‘No, I won’t do that, dear Dickie,’ replied Viva Seabrook with a smile that was as affectionate as it was mischievous, at least insofar as I could ascertain, the layers of lurid makeup she applied must have been as thick as an Egyptian, by which I mean a Pharaoh’s, death mask. ‘You must bear in mind that very young boys will do almost anything as long as they get to dip their wick in some woman. So I’m lucky that way, although they do sometimes cover my face with the sheet or even with my own skirt and that does make me feel pretty bad. Well, not so much now, but the first time one of them stuck a pillow over my face, I hit the roof, and the boy fled, terrified by my insults and cursing. I consider myself rather attractive, but naturally they might associate me with their mothers or their aunts, and that could be a bit of a turn-off and, generally speaking, they’re so primitive, so utterly heartless and brutal … Well, you know what I mean.’
I found it odd that she, too, should speak so bluntly in front of a complete stranger like me. Perhaps the milieu and their vanity spurred them on; perhaps they didn’t notice the people around them, as if only the very famous really connected with each other, and the rest of the world was just a mist that didn’t matter or counted only as an audience or a claque who might cheer and applaud, or, in the worst case, maintain a respectful or constrained silence and, as if sitting in the dark of a theater, merely listen to this celebrity dialogue. In a sense, it was as if they were there all alone, just the two of them. And what Dearlove said in reply, having first rested his curls for a few moments on Seabrook’s vast decolletage, as if seeking consolation or refuge in the bosom of an old friend, confirmed me in that impression: ‘Oh, Viva, how much longer have we got, how much longer have I got? A day will come when I’ll be nothing but a memory for the elderly, and that memory will gradually fade as those who keep it alive all die, one after the other—with the number of those who remember me steadily decreasing, with no chance of it ever increasing—after it had been constantly growing for years and years, that’s what I can’t bear. It’s not just that I will grow old and disappear, it’s that everyone who might talk about me will gradually disappear too, those who have seen me and heard me and those who have slept with me, however youthful they were at the time, they’ll become old and fat and will die too, as if they’re all under some kind of curse. It’s unlikely that my songs will survive and that future generations will continue to hear them—what will become of my songs when I’m no longer here to defend and repeat them, when I’m no longer up to performing concerts like tonight’s? They’ll never be played again. I’ve hardly written a thing in the last fifteen years, great tunes that others might rediscover and sing tomorrow, even if they’re in ghastly new versions; I no longer have the energy to sit down and write new ones. Besides, I doubt I could come up with anything very memorable.’ And he added disconcertingly. ‘I mean if not even Lennon and McCartney have managed to write anything for ages and ages now, how could I? I’ll be entirely forgotten, Viva. Not a trace of me will be left.’
There was something rather theatrical about his tone of voice and about the gestures that accompanied these laments, but it was clear that they contained some truth as well. He again stretched his legs, and I leaned forward a little to get a better look at those hideous ink-daubed heels of his, I felt curious to know what design or motto he’d had tattooed on his skin.
‘But John Lennon has been dead for thirty years,’ I couldn’t help saying. ‘How the hell could he compose anything?’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Dearlove responded sharply. ‘He wasn’t much good anyway. If someone hadn’t shot him, his songs would probably make people nowadays throw up.’—‘Another candidate for the Kennedy-Mansfield brotherhood,’ I thought.—‘such a wet, pretentious git, and he couldn’t sing either.’—And he shot me a fulminating glance with his once small and now unnaturally large eyes with their cropped lids, as if I were a staunch defender of Lennon, which I never have been and never will be. I rather agreed with former dentist Dearlove’s diagnosis, but telling him so would have seemed like the lowest form of sycophancy.
At least my imprudent intervention had the virtue of briefly angering him, that is, of enlivening and rescuing him from the melancholy state into which he had subsided, and during the rest of supper he was once again a jolly man making rather inopportune jokes that verged on the tedious. I spent most of the time in silence, now and then attempting to lean over discreetly and crane my neck so as to read his heels, but without success.
Later on, thoroughly fed up, I gave Ure or Dundas the shortest possible report:
‘I can confirm everything I told you before, but with this one amendment: he is so concerned about his posterity that, who knows, he might one day commit some atrocity in order to be remembered just for that. He doesn’t believe that his music will last any longer than he will. So, in a moment of desperation, far from avoiding such a blot at all costs, he might very well blot his own life and thus deliberately enter the ranks of the Kennedy-Mansfield clan, as you call them. However, this would have to be while he was in the grip of a deep depression or else confused, or in a few years’ time when he’s retired and no longer gives concerts or enjoys the protective adoration of the crowd. He’s so focused on himself that he sees it as some kind of unfair curse that those who admire him and have met him should die, as if this were something that didn’t touch and wasn’t shared by all those who have trod the earth or strode the world.’ And I added at once: ‘Listen, you know him better than I do, what is it he has tattooed on the heels of his feet?’ I thought it best to formulate the question in this rather absurd way, because, in English, ‘heel’ can also mean the heel of a shoe.
Tupra, however, ignored me. He wasn’t satisfied and I had to recount every last sentence exchanged over supper, by Dearlove, by Viva Seabrook, by my show-business compatriot who had been sitting near us and by anyone else who had made a contribution, however minimal, to the conversation. I loathed having scrupulously to reproduce these dialogues and being forced to relive them. I felt like those vacuous diary writers recording their mean little lives in great detail and then publishing them, to the tedium of unwary readers or perhaps readers who are equally mean and vacuous.
Why he took me with him to York, I don’t know. We walked a long way around the very long wall surrounding the city, as if we were two sentinels or two princes. He wanted us to drive out to the neighboring village of Coxwold, where, two and half centuries before, the writer Laurence Sterne had his home in Shandy Hall, named in honor of his most important novel, Tristram Shandy? I attributed Tupra’s interest to the influence of Toby Rylands, who, when I knew him, had already spent years working on ‘the best book ever written,’ as Rylands told me once—not so much immodestly as with conviction—about Sterne’s other major work, A Sentimental Journey; as if Tupra wanted in this way to pay homage to his former teacher at Oxford or at MI6 or both, and I had nothing against the idea, on the contrary, and besides who was I to object? Nevertheless, as soon as we arrived, he sought out the man in charge of that house-cum-museum, a man younger than either of us, and whom he introduced to me with the unlikely name of Mr. Wildgust before shutting himself up with him in his office, having first urged me to have a look around the house and garden on my own. In each room of that pleasant, peaceful, two-storey mansion was an elderly man or woman—volunteers, doubtless retired people—who, whether you wanted them to or not, provided you, the visitor, with extensive information about the life and habits of its eighteenth-century owner and about the renovation work carried out on the mansion, both in the days of a certain Mr. Monkman, revered founder of the Laurence Sterne Trust (I gladly made a small contribution to the cause) and now. In the spacious garden I did something that is probably punishable by law: I uprooted a tiny plant, which I concealed and kept moist for the rest of the trip, and later, in London, with barely any care or effort on my part, it grew into a plant of extraordinary lushness and vigor, although I never discovered its name, in English or in S
panish (I was thrilled to have carried off and preserved some living thing from the garden of the Shandy family). Tupra didn’t bother to visit the house, he had done so before, he said, and this was doubtless true. After an hour, he reappeared with Wildgust, a semi-youth of an affable, innocent, jolly appearance, with glasses and rather long fair hair, and we returned to York, where Tupra may have met up with someone else, but I did not. He didn’t ask me to provide him with an interpretation of anyone or an opinion on anything, not even on Sterne or York’s endless city wall or Shandy Hall.
It was hard to believe that such a practical man as Tupra would have anything but a professional relationship with Coxwold or with Mr. Wildgust, and it was equally hard to imagine why he would go and see the latter in person or of what possible use he could be to him, a mere employee leading an apparently contemplative life—he obviously didn’t have much to do: when we arrived, he was immersed in reading a novel at the stall selling souvenirs and postcards, with not a customer in sight—stranded in a Yorkshire village where, in his day, the worldly, irreverent and not very vocational Reverend Sterne had been appointed curate. Nor was it easy to comprehend what business he might have with the Berlin shoemaker whom we visited in a tiny elegant shop called Von T (bespoke shoes for gentlemen), on the one occasion when we traveled to the Continent, shortly after these other trips on the large island. To be sure, Reresby did try on and buy some shoes, and it was at Tupra’s urging that Herr Von Truschinsky of Bleibtreustrasse, using beautiful hand-crafted wooden tools the like of which I had never seen before, took the exact and complete measurements of my two feet—length and width, height, instep and tattooable heel—in the confident belief, he said with modesty and tact and in excellent English, that I would be pleased and inspired enough to follow my boss’s example and order more pairs in future, from England or from Spain, and the truth is that, despite the high prices, I bought two pairs, with excellent results and a consequent improvement to my appearance at ground level. (And to think that I had once feared that Tupra might wear boots or clogs or worse, if there is anything worse.) The odd thing is that the shoes bought by Reresby and myself were both English brands I had never heard of before—perhaps because they were so exquisite—Edward Green of Northampton, established 1890, and Grenson, from I don’t know where, established 1866. It seemed somewhat extravagant to travel to Berlin in order to get them—Tupra chose two models, one called Hythe and the other Elmsley, the first in ‘Chestnut Antique’ and the second in ‘Burnt Pine Antique,’ and I chose Windermere in ‘Black’ and Berkeley in ‘Tobacco Suede’—instead of buying them in our own country, that is in Tupra’s country in which I was living at the time. After the measuring ceremony, carried out with extreme delicacy and care by the owner and sole employee, Tupra went into the back of the shop with Von Truschinsky and they conversed behind the curtain for about fifteen minutes, while I amused myself looking through catalogues of fine shoes, which is why I know so much about the actual names of the colors and why some of the shoes I wear now were created by the superlative John Hlustik, which did not mean much to me at the time, but sounded important and Czech. The murmur that reached me was not English, but neither did I have the impression that it was German.
As in York, Tupra didn’t require me to interpret anyone in Berlin or to meet anyone else. He left me free to do as I pleased and did not invite me to a supper he attended with people from the city. On the flight back, I thought he would at least ask me for my necessarily superficial opinion of the shoemaker and, perhaps belatedly, of Mr. Wildgust, even though I hadn’t been present for a substantial part of either conversation. But since, after an hour of discomfort in the air, Tupra was still talking to me only about horse-racing and soccer (he was infuriated by the unnatural Russian wealth and Lusitanian antipathy of the soccer team he had supported all his life, Chelsea), I couldn’t resist asking him:
‘Just out of curiosity, what language were you and Mr. Von Truschinsky speaking when you and he were alone?’
He looked at me with such an accomplished show of surprise that I even thought it might be real.
‘What language would we be speaking? English, of course. The same language in which I was speaking to you. Why would I change? Besides, I hardly know any German.’
It wasn’t true that they had been speaking in English, but I didn’t want to argue. So I changed the subject, or perhaps not that much:
‘Listen, Bertram, I can understand why you asked me to accompany you to Bath and Edinburgh, and I hope I proved useful to you there. But I can’t understand why you wanted me to go with you to York nor why I came to Berlin. You didn’t set me any task, and I can’t see what use I was. And don’t tell me that it was to keep you company, that you don’t like traveling alone. In York, you had the company of Jane, although in the end we hardly made use of her at all.’ Jane Treves hadn’t been part of the excursion to Coxwold nor had she walked for a long time around the medieval city wall. We had merely had supper with her. It could be, why not, that he had made use of her and that she had slept in his room.
‘She was very busy seeing relatives. I included her in the trip more than anything so that she would have the chance to see them. She hasn’t visited them for ages. I’m very pleased with her work. She’s hardly stopped lately.’
‘And yet, on the other hand, with all these short trips, you’re forcing me to postpone my journey to Madrid. You may not realize it, but it’s been ages since I saw my kids; I’d hardly recognize them. Or my father. My father’s very old, you know, he’s only a year younger than Peter. Sometimes I’m afraid I won’t see him again.’ And here I did insist. ‘Why did you ask me to come with you to Berlin? To buy shoes? To renew my footwear?’ Tupra smiled with his thick lips that hardly grew any thinner when stretched.
‘I wanted to introduce you to Clemens von T, he’s an old friend of mine now and provides a magnificent service, you can trust him absolutely. I’m sure that, from now on, you’ll be much better shod. And you’ll be able to deal with him direct. Anyway, I have no trips planned for next month, so if you want to spend a few weeks in Madrid—two or three if you like—that will be fine.’
Such a generous amount of leave. I was taken aback. I thanked him. But there was no way he was going to reply to a question to which he was determined not to reply, I knew that all too well, nor would he explain something he either shouldn’t or couldn’t explain. I gave up. I assumed that when he mentioned my being able to deal direct with Clemens von T, he was not refering to shoes, and that in future he would ask me to consult him about something other than footwear. Nevertheless, the truth is that even now, when that time of fever and dream has long passed, I continue to order my handsome long-lasting pairs of shoes from that tiny shop in Berlin.
Tupra meant what he said on the plane, and so I arranged my trip to Madrid for the following month, a stay of two weeks, I realized this would be quite long enough, possibly even too long, I mean, once I had seen everyone, I wouldn’t know what to do with my time.
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