Joshua Then and Now

by Mordecai Richler

  “Oh, no. I don’t play. They belong to her darling brother, who’s visiting London at the moment.” And then Colin went on to say how they must all return to Canada soon and work together to expel the American exploiters. “If you only knew,” he said, “how much I envy you your working-class experience.”

  “Well, Colin, old fuck,” Joshua said, beginning to play with him, “I wouldn’t mind having your inheritance. I wouldn’t turn my back on it.”

  “Oh yes, you most certainly would,” Colin said, all twinkly.

  Midnight came and went and there was no Pauline. “Well,” Joshua said, getting up to go, “I do hope to see you both at Celia’s on Saturday night.”

  “You’ve got your eye on Pauline,” Colin said.

  “Oh no I haven’t.”

  “Take care. She may not be the stuff your dreams are made of.”

  There was a couple locked in a heated argument in a parked Hillman across the street, but as Joshua emerged onto the pavement the man who was with Pauline quickly doused the inside light. Joshua hurried away, bent into the slashing rain. Local Odeon my ass, he thought.

  They did show up at Celia’s on Saturday night, but Pauline infuriatingly defeated his every approach, sliding away from him each time he started in her direction. She was drinking heavily again and laughing too much. Bitch. He hated her. But she was also beautiful, wearing a tight black silk dress that buttoned down the front. Joshua kept his hands in his pockets, drifting to another part of the living room, looking for an argument. But he couldn’t stay away and neither, if he’d only realized it then, could she, constantly fluttering around him, tantalizingly just out of reach. When he next caught sight of Pauline, she was hanging on the arm of a big handsome black, a talented West Indian writer Joshua knew. Bitch bitch. He also began to drink too much, seeking out strangers to insult, and when he next did a compulsive circuit of the rooms, he couldn’t find Colin or Pauline anywhere. Heading for the toilet, he concluded that they both had left, and good riddance too. His mistake. He opened the toilet door to find Pauline and the West Indian writer in a fierce embrace. Pauline was bent over almost backwards, his basketball-player-size hands with their pink palms driving her silken buttocks to him. Elbowing past them, Joshua whacked back the toilet seat.

  “Oh, come on, man,” the West Indian moaned, “please.”

  Joshua contrived to piss in a pleasingly high arc, singing in his froggiest voice, “Tote dat barge, lift dat bale, git a little drunk and you land in jay-il, but ole man rivah, dat ole man rivah …”

  The West Indian began to heave with laughter.

  “I thought you were a married woman,” Joshua called over his shoulder.

  “I don’t want you coming round to our place any more and patronizing him. He’s a much better man than you are.”

  “Or woman,” Joshua shot back, slamming the door on them.

  A fresh drink in trembling hand, maybe a half-glass of straight Scotch, he drove an unsuspecting blacklisted screenwriter against the wall, excoriating him and his kind.

  In those days, when the blacklist was most rigorously applied, many of them had to write or direct episodes of the Robin Hood series under pseudonyms for producer Hannah Weinstein. With a stroke, $10,000-a-week masters reduced to £500-an-episode navvies. Oh God, Joshua thought, film-makers of the left actually driven to living off capital. But, mindful of their heritage (the Paris Commune, the storming of the Winter Palace, Lillian Hellman saying no to the resounding sound of her own applause), they sneaked progressive thoughts into the Robin Hood series. So a soulful Jewish tailor might be discovered in Sherwood Forest, doing piecework for the dastardly sheriff of the shtetl of Nottingham, who maintained a non-union shop. The tailor, scratching his snowy head, ruminating under an oak tree, anticipating Proudhon, might tell Friar Tuck that all property was theft. In Nottingham itself, miraculously, a black might be found, maybe a runaway slave, and Robin and the chevra would do battle for his equal rights. Put plainly, though the work was demeaning, no opportunity was lost to educate the masses. De haut en bas.

  And now Joshua, cheeks scorching, found himself actually shouting at one of them. “And what about Isaac Babel,” he wanted to know, “Mandelstam, and the rest? Aren’t you, with all your whining, marginally – yeah, marginally – better off than they were, and when did any of you ever speak up for them?”

  “Hey, I thought you were the kid who was the Spanish Civil War buff?”

  “I am,” he replied, embarrassed.

  “Which side are you on?”

  “Well now, I’ve got a problem,” Joshua said, his anger dissolving into laughter, “I can tolerate everything about the left but its advocates. And now,” he added, “I think I’d better get the hell out of here.”

  Joshua managed to acquire the West Indian writer’s new novel and wrote a most vitriolic review of it for the Spectator, suggesting that it was the kind of self-pitying cry that could only appeal to vacuous but rich white women liberals who, in their quest for sexual punishment, were excited by inchoate black anger; and he mailed a copy to Pauline.

  “Oh, are you ever a shit,” she said, on the phone immediately.

  “Come to lunch with me.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Why?”

  “You are utterly without scruples,” she said, hanging up.

  Yes. Right. And I am also going mad, he thought. Absolutely mad.

  Night after night he would sit in his flat drinking prodigiously, and in his mind’s eye, unbutton that black silk dress, undo the filigreed bra, allowing her glorious breasts to spring free, pausing to kiss them reverently before he stooped to remove her black pumps, roll down her stockings and yes, oh yes, relieve her of her silken panties (modestly white, he decided) and then, imagining unspeakable yet tender acts of love, he would rush into the toilet to masturbate, emerging humiliated, a pimply teenager again, pumping away. He hated her. He wanted to hurt her. He swore he would never take her to lunch even if she came to him on bended knees. Bended knees, he thought, trying to unzip him with her teeth. No, no. Stop that. Sure, he’d take her to lunch. To Lyon’s Corner House. Or the ABC on Bayswater Road. Heh heh heh. And the next afternoon he would find himself in Hampstead, searching in one pub after another, hoping to run into her. Consuming large gins here and there, grinning foolishly, as in his mind’s eye he bathed her, he powdered her, he perfumed her. And then he combed through all the neighboring Odeons and Granadas. And what if he found her necking with some pink-tongued, big black ape? Murder, that’s what. Then one demented morning he even set his breakfast table for two, chatting with an imaginary Pauline over a cuppa.

  “I’m sorry,” she said demurely, “now you must think I’m wanton.”

  After last night, she meant.

  “On the contrary,” he said, “it is I who hope you don’t think me a beast now.”

  “A beast?” she asked, shining with gratitude. “Oh, no. At last I know what it’s like to have a real man make love to me.”

  “Come here, my sweet.”

  “Oh, yes, please. But wherever do you get the strength?”

  Margaret came round on Wednesday afternoon to discover that his bruised member wouldn’t rise; he had been stricken with impotence.

  “Poor Mr. McThing won’t stand to attention,” she simpered.

  “God damn it,” he said, leaping off the bed, “this is my cock. It’s not called Mr. McThing or Captain Hook. Don’t any of you nutty people on this ridiculous offshore island ever get beyond the nursery?”

  Weeping softly, Margaret began to dress, tying the straps of her somewhat faded bra together with a safety pin.

  “And, furthermore,” Joshua said, “Sidney’s known about our Wednesday afternoons for ages.”

  “That hardly matters any more, does it?”

  “He’s my friend.”

  “And wasn’t he your friend when you invited me to come here in the first place?”

  “Oh, shit, Maggie. I’m sorry. I’m go
ing crazy. I’m a wreck. I’m in love with a nigger-loving whore.”

  He actually began to shop for her. At Woolland’s. Harrod’s. A Bali “Self-Expression” Seamless Front Closure Contour Bra. From Yves St. Laurent, a tempting two-part party-goer for Yves-tide, just a whisper of silk ruffles. From Givenchy, a smock that smacked of Paris, complete with maddening slit leg show and tiny tucks. He bought her a scooped draw-stringer by Renata, with an all-encompassing whirl of softness in a sizzling sateen print. Softie, slim lingerie after Dior and more, much more of the sort of thing that he only intended to allow her to wear in their bedroom.

  He sent her the copy of Esquire with his piece on London. And he phoned again and again. If Colin answered, he hung up. If she answered, she hung up.

  Letters bounced back unopened.

  She was not to be seen at Celia’s any more, probably because there were too many white men there.

  Bitch. Whore. Cunt.

  He punished her, no longer taking his purchases from Woolland’s and Harrod’s to bed with him, but shoving them into a dresser drawer. Undressing her in his mind’s eye, vengefully now, he was pleased to discover that she had droopy tits and swampy pubic hair, where only crabs nested. Smelly down there. Yes. He was better off uninvolved.

  He began to write for the New Statesman as often as possible, because he knew she read it, maybe even in bed when Colin was out giving of his thin blood to Korean orphans or demonstrating against the Bomb. Yes, in bed, his cunning prose fondling her warm high bosom as she leaned over to put out a cigarette. Or in her sweetly scented bathroom, his words nestling in her lap as she applied lotions to her leg hairs, those long bare legs outstretched. Or maybe she even sat on his paragraphs in the kitchen, taking a solitary cup of tea, the heat of his adjectives penetrating those sensuous buttocks. Oh my God, he thought, lying alone on his lumpy sofa, erect and dripping.

  Oh yes, oh yes, ostensibly pronouncing on the contemporary American novel or Teddy Boys or Canadian politics, he was really writing for an audience of one, spinning love letters in the sober pages of the Statesman with hidden salacious messages, just for her. For her to ponder in bed or to sit on or touch with those long cool fingers. He also began to attend every left-wing occasion, however dreary, advertised in the back pages of the Statesman, because he hoped she might be there. So he dozed through China Friendship lectures, readings by Bulgarian poets, and celebrations of the new Russian technology. And he did find her, more than once, only to be cruelly rebuffed and end up encouraging the solemn Colin to try yet another publisher, maybe one less reactionary, with his appalling novel. Prick.

  Pauline gradually came to count on his intruding presence and was disappointed, she had to acknowledge, when he didn’t turn up for an opening night at Joan Littlewood’s theatre in East Stratford. Didn’t he know they would be there?

  On their return to their bed-sitter, Colin was the first to notice something amiss. Probing for the remembered heel of gin on a shelf, he was surprised to find a full bottle and beside it a little stranger. “How many times,” he asked, “have I told you not to buy South African sherry?”

  “But I haven’t.”

  “Who did, then?” he asked, even as he dipped into the larder for a jam jar, drawing back, bitten. There sat a dozen new bourgeois tumblers. “Did you buy glasses?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, her manner as nonchalant as she could manage, for she had already reached into the wardrobe for her dressing gown, only to be startled by its unsuspected weight. There was a bar of Givenchy soap in one pocket and a small bottle of Lanvin cologne in the other.

  “Anything wrong?” he asked.

  “No.”

  But when she pulled back the bedspread, she was hard-put to suppress a gasp at what she found lying there.

  Softie, slim lingerie after Dior.

  Joshua waited anxiously by the phone the next morning, he didn’t dare leave his flat, but there was no call.

  O.K., that’s it. He’d had enough. He was through with her. Absolutely. And so, on impulse, the following Saturday afternoon Joshua lugged the boxes from Woolland’s, Harrod’s, and Dior to a Hampstead garden party that had been organized to raise money for the latest bunch of Africans triumphant in Kenya or Nigeria. She had to be there with the other nigger-lovers. He caught her alone and thrust the lot at her.

  “What’s this?”

  “They don’t fit me, you bitch,” he said, his manner ferocious, “so you might as well have them,” and he fled before she could shove them back at him, even as the congregation was singing a CND marching song, to the tune of Clementine:

  In the heart of ancient London

  Lived a man and daughter fair

  With the pep that marks the hep-cat,

  But her daddy was a square.

  Then, suddenly, it was November 4, 1956, and Joshua stood in Trafalgar Square, along with thousands of others, come to hear Nye Bevan speak, and, in his case, possibly, just possibly, catch a glimpse of Pauline.

  Any way you looked at it, it was a black Sunday. At breakfast Joshua read in the Observer that a high American government official had said, “There are people inside the National Security Council who have already urged that we use tactical atomic weapons … to help Hungary.… If the Hungarians are still fighting on Wednesday, we will be closer to war than we have been since August 1939.”

  Three-thirty in the afternoon, as Joshua stood in front of Canada House, in Trafalgar Square, Russian tanks had already encircled Budapest, an Anglo-French invasion fleet had set sail from Cyprus, pipelines in Iraq and Syria were aflame, and Israeli troops had routed the Egyptian army in Sinai.

  Thousands had been drawn to the meeting organized by the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress. Pauline simply had to be amongst them, but where, and how to find her?

  People filled the square, they filled the streets bordering the square, and they spilled over the steps of the National Gallery and St. Martins-in-the-Field. It was the largest demonstration since the war and many who had come to protest were astonishingly young. They had, it’s true, a special interest. Many had already been called up. Others were expecting to be called up soon.

  The audacious Nye Bevan was at his corrosive best. While the pigeons of Trafalgar Square, temporarily homeless, swooped and complained above, he said, “If Eden is sincere in what he is saying – and he may be – then he is too stupid to be prime minister. He is either a knave or a fool. In both capacities, we don’t want him.”

  “Eden must go!” the crowd roared back. “Eden must go!”

  A perplexed Tory to Joshua’s right countered with, “Yes, but who’s going to replace him?”

  Once Bevan had finished, the aroused crowd churned about hopelessly for a moment or two, private arguments flaring up here and there, and then, suddenly, spontaneously, it knit into a marching group. A toothy girl in a green cashmere twin set turned to her escort. “I say,” she said, “they’re actually going to march on Downing Street.”

  March on Downing Street they did, thousands upon thousands of them, bringing traffic to a dead stop, waving banners and shouting, “Eden must go! Eden must go!”

  And there she was. Unmistakably. Pauline, Pauline. And, oh my God, she was wearing her tempting two-part party-goer for Yves-tide, with its whisper of silk ruffles.

  To hell with Hungary! Fuck Suez! Oh my darling, my love, but beside her bobbed the ineffable Colin, beet-faced, hollering, “Eden must go!”

  And you too, you little prick!

  Bobbies, many of them young, apple-cheeked boys, stood about ten feet apart all the way down Whitehall, even as Joshua, possessed of an insane will, bulled his way through the crowd, hopping up and down for a glimpse of honey-colored hair, listening for the whisper of silk ruffles above the din.

  Pauline, Pauline.

  At first the bobbies didn’t interfere, but when the demonstrators reached Downing Street, out charged the mounted police. “Shame,” the crowd chanted, “Shame!”

  A l
ong, pallid, black-bowlered man banged his furled umbrella on the pavement again and again. “Well done, the police,” he shouted. “Well done, the police.”

  Joshua came up behind her and she turned, just for an instant, and smiled before she turned away again, driving her back shamelessly into him.

  Heaven.

  And he knew, he could swear, she was also wearing her Bali “Self-Expression” Seamless Front Closure Contour Bra, and time and patience would reveal what more.

  “Eden must go!” cried a crazed, unknowing Colin.

  His arms slid around her waist, her honey-colored hair was driven into his face, and he began to tug her back and away.

  The crowd surged forward, trying to breach Downing Street, the mounted police pushed them back again, then the crowd heaved again; and Joshua was dizzy with Pauline’s perfume.

  “Stop pulling. Patience,” she said. “We’ve got to wait for Colin.”

  “He’s just been arrested,” Joshua said.

  “Where?”

  “I saw.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “It’s the pokey for him tonight. He’ll be absolutely thrilled.”

  “You’re lying,” she said gaily, not taking her hand from his, falling against him again, laughing.

  Joshua kissed Pauline on the mouth for the very first time. “Marry me,” he said.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Marry me, marry me.”

  “But I’ve already got a husband.”

  “Of sorts.”

  “Joshua!”

  “I’ll take care of him. I come from a family of gangsters.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet,” she said.

  When they finally quit Whitehall around six o’clock, the traffic had started to move once more and the pigeons were in possession of Trafalgar Square again. The next morning in bed they read in the Daily Mail that even while they had been heaving and chanting, Sir Anthony Eden had been sitting in session at Number 10 with leading cabinet ministers. The Mail observed that the demonstrators’ ranks had included “large numbers of coloured men, some accompanied by white women. There were also Greeks, Cypriots, Indians, Pakistanis – many of them waving communist publications.…”