‘About?’
Atkins sighed regretfully. ‘Aboat.’
‘But that’s only the—’
‘There are just two valleys in West Virginia in which pure eighteenth-century English is spoken, English as it used to be spoken in the eighteenth century. I come from there. Now . . . How do you –?’
Mrs Atkins turned her head suddenly towards her husband and said with great conviction: ‘Mr Micheldene isn’t interested in playing word games. Why don’t we all go and sit down?’
‘If you’re looking for somebody to discuss pronunciations with, Mr Atkins,’ Roger said jovially, ‘I’ve got the very man. Come and meet him.’
They went over carrying their drinks, Roger his fifth or so, Atkins his first, at any rate since arriving. On the way Roger found himself trying to explain who Ernst was and what he did. He failed to hold his audience. When he was five yards away from her Helene finished saying something to Macher, got gracefully to her feet and walked off towards the changing-huts. Her hair had almost dried and was stirring fluffily in the light breeze that had sprung up.
After uniting Bang and Atkins Roger wandered off by himself. He looked round the large expanse of undulating turf which the Derlangers called their yard. Its lack of flower-beds and hedges gave it, for him, an unfinished look. A low tree-covered hill half a mile distant showed off the red and orange tints they all kept talking about. Apart from this kind of thing and two or three scattered houses there was nothing in the whole panorama to arrest the eye. No vehicle moved on the road. At the base of a pine on the far side of the drive a squirrel sat on its hind legs and glanced about with affected curiosity. Then, with affected urgency, it ran up the trunk, disturbing a scarlet bird which flew energetically away towards the wood. The Derlangers’ Negro maidservant let the screen of the back door bang behind her and went round the far side of the house. Was all this worth the effort of close observation, of an attempt at understanding? Roger thought not.
There was much else to occupy him. Before the evening ended he had got to make some arrangement with Helene, or at any rate an arrangement to make an arrangement. Not for the first time he envied a chap in a French film he had once seen. This chap had had a special lute thing on which at suitable points he played a special chord. Its effect was to reduce to senseless immobility everyone except the lutanist and whichever young lady he had his eye on. After retiring together for as long as they liked the pair would resume their former positions and another chord set life on the tramp again. Snappy little gadgets, those lutes, but very hard to come by.
Short of a lute or a carefully placed hand-grenade nothing suggested itself as a means of detaching Helene or even of slowing the others down to a level where they could be relied on not to rush up every fifteen seconds and start discussing something. But get hold of her he must. The next couple of weeks were going to give him his best chance so far, perhaps his last, of taking Helene off somewhere, even for a couple of days. That would not be as good as a couple of decades, but it would be better than what he had had up to now: half a dozen bits of afternoons and evenings in Copenhagen and London and a large part of one night when Ernst had gone to Oxford to read manuscripts. It hurt Roger that he could remember so little of what he wanted to remember of that occasion. All the rest was still vivid, the feigned departure (for Arthur’s benefit) from the rented Hampstead house, the half-hour on the landing in stockinged feet while a wakeful Arthur drank hot milk and had a story told, and the very real departure at 5.45 a.m. while a reawakened Arthur could be heard struggling to turn the knob of his bedroom door. The couple of days must not feature Arthur.
However, Roger told himself now he would take on a whole striking force of Arthurs if that couple of days could be extended indefinitely. Was there any real hope of taking Helene off Ernst? The last time in London she had promised to think about it and for once had kissed him on the mouth when he saw them all off at the airport. And yet her letter, arriving nearly a month afterwards, had been as cheerful and as merely friendly as always. (And why had she never learnt how to spell his name?) He had wanted to ring her up and say what he so often wanted to say face to face with her: Look, you’re supposed to be my mistress. It was not as if any rotten sod, or other rotten sod, were in the running; he was pretty sure of that. What did she really think of him?
Just then Helene came out from the huts, combing her hair half-heartedly. It looked unusually fine and light. He let off a short prayer that she had not really forgotten April 1961, had only been pretending for Ernst’s benefit. Then he went down the slope to join her. He slid about a bit in doing so, either because of the gin or because he was holding his stomach in so tightly that his legs worked like stilts or because the grass was slippery. He walked Helene along to the house accompanied only by Suzanne Klein and Irving Macher and Strode Atkins and Nigel Pargeter. He asked Helene if she had enjoyed her swim and she had time to say yes before turning away to listen to what Macher was saying about William Golding.
Indoors Grace won an argument with Joe, who wanted them to eat in the yard, and led the women off upstairs. Joe stood scowling for a moment before taking Atkins away with him towards the domestic regions. Macher was also missing, perhaps climbing a drainpipe to find out more about what Helene was like to look at. Roger found himself alone with Pargeter, who was about twenty-four and bespectacled and very short in the leg and who said:
‘Is this your first visit?’
‘To this house?’
‘No, to the United States.’
‘No. Is it yours?’
‘Yes. I’ve only been here a couple of weeks. I was ill.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘I’m in the graduate school at Budweiser.’
‘Doing what?’
‘A Ph.D. thesis on Gavin Douglas.’
‘What, that fifteenth-century Scotch bloke?’
‘Yes, do you know his work?’
‘He wasn’t an American, was he?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then what the hell’s the point of coming over here to write about him?’
‘I didn’t come over to write about him. I wanted to do a Ph.D. and I got this studentship at Budweiser, so—’
‘But aren’t there manuscripts and stuff with a bloke like Douglas? You won’t find those in Pennsylvania.’
‘I’m not on that side of it.’
‘Indeed?’ Roger said, and went out. He genuinely wanted to go to the lavatory. Further, under pretext of not knowing the house all that well he could wander about a bit in the hope of running into Helene. He warned himself that kissing her must take second priority to arranging when he could telephone her without risk of Ernst being about. Failing any of this, he might be lucky enough to come upon Macher doing something discreditable, pocketing a pre-Columbian objet d’art or being familiar with Suzanne Klein on a Dutch colonial day-bed.
In the event all he got to was the jahn. He paused in rebuttoning his trousers to take in the framed map of the world that hung on the wall. It had the Americas running down the middle, so that most other places were cut in half or appeared twice. How long would it be before they got UNO or something to shift the meridian of longitude so that it ran through Washington? And why – he glanced in the mirror – did Americans’ faces not go nearly as red as his when they drank fully as much as he did?
Downstairs he was in time to see Joe striding with lowered head over to one of the pair of hearths that stood back to back half-way down the room, a pile of logs in his arms. These he let fall from chest height into the fireplace, afterwards booting the strays into position. Without looking up he said:
‘If it’s going to be as Christly cold as Grace seems to think, we’d better do something to keep from freezing to death. Now the kindling. There used to be some . . .’
Attentively watched by Roger and Pargeter, he was rummaging with most of his strength in a cupboard under a window-seat when Grace returned. ‘Sweetheart, what on earth are you doi
ng?’
‘I was saying that since winter seems to have struck all of a sudden it’s time we got a fire going. Then I’ll start fixing a toddy, or perhaps a few hot buttered rums might—’
‘Joe, you’re crazy, darling we’ll roast in our seats with a fire. I didn’t mean it was—’
‘All right, so we’ll open the windows.’
‘Honey, really . . .’
Grace, hands clasped, stood shaking her neat waved head at her husband, who walked on his knees to the next cupboard and wrested it open. Pargeter moved over to Roger as if he very much wanted to discuss the weather with him. Then, with much rattling and clinking, Atkins came slowly in carrying a tray of drinks. The disposal of this, followed by the exertion of getting the plastic seal off the neck of a gin-bottle single-handed and equipped only with a sharp knife, seemed to drive the projected fire out of Joe’s head.
When Helene reappeared she had Mrs Atkins and Suzanne Klein and Macher with her. Macher was, and evidently had been for some time, talking about his novel.
‘Their great fear,’ he was saying as Roger came up, ‘is spilling food down themselves, you see. As well as looking slovenly and sordid it advertises their condition. So in this blinkie joke-shop we have special sweaters with soup-stains down the—’
‘Do forgive me,’ Roger broke in, ‘but what exactly is a blinkie joke-shop?’
‘A joke-shop for blinkies, only they don’t know it’s a joke-shop. They think it’s just a regular store with a few specialties in the way of . . . Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Micheldene, I forgot you didn’t hear what I said earlier. A blinkie is a blind person. And that’s really a very descriptive term; it gets the fuss a lot of them make with their eyes, never letting them alone, opening and shutting them, screwing them up this sort of way,’ – he demonstrated – ‘rubbing them and so on. Anyhow, in this store there are all sorts of things – blind seeing-eye dogs, cups for nickels with a sign saying Take One, and the dark-glasses counter is really something. All sorts of slogans painted in white on the lenses: Screw You White Man for Negro blinkies, and then an assortment of, oh, God Damn All Kike Filth, Death to Lousy Irish Micks and so on, depending on the minorities situation in the district the guy comes from. Then for the favoured patron there’s the girlie section – three-dimensional nudes, you know, very complete, four ninety-five, with slogans as before. Across the back it says Take Your Cotton-Picking Hands Off Me, You Blinkie Pervert, and on the stomach there’s—’
‘But nobody would see that, would they?’ Mrs Atkins asked. ‘It wouldn’t be like the things painted on the glasses, which other people can—’
‘But that’s the whole point. Don’t you see this makes it better? This way it’s pure offensiveness, nobody getting any satisfaction out of it, all done for its own sake. Just the idea, nothing more. Like setting up a time-bomb in a children’s hospital fixed to go off after you’re dead. Wanting actual kicks from seeing it or hearing about it, that’s weak and self-indulgent, that’s being human, whereas what I’m concerned with—’
‘Let’s hear about the Black-Out,’ Suzanne Klein said.
‘I’ve renamed it the Blind Spot now. Oh, I don’t know, Suzanne, perhaps we’d better leave that part. Maybe later.’
‘What is the Blind Spot?’ Helene asked.
‘It’s this blinkie burlesque joint,’ Suzanne said, laughing in a carefree, extraverted way, ‘where the strippers all have horrible faces, only of course the fellow who MCs the show builds them up as raving beauties. Go on, Irving.’
‘Well . . . it’s just when the girl with the biggest squint and the most acne is taking off her G-string that the hero gets his sight back, and naturally he’s got everything – soup-stain sweater, Screw You White Man glasses, transparent pants . . .’
‘How does he get his sight back?’ This was Helene again, listening to Macher as intently as if he were Ernst.
‘The gods restore it to him, what else? Out of pity. They’re always doing things like this. You remember that story by Chaucer where there’s this blinkie oldster with the hot wife. It’s really quite neat. He . . .’
Roger stopped listening to Macher’s account of The Franklin’s Tale. The fellow was earning a bigger and better punch-up, oral or physical, with every sentence he spoke, but it was too early yet for anything like that. Midnight, and extreme general drunkenness, were needed. And he must reconnoitre the enemy further before moving into the assault. Roger turned down the idea of a halting, puzzled question about whether all this stuff was meant to be funny. His tactical sense told him that Macher was more than ready for that one.
So he watched the women instead. Suzanne Klein’s obvious attachment to her nasty escort depressed him. Although on the small side for his own taste, she was attractive, not as attractive as Helene, but still several times more attractive than her with-it off-beat far-out co-religionist deserved. Pretty women always tended to go for horrible men.
How was it, then, that Helene did not go for him, Roger, more heartily and continuously than she had done up to now? Most of the time, of course, he did not consider himself to be truly a horrible man. But it would have taken a far more self-deluding mind even than his not to notice that, to a superficial eye, Roger Micheldene Esq. was a bit more horrible than, say, Dr Ernst Bang. And the trouble was that, like the rest of her sex, Helene had a superficial eye. This made it hard merely to get the chance of showing her the importance of things like, well, intellect and maturity and individuality.
He glanced intermittently and briefly at Helene. What he saw made him wish that there were no such thing as sex. He noticed that one of the lighter locks of hair had moved to the wrong side of the zig-zag parting. The white dress seemed to have shrunk a little in the last hour or two. Alternatively, after it had been sprayed on to her she had been selectively blown up with a bicycle-pump. And here she was pretending to be just a woman enjoying herself.
Mrs Atkins, at any rate, was making no such pretence. She stood in a slumped posture, dividing a not very attentive attention between her glass, Macher and, less often, her husband, who was now laughing almost without interval at the other end of the room. Her real interest, whatever it was, showed up in the periodic watchfulness that Roger thought he saw entering her wide-eyed gaze, though what if anything she was watching could not be placed. This look combined with her dejected, beaten air to remind Roger of someone. For the moment he had no idea who.
Dinner was announced, not a minute too soon for anybody who wanted to get to the table under his own power. As it was, Strode Atkins stumbled thoroughly three entirely separate times, once clutching at Roger’s lapel for support, as the party made its way down a curving flight of stone stairs to the eating-room. Here curtains that Grace had said were folk-weave shut out whatever there was outside, with yellow candles burning in double-spiral pewter candle-sticks. Above the wide hearth stood a lump of blueish stone that some Red Indian or Eskimo had battered into something like the shape of a man. The table-mats, instead of educating the guests with scenes from early sessions of Congress or maps of Pennfylvania with part of New Jerfey, were of plain linen. They interested Roger less than what was on them: gilt-rimmed plates bearing clam shells filled with hot crabmeat and breadcrumbs. This sight, and the thought that dinner-time was never much good for arranging to take people to bed, reconciled him to sitting between Ernst and Mrs Atkins at the far end of the table from Helene.
Roger began eating. There was a roll-basket on the table near him, its contents hidden by a napkin. Underneath this were lengths of hot Italian bread soaked in garlic butter. He decided he would not eat this, and then suddenly found he had started to. His decision to eat only one piece went the same way. By the time the Southern fried chicken arrived from the gloved hand of the Negro maid it was plain to him that he might as well be hung for a fat-tailed sheep as a lamb. With the chicken there were turnips, spring onions – no point in refusing them after the garlic – and corn on the cob with more butter. A razor-blade embedded in a wood
en handle for slicing the cobs and a paintbrush affair for spreading the melted butter on them were passed from hand to hand. Roger used both instruments a lot.
While Ernst and Pargeter, who was sitting opposite, filled him in on what terrible courses of study were available at Budweiser, Roger concentrated on his food. It was the least he could do for something that was bringing his coronary nearer at such a clip, that was already, he sensed, sidling irremovably into his paunch and his neck and his bosom. Let it. As he waited for his helping of blueberry pancakes with fresh cream and Wisconsin cheddar, the thought of dieting brushed feebly at his mind like an old remorse. He was aware that just eating a little of what he did not fancy would sooner or later do him good in the sexual chase. This idea had been brought sharply into focus at a fellow-publisher’s party the previous year. Somebody’s secretary had told him that what he wanted was all right with her on the understanding that he brought his block and tackle along. Five days later, sipping a half-cup of sugarless milkless tea to round off a luncheon of a lightly boiled egg with no salt, a decarbohydrated roll resembling fluff in plastic, and a small apple, he had made up his mind for ever that, if it came to it, he could easily settle down to a régime of banquets and self-abuse. He sent his plate up now for a second helping of pancakes and put three chocolate mints into his mouth to tide him over. Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.
With the Gaelic coffee, surmounted by half an inch or so of chilled cream, he felt his survival till breakfast guaranteed and accepted a cigar ceremoniously produced for him by Joe. It turned out to be a perfectly ordinary Manila, a little hot in the mouth, but airy, well-rolled, and with no beastly Brazilian leaf in it. The first couple of inches should be quite smokable. Waving away a lighter and calling for a match, he lent an ear to Pargeter’s anguished account of a Budweiser freshman programme called World Literature 108. He added the other ear when Pargeter said:
‘By the way, I’ve got a message for you from Maynard Parrish.’
One Fat Englishman Page 4