“All right,” she said. “Now only one more to see.”
“One more?”
“Princess Margaret.”
I laughed and said we would have a try, but a few days later read in the newspaper that Princess Margaret had left London and would not be returning for a month; and Suzie was very disappointed, though it did not matter so much after seeing the Queen.
Three weeks after our arrival in England the exhibition of my pictures opened at Uliman’s Gallery in South Audley Street. The pictures were all of Hong Kong, and 90 per cent of them of the Nam Kok, and since Suzie featured in so many, and often in bar scenes with the sailors, there could be no pretense about her past; and I told Suzie that I did not think she should attend the private view, for it would be too much of an ordeal. However, the evening before the private view she was very thoughtful and preoccupied; and the next morning she came to me with two silk cheongsams over her arm, and said, “Which do you like best?”
“You’re not coming, Suzie?”
“Yes.”
“Then wear the yellow—the one you were married in.”
But then in the taxi on the way to the gallery her nerves gave way and she suddenly announced that she could not go through with it, and that she wanted to go back. I told the driver to pull up, and said that we would just sit there for a minute and talk.
“No, I want to go back,” she cried in a sort of panic. “Just let me out and I will go back. I’m sorry, but I’m so scared. I’m so ashamed.”
“You needn’t be ashamed, Suzie. You’re as good as anybody.”
“No, I’m ashamed. They will all say, ‘She’s just a dirty little yum-yum girl.’ It’s true—I’m no good.”
I nodded toward a woman crossing the road. She was tweedy and upper-middle-class and making for Harrods. I said, “You’re as good as that woman. You’re worth fifty of her.”
“No.”
“You are, Suzie. I’ll tell you about that woman. She’s a snob. She’s intolerant. She’s possessive. She’s so overmothered her son that he’s turned out a queer. She’s bullied and browbeaten her daughter until the poor wretch daren’t say boo to a goose. The other daughter’s run off with a Jew, so she won’t speak to her or have her back in the house. In fact she’s a silly old bitch, and you can tell her so from me.” Suzie was silent, and I said, “Go on, tell her off properly. Say, ‘You’re a silly old bitch and I’m worth fifty of you.’”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Go on, Suzie. Say it. Give her hell.”
“You’re a silly old bitch and I’m worth fifty of you.”
“‘And I’ve nothing to be ashamed of—I’m proud!”
“No. I’m just a dirty—”
“Say it!”
“I’m proud.”
“‘I’m the proudest person on God’s earth!’”
She said it once and then said it again as if she was beginning to feel it, and then she began to smile, and soon she was sitting up proud and straight in the Chinese way, and then we drove on to the gallery, and she looked so proud and poised as we entered the gallery that you would have thought twice before calling her a whore, and if you’d done so you would have felt that it had made you dirtier than it had made her.
In the gallery she stood close by my side and I held her hand, and I did not let it go all afternoon; and sometimes there was tension in her hand, but her eyes were proud and calm and met other people’s eyes with a calm level gaze. The gallery was crowded and all the time Ullman was bringing up people to introduce, and at first you could see them thinking, “I know she was a sailor’s whore but I must behave naturally,” and so of course they did not behave naturally at all, but were gushing and false, the men trying to be gallant and all but giving her winks, and the women being very patronizing and thinking, “How charming of me to be so nice to her—how broad-minded!” And then they met Suzie’s calm level eyes that seemed to be saying, “All right, take a good look, because I’ve nothing to hide,” and they began to feel her presence in a new way; and at this point a few turned hostile, thinking, “Aha, she thinks because I’m nice to her that she’s as good as me,” and with sudden coolness trying to put her back in her place—but most were pleased and relaxed gratefully, and did whatever they could to show their appreciation and respect, and paid her compliments with real warmth.
“My dear, I envy you,” one woman impulsively exclaimed. “I really do—your experience of life! It makes one feel one’s lived so narrowly, been so shut in!” And she went away in a flurry of frustration as if intending to knock off a policeman’s helmet or undress in the street. And another elderly white-haired lady with a silver-topped stick told Suzie that she was beautiful.
“A great beauty, none of the paintings do you justice.” And she turned to me and snapped, “You haven’t caught it—none of your paintings have caught it.” This was true, though not due entirely to my deficiencies as a painter; for all the work on exhibition belonged to my earlier days at the Nam Kok when the prettiness of Suzie’s round white little face had been immature, and it was only prison and her long illness that had brought the maturity which alone gives real beauty to a woman’s face. But when I tried to explain this to the white-haired lady she just said, “Pah! I’d have liked Humphrey to do her—it’s a real Humphrey face. If only Humphrey wasn’t in America!” And Humphrey, whoever he was, being in America, she went off and bought two of my pictures, telling me later, “I’m not as wild about your stuff as some of the others appear to be. But one day with a bit of luck you may do something good.”
Then it was over and the last viewers had gone, and Roy Ullman was sailing up to us, discreetly wafting scent and beaming all over his white moon face, and saying, “Success! Look at all those delicious, delicious red spots!” He waved a manicured hand round the gallery indicating the number of pictures marked as sold. “I do really, really congratulate you. What a success!”
I said, “It’s Suzie who’s had the real success today.”
“Oh, quite, of course. Everybody thought her quite, quite enchanting. But naturally it’s your pictures—”
He was rather a stupid man. He did not understand the ordeal through which Suzie had passed. But all afternoon I had watched people going out through the glass door to the street, because it was then that they would betray themselves, and there had not been a single snigger, and this was a triumph so much greater than my own that I could think of nothing else. And I left the gallery aglow, not because of the red spots but because of Suzie, and because I was so proud of her.
After the opening of the exhibition we became involved in a social whirl. One invitation led to another and our days were filled with engagements; a lunch party with Ullman and an art critic lasting until four o’clock, two cocktail parties between six and eight, dinner with someone in St. John’s Wood, then at midnight down to Chelsea where they’d said, “Don’t worry what time—our parties usually last three days.” And it was at that Chelsea party, as a matter of fact, that Suzie suffered her only real bad moment—when another guest, a cow-eyed woman given to making outrageous remarks with the innocent air of discussing the weather, asked her out of the blue what she would do if in London she ran into some sailor she had known in Hong Kong. There was a ghastly silence. The dozen people round us were paralyzed by the remark. Then Suzie said, “I would say, ‘Hello, good morning,’”—and there was a great burst of relieved laughter all on Suzie’s side. She had not meant to be funny: her brain had been stupefied with embarrassment and she had said the first thing that had come into her head. But everybody thought her reply wonderful, and it gave her the reputation of a wit.
And it was Suzie who saved me from making a terrible fool of myself. I had begun to enjoy the social life, for the exhibition had had a lot of publicity and I was received everywhere like a lion. Everybody seemed to know me and to admir
e my work—and if they happened to reveal by some little slip that they had not actually seen it themselves, and were only going on hearsay, I could still flatter myself that they felt ashamed of their omission. In fact we were moving round in a narrow little circle, but it seemed like the whole world, and for the first time in my life I thought, “I’m somebody—I’m really somebody!”
And then suddenly I found I could talk—about art. Gone were the days when I was inarticulate about painting, and could only mutter about myself, “I see something I want to paint, and try to paint it,”—for now all at once I had perceived significance in my own paintings and had begun to spin them round with webs of theory, using high-flown professional words whose meaning I had only just learned. I could be eloquent, I could be amusing; and at dinner parties, where formerly I would have talked only to my nearest neighbors, I was quite ready to take on the whole table. For after all I was an authority now. I was somebody.
One night at Roy Ullman’s house I had been holding forth like this at dinner, and after the ladies had retired one of the guests, a producer for television, asked me if I would be prepared to give an illustrated talk.
“In fact we might discuss the idea of a series,” he said.
I said I wished that he had asked me a month ago—it was too late now, for we had only three days left in England. We had air passages booked for Japan—with a night stop at Hong Kong en route when we would stay at the Nam Kok.
Roy Ullman examined his manicured nails. “Of course I don’t want to influence you—but not even an artist can afford to ignore his public. And taking the long view, I believe the advantages of your staying in England a bit longer might be simply, simply enormous. . . .”
I was soon won over, and when Suzie returned to the room I put the same arguments to her, and eventually she said without much enthusiasm, “All right, I don’t mind,” and Ullman, who really disliked her, said, “Hurrah, the little lady agrees,” and rang up the airline for us and canceled our bookings.
On the way home Suzie was silent and remote and I was a little piqued, for I felt very flattered at being asked to talk on television and I would have liked her also to be pleased. Her mood was a challenge. I had to reconquer her. But when we were in bed and I made the familiar overtures she said she was tired and withdrew from me, and I turned away feeling rebuffed and annoyed.
However, the next morning, as I was trying to get on with a half-finished portrait of her which was the only work I had done in London, I noticed a spark in her eye, accompanied by other invisible but provocative feminine emanations which meant only one thing: that she herself now felt disposed toward what last night she had denied me. I laughed and teased her for a bit, and then went to her; and when later I asked her to explain her unusually capricious behavior she said, “I like you today. I like you when you work, and wear that dirty old coat full of paint.”
“And when don’t you like me?”
“When you get stuck-up and talk too much, and go boom! boom! boom!”
She gave an imitation of me pompously holding forth. I was very hurt and flew to my own defense, saying that after living so long in the artistic vacuum out East it was wonderful to be among people who talked the same language and who appreciated one’s work, and that I was deriving great benefit from mixing with other painters, and with critics and connoisseurs.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think in England you just get hard. Too many people. Too much talk. Too much boom-boom-boom. You get hard inside.”
“You know what’s the matter with you?” I said. “You’re jealous. You’re jealous of my success at parties—and of all those pretty girls who come up and tell me I’m wonderful.”
She shook her head.
“Of course you are—you’re exhibiting all the classic symptoms. Go and look at those green eyes in the mirror!”
I was delighted at the way I had turned the attack, and remained well-satisfied with myself all day. And it was only that night, after I had lain awake for a long time in the dark with a gnawing uneasiness, that all at once I saw the truth of Suzie’s caricature of me—saw myself smugly seated at some dinner table, dogmatically holding forth about things of which I had scarcely an inkling, contriving theories to boost my own work and belittle the work of others. Thinking “I’m somebody” because really, deep down, I was afraid of being nobody. Talking instead of doing. Criticizing instead of creating.
Oh, God, it was horrifying—those smart sterile cocktail parties, that aesthetic chitter-chatter, that endless boom-boom-booming that made you feel big but that killed you inside—that killed that little flame that needed so desperately to be nourished. And I was seized by panic, and the wild urge to escape before it was too late, and I woke Suzie and switched on the light and said, “Suzie, I’ve been a fool—a perfect fool.”
“What’s happened?” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“You were right, Suzie. I’m just destroying myself here. We mustn’t stay.”
“What about your talks?”
“To hell with the talks.”
“But you like talking. You won’t be able to talk in Japan.”
“I don’t want to talk. I want to paint.”
And the next morning we went to the airline office and got back our old bookings, and five nights later we were back at the Nam Kok.
II
And I do not think there has been another night like it at the Nam Kok before or since. The girls were far too excited by Suzie’s return to think of working, and they ignored the sailors and stood crowded round our table so that we could hardly breathe, and they would not move except to feed a new coin into the juke box; and they played “Seven Lonely Days” in our honor all evening. And each time the record restarted there were ironical catcalls from the sailors, and I could not help sympathizing with them because the girls’ neglect was quite sufficient hardship in itself without such musical monotony to drive them mad.
Suzie had brought presents for all the girls, and they opened them with suitable exclamations of surprise and delight. The only girl who remained apart was Doris Woo who sat primly alone in the corner, blinking like a schoolmarm behind the rimless glasses, until at length two rather drunk sailors started a row over her because she was the only girl going. However, as she got up to leave the room with the winner Suzie called to her to come for her present, and the other girls joined in the exhortations and made way for her to approach.
“I don’t want anything,” she snapped. “Who was it meant for?”
“For you,” Suzie said. “It is a present from London for you.”
“I don’t believe you,” Doris said bitterly.
She tore the paper off the little parcel as if she was doing us a favor, saying she knew better than to believe that in London we had ever given her a thought; but her words were cut short as she saw the contents, a little leather note-case with Doris Woo in gold letters across the corner. She stared at it in silence, her glasses misting. She could not say anything for a long time, but remained at the table; and when the drunk sailor impatiently summoned her she just shook her head, and the other girls pushed him away. Then Doris asked Suzie how much it cost to go to London, not because she wanted to know but just to show interest, and I told her the cost by sea, saying “That’s in pounds,” and the comedienne Fifi said, “Well, what does that make in short-times?” And this provoked such an outburst of merriment that nobody noticed “Seven Lonely Days” come to an end, until a sailor had seized his opportunity and some other tune had burst upon the room, whereupon they all turned on the poor matelot with cries of anger and dismay.
Then Typhoo asked if there were many Chinese people in London, and Suzie said we had been to a Chinese restaurant with a Cantonese cook and waiters, but the food had been a travesty of real Chinese food; and then the luscious little Jeannie wanted to know if there were any Chinese bar g
irls or dance girls in London.
“They do not have any bar girls or dance girls in London,” Suzie said. “Only street girls.”
“Ugh!” shuddered little Alice, who had a new expensive hair-do of tight little curls, and she shook with giggles.
“And they are all European,” Suzie said. “But some of them are very beautiful, and wear beautiful furs.”
“How much do they charge?” Jeannie asked. She looked tired and much older and was just beginning to run to seed, so that soon she would no longer be luscious, but just fat; and I had a sudden distressing vision of the old overblown whore, calling from some darkened doorway, that would be Jeannie in ten years.
“I think they charge more than—than us,” Suzie said. She had been about to say “more than you,” but had been afraid to sound stuck-up.
Old Lily Lou leaned across the table. “What about the Queen?” she whispered huskily. “Did you see the Queen?”
“Yes, as close as you,” Suzie said. “Oh, yes, she was very pretty.”
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