Genius

by Patrick Dennis

  “You don’t suppose they’ve jumped the rent again after seeing us?” I muttered to my wife.

  “Are you insane?” my wife said. “That nice biddy who works for Starr couldn’t have jumped over the doorsill last night. He was in far worse shape than we were.”

  Catalina rattled off something to her mother in Mayan, was handed a pass key from the depths of the reticule, unlocked the door, and entered the apartment. There was an ear-splitting scream that started Perro to barking and started Loro on his famous imitation of Madame X demanding the rent. From the depths of Apartamiento 2 we could hear the familiar, somewhat hammy voice of Leander Starr roaring, “Madame, what are you and that bag of bones doing in my quarters?”

  “Starrr?” Catalina screeched. “Leondorrr Starrr!”

  Mamacita fled from the apartment, reticule flying, fell to her knees on the patio, and crossed herself three times. She was followed by her daughter, who had gone ashen beneath her rosy panchromatic make-up. Leander Starr was not far behind.

  From what St. Regis had told us the night before, I had rather expected a wizened, shriveled old man—white or bald, perhaps even toothless, and certainly drained of any and all fire. No such thing. Starr still came on strong. Always resembling some well-known matinee idol, Starr had now entered his Basil Rathbone phase. He was still tall, still dark—although in the bright sunlight there was a suspicious green and purple opalescent sheen to the black of his hair. Far from looking seedy and threadbare, he wore white silk pajamas and a scarlet dressing gown cut along the lines of something you might expect to see on Prince Albert or Napoleon III.

  For once la Ximinez was beyond speech. She could only tremble and say “Starrr.”

  “I can readily see, Miss Ximinez, that your fifty years away from the jungle have done nothing to improve your deplorable morals. You are still forcing your way into the rooms of innocent men. Or is it this seductress whose body you are trying to sell?” He indicated Mamacita, and she crossed herself again. “Now be off or I’ll have the police on you. Policía!” he shouted dramatically.

  “Starrr,” Catalina began. “Ai gived theess plas to a Señor San Ray-hees. Alice—somet’ing lak that—San Ray-hees? This my house. Ai own.”

  “St. Regis is my valet. Surely you don’t think I can bother with dreary details, like hiring a little pied-à-terre in this Indian village. If, as you say, this hovel really belongs to you, I would like to point out certain shortcomings in the appointments. There is, for example, a very large cockroach in my bathroom.” The Ximinez grasp of English was not enormous. She spoke just enough to get by and then only after having rehearsed it to herself—as I do with Spanish. She also found it more blessed to give than to receive when it came to conversation, and so it was obvious that she had understood almost nothing of Starr’s denouncement. He seemed to sense this and translated in very bad Spanish. “Una cucaracha en el cuarto de baño. Uno ratón en la cocina. Disgustamente!”

  “Ai fix, Starrrr,” Madame X whimpered. “Ai fix right now. Dees day. Ai come only for the rent. You pay now. Ai fix.”

  “Do you mean to say, Miss Ximinez, that you can stand there got up like the whore of Babylon and ask me to pay you money for quarters unfit for human habitation? It’s risible! When my financial advisor, Mr. St. Regis, returns, you may take the matter up with him.” He drew himself up to an impressive height, took a deep breath, and then bellowed, “Now go!” Mother, daughter, and dog took to their heels. Without stopping to collect another centavo’s rent from anyone, they scuttled the length of the patio, slammed their heavy carved door, and clanged the bolt into place.

  Lost in admiration, we burst into applause. “Bravo!” I shouted. “Viva Starr!”

  Starr bowed briefly in our direction. “Ah, Dennis, dear boy. Mrs. Dennis. I had heard that you’d retired down here. Still writing?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Still directing?”

  He ignored my question. “A pity that you weren’t able to put enough away for your declining years. I felt—to my great regret—that your recent, um, outpourings lacked the vigor and vitality of your earlier work. But I suppose that’s true of all you writers. Look at poor Willie Maugham. Well, now that you know where to find me, the two of you must look in for cocktails. Say this evening, when my butler returns. Sevenish? And now if you’ll forgive me, I have a severe migraine and must lie down in a darkened room. Hasta la noche.” With that he was gone.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “I’ll be double damned.”

  An hour later, after a warm tub and a therapeutic beer, we were dressed up in our party clothes and on our way to the Maitland-Grims’s. My wife, all gloves and nose veils, looked like Joan of Arc at the stake, and there was even a certain grim-jawed stoicism about me. I suppose suffering does ennoble.

  Many, many years before the war, when I was just old enough to be taken to wholesome musical comedies, there was invariably in every show a foppish, ersatz young Britisher named Freddie or Reggie or Ceddie. His lines were pretty well limited to fatuosities like, “What-ho . . . Right-oh . . . Pip-pip . . . Oh, I say.” He was always the son of a duke or, at the very least, of a belted earl. He never got the joke or the girl. And he was known in the theatrical trade as the Silly-Ass Englishman. I have never seen such a person in real life, and I doubt that one ever existed off Broadway. If there ever were such types in England, death and taxes have taken their toll.

  But in this age of women’s rights the Silly-Ass Englishman has been replaced by a very real and all-too-common female counterpart, the Silly-Ass Englishwoman. You can see her in Mayfair, Belgravia, Chelsea, and Knightsbridge. Her picture is forever in the Tatler—not attending good, staid English affairs like hunt balls or point-to-points or art exhibitions, but at those functions that are inaccurately described as “fun,” such as roaring-twenties parties, gambling-club openings, and twist contests. Youngish, foolish, and usually pretty, the Silly-Ass Englishwoman grasps at any new wrinkle of fashion as though it were a life jacket. Becoming or not, she adapts herself to it rather than it to her. If skirts are too short and heels too high (as they certainly are this year) hers are shorter and higher. If lips are very red, she looks as though she had been caught sucking blood from a jugular vein. If lips are pale, she zincs hers until her teeth take on the patina of old rosewood. She lives in a mews cottage or a service flat done up by Michael Inchbald or David Hicks. She exists only for new faces and new places, and you can be sure that her poor old mother would turn in her grave could she but know, because the Silly-Ass Englishwoman has either stepped down or stepped up from the place where she was born to become the heart and soul of a new class of English society that never existed before—and anyone with a modicum of charm or a good deal of money is welcome.

  Bunty Maitland-Grim, our hostess of the day, personifies this new phenomenon. She is somewhere between thirty and fifty years old. Her father could have been anything from a dock hand to Lord Chamberlain, but from her accent you could never tell exactly when or where she started. She is small and has a lovely figure, although her feet are rather large. I suppose she is a brunette, but over the years we have seen her brown, black, ash blond, piebald—that was ’59 when women were having their hair chemically streaked to make themselves look like shaggy zebras—gold and silver. This winter she is back to a rich, sable brown, puffed and teased and tangled high around her head as though she might be wearing—for some reason known best to Bunty—a successful chocolate soufflé. From beneath two tattered draperies of hair her pointed little face peers out, the eyes lined and extended almost to her ears, the lids stained an iridescent green, which makes one imagine the advanced stage of conjunctivitis. As the day wears on, the many coats of mascara have a tendency to smudge. Powdered flour-white, with a pinkish daub for a mouth, the Bunty of this winter gives you the unsettling feeling that you’ve seen her somewhere before. And of course you have. It’s Marcel Marceau. But Bunty has no gift for the mime. Her mouth is never still, calling out idiocies ove
rpunctuated by no-longer-fashionable catch phrases like “Oh, but darling . . . too divine . . . a fun party . . . sheer heaven . . . too blissful . . . ghastly bore.”

  We have known her—very slightly—for five years now. Bunty knows everyone, always very slightly. Her latchstring is a lasso. If the Pope himself happened into London, Bunty would think nothing of ringing him up, introducing herself with the sublime assumption that of course His Holiness had read about her last Come-As-Your-Favorite-Courtesan party in the Daily Express and asking him to rush to her place in Hamilton Mews for Bloody Marys with Edith Sitwell, Billy Graham, the Queen Mother, and Sabrina. “Then, ducks, we’ll all run round the corner to Les A. for a bitey.” After which she would blithely call the others and promise them the Pope. The odd thing is that quite a lot of people are so stunned that they accept. Look at us.

  Married to a totally colorless older man of impeccable background and impressive income, Bunty has been leading the life of an international gypsy for the past fifteen years. She is in London for the season, in a dismal country house called—appropriately—Grim Place over weekends, in the South of France during August, and in a series of warm, westerly places after Christmas. Nassau, Jamaica, Palm Beach, Bermuda, and a lot of other resorts have all contained the Maitland-Grims from time to time. Taxes or foreign holdings or something like that have quite a lot to do with their constant peregrinations. However, Bunty has developed a pretty fiction that Major Maitland-Grim (retired) writes. I’ve noticed that everyone we meet who does absolutely nothing says, if asked, “I write.” This could mean, I suppose, a laundry list, a post card, or a begging letter to the bank. However, the statement “I write” has come to mean full-time bum.

  Henry Maitland-Grim has never been known to say anything more than “Hello,” “Yes,” “No,” “Please,” “Thank you,” and “Good-by.” With Bunty always on, he’s lucky to get that much inserted into the record. Bunty always speaks for him—“Oh, but darling, poor Henry is working himself to the sheerest rag what with all his research on the Maitland-Grim family in Jamaica” (or Bermuda or Nassau or Trinidad or wherever; in this year of grace the Maitland-Grims seem to have been conquistadors with four centuries of roots entangled in the eroding soil of Mexico). What Major Henry Maitland-Grim actually does do, other than pay the bills and put up with Bunty and the inconvenience of a wooden leg, is drink. They say that Bunty, not the leg, drove him to it, and I can believe that. Mind you, it’s not a loud, showy, obvious kind of alcoholism. Henry is far too refined and too repressed for anything like that. He just puts on a tidy little package upon arising every morning and keeps working on it throughout the day. I can’t say that I blame him. With Bunty around, it’s essential.

  This year, Bunty has leased a very large, very grand house in San Angel, which is Spanish colonial with a vengeance, its forbidding façade belying the enormous amount of space inside and behind. But she has managed in a matter of weeks to wreak her own subtle forms of destruction. The two suits of conquistadors’ armor standing in the salón de entrada now sport flower leis and hats from Chez Elle. The collection of pictures that ranged from Velasquez to Tomayo have all been removed and replaced by the derivative fashion-magaziney dabs and daubs run up exclusively for Bunty by her large stable of Chelsea painters. Everywhere there are flower arrangements consisting not so much of flowers as cabbages and grapes and seashells and—in one especially unforgettable display—a pearl necklace. For a very brief period Bunty fancied herself as the peer of Constance Spry and got poor Major Maitland-Grim to set her up in a very expensive flowershop in Berkeley Square, where she attended only the grand opening and, two months later, the grand closing. However, she is still filling her husband’s riding boots with lilies and larkspur, raiding kitchens for buds of garlic and colorful onions in her perpetual quest of the outlandish. It is, as far as I can see, her only domestic talent.

  We were the last to arrive, and Bunty was at her most frenetic, all got up in tight gold-lamé trousers, high-heeled gold mules, and enough necklaces and bracelets to sink her if she’d fallen into the swimming pool. “Darlings, you’re so naughty being so late!” Bunty has never been on time for anything in her life. “But I mustn’t be too cross, must I? I know you’ve been up since the screech of dawn writing some absolute bit of divinity.” We let her greeting go by without comment and submitted to her welcoming kisses. She’s a great kisser and has been known to kiss total strangers on the hunch that they must have met somewhere. “Now, darlings, do let me introduce you all round, then Henry will get you something to drink. I’m having a simply heavenly thing I invented last week. It’s called the Bunty Bomb, and it’s tequila with lime juice in a tall glass and you pour champagne over the top of it. Or if you’d rather have something else . . . Oh, here you are, darling. Do let me introduce you to two of my oldest chums in the world. Lady Joyce, this is Patrick Dennis, who writes all those divine little books, and this is Mrs. Dennis who does—well, I don’t know quite what she does do, except count piles and piles of lovely mon every day. In fact I can’t fancy why you’ve never met before. Really, my dear, you can’t travel an inch without being absolutely inundated with his books. I do believe that they give them away with passports and visas and things. As I said to . . .”

  “But Lady Joyce and I have met,” I said. “Aren’t you Monica James—the former Mrs. Leander Starr?”

  “Why, yes,” Lady Joyce said. “But I don’t believe I remember where.”

  The label “starlet” never quite fitted Monica James except to imply that she was an up-and-coming young actress. But actress she was and not the usual ball of fluff whose only performances are limited to publicity shots, cheesecake art, and producers’ bedrooms. She was blond and very beautiful in the way that only English girls are beautiful, with a lovely skin, a slightly aquiline nose, and the kind of carriage that made one believe that she rode expertly. In the twenty years since I had seen her, she had become even more the idealized Country Life frontispiece. She was still very much the pink and white silvery blond, but the years had caused her excellent bones to be a bit more pronounced. Her hair, which my wife swears has never been near the dye pot, was arranged in a classic, becoming manner, very flattering and suitable to her age, which was somewhere in the middle forties. Her dress was fashionable and obviously expensive. It was the kind of outfit that she could put on ten years from now and still look aristocratic and smart. By way of ornamentation she wore the only strand of real pearls in the room and two very impressive rings. One wondered how she and Bunty could ever have come to know one another.

  Cocktails went on for a very long time, as they always do at Bunty’s, and over my glass of weak whisky (my wife and I had intelligently refused the Bunty Bomb) I watched Lady Joyce, poised and confident, being charming to the odd collection of mismatched people Mrs. Maitland-Grim had ensnared.

  About half past three, luncheon was announced, and save for a meandering centerpiece of orchids and artichokes, the long refectory table looked very elegant with its Mexican silver service plates and goblets. Bunty had also shucked the plain white jackets off her two menservants and had replaced them with loose hanging green and orange striped beach shirts from Lila Bath (“So divinely native, darling”), which gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I must eat very rapidly so that the help could get off for a swim. Otherwise everything was very grand.

  Lady Joyce was seated between Henry Maitland-Grim and me, and from the look of our host, he had had at least two Bunty Bombs too many. He’d retreated into his collar and was simply not relating. I mean it was all he could do to sit at the head of the table and toy with his lunch. As for carrying any conversational ball, he was less articulate than ever, an occasional cultivated grunt being about his only contribution. This left Lady Joyce to me exclusively, and there have been worse fates.

  “I’m sorry I mentioned Leander Starr when we met today,” I said. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, but I was so surprised to see you again after all these years . . .
”

  “But you didn’t embarrass me at all,” she said. “Besides, it was interesting to be married to Leander. I mean there were perfectly ghastly times and he was the most impossible man to live with, but he was never dull.”

  “And, uh, Lord Joyce?”

  “I’m afraid he was just a baronet, not a peer. He’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. He was a dear man—much younger than Starr and completely different. Daddy was so pleased when I married him. He pulled every possible string so that he could conduct the ceremony himself. My father was the vicar in our little village, you know, and Joyce was the son of the local squire. It was just a little slice of Jane Austen. He represented everything that was dear to Daddy—old family, good schools, wing commander in the R.A.F., love of the land, successful cattle breeding, Adam furniture, an interest in local affairs.”

  “Are you very good at opening bazaars?”

  “To tell you the modest truth, I’m perfectly splendid at it. After all, I made a round dozen films before I retired, and in every one I was a vapid ingénue named Lady Caroline or the Honourable Victoria. It got so that I could do those roles without even reading the script, and of course it carried right over to Boar Hall—that’s the name of our place, I’m sorry to say. You know there are quite a lot of us Pams and Jills and Sybils—all nice young girls from nice hard-up families—who caught the acting bug, got it out of our systems, and wound up with nice young men in club ties who had been patiently waiting for us. Even Bunty had a crack at the stage, you know.”

  I glanced at our host who was dozing over a plate of prawns and couldn’t imagine him—or anyone else—patiently waiting for Bunty to do anything but shut up. “Wasn’t it ever a bore at Boar Hall—I mean after Starr?”

  “Deadly. Oh, I don’t quite mean that. After Starr it was a bit like having a lovely long rest in a very posh nursing home. Lots of lovely fresh milk and eggs and acres of flowers and splendid rooms simply crying to be done over and enough money to do them up properly. Yet, even the nicest nursing home can pall after a while. But my husband was so sweet and so proud of ‘the splendid way you’re taking hold, old girl’ that I’d never have dreamt of letting on. And then I had a baby to fuss over until he was packed off to school. Don’t worry, I’m not going to show you pictures. He’s enormous and he rows. There have been unhappier lives than mine.”