“Dear Boy,
“You are much missed here, mostly, it should be said, in the Macaroon, where there is no longer your scowling young face to amuse me, and the barlady, whom you abhor, has gone on what she insists on calling her ‘hols’ to, of all places, St Helier in Jersey, suitable enough, I suppose, for a cow like her, but all the same, depressing. I had always secretly hoped that my presence there might somehow, by its very luminosity, bring culture to those privileged to serve me. I had imagined her earnestly scanning the pictures in, say, the Academia, or going to Toledo to look at the Greco landscape, but no, she has gone to (forgive me) pastures old, there to browse and chew the cud, no doubt to return more creamy of wit than ever. What else is new around here? There has been a rumpus or two, mostly royal ones rather than interesting twos, but I have been given the chance to have a programme of my own, long past everyone’s bedtime, in which I am to be allowed to interview people in the news about Life. Knowing nothing about Life, I should be excellent. The series starts in September. Make sure you are back in time to see me, and have saved enough of Uncle Edward’s money to buy yourself a huge-screen set. I wish to be in all my friends’ bedrooms.
“Your erstwhile chum Miss Gallagher has announced her engagement to someone I have never heard of. Perhaps you knew this already. She certainly baited her hook again pretty fast. According to The Times announcement, he is the son of a naval officer, and no doubt that will please you—let her sail out of your life once and for all, dear boy, on a sea of indifference, turning the green one blue with boredom. Ah, you were lucky there. I thought she would get you, but you escaped. Myself, I seem to be as unsteady as ever, moving from blonde to brunette with the impartiality of a true connoisseur. It must be my status as an alimony-paying divorcé that makes me so attractive. I am growing deep rings under my eyes for the television cameras: I want people to write to me and propose marriage, or at least offer to mother me.
“Now to the point, my protégé. Uncle Edward is pleased with your progress up to now, but your last letter to him about the miniature has thrown him into a state of intense excitement. I spent last week-end with them in Gloucestershire, and the house was in a turmoil, as he paced from room to room, muttering ‘I should never have trusted so young a boy with so important a mission.’ Try muttering that to yourself and see how disturbing it can be. He trembled and shook and wrung his hands a good deal, his voice quavered and he was absolutely intolerable on Sunday, since there was no post to bring news from you. He kept going out on to the terrace and staring westward, as though to sight approaching letters. Then he would go to his study and sit for about five minutes with his head in his hands, before starting to pace again. It was nerve-racking for the rest of us. So be warned. He may suddenly arrive and demand to see the old lady, about whom he speaks with a not wholly sane frenzy. Do, Harold, put all our minds at rest. Your letters are received with all the eagerness of a young bride waiting to hear whether or not her husband has been killed in battle. He sits at the breakfast table and holds the envelope in his hand, turns it this way and that, sighs, etc., then tears it open, often with a dirty butter-knife, and the whole family sits with baited breath as his face records your renewed failure. I exaggerate, of course. I’ve only seen him get one letter from you. But one was enough.
“I must go and insult a public figure or two now, for my supper. Remember, when God is with you, you never sleep alone, my child. Yours in Christ.
Dennis.”
Harold laughed once or twice to himself, then looked thoughtful, though his head was empty. He was doing his best, after all. He hadn’t seen the miniature yet, but the way things were going there was a good chance of seeing it soon.
He opened the other letter, not recognizing the handwriting. It was an invitation to Helen’s wedding. He supposed her mother must have sent out the invitations. It said that his company was requested to view the proceedings, which would be held in a fortnight’s time. Quick work, indeed. The man’s name meant nothing to him at all: Colin Marshall. He must have met a Colin Marshall somewhere at some time in his life, the name sounded like a middle-class version of John Smith. But if he had ever met one, he had blotted out the memory. He decided to send her a wedding present of some handsomeness, partly to embarrass her, partly to ease his conscience. The spider was making tentative jabs again. He had bought several Indian blankets in Arizona. He would choose the nicest of them and send it off airmail, which was so expensive that the spider would have to shut up. He felt a good deal of relief that Helen was off his conscience and into the arms of this Marshall person. She had been something of a lurking shadow over his life, and at times, looking at Diane, he had been reminded of how badly he had behaved with her distant predecessor in his affections, and wondered if he was to be trusted with someone so nice.
The differences between Helen and Diane were so many and various that he was continually telling himself that Diane could not possibly be his type. After all, there were endless books which told one that there was a particular kind of girl one was always looking for (when it wasn’t secretly one’s mother), and only a master of double-think could have made Diane and Helen kindred spirits. For instance, while Helen was pretty, her prettiness was a sort of competent prettiness, the handsomeness of a girl who could be expected to make an excellent mother and chairwoman of the local Women’s Institute: and the idea of Diane sharing recipes for chutney with other married ladies was simply ludicrous. Her shoulders weren’t as good as Helen’s, it was true—they were rather bony: and she didn’t have the dramatic curve into the waist that had been Helen’s outstanding feature. But such points were marginal. The difference was something much more important, much more profound. It was a difference in attitude to life, basically. Helen would never let herself go, would always be thinking of what happened next, of how long there was before they must go to sleep if they were going to be up in good time in the morning. She was practical, and unhappy when the sensible ordinary way of doing things was disturbed. To Diane it could not have mattered less what happened next: she was always too busy with the present to bother about the time, to care whether she was going to get enough sleep or not. Not that she was all gaiety and liveliness: at times she would be very quiet, rather apathetic, apparently absorbed in some private meditation. And she could be difficult, quick-tongued, harsh, as though driven to restlessness by some inner pressure she could not control. She could be kaleidoscopic in her moods, shifting suddenly from the high gear of laughter to a gloomy indifference that baffled him.
In fact, Harold was intrigued by her. His first impression of a pretty girl who was rather sexy had given way to a jumble of images, whose only consistent feature was that Diane’s eyes seemed always to have tiny pupils. He was puzzled by his own feelings: after the evening they had gone dancing on the Strip he had seen her every day, but somehow had failed to come at all close to her. They would kiss and fondle each other, but though she seemed to enjoy it as much as he did, there was the sense that somehow he wasn’t really getting through to her, that she was holding something back. The block she had talked of was tangible, then, as though there was a polythene bag round her feelings. He never felt that she was fond of him: he was just, it seemed, another of the boys who had tried to set her alight, and he was as unsuccessful as any of them.
But if he was failing with her, she was certainly succeeding with him. If he wasn’t yet blazing, there was certainly a warm glow whenever he thought about her, and he thought about her most of the time. He felt curiously light-headed and happy, everything seemed suddenly to be good, the weather, Los Angeles, life in general. And he felt strangely virtuous when he was with Diane, as though her presence was some kind of blessing, so that he could only do right. “Right” and “good” weren’t words he liked to use very much, and when he did use them he was careful to treat them lightly, almost casually: but now they seemed to be the only words which described what he felt. Which certainly hadn’t been the case with poor Helen: there it had
been much more a matter of grim pursuit and grim victory. Now there didn’t seem to be any pursuit: he saw Diane as often as possible, but it wasn’t a question of hunted and hunter, it was more as though their being together was somehow natural and—and right. Not having experienced this feeling before, Harold was doubtful if it was love. And even if it was, he had known her such a short time that it would be dangerous to hope that twin souls were now being entwined or that this was the Big It, or any of the rest of the romantic junk. As he had reflected before, the whole thing was an illusion, anyway: it was only if you believed in love that you felt it, so the whole thing was a matter of self-deception.
Yet there was a lot to be said for self-deception. And, believing himself to be absolutely clear about his own motives and feelings, he allowed himself to call what he felt for Diane “love”. Since he could not spend all of every day with her, he began to daydream. If this was love, then presumably the next step was marriage. That was all right, though, because when he was with her everything seemed so natural: it was obvious that if that was how things were between them, they should try and make it a permanent state. Although Diane’s feelings dropped out of account at this stage of the daydream, he was able to imagine her agreeing to marry him. It would be very simple. They would be standing at the turning-circle above the Washburns’ house, and he would be holding her, gently (there was to be no crushing of breasts and panting for Harold), and he would say “Diane, when shall we be married?” And she would say, “For ever.” This reply pleased him enormously, and he imagined the scene so often that it almost came to seem that it had actually happened.
However, the reality of the situation prevailed. Diane was always curiously distant when he wanted her to be closest, and the phrases he had been planning to say to her had to be kept back for future use. Anyway, they seemed wholly inadequate in her presence, and required her to be word-perfect in her responses, which she wasn’t.
One day they had gone to Disneyland, and wandering along the sidewalks they had seen a theatre that advertised old movies. They went in, and to his disappointment Harold found that it was simply a room with six screens, all of them tiny, on which six very old silent shorts were playing at once. However, it was dark and he put his arm firmly about her shoulders as they watched a flickering melodrama. There was a villain with a fierce moustache, an innocent victim, who might well have been Mary Pickford for all Harold knew, and a lover who spent most of the time clasping his hands and looking piteously at the camera.
“I liked that,” said Diane, as they came out.
“The trouble with old movies,” said Harold, “is that they make you feel everyone is so isolated. I suppose it’s because they couldn’t get more than one person on to those midget screens without it looking like a crowd.”
“Yeah,” said Diane. “It’s like when you’re lying in bed and thinking about Elvis Presley or Tab Hunter or someone, and it’s marvellous, only you’re there in bed, and they’re stuck inside your imagination, and never the twain shall meet.”
“It’s like when I’m thinking about you,” said Harold. “I plan marvellous things to say to you, Diane, but somehow they come out all wrong, or there’s no opportunity to say them.”
“Gee,” she said, laughing and taking his hand. “Do I spend a lot of time in your head, honey?”
“I’m afraid you do, yes.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said, and she swung his hand as they walked, “in fact, it’s a privilege.”
“But I might be raping you, hour after hour.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you’re too nice for that.”
“But I’m in love with you,” said Harold.
“Are you now?” she said. “Harold, don’t spoil it. I was getting to like you. If you go and fall in love with me, that’ll just ruin everything.”
“Well, really,” said Harold. He was deeply offended.
“Well, really, what?” said Diane. “Jesus, I hardly know you. This is the fifth time we’ve been out together. Do you expect me to fall into your arms like Mary Pickford?”
“I’m sorry I spoke,” said Harold.
“You don’t have to be,” she said.
But the rest of the afternoon was ruined.
Another time she took him to a baseball game in the Colosseum, not that he was interested, but she insisted that he learn how American games were played.
“It’s cultural,” she said.
So they went to the enormous stadium, and as the lights came on and the diamond shone dazzlingly green she tried to explain what was happening. The Dodgers were playing the Braves. Harold understood practically nothing, but he liked the crowd, eating hot-dogs and pop-corn just as he had always imagined, and the figures in white below him, performing like automata, going through some arcane ritual.
On the way home he said, “Diane, I can’t say I understood any of that, but I like being with you anywhere.”
“You’re kind of fun to have around yourself,” she said. “If I ever come to England you must take me to a cricket game.”
“I hope you’ll come often,” he said.
“I might,” she yawned. “Not while Grandma’s alive, though. I don’t see her doing any travelling.”
Harold tried to find the right words to say he hoped he might marry her and that she would come to England to live with him, but it was too difficult, and she didn’t seem very receptive to that kind of suggestion. Besides, why should he go back to England? Might not the opportunities for living at full stretch be greater in America? Perhaps he could settle in Los Angeles. The sense of freedom that he enjoyed in America was almost certainly due to the fact that he had a lot of money to spend for the first time in his life, but there was also something about the States that he couldn’t yet define, but which he found attractive. It was partly an easygoing quality which might prove delusory. Partly, too, it was the fact that he wasn’t in England. But it was more than these: it was a sense that what happened in America, what people did, whom they elected, mattered. Having at first been offended by the ordinary American attitude to England, he now began to see why his own country appeared cute and small and unimportant. The Americans thought it was finished, a great little island on its way down. And it was because they could think of England, once so dominating, as essentially a minor place in the world, that Americans were on top: at least, that might explain it. Their confidence was exhilarating after living in a country where it didn’t really matter whether the Tories or Labour got in because they were all second-rate, anyway, they were all dim, they had no real say in the world any more. It was election year, and to be in America while the parties were lining themselves up, while primaries were being bitterly fought, with the conventions coming soon, was to feel that the future of the world, not only of America, could depend on one’s vote. Harold wished very much that he had a vote to cast. And then there were simpler things, things which made life easier, more comfortable, like shops that stayed open till late at night, and intelligent licensing laws (in California, anyway). And there was the landscape, the emotion he had felt in the desert: it was a sense of bigness.
He thought of what he had said to Dennis as his train was about to depart, his sudden plaintive “I wanted to do something big.” Afterwards he had felt ashamed of being so naïve. But in America a remark like that didn’t seem so silly, and the something big seemed possible.
He wondered what kind of pigeon-hole Dennis would put him in for thinking that. He re-read the letter, sitting in his dressing-gown, finishing the breakfast he insisted on having in his room. Dennis and his television programme, Helen and her fiancé, all seemed as though they were on another planet, not merely a different continent.
The phone rang, and he said “Hallo” in a specially vibrant masculine voice he’d been practising for Diane, assuming that it would be her.
“Harold?” said a man’s voice.
“Yes,” he said, hastily dropping the vibrations.
“T
his is Eddie. Where have you been?”
“Oh. I’ve been around,” said Harold stiltedly.
“Something the matter with you, Harold? You sound all goofed up. Anything wrong?”
“No, no. I was hoping you’d call, actually. I wanted to tell you——”
He wanted to tell Eddie that he didn’t in the least want to see him again, but now that he had Diane he felt more secure about things. He decided that it wasn’t Eddie he disliked, it was Eddie’s friends. But Eddie had already interrupted him.
“Listen, kid, I’ve got a guy wants to meet you. Some old guy. Says he knows about you, wants to have a look at you.”
“Who on earth can that be?”
“I don’t know. I met him last night. There was a real ball at his place. You should have been there. Wait a minute, I’ve got his address somewhere, maybe his name, too. Yes. A guy called Henry Washburn. He uses make-up. He’s a real old queen, the kind I hate. But he’s kind of rich, I guess. It was a swell party, Harold. And some of the chicks were way out. Invisible.”
“Listen, Eddie,” said Harold. “I know exactly who he is. And I don’t mind meeting him. But I don’t want to go on any more of your binges. So I shall bring my girl—my chick—with me, if you don’t mind.”
“I guess he doesn’t like chicks,” said Eddie. “Do you have to bring her? Can’t you make it alone?”
“She’s his niece, so he shouldn’t mind.”
“Great. So you know the guy already, huh?”
“No, only by reputation.”
“I guess his reputation’s kind of hot, right?”
“His mother loves him. What is finer than the love of a mother for her child?”
“I could tell you,” said Eddie. “How about me picking you up around six?”
“I think I’d rather drive my own car, if you don’t mind. I have an old-fashioned superstition about stealing. Besides I’ve got to collect Diane first.”
“Have it your way, then,” said Eddie. “It’ll be the first time I’ve dumped a hot car in a swank hotel parking lot. It’ll give me a kick. See ya, then.”
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