Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

“But I happen to be serious. Tread on the bloody pages before your shoes dry.”

  Joshua did as he was asked.

  “Margaret finally found out about me and Lucinda and stormed out of here late last night. If she is leaving me for good this time, she had better come back for this lot.” Murdoch poured him a cognac, his smile fierce. “Do you really fancy her that much, Joshua?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Murdoch wasn’t convinced.

  “I rather suspected you were into her knickers once she began to insist how you were the most pathetically unattractive of all my friends.”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “Too bad. Ah well, somebody will marry her, don’t you think? Now that I’ve had her teeth capped. Scheming little mouse. Her behavior was perfectly proper until I settled the dentist’s bill. No NHS for her. It had to be Wimpole Street. Seriously, don’t you think somebody will marry her?”

  “With two kids?”

  “Aha,” he exclaimed.

  “I’m not having an affair with Margaret.”

  “Then why has she suddenly taken to bathing before going out shopping in the afternoon?”

  “She could be having an affair with somebody else.”

  “Then why would your phone be off the hook those same afternoons? Don’t deny it. I checked with the operator.”

  “I could be having an affair with somebody else, too.”

  “Oh, really,” he asked, interested, “who with?”

  Joshua didn’t answer.

  “I smell a dirty rat.”

  “What about Lucinda?”

  “I’m afraid she’s preggers.”

  “Is she expecting you to marry her, then?”

  “Margaret’s simply aching to find out the answer to that one, isn’t she?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Judas!”

  “Are you in love with Lucinda?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a bore, Joshua.”

  He helped Murdoch stow the drugged children into a bed that reeked of urine and then drank more cognac with him as he continued about his work. Pages, dripping with beer, were hung out to dry before the faltering fire. He scribbled corrections on other pages, while Joshua crumpled and uncrumpled further sheets for him. More pages were burned here and there with a cigarette, others were stained with tea. The manuscript, he explained, had come to him unsolicited from a young writer in search of advice. Once it had been properly aged, Murdoch planned to sell it to the dealer as an early effort of his that he had, on reflection, decided not to publish. He refilled their glasses and they drank to that, regarding each other warily. “The irony is,” he said, “that I don’t really enjoy the actual fucking that much. I find women terrifying. And they’re all much the same in bed, aren’t they?”

  “Then why must you change partners so often?”

  Murdoch contemplated that one. “Well,” he said at last, “it is becoming disconcertingly easier for me to start an affair rather than a new novel. And what I do enjoy are the deceits. The stratagems. The dangers. All the lovely little lies. Mind you, I’d never stoop to cuckolding a good friend. I’m not a total shit. I know, I know, ‘I’m not having an affair with Margaret.’ Balls, you aren’t.”

  Murdoch began to strut.

  “I shouldn’t tell you this, but no matter how flattering she is to you now, the truth is she could never finish your boring little article in Encounter.”

  “Sidney, you are pathetically insecure.”

  “Of course I am. Aren’t you?”

  “What are you going to do about Lucinda?”

  “The proper thing, it goes without saying. But the poor child,” he added, unable to repress a grin, “is under age and can’t possibly marry without her parents’ consent.”

  “Which just might be forthcoming, given the compromising circs.”

  “Shit. Shit. Shit. What a pain in the ass you are. Can you lend me a hundred quid?”

  “Wait. Hold it. I think I’ve got a better idea,” Joshua said, beaming at Murdoch with drunken benevolence. “You and I, Sidney, might just be able to earn a tidy sum in the great state of Texas,” and he went on to improvise his scheme.

  “Of course, of course.”

  “We could backdate the stuff to Cambridge.”

  Murdoch splashed more cognac into their glasses. “Ah, Murdoch,” he sang out, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Yes. Good. Excellent. It could bring a small fortune. Of course you realize that I am famous while you are merely well known, and only in Staggers and Naggers circles at that. So you would have to agree to a sixty-forty split in my favor. What do you say?”

  Joshua agreed at once, and in the weeks that followed, they both avoided real work, laboring to outdo each other in their joint project. All unavailingly, alas. For before they could market the stuff, Murdoch ran afoul of the Texans. His instantly aged manuscript, sold to the university, turned up in print, the real and inconsiderate author earning a good deal of attention. The Texans took umbrage, so did the real author, and Murdoch found himself threatened with a lawsuit, until he explained away his swindle as an absent-minded mistake. Letters gone into the wrong envelopes. Happens all the time, don’t you know?

  On the other hand, their work could not be written off as a total loss. At least to Murdoch, the custodian. A malevolent stranger (Margaret, Murdoch hinted darkly) stumbled on the stuff, photostatted some of the more outrageous chunks, and mailed them to Lucinda’s parents in South Ken. They absolutely forbade the marriage. Lucinda was dispatched to Switzerland, and Margaret – sweet, ostensibly dependent Margaret – emerging after an understandable period of despair, was astonished to discover how capable she really was. “People used to think I was mute, an idiot,” she told Joshua, “because whenever we went to dinner parties I could never get a word in edgeways, everybody was so intent on Sidney’s bon mots. And you know how he loves to perform. Holding forth at anybody’s table. Polishing his anecdotes. Now when I’m invited out, people actually listen to what I have to say. There are men who find me both attractive and witty.”

  Joshua had now become a regular at Celia’s delightful bottle parties, which abounded in left-wing journalists, contributors to the New Statesman and Tribune, and American refugees from McCarthyism. Hollywood people. There were also impecunious Africans, an engaging, hard-drinking bunch, seemingly indolent, who were to disappear only to return a decade later, Joshua was to discover on a visit to London, borne to the same parties in chauffeured limousines, unraveling turtleneck sweaters now eschewed for three-piece gray suits, this one the foreign minister of Malawi, that one the freshly appointed Zambian ambassador to the Court of St. James. Each one bearing a willing, flushed Belgravia rose on his arm, the black man’s burden. And then, yet another decade later, settling into the New York Times in The Kings Arms, jesting with The Flopper, he would read of these genial men he had known in their prime, one executed by the latest supreme liberator of Kinshasa, the severed head of another found floating in the Upper Volta River.

  It was as a result of a chance encounter at one of Celia’s parties that Joshua actually made direct contact with the dreaded Party and, incidentally, Pauline.

  The dazzling, baffling Pauline, whom he would sometimes espy being not so surreptitiously fondled by a black man, headed for another part of the room at even a hint of his approach. And if he pursued, doggedly, she would move away yet again, her long legs rustling.

  Then one night at Celia’s somebody cornered Joshua, saying “I’ll bet you’d be afraid to speak at the Communist Party Writer’s Group?”

  Pauline, for a change, was sufficiently close to overhear, and he could tell by her face that she expected a craven response from him.

  “Certainly not,” he said.

  “Jolly good. We’ll expect you a week Wednesday. You can speak on modern American writing.”

  Early that Wednesday evening, in The Bale of Hay, Joshua pleaded with a drunken Murdoch to come along with him.

&nbs
p; “Oh, but it’s no good, my dear. If I go, the room’s bound to tilt in my direction. You’ll be totally ignored.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  “The women who attend those lectures are perfectly dreadful. They pong. They have moustaches. They wear elastic stockings. And they always want you to sign some bloody petition. Let them get Amis. He’s willing to sign anything, if only because his name comes even before ‘Auden.’ But nobody reads as far as the M’s.”

  “If you don’t come with me, Sidney, I’m going to sign your name to every petition going, and you will never get to be a visiting lecturer at Iowa or Stanford.”

  “They’ll only serve punch or some vile Georgian wine, and they’ll expect us to sing songs with them.”

  “They’ve promised a bottle of Scotch,” Joshua lied.

  The house was in Highgate. At least thirty comrades had been prepared for, but only sixteen had turned up.

  “The Bulgarian folk dancers opened in the West End tonight,” the host, a Daily Worker editor, explained consolingly.

  They waited another half-hour in the dowdy living room, sipping plonk, until three more people drifted in. Everybody in the group was supposed to be a writer, but most of the audience was composed of plump, good-natured matrons who had brought their knitting. Joshua was given a fulsome introduction and dug right in to pontificate – knowledgeably he hoped – about younger American writers. Mailer, Styron, Salinger, Capote. Nobody was interested. Nobody, that is, except for a febrile Colin Fraser, who scribbled notes throughout his lecture. Unlike Pauline, who appeared to be reading the New Statesman, rattling the pages as noisily as possible. Infuriated, Joshua decided to get a rise out of them. Although he admired the political stance of progressive writers such as Howard Fast, he said, he much preferred reading reactionaries like Faulkner or Evelyn Waugh.

  “Why,” a woman immediately demanded, “won’t they let Howard Fast out of jail?”

  “Because he’s done such violence to the English language,” Murdoch called out.

  Everybody turned to glare.

  “I’m Sidney Murdoch,” he said, grinning.

  “Oh, is that who you are,” Pauline said. “I thought for a moment that you were Mary McCarthy.”

  Murdoch shrank back into his folding chair, seething.

  “Is it true,” another woman demanded, “that a progressive writer can’t find a publisher in the United States today?”

  “Would you say that all American writers are corrupted by success?”

  Joshua managed to excuse himself early, but he was stopped at the door by Colin Fraser, notebook in hand, a disapproving Pauline trailing after.

  “I’ve seen you at Celia’s,” Colin gushed. “We’re Canadians too,” and, introducing Pauline, he suggested they move on to the nearest coffee bar.

  “Coffee keeps me awake,” Murdoch protested.

  “Well then, let’s go to our place. Digs. We can knock back a few jars there.”

  Emerging from the Haverstock Hill tube station, strolling back to their place, Joshua managed a quick word alone with Murdoch. “I want you to wait until I’ve gone to the toilet, and then you are to tell her how absolutely wonderful I am.”

  “But I’d like to fuck her myself,” Murdoch pointed out, grieving.

  “God damn it, Sidney. This is important to me.”

  “Do you think he’s a poof?”

  “I hope so.”

  Colin Fraser, scrawny, pallid, angular, constantly jerking his oblong head to clear stringy brown hair from troubled blue eyes, sprang from Ottawa, an ambassador’s son. He was a literary scholar, doing research in the British Museum on the novels of Jack Lindsay and others, and working on a progressive novel of his own, its theme the Winnipeg general strike. He and Pauline lived in a dank little basement bed-sitter in England’s Lane, where, fortunately, there was a half-bottle of gin available, as well as beer, but only old mustard or jam jars to serve as glasses. They lived in penury (self-inflicted). Colin had his scholarship and Pauline was working as a supply teacher, mostly in terrifying secondary moderns in Brixton or North Kensington. Neither of them, as a matter of principle, was dipping into family money. Colin, in fact, had renounced his sizable inheritance. “I had a look at the trust fund portfolio once,” he said indignantly. “It holds shares in South Africa and in companies that produce arms that were used in the Korean war of aggression.”

  “Oh, shocking,” Murdoch said.

  Colin read Peace News, he subscribed to Tribune. He would, Joshua was to discover, journey to any church hall or school basement, no matter how difficult to get to, if only there was a minister appearing on the platform there, who would rebuke him for having been born white, an exploiter of Africa’s soul, or failing that, if there was some frizzy-haired matron in sensible shoes who had just returned from liberated China to show a jumpy, out-of-focus documentary about the joys of life in a Cantonese bicycle factory. Having discovered that Joshua was from Montreal, he droned on and on about French Canadians and how badly exploited they were. Joshua was inclined to scoff, but nodded instead, agreeing to anything, his eyes fastened longingly on Pauline. Maddeningly beautiful, perversely hostile. She was drinking heavily, seemingly embarrassed by Colin’s progressive bromides, but fiercely protective, not yielding an inch. She was clearly more intelligent than he was; he couldn’t figure out what they were doing together.

  Murdoch, having performed his commission during Joshua’s calculated absence, laying it on Pauline about his incomparable merits, had begun to doze. He was bored. And so was Joshua. But he was determined not to leave without a moment alone with Pauline. Finally, the insufferable Colin rose to go to the toilet. Joshua quickly sat down beside Pauline. “Would you have lunch with me tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Only,” she said, her smile sweet, “if you promise me that we can go back to your place afterwards and fuck like crazy.”

  Joshua turned pale. Murdoch wakened, gaping.

  “No. We can’t go to lunch. I’m a married woman.”

  “Yes. Certainly. I appreciate that. But I thought maybe –”

  “Besides, I don’t like you.”

  “Neither do I,” a revived Murdoch said. “He’s poking my wife on Wednesday afternoons. She comes home late. I have to make do with a cold plate and maybe yesterday’s trifle reheated.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” Joshua said, and once more he asked, “Please come to lunch with me.”

  She was hesitating, possibly about to acquiesce, when Colin bounded back into the room, beaming. “This is fun,” he said. “This is damn good fun. I so enjoy the company of creative comrades.”

  Pauline, betrayed, grabbed her coat and stomped out of the bed-sitter.

  “I’ll get her,” Joshua offered.

  “No. She-does it from time to time,” Colin said, not the least distressed. And all at once he seemed to relax, as if to say, Now they could really talk. Saying how highly he valued Joshua’s opinion, he asked if he would read his manuscript. Oh, with pleasure, Joshua said icily. And then next Wednesday, Colin said, he could come to dinner, and they would discuss it.

  “He’s busy on Wednesdays,” Murdoch said.

  In the morning, Joshua wakened to find a letter from Peabody, who was working for Esquire, along with an issue of the magazine including a piece of Joshua’s on London. Janet had given birth to their first child only a month earlier. “I’m writing this by the seaside, on the beach where I used to build sandcastles as a boy. We’re staying in East Hampton for the summer, at my father’s place, and the day of Jeremy’s birth my father and I solemnly planted an apple tree to mark the event. The tree my father planted the day I was born still bears sweet fruit, even as Janet has, but I fear my father will not live to see this tree mature. He’s seventy-one and suffered his second stroke last winter. I read Dickens aloud to him at night, even as he once did for me, and I assure my mother on the hour that I do not smell gas in the kitchen and that I will wear a hat in the sun. I wa
ken each morning at dawn, a voyeur, concealed in the grass that grows on top of a dune, come to watch Janet nurse Jeremy in the sand by the sea. It is an exquisite sight, beyond my powers of description, and my only fear, embarrassingly coarse, is that such is my reverence for mother and son joined in such poignant embrace that I will never lust for her again. I have decided to lay down a library rather than a wine cellar for Jeremy, all our favorite books, and I would appreciate suggestions. Yes, I know, Isaac Babel.

  “Janet, who was working at Time until swollen with seed, is a splendid girl. After she has nursed Jeremy, she sets him down tenderly in a wicker basket in the shade, unpins her black hair, shakes it out, and plunges into the sea. My God, Joshua, old Feodor be damned, and crabby old Eliot as well, there’s a lot to be said for this life. In the evening we soak our freshly cut corn in a bucket of sea water and then roast them over a charcoal fire. This we follow with bluefish, caught that very morning, and fruits de pays, as we used to say. Come home, troubled spirit. Janet longs to know you and even I have come to miss your surly presence. I’ll be taking a leave of absence this autumn to work for Adlai, assuming that he will run again, but I doubt that he has the fire to take Ike. Even so, I’m glad to be back. Come home, Joshua.”

  Having suffered through Colin’s unspeakably bad and sentimental attempt at a novel, Murdoch howling at passages Joshua read aloud to him, he made his way to the basement bed-sitter on Wednesday night, armed with a dozen red roses. But Pauline had outwitted him. She wasn’t there, but at the local Odeon, he was told.

  “She felt we could talk more freely on our own,” Colin said. “Well, I’m all pins and needles. What do you think?”

  “I think your novel’s absolutely marvelous,” Joshua said, “and that you should send it to a publisher immediately. Don’t change a word.”

  They sat down to eat bangers and mash Colin had thoughtfully prepared. The bangers, squirting hot fat like pus, were pink through the middle and the potatoes abounded in rock-hard lumps. “Shall I be mum and pour?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  Joshua indicated the set of golf clubs leaning against the wall. “Don’t tell me,” he began.