"Don't," Carlo said, "underestimate yourself." Mario brought in coffee and a box of Partagas. Carlo spoke to him at some length in the Milanese dialectclose enough, I gathered, to that of Moneta--telling him that the dinner we'd just had was fit only for flushing down the gabinetto and that he'd bite everybody's balls off unless there was a speedy improvement in the cucina and much else in the same style. "I can," Carlo told me when Mario had gone, handing me the cigarbox and wax fiammiferi, "be like a peasant if and when required. I can be anything they damned well want." I was in my cold bed early that night. I had an early train to catch for Geneva. I was opening a bank account there, not at all liking the prospects for the rest of Europe in the spring of 1938. Hitler had just marched into Austria (not ridden: all the motor transport had broken down on the road to Vienna) and received in his hometown Linz a welcome of fruit and flowers. But Carlo was looking beyond Hitler and the rest of the predatory bastards.
CHAPTER 51
Pope Pius XI died on February 10, 1939, and Eugenio Pacelli fulfilled Carlo's prophecy by being crowned, just over a month later, Pope Pius XII. There seemed already to be a vague sense hovering like cigarette smoke in Fleet Street that I was somehow connected with the Vatican, and I was asked by the Daily Mail to cover the obsequies, the attendance on the right smoke signal, and the coronation. I refused: I did not wish to hang about Rome with Sir Hugh Walpole, who was doing the same job for the Hearst organisation, and be drawn by him into pursuing the pedicabile what time the Conclave decided the claims of the various papabili: it was not, despite Carlo's prognostication, all that easy going for Pacelli.
I stayed home and saw Great Britain recognize the government of General Franco, Hitler annex Bohemia and Moravia and proclaim a German protectorate, Lithuania cede Memel to the Reich, Italy seize Albania a week after the end of the Spanish Civil War. That there was going to be a Second World War few would then accept: we had had our scare the previous September, and now Chamberlain and Daladier would repeat the pattern of the Sudetenland in respect of the Polish Corridor and Hitler's final territonial demand. We were all learning to live with our shame, an aspect of the human condition.
On the day of Great Britain's signing of a defence agreement with Turkey I was sitting in my salon in E2, Albany, studying the studio portrait that Hirsch had done of me. Careful underlighting and airbrushwork made me look younger than I was. When I faced the shaving mirror each morning I saw a man of an undoubted forty-eight years, uneasy, unloved except by his readers, weary, tinted by good living, chin sagging, hair greying and thinning but superbly sculpted by my regular operative at Trumper's of Mayfair. The creature in the photograph was your popular novelist, unlined and with youth's dreaming eyes but wise with a hard-bought wisdom: a man you could trust but not too much, traveled, of sure taste in the arts, not terrifyingly overintellectual but well-read and sufficiently clever, sharp or compassionate as occasion required when giving in the mass press his views on modern woman, the intentions of the dictators, friendship, the importance of Faith, the status of William Somerset Maugham, the decadence of the French, the beauties of rural England. The portrait would serve perhaps for another decade in the promotion of my books. My agent would ensure that it got to isolationist America, falangist Spain, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, imperialist Japan, and other countries where I fed an appetite for sedative fiction. My most sedative to date, meaning exciting with no hint of the subversive, would be out shortly: A Time of Apples. I had already told Carlo what it was about.
I put down the portrait sighing and reread the letter from my father's second wife. He was very ill, she said, with ailments appropriate to advanced age, nearly eighty now, that was to say pulmonary congestion, a growth in the prostate, cataract, what looked like Buerger's disease or thromboangiitis ohliterans, oral ulcers, chronic dyspepsia, the approach of feeblemindedness. His second marriage had not been blessed with increase and he talked or rambled much now about the children he had not seen since the end of one world war and would not, unless we all (all!) made speedy tracks to Toronto, see again because of the impendence of another. He did not seem to have taken in that Tom was dead. He had a vague notion that somebody had turned him into a grandfather. He had one or two books of mine and had the idea that I lived with my British publisher. He did not know that his daughter dwelt a brief flight away and was making a name as a sculptress.
"No," I said aloud to my books and pictures and bibelots and Bokhara rugs. "No," to the English May sun and the distant comforting hum of the London traffic. Carlo had taught me that paternity was a fiction and that filial piety was due only to God and one's blessed mother, if one knew who she was; Carlo might be right, since he was going to be the next Pope. Fathers and sons: nonsense. And then the bell to the apartment discreetly sounded and Jack, an old warty porter, showed in the son of a very distinguished father.
This son bowed and clicked heels mockingly and said, "Ein Brief fur Sie," putting down his suitcases and tennis racquets. He took the letter from his inner jacket pocket with his left hand and handed it over with arm stretched and body forward inclined as from a posture of mock military attention. The letter was from Jakob Strehler and the printed letterhead said Albrechtsgasse 21, Wien. It was in German and penned in a kind of mockery of primary school calligraphy. Mockery, then, was in the blood. "Please sit down," I told the son in English, and he sat to mock military attention on one of the Louis Quinze chairs. I sat in a fauteuil facing him and read.
The great Strehler addressed me as his dear friend and said that I must not think he had been ungrateful for my frequent expressions of admiration, both in the reviews I had been good enough to send, safely received but, as he was aware, never acknowledged, and also in my letters, similarly unacknowledged. He was, he feared, no letter writer. He wrote only for fame and money, especially money. The situation in Austria, now a mere province of the Third Reich, was undoubtedly dangerous for such as himself, a Jew, a so-called intellectual, a democrat, a believer in free speech; nevertheless he proposed to stay on more or less in hiding, helped by the international reputation (though not the money, alas spent) bestowed through "the bounty of Sweden" as Yeats called it, helped too by his own comparative indifference to the future. His wife, as I might not know, had returned to her native New Zealand some years past, taking their daughter with her but leaving their son to his own, Strehler's, unhandy ministrations. For him Strehler feared, and him he assigned to such care as I, Toomey, was able to give him. He apologised for the unsolicited gift of a son, but he doubted not that the traditional hospitality of the British to refugees from oppression was well represented in me. He wished now he had read some of my books, but it was probably too late; besides he did not usually read his contemporaries.
Heinz, as he was called, had few talents except for pleasure, which included the good-natured or perhaps, to be cynical, advantage-seeking willingness to give pleasure to others so long as it cost nothing. It was through the good offices of one to whom he had given such pleasure, a high officer of the Austrian Nazi Party, that Heinz's egress had been able to be effected from the Reich, a Jew-hungry entity (Judenshungrige Einrichtung). I was to do with him please as I thought best. I was to tell the Anglo-Saxon literary world not to worry about the fate of Jakob Strehler. His works would outlast the thousand-year Reich. Es in, as Bach affirmed in a chorale borrowed for a violin concerto by Strehler's friend Berg, genug. I was to receive Heinz as a piece of a broken father and as a token of appreciation of past kindnesses. Ich danke Ihnen herzlich. Jakob Strehler.
I took this letter reverently and placed it in a desk drawer, on top of another German letter of appreciation, though one brief as a bark, from ReichsfYhrer Heinrich Himmler. Then I turned to look glumly at my present. "Welcome, Heinz," I said. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-three years."
"What do you propose to do here in England?"
"Bitte?"
"What do you wish in England to do?"
"Ah." He smiled lusciousl
y as he melted with great speed out of his mock stiffness, entwined his legs with the bonelessness of Jim Joyce, leaned back in an odalisque pose, and searched his pockets for cigarettes. He came up with some Chesterfields, and he sent one flying to his lips with a nail flick on the base of the pack. "Give me fire," he said.
"A light, you mean, give me a light." I gave him fire from my gold Dunhill lighter and he rested, during the lighting process, his hand lightly on my firing wrist. The cigarette, too much nitrate in its paper, crackled. He said, walrussing smoke from his nostrils: "I do what you wish that I do."
He disturbed me. He was so blatantly, almost commercially, epicene. Handsome, very, despite the thin mean mouth. It is hard to say what a Jew looks like, but Heinz would have served well as chief exhibit in some Ausstellung of male Nordic beauty. It was the New Zealand side of him probably, but it might have been abetted by a throwback to Crusader blood, the rescuers of the holy places being generous in the donation of their northern seed to Palestine. I lighted a cigarette of my own and we sat facing, puffing smoke at each other in unequivocal signals. He was a whore all right. I was crackling, like his Chesterfield, with conventional desire tainted with foreknowledge of disgust. I felt like at once sending him packing, tennis racquets and all, but I had a duty to a great man. "The great man your father," I said. "He must also leave Austria. What plans have been made? What friends does he have? Sigmund Freud is already in London, but it took time to arrange the payment of the Reichsfluchtsteuer and the other ridiculous taxes. I cannot believe that your father wishes to stay. Please tell me precisely what is the present position as regards your father." I spoke in German; his English, for one whose blood was half anglophone, was atrocious. In German he told me that his father had been lucky because of his Nobel Prize, but that the luck would not last. The day after die Kristallnacht of last November his father had had made a metal plaque and affixed it to a spot on the facade of the apartment building somewhat above the reach of SA hands painting Jude; the plaque said: "Jakob Strehler, Austrian Novelist, Honored in the Name of the World by the Academy of Sweden Which Awarded Him the Nobel Prize for Literature." The Reich did not want to offend Sweden, nor, as yet, was it altogether convinced that Jakob Strehler was an echt Jew. Strehler was not a Jewish name. There was the evidence of his own son, and here Heinz stretched and grinned complacently, a true piece of Aryan manhood if ever there was one, to contradict the cruder imputations. But the time would come, and Heinz did not seem greatly concerned about it. I said, "Let me show you your room."
"Bitte?"
"Your English is not very good. Perhaps you have had nobody to speak English with, to."
"My father, a little. Once I speaked it good."
"Well, you mean. You spoke it well."
"Once I spoke it very well."
"Good, that's very good."
I carried his bags, which he seemed to expect, but I left the racquets to him. He looked at himself before looking at the room: there was, just within, a cheval glass, a fine old spotty one I had picked up at the sale of Lady Huntingdon's Belgravia effects. Then he tested the bed, its sheets newly changed after a visit from the American producer Jack Rappaport, and bounced his arse on it for resilience. "Well," he said, "very well. So here I sleep." At least he did not ogle me from that position. Rather he ogled himself anew in the dressing-table mirror, admiring the sit of the fawn jacket with its skimpy Central European cut and the blue tie with its horrid design of golden leaping hares. "We will go to the Cafe Royal and there drink a cocktail and then eat lunch and discuss your future."
"Bitte? Please?"
"Deine Zukunft." He simpered at my unthinking use of the familiar form. Then he bounced up, opened one of his suitcases, and began to change his clothes. No pudeur, of course, no Schamhaftigkeit. I was expected to watch, so I watched. He encouraged me to note that he was not circumcised. The rest of the body was a hard golden almost textbook model of Aryan male comeliness. He put on what he must have thought of as his British suit: drab grey but still skimpy. He hummed Trink, trink, Bruderlein, trink as he redressed. That had been, at the time of the 1934 massacre, an SA favorite.
We were looked at knowingly in the Cafe Royal upstairs bar. Middle-aged Toomey, tastes often guessed at, tastes now blatantly advertised. Heinz drank three martinis and smacked his lips after sipping. I took him down to lunch and he tucked in to a large hors d'oeuvre, poached turbot, roast beef with horseradish, Stilton, and a double helping of chocolate mousse. "Das schmeckt gut," he said often, and once, "Die gute Englische Kochkunst." We had two bottles of chilled Wachauer Schiuck in memory of dead Austria. We talked. My father said that you would see to everything. He spoke of your becoming my Pflegevater and of British papers of Annahame or Adoption. Is your father mad? It is all too possible, to me he has always seemed mad. You do not like your father? I like him when he is away in the house near Gerasdorf and I am in Vienna or he is in Vienna and I am in the house near Gerasdorf, though I do not like the house near Gerasdorf, it is too far from Gerasdorf and besides there is nothing to do, not even in Gerasdorf. I should be glad of another father. Oh my God. No, I cannot be your father. If you can get work in England then a work permit can be arranged and you can be your own master, I can look into that, but you cannot, God help us, assume so serious and binding an enactment as adoption. Out of devotion to your father's work I will do everything possible for you, but there are, you understand, limits. He seemed to regard devotion to his father's work as a demented foible, not less demented for his having met it often and seen it sanctified by the Swedes, but he considered his father's work to be oldfashioned, boring and pretentious. Himself he preferred a good Jack London or a Kriminalroman. Or the cinema, he was mad about the cinema. How many cinemas gave there in London?
A well-known sodomite, James Agate the theatre critic, came in and looked hard at Heinz, making signals with his puffed and englowed cigar spunk. Heinz twinkled at him and moved his shoulders. I told Heinz that the situation as regards employment might shortly ease for the incoming Jews, the trade unions relaxing their strictures. Jews? Jews? Heinz said he had no time for the Jews, a grasping and puffed-up race. Yids, sheenies. But damn it, man, you yourself are a Jew. Ah no, I am not because my mother was not, that was made very clear to me by a Jewish rabbi who visited my father, but the Nazis do not always understand what it is to be a Jew. God, man, your father is a Jew and a very distinguished one, isn't that enough to make you a Jew? Isn't the fact that you were liable to be persecuted as a Jew enough to make you feel solidarity with that suffering race? Never: me they would not persecute; me they wanted to feature on a poster persuading young men to join the army and serve the Fatherland. The Jews are getting now what has been coming to them for a long time. Oh my God.
What jobs have you had, what trade or profession were you reared in? I have done many things but I liked none of them. I worked once in an insurance office but they dismissed me on a false charge of peculation. I played the drums for a week in the orchestra of the Gestiefelte Kater or Puss In Boots cabaret. I acted a silent soldier in a play by Schiller or Schilling or somebody. I have had friends, both male and female, who have looked after me but they always ended the association by becoming unreasonable. My father sometimes gave me money, sometimes not. He gave me money for this journey but it was not enough, I spent much of it in Paris and what was left in Dover where I stayed last night. There was not much in Dover to spend money on but I spent it. I think a man in a Bierstube robbed me of some but I cannot well remember. The fact is that now I have no money.
We had coffee and cognac. Heinz asked for whipped cream with his coffee, an old Viennese self-indulgence, Oedipal, Freud had said in his autobiography, and when I took out my wallet to pay the bill he made whistling noises and come boy to me gestures as to a dog. He meant that he required some of the banknotes in that wallet. I sighed and gave him five pounds. His eagerness to be off to spend them was of the writhing kind of one merely anxious to spend a penny. You give me the
key also? Ah no, ah no, no key. You ring the bell like everybody else. He made a mou or schiefes Gesicht. I went out with him through the stares of the lubricious and watched him hare off toward Piccadilly Circus.
I had an article to write for the Daily Express about women who painted their toenails and what this signified in terms of the decline of our civilization. I went out to dinner with John Boynton Priestley, the Yorkshire novelist. When I got back to Albany at just after ten Heinz had not yet returned. I put on pyjamas and dressing gown and waited. I tried to read the literary essays of his great father and saw for the first time that their pomposity was a mockery of Pomposity. I must not be pompous with young Heinz.
Well after midnight he came back, not too drunk though tieless. Two giggling girls were with him, slobbermouthed and coarse but not prostitutes, at least not yet: they had arrived that evening at King's Cross from Jack Priestley's county. They had met Heinz, whom they called Baked Beans, in a pub in Leicester Square and he'd stood them port and lemons and said they did not have to worry about where to spend the night, they understood him all right though he talked funny, but that was because he was a foreigner, he had this old man that was his friend and he had plenty of room in his posh place. I'm Elsie and this is Doreen, pleased to meet you. They wore low-cut summer frocks and artificial silk stockings, were inexpertly made up (caked powder, greasy lipstick) and had overdeveloped busts. Out, I said, out out, ladies, this is not a dosshouse. I was mean, that's what I was, where was they to go at this time of night, and Heinz said they was his friends, they had started to give him English lessons. That's right, Elsie or Doreen said, we had sausage and chips in one of them corner houses and he said he wants us to learn him to talk proper. Out, both of you, and I slippered sternly toward the telephone. Oh all right then if that's the way it is, but you're proper mean. And Doreen, or else Elsie, feinted a punch in my balls as I showed them out. Ta-ta, Baked Beans, see you tomorrow. Then I confronted Heinz, who muttered things at me with Scheiss in them.
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