As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  “Leslie will serve us something delicious out here in a moment.”

  She began to get up to go to Leslie’s help, but Martin, horrified, motioned her to lie down again.

  “For God’s sake don’t fuss him when he’s serving. You talk to me. Shall we finish this bottle?”

  “I’d like a towel,” she said, shaking her head to refuse more drink. And he handed her one. She didn’t want to be either sweaty or light-headed for the coming conference. He poured the rest of the champagne into his glass and gobbled down the two remaining stuffed eggs with satisfaction. He smiled at her. Immediately honest terrier turned to many-toothed shark—“inviting little fishes in”. He patted her hand.

  “They all liked you.”

  “They didn’t notice me.”

  “I said. They liked you.”

  He was clearly pleased with her. When the male troop of regular week-end visitors had descended, unexpectedly to her, she had almost run for it, and then had hoped that the sun might shrivel her up; but oiling her back had saved the day. They had felt occupied with her, and, so occupied, she had become machinery for them, part of the scene, an aid rather than a hindrance to the Sunday morning great relax. As she felt Martin’s satisfaction, she stretched out her legs and wriggled her toes with relief. Not only that this ally was in a good mood, she told herself, for truly self wasn’t her only thought, but since she seemed fated to bring division wherever she went, to Martin and Leslie as well as to Them, it was nice to know that she had done a little comforting as well.

  “It’s what I told Leslie last night, you’re a sensible grown-up sort of girl. Not the sort to bitch or act coy or offended when you find yourself with a gay group. That ought to show him that you’re old enough to know your own mind. But I don’t suppose it will. Not to worry. We’ll fix it our way. Only don’t go into all the reasons with him, Ally. It only sends him up the wall. And anyway it doesn’t sound to me as if you’ve understood yourself what it’s all about or those boys of yours. Well, don’t tell me, duck, because I never went in for education and ideas and all that, so I shouldn’t understand anyway. But it makes Leslie feel his age not being with it, or whatever you say. So don’t fuss with it. Just stick to your point and I’ll back you. All this about how you got the baby! I can’t understand your parents, they’re supposed to be swinging. What’s it matter who the baby’s father is if it isn’t going to have one? And if it is, well so much the better, but it doesn’t matter either. Anyway I didn’t give Leslie that villa in Corfu to leave it empty. All those servants doing nothing! If he hasn’t the head or the energy to make himself a bit of money by letting, then the least he can do is to lend it to his niece when she’s in trouble. I built a house for my old mother, you know. And I keep my auntie and her son too—he’s simple . . .”

  As Leslie came out with the laden tray, Martin’s tone to Alexandra became more gossipy, casual and yet heart to heart.

  “There’s a very good English doctor lives on the island which is just as well since it’s your first. And Elena, Leslie’s housekeeper, will take midwifery in her stride, I’m sure. She can do anything, that woman. And then when it’s all over and you’re rested and you know how you’re placed, we can think again. One thing I do agree with Leslie is that all this University hasn’t helped. What do you want a degree for anyway? It won’t bring you men or money. Or exercise your ambitions if you’ve got any. Teaching! Take warning by Leslie. No! I should have thought a boutique would be the right thing. I know there’s a lot of money lost that way lately but that’s their fault, they don’t work hard enough. Finding the right site’s the great thing. And, of course, never rent. But if your mother won’t help, I could always find the capital for you. As a loan. Who knows, people might think the child was mine. That would give them something to talk about . . .”

  Leslie said, “There’s lobster salad in there, chicken salad there. Help yourself to mayonnaise. I hope you’re not fussy about garlic. The other day I had to make a separate salad for some silly model bitch Martin brought back here. ‘Anyone can tell you don’t cook for women, Mr. Grant.’ Silly cow!”

  Alexandra could not bear to see her loved uncle’s pretty face looking so cross. She tried to reach him on their usual wavelength.

  “She might have been a witch. Garlic’s one of their banes.”

  But he merely said to Martin, “Do I open a Niersteiner? Or have you drunk enough? You sound as though you have. The great understander of the young! Jesus God, as if I don’t suffer from the effects of that sort of self-indulgent wish-wash from the parents of all the dribbling horrors in C stream who make my life hell.”

  “Do make up your mind, Leslie. Either teaching school is hell or it’s the one thing important in the whole of your life. You scream rape every time I try to find ways for you to give it up.”

  “I’m not discussing our affairs now, Martin. They’ve been on ice a long time and they can cool a bit longer. But I am not having Ally going to Corfu to have this baby which never ought to be born. You gave me the house. I never wanted it. But now I’ve got it, it shall be used as I choose.”

  “Oh, Madam is upset. But Madam’s very silly. She’s too grand to read her terms of settlement. I gave you that house, Leslie, as you well know so that you could get a rent out of it as well as a holiday home. To help you get away from teaching snotty-nosed little bastards who tire you out and make you look old before time. But you should know me better, love. I tied it all up with Hugh when he drew up the settlement. It’s only yours, dear, if you use it for an income. But Madam’s too grand to be a landlady. So I do the inviting for you. And I invite your niece to go there. As you would, if you had any proper sense of what’s due to your family . . .”

  “I couldn’t, you know, Martin . . .”

  “Shut up. And you too, Martin. Listen, Ally! When you told Perry and Zoe that you chose me to advise with while they went abroad, you thought I’d be flattered like Martin here and say just what you wanted to hear. That’s typical of the basic soppiness of your generation—‘If I show you love, give me what I want.’ And, on top of that, that soft discipline—Eng. Lit. If you’d studied history you’d have known that the world’s changed by changing the power groups. Fucking in threes is quite irrelevant. Only somebody who’d been fed on Rousseau or Shelley could believe such bourgeois crap. I’m fond enough of Zoe but that’s where it comes from, Lytton Strachey—Bloomsbury group nonsense! And as for you, Martin, if you’d had a bit more education and a little less so-called horse sense you’d know that if these ideas of Ally’s ever did catch on, you and all you care for would be shot to pieces far quicker than any guerrillas could do it. It’s lucky for you it’s all moonshine.”

  “Now, Leslie Grant—three things: One: Ally came to you, when her parents made her choose someone to talk to, not because she thought you’d give her what she wanted, but because she’s in trouble and needs help. And if blood doesn’t count for that, I don’t know what it does count for. And in any case, she only agreed so as to get them to go abroad for Perry’s novel’s sake. I think that was the best mark you earned with me, Ally. It showed you’re not half as self-centred as most of us were at your age. Not that I could read more than six pages of his first. But then I never can read novels. They’re made for people who haven’t got lives of their own to live. Anyway she only chose to come to see you to get them to agree to go away. So let’s have no more of this beloved uncle stuff.”

  “No, no, Martin. I did choose Leslie especially because he’s always been someone I can talk to.”

  “My dear Ally”—for the first time, Leslie came and sat beside her. He put his arm round her waist and stroked her hip. “I want to talk to you. You know that anyway. But talking does mean listening to the answers. Oh blast being a schoolmaster! It means I can’t say anything without preaching. But just listen. You try out a new way of sex—new to you that is—all right, have it your own way, a new way of life. An accident happens and you insist on standing by it—no
matter how the poor little bastard’s going to suffer . . .”

  “Oh, shut up, Leslie. Don’t be so hypocritical. We’ve all tried sex for tricks in different ways. Oh, yes, you have as well. And now you speak as though she’d been trying to blow up Parliament. I’m sure I’ve been the spread in more than one sandwich and I’m as die-hard a conservative as you could find. It isn’t as though Ally even took part in one of those sit-ins, did you, love? No, I’ll tell you what it is, Leslie. I thought it the other day when you started standing up for that stupid Gay Power thing, you’re getting to be a bigoted queer. If Ally had been your nephew, more fun to him, but when it comes to girls, you go all prissy. I hate that.”

  Suddenly, it seemed to Alexandra as though the whole discussion of her future was being swallowed up in this mess of Leslie and Martin. She could see them squaring up for a fight. Leslie had pushed his plate of chicken salad away hardly eaten and was swinging his chair on to its back legs, like a sulky schoolboy. Martin had doubled his already voracious intake of lobster and hardly bothered to push in the long strands of lettuce thickly coated with mayonnaise that hung from the corners of his mouth. She was forgotten. It didn’t seem sensible, right or fair.

  She said in a high, tense voice, “Very well, I’ve heard you, Leslie. But why don’t They want me to have the baby? Why would They stop at nothing to prevent its being born? Even to taking me off to Sicily against my will.”

  Leslie took his arm from her waist. He got up and sat at the other end of the wrought iron and marble table.

  “Oh, don’t be a silly little fool. Where do you get hold of all this romantic rubbish? I suppose you think poor old Perry had hired the Mafia to hold you down. A hideous, cackling old crone, a Harley Street man who once held his head high now struck off and shaking with D.T.s, the lonely maquis, the polluted instruments, and what about an unfrocked priest to bury you? Really! No, Ally, come.” He came over again to her, took both her hands in his and began to chafe them. “We all love you. And we understand. But you must stop play-acting.”

  She drew her hands away. “I know,” she said, in a far-away voice, the words very exactly enunciated—she wanted to produce it as casually as possible, to take him by surprise, “I know exactly what you’re all trying to keep from me. There’s a taint of madness, isn’t there? Oh not with you and Him. The Little Mam’s sort of almost too sane and straightforward. But with Mama. Why did she have no more after me? It’s like Virginia Woolf, isn’t it? If people had only been honest. It might be Victorian times, the way it’s been kept from me.”

  “Rubbish, Ally, and you know it. This hysteria of yours, yes, all right, even those faces, which must be very frightening, are simply exhaustion and being in a mess. When you don’t encourage them yourself. What sort of a doctor there must be at Zoe’s famous prenatal clinic not to give you proper sedatives, I don’t know. Now if you blamed your mother for that! She seems to come out of Peter Simple sometimes, she’s such an N.W.3 caricature. But it doesn’t mean she’s mad. Nor are you.”

  “She’s much more hysterical than I am. The other day at the hotel she screamed and broke all the glasses in the bar. I never lose control in public. Or not yet.”

  “No, you’re much too canny to risk trying it on with anyone you’re not sure of. I’m sorry. I’m sure you’re having a hell of a time and it’s not your fault. But the poor woman hoped to be in Sunny Syracuse and thanks to you she landed in Smoky Skipton. And then you complain because she didn’t act proper in the bar.”

  “All right, then, why didn’t they have another child? Why didn’t they? Tell me that. And why did my grandparents die so suddenly together like that?”

  “A suicide pact in their madness, of course. Didn’t they tell you? They cleverly found tainted shellfish in Ceuta and died in agonies.”

  “Leslie, really! The poor girl’s dizzy with worry. This is not the time for campy jokes.”

  “Isn’t it? It has me howling. But then you can’t take Orton, can you, Martin? A nice matinée and a tray of tea at a play with a problem like The Winslow Boy, that’s you, isn’t it? In her present mood my niece can put on a problem play a day for you. Why didn’t your parents have another child? All right, I’ll try to answer that one. Because Perry thought it would get in the way of his career as an artist and Zoe told him he was right. And maybe she said it all the more strongly because she had had a bad time having you. I don’t know. Ask her grandparents, the old Needhams, and about the family madness. If you slip the question in in your clever, casual way, you might set the old woman off in maniac laughter. That would prove it, wouldn’t it?”

  “I insist you talk seriously to Ally if you’re going to discuss her life with her.”

  “You insist! What the hell do you mean? Because you were lucky enough to get me on the rebound, doesn’t mean you can tell me how to behave to my own family. You and your bloody money I Oh, God, now I’m shaking all over. And saying things to Martin I shall be sorry for. If you wanted to make another household miserable, you’ve succeeded nicely. And that lost little flower-child face isn’t going to help. I’m taking the car and driving straight back to London. This talk’s gone on too long.”

  “Her Ladyship wants the Daimler—and how am I to get back?”

  “If you’re so stinking rich, you can hire one. But let me say this before I go, Martin, I’m not living with you on a blackmail basis. If Ally has her baby in my villa then that’s the last you’ll see of me.”

  “Blackmail!” shouted Martin, “and what do you think that threat is?” But Leslie had gone.

  Alexandra had it all planned, when, after resting on her bed, she came down to make a scratch meal for herself and Martin. And a great success it was. She had never talked with him alone before. Now, rested, anxious no doubt to put the row with Leslie out of his mind, he expanded and chattered for hours over coffee, which she had brewed strong like Rodrigo insisted, and brandy. She had made up her mind that, of course, she could not accept the Corfu villa, sad though it was to dismiss the picture of herself and the other two cart-wheeling and hand-springing (three wonderfully graceful acrobatic Hobbits) on the sun-baked beach; but, in any case, she would not be graceful then. Oh God! Not to think about that. She couldn’t bitch up the relationship of two people she liked, but she must get out of it without wounding Martin’s pride.

  Now, all the blame could go on her—“ungrateful little bitch”—so long as he and Leslie were reconciled. She would go away tomorrow and write a letter explaining, perhaps a little curtly, so that, disliking her, he would more quickly be ready to forgive Leslie. But before she made this sacrifice—which of course it wasn’t, for she had no one to blame but herself for being in the position—she could see no harm in bathing in his pleased friendliness, in giving him the surely first-time pleasure of expanding with a young woman.

  So she let him talk and, indeed, became absorbed in what he said, so strange were the pleasures of life that he revealed to her. There was bribing a cutter for patterns of a rival’s new spring models (not a money bribe, but getting him some frightfully difficult-to-procure kinky gear). Then there was knowing the right moment to flood a small man with excess orders when he’s holding out against your price. He had wisely remembered nothing of his hint to his long-serviced, too-sure-of-herself overseer to keep a toilet time register for the girls and had taken the credit for forcing a public apology from her to the staff when the toilet time had been slashed to a minimum. He had written a letter to the labour people about the Jap chef’s sex record so that his work permit was cancelled when Bob Fanday had learned the sukiyaki and the tempura and could take over. He had made old Mavis, six or seven of the boys, Mrs. Newsome, and three of the girls’ mums write letters of complaints about the rats at the Splendida Mare to the tourist agencies the year before he opened his own two hotels near Rimini. And there was all the other fun of the fair, including sending sick people on holidays, couples away to repair their marriages, taking old people to the theatre, giving youn
g people a start, even sometimes a shove, and so on, which, as he said, he could never have done, unless he’d been sharper than the next man and made money.

  Alexandra felt that she had little to tell from her young life that could vie with all this, but, not wanting him to feel that he was giving his friendship (even though sacrifice, common decency must force her to return it the next day) to someone completely hopeless about life, and encouraged by the brandy, she did give him an account of how she and Ned and Rodrigo had nicked from a London store for three whole weeks without detection. She didn’t tell him how Ned had done it as part of undermining the established unloving world of buy and sell, and Rodrigo as a kind of training for toughness and cunning like a peace-time commando, because she thought he was concerned enough most of his time with what boys did, and the special thing she was giving to him was to know a girl’s mind. So she said quite a lot about the dangers, the quick thinking and the plausibility needed with shop assistants and floor managers in her role as decoy.

  “But I mustn’t tell you what shop it was,” she ended, “because it’s very well known, and when they settled without the police, partly I’m sure because both Mama and Rodrigo’s aunt are such very good account customers, we swore on our honour not to tell, because they were frightened letting us off would encourage others.”

  He looked restless as she spoke, but he then said that he must go to the toilet and should they call it a day? So she supposed it must have been that which had set him twitching, and she made her own bemused way to bed, happy that she’d given him an unusual evening in return for his understanding.

  The next morning when she came downstairs late with a headache, she found only a countrywoman washing up at the sink.

  “Miss Grant? Ah, he left that for you, Miss, there,” and she indicated a letter on the kitchen table. It was quite a short note: