• • • • • • •
Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she and her sisters have brought back from the sea.
Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It’s Boxing Day. The evening’s very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago, somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth a frock that Penelope will grow into.
The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was Hansel and Gretel. Claire immediately took off under the seats where others were moving about by secret paths, a flash of braid or of white collar now and then among the tall attentive uncles in uniform, the coat-draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be a boy but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage. The funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery. And pretty Gretel waited by the Oven for her chance. . . .
Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the theatre. A few of the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gretel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in the gathering silence stepped to the footlights, and sang:
Oh, don’t let it get you,
It will if they let you, but there’s
Something I’ll bet you can’t see—
It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s right over there,
It’s waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!
Oh, the greengrocer’s wishing on a rainbow today,
And the dustman is tying his tie . . .
And it all goes along to the same jolly song,
With a peppermint face in the sky!
“Now sing along,” she smiled, and actually got the audience, even Roger, to sing:
With a peppermint face in the sky-y,
And a withered old dream in your heart,
You’ll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,
With the pantomime ready to start!
Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,
And the Jerries are learning to fly—
We can fly to the moon, we’ll be higher than noon,
In our polythene home in the sky. . . .
Pretty polythene home in the sky,
Pretty platinum pins in your hand—
Oh your mother’s a big fat machine gun,
And your father’s a dreary young man. . . .
(Whispered and staccato):
Oh, the, man-a-ger’s suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe,
And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives,
All the world’s in a daze, while the orchestra plays,
So turn your pockets and get your surprise—
Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise,
There was nobody there af-ter all!
And the lamps up the stairway are dying,
It’s the season just after the ball . . .
Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,
And the lifesaver’s heaving a sigh,
And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,
Are of children who are learning to die. . . .
Penelope’s father’s chair, in the corner, next to the table with the lamp, is empty. It faces her now. She can see the crocheted shawl over the back, many knots of gray, tan, black, and brown, with amazing clarity. In the pattern, or in front of it, something is stirring: at first no more than refraction, as if there were a source of heat directly in front of the empty chair.
“No,” she whispers out loud. “I don’t want to. You’re not him. I don’t know who you are but you’re not my father. Go away.”
Its arms and legs are silent and rigid. She stares into it.
I only want to visit you.
“You want to possess me.”
Demonic possessions in this house are not unknown. Is this really Keith, her father? taken when she was half her present age, and returned now as not the man she knew, but only the shell—with the soft meaty slug of soul that smiles and loves, that feels its mortality, either rotted away or been picked at by the needle mouths of death-by-government—a process by which living souls unwillingly become the demons known to the main sequence of Western magic as the Qlippoth, Shells of the Dead. . . . It is also what the present dispensation often does to decent men and women entirely on this side of the grave. In neither process is there any dignity, or any mercy. Mothers and fathers are conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving themselves cancer and heart attacks, getting into motor accidents, going off to fight in the War—leaving their children alone in the forest. They’ll always tell you fathers are “taken,” but fathers only leave—that’s what it really is. The fathers are all covering for each other, that’s all. Perhaps it’s even better to have this presence, rubbing the room dry as glass, slipping in and out of an old chair, than a father who still hasn’t died yet, a man you love and have to watch it happening to. . . .
In the kitchen, the water in the kettle shakes, creaks toward boiling, and outside the wind blows. Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate slides and falls. Roger has taken Jessica’s cold hands in to warm against his breast, feeling them, icy, through his sweater and shirt, folded in against him. Yet she stands apart, trembling. He wants to warm all of her, not just comic extremities, wants beyond reasonable hope. His heart shakes like the boiling kettle.
It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing really holds her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms. . . . If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence of maps, girls, and rocketfalls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be with her more . . . if it happened when they were together—in another time that might have sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, certain situations are just more hep to the jive than others—but they’re apart so much. . . .
If the rockets don’t get her there’s still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband’s orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn’t make. . . . Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you’ve found life. I’m no longer sure which of all the w
ords, images, dreams or ghosts are “yours” and which are “mine.” It’s past sorting out. We’re both being someone new now, someone incredible. . . .
His act of faith. In the street the children are singing:
Hark, the herald angels sing:
Mrs. Simpson’s pinched our King . . .
Up on the mantelpiece Sooty’s son Kim, an alarmingly fat crosseyed Siamese, lurks waiting to do the only thing he enjoys these days. Beyond eating, sleeping or fucking his chief obsession is to jump, or topple, on his mother, and lie there laughing while she runs screaming around the room. Jessica’s sister Nancy comes out of the loo to break up what’s becoming a full-scale row between Elizabeth and Claire. Jessica steps away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to him as a bird’s song, ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the handkerchief comes away . . . “Oh sooper dooper,” she says, “think I’m catching a cold.”
You’re catching the War. It’s infecting you and I don’t know how to keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don’t leave me. . . .
2
Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann Goering
You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.
—MERIAN C. COOPER to Fay Wray
• • • • • • •
THIS MORNING’S STREETS are already clattering, near and far, with wood-soled civilian feet. Up in the wind is a scavenging of gulls, sliding, easy, side to side, wings hung out still, now and then a small shrug, only to gather lift for this weaving, unweaving, white and slow faro shuffle off invisible thumbs. . . . Yesterday’s first glance, coming along the esplanade in the afternoon, was somber: the sea in shades of gray under gray clouds, the Casino Hermann Goering flat white and the palms in black sawtooth, hardly moving. . . . But this morning the trees in the sun now are back to green. Leftward, far away, the ancient aqueduct loops crumbling, dry yellow, out along the Cap, the houses and villas there baked to warm rusts, gentle corrosions all through Earth’s colors, pale raw to deeply burnished.
The sun, not very high yet, will catch a bird by the ends of his wings, turning the feathers brightly there to curls of shaved ice. Slothrop rattles his teeth at the crowd of birds aloft, shivering down on his own miniature balcony, electric fire deep in the room barely touching the backs of his legs. They have filed him high on the white sea-façade, in a room to himself. Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and his friend Teddy Bloat are sharing one down the hall. He takes back his hands into ribbed cuffs of a sweatshirt, crosses his arms, watches the amazing foreign morning, the ghosts of his breathing into it, feeling first sunwarmth, wanting a first cigarette—and perversely he waits for a sudden noise to begin his day, a first rocket. Aware all the time he’s in the wake of a great war gone north, and that the only explosions around here will have to be champagne corks, motors of sleek Hispano-Suizas, the odd amorous slap, hopefully. . . . No London? No Blitz? Can he get used to it? Sure, and by then it’ll be just time to head back.
“Well, he’s awake.” Bloat in uniform, sidling into the room gnawing on a smoldering pipe, Tantivy behind in a pin-striped lounge suit. “Up at the crack, reconnoitering the beach for the unattached mamzelle or two, no doubt . . .”
“Couldn’t sleep,” Slothrop yawning back down into the room, birds in the sunlight kiting behind him.
“Nor we,” from Tantivy. “It must take years to adjust.”
“God,” Bloat really pushing the forced enthusiasm this morning, pointing theatrically at the enormous bed, collapsing onto it, bouncing vigorously. “They must have had advance word about you, Slothrop! Luxury! They gave us some disused closet, you know.”
“Hey, what are you telling him?” Slothrop forages around for cigarettes. “I’m some kind of a Van Johnson or something?”
“Only that, in the matter of,” Tantivy from the balcony tossing his green pack of Cravens, “girls, you know—”
“Englishmen being rather reserved,” Bloat explains, bouncing for emphasis.
“Oh, raving maniacs,” Slothrop mumbles, heading for his private lavatory, “been invaded by a gang of those section 8s, all right. . . .” Stands pleased, pissing no-hands, lighting up, but wondering a little about that Bloat. Supposed to be oldtime pals with Tantivy. He snaps the match into the toilet, a quick hiss: yet something about the way he talks to Slothrop, patronizing? maybe nervous . . .
“You’re expecting me to fix you guys up?” he yells over the crash of the toilet flushing, “I thought the minute you guys get across that Channel, set foot on that France, you all turn into Valentinos.”
“I hear there was some prewar tradition,” Tantivy hanging plaintive now in the doorway, “but Bloat and I are members of the New Generation, we have to depend on Yank expertise. . . .”
Whereupon Bloat leaps from the bed and seeks to enlighten Slothrop with a song:
THE ENGLISHMAN’S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT)
(Bloat):The Englishman’s very shy,
He’s none of your Ca-sa-no-va,
At bowling the ladies o-ver,
A-mericans lead the pack—
(Tantivy):—You see, your Englishman tends to lack
That recklessness transatlantic,
That women find so romantic
Though frankly I can’t see why . . .
(Bloat):The polygamous Yank with his girls galore
Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits,
(Tantivy):Though he’s secretly held in re-ve-rent awe
As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz. . . .
(Together):If only one could al-ly
A-merican bedroom know-how
With British good looks, then oh how
Those lovelies would swoon and sigh,
Though you and I know the Englishman’s very shy.
“Well you’ve sure come to the right place,” nods Slothrop, convinced. “Only don’t expect me to put it in for you.”
“Just the initial approach,” Bloat says.
“Moi,” Tantivy has meanwhile been screaming down from the balcony, “Moi Tantivy, you know. Tantivy.”
“Tantivy,” replies a dim girl-chorus from outside and below.
“J’ai deux amis, aussi, by an odd coincidence. Par un bizarre coincidence, or something, oui?”
Slothrop, at this point shaving, wanders out with the foamy badger brush in his fist to see what’s happening, and collides with Bloat, who’s dashing to peer down over his compatriot’s left epaulet at three pretty girls’ faces, upturned, straw-haloed each by a giant sun-hat, smiles all dazzling, eyes mysterious as the sea behind them.
“I say où,” inquires Bloat, “où, you know, déjeuner?”
“Glad I could help you out,” Slothrop mutters, lathering Tantivy between the shoulderblades.
“But come with us,” the girls are calling above the waves, two of them holding up an enormous wicker basket out of which lean sleek green wine bottles and rough-crusted loaves still from under their white cloth steaming in little wisps feathering off of chestnut glazes and paler split-streaks, “come—sur la plage . . .”
“I’ll just,” Bloat half out the door, “keep them company, until you . . .”
“Sur la plage,” Tantivy a bit dreamy, blinking in the sun, smiling down at their good-morning’s wishes come true, “oh, it sounds like a painting. Something by an Impressionist. A Fauve. Full of light. . . .”
Slothrop goes flicking witch hazel off his hands. The smell in the room brings back a moment of Berkshire Saturdays—bottles of plum and amber tonics, fly-studded paper twists swayed by the overhead fan, twinges of pain from blunt scissors. . . . Struggling out of his sweatshirt, lit cigarette in his mouth, smoke coming out the neck like a volcano, “Hey could I bum one of your—”
“You’ve already got the pack,” cries Tantivy—�
�God almighty, what is that supposed to be?”
“What’s what?” Slothrop’s face nothing but innocent as he slips into and begins to button the object in question.
“You’re joking, of course. The young ladies are waiting, Slothrop, do put on something civilized, there’s a good chap—”
“All set,” Slothrop on the way past the mirror combing his hair into the usual sporty Bing Crosby pompadour.
“You can’t expect us to be seen with—”
“My brother Hogan sent it to me,” Slothrop lets him know, “for my birthday, all the way from the Pacific. See on the back? under the fellows in that outrigger canoe there, to the left of those hibiscus blossoms, it seZ SOUVENIR OF HONOLULU? This is the authentic item, Mucker-Maffick, not some cheap imitation.”
“Dear God,” moans Tantivy, trailing him forlornly out of the room, shading his eyes from the shirt, which glows slightly in the dimness of the corridor. “At least tuck it in and cover it with something. Here, I’ll even lend you this Norfolk jacket. . . .” Sacrifice indeed: the coat is from a Savile Row establishment whose fitting rooms are actually decorated with portraits of all the venerable sheep—some nobly posed up on crags, others in pensive, soft close-ups—from whom the original fog-silvered wool was sheared.
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