by Gavin McCrea
Max, who had been a special witness at the ceremony, also ended up being party to the eventual break. When, years later, Eva asked him about it, he said to her: There were important things you didn’t see, Eva, because you were just a child. I don’t see why you shouldn’t know about them now. Only you must promise not to hate the messenger.
—You must help me, her mother had said to Max one morning before rehearsals. You must talk to Paul. He has gone mad. You must make him see sense. I thought he’d soon tire of this girl. His affairs have always had a time limit. But Doris isn’t like the previous ones. He has lost his mind over her. I’ve told her she has to go, but she won’t. Paul won’t let her. There’s no reasoning with him, and I fear if I push too hard, well, you know what could happen then: the bastard will leave with her. Please, Max, speak to him on my behalf. Convince him to get rid of her. Tell him she can stay until opening night, but then she has to go. Do you hear me? She simply has to.
Max, though he did not want to, arranged to meet Paul at a restaurant on Wardour Street. Max knew his friend would be late so he took a book to read while he waited. The restaurant was long and narrow and French, packed with little square tables. The late-dinner crowd had installed itself in the brighter, smokier space at the front. Max put himself at the very back, alone and in near darkness, ordered some wine and read by the candlelight.
Paul arrived a mere twenty minutes after the agreed hour. He had brought Doris, even though Max had expressly asked him to come alone. Paul snatched the book out of Max’s hands and looked at the cover.
—Not you as well, he said.
—It’s not that bad actually, for a debut. I’m pleasantly surprised.
Paul hissed and threw it down on the table.
—Sorry we’re late, said Doris.
Max kissed Doris’s hand, knowing she was not accustomed to it.
—Don’t worry, Doris—
He spoke her name as if pronouncing for the first time a commodity only recently imported from abroad.
—by now I’m used to it.
She retrieved her hand and wiped it discreetly on the back of her skirt. Max smiled at this gesture: for her type, nakedness began at the hands; to have attention drawn to them in this way would have left her feeling exposed.
Paul paced around in search of a better table:
—It’s a crime to be buried back here like moles. Ah, there’s one.
He marched them to a table that had just been vacated by the window. Impatiently, he drew a circle in the air over the dirty plates as a signal to the waiter to clear them. The three of them sat uncomfortably — well, Doris appeared uncomfortable, Max and Paul were content simply to observe — while the waiter wiped the plastic covering and set four fresh places. Max thought about instructing him to take the extra seating away but decided against it. It seemed Alissa was to be present even when she was not.
Max put his glasses back on to read the menu. Having eaten here before and therefore knowing what to avoid, he ordered for everyone: mussels to share followed by sole and another bottle of white wine.
—All right for you, Doris?
—Lovely, she said, though it turned out she was ignorant as to what mussels entailed.
—Oh, so you’re Jewish, Max said. Are you observant?
—No. But me dad has always been against them.
When the mussels arrived Paul attacked them with his fork, a method that often left the little bits of flesh torn, and the area around his plate spattered with sauce. Max used an empty shell as pincers to prise them out more delicately, and he was happy to see Doris followed his approach even if it might have appeared disloyal. Paul did not seem to notice or to care. He was immersed in a monologue about a production of Timon of Athens that he had recently seen. Max winked at Doris before beginning an argument with Paul about a small point he had made. Because she knew nothing about the subject, Doris would not have been able to judge the rightness or wrongness of their views, but she was smart enough to recognise a false debate. Here, parading as genuine argument, was a series of puns, anecdotes and boasts, punctuated occasionally by weighty pronouncements, all met by rapid agreement. Each was not saying precisely what he thought, but rather what he believed would impress the other and make him respond. Each anticipated and directed the other’s replies. Each fell into and out of the other’s tone. Paul’s speeches were a kind of citation of Max’s. Max uttered words which followed directly from those that Paul had just spoken. No part of their exchange was not infiltrated by the need to compete.
Their talk passed from interpretations of individual productions to the question of a national theatre, and from there to the Lord Chamberlain, the squalor of the West End, and the indecency of requiring good plays to show profit. Neither of them mentioned The Sing-Song Tribunal. Max had objections to the amount of cuts Paul was making to his script, while Paul was unhappy that Max’s interventions during rehearsals were undermining his authority as the director; they both expected that, by the end of the night, without their being mentioned, these things would be resolved of and by themselves.
Max observed Doris as she tuned in and out. He imagined she was switching allegiance according to the flux of her feelings, one minute wanting to see Paul dominate, the next enjoying his having to bow low. At no point did the men make an effort to talk about anything that might interest her or require her participation. They understood that she did not have their culture, and so, out of a perverted sense of consideration, kept her separate. Her part was to be the perfect audience: quiet as a mouse, stirring at tense moments, drawing in breath at startling revelations, never restless or indifferent, glad to be being improved. Needless to say, Alissa, had she been here, would not have been similarly tame. In that seat she would have sat, as tough as ash, surrounded by an air of assurance and ease, and matched the men, one for one, two for two. More, she would have brought out the richest parts of herself and made the men tremble by means of them, for she was of a different kind, stronger and more thoroughly alive than ever a woman should be.
After a while, Doris began to express herself in the only way the situation allowed: by sulking. As she picked the bones from her sole, she put on an interest in anything other than what Max and Paul were saying. The other diners. The passers-by outside. The wax on the bottle in which the candle was stuck. Max did not reveal his awareness of this change in her. On he talked, and Paul too, their voices now hoarse as they strained to make themselves heard over an increasingly rowdy table nearby. They seemed to relish the challenge that these more difficult conditions posed, adding volume and range without abandoning the exclusiveness, the intimacy of their dialogue.
—Is anyone else coming?
Max broke off mid-sentence:
—What’s that, Doris?
She cleared her throat. Put more force into her voice.
—Is we waiting for someone? There’s an extra place set.
Perplexed, Paul turned to peer at the plate, the glass, and the knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin, as if searching for something hidden amongst them. Doris watched him until her patience ran out, then raised her arm to get the waiter’s attention. For a long minute she sat like this, believing that by being good she would get noticed in the end. When this failed:
—Shit this.
She put two fingers into the corners of her mouth and whistled. The room fell quiet. Heads turned. Paul’s brows shot up. Max coughed wine out of his throat.
The waiter approached, scowling.
—Hi, look, I’m sorry, Doris said to him, I don’t mean to be, you know, it’s just there’s only three of us eating, i’nt there, so can you take that place away, d’you mind?
The waiter looked down at what remained of their meal: dried streaks of sauce and little piles of bones.
—Well, everyone is finish, no? I can take away all?
—Yes, please, said Max
with feigned solemnness. Take it all. Then the bill when you’re ready, thank you.
Once the table had been cleared, Max leaned into the empty space, then Paul, each trying to hide behind the other, and started sniggering behind their fists like schoolboys.
—What the hell was that, Doris? Paul whispered.
—Give over, Paul, Max said. You know damn well what that was.
Max took out a wallet containing a number of notes of large denominations. Without waiting for the bill to arrive, and as if to show his lack of concern for money — though this was not his conscious intention — he dropped three tenners on the table, far too much, and then threw some change over them as an extra tip.
—Let’s get out of here.
They went first to a milk bar on Old Compton Street, then a pub two doors down, and when that closed to a basement club where there was jazz music and dancing.
—We should go home soon, Doris said at each stage. We have the final dress rehearsal in the morning.
But the men did not listen. And Max could see that, in truth, she did not really want to go. Because for the first time that evening, perhaps for the first time in her life, she was having fun.
—Having a good time? said Max.
—Yeah, actually, she said. I like it here.
She was the sort of girl for whom going out would have never been amusing. Gossiping would have felt trivial. Being pulled onto the floor by boys would have felt bullying, and she would have resisted it. Dancing, on the rare occasions she acquiesced, would have felt like the performance of a duty; the most she might have mustered was a listless dragging of her feet. Max enjoyed seeing her surprise as she found things came more easily with Paul and him. They took turns: while one danced with her, the other guarded their little table under the cellar arch, which meant she was rarely off the floor. She was by no means a natural, having had little practice up to now, and was therefore extremely self-conscious at the beginning; watching the other girls — so chic, such verve — she looked like she wanted to weep. But after a lot of encouragement and with the help of the rum, she began to move more loosely, and the more loosely she moved, the deeper the music penetrated, until eventually she was stamping and twisting and twirling and reaching through the blue smoke to make contact through the fingertips. There were moments, perhaps, alone in the toilet or resting against a wall, when her heart might have sunk if it occurred to her that, at a time when the world was haunted by the image of a hand pulling down a big black lever, or of a finger pressing a button, here everyone was, spending their money just to drink and dance. But these moral torments, if they happened, would have been brief. Overridden quickly by admonitions from the men to smile and be happy.
For they were competing for her attention now. Perhaps as compensation for having ignored her in the restaurant, or perhaps because in this environment it was good to be seen to be guardians to a girl, they performed for her a kind of duel of concern. They could not enjoy themselves if she did not; entertaining her was to be their only entertainment, and they tussled to prove it. They lit her cigarettes. Replaced her drinks. Went to and from the bar to fetch her glasses of water. Made her aware, discreetly, by touching the corresponding spot on their own faces, when her make-up required fixing. Cleared space for her on the floor by pushing backwards against the crowd. Removed from her orbit any men who looked like they might bother her. And, by all of this, made her feel, in a small way, a woman, while making the public believe that she possessed more, much more, than her drab appearance promised.
As a further kindness, they kept their conversation away from intellectual subjects and instead talked each about the other. Shouting into her ear, or across the table, Max told her what he thought she ought to know about Paul, and Paul about Max, each trying to astonish her with their candidness. There was humour in their stories, and not a little teasing, though they always expressed themselves in the proper way; they were careful not to be coarse or unreasonable, and to respect the limits which, over the years, they had set for each other. The broad outlines of their accounts matched; it was only in the details that they contradicted each other. Doris would have tried to balance their respective versions, one against another, with a just impartiality, though at the end she surely would have found it easier to trust Max, because he had nothing to gain from embellishment or fabrication. He was not chasing her affections. Admiring yet heedful, even a little formal, he demonstrated no desire to win her away — even though his job, he did not forget, was to do just that.
—At Cambridge, Max was a fucking spectacle, Paul told her. While the rest of us clung on to our uniforms, a brown Norfolk jacket was the usual thing, or maybe, if you were in the gay set, a bright yellow jumper and the blazer of a good suit, Max went round in these outrageous loose-fitting blouses that he found in a jumble sale but claimed were actually worn by peasants in Russia. Can you imagine it?
—Well, he was a pompous son of a bitch, Max said. He always took care to let you know that he regarded Southerners as inferior. Christ, such a merciless bore. Only in the North was life real. The work done up there was the only kind of any value. Northerners were generous and warm-hearted and democratic, Southerners merely snobs and parasites.
—It was Max who recruited me, Paul said. I spent much of the rest of my first year missing tutorials in favour of selling the works of Marx and Lenin around the colleges with him. Anything Max did, I also wanted to do. What he was, I became. The thing about Max was, it wasn’t only the radicals who liked him. He was new money, an arriviste, but the uppers, too, went out of their way to include him. They loved him as much as the rest of us did. After all, he had what has always counted.
—And what’s that? said Doris.
—Money, power, said Paul. And of course he was handsome then. People found him irresistible.
—He’s still handsome, said Doris, winking at Max.
—Oi you, said Paul and poked her gently. You should have seen him then, though. If you’d been around, you’d never have gone for me over him.
—That’s enough of that, Paul, said Max.
—Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Everyone went for you first, over me. Alissa included.
—Do shut up and go top us up. I’ll take Doris upstairs for some air. She looks like she’s going to melt.
Paul obeyed, and Max accompanied Doris outside onto the street. They stood, fags in hand, exposing their sweating arms to the breeze, observing the cut of the passing revellers. Doris was drunk, probably a little ill, but clearly happy. She would have been enjoying listening to the men; she would have liked that they were so eager for her to understand them. Their lives sounded important, which would have made listening to them feel important. When asked, she gave little pieces of her own life, too, but not much. That did not matter now. Nothing she could say about herself would keep their focus on her so firmly as speaking about themselves.
—Is it true what Paul said? she said.
—Paul says lots of things. Eventually you’ll learn which nuggets to cash in and which to discard.
—About Alissa, though. Her liking you first?
Max had gone to great lengths not to mention Alissa. Now that she had finally come up, he felt the sense of relief that follows a period of restraint. Alissa was there, like a scab on the leg; it was unnatural not to want to scratch it.
—I don’t know about that, said Max. I was friends with Alissa before Paul was. There’s nothing more saucy to recount than that.
—So you weren’t an item, you and Alissa?
Max looked pensively upwards, to the cut of clear night sky running between the buildings.
—Not really.
Doris sucked on her fag.
Max glanced at her sideways:
—Did Paul say differently?
Exhaling a thin line of smoke through her pursed lips, Doris shrugged:
—You want t
o know what Paul says about you?
—I don’t know. Do I?
—He says he’s obliged to work much harder than you for the same results.
—What a bull merchant.
—That things just happen for you without having to spend any effort, while he has to struggle and strain to get anywhere. Is he talking about Alissa?
—Maybe. Okay, listen, quickly, before he comes back.
Alissa had been a year behind them at Cambridge. At the time of their first meeting, Paul and Max were in their second year, while she was a recent arrival, one of about twenty Newnham girls auditioning for the Amateur Dramatic Society. Paul and Max, who had joined the Society as a means to spread the communist message, were in the rehearsal audience. At Cambridge the ratio was ten men to each woman, so they had come only in part to judge the talent of the girls; their other motive, which they did not conceal, was to single out prospective sweethearts. Max, too, played that game then.
The audition process was gruelling: a monologue, a song, a mime and several improvisations, all watched by about a hundred people, including the other contenders. Alissa, Max remembered, was then a strange-looking creature of doubtful sex: skinny and flat-chested, hair cropped short, lines of experience already engraved onto her young skin. Unlike the other girls, who acted as if obeying distant ideas, she moved like she was thinking with her body; even the simplest of gestures appeared an interplay of all her muscles. At the same time, there was no ostentation in her performances, nor cheap efforts to seduce. There was instead the letting out of forces that might otherwise have turned to nervousness; a craving to live like mad for the pleasure of others. Initially, Paul did not see any of this. Another girl had caught his eye. A blonde whose prettiness was a close approximation to the forms shown on telly and in the magazines. It took Max to shake him out of his trance and make him see that Alissa was the only one deserving of their attention. The only mature girl there. And, if they looked properly, with an open and modern mind, the only really beautiful one. Compared to her, the rest were just fluttery adolescents.