Old Acquaintance (5 page)

LOTTE
had accepted two duties. The first, and less important, was to make a small opening speech. The second, and the more so, was to present one of the prizes, the one for best actress, she believed.

The stage was flanked by flags of all nations, or at any rate,
of all nations which made films. The screen was concealed by a curtain hung in Vienna folds, like a window, though there was nothing behind it to see until the projectors came on.

There were no chairs on the stage. The judges and speechmakers were seated in the front row and went up, when called upon, to be introduced by an M.C. That was just as well. One cannot be glamorous and a sitting duck at the same time.

She was described as someone I am sure you all know and love.

Equally sure that they did not know her, for she had always covered her tracks well, and that the love of stage-folk is merely a mutual conspiracy, Lotte walked to the stage with leggy assurance, though missing that theme song which had trumpeted her triumphant return from limbo in every major night club in the world. Alas, for
La
Vie
en
Rose
one needs spectacles of the same color, and Lotte, who was myopic, faced her audience as though speaking into the background of a fantasy by Goya.

Seeing them was like looking down on the world she had surmounted. She felt exactly like a mountain climber. There isn’t anything up there, but at least you can see how you got up, and the air is bracing (actually there was a cold draft coming from somewhere).

Her little speech only took two or three minutes. She was gracious, bland, enchanting, her voice carefully plumped out with quiet laughter, kind, benign, and definitely an elder statesman.

Then the show was on. Surely only a very foolish person would enjoy to watch himself lurching about up there, through a series of arbitrary dramatic hoops made out of celluloid. You have to be catlike to enjoy that sort of vanity, and Lotte was doggy. A puppy may bark at a mirror, but then he sighs and decides to ignore it.

Lotte ignored it. She had seen films before.

AFTERWARDS
the four of them had dinner. The starlet was not amusing, but one has a duty to be civil. She seemed both to be overawed by them and to regard them as irrelevant. They were too old and odd, and Paul, though attentive, was not a professional. It seemed unlikely she would ever be a star. Almost certainly, she would marry a shoe manufacturer and be replaced by someone else just like her. They did not worry about her and she did not worry about them.

Charlie addressed himself to the wine list with a blank deceptive indecision, monocle and all, which would not have fooled a fly. Having been poor when young, he enjoyed these ceremonies all the more now he could afford them. Though he knew wines well, it was their names he ordered by.

Beaujolais was good for certain late afternoons. It suggested a gentle, well-fed melancholy. Médoc (which he didn’t like) he ordered when he could, because the name fascinated him (something to do with Langue d’Oc,
le
prince
d’Ac
quitaine
à
la
tour
abolie,
and all that. Thieves have their rhyming slang, and so do the extremely civilized, though no professor has yet compiled it in a dictionary in which to look themselves up). Chambertin was his favorite to drink, but he always forgot to order it, because the name displeased him, he didn’t know why. A mixture of Chamberlain and
libertin,
perhaps. On white wines he was less good. Chablis was drinkable. Bordeaux he loathed.

So white wines usually turned out to be a Sylvaner, because
of Aeneas Silvius, perhaps, which suggested pig-a-back out of Troy, a Delacroix he liked (because of the posture), while the fire was going, though since the picture actually had something to do with the Good Samaritan, it also suggested the more nearly austere Popes and Gibbons’s silver swan, who living had no note.

“A Sylvaner ’53,” said Charlie, looking forward to the wine cooler. He was fond of the sound of ice, the chichi of the bucket, and the glitter of diamonds.

Paul wanted to dance with the starlet.

“What, again?” asked Charlie, staring balefully at a runny egg mayonnaise. That English restaurants should serve bad French food we expect, and even praise. That continental restaurants should serve bad English food was going too far.

He was annoyed. Lotte didn’t see why he should be. A warm milk glass egg mayonnaise is a sickening goody, no matter where served, and if Paul wanted to pretend he was a ski instructor being nice to a rich American, she didn’t see why he shouldn’t. Having dissembled by the imitation of vice, she had a wistful attitude toward those whose real dream was to simulate virtue. Perhaps the poor boy misses women, she thought, of his own age, but did not say so. Since her mind often made unfortunate because automatic connections, she was always careful to leave the wit to those who needed it. She did not like to cause harm.

“Why don’t they come back?” said Charlie. “I don’t want another cocktail before dinner. I want dinner.”

They came back, though not soon enough. The starlet drew a thin tulle gauze over her shoulders, having felt the chill.

The waiter wished to consult about the salad dressing. He had the manner of a culinary Metternich. In the concord of Europe, the problem of salad dressing looms large.

Paul made a dart for independence. “Salad cream,” he said.

Charlie’s monocle fell out. The waiter looked perturbed.

“It’s something I learned about in England,” said Paul. “It saves trouble.”

“I’ve been there,” said Charlie, who maintained very high standards, chiefly by piling his preferences by main force on top of other people’s whims. “It’s like boot polish, only yellow.”

“Well then, Green Goddess salad dressing,” said Paul.

“Heh?”

“Green Goddess salad dressing.” Paul was being stubborn. These little scuffles for independence can be embarrassing. Lotte looked at the view.

The starlet blinked her eyes. The salad cream dialogue had puzzled her, but now she knew where she was.

“The
Green
Goddess,”
said Charlie slowly, “is the name of a play. It is about a wicked
rajah
who is extremely
nasty
to some
English
people whose plane has just crashed. The plane has crashed because it ran out of salad cream. It is by Mr. William Archer, the
admirer
of Ibsen.”

“You mean like
A
Doll’s
House
,” said the starlet, unexpectedly.

“I mean it
is
a doll’s house,” said Charlie. “I don’t care what they did in Kenya. Kenya’s doomed anyway. If you want to be pukka, you can go be pukka in the provinces. Here you have lemon juice, lots of vinegar, and very little oil. Probably the Americans will do it as a musical. Why not?”

“Do what as a musical?” asked Lotte, seeing he was trying to duck back into nonsense, where he belonged.

“A
Doll’s
House,”
said Charlie bleakly. “Set in Kenya. With an all Negro cast. It’s either about Apartheid or the brotherhood of man, depending how you look at it.”

Feeling benign, now he’d made them uncomfortable, he took Lotte off to dance. He needed air.

“That was cruel,” she said.

“Have you ever tasted salad cream?” he asked.

“No, but …”

“Then don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

Lotte thought she understood quite well. She could now relax. Once Charlie had managed to be unpleasant about something, he became so apologetic that he went round being saccharine to everyone for days. The rest of the evening would be his own variety of thistledown. And Charlie, in his thistledown mood, though difficult to follow, was often quite funny when eventually he came down out of the upper air and took a deep breath.

They were now alone. The starlet had excused herself. It was getting late. She had to return to her producer. If she stayed any longer, she said, she’d turn into a pumpkin.

“Very likely,” said Charlie, after Paul had taken her off, “she will in any case. If he has to go through that ridiculous performance, he might at least have the taste to pick on someone like that.”

“Like what?”

“That woman over there….”

Casually, Lotte turned around to look, and for once in her life, was genuinely startled. “My God!” she said.

“Lovely, isn’t she?”

It was Unne.

She was certainly noticeable. Men of Charlie’s preference were always bowled over by Unne, as had been Hans Christian Andersen, her original creator. She had a mute and ethereal distinction. She did not belong in time. She was a snow princess and an ice queen. When she was a child, surely, her dolls must have been made of snow. You could tell that by the
frostbitten sting of her hands. She had loved them so, but that had merely melted them all away. Too much breeding had made her, not febrile, as it does some, but quiet as a mirage. She did not belong on that terrace. She did not belong anywhere. She merely floated through the world in her bubble. The bubble touched gently here and there, but she never did. With both hands outspread, in childish wonder, she merely watched. When she was at last an old woman, no doubt she would pose for her portrait with folded hands, exactly the same, untouched, a stranger in her own body, but older. So men like Charlie thought of and described her. Perhaps, but Lotte found her maddening.

Of all the strays she had picked up from time to time and helped on their way, in exchange for company, Unne alone needed no help and wanted no company. And yet she would not go away. And she was the last person Lotte wanted to see just then, or to be seen with by Charlie. She did not want to be caught out.

Unne looked round the room as though it wasn’t there, which very probably it wasn’t, found Lotte, who was, and came over. She was wearing a little nothing of gray wool which defined her exactly.

“You weren’t in your room,” she said. Her voice was like the rest of her, remote, but gentle. “Miss Campendonck thought maybe I should come ahead.”

“Damn Miss Campendonck!”

Charlie looked amused. “And do you always do what Miss Campendonck tells you?” he asked.

Unne, who was the daughter of a diplomat, was quite the equal of Charlie. “I don’t care for Paris much,” she said. “Besides, Bill’s back.”

Bill was Lotte’s accompanist. Apparently Unne didn’t care for him much, either.

“Miss Campendonck said she’d be along Thursday, they’ll all be along Thursday, and are you certain she’s to have a north room?”

Charlie screwed his monocle in. “Sometimes I think Miss Campendonck has tumbled to the truth. You’re nothing but a booking agent for your own camp followers,” he said unkindly. “You can introduce us now, if you like.”

Lotte introduced them, though she would have preferred to ram his monocle into his mouth, instead. If he had decided to play Cheshire Cat, he might at least have had the decency to fade out on cue and leave them alone.

He wouldn’t, of course.

Then Paul came back.

To her surprise, Unne seemed to like Paul. As much as she ever liked anyone. Lotte relaxed. That would make the visit easier.

SHE
liked these responsibilities, which we keep for six months and then let go. They are substitutes for the children we might have had. But sometimes responsibilities lie in wait to assume us, rather than we them, and of that she had always been afraid. She had known Unne off and on now for a year. A year with anybody else would have exhausted her patience, which was to say, her curiosity. But Unne was self-contained. She had seen what was behind all that decorum only once.

A diplomat’s daughter learns tact, but has no home. She
has at best only a temporary foothold in permanence, when the tour of duty is a long one. She learns she has no part in other people’s lives. Now she was going away from everyone she had pretended, for the past two years, she had known all her life. It was at that farewell party that Lotte had acquired her.

Unne was upset. Her only security was to live in a world in which nothing is ever moved, and the people we see today are the people we will always see. Hence that calm. In herself she carried the stability she needed and could find nowhere else. The world is empty. It is a lovely garden we may visit only during visiting hours, when the owners are away. Unne knew that at fifteen, and was capable of being resigned to it at twenty. At forty she might even enjoy it. But not at twenty-three.

Lotte had found her seated alone, halfway up the back service stairs, with her head in her arms, pretending not to cry. They had toasted her away, and unable to bear it, she had smiled with pleasure and then hidden here.

“Isn’t there anything more to the world than a dinner party?” she asked.

It was useless to tell her that for well-conducted people the world
is
a dinner party, and nothing else.

“Isn’t there anything, anywhere?”

Lotte was compassionate. There are some people to whom the best way to be kind is not to lie. They are the people like ourselves, who do not mind being told the truth, because what we believe the truth to be is what they believe it to be.

“No,” she said.

Unne leaned against her. “I want to touch someone,” she said. “I want to feel warm.”

Lotte was powerless to help. Such things made her uneasy.
She was the wrong sex. What Unne needed was the cool heat of a vast difference between the sexes, and more affection than sensation. But why say so?

Instead she said, “Why not come to Paris with me?”

In the beginning she had been grateful for the company. There are times when a light in one’s own house comes to look as lonely and as exclusive as the lights in other people’s houses, whom we do not know either, as we walk by. But it is rather depressing, also, to see a pale carbon of yourself when young. Yet she was glad Unne was back.

T
HE
next day they were locked up in their rooms, at least until the festival began, for a storm had blown up during the night. The rain on the terrace had the angry, desultory sound of men peeing against a wall. It was full of small beer, and besides, might give birth at any moment to Orion, for rain is an emotional conductor.

Paul was in his bedroom reading a book Charlie had not written. Charlie was in the living room toying with the remains of a stale
croissant
and trying to write a book which Paul would not read. Nor would he read it himself. He did not write the sort of book he liked to read. His own favorite reading consisted of memoirs, gossip, history, and cheap thrillers, the bloodier the better. His books were about what happened to people he could no longer remember or had never known.

He was a one-book author. Having written it, he sensibly did not try to write it again, but instead wrote other books.
As a matter of fact, he did not know how he
had
written it, though it was reputed good.

“I may not live up to my promise,” he told Lotte once, “but at least I succeeded in living it down.”

He had a wonderful freedom, for the books he wrote now had made him rich, whereas that one good book, halfway good book anyhow, had preserved his reputation. When he and Lotte were young, they had neither of them expected this life they lived now. At least he hadn’t. Women, if the worst comes to the worst, have always the hope of marrying well. But he had had no hope at all.

Now he was miserable in comfort, which meant that, except at three in the morning, when his sleeping pill didn’t work, he was never miserable. He enjoyed his life very much. He never tired of watching it. “You will admit that, if it was not life, it was magnificent,” said Fitzgerald once, speaking up from squalor, of the carpeted existence of the rich. Being rich himself now, Charlie agreed. Nor had he ever been tempted to slash his wrists over a chorus boy. Suicide he left to Seneca and the proper time. The world is full of chorus boys, the woods are full of wives, but we have only one pair of wrists. He always treated razor blades with caution. There is a temptation in them, even though we do not feel it. They have the seductiveness of all dangerous things. If we are to survive we must lash ourselves to the mast.

Of course to write books is only to play with dolls, but it is by playing with dolls that a child learns how people behave. So Charlie found the work interesting enough.

To be second-rate is not the same as to be a fraud. If you are a fraud you worry. If you are second-rate, you are allowed to putter and to have your vanities. He liked to spend all morning searching for the
mot
juste
to fit in a passage that didn’t really deserve one. A good brood over the
alchimie
du
verbe
was thoroughly enjoyable. Because of course it
didn’t matter. He could afford to fribble away his time that way, and since he could not succeed, he did not have to worry lest he fail.

However, though he liked the contiguity of the world, he never could abide someone in the same rooms while he was working, so he got up and told Paul to take Unne downstairs for a drink and leave him in peace.

To his surprise, Paul seemed to like the idea. But instead of getting peace, Charlie just found himself thinking about Lotte. He called her up.

“I’m still in bed.”

“I’ve seen you in bed before.”

The number of people who were allowed in to that presence before it had its face on must be limited, but he was one of the permissible. She hesitated, and then told him yes, to come along.

Going down the hotel corridor it occurred to him that he had read in Musil (though Charlie never read authors when they first came out, he did believe in being on to the latest thing, so he always read them when they were revived) the idea that people live in hotels because it gives them the illusion of living in a country house, and they can’t afford a country house any more.

Suppose, then—it was another one of Charlie’s imaginary novels (in reality Charlie wrote only about the more expensive sort of refugee, or about his own past, though not often, since he couldn’t remember his own past very well, not having had one)—that you took one of those charming tales by Turgenev, in which the world is a country house, Adam has a commission in the army, Eve has just come back from her finishing school, and Razumov, whatever his ideals, wouldn’t hurt a fly really, and moved the setting to a hotel, but to this kind of hotel, a hotel for the resident or at least the migratory rich.

No, it wouldn’t do. Turgenev’s people have all graduated to sports cars, and scorn the brake. That ruins their charm. It has also changed their nature.

He went into Lotte’s sitting room without knocking, and on into the bedroom. She was in bed, but it was plain she had been out of bed long enough to do something to her appearance before getting back into it in order to give the impression that she had not yet gotten up.

“I sent Paul off to amuse Unne,” he said, curling up on the coverlet. He felt boyish. But then the last time he had curled up on Lette’s coverlet was two wives and five or six Pauls and four novels and fifteen years ago, when he had been staying with her in Beverly Hills. The posture erased the interval.

She must have been thinking of that too, for her face had the faintly puzzled look it got sometimes, when she was thinking of one of those few of her many temporary houses in which she had felt at home. Yes, she was definitely doggy. That’s the expression a dog sometimes gets when you take him back to visit the new tenants in the old house.

There were times when Charlie repented of having so suavely groomed himself into a cat. But there had been no choice. No other role had been possible. It was also true that you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.

He wished he hadn’t thought of that, because he couldn’t remember, come to think of it, whether a sow’s ear had any down on it or not. If it didn’t have any, then the point of the proverb wasn’t quite what he had always thought it was.

He wanted to ask her, but thought better not. Sometimes people shook like whippets when you asked them things like that. So he said nothing.

After a while, as though in a temper at being ignored, the rain even stopped, and the sky, like a tractable child, brushed back its clouds, forgot its tantrum, and took once more to smiling.