Old Acquaintance

by David Stacton

  Turning right, they faced the bridge over the Moselle. To the north were the ruins of another bridge, bombed during the war. Their bridge had the black precision of something built with a Meccano set. The town lay beyond, with its twin cathedral towers naked in red brick, and its concealed bustle.

  Neither one of them wanted to go into Trier really, but they had to go somewhere.

  We are going back into Germany, Lotte thought. It is hostile territory. And yet it was just the tail end of the Saar. It had a Frankish feel to it. It would be safe enough.

  They crossed the bridge, over the docile river. The day had begun as a picnic. It was turning into a sight-seeing tour. That’s what you do, if you have nothing else to do: you see sights. If you do the Romans first, there is not much in Trier to see, except for the town gate, and that Charlie was saving until lunch.

  Charlie wished the day to pass agreeably. Therefore he felt tense. We can do no better than the best we can, and have to screw ourselves up to achieve even that. It is a great shame that our abilities should also be our limitations. He had had the hotel pack a wicker hamper, but the trouble with “delicious continental cuisine” is that it lacks flavor, the wax paper contains too much wax, and the contents of the “choice wine cellar” turn out not to carry from the basement up to the dining room, let alone out into the open country beyond. For a picnic one wants a boiled egg, not a stuffed egg that runs, and the jellied chicken turns out to be mostly mummy gum. What was needed was either a garbage pail or an indiscriminate swan. What was really needed was a length of salami, French bread, and a bottle of Chianti from a local shop. But they were too far north for that. The picnic hamper rocked neglected in the back seat, as though someone had abandoned a baby.

  It must be said that for the erstwhile capital of the Roman Empire, Trier had remarkably little to show above ground. When the Empire became Holy, the results had been more nearly enduring, but that they would save for the afternoon. At the moment they stumbled among the nettles of the Termae, which looked like nothing so much as a hill built by moles with a taste for lining their burrows with brick. This sort of thing exists mainly to justify the existence of Fullbright students. No doubt the place had great historic interest, that being the phrase for something old but uninteresting. But it did not amuse.

  Lotte twisted her ankle.

  “If we have to go to the open country, couldn’t we go somewhere where there are fewer gopher holes?”

  “What do you mean gopher, the Emperor Constantine dug that hole. Of course you may be right, even so. Whether he had shovel teeth remains a moot point. In the statues his mouth is closed.”

  “Charlie, sometimes I think you’d try to talk down the common hangman.”

  “Well, first one begs for more time, and then one wonders how to pass it,” said Charlie. “When we were young, we were serious. Now we’re comical. It’s our last line of defense.”

  “Defense against what?”

  “I don’t know. Inevitability. It’s either that or go on a pilgrimage to the horse-knacker’s yard. Though I must say one gets tired of living the same joke, day after day. That’s too much like nagging.”

  Lotte sat on her stone and meditated upon the nature of the albatross. “What’s wrong, Charlie,”

  He turned to watch, not the view, but a group of German tourists with white legs and explicit shorts. Charlie had nothing against his fellow citizens, but he hated white flesh. Usually, when the short-wearing season was upon him, he was well on his way south. In southern California everybody had been brown, he remembered. It had been almost enough to make him dash to become a citizen. Whatever else you may say about Americans, at least about the Americans Charlie had met, at least they didn’t have white flesh. The Russians do. Like Gide, Charlie had had his own reasons for parting company with the Noble Experiment.

  He wanted her help, if she could help.

  “I need a Paul,” he said. “I can’t help it. And I get tired of looking around for a new one every year. Even though as soon as I get one, it turns out he isn’t there, so one begins the search again at once. If you see what I mean.”

  There was no answer to that. She saw what he meant. “Charlie …”

  “What?”

  “I’m very fond of you, Charlie.”

  He smiled. “That means I’ve begun to bore you. Very well. Let’s go have lunch.”

  The Termae were harder to get out of than they had been to get in to. All the path led to was barbed wire.

  “Gives you that old concentration camp feeling, doesn’t it?” said Charlie, testing the wires with his hands. “You see that tower over there? That’s lunch.”

  When finally they found their way out, the car was so hot to the touch that they had to climb over the doors instead of opening them. The metal trim smelled of new-mown grass.

  *

  The great black gate of Trier had always been kept up, no doubt because the Christians had had a use for it. Now the Christians were gone, at any rate from their points of vigilance, the antiquarians had taken over. We are very proud of the Porta Negra. It is our trademark. It brings the tourists in.

  It was pocked by incessant war. No doubt an expert in ballistics could have reconstructed a history of artillery from its holes. Though removing monastic accretions as impure, the antiquarians had at the same time constructed a monastic cloister to the left of the gate, for use as a Rathaus, exhibition hall, and restaurant. They had lunch there, in the courtyard of what would have been the cloisters had there been any monks. It was undoubtedly the smartest place in the town.

  Lunch was not a success, despite a high clear sky, with scudding clouds. Every time the conversation started up, a shadow rippled across the table, like a manta, hunting. The clouds were getting ready to pounce.

  “Afterwards I want to see the Residenz,” Charlie said, holding back the silence, like a comedian holding the door against the Abominable Snowman, who may or may not exist but nonetheless, he’s here. “There was an Elector at Trier you know. He took himself seriously. Fortunately he never had enough money to build something really big, so they say it’s a gem.” He looked at her helplessly. “It has large cast-iron gates.”

  She had been somewhere else. “Gates?” she said.

  “Of cast iron.”

  “Who are all these people anyhow?” She looked around her.

  “Supporting players,” said Charlie. “You’re on now. Take it again from ‘cast-iron gates.’”

  She gave him one of her better smiles. “Is it really worth seeing, Charlie?”

  “Anything that’s there is worth seeing, unless you really want to dawdle over that interglacial slush they call mocha ice cream.”

  “It isn’t very good, is it?”

  “I can only say it is their best,” said Charlie, “and draw a discreet veil over it. Or possibly, since we seem to be short of discreet veils, a paper napkin will do.” He crumpled his napkin over her dish. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  They went.

  “We are traveling,” he told her. “We are fellow travelers. It’s a one-way route. It must hurt them a lot to bring the empties back for more. Think of the overhead.”

  There was a screech, and a hefty yellow shadow veered across them, like a pterodactyl on a string.

  “Are you still there?”

  Lotte didn’t answer.

  “For your information, I would like to inform you that I have just missed a tram. Rather, to be accurate, that the tram has just missed me. It was a yellow tram. I have cheated them.”

  “Very well, who are them?”

  “They,” said Charlie. “If you have looked at newspaper photographs carefully, you will have noted that the spectators at any accident are always the same spectators. They were once in fatal accidents, and they are lonely. Memorize their faces. Next time you see them, jump out of the car and run like hell. They want you to join them. They were first discovered by Ray Bradbury, a science-fiction writer. What he does when he sees them I have no
idea. Perhaps he lets his wife drive. The suburbs are nicer, aren’t they? There is a bronze statue of one of the Bishop Electors in the Dom. He is shown as a skeleton, getting out of his coffin, with his miter on. He may have forgotten his skin, but he hasn’t forgotten his miter. It’s in all the guidebooks. I think we will leave it there. Instead we are driving to the perfect country house. Our friend, the Prince Bishop, or the Bishop Elector, or the Cardinal Bishop, or whatever he is, is having something new for tea. The latest importation from the Abendlandes. What is it?”

  “Petits-fours.”

  “I think not. Try again.”

  “Corsets. Was he fat?”

  “Padding merely. He was too lean. No, it is a centerpiece, I think. The Battle of Fontenoy, in ice, superimposed on a model of Alsace Lorraine. Or am I too far to the north? Should it be the Saar? ‘Lebensraum,’ shouts the Cardinal Bishop. We did agree he was a Cardinal Bishop, didn’t we?”

  “Erroneously, but it will do,” said Lotte. “Unfortunately the melting ice provides a surface, the model accelerates down the table, at a playful push from the Cardinal B., skidding wildly past three proud prelates, the Prince Palatine, and a great-grandson of Axel Oxenstierna, smack into the lap of …”

  “Léon Blum,” said Charlie.

  “My God, why?”

  “I don’t know. I always liked his face. And nobody ever does mention him any more. French politicians go out of date as fast as movie stars. Although, come to think of it, they come back sooner.”

  “Is it an international incident?”

  “Well, you know what the French are like. We’re there. Put on some lipstick. The Cardinal Bishop can’t stand a woman who doesn’t paint.”

  “Haven’t you got that wrong?”

  “No, he has.”

  Before them loomed two ceremonial gateposts, a string of ornamental fence between high shrubs, and a well-kept look about everything, but no gates. Charlie rather grandly did a toot-toot-toot on the horn and swerved the car into what should have been the state drive.

  It petered out into weeds.

  As for the Residenz, it wasn’t there. It must have gotten bombed in the war. There was just a chicken sprinkle of gravel, dead grasses, some weeds, some stairs going nowhere, nothing else, except the silence.

  “It isn’t there,” said Lotte. They had been trying too hard to laugh. She couldn’t help it. She began to cry.

  Charlie froze.

  “Oh, leave me alone,” said Lotte, “what help are you, anyway?” got out of the car, slammed the door on him, and ran into the ruined garden, narrowly avoiding the cavity which now stood there as the socket of the extracted house.

  “Hey, look out,” shouted Charlie.

  She swerved into the shrubbery. Her age disappeared when she moved. From the back, she looked like a badly frightened girl. He couldn’t help noticing that the reason she always sauntered in public was that she had a badly balanced run.

  He was appalled. He was used to the eternal young woman. He didn’t want to see the old woman show through, like velvet gone thin with use. In all the years he’d seen her she’d always been the same. And here she was, showing feeling. It nearly broke his heart.

  He waited a while, stepped over the door on his side, and went after her. He didn’t know what on earth to do, but he knew he had to do something. He wanted to do something.

  She was sitting on the torso of a fallen marble satyr, not even smoking a cigarette. She didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t look at him. Her hands were shaking.

  Companionably, he sat down on the rump, which, since the statue had been large, was a convenient distance away. Together they watched a large but disagreeable hydrangea, ghost green in the bud, a shade most unlike a color, when you came to think of it.

  “Do you think I like it? Do you think I like being shut up with Campendonck and all the rest of them?” she said.

  No, he didn’t think so.

  *

  “Perhaps I should tell you about one of my bathtub friends,” he said, after a while. “Bathtub friends are imaginary people one thinks about in the bathtub. They are very real, though they don’t hold up well in England: the water isn’t warm long enough. But here I’ve been seeing a lot of Mr. Farnaby these days. He’s an American, of course, filthy rich in a nice clean apologetic sort of a way, and rather a sad man. He’s a descendant of Farnaby, the composer, you know. One thing about Farnaby, he may be an American, but he has the best credentials, he’s related to everybody. He had the College of Heralds searching for years. ‘Just give me something small enough to put up on the mantelpiece and explain to guests,’ he said. ‘No lozenges. No bend sinister. Something plain. Not too much gold on the curlicues. And some quarterings, of course.’

  “He didn’t have any trouble getting it, either. Everybody liked Farnaby.

  “The thing that makes him sad is that all his life he’s wanted to make a joke. What he really likes is puns. He has an awful daughter, her name is Marge. Marge married a quite ordinary man, an ex-football player from Notre Dame, who’s a physicist now, a humorless type, but friendly. Or maybe, come to think of it, he’s an ex-M.I.T. graduate who went into football. At last, thinks Mr. Farnaby, who’s quite alone in the world otherwise, Marge has had the sense to marry someone I can tell a pun to. He never gets the chance to find out. Marge clears her throat. ‘Dr. Johnson said a man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket,’ she says. ‘Come along, Herbert, or we’ll be late for the P.T.A. meeting.’

  “‘It wasn’t Johnson,’ says Farnaby, who knows the literature. ‘It was John Dennis, 1657–1734. And besides, you don’t even have any kids yet, why the P.T.A. meeting?’”

  “‘Herbert and I believe in prenatal conditioning,’ says Marge. ‘We hadn’t meant to tell you yet, because it hasn’t happened, but when it has, we will.’ She takes Herbert by the scruff of his football togs and drags him out of there, never giving the matter another thought. When it comes to henpecking, Marge’s a champ. Her mother taught her how.

  “At long last, after thirty years of marriage and twenty-three years of planned parenthood, Mr. Farnaby’s dander is up. His wife is dead. Marge has a house of her own, or will have, as soon as he buys it for her. He has retired from the management of his Truss Company. So why, at last, in these evening years of his life, should he not indulge his secret dream?

  “So he does.

  “His first entry is quite modest. Ever since childhood Mr. Farnaby has hoarded his stamp collection. It is only a boy’s collection, but now he has decided to put childhood things behind him, Mr. Farnaby decides to make a clean sweep. He takes it round to his friendly neighborhood philatelist. It is a grubby shop, but has atmosphere. The proprietor is out in back, indulging in a coughing fit, and engaged in screwing down the press on which he has just inked twenty-four Cape of Good Hope Triangles, in the half-penny denomination. He is a forger in a small way, steady and dependable.

  “‘By Jove,’ says a fusty stranger standing with one knee bent on an R. H. Gibbings Grecian love seat, with an amazed ejaculation. ‘See here, Farnaby. Is this not an extraordinary treasure to unearth from the pounds and paddocks of a mere apothecary’s shop?’ And he holds up an envelope (addressed to Paul Elmore More), on which there is a veritable Cape of Good Hope Triangle, in the green, half-penny denomination, franked with an address in the Hebrides, but of that, no matter. ‘Do you suppose the fella knows what he’s got, eh?’

  “It is a palpable forgery. Mr. Farnaby’s heart gives a leap. It gives two leaps. It plays leapfrog. ‘I shouldn’t imagine so,’ he says carelessly.

  “‘What do you want for this piece of dubious and badly canceled rubbish, my man?’ asks the stranger cannily, masking his real motives as the proprietor shambles back.

  “‘Oh, that’s just one of an old letter batch I bought on spec.,’ says the proprietor, his eyes gleaming. ‘I imagine 2.80 would cover it.’

  “‘How fortunate,’ says the stranger. ‘As it happens, I
have just canoed down from Winnipeg, after a sojourn with English cousins, erstwhile black sheep but enormous rich these days from the cattle fields of Manitoba. In currency, all I have is a pound note. Would you accept that, eh, fella, in lieu of the local specie, or must I return with a bank draft posthaste?’

  “It is too good to be true. Mr. Farnaby is quivering with excitement. At last his chance has come. Hastily he leaves the shop, returning almost instantly, accompanied by a constable.

  “‘Officer, I unmask that man as a palpable forger.’

  “‘I don’t see any palps. I don’t even see warts,’ says the constable, a slow-witted rural peace officer from the Agatha Christie country.

  “‘I mean the stamp this foreign, though English, gentleman has just been induced to purchase,’ explains Farnaby. The constable, himself an amateur philatelist, takes out an eyeglass and examines the stock. ‘’Tis true, ’tis pity, ’tis pity, but ’tis true,’ he exclaims. ‘I fear I must impound your purchase, sir.’

  “The stranger whips out a card. ‘Grimsby,’ he says. ‘Horace Grimsby of St. Louis de Ha-Ha, Quebec Province, and the Belvedere, Worthing, a house I inherited from my mother’s side. Oh, dash it! Dash it! And I suppose my modest deposit is also confiscate?’

  “‘I fear so, sir, yes,’admits the constable, touching his helmet respectful-like. He recognizes a younger son when he sees one.

  “It is Farnaby’s chance.

  “‘Ah well, Grimsby,’ says Farnaby. ‘Penny wise, pound foolish, eh, my man?’

  “And he leaves the shop. From this simple beginning comes the single-minded hobby on which he squanders his entire fortune. For instance, there is the business about Dr. Clittering.”

  “Charlie, you’re an idiot. An absolute idiot.”

  “Oh, I know that. Shall I go on?”

  “Well, yes, I think you just might, you know.”

  “Clittering is harder. He’s the famous Egyptologist. He lives next door to Farnaby, and Farnaby can’t stand him. Clittering is a mother’s boy and a bachelor. Always was, even as a child. Always will be.