by Stephen Fry
“We do?”
“Well, of course we do!” Oliver looked at me in amazement, saw that I was genuinely adrift and then became puzzled himself. “Don’t we? I mean, darling. I assumed you were here for the same . . .”
At this point the door opened and Max and Mary Clifford strutted in.
“Ah, Ted . . . returned from your adventures.” Max extended a languid hand. Born in Liverpool, yet with an accent and manner that makes the Duke of Devonshire sound like Ben Elton. A self-made man who worships his creator, as someone said about somebody else, or somebody else said about someone. His wife Mary is of Welsh stock—Wrexham, if memory doesn’t deal me a dog-turd, and is also possessed of vowels like a line of Lalique icicles.
She proffered a powdery cheek and wagged a waggish finger. “Now, Ted, I hope you’re going to be very well behaved and very sober tonight. The Bishop and his wife are coming over this evening and the Draycotts will be here too, so best party manners.”
Un-yippee and un-hurrah.
“That goes for you too, Oliver. No atheistical talk, we beg.”
Said as if she were throwing the party and this was her house.
“Is he Heidi or Lorraine?” Oliver wanted to know.
Mary looked blank. “He’s Ronald, Oliver. Ronald and Fabia, I think their names are. They used to be at Ripon.”
“I think what Oliver wants to know,” I said, “is whether the Bishop is High Church or Low Church.”
“Thank you, precious,” said Oliver.
“Oh, nothing like that,” Max pronounced with authority, taking two sherry glasses deftly in one hand. “Solid public-school hymnbook. No nonsense.”
“Looks like Molly Moderate,” I said to Oliver.
“Hm . . .” Oliver looked at his nails dreamily. “Pity. I’m best at twitting the low rent, as it happens. Bishop-baiting,” he explained to Mary, “is one of Mother’s specialities.”
“Now, Oliver,” Mary screeched. “I absolutely forbid . . .”
“Forbid what?” Michael had arrived, hair sleekly brushed back, sapphires winking in his shirt front.
“Oliver’s threatening to tease the Bishop this evening.”
“Really?” Michael looked towards Oliver, who jiggled the ice in his glass in lazy salute. “I think he’s more likely teasing you, Mary.”
“Oh.”
“But, you’re welcome to try your luck, Oliver. I believe Ronald used to box for the army. Isn’t that right, Max?”
“So they tell me, Michael. So they tell me.”
Max has mastered a particular tone of voice with which he addresses Michael. It tells the world of a special relationship, a close and secret bond that shares its own private joke about the world. It drives me absolutely potty, as you can imagine. I knew Michael long before Max and his kind. There is a simultaneous envy (I know that Max, as a fellow boxwallah, can talk turkey with Michael in a way denied to me) and a protectiveness. I feel like Piggy in Lord of the Flies, left behind when Ralph is borne off with the others to explore the island. “But I was with him before anyone! I was with him when he found the conch,” I want to cry.
In the event the Bishop went largely unbaited. Twenty of us sat down to dinner. I suppose I had better give the guest list and you can tell me in your letter back whether you need further details.
Michael and Anne
Ted
Patricia
Max and Mary Clifford
Rose (Michael’s ancient Austrian aunt, never said a word)
Oliver
Simon
David
Ronald and Fabia Norvic (the Bish and Bishess)
John and Margot Draycott
Clara (the Cliffords’ daughter—skinny, wears a brace)
Tom and Margaret Purdom (local squirearchy)
Malcolm and Antonia Whiting (local literati, to please me. Ha!)
YOUR MOTHER
Yes, I thought that was worth leaving to the end. You could have felled me with a cocktail-stick. Your mother. Rebecca Burrell, née Logan. In the flesh.
Five minutes before we went in to dine, the full complement, as I thought, having been mustered, a peal was heard from the doorbell and there she stood. With luggage, with presents for the boys, with all the useful clever gifts from Fortnum’s that city-dwellers bestow on their deprived country cousins—rustic pies, stone-ground loaves, Norfolk honey, grain mustard and wind-dried lavender—with, in short, all the paraphernalia that betokens a long and cosy stay.
“Bex!” cries Michael, falling on her neck. Then he beams at me. “So, kiss my sister, Ted.”
She was sporting a beady, I-know-you’re-wearing-dirty-underpants sort of face but with the trace of a smile lurking in its margins. I’d seen her four years ago, at Christmas. Michael had been hoping to forge a rapprochement then I suspect, but it hadn’t really worked. I was too rebarbative, Rebecca was at her spiky worst and Pamela Pride, as Oliver might say, had woven her wicked web all too easily. With so many people there it had been possible for us to ignore each other. It’s going to be harder these next weeks.
So, Jane, give it to me straight: did you or did you not know that the She-Beast of Phillimore Gardens would be coming? If so, I hate you and hate you and hate you for not warning me.
We were seated apart at dinner which was some kind of a relief. I had been given the treat of walking Patricia in and sat between her and the squire’s wife, Margaret. Simon sat at his mother’s end of the table next to Clara Clifford and engaged her in conversation without vomiting at the sight of the particles of food that were getting caught in her brace, which is more than I could have managed. David sat at Michael’s end, unostentatiously avoiding meat. He had to parry the ludicrous remarks of Antonia Whiting, some of which drifted over to my end.
“Malcolm and I are trying to set up a South Norfolk Festival of Poetry and Prose. We think Jeyes of Thetford might sponsor it. Malcolm’s worried that the ‘J-Cloth Festival’ might not sound right. What do you think?”
Oliver, largely thanks to Mary Clifford’s witless proscriptions earlier on, was at his most disgraceful. Talk of festivals reminded him of an anecdote and he discoursed at length about the erotic adventures that had attended his visit to the Venice Film Festival last year.
“You won’t believe the trade that you can find trolling up and down the Dorsoduro,” he said. “After a week my back-pussy was like a wind-sock.”
“What’s a back-pussy?” Davey wanted to know.
“We were rather disappointed in Venice, weren’t we, Tom?” Margaret Purdom put in hastily.
“The prices in Harry’s Bar were ridiculous. Absolute scandal. For two Bellinis you had to pay . . .”
“There was one boy,” Oliver continued, “who worked behind the guichet at the Academia. I got him to come back to the Gritti with me only to have him deliver the sweetest warning. You see, he was possessed of the most enormous . . .”
The door opened and Podmore came in to clear away the soup plates. Oliver was equal to the occasion. He knows better than to talk loosely devant les domestiques. Barely pausing for breath, he put up a hand to one side of his mouth, as if to shield Podmore from corruption, and continued, “. . . the most enormous C-O-C-K . . .” spelling the word out in a loud and frantic whisper. Podmore’s chin wobbled a fraction and Margaret Purdom let out a small scream, but Oliver looked pleased with his social adroitness.
“It was so sweet,” he went on, once Podmore had departed, “Gianni, for such was his name, anxiously explained, in one of those divinely dusty Italian voices, that he was afraid he might hurt me. ‘Carissimo,’ I said, ‘I’ll grant you it’s a monster, but after what I’ve been through this last week you’ll be lucky if it touches the sides. It’ll be like a paper boat up the Grand Canal.’ Still, that’s enough of me. You much of a traveller, Bishop?”
Patricia nudged me. “Oliver makes it all up of course, doesn’t he?” she whispered.
“Naturally,” I said. “Nobody has sex any more, straight or bent.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“It’s the great paradox of the age. Before permissiveness came in, everyone everywhere was at it like randy goats. But the moment the young started to insist on talking about it all the time, you couldn’t get laid if you were a table at the Savoy. As soon as something becomes a Right you can’t bloody do it any more. Self-consciousness, you see.”
“In Gerald’s Fortnight, my third novel . . .” Malcolm Whiting said.
“I just think it’s all so unnecessary,” the Purdom offered from my right.
“Unnecessary?” Oliver’s ears had pricked up at the other end of the table.
“Hear, hear,” said Max.
“The protagonist of Gerald’s Fortnight . . .”
“The day sex becomes unnecessary,” said Michael, “will be a dark one indeed.”
I was glad he had decided to join in. There is nothing worse than a Jew sitting and listening to a conversation. They nod their heads with a fraudulent air of rabbinical wisdom that makes you want to set about them with staves.
“Do you mean sex is now unnecessary because of artificial insemination?” asked Simon, having a pitiful stab at sounding sophisticated.
“I’m not saying hex itself is unnecessary . . .” Margaret Purdom is one of those ghastly upper-middle-class people who can’t quite bring themselves to pronounce the “s” in sex. “I just mean the endless talking about it and showing it on television and rubbing our noses in it.”
“Does it shock you, Mrs. Purdom?” asked Oliver.
“Of course not . . . it’s just so uncalled for. There was a thing on the other day . . .”
“What about tea-drinking?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Tea-drinking,” said Oliver. “Do you object to that on television?”
“Well, of course not. I don’t see . . .”
“Nobody calls for tea-drinking though, do they? I mean, in television dramas, the camera could easily show the kettle boiling on the hob and then cut discreetly away. But no, they have to show the whole thing. The arming of the tea-pot, the pouring-out, the plopping of the sugar-cube and the slow sipping from the cup. Isn’t that ‘unnecessary’ too? Isn’t that completely uncalled for?”
“Hardly the same thing, Oliver,” said Max.
“No, of course not! Because no one is shocked by tea-drinking, are they? They are shocked by sex but they daren’t admit it. I could respect that Mary Whitehouse creature and her moral minority if they had the Betty Balls to admit that they were in fact frankly and deeply shocked by the spectacle of naked coupling on a public screen. Shocked to their winceyette knicky-knicks. But, instead, they think it’s more impressive to give off a tiresome worldly air. ‘I’m not shocked,’ they say, ‘oh good heavens no. I just find it all rather boring,’ as if Tessa Tedium were the Chrissie Crime.”
While Ma Purdom struggled for a reply (to an argument that I suspect Oliver had trotted out many times before . . . probably on one of those “The People Grill the Producers” shows that the BBC now inflict endlessly on us in a futile attempt to crawl to the audience), bold husband Tom leapt to her defence.
“Yes, that’s all very clever-clever,” he said, “but you can’t argue that the world isn’t in an unhealthy moral state.”
“Wouldn’t think of it, dearest. People lie, cheat, rape, swindle, kill, maim, torture and destroy. Bad thing. People also pop into bed together and cosy up. Good thing. If we imagine fucking is a sign of moral decay we’re being just a little bit stupid- stupid, aren’t we?”
“I still don’t see why we have to go on about it all the time,” said Margaret.
“Gerald’s Fortnight was accused by critics of . . .”
“If you really want to crack down on promiscuity among the young,” said the Bishop, “then you should surely fight for sex scenes on television to be more realistic. Show the whole thing with actors that look like real people instead of like models. Once children know about the squelch and the stench and the whole slippery mess of it they may become less anxious to try it out until they have to.”
Bit hard on the Lady Bishop I felt, but a point well made. Patricia at this point, heated by such saucy talk, started consciously or unconsciously to rub her leg against mine. It was good to have a woman’s thigh pressing against me and, victim of the primal curse on man, which is a need to show off to women, I embarked on holding the company spellbound for a while with my sparkling theories on art and life.
Oliver, being the bitch he is, tried consistently to undermine me with bitter little interjections. I held my own, naturally, but refused to allow the conversation to sink into sterile mud-slinging.
“Returning to the subject of sex for a moment,” said Michael, during a pause which followed a more than usually platitudinous observation from Simon. “When I bought Newsline Papers Ltd, I called a conference of interested parties to see whether we should stop showing naked women in the pages of our tabloids.”
“Interested parties being bricklayers and spotty teenagers, no doubt?” said Oliver.
“Being psychologists, sociologists, feminists, moralists and representatives of religions,” said Michael. “The bricklayer and the teenager I can cope with. I said to these experts, ‘Pretend you own this newspaper. If you can’t turn it into profit in six months you’re out of a job. What do you do?’ Well, you never heard such nonsense in your life. ‘Let’s have more good news,’ ‘Make it a family paper,’ ‘Show women in a positive light,’ ‘affirmation,’ ‘family values’ . . . I slapped on the table in front of them a copy of the rival paper. ‘This is the competition,’ I said. ‘It sells millions every day. It is the opposite of everything you have mentioned, but it sells. Why? Tell me, please, why? Because people are stupid? Because people are cruel? Because people are ignorant? Because people are savage? Why?’ And they answered, ‘Because it’s there. It sells because it’s there.’ ‘The Independent is there too,’ I said, ‘and the Christian Science Monitor and Spare Rib and the Morning Star. They are there too, but they don’t sell. Give me a better answer.’ But no better answer came.”
“Of course not. Because what they wanted to say,” said Max, “is that newspapers should be under their control. They know better.”
“Well, who’s to say they don’t know better, Max?” Michael said. “Perhaps they do know better about many things. About selling newspapers they don’t know better, that I will say. I tried running it for a few weeks without naked ladies and the circulation dropped. We put the naked ladies back in and the sales rose. What else could I have done?”
“You could have gone into another fucking business,” said David with sudden and extraordinary ferocity.
The whole table froze in a fraught and deathly silence. There was something terrible about such savagery from such a source. Few things are more sphincter-winkingly embarrassing than a family row at the best of times. I could hear Patricia beside me holding her breath.
“Well, Davey,” said Michael, “I did go into another business, if you remember. I sold the newspapers.”
“And someone else bought them and is profitably printing pictures of naked ladies to this very day,” said Max.
“Well, thank God it isn’t my father!” David was trembling at his own courage but otherwise he managed to maintain a steadfast front.
“Davey is very concerned with the whiteness of my soul,” said Michael ruefully, much as a husband might joke about his wife’s solicitude for his waistline.
There was a sudden outbreak of little local conversations and no single topic dominated the party again for the rest of the dinner.
Davey left the table w
ith the ladies but Simon stayed for the port, his demeanour failing hopelessly to project an air of being simultaneously grown-up, respectful, blasé, grateful and impassive.
Max slid down to my end of the table and put an arm to my shoulder.
“Well, that was a sticky one, I think,” he said in a low voice. “Of course, little Davey can do no wrong, can he? The sun shines out of little Davey’s rear end, doesn’t it? If Simon had said such an unctuous and insolent thing, not that he would, there would have been hell to pay.”
I remembered that Max was Simon’s godfather and found myself amused that he should show such loyalty. I felt bound to reciprocate and soon we were at it like a couple of old generals taking sides over a rematch of Waterloo.
“Well, he may have been a tad unctuous, but it was brave, it was spirited and it was felt.”
“Sodding cheek and you know it, Ted.”
“So, it’s better to be drained of imagination and ideals at birth than to risk losing them later on, is that it?”
“Simon isn’t devoid of imagination or ideals. It’s just that he has manners and decency enough to respect others.”
“The kind of manners and decency that question nothing, challenge nothing and achieve nothing.”
“Oh pish, Ted. As if you believe a word of that. You’re the most cynical man in Britain and you know it.”
“Never, Max,” I said, “never, ever tell a man he is cynical. Cynical is the name we give those we fear may be laughing at us.”
“Don’t get all gnomic with me, you old fraud.”
The trouble with Max, repellent as he may be, is that he is not quite as stupid as one would like him to be. Not that he’s brilliant, it’s just that he’s always just a tiny bit brighter than would be convenient.
“This is a silly conversation, Max.”
“You’re right. If the truth be told, I just came over to steal a cigarette off you. Can’t cope with Michael’s enormous cigars.” I obliged him and he puffed on it like a schoolboy. “Heard about your dishonourable discharge from the rag. Sorry about that. Quite agree with you over the Lake man. His plays get worse and worse. Pleased that Rebecca’s arrived, are you? You and she . . . weren’t you . . . once upon a long ago?”