but he swallowed his indignation. How, he wondered, would Ziggy Spicehandler convert a situation like this to his own advantage?

“It was just the thing, Mr. Rapani. Trouble is I need another tube tonight.”

“Already?”

The following week Mortimer, walking past Rapani’s shop, was startled by a rapping on the window. The old man beckoned Mortimer into the rear of his shop and handed him an unlabeled little box of brown pills. “My own mixture,” he said with a wink. “In case you get tired.”

Soon Mortimer, trapped into playing out his Ziggy-inspired role, felt obliged to stop at Rapani’s at least once a week. He found himself buying tubes of vaginal jelly, diaphragms in all available sizes, prophylactics, and Rapani’s very own aphrodisiacs. His stature at The Eight Bells skyrocketed.

“Clean collar, dirty mind,” Donnelly observed.

Rapani seldom began to read from his pornographic paperbacks before Mortimer had arrived. “Would you say, Mr. Griffin, that this writer was, ah, accurate?”

The day after
News of the World
revealed that greenbelt suburbanites, seemingly respectable, actually went in for wife-swapping, Gregory, the headwaiter, went out of his way to be friendly. “It’s nobody’s business but your own,” he said.

Wzcedak leaped to Mortimer’s defense when the
Sunday Pictorial
did a series on orgies in Debland. “The way they parade their pussy on the King’s Road,” he said, “there isn’t one of them who isn’t asking for it.”

Mortimer walked tallest in the heady days of the Profumo scandal.

“Here he comes,” Rapani would say, raising a glass to him, “the man in the mask.”

Wzcedak was openly envious. “He’s just lucky enough to have the right accent and –”

“And something else besides,” Taylor interrupted, beaming.

With the Denning Report looming over all of them, Donnelly worried for Mortimer’s sake. Night after night he insisted on buying him doubles. “Not to worry,” he said again and again. “They wouldn’t dare to name names.”

Mortimer tried to give up his visits to Rapani’s shop, but it was no use. Now Rapani brought the goods directly to the pub, forcing them on an unwilling Mortimer. When Mr. Justice Linslow chose to exercise discretion in the case of a famous film star’s adultery, Rapani pinched his cheek. “Naughty boy,” he said.
“Naughty boy.”

Then things quieted down until one American magazine after another looked upon London and pronounced it swinging.

“They should have gone to you for an interview. You could have told them what’s what.”

“Where would I find the time?”

17

A
NOTHER SLEEPLESS, OPPRESSIVE NIGHT, FOLLOWED
by another vile day. Coming out of the toilet,
The Times
folded under his arm, Mortimer ran smack into Joyce, who said in her special icy voice, “Forgot something, didn’t we?”

Mortimer was baffled, caught off-balance, until she thrust the tin at him: deodorant spray. “Oh,” he said, taking it and returning sheepishly to spray away his smell.

Mortimer wasn’t angry. Hygiene, he knew, was her obsession. She simply couldn’t tolerate stale food or body odors or a speck on her sheets or insects in the house, even one little fly, which she would hunt down if it took her hours, armed with yet another deadly spray. Joyce’s horror of filth extended to secondhand books. She wouldn’t let him keep them in the house on the grounds that the previous owner might very well have been a smallpox carrier. Or syph-ridden.

Oh, well. Mortimer dropped Doug off at his wretched school and then continued to Oriole House. In the parking lot alongside Oriole, he ran into the so recently rejuvenated Lord Woodcock.

“Can you take the chair at the conference this morning?” Lord Woodcock asked. “Dino Tomasso is indisposed.”

Remembering the two black-suited motorcycle riders, Mortimer asked, “Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Eye trouble. A minor operation. Can you or can you not take the morning –”

“Certainly, sir.”

“That’s marvelous, Mortimer. We’re counting on you, you know.”

How well Lord Woodcock looked, Mortimer reflected, as the saintly old man strode to his car.

Only a year ago Lord Woodcock had seemed to be withdrawing into feeble and melancholy dotage, which was easier to comprehend if you remembered the trials and deceptions that British radicals of his generation had endured: Ramsay MacDonald, Spain, the Stalin-Hitler Pact, Hungary, Nye Bevan’s untimely death, Nkrumah … Mr. Woodcock, as he was then, was understandably disconsolate, even bitter. Almost alone among surviving old socialist hellions of the thirties, he had not been ennobled. Again and again, he was overlooked on the Honours List, increasingly cut off from old comrades who now read
Tribune
and formed ginger groups in the bar at the House of Lords. Then, miraculously, Woodcock was offered a peerage, the Star Maker came into his life, and the transformation in the old man was heartening to behold. At Oriole Press, once more he rode with the young, possibly even a step ahead of them. On the terrace of the House of Lords, he was reinstated to the company of old radicals, once again able to reminisce about the hunger march and even to take the micky out of old Oxbridge enemies, peers of the wrong type, the hereditary type, who had served on the opposite side in the general strike. Old leopards, to hear Lord Woodcock tell it, never change their spots. Defiantly, he explained to Mortimer, the Labour lords rented their ermine at Moss Bros., cracked naughty jokes about the Queen, and insisted on being called by their first names at the party conference. These men who wrote revolutionary pamphlets during the Spanish Civil War now honored their radical past by scribbling anti-establishment graffiti in the peers’ toilets. It’s there, Lord Woodcock said, chuckling, for all the other lords to see.

Counting on you
. This was the first indication Mortimer had had from Lord Woodcock in months that, like Hy, he was still a candidate for the big job, once Dino Tomasso returned to Hollywood.

Following the morning conference, Mortimer cornered Hy in the hall. “Hy,” he pleaded, “let’s bury the hatchet. We’ve been friends for years. I –”

“Any time you’re prepared to meet me in the gym, baby, you just let me know.”

“Hy, for Christ’s sake. It’s soon going to be Christ –” Mortimer stopped himself, flushing.

“Christmas? Thank you. Thank you very much,” Hy said, slamming his office door after him.

Grudgingly, Joyce started on her shopping for Christmas dinner, going to Monty’s, on Haverstock Hill, to place her fruit order well in advance. Fortunately for Monty, who abhorred serving Joyce above all his other customers, he saw her coming this time and quickly bolted out the back door, obliging Archie, the new assistant, to take her order.

“Sprouts?” Archie asked brightly, pencil poised.

Joyce said a pound would do.

“And what about new potatoes? Lovely they are.”

“Where are they from?” Joyce demanded suspiciously.

“Italy.”

“All right, then. I’ll have three pounds.”

“Now just feed your eyes on these pineapples. From British Guiana they are. Flown –”

“Where they are holding Dr. Cheddi Jagan in detention?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Would you have any Cuban pineapples?”

“Sorry, no. But let me slice one open for you. These are ever so good.”

“That’s hardly the point at issue. What about your oranges?”

“Spanish navels. Del-icious. Just in.”

“Spanish
navels. Did you say Spanish fascist navels? Where
is
Monty?”

“Gone out. Oh, look here, we do have some Jaffas, if you like?”

Israeli; now there was a poser. “No.” Not since Dayan. “Have you any dates?”

Archie flashed a box of Nigger brand at her.

“Where is Monty? I insist on seeing him.”

“Hello, dear! Kiss?”

“Up your ass.”

“Oh, my. Bad day?”

“Übersturmführer
Griffin sucked up to me again at the office. Chicken-shit bastard,” Hy said, slipping into a shuffle, his lightning left jab stopping just short of Diana’s breasts, “think he doesn’t know? One wrong move and I’ll flatten him.
Like this,”
he said, his right hand suddenly flashing upward toward Diana’s chin.

It was a feint. But Diana, taken by surprise, stupidly raised her guard, presenting Hy with a splendid opportunity to bury a right hook in her belly.

“Ooof,” went Diana, staggering backward.

“Sucker,” Hy hissed, following through with a hammering left to her kidney. A zig, a zag, and then a rat-tat-tat to her ears.

Finally, Diana flicked him off her. “Would you care for a drink before dinner, luv?” she asked warmly.

“I’m going out for dinner.”

“Alone?”

Heh-heh. He didn’t answer. Instead he shuffled backward, lunging, thrusting, shadowboxing his way into the bathroom. Hy stood on the bath stool, got his mouthpiece out of the medicine cabinet, and growled at his reflection in the mirror. Hyman Rosen, after all, was merely his goy-given name. Actually, he thought, baring his teeth at the mirror, I am Chaym ben Yussel, one of a great pugilistic line,
which includes Black Aby, Cat’s Meat Gadzee, Ikey Pig, Ugly Baruk Levy, Little Puss Abrahams, The Yokel Jew Sodicky and, above all, Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza! On January 9, 1788, Hy remembered, the great Mendoza, his ankle broken, fainted from pain, and his archenemy, the brutish Gentleman Dick Humphries, stood over him and shouted, “I have done the Jew!” The hell he had. For on May 6, 1789, Mendoza met Humphries again and reduced the braggardly goy to a bleeding pulp. Grrr, went Chaym ben Yussel. Grrr.

Oh, dear, Diana thought, recognizing the mood, Hy’s Jewish-avenger mood. In such a state, he was inclined to rake the streets, searching for covert Jew-haters; testing people in bus queues, telling them to get fucked; charging after young couples coming out of espresso bars, cursing them in Yiddish; and spitting at old men out walking their dogs. All the same, it wasn’t easy for Hy to provoke a fight. Most people had a too-well-developed sense of fair play to hit back at the crazed little man. If he persisted, they made sport of him. But kicking, punching, his flow of obscenities unceasing, Hy was, on occasion, difficult to ignore, and once or twice he was badly mauled.

Grrr
.

Mortimer hurried, late again, to catch up with the group he had joined at Paddington Station.

“Have I missed much?” he asked Agnes Laura Ryerson.

“Not to worry,” their leader said, intervening, his grin infectious. “But I think you’d best sit this one out and catch your breath, don’t you?”

Mortimer had chosen Paddington over Waterloo and other stations after considerable deliberation because he was not likely to run into commuters known to him there, which could be hellishly embarrassing. Not that he hadn’t taken precautions. He wore dark glasses and was known to the others as Jim. All the same, he thought, I shouldn’t be doing this. God knows what Joyce would think. Andv
she’d be right, as usual. It’s commercialized, the brotherly-love bit oozes smugness. The parties, an excuse for the worst sort of promiscuity, are good business and tax deductible. The gift-giving aspect is phony and even most of the cards you get are not from friends but from other firms. Still, Mortimer was a sucker for Christmas. Even before the decorations had gone up on Regent Street, he’d caught the fever.

Last year, damn it, it had been touch and go with Joyce over having a tree. “With so-called Christians bombing Viet Nam? Hypocrisy,” Joyce cried. “I had to live with it as a child, but not in my own house.”

Mortimer could remember his anguish walking the streets of Hampstead with Doug and staring enviously at the enormous Christmas trees in all the other homes. He decided to have another stab at Joyce. He pointed out that Mrs. Cohen from next door had been giving him filthy looks. “It may seem to the Cohens,” he said, “that we don’t have a tree in our window because we resent theirs. We are, if only by omission, rebuking them for intruding on the celebration of the birth of our Saviour.”