I was now beside the waves, and I could just make the sign out, ‘Boats for Hire’, and saw them moored fifteen feet away from me out there. So thinking, why not? anything to relieve the agony, I sat on the grass, and took off my nylon stretch and Itie clogs, and rolled up my Cambridge blues, and stepped into the drink like King Canute. By the time I reached the first boat, I was up to my navel like the hero in an Italian picture, and hoisted myself into the thing and, after a lot of bother untying a skein of greasy cables, I managed to put out to sea. As soon as I was in the middle, I let her just float along.
I lay there, ruddy uncomfortable, gazing at the stars, and thinking again of Suze, and of how absolutely nice it would be if she was there, she and me. ‘Suzie, Suzette,’ I said, ‘I love you, girl.’ And I washed my face off in the muddy, invisible slop.
Then I sat up inside that boat, and thought, how can I make a lot of money quickly, if that’s what she wants to get? Naturally, I thought of Wiz, of his plans for his prosperity, but knew I could never make it that way – honest, not because of morals, or anything like that, but because that life, though it may be glamorous in its way, is so really undignified, if that’s the word. I want to be rich all right, but I don’t want to be hooked.
Wham! we slapped into the bottom of the bridge, the boat and I. I looked up and saw a geezer looking over, and I waved up to the silly sod, and shouted out, ‘Bon soir, Monsieur!’ and he said nothing in reply, but started throwing pennies down on me, or maybe they were dollar bits, I couldn’t see, and didn’t care to, because this character’s idea of having a ball struck me as most dangerous. So I rowed on to the other bank, and disembarked just at the Lido, and had to climb a fence to get out of the enclosure, and ripped myself in several painful places.
The law, as anyone who knows it will agree, has a genius for showing up not when you’re doing something, as it should, presumably, but when you’re quite innocent and have just done something. This cowboy flashed his lighthouse on me as I was putting on my shoes and socks, and stood there saying nothing, but not dowsing that annoying glim.
But I was determined he’d have to say the opening word, which he did by asking, after several long minutes, ‘Well?’
‘Having a paddle, officer,’ I said.
‘A paddle.’
‘That’s what I told you.’
‘That’s what you tell me.’
‘In the old Serpentine.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Down there.’
‘Down there, you say.’
This conversation seemed to me quite mental, so I got up, and said, ‘Goodnight, officer,’ and started off, but he said to me, moving up, ‘Come here.’
So naturally, I ran.
One thing you learn about the law is that they don’t like running because their helmets usually fall off. What’s more, they don’t like any kind of physical effort – in fact, the one thing coppers all have in common, apart from being tramps, is that they have a horror of physical labour of any kind, particularly manual. Just look at the expression on their faces when you see a photo of them in the papers, digging among the rushes for the killer weapon! So if you’re fast on your feet, and there’s only one of them, you can fairly easily elude them, which I did now by dodging behind that Peter Pan erection, and diving in some smutty bushes.
‘Further on, mate – get further on,’ a voice said, as I’d inconsiderately got entangled with a bird and client, which of course wasn’t my intention, so I bowed myself out, and got up on the road again and over it among the great dark trees, far darker than the dark sky up behind them, and I started walking normally, like some serious kiddo who’s gone out nocturnal birdwatching, or learning poetry by heart for a dramatic evening at the borough hall. After trampling by mistake over some flower beds, for which I apologise, I came out on the south side of the Hyde, and escaped through the ornamental gate into the embassy section that starts up round about there.
If attending a teenage party, or in fact one of any other kind, I’d naturally wear my sharpest, coolest ensemble – possibly even my ivy-league outfit a GI got for me last year from his PX. But the Lament would be disappointed if, billing me to her public as a teenage product, I didn’t show up in my full age-group regalia. So I wasn’t embarrassed by my non-Knightsbridge clobber, but only a bit at being drenched downwards from the hips: however, I was hoping they’d accept that as just a bit of teenage fun.
So I rang the Dido bell. And, as often happens when you attend a party, another cat arrived on the doorstep at the same moment. Usually, they don’t address you until properly introduced within, but this one was something of an exception, because, without even telling me his name, or anything, he smiled and said, ‘You for the tigress’s den as well?’
I didn’t answer that, but smiled back just as politely (and with just as little meaning) as the cat – who was one of those young men with an old face, or old ones with a young one, hard to tell which: anyway, he had a very sharp top-person suit on, which must have cost his tailor quite a bit.
‘You’ve known our remarkable hostess long?’ he said.
‘That’s how it goes,’ I answered, and we passed inside the block together.
No need for a lift this time, because Dido has a ground floor thing around a patio out the back, which is even selecter than a penthouse, in my opinion, because it’s somehow more unexpected: I mean the patio, which was very large for London, and still full of gaps in spite of a fair number of hobos already milling around there. Lament’s one of those persons who, when she throws a party, and you’ve just arrived, you don’t have to hunt around for her under the cushions or in the toilet, to say hullo, because she’s felt you directly you come in, and is on the scene immediately with a merry word of greeting. Up she glid, wearing a white hold-me-tight creation, like an enormous washable contraceptive, and with her ginger hair wind-tossed and tousled (I’ll bet it took her all of half an hour), and with her radar-eyes gleaming on the target, and with her geiger-ears pinking big discoveries, and with her Casualty-Ward-10 hands slicing through the hospitable summer air, and with her feet, claws withdrawn inside the pads just for the present, very successfully and snakily carrying the lot.
‘Oh, hul-lo, infant prodigy,’ she said to me. ‘You’ve already met my ex-lover Vendice? Are you hungering for something? Have you wet your pants?’
‘Yes, yes, and no,’ I told her. ‘I’ve come straight up to your tenement from a bathe.’
‘But of course,’ she cried out, but in a low, rasping voice, as if someone had cut six of her vocal chords. Then she leant her head until her carroty locks swept by my neck, and said, ‘Any items for the column?’
‘Lots. How’s the price these days?’
She put her lips on my neck skin without kissing, actually. ‘You’ll tell me for love,’ she said.
‘Yes. All the dirt. A bit later,’ I assured her. But she didn’t hear me, because she’d swept on along her mossy hostess’s track.
I think Dido’s the most unscrupulous person I’ve yet met, though I don’t mean especially about money. What I mean is, she believes everything in existence is a deal. For example, when she came pounding around the teenage ghetto, collecting material for her articles I’ve referred to, she gave all the kiddos the impression that she wanted to buy the teenage thing, like somebody booking a row of ringsides at the circus. And when she looks at you – and she’s always very pleased to see you – her eyes say she knows just how much your price will be. She’s somewhere between thirty-eight and fifty-eight, I’d say, and this flat of hers in the Knightsbridge red-light district must be worth a bit more than ever her column pays her, so there are no doubt other items in reserve. The sex angle, so the chatter goes, isn’t bent in any direction, and no one in particular’s in evidence around her garret, though there are said to be favourites, and sometimes the industrial daddies from the North move in a while to look around.
I gazed at the saleroom, to see what sorts of customers she’d mustere
d. I don’t know if I can convey this idea exactly, but the general impression they all gave was of being well stoked with nourishment, well decked out in finery, but all on someone else’s money. This is a curious thing – that you can usually tell who has their own loot, who not: rather as you can the really sexual numbers, boys and girls, from all the others, I mean the serious operators, by a sort of quietness, of purpose, of relaxation they possess.
Up came the Hoplite. He had on some Belafonte-style, straight-from-the-canefield (via the make-up room) kind of garments, with too many open necks, and tapering wrists, and shoes like tin-openers, all in light colours except for some splashes of mascara that gave his eyes melancholy and meaning. He plucked at my arm, and told me, with an agonising sigh, ‘Look, yon’s the Nebraska boy.’
I saw, chatting away beneath the pergola, a perfectly ordinary young US product – fresh, washed and double-rinsed as they manufacture them in thousands over there.
‘Cute,’ I told Hoplite.
‘Cute! Oh, lordy me!’
‘Well – dynamic, then.’
‘That’s a bit better.’
‘You hitting it off, you two?’
‘Ah, woe …!’
The Hoplite gripped my arm, gazing to and fro languorously from the Nebraskan one to me, and said, ‘It’s ghastly, you know. He’s ever so friendly to me, and cheerful, and sometimes even grins and reaches out and ruffles my hair.’
‘Painful. I feel for you.’
‘Have pity! Ah me, ah me!’
‘Ah you, all right. Where’s the lush hidden?’
‘It’s not. You help yourself from the sideboard, just like that.’
I worked my way over with young Fabulous, who eased aside the multitude with his shapely tail.
‘Ah-ha, you remind me,’ I told Hop. ‘The Call-me-Cobber number wants to sign you up for a television thing’ – and I told him about the Lorn Lover programme project. The Hoplite looked very dubious indeed. ‘Of course, you know I’d love to have my face and figure up there in between the commercials,’ he told me, ‘and naturally, I’d love to appear before the nation to tell it all about Nebraska. But do you think, really, public opinion’s ripe yet for anything so bold?’
‘You could say it’s a deep and splendid friendship that unites you.’
‘Well, in a sense it is.’
‘I’ll speak to C.-me-C., then.’
‘And I will to Adonis.’
Standing there alone, clutching my lime-and-tonic, I was accosted by one of those numbers you always meet up with at a party, and she opened up to me with,
‘Hullo, stranger.’
‘Hi.’
‘How are you called?’
‘And you?’
‘You tell me.’
‘David Copperfield.’
She shrieked. ‘I’m Little Nell.’
‘There you go!’
‘What do you do?’
‘Only on Saturdays.’
‘Naughty. No, I mean your job.’
‘Photographic work.’
‘For Dido?’
‘I’m freelance.’
‘Plenty of windmills to tilt at?’
‘That’s how it goes.’
‘Which end of town you live?’
‘The end I sleep in.’
‘No, seriously.’
Here they always give you the, ‘But I’m interested in you,’ look.
‘Round W10.’
‘Oh, that’s unusual.’
‘Not to those who live in W10.’
Here, having a little thought to wrestle with, her brain started pinking.
‘Know everyone here?’
‘Everyone except you.’
‘But you do know me. I’m Little Nell.’
You see what I mean? Honestly, that’s what parties always turn out to be. All the pleasure of a party is going there, up as far as the front door only.
Bits of the company had started dancing, but I didn’t want to join in this activity, because either they were doing that one-two, one-two ballroom thing, which makes everybody look like waiters and usherettes out on their annual rave, or else, if they were jiving, they were all of them frantic and alarming, like a physical culture demonstration by a bunch of cats with colic, knocking themselves out quite unnecessarily, because the real way to jive is to swing your body, not your legs and arms. I must admit some of the birds tried to get a hold of me, on account of the prestige of the teenage performance, but I pleaded not guilty, and made it over to the pergola. There I unhitched my Rolleiflex, and took a few pictures just to keep my hand in, and for a rainy day.
‘I’d like some of those, if they’re successful,’ said a gent standing there beside me.
This gent, who wore a north-of-Birmingham suiting, was the one exception to the thing I said earlier on about their all, myself included, being a lot of parasites and ponces: I mean, he looked as if it was on himself that he depended – you know, substantial, and not throwing it all up at once. And this turned out to be the case, because he told me he was a businessman, a manufacturer in the motor industry, and believe me, I got quite a kick out of knowing him, as I had never actually met a businessman before – in fact, hardly believed that they existed, though realising, of course, they must do, somewhere.
‘Good for you, chairman!’ I said to him, pumping his business-manly paw. ‘If you ask me, you commercial cats are the only ones that really keep the nation sliding off its arse.’
‘You think so?’ the number asked me, giving the ‘amused smile’ the seniors turn on whenever anything intelligent is said by an absolute beginner.
‘Naturally, I think it,’ I told him, ‘if I’ve just said it.’
‘Not many would agree with you,’ he said, beginning to latch on to my conception.
‘You don’t have to tell me! Turn on your telly, or your radio, and do you ever catch anything about businessmen? Does anyone write books about them in the paperbacks? And yet, don’t we all live off what you do? Without you tycoons, there just wouldn’t be the money for the rent.’
‘You’re very flattering,’ this industrial number said.
‘Oh, shit!’ I cried. ‘Will no one ever take my ideas seriously?’ The balance sheet product started to laugh soothingly, so I grabbed him by the lapel of his family-tailor hopsack, and said, ‘Look! England was an empire – right? Now it isn’t any longer – yes? So all it’s got to live on will be brains and labour, i.e. scientists and engineers and businessmen and the multitudes of authentic toilers.’
The cat looked surprised and pleased.
‘Mind you,’ I added, just to bring him down a bit, ‘I’m not saying business is difficult. I don’t think it’s difficult to coin loot, provided you’re really interested in it – provided it’s your number-one obsession.’
‘I’ll not disagree with you altogether there,’ the boardroom product said.
‘Most of us think we’re interested in making money, but we’re not: we’re only interested in getting our hands on someone else’s.’
He looked at me approvingly, as if he’d sign me up immediately as chief teacup boy in his twelve-storey office block.
‘And how is the car trade?’ I continued.
‘Don’t tell a soul,’ he said, looking around him, ‘but it’s prospering.’
‘Crazy!’ I said. ‘But of course,’ I went on, ‘you know you automobile producers are a bunch of murderers?’
‘Oh, yes? Would you say so?’ he said, smiling ‘tolerantly’ again.
‘Well, in a sense you are. You read the figures of the slaughter on the highways?’
‘I try to forget them. What are we to do?’ This automotive one was still looking a bit ‘amused’, but I could see I’d touched him on a nerve. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘if you took the cars off the roads tomorrow, the whole economy would collapse. Have you considered that?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘In addition, the export industry on which, as you’ve said, this country li
ves, requires a healthy home consumption to sustain it.’
‘There you go!’
‘So death on the roads is the price we pay for moving the goods around, and earning currency abroad.’
I looked at the cat. ‘You’ve said all this before,’ I told him, ‘to the assembled shareholders.’
‘Good heavens, no!’ the number said. ‘As a matter of fact, son, I say it chiefly to myself.’
‘Well,’ I told this industrial chieftain, ‘you know as well as I do, if you’re a driver, which I expect you are, that there’s stacks of goons sitting behind steering-columns who like the idea they may mow some victim down.’ I waited, but he didn’t answer. ‘An accelerator and a ton of metal,’ I went on, ‘bring out the Adolf Hitler in us all. They know there’s no danger to themselves, sitting up there inside that tank, and if they make a kill, they know nobody’s going to hang them.’
The profit-and-loss one now began to look a bit uneasy – I mean, not at my ideas, but me – which always happens if you let loose an idea.
‘Car driving,’ I told him, twisting my knife round in the wound, ‘is the licensed murder of the contemporary scene. It used to be duelling and cut-throats, now it’s killing by car.’
I saw I mustn’t keep on rucking him, because, after all, this was a party, so I patted him on his hopsack, just like he’d done me, and struggled across to cut in on Call-me-Cobber, and have a spin round with the ex-Deb-of-Last-Year. But: ‘Fair goes, now, fair goes,’ the Cobber said, and he pulled the ex-Deb out of reach, and all I got for my attempt was her making apologetic faces at me over the Aussie’s beefo shoulders.
‘Aboriginal!’ said Zesty-Boy Sift.
This Zesty, who had come up now beside me, was the only other teenage product present at the barbecue, and I hadn’t spoken to him yet for two reasons: first, because I meant to borrow five pounds from him, and wanted to choose my moment, and second, because this Z.-B. Sift had come up very abruptly in the world since I first knew him, and I didn’t want to show I was impressed.
But in actual fact, I was. In the far dawn of creation when the teenage thing was in its Eden epoch, young Zesty used to sing around the bars and caffs, and was notorious for being quite undoubtedly the crumbiest singer since – well, choose your own. But – here’s the point – the songs he sung, their words as well as harmonies, were his invention, thought up by him in a garage in Peckham, where he used to toil by day and slumber in an old Bugatti. And though Zesty caught all the necessary US overtones to send the juveniles that he performed for, the words he thought up were actually about the London teenage kids – I mean not just ‘Ah luv yew, Oh yess Ah du’ that could be about anyone, but numbers like Ugly Usherette, and Chickory with my Chick, and Jean, your Jeans!, and Nasty Newington Narcissus which all referred to places and to persons which the kids could actually identify round the purlieus of the city.
Absolute Beginners Page 11