‘Down South. Whose side are you on anyway?’
‘Nobody’s. I’m just visiting.’
‘Well, I won’t burden you with my little secret then. Jesus, I better get moving. The idea was to be out of here before Big Daddy surfaced. With a bit of luck, he’ll still be enjoying the incestuous pleasure of his bed. You dig the literary allusion? I was majoring in English Literature before I dropped out of Tulane.’
‘Not incestuous exactly, is it?’
‘It is too. We called her Aunt Jane when we were kids. What brings you to this hellhole?’
‘I’m giving a lecture.’
‘Oh yeah, I heard. On the British recovery or something. What a laugh.’
‘I couldn’t agree more.’
‘No, I didn’t mean your lecture, I meant the audience. Lecture – they couldn’t even spell the word, certainly not after the happy hour. Sorry I shan’t be there. You couldn’t give me a hand with one of these bags, could you? Just down the stairs.’
My bare feet slithered on the thick pile of the stair-carpet and the fresh morning air frolicked through my pyjama bottoms, as I followed her down to what looked like the back door.
‘Doh, what the hell do you mean by this? This is . . . it’s an outrage. You’re a goddamn thief.’
From the back door, I could see Dodo Wilmot standing behind the open doors of a big removal van and wearing, no, yes, riding-breeches of a peculiar saffron colour. In his hand he had a riding crop which he was swooshing to and fro in his anger, more like a conductor whipping up a sluggish orchestra than a man preparing to hit someone.
‘I’m just taking what’s Mom’s and mine.’
‘Thief, thief. That bonheur-du-jour . . .’
‘It’s Mom’s.’
‘No, it fucking isn’t. I bought it at Partridges, in London.’
‘I don’t care which bunch of vultures you bought it from. It’s hers, it’s always been in her boudoir, and it’s hers.’
‘Look, your mother doesn’t need a goddamn bonheur-du-jour any more.’
‘No, and whose fault is that?’
Having slung the last bag in the van, Dodona shut the doors. From my barefoot viewpoint it wasn’t possible to see how much she had piled up in there, but to judge by Dodo’s vibrations it must have been quite a haul. As she passed by him, I thought he was sure to hit her, but he didn’t. In a curious way, having the riding crop in his hand seemed to deter him. You felt with his hands free he would have shaken her at least. In fact, her decisiveness seemed to deflate him.
‘Look, Doh, you can’t just strip the house like this. Besides, you haven’t any place to store all the stuff. You can’t take it to Mount Ararat.’
‘That’s my problem.’
‘You’ve no right to half of it, you know that. I could have the lawyers repossess it, just like that.’
‘That would look great, wouldn’t it? Waldo R. Wilmot reduced to putting the bailiffs in on his daughter. Must be down to his last nickel, better sell the stock before everyone else does.’
‘Oh come on, Doh, it’s not like that. Just leave that stuff and come eat breakfast.’
‘I don’t eat breakfast, because I don’t want to look any more like you than God made me, which was a dirty trick in the first place. Besides, I’ve got a date.’
She jumped into the truck and scorched off down the gravel sweep.
Her father stood in the yard, the rage drained out of him, disconsolate yet not so absorbed in his misery that he failed to spot me standing in my pyjamas at the back door.
‘Hey you better get some clothes on. You look pretty rough.’
‘That’s what your daughter said.’
‘We’re so goddamn alike. That’s the trouble. Headstrong, wilful, you pick the word for it, but it boils down to we don’t like to be crossed. Hey, you sound like you caught cold last night. I’m hells sorry about that, it was just irresistible, you know, when you’ve got that little titty by your chair to press it. I know I shouldn’t, but when those sprinklers start up and you guys start running, it’s just a terrific sight.’
The thought of our soaking had gone quite a way to restoring his humour but not mine, because it was suddenly plain to me that the jape was not a whim of the moment but needed some planning, viz, instructing Charles to make us get out of the car and walk across no man’s land.
‘Now let me fill you in a piece about the Trumbull Club. We named it for Gideon H. Trumbull, First Secretary of the Treasury in the Commonwealth of Virginia, great feller, lost an eye in the revolutionary wars, made a fortune in military supply, first-rate economist, first-rate drinker and fornicator, our kinda guy. Elbow said his treatise on the circulation of money was the best thing to come out of the States before Harry Johnson or maybe Milton Friedman.’
‘Elbow?’ I gasped. Wilmot seemed to have forgotten I was only in pyjamas and was leading me by the arm across the lawn still sloshy from the sprinklers towards a vine-clad barn at the far end of the grass. Beyond were blue hills. The sun was silvering the dewdrops.
‘George Elbow, only goddamn economist worth a cent, born Georg von Ellbogen in Vienna, Austria, has a chair in Chicago now, you could say he was the Trumbull of our day, they said he had the biggest cock in Vienna. Well here we are, the Captain’s cabin, how do you like it?’
The barn was panelled inside and hung with pictures of naval engagements. Thirty or forty little gold chairs were drawn up expectantly facing a lectern with a screen behind it. I was filled with a terrible foreboding.
‘They’ll be coming for an informal brunch-type thing, eleven-thirty. Don’t worry, they’re a fun crowd.’
It was on the dot of eleven-thirty that a red-faced man driving a spruce little gig pulled by a high-stepping pony with a foamy mane came up the drive, removing his cap to Jane and the rest of us.
‘Everton Billings, Billings Lifts, number two to Otis in the South but rising to all floors.’
Billings tossed back the first cocktail he was offered in a single gulp, then picking up a few lumps of sugar from the coffee table in his yellow-gloved hand tossed them to the pony who caught them with a swirl of its mane. He greeted me with enthusiasm and enquired whether I had been to Badminton lately.
‘And this is Frank Freed – Freed, Torpor & Sloth, slowest lawyers in the States.’
‘Tarpion & Sloan,’ corrected the tall lugubrious man in the cream linen safari jacket and jade foulard.
‘Abbey Headlamp from Golgotha Cement.’ A stately woman with dollops of blonde hair piled above her smiling pudgy face.
Already I was not sure how much of these names I was mishearing, how much was Dodo’s embroidery.
‘Bing Busby, Northern State Insurance, Eddy Barkovitz from Bluehills, how ya doing Ed, Bluehills is the biggest manufacturer of prosthetics in the East, that right Eddy, you lose an arm or a leg, you go to Eddy and that’s what he’ll cost you.’
‘Heard that one before some place, Dodo.’
‘The old ones are the best, you know that. Well, look who’s here. I want you to meet a very dear friend of ours, Senator Hamilton Sandfish.’
This was an impossibly tall man in a grey suit which fitted him as well as his fine weathered face in which even the liver spots of old age seemed to be put there deliberately. I don’t think I had ever seen a person of such distinction and the smile which slowly crinkled across his face like a crumbling sandcastle left me so weak at the knees that I could hardly take in the few courteous words he burbled down to me. As he moved on to greet Jane, I could feel how proud Dodo was to have landed such a specimen. Over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of a yellow glove tossing another cocktail to its owner’s lips. It was hot on the verandah and the Trumbullites were shouting as hard as they were drinking, spilling out on to the lawn as their numbers grew, the creamy linens and flashing silks – silver, petunia-pink and a delicate shimmering shade of magnolia – looking brave against the dark green of the sodden pelouse. Back on the verandah, Charles and the rest of the
staff were wheeling in silver trays: eggs benedict, Virginia muffins, soft-shelled crabs, and a dozen other dishes pretending to be less substantial than lunch. A few of the younger Trumbullites wheeled back from the lawn like a flock of startled pigeons to scoop up these delicacies, but the older magnates held their ground waiting for refills as two black maids moved among them with cocktail shakers glinting in the sun.
‘Well isn’t this the most enormous fun? How nice to see you again,’ said an English voice.
I half-turned to see a face I didn’t immediately recognise but then pinned down as Pettifer, Pettigrew or whoever – the man famous for charm whom I had met the evening of the disastrous re-encounter with Jane.
‘What, er, brings you here?’
‘To hear your lecture of course.’
‘No, seriously.’
‘I’m looking forward to it immensely. It’s a piece of luck that I happened to be over here following up a little bit of business with our friend Dodo. They’re wonderful, our cousins, aren’t they?’
‘Cousins?’
‘Americans, so resilient. There’s poor Tucker, you know about Tucker? Yes, well, it’s only a month, certainly no more than two since her accident and here they are putting on such a fine show. Absolutely first-class,’ he added reflectively after a little pause, as though considering other examples of such resilience before deciding in which class to place this one. ‘Dodo’s an amazing chap, you know,’ he went on.
‘Yes.’
‘Basically, he’s a romantic. That surprises you, but that’s the way I look at it and I’ve been knocking around with him for more years than I care to tell. He falls in love just like that – he sees a girl, doesn’t matter who she is or what she’s doing, could be serving in a shop, could be a princess, and he just has to have her. Don’t know if you ever came across a blonde who worked for him? A geologist I think she was, a bit too serious for me and you wouldn’t have thought his type at all. But he fell for her, head over heels, wouldn’t let her out of his sight.’
I soared out over the lawn, and the bright silks of the crowd, and fixed my eyes on the low blue hills beyond and thought how clean the air would be up there.
‘Must be a peculiar experience, for a girl like that, I mean she was from nowhere, and suddenly she had Dodo bearing down on her like a rogue elephant. The funny thing was, he was a bit scared of her, didn’t want her to think badly of him, so he wouldn’t tell her about the beryllium thing, kept her thinking up to the last minute he was digging for emeralds. And that was the end of that. Next thing you know, he falls hopelessly in love with Jane who he’s known for years, wife’s best friend and all that. I don’t know how he does it. They’re so sweet together, like a couple of teenagers, don’t you think?’
He paused, in that way he had of seeming to listen to his words die away as though savouring the last echoes of his own charm.
‘Have you met the Senator? He’ll be introducing you.’
‘Senator Sandfish?’
‘Yes, the dear old Ham Sandwich. I don’t know how he gets away with it.’
‘Gets away with what?’
‘You go along to his office and there’s always half a dozen fellers waiting with envelopes stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills – oil, construction, you name it. Dodo’s had him on a retainer for as long as I can remember. Not a lot upstairs, but he’s still awfully decorative, ah there’s old Billings. I must just tip my hat to him.’
Pettifer/Pettigrew drifted off into the crowd. Watching him go, I saw to my surprise Dodona coming towards me. Surprising, not just that she had come back, but that she had tugged on a cotton frock of a colour that could only be described as beige.
‘You said you weren’t coming.’
‘Couldn’t miss it. I changed in the truck,’ she said. ‘Wore it in my junior year, depressing isn’t it? You seen the boys yet?’
‘Brainerd and Timmy?’
‘Your kids, yeah. You ought to look after them better, they’re stinkaroo.’
‘Already?’
‘We work fast in these parts. Look at this distinguished assemblee, not a sober man among them.’
‘Well, I’m doing all right myself.’
‘Yeah, you look smashed enough to pass unnoticed. You got any slides? Well, I’ll look after them for you. You need a steady hand on the projector.’
Just then a microphone crackled into life somewhere and I saw Senator Sandfish standing on a bench, amid the roses that fringed the lawn.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasant duty to call you to order at this convocation and to invite you to drink the health of our founder, the Honourable Gideon H. Trumbull, coupled with the great Commonwealth of Virginia.’
Glasses held high in the hot sun, solemn chanting of the toast, blue hills shimmering in the haze. Party then shuffled across the lawn to the place of execution.
Cool, measured, not without a touch of irony – that was to be the tone of the lecture, so that its message would steal up on the audience and take them off guard. My text would begin by guiding them through the derelict industrial landscape of Britain Before – the bombsites overgrown with ragwort and buddleia, the grimy winding gear in the Welsh Valleys, the silent shipyards on the Tyne – before swinging into the After, the gleaming new strip mills, the swooping motorways, the soaring tower blocks, a little Manhattan in every British city.
This strategy was a mistake. The audience in its hyped-up state was too easily moved by the first images that Dodona clicked up on to the screen.
‘Geez, isn’t that awful?’
‘Even Pittsburgh was never that bad.’
‘We went to Stratford last year, and Oxford, but we never saw anything like that.’
These expressions of horror seemed to release them from any obligation to be quiet, and a steady muttering, occasionally breaking out into chuckles and even open guffaws, set in for the rest of the lecture. This should have stirred me to talk louder over them, but in fact a kind of drowsy indifference drifted over me. I sensed the beginnings of that disembodied feeling which often comes with being medium drunk, a sensation of hovering a few feet below the ceiling and watching, not unkindly, your alter ego continuing to perform down below. Now and then, one of my statistical slides seemed to quieten the audience for the time it took them to read the figures, the one showing the recent rise in Britain’s share of the European semi-finished steel products market being particularly effective, but then the background chatter resumed and my own attention continued to wander, pausing for an instant or two on stray unfocused thoughts – about the nature of human lust, why Dodona had come back, whether I was going to be sick – before returning to the text I was reading out, with a renewed sense of how dull it was and consequently a growing sympathy with the audience who clearly felt much the same. Now and then, tips about the art of lecturing wandered into my head – don’t gabble, speak deliberately – which would have been good advice if I had not already been speaking at something like dictation speed. Also: don’t be ashamed of your notes, in fact brandish them, Churchill used to. Good advice, too, except that in brandishing them I chanced to swat the mike lightly to and fro, producing a quick succession of rhythmic squawks, such as might be obtained by applying a mute or baffle to some brass instrument. At which point I remembered that the technique for recovering from any hitch of this sort was to look up at your audience and by frank and warm eye contact re-establish sympathy. As my gaze ranged to the far end of the barn so that not even the backmost rows should be spared, I saw through the big back window two faces peering in with hideous grimaces. At first this gurning, not to mention the steam of their breath on the glass, made it hard to identify them, but then their features relaxed into something approaching normality and I saw that it was Timmy and Brainerd. Their faces disappeared for a minute or two before something large and white moved slowly across the window, which turned out to be a naked bottom apparently propped up on some other person’s equally naked shoulders. The bottom dis
appeared, to be followed by one of the heads again, with the other person clambering up on top of him in order to manoeuvre his crotch into view but falling off again before managing it. Derailed by this sight, my speech had slowed to a crawl and, when I reached the bottom of the page, to a halt. At my side, Senator Sandfish, sensing the opportunity presented by this impasse, rose with marvellous briskness to lead the applause, leaning over to me at the same time to burble inaudible felicitations into my ear. He was followed by a flock of Trumbull clubbers. Billings clasped my hands with empressement, Abbey Headlamp stroked my forearm and said ‘So clever’ as she might to a cat. She had been chatting to her neighbour from about three minutes in and couldn’t have heard a word. This tide of insincere congratulations ebbed soon enough, and it can only have been a couple of minutes before I was alone sitting on my gold chair on the little platform. As I got up to shamble out after the audience, I felt a little pinch at the back of my upper thigh and turned round to see Dodona looking up at me with an expression of such cheerfulness as I had not yet seen on her.
‘That was one lousy lecture. What a turkey. Come on, you need a break.’
She flipped back a green velvet curtain behind the miniature stage to reveal a little back door which she unlocked and beckoned me through. We were immediately in a low-growing wood of scrub oaks and some hazy-leafed trees which the sun could only just flicker through. Here and there the sun caught a patch of stagnant water, almost overgrown with moss and water-lilies. Our feet were flip-flopping along a narrow boardwalk with planks broken in places and a lichened railing, some of that broken too. There were crickets zinging and now and then the croak of a frog and dragonflies pulsing low over the green pools. Ahead of us a bright scarlet bird jinked through the trees.
‘The enchanted wood.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. How did you know we called it that? No one comes here any more. It was Mom who loved it, so it’s going back to nature now.’
The boardwalk zigzagged through the wood for what seemed like a mile but was probably only half that and then finished at a broken-down gate on to a sandy dirt road. The U-haul van was parked across the road in the entrance to a field full of sweetcorn waving its rusty tassels in the steamy breeze.
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