Stewart, Angus (3 page)

They moved into a drawing room cluttered with a profusion of Victoriana. It was also filled with people.

'Kate, darling, Dan is here,' Jaqueline announced, 'and this is Mr. Gadston out from England.'

A very old lady indeed got up from a moquette settee. Her eyes seemed to be papered about with onion skin. Her mouth hung open without muscular control, and she clung to both Gurney's hands for a moment like a delighted child. 'I was so glad . . . so glad,' she said, and teetered round on Jay. 'From Finland?'

'England.'

'Good,
Good!
Holiday is it . . . is it?' She seemed to Jay to search his face with an unjustifiably tense anxiety.

'Not really. I've been here about two years.'

But we've not met before? . . . ever before?'

Jay smiled. 'No. Never.'

Catherine Diergardt gyrated like some enfeebled clockwork toy. For all her extreme old age she made introductions effectively. An impeccable young American couple, the girl feeding broken biscuits to a twelve-months' child, were Mr. and Mrs. Cooper-Madison. His haircut and eyes were unquestionably Fullbright. They had connections with the U.S. Consulate; and she taught school. A bruised, leonine woman, wearing a tawny dress and flat suède shoes, was a Mrs. Allen, an English resident. Jay suspected she might have left a hockey stick in the hall. On her right, the lank man with pale, oval face, heavy-rimmed spectacles and coffee-coloured suiting, was Elton Hoover, an American writer. He wore an expression of studied withdrawal, sat upright though relaxed on a straight-backed chair, and inhaled with deep, careful movements from a Casa Sports cigarette. There was evidently some distinction to him. The Englishwoman, however, was busily questioning the man on her left. About him there was an aura of Jewry and Middle Europe. His eyes were felt-brown and shadowed, and his cupola-like forehead heavily pocked.

'And this is Mr. Harold Lom, who is making a film for the B.B.C. Television,' Mrs. Diergardt said.

Lom got heavily to his feet as he took Jay's hand.

'Mr. Gadston has a little colour camera and I've been telling him he must go on a bus to Xauen,' Mrs. Diergardt went on. 'For some time he was with the British Embassy in Finland, though he looks very young.'

'No!' Jay said desperately. 'I make bird-tables.'

Mrs. Diergardt's jaw relaxed more helplessly. She panted, her head moving reflexively, and for a moment she looked like an abandoned retriever. For the first time Jay noticed that her left hand was withered. 'Yes Mr. Gadston makes bird-tables,' she said, recovering.

'How very interesting,' Lom said without irony. He sat again.

'For a firm in London is it? . . . is it?' Mrs. Diergardt wondered.

'Locally. To order, as it were,' Jay said. A discussion of his professional capacities struck him as being of no interest to anyone, least of all himself.

Jaqueline came up. 'Let us sit down and have tea now, Kate, no?' she said, and steered her tottering charge into a chair next the young American.

Dan Gurney, meanwhile, was heavily at ease. Seated beside Jaqueline he became involved in some esoteric discussion relating to real estate. Elton Hoover was talking to his more academic co-national; a slow, ruminative drawl, neatly broken with much, 'Well, Mister Madison.'

Quite suddenly the infant on the American girl's knee took a swipe at Gurney with a rubber doll. 'Jesus Christ, control that
baybee
!'
Gurney said none too tolerantly.

'You're filming here?' Jay hazarded to the sad Jew. In the hard shafts of sunlight he looked a sick man; a tortoise stripped of its shell perhaps.

'That is the idea, yes.' He spoke very precisely.

'Documentary of some sort?'

'Yes. There is much of great visual beauty here you know.'

Jay looked at him quickly. 'Surely'

'But for me it is almost . . . a holiday,' Lom said. 'Really I have retired.'

'Never!'

'But yes! We have another unit coming soon. Not my unit.' The seemed to close up.

The atmosphere in the room suddenly irritated Jay. The Englishwoman called Mrs. Allen was talking loudly; throwing herself about to illustrate some point. Cups of tea were being handed out by a second
maidservant. The very young one followed behind her with a plate of small cakes. The technique appeared to be to automatically pile each guest's sideplate with a large selection of these. Jay followed the girl's skirts down to the floor, wondering vacantly whether she belonged to anyone. The people in the room seemed too disparate for cohesion; the house, with its accumulated junk of a dead Germanic diplomat, too static and alien for sanity.

'Kate, darling! Henry looks as if he hasn't been dusted for a year!' It was the Englishwoman who suddenly called, and, as if in answer to Jay's thoughts, pointed through the half-open door to where one of the suits of armour was visible in the hall. The Berber girls continued to drift about the room stacking the plates still higher, while Mrs. Allen defined their tribal faults. It was a monograph without ethnological profundity, Jay supposed. For his own part he was wondering what the young one must look like with her clothes off.

'Ever thought of making a blue movie?' he asked the man called Lom suddenly. Gurney was invoking Christ some more as the all-American infant peppered him with biscuit crumbs, and the atmosphere of the room was relatively uninhibited. ‘I mean . . . elevating it to an art form, or whatever,'

To Jay's surprise the Jew looked at him with quickened interest. 'Under the influence of cannabis, yes, many times,' he said succinctly.

'
Kif?
'

'That is right.'

'Never touch it myself,' Jay said. 'But tell me more.'

'What is there to tell? These things are visual. They have nothing to do with words.'

‘Oh,' Jay said, disappointed.

'You want, perhaps, the lead part!' Lom said, chuckling now. 'You are young, and perhaps you will have one in life. But not in my movie . . . my
blue
movie.'

'Proverbs.'

'And why not? A film must be a proverb. An
exposition
of something that is universal. I think only in visual terms. So how can I talk otherwise than in proverbs?'

'Stalemate.'

'Exactly. Meanwhile these little almond cakes are good, are they not? The tea is perhaps Lapsang?'

'Could well be,' Jay said. He buried his nose in his teacup. The gnome-like man did the same.

For all her senility, Mrs. Diergardt was in command of her mind. She moved from guest to guest, with a word, however meaningless, for each. It was at her instigation that the boisterous Mrs. Allen now flopped down beside Jay, and Harold Lom was insistently trundled away.

'Goodness! Hallo!' Mrs. Allen said.

Jay half rose so as to he able to nod the more profoundly.

'You
are
English?'

'Yes,' Jay said.

'Frightful here, because one never
quite
knows, does one? I mean, which language to
speak
.'

'I imagine it can he confusing. Have you lived here long?'

'Goodness yes
Donkeys
' ages. Mohammed Cinq virtually
kidnapped
Jonnie to sort out their frightful railways. Then Leopold whisked him away to do a trans-Katanga. The blacks got him.'

'I'm sorry,' Jay said.

'It was frightfully complicated. They told me the money could only come to the Free Zone, so I stayed. But the Moroccans are so
cruel
as well as stupid.' Mrs. Allen flounced about some more. She made a dive for a rock cake. Her face was square and heavy, and there seemed to be vaseline smeared about her eyes. 'I'm never going to identify a man for them again.'

Jay looked enquiry at her.

'This frightful business in the Diplomatic Forest,' she said. 'But you
must
have heard. I was out there with Sally Cline—oh, she's a great friend of mine—and this man
threatened
us with a great stone. He threw it at the windscreen—it cost a frightful lot to have repaired. Sally said,
drive on
,
and I did. But I noticed the man had a green bicycle. Lying in the ditch. Then next day two Englishwomen went picnicking in the Forest. They had their husbands with them—enough thank you . . .' Mrs. Allen said to the maid, who was putting sugar her tea. She took a long gulp from the cup, and turned back to Jay. 'Well, of course, rape is a very serious offence. One of the women was raped. Really quite horribly. We knew we ought to tell the police. I mean, we
had
to. A man had thrown a stone at my car only the day before. Anyway—to cut a long story short—I went out there with a police van. And they found the man with the green bicycle. I didn't know
what
to say. I
didn't want to identify
anyone
.
But I think they saw that I recognised the bicycle. It was quite enough.' Mrs. Allen took another long swallow of tea, and shuddered profoundly. 'Of course, they hung him up by his heels—beat him and all that. And it turned out it
was
the same man. The man who had raped the Englishwoman. Frightful relief. Jonnie used to say that they have to beat prisoners because the people can't read, you see. They have to be
shown
things.'

'Don't you think it may simply be that a percentage of any authoritarian regime will always be sadistic thug?' Lom asked quietly. Jay was unaware that he had been listening to the monologue.

'Oh, I don't know anything about that!' Mrs. Allen said.

Lom looked a little hurt. 'I mean, this is an absolute autocracy, you know. A medieval monarchy has its benevolent aspects, yes. But it must have a ruthless executive. Ruthless executives attract some very unpleasant men. Why, they even get paid! Is it not so?'

'Some of the lavatories are certainly medieval,' said Mrs. Allen. 'Mine dribbles all night long.—Kate, dear,' she called across the room, 'I must go home now. Because of the voting. It may get very noisy in the town.'

When Mrs. Allen had been shown out, Mrs. Diergardt settled herself between Jay and the American writer, Elton Hoover. Lom appeared to be discussing Europe with Jaqueline, while Dan Gurney exchanged heavy, sporadic remarks with the American Fulbright. The American's Spanish-looking wife contentedly dandled the baby.

'Do you know anything about the English Pastoral Orphanage here?' Mrs. Diergardt asked Jay. She talked in short, careful gasps, and her head continued to oscillate gently as though balanced on hairsprings.

'Not really—what is it?'

'It's a foundation for orphaned Moroccan children here, and it's administered by a Church of England Trust in London.'

'A
Christian
foundation. English money?'

'Yes. But the Sultan helps, and is often very kind to the children when he comes. Last year he gave them thirty thousand francs for two new lavatories. He gave the English matron some lovely Japanese tea-towels. There's a great need for charity in the world today.'

'Yes,' Jay said, baffled. Mrs. Diergardt had a disconcerting habit of bringing her bloodless face to within inches of one's own. Her
steady eyes and salivating mouth were expectant and reproachful at the same time like a dog waiting to be fed something. Only sympathy, perhaps.

'Are you fond of children?' Mrs. Diergardt drooled earnestly.

Jay realised with discomfort that the old lady belonged to a class and generation that consciously talked to the young; that this was what he was being subjected to. Irritation at the dogs rose in him again.

'Heavens yes! Quite as much as the next man!' Jay affected a little bounce of enthusiasm; and something ground to a standstill inside him.

'Good,' Mrs. Diergardt said. 'There's such a nice English girl here who's come to help—Caroline Adam. But just now she's acting as an interpreter for Mr. Lom's film team.' The old lady's face continued to quiver in expectation beneath his. There was a perfectly meaningless pause. 'I'm looking for someone to put down a little money to found a club for working Moorish girls,' she went on eventually. 'You know, there's nothing for them to do. They only get into trouble. Often they come to me but I can do very little for them. I'm not a rich woman. Perhaps if you travel around you may meet someone who might be interested . . . Just a little money . . . we have a
crèche
here already, you know.'

'I'll keep my ears open,' Jay said. His eyes at that moment were distracted by the servant girl, but this time it wasn't her young beauty that arrested them. What he had seen was something horrible. It had been no more than the fractional motion of a hand. The girl had just placed three white pills on Mrs. Diergardt's side plate, but had done so with a quick disdain so intense as to have seemed almost incredible. So much for the working Moorish girls.

The old lady was turning dutifully to Elton Hoover. 'Is it a
Psychological
novel you're writing, Mr. Hoover?'

'Well, Mrs. Diergardt, I suppose all novels have been what you might call psychological ever since your Henry Fielding wrote
Tom Jones
.' Having delivered himself of this, the American seemed to feel his conversational duties were discharged. He seemed to be chewing the cud in some far away grass-roots state. An autistic black kitten was rolling itself up in one of the rugs on the floor. Elton Hoover looked many miles through it, and continued to move his jaw on nothing more substantial than thought.

'Selly Wilburs was here to lunch last week—did you know?' Jaqueline said, trying to rouse him. 'He was telling us all about your new technique of putting the same word in strange patterns—no?'

'A very talented young man,' Hoover said. He came back sufficiently to nibble a pastry.

'This is most mysterious, Dan!' Jaqueline called, turning from the whispering maidservant. 'A taxi has come for you!'

'Thank you, Jaqueline,' Gurney said, He heaved himself to his feet; and Jay was thinking it was a name only an Australian accent could do justice to. But Mrs. Diergardt had decided it was his turn again.

'And where were you at school?' she asked.