I was an hour early in the downtown complex of Fun Inc. ‘Fantasy – Understanding – Nurturance’ was carved in freestanding porphyry letters on the pediment. I looked for somewhere to kill time. But it seemed complicated to find a parking place and then move again, so I entered the compound of the head office very slowly, and made my way as driftingly as possible to the reception area, where I announced myself. ‘How are you doing, Anna?’ the receptionist answered, with a lovely smile. She was wearing her name on a brooch, Marylynne. ‘Mr Van Mond is expecting you, but if you don’t mind waiting …’ Her garnet fingernails clicked on the buttons of the telephone she pressed, and I heard my name given. ‘I’m terribly early …’ I apologised.
‘Not at all, Anna,’ she said, and continued to clothe me in her radiance. ‘What will you have?’ She gestured at an attendant, who stood by, almost bowing. He was wearing the same polka-dot fabric of the receptionist’s blouse; then I realised they weren’t spots in fact but little smiling mouths. I found myself bowing back, because he was black. Service from blacks makes me anxious.
‘Coffee, please. No, juice.’
‘We have orange, grapefruit, pineapple, or our Tropical Elixir which is papaya, melon and kiwi cocktail garnished with a freshly picked spray of mint.’ His smile undid the knot inside me for an instant.
‘Please, yes – that last thing.’
‘With or without ice, ma’am? Our visitors from England aren’t used to ice cubes the way we like them, I know it.’
‘With, please,’ I said.
‘Rad!’ he said, and sped away; was he wearing roller skates?
At last I sat down; in the cool green antechamber of Fun City Inc., under the araucaria and eucalyptus forest growing in indoor amphorae, I called to mind tribeswomen forced to wear bras by missionaries, so uncomfortable and clumsy did I feel in my Indian cotton blouse and skirt and sandals. I should have painted my toenails, I thought, I should have painted my legs; I looked down at them discreetly: was my dry white London skin flaking? Was stubble coming through?
Like the third of the three kings, the youngest, the Moor, the server reappeared, in his pyjama suit covered in puckered little smiling lips, and dashed to face me with a tray.
‘Enjoy,’ he commanded me. The Tropical Elixir foamed; a wedge of lime split its rim, and a dish of tiny fruits stood beside it, with a cumquat and a lychee and something I’d never seen before, like a pale green Chinese lantern – a physalis berry, I discovered later, back in London one afternoon, when I strayed into the market near the archive. The paper doily read, ‘For your sweet thoughts today.’ I took it for Ephemera, slipping it carefully into the paperback in my bag.
There was no one else waiting; the receptionist watched a screen beside her, which was showing the same cartoon as the large television set I discovered playing in one of the groves of trees; it was a vintage Fun City cartoon, plenty of squashed cats and other irrepressible pets. I began to look through my file, making sure that once I was inside with Mr Van Mond, Executive Vice-President in charge of Arts Sponsorship, I would remember, without too much shuffling, the figures the museum had given me.
The moment the electronic clock above the receptionist’s head pulsed the hour of my appointment, she picked up the telephone and I heard her announce me.
‘Anna,’ she called, ‘You can go up now to Mr Van Mond’s office. Rosemarie will take you.’
Rosemarie appeared and smiled at me, ‘Have you had a good trip?’ she asked. ‘Are you very jetlagged?’
I found I liked the way the entire staff treated me as if we were old friends; I found it enfoldingly warm, like a funny dream in which people hail you with praise; Cleopatra’s milk bath must have felt like this, I thought. Rosemarie, guiding me down a sea-green corridor lit in undulating spirals of blue light, seemed to be ushering me towards some delicious intimacy, as if we were on our way to a fitting for a special dress and she was the couturière who would be taking my personal measurements, discreetly, without cruel exclamation. She herself was so well-tailored, in her lettuce-green suit with the inevitable blouse of smiles and kisses that again I worried that my informal two-piece was somehow offensively underdressed. Would Mr Van Mond think, Shabby, and dismiss any chance for the Museum of Albion? Would his tuned nostrils catch a whiff of the wrong kind of perfume? I had put on the Diorissimo cologne I’d bought on the plane, a rather heavy jasmine for my taste, and I was first baked, driving with the sun roof open in the Porsche, and then chilled, waiting in the arboretum of the entrance: I could feel damp under my arms and in my groin. Rosemarie on the other hand exuded as fragrantly as the essence counter in the Bodyshop, while Mr Van Mond himself, when I was finally shown in to see him, was redolent of a skin bracer, with a name, no doubt, like Corsair or Sabretooth.
But that wasn’t till later; his anteroom, where Rosemarie left me, was attended by another receptionist. His secretary, I assumed. She was working on a word-processor; her name was Loella, it said, on the heart-shaped brooch on her lapel. She was a bit older than Rosemarie and Marylynne downstairs, and less smiley.
I began to feel quite wretched with panic. I was a foreigner, I was suing for help, coming from a long way away with my different customs, and my partly different speech. I thought of my grandparents, Maria Filippa and Davide, and of their endeavour seventy-odd years ago, on the other coast. I wanted to get back to the photograph albums Lucia had brought out for me to look at: Davide wearing kid gloves, Maria Filippa in strap shoes and lace.
I pressed the pulse at my wrist against my thighs to steady it; and rehearsed to myself. ‘The Museum of Albion contains the finest archive of …’On the walls of Mr Van Mond’s antechamber there were posters advertising American exhibitions of art from all over the world, each one discreetly stamped in the corner ‘F.U.N’ over a bushbaby with a bouncy tail. The corporation thus made known, in the most mannerly way, the source of the financial support which had made the exhibition possible.
Then I was in his office; he had Grecian 2000 hair, longish, and was the first person I’d seen there who wasn’t wearing smiles on his shirt. He stood up when I came in, and walked round the long desk of slim dark wood with a slippy slidy gait in his light leather shoes, and gave me a firm hand, holding on to me until he had set me down in a high-backed leather and steel chair (we had one in the museum’s twentieth-century section, I realised as I sat down, but here there was no cord to prevent me sitting on it). His warm, dry pressure on my hand had not felt reassuring.
Watching the television with Nicholas, I’ve noticed that the sign of a screen villain these days is fondling. Whenever anyone intends harm, they announce it by squeezing someone by the shoulder or the upper arm. In Star Trek the travellers on the spaceship do not exchange caresses, they are too deeply virtuous. Movements of affection betoken insincerity: only the deadliest villain would reach out softly to touch an innocent face. So lethal is such a gesture that you expect him to leave a burnmark, like napalm. Sincere people never touch each other. They live shrink-wrapped in their smiles, with the air they share machine-cleaned and the lavatory seats covered in disposable plastic ‘For your protection’. Kissers nowadays are invariably Judases.
Mr Van Mond looked at me as he went round the desk again and laughed, a big cheerful guffaw. He was still looking at me as he adjusted the photograph of a family of five children, all in cowboy shirts, and he was saying, ‘So you’re Anna Collouthar, I would never have guessed. I thought Sir Julian would send over some little librarian, you know the type, a kind of dear quiet little precise person like a nun, and instead’ – he spread his hands with a fraternity ring on one finger, and so evenly suntanned they looked dipped in foundation – ‘you. You’re quite something. Thank you, Sir Julian!’
I was laughing. I never have been one of these women with a quick answer to a man’s remarks. He went on, ‘I want you to know that all of us at Fun City are very very well disposed to finding some enabling facility for you guys in the Albion – as we can’t bri
ng the museum with you all over here, we might as well do the best we can over there. Just tell me, what do you want, Ms Anna Collouthar?’ He beamed, but somehow managed to do it gravely.
I began, ‘The collection of Ephemera was begun in 1951 by a vicar and his wife in Lyme Regis. It is the finest archive of …’
Mr Van Mond was talking to his secretary, ‘Will you switch on the tape please, Loella? Thank you, dear.’
He nodded, and I went on. ‘The Reverend Thomas Press and his wife Cordelia. They realised that children’s materials of all sorts were not being preserved, that children did Find-A-Word and Join-The-Dot and Cut-Out-The-Dioramas puzzles in games books the world over, and that these valuable social documents, evidence of attitudes to youth and ethics, invisible, but no less influential for all that, were all disappearing …’
Mr Van Mond was smiling at me, looking me up and down, and shaking his big groomed head, offering his incredulity to me as a dog a ball. His tanned complexion wasn’t wrinkled, not like the skins of old people in Ninfania, but supple, a well-handled leather binding. He said, almost to himself, ‘Imagine, I was thinking of putting your visit on indefinite hold!’ He waved me on.
‘Then the collection expanded; they acquired past children’s reading matter, play materials, cards, board games, story books, colouring books. In those days, you could find them for a song – and gradually they began adding sweet wrappers – candy …’ – he nodded – ‘and lollipop sticks, the kind with mottoes printed on them, like “A Stitch in Time Saves Nine” and “All That Glisters Is Not Gold”.’
He leant forward, and said, ‘Do you know what one of our writers said about this city? He said, “Tinsel has all the properties of gold, all its qualities. But tinsel has something else: pathos.” I like that. I like that a lot. That’s one of the reasons I like it here. In Parnassus. All the qualities of gold. And pathos. Do you enjoy pathos, Anna?’
‘Yes, yes, I do,’ I said. Did the future of Ephemera depend on it?
‘I knew that Sir Julian had changed the old Albion, but I did not expect this. You, the Curator of Ephemera!’ He looked at the dossier in my hands. ‘Go ahead, I’m listening.’
‘The whole collection will have to be sold off very soon, because there simply isn’t any room to house it. At the moment, it’s in a building on the third floor in the East End in packing cases and cartons, and I’m cataloguing it on my own …’ I was departing from my script, complaining, and Mark had warned me, ‘Don’t moan. For God’s sake. Americans want everyone to be bullish. Keep our end up. Make Fun City feel it’s a minor hiccup, not that we might sell.’
‘There are Fun Inc. products in the archive?’ Mr Van Mond spoke absently, his eyes not quite fixed on a painting on the wall to his right. ‘Not of course that we would insist on it. Rather the opposite. We take pride that we impose no conditions. We don’t even ask for an acknowledgment. Credits can be invisible. We like to hide our light under a bushel.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I began again, ‘we represent Fun Inc. very well. We have quantities of examples, going back to the Forties, the Fifties. Rare items too, that even you might not have. We have the incunabula of ephemera!’ I followed his eyes, and realised with surprise that it wasn’t a poster from a show he had sponsored, or a golden disc or even an Andy Warhol version of a F.U.N. bushbaby, but one of those Jacobean mourning portraits of a woman lying pale in a four-poster bed, with several children and her husband standing beside it, carrying emblems of mortality, a skull, a withered flower, an hourglass. He noticed I was following his gaze, and he said, with some warmth, ‘I have five children too, but my wife is still alive. Very much so! Mrs Van Mond is a splendid woman, we’ve been married sixteen years, and here out west, that’s some story. And we’ve only married each other once. That’s rare too.’
‘Ooh,’ I stammered, ‘how wonderful. Well done!’
‘Go ahead, my dear,’ he said. His eyes fell on my hand. ‘Lucky man!’ he sighed, fixing on my wedding ring.
I resumed, returning more closely to my plan, and sang Ephemera’s praises. At last I concluded, attempting a flourish, ‘We need a building, that’s really the long and the short of it, I suppose. Will you help us? Would you consider sponsoring Ephemera’s new home?’
‘A new wing at the Museum of Albion?’ He looked at me, crinkling, and folded his hands carefully one over the other. There was a pause, then a dimple in one corner of the grave mouth. ‘I’ll be happy to see Sir Julian about it. Tell him we’ll give him a grand reception!’
I realised I was dismissed, that my time for special pleading was over. I seemed to have been snubbed, yet at the same time I felt that I had somehow stumbled on the treasure in the paper chase even though I hadn’t read the coded messages right or even found them in the proper order. I stood up, he came round the desk again and this time put both hands on my upper arms and gazed deep in my face, so that I giggled, with a hep-hep sound. Before I dropped my own gaze, I noticed a tiny muscle quiver in the sunburned webbing under his eyes; but they were pleasant eyes, light brown and sentimental, and I wasn’t in a mood to be hard on sentiment, somehow.
‘You really are an English rose, and you’re in my office,’ he said. ‘It does me good to look at you, like a dose of vitamins. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” It is my very favourite, personally favourite period, seventeenth century.’
I didn’t dare say I was half Italian, and half southern Italian at that. Not even Florentine.
Loella came in; he’d buzzed her, inaudibly, and I was shown out.
When I reached the arboretum, Marylynne greeted me: ‘Anna, could you please take a call on the internal phone?’ She gestured towards a parting in the grove of trees, where a blue receiver was flashing.
Loella said, ‘Anna, I have Mr Van Mond for you.’ He came on the line; there was a pause, like the moment between tuning up and the first note of a concert, and then he began:
‘Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no …’
He had that special vibrating voice some men who fancy themselves put on when they’re trying to impress you, treacly and so sincere, and I’d have liked to drop on the floor and leave myself there in a heap just as Nicholas does with his clothes before he gets into bed. But Mr Van Mond was in full spate, and I worried, would it hurt the chances of Ephemera if I shut him up?
‘… We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day …’
He sang out, like a well-behaved schoolboy trying to win the school cup in Elocution.
I shifted, on the end of the phone. What the fuck did he want’ Could he really want to sleep with me? It seemed incredible. Should I stand up to him, karate chop with the receiver? Or try a jokey defence, Who’d have thought you were a Dirty Old Man, Mr Van Mond?
“… ten years before the Flood:
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.’
What would Mark say? Lie back and think of the Albion? Simper, simper? But how to do it? And where? At Auntie Lucia’s?
He was saying, ‘My vegetable, love.’ I thought of Nicholas’s father. I cursed him. There’d been little growing in our love. You bastard, you bastard, I said to him, there was April in you when you wooed, December when you wed.
‘An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thine forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast …’
I must stop this man. It was ludicrous. I tried to speak, but only a kind of squawk came out, and he went soaring on, holding out the words for me to catch as a skydiver his hand.
For years, no one had told me I was praiseworthy; no one had even mentioned pleasure in looking at me. (Except you. Except you and your sisters.) I hadn’t had a fuck for months, not since that last time Nicholas’s father decided to have a quick one again, and then thought better of it, afterwards, of course.
‘For, Lady, yo
u deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.’
But I couldn’t, I couldn’t. Not like this, this women’s magazine stuff, the business trip, the easy lay, the tanned stranger.
‘But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.’
What would you be like? You’re awfully old. Your lips are rather crêpey, a bit like a mollusc’s foot. Would they feel like that? And your body, would it be wrinkled like your face? Probably brown all over like everybody in California. Would you have little white trunks of skin round your bottom? What would your cock be like? This cock that’s produced all these children and has stayed for sixteen years with Mrs Van Mond, that splendid woman? Would it have a kind of worn-out look? Your pubes, would they be Grecianed too?
‘… And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.’
How often have you done this before? Will you give me a baby, another little fellow in black satin breeches and lace ruff? Will you give me AIDS? Quaint honour! Perhaps not so quaint these days.
I’d rather like to have another baby.
Nicholas would like it too, he goes on at me about a brother. (Always a brother, not a sister.)
Mr Van Mond had paused; I took a breath, I could halt the flow, I could say, ‘I must go, Mr Van Mond, I don’t understand what this is about, Mr Van Mond.’ Frost, English frost, quite right and proper from an English rose.
He said, softly, ‘Are you still there, Anna Collouthar? Then listen my dear, listen:
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
The Lost Father Page 31