Mating (47 page)

It was all dissolving as I approached. Two late contributions that struck me as not quite in keeping with the spirit of the event rang out, one being No more to drink only always bush tea! and the other being No more only to be using block soap! The first referred to Sekopololo’s resistance to stocking socalled white tea, brands like Joko available from South Africa, out of fidelity to the idea that we should continue drinking the locally gathered rooibos tea, which was free and perfectly good, albeit without caffeine. The second related to Sekopololo’s similar chariness when it came to ordering commercially produced soaps, again because we were supposed to be happy with the local homemade soap, its feeble lathering capacity notwithstanding. Somebody was out to provoke a little. That was interesting.

Denoon was off with the performers. It was truly over. Once again Harold and Julia seemed to be my lot: I was the logical one to do something since no one else was, and here they were, wafting toward me, Harold looking especially superior to everything and Julia looking rather numbly appeasing. Harold had wanted to say something, but, he claimed, only by way of thanks, and that hadn’t been arranged, which increased my guilt feelings, because if I hadn’t sequestered myself I could have seen to it.

So I said to come to dinner in a half hour, that it would be just entre nous, at which they half melted with relief. In truth I may have invited them because I thought it would be easier than facing Nelson alone with the fund of questions I had built up burgeoning. There was also defiance in it in that I was fairly sure the last thing in the world he would choose to have happen that evening was a prandial confrontation with the people he had been aiming his shafts at, at least in the Perfidious Albion segment. It was defiance saying to me that if I wanted to have people in I should be able to. He would be welcome but not as a boor. He was going to have to be nice as a courtesy to me. He was going to have to be nice out of his best instincts, not via negotiation with me. With men it takes too long for me, as a usual thing, to come face to face with the nature of what I’ve actually gotten into. Is this the man? was the question that was always with me. Nelson would be lovely to people of my choosing as a courtesy to me if for no other reason, or I could draw my own
conclusions. Of course in this case I was choosing guests specifically not to his liking. But tant pis. He hated what the British had done in Africa. I appreciated all this and also all his buried anxiety about his origins at every level, from the mother of empires through his mother and father. But nevertheless. Why should I give in to his hysteria over being a created being instead of some self-created neat original? I would love to be original. I would love to. There are things you can do something about and things you can’t. I was determined that Nelson was not going to be someone with a neurotic stance toward his origins. That way lies madness.

Anyway, Harold and Julia would turn up in no time to partake of I knew not what at that point. But I sped home and began deciding what canned delicacies to sacrifice for the occasion. Our last can of consommé was going to go for onion soup. I was feeling reckless. I pulled down items, like some smoked oysters, I knew Nelson would bridle at laying out. Oddly and to my great relief he was all mildness about their coming for dinner. I sensed he was nervous that I was going to take up the question of the point of the Albion exercise, at least, and that he was glad not to have to look forward to being alone with me, even if it meant more Harold. Combined with any rays of indignation proceeding from me was the symbolism of my having a knife in my hand while I sliced onions perfectly thinly, like a machine of some kind. I slice very thin and I slice very fast. It’s a gift I have. Nelson helped minutely with dinner.

I heard our guests outside. I said to Nelson The only substantive thing I want to beg you to let alone is religion. The man is an observing Catholic and not an adolescent you might consider it reasonable to proselytize. If you want to argue about England you’re on your own, but do it on the merits and be scholarly, the way you can. He said something like it was never too late for reason, which I took to be apropos my request about arguing religion, but in such a murmur that I took it as compliance.

This is more a collation than a normal kind of dinner, I said when they came in. In looking at what I had wrought, I realized I had just been putting one thing next to another and come up with something signifying nothing. Also I had concentrated on what was quick. There were chapatis, toasted sprouts, tabouleh, the oysters, the French onion soup, goat’s milk clabber to go with the tabouleh. There was no entrée, strictly speaking. I decided to boil some eggs.

Evidently Harold had more than one crucifix. This one was silver, also very large, a Maltese cross. Denoon admired it and asked Harold if
he knew who had the world’s largest personal collection of crucifixes. Harold had no idea, but when he was told it was Boy George he seemed genuinely delighted to know that, not offended in any way I could tell, and then I saw why: he was just into the foyer of drunkenness. That was also why Julia seemed so scattered and tense, sans doute. In a trice Harold was producing from a knapsack the source of his joy, which was a bottle of rare Scotch, Oban, a little more than three quarters full, a gift. Ah, Denoon said, trying not to look my way.

Harold seemed very happy. He stalked around our place, peering condescendingly at different things and saying whatever he was saying in a voice audible only to himself. I don’t know what he’d expected, but he was clearly and stupidly pleased to see that technically speaking we were among the poor and that however he lived, it was at a level above this. Julia wanted to be gracious. She followed Harold around and said countering things. But he wanted more to drink. Do you see what this is? he said, holding the bottle up close to Nelson’s face, Oban. I hope you will join me, and you also—he said to me—as Julia will not do, her only fault. But there was a surprise. Her hands were full of mugs. Ah well, this one time, she said. He had begun pouring. He looked blue murder at her and poured a trifling drink. More, sir, please, she said. He complied only barely. He looked at her, astounded underneath. My drink was also derisory. Denoon he lavishly supplied, and himself.

Denoon hesitated over his huge drink. Here I have some responsibility. I think he was about to give some shred of a piety vis-à-vis not wanting to indulge in something, an evil that he was forever urging the avoidance of in Tsau, but I preempted and said They’re leaving tomorrow, trying to show that a drink tonight hardly mattered. I thought we could all be normal together, just possibly. I think I also wanted to show Julia at least that there was no question of Nelson needing my permission re a drink before dinner. Because I think Nelson had been on the point of looking, in some way he thought would be covert, for my permission, which was not tolerable.

Julia was looking agony in my direction. The sky at dusk is so luminous, she said, and wandered off and out into the courtyard as though to look at it, despite the fact that night had fallen and I had batteries of candles going. I never drink, Denoon said to Harold, then drank hungrily. He was transformed with his first couple of swallows. I could tell. His sensitivity to alcohol had to be genetic. Julia called me out into the yard.

Give them some starters, she said. The oysters could be starters, I
proposed, but that was no good because Harold disliked seafood unless it was plaice fried stiff. Then she wanted to know when we could get soup out, at the soonest. I estimated it would be twenty minutes and this seemed to send her into distraction. She stood in the doorway, looking in at Harold and Nelson, then came back and went so far as to get down on her hands and knees in order to blow into the firebox of the yard stove, to forward the soup, as she put it.

Are they getting on? I asked.

More than well, she said. Then: I think he would eat cashews, if you have some about.

I didn’t have any.

Several times she said Well, I must tell you. But she stopped each time before saying anything more. I had to stop her from, in her agitation, pushing more sticks into the fire than made sense.

I don’t know about your husband, she said, but Harold is very susceptible to drink. This is so wretched for me, but I am very worried. Harold likes your husband very much, and he might say something I am very worried could, er, flow back. To the British Council.

Nelson is not my husband, I said. I didn’t want to go further into it than that. She gave me a long look, a surprised look.

How do you conclude he likes Nelson? I asked her. They seem so opposite. Before she could explain, I remembered I had a Gouda cheese, not too old, sitting in its carapace on a shelf somewhere. Gouda is durable. I ran to get it. This could be the answer to the appetizer question. But something had penetrated its red shell. The cheese was hard, a kernel of its former self, wizened. That was my news for her.

She said You see, when we finish a booking we have an agreement that, all right, he can—er—be himself, um. But because we like you so very much, well, and this is more drink than he, you see, I worry, we must eat, truly, how are they? She was as disjunct as that.

I said I was there long enough to hear Nelson explaining the origin of his bête noire World War I, where history went wrong.

Harold loves history, she said.

I said Well, he is getting an explanation of why the war that ruined everything began. I had heard this one before. The proposition was that the Czar had caused the war by calling for a general mobilization intended to stop a general strike going on in St. Petersburg. The Germans and everybody else had misread the mobilization, and voilà. Nelson collected historical inadvertencies, the accidents underlying the supposedly inevitable or foreordained. I can’t remember them all. One had to do
with the supposed historical enigma of the persistence of Judaism as an entity in a world so hostile to it. There were two parts to this. One was that the existence of Judaism as a distinct religion was attributable to the accident of the Seleucids overthrowing the Ptolemies, because if the Ptolemies had kept control of Palestine the hellenizing process which had already captured the town elites would have worked its way out to the rustics and run its course. But the Seleucids with their fanatical confrontationalism had radicalized the Jews, and the rest is history. The second part of this is lost.

It’s a very poor idea, trying to instruct Harold in anything, especially the historical, Julia said.

She was right. I said At this very moment your husband is taking the position that if Nelson is correct about the First World War then it’s the socialists after all who’re really to blame for it by going on strike when they did, which is hardly Nelson’s interpretation.

Denoon came out with a flashlight, and I thought for a moment he was about to help us with the fine detail of cooking in the dark, but no, he wavered off into the bush, walking not quite as I was used to.

She saw something in my expression, because she clutched my hand with both hands and said And nor is he my husband, Harold. England is hard. I don’t think you know. There is no regional theater, nothing like. So we do this. My husband is dead. Harold is a homosexualist, you see, and we agreed we would say we were married. There was a ceremony of sorts. Because you see the British Council prefer very much to make use of the married for overseas work like this. Nelson slid past and into the house, carrying something.

She wanted to tell me everything. I tried to listen. There was a tortuous story about favoritism at the BBC. I had things on my mind. The main one was the question of whether Nelson would hold to his promise to stay off the subject of the Catholic Church. The Church fascinated him, and his thesis about it was that through stumbling into the celibacy requirement for priests it had created an accidental sanctuary for homosexuals whose concentrated talents would result in a capital-accumulation mechanism second to none, since the assets of the Church could never be in danger of being dispersed to the heirs of its dramatis personae. Thus, through celibacy to temporal power and invincibility. He loved to talk about the Church, and I was afraid drinking would erode whatever barrier his promise to me constituted. It was institutional permanency that fascinated him, the unmoved movers historically. And Harold was so floridly Catholic. The irony involved in the Church both
stigmatizing homosexuals and covertly and brilliantly exploiting their energies was going to recur to Nelson and be difficult to resist. And it occurred to me that another angle of attack might be suggested by Harold’s also florid antisocialism. Nelson had a teasing analysis of the Church as a model socialist institution that I’d heard him trot out before. This would be more manageable on my part, if in fact he succumbed to temptation.

Julia was dishing up soup before my very eyes. It wasn’t as hot or as married as I like French onion soup to be, but I deferred to her anxiety.

We went in with the soup. It seemed to me that both Harold and Nelson were responding benignly to the alcohol. In fact brotherhood was in full flower. Our men had found common ground on an astounding issue, Shakespeare, agreeing that whoever wrote the plays was amazing because for any of the credible candidates, including Shaxpur, writing was a part-time activity, subsidiary in his case to acting and wool gathering, as Denoon put it. He meant, of course, wool factoring. They were even beginning to agree to disagree, I gathered, about men in relation to women, sequent to an exchange of pleasantries about the Lamentations spectacle. Harold wanted a hearing for his denial that men were harder on women than they were on other men, only a hearing. In other words, denying the reality of gynophobia, I thought to myself. Go ahead, Denoon said, fairness incarnate. Also coming up was a hearing for the proposition that women were as bad as men, given the opportunity, as indicated by the fact that the most murderous and depraved period in Turkish history was the wellknown socalled Rule of Women, when concubines ruled various sultans from behind the curtain of the seraglio. We adore women, Harold was maintaining.