Willie was now holding forth on the subject of Children. “To children, childhood holds no particularly striking advantage? Their wants and desires are eternal, and they never seem to yield to the passing of time?”
“We’ll go to the George and Dragon,” I murmured to Sissie.
“ . . . A child’s life is full of tedious questionings—Where have you been? What makes this work? How is it made? The only answer, of course, is another question—Why do you want to know?” The bishop was in full swing.
Sissie gave me a questioning look.
“The terrible thing about childhood,” the bishop droned, “is that we were taught that we ought to admire people who are good, when all we cared about was whether they were kind?”
“It’s an English-style pub,” I hissed at Sissie, “up toward the town quay. It’s run by two London blokes—brothers. I was in there the other day. They’ve got Watney’s beer and Bass ales.” So runs an exiled sailor’s mind.
“ . . . To talk to a child, to really fascinate him, to hold all his attention, is much more difficult than holding a whole congregation with a sermon, but it’s also much more rewarding, I feel?”
“Oh, my deah Tristan, how jolly splendid of you to think of finding an English place for deah Willie and me!” Sissie squeezed my arm like a nutcracker crushing a shell.
“It has been said that to enter heaven one must become as a little child?” Willie chanted.
I decided to converse. “I should think that to enjoy any heaven yet invented it would be best to remain a child.”
But deah Willie was not biting. He thundered on. “When a child is good I do not love him because he is good, but because he is a child?”
“Oh, deah, dahling Willie.” This, of course, from Sissie.
“But children know when they’re being patronized,” I said, as we reached the steps leading down into the George and Dragon. “They know, and they go straight and immediately on the defensive against you, against anyone who treats them as strange beings—against someone who loves them simply because they are children.”
My dander was up now, fortified by the strong odor of Bass ale slops rising up the steps. “It’s a sort of insulting discrimination to treat young people as if they were a different sort of animal. Children are people!”
I raised my voice above the wailing of some California song by the Mamas and Papas. It occurred to me in a flash that it was highly appropriate that young adults—practically children—should name their group of childishly whining voices after the soppy pseudonym of parental authority. “Children are people!” I repeated loudly just as the music stopped.
For a blessed moment there was a golden silence in the dimly lit, tiny, crowded bar. Then a throaty voice from a dark corner shouted, loudly and drunkenly, “Children should be seen . . . and fuckinwell exterminated!”
As the music recommenced I made my way to the bar and peered into the dark corner whence had been hurled the harsh remark. A blond lady who sat at a barstool called over her shoulder in a low, ripe, fruity English voice, “Take no notice, darling—it’s only Steel. He doesn’t really mean it. He’s had one too many, that’s all.”
The lady turned her head toward me. She was ancient. I don’t mean elderly, I mean ancient. From behind, a quick glance at the shapeliness of her back and her hair had given me the impression that she might be thirty or so. When she turned I saw immediately, even in the dim light, that she was at least eighty. I discovered later that she was in fact eighty-nine. Her face was heavily made up, with flat white powder liberally patted over her wrinkles, and gleaming red lipstick. Her eyes, under drooping lids, were dark blue, and looked straight into mine.
I decided it was a good, honest face. I smiled at it. It cracked. The cigarette dangling from her lips lowered its angle and sent smoke up into her eyes, so she shut them momentarily as she continued. “Steel’s a writer, and you know how they are.” She lowered her head and flicked cigarette ash from the sequined bag lying on her lap.
I grinned again and said, “Yes, of course. Not to worry, love.”
I peered again into the corner. Sitting there was a stocky man with a large, leonine head covered with dark curls, which fell around his ears. His face was heavy and his jowls fell from each side of his nose, which had a rounded Jewish cast. At first, as I stared at him, he was slouched with his chin down into the collar of his Astrakhan overcoat. His eyes were shut. Then one eye opened. It gleamed back at me, a mischievous button. The other eye opened. A generous, sensitive mouth grinned, and the first eye winked at me. I laughed silently and winked back. At least he had shut up the bishop momentarily.
I turned back to the ancient lady, who was squinting at me, studying me. Next to her a young Ibizan, about twenty-two and well-dressed, leaned against the bar. He eyed me with what I took to be hostility. I immediately sensed that he was the ancient lady’s escort. I smiled at him and greeted him in Catalan to put him at ease. Right away his anxious tension dissipated, like gas escaping a collapsed balloon.
There were horse-harness brasses all along the low, black beam over the bar; a touch of home, even if they weren’t genuine. The bartender was a thin, hurried, anxious-looking young man, with curly black hair and sharp, darting eyes. He dashed around the minute space behind the bar as if concerned that the very last ship was departing the island with all his customers, and he needed to get rid of all his stock before the imminent sailing.
Deah Willie’s sonorous tones almost drowned the Beatles’ music now issuing from a large tape-deck on the bar shelf. “A large Scotch and soda. Brandy or Scotch, Cecilia? Tristan?”
“Oh, deah Willie, gin, please. Booth’s,” simpered Sissie, standing close behind me.
The ancient lady had been glaring at Sissie; then, just as fast as the sun breaking through clouds in the Trades, she smiled. “I hear you’re English,” she said throatily. It was a statement to lesser breeds without the Law, and to the world in general. She stuck out one white-gloved hand toward me. “I’m Lulu,” she whispered hoarsely.
I introduced myself and Sissie.
“And this is Eduardo,” said Lulu, nodding backward toward her young companion. “He doesn’t speak English, but despite that he’s awfully nice—you know, in their way.”
As Sissie took Eduardo in with her steely North Sea eyes, he seemed to cringe visibly, yet at the same time put himself on offer to her. He reminded me, at that moment, of a snake farmer I had once seen trying to trap a cobra.
“Awf’ly naice to meet you, old chep!” Sissie screeched at Eduardo.
Behind Sissie, deah Willie was bellowing something about the dartboard, which, obviously pristine and never used, was hanging proudly on the back of the bar door. In that bar there wasn’t room to swing a cat, much less play a game of darts.
“Put a man in a room where he can play darts or dominoes,” droned Willie, “or read a newspaper in peace, or have a rattling good talk, and one observes that he will not drink as fast or as deep, or as strongly as he otherwise would? I’m very pleased that there are facilities here for other activities beside drinking? There should always be other things to do in these establishments beside drinking? What does a man drink for? To amuse himself? And to forget all his troubles and the woes of the working world?”
“Bullshit,” roared the voice of Steel the Writer, from the dark corner. It had the flat yet tangy New York flavor to it. “Bullshit. For that he goes to a goddamn whorehouse!”
For a moment there was no reaction. Sissie, startled, turned to me, smiled a quick smile, then flung the rest of the smile to Miss Lulu’s escort, the smoky-eyed Eduardo. Taking in the bishop, wincing as Willie let loose again, then side-glancing at Lulu and me, Eduardo decided that the whole match was too much for him. He retired from the fray and gloomily studied the whisky for which Miss Lulu had just paid from her sequined bag. The snake farmer, too, I remembered, had mounted h
is jeep in disgust and taken off in a cloud of dust, back home through the bush.
I looked at Steel the Writer. His big, handsome head was still bent forward, resting on his chest. But his eyes were gleaming, wide open, studying the bishop with, a taunting leer. I grinned at him. He raised his glass, drank it off, and slammed it back down on the tiny table in front of him.
Willie threw the congregation another maxim from the pulpit: “It’s the privilege of good-fellowship to talk nonsense, and yet have that nonsense respected?”
“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow,” recited the drunken-sounding voice from the corner. “The guy’s a goddamn plagiarist!”
This time I didn’t just smile at Steel the Writer. I attended him. There must have been some respect in my look. He watched me for a full second, and something passed between us. He knew that I knew that Willie was paraphrasing one of Charles Lamb’s letters to his sister Mary. For a moment I was flabbergasted. I reckoned that it was a chance in a billion that anyone east of New York and south of London would know just how very unoriginal deah Willie was, but I saw in a flash that Steel the Writer had reckoned up the situation, too.
Steel stood up. He was a big man, bearish in his open Astrakhan coat. He raised his arms above his head and stretched them, almost touching the ceiling of the bar. Then, with a ponderous movement, he slowly pressed his way through the throng crowded at the bottom of the steps, staggering slightly and grinning at me. He winked again, turned his broad back, and slowly, steadily made his groggy way up the steps and out into the narrow, moonlit street. The bar was then, somehow, much emptier, as if London had been deprived of its tower.
Now Willie had the ground to himself. He rambled on. “I’m told that some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in daylight, or when they are sober?”
“What a dreadful, tiresome little man!” moaned Sissie, alluding, presumably, to the departed American. Every male she disliked was “little.”
I leaned over to her. “The Thurber you get from England.”
“Oh, Tristan! I didn’t know that you knew Lewis Carroll!” She had misheard me. “Oh, I simply adore Alice in Wonderland,” she screamed at Miss Lulu. “Don’t you?”
“No, I prefer Hemingway,” replied the ancient lady. “He’s much more manly.”
I studied Miss Lulu with new-found respect—even a little fondness. She had tried to defend Steel in her own way, but it was no use. She might as well have tried to sink the Majorca ferry with her handbag.
But soon the scotches that Lulu was knocking back like a trouper, and Sissie’s gin (“Booth’s London Dry, please—I simply cawn’t stend that dreary Dutch nonsense!”) did their work, and both ladies were chatting away at female small-talk, the eighth wonder of the world, while Willie beamed about him and broadcast to the motley audience in the George and Dragon more of “his” views on writers.
“When one says that a writer is fashionable, one practically always means that he is read by people under thirty?” I could almost see a half-starved, tubercular Orwell turning in his grave.
“Of course, most writers are depressives—they need perpetual reassurance?” I didn’t know who he was quoting now, but I concluded it must have been some editor or other.
With Willie’s organ-voice zooming at me across six barflies, I turned around to inspect the people behind. My eye was immediately struck by one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. She was tall and willowy. She gazed at her companion—a small, fat man with thinning hair and the wily face of a bookmaker—as if he were the captain of a lifeboat and she were waiting for him to rescue her from the foundering Titanic. She had dark blond hair and a face like a delicately sculpted dream, as if the artist had used a feather and a sycamore leaf instead of a mallet and chisel, and had worked away at the shape of that face for an eternity to perfect it. Set in the face were the eyes of a Siamese cat, gray and gold and green and deep. It’s easy to say that her smile brought to mind the Mona Lisa, but it did—except that the perfectly shaped lips were closed because they were wise lips, and not merely to cover bad teeth.
The Vision noticed me looking at her. Her green-gray eyes gazed into mine. The slight smile remained, frozen. She looked into me as I would look into a grave. It was as if she were crying into a void. Desperate. She might have been twenty-four.
I turned my glance to her companion. I had overheard him talking in the cockney accent of the London suburbs. He was shorter than I, and when he turned his watery blue eyes on me he lifted one eyebrow. He was chubby and flaccid, and his skin, in the light of a green lamp above us, was somewhat the color of a melonskin—pale green, with liverish yellow patches. I guessed his age at around forty-five, but he later told me he was thirty-two.
“You English?” he asked.
“Well, Welsh.”
“Yeah, my old man was Welsh. Kept a dairy in ’ampstead, he did. Wotcha doin’ ’ere, then?”
“Oh, knocking around. My boat’s in the harbor.”
“Yeah? Used to be in the navy meself. Wanna drink? My name’s Alf.” He turned and nodded casually at the Vision, who I now saw was dressed neatly in a gray jacket, a frilly blouse with its neckline high and demure, and silk pajama trousers. “And this bird is Louise.”
The young woman showed no sign that Alf had spoken. She gazed ahead of her as if she were sleepwalking with her eyes wide open.
“She don’t drink,” said Alf. “She’s just comin’ off an acid trip.” He smirked at me. “She yaffles it like a bloomin’ kid eatin’ candy! Her old man’s a bleedin’ cabinet minister in ’olland, an’ ’ere she is, screamin’ ’er bloody ’ead orf ’alf the time, when she’s not on her back dishin’ out khifer to the locals. Them randy sods, they’re at ’er like bloomin’ kids at the jellybeans, ain’t they?” He laughed again, his fat lips slobbering as he pushed between Sissie and me to get to the bar, where Willie was droning on and on at two well-dressed elderly gentlemen, both with soft, smooth faces, who had entered moments before, holding hands.
I tried to talk to Louise. “Which part of Holland are you from?” I asked as pleasantly as I could.
The gray-green eyes never flinched. The perfect mouth hardly opened. She spoke in a low, flat, clear voice. “Fuck Holland.”
“I spent the winter there a couple of years back—at Volendam. Do you know it?” I tried to smile.
“Fuck Volendam.”
“How long are you in Ibiza?” I continued bravely.
“Fuck Ibiza. And fuck you.” Still no sign of any emotion. No sign of any intent, any awareness, any presence, any love. The face, startling in its beauty, showed nothing. No petulance, no dislike, no distaste, no hatred—nothing. Only a cold, cold, beauty. It was like looking at the frozen, ice-shining rocks of Spitzbergen on a calm day. There was nothing sinister in that face. Nothing evil. The eyes did not threaten, or menace, or daunt, or warn, or intimidate. They did nothing. They were blank, as if she were blind, as indeed, for a flash, I thought she might be—until I caught a flicker from them as she stabbed a stare at Willie. That was the only reaction that wonderful face showed in the whole hour I watched her eyes, on and off, in brief glances, while I observed the assembly and listened to Alf.
Alf came back from the bar, bearing our drinks. He nodded his head toward Sissie, with whom he had just had a short, joking exchange. “She your old woman?”
“Passenger,” I replied.
“Cor, blimey, ain’t ’alf a life, innit?” He gulped at his beer, looking at me the while. “Only come down ’ere twice a year,” he said.
“What do you do? I mean, do you work?” I asked, as I took in his loud checked jacket, blue shirt, and silver tie done in a wide Windsor knot.
Alf spluttered as he gulped his pint again. “Wot, me work? You must be jokin’! Nah, I backs the gee-gees. I makes enough to come down ’ere every four months, and
stay ’ere fer about two or three months, then orf I go, back again, see?”
“What do you do here, then, Alf?”
“Oh, I drinks an’ . . .” He craftily threw a leer at the still-staring Dutch lass, “ . . . an’ I gets me end away, don’t I?” He said this last bit almost defensively. “Only it’s buggered up now. She caught a dose o’ siff, an’ the local docs won’t treat ’er, so she’s got to go orf to bloomin’ Majorca, ain’t she?” He raised his pint again, gulped deep and long, smacked his lips as he put down his glass, and went on. “Still, I don’t mind. Plenty more where she came from, eh?”
“You meet her down here?”
“Yeah, she was down on the beach dishin’ it out, along with about twenty other birds. They had a midnight party over at Figueretas—Ronnie the Pouf’s place. Bloke called Legros stood all the booze and brought about five dollie-birds and three young blokes. He fancies them, see?”
“What do all these people do, Alf? I mean how do they live?”
Alf grinned at me after he set his beer down again. “Oh, a bit ’ere, a bit there. You know how it is. Ronnie the Pouf, well, ’e’s a sort of barman, but Legros, blimey, ’e’s got money growin’ out of ’is ears, ’e ’as; ’e’s an art dealer—you know, flogs paintings. Travels all over the world. I think ’e’s a poufter too, but ’e knows I’m on the other team, so ’e never bothers me. We get on all right. ’E even invites me up to ’is mate’s ’ouse for drinks now an’ again. They got a swimmin’ pool an’ all up there . . . up in the Old Town it is.”
My ears pricked up. I looked at Alf closely. “Oh? What’s his mate do, then?”
“Oh, ’e’s a real turn, that one. Another poufter . . . ’E’s a . . . what do you call ’em—you know, people what buy paintin’s?”
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