A Choice of Enemies (19 page)

“All right,” Norman said, annoyed, “look at it this way. If Karp walked in right now he’d be quite capable of making all three of us feel that he had interrupted a seduction scene.”

Joey rushed to the window again. “Please draw the curtains,” she said.

“Joey, sweetie, he’s not following you.” Norman pulled on his jacket. “Let’s go to the pub.”

In the pub they were forced to stand very close together, her dress was very tight, and he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on what she was saying.

“There was a time,” she said, “when I believed in every one of Charlie’s schemes. He was leaner then. And at twenty-one, I guess, you think that every hopeful is going to make it. There seems to be so much time.”

Norman looked down into his glass, but from there his gaze went, inevitably, to her wide capable hips, so he quickly looked up at her face again and smiled inanely.

“But I’m glad he never did,” Joey said. “Because if Charlie had made it, Norman, he would have left me. Not that he isn’t going to leave me anyway. Probably sooner than you think.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m the girl Charlie promised everything to. Don’t you think he’s got a heart? Last night he saw it all. He was never going to do any of the things he had always counted on. Do you think he wants me around for the rest of his life to remind him he’s a failure?”

“Last night was an aberration. He’ll be
O.K
. yet.”

Norman ordered two more whiskies and a bottle to take home with him.

“He’s dying to have a child, poor man, and I’ll never be able to give him one.”

“You could adopt one.”

“Damn it, Norman, why is it the bastards who always have the talent? Tell me that.”

“I remember,” Norman said, “that when they were all drawing cheques from
WPA
, Charlie was the envied one. He could tell a story better than most of them.”

“Where will he go from London? There’s no place left for him to go.”

“There are other things,” Norman said self-consciously.

“Not for him, there aren’t.”

“What about you?”

“I don’t matter.”

“Come on, Joey.”

But she was serious.

“I love him. In my own bitchy way I always have. I could forgive him for not ever making it, but that’s just what he doesn’t want.”

Norman paid for the bottle of whisky and they returned to his room.

“What will I do when he leaves me?”

“You’re being morbid. He’s never going to leave you.”

Joey sat down beside him on the bed. “None of us have amounted to much,” she said, “have we?”

Norman was hurt. “I guess not,” he said.

Joey gave him the full benefit of her body in profile.

Norman coughed. “We seem to belong to a world of broken promises and angers valued like valentines. A world that’s done. But Ernst – you know – is struggling to be born. We came from an ordered world, Joey, and out of that order we made chaos, and out of that chaos came Ernst. So in a sense we’re responsible to him. Or that’s the way it seems to me anyway.”

“Are you in love with Sally?”

“Yes,” he said, “I am.” But he was startled. He had not expected to say that.

Joey began to tremble. “Norman. Oh, Norman.” He held her cold, shivering body close, and stroked her hair. A knifelike sob cut through her. “Oh, Norman.” He led her to the bed, her body boneless, submissive, feverish, and pulled back the blankets and covered her. As she lay there sobbing brokenly he poured two stiff drinks and then, as an afterthought, he drew the blinds. Joey whimpered. He kissed her cheeks. He took off her shoes and rubbed her ice-cold feet.

“What will I do if he leaves me, Norman?”

“He’ll never leave you,” he said, handing her a drink.

“You say that because you think he’s second-rate. You’ve never taken Charlie seriously, have you?”

“Of course I have.”

“A word of praise from you would mean so much to him, but you never mention his writing at all.… Ernst seems to mean more to you than Charlie.”

Norman didn’t reply.

“He works so hard at it,” Joey said. “He’s always leaving himself open to rejections and ridicule. He’s not a coward like you. All these years working away on an academic biography the size of an insect. Polishing and polishing and polishing. Too frightened to expose it to the light of day.”

“I happen to enjoy working on it.”

“You’re not dirty like Charlie. Your hands are clean,” she said, shivering.

“Would you like a hot drink?”

She shook her head.

“More blankets?”

“All his life Charlie has had to do with second-best. Like me.”

“Come off it, Joey,” he said, covering her with another blanket.

“Did I ever tell you how we met?”

“No.”

“I was working for –” she named an important left-wing magazine of the ’thirties “– when Johnny Rubick came back from Madrid.”

Rubick, who had talked to the committee since, was one of Hollywood’s most gifted directors.

“He was working on his novel then – it was before you knew him – and all the girls in the office were after him. He was so glamorous, Norman, and – Charlie was writing for us too then and he was always asking me out, but I never had time for him. Not in those days. I – You see, I became Johnny’s mistress. One of his
innumerable
mistresses I should say.…”

She told him how after he had impregnated her, Johnny had told her not to worry, he had a friend who would fix her, and the two of them had gone to a cheap hotel with Johnny’s friend, a deregistered doctor, and the job had been done there. But Joey shouldn’t have gone to work the next day, that was her error.

“I bled badly.…” Johnny, she discovered, had driven off to Mexico with an actress. He was gone. “When Charlie looked up from his typewriter he saw that I’d fainted.…”

Joey would always remember the young doctor with the bad teeth, who sucked the shell-frames of his glasses, as he told her that she would never be able to have children.

“And when I woke, Norman, there was Charlie. He had been sitting with me for two days.… When I woke in the public ward, wishing myself dead, Charlie was there holding my hand and smiling. He had come with flowers and a proof of his latest short story. He came, Norman, when nobody else would have me.”

“I’m sold,” Norman said. “He’s a great guy.”

“When the war came Charlie didn’t become a
P.R.O
. like the rest of them. He could have had a soft job with the army shows, like Bob, or been attached to a film unit like so many others. But not Charlie. Old and flat-footed as he was it was still the infantry for him. Four years of it, Norman, with all those people offering him soft jobs.”

Norman bent over Joey and kissed her forehead.

“Help him,” she said. “Tell him he’s good. Coming from me it doesn’t mean much to him. But from –”

“I’ll try,” he said, smoothing down her hair. “I’ll try to help.”

The phone rang.

“Don’t answer it,” Joey said.

“Joey,” he said, “please.” He picked up the receiver, his smile reassuring.

“I know she’s there,” Charlie said. “Don’t pretend.”

Norman was too stunned to reply.

“Tell her that if she isn’t home in fifteen minutes she needn’t come home at all.”

Norman hung up. “It was Charlie,” he said. “He must have followed you here after all.”

Joey leaped out of bed, hurried into her coat and shoes, and left without a word.

A little later Norman climbed the stairs to Karp’s flat for dinner. Karp wasn’t there. There was a huge ham, untouched, in the garbage pail. The kitchen reeked of burnt potatoes. In the living room Norman noticed the empty bottle. The door to the upstairs bedroom was shut. Norman put his ear to the door and, although the sound was muffled, he could tell that a man was crying out in pain. This had happened before. The last time Karp had not emerged from his bedroom again for three days.

Norman stopped off and knocked at Ernst’s and Sally’s door.

“Ernst?”

He thought he heard someone move quickly inside.

“Sally?”

No answer.

Outside, he hailed a taxi. He wondered idly whether there was a party at Winkleman’s tonight. He thought of going to visit Jeremy,
but he was afraid. Wherever he went tonight he wanted to be sure of a kind reception. Landis? Bella had certainly phoned Zelda by now and he was probably not welcome there too any more. Graves? Certainly not.

At that moment Norman realized something that should have been obvious to him before: he realized that all his friends in London were aliens like himself.

Proud they were. They had come to conquer. Instead they were being picked off one by one by the cold, drink, and indifference. They abjured taking part in the communal life. They mocked the local customs from the school tie to queuing, and were for the most part free of them by dint of their square, classless accents. Unlike their forbears, they were punk imperialists. They didn’t marry and settle down among the natives. They had brought their own women and electric shavers with them. They had through the years evolved from communists to fellow-travellers to tourists. Tourists. For even those who had lived in London for years only knew the true life of the city as a rumour. Around and around them the natives, it seemed, were stirred by Diana Dors, a rise in bus fares, test matches, automation, and Princess Margaret. The aliens knew only other aliens. It was reported occasionally that the men in bowler hats had children and points of view, that, just like in the movies, there were settlers in Surrey, miners in Yorkshire, and workers who – aside from being something you were for like central heating or more gin cheaper – were bored with their wives, suspicious of advertisements, and, just like you, inclined to wonder at three-thirty in the afternoon what it would be like to come home to Sophia Loren.

Norman felt stupid.

Around and around him men clocked in every morning at 7.30 a.m., girls sat down after an eight hour shift at Forte’s to write letters to Mary Grant. Clocks, cars, pyjamas, and railway ties were produced. Around him the real £.s.d. world existed. The only sons of
white fathers went out to Malaya to murder the only sons of yellow fathers in the interests of national prestige. At eleven every morning pimpled boys went from office to office with luke-warm tea in tall chipped white cups for girls who took letters from their bosses beginning, “In reply to yours of the 23rd inst.” Middle-aged couples failed to see the latest Martin and Lewis at the local Gaumont because they couldn’t afford it. High-strung boys from Wapping failed their eleven-pluses. Old age pensioners were admitted free to the public baths. Around and around him people had already realized that they would never be able to sleep in until after eight on a Monday morning or go for a walk in the park on a Wednesday afternoon or see Paris. Around him moved a real city where Sally’s choice of a lover, Charlie’s script, Winkleman’s chance of a production, and his own loneliness were of no bloody account.

Norman’s thoughts turned to Thomas Hale in Canada and he wondered how it looked to him. Hale came over every year like a kafka with office to mark you down either in the book of sales or the book of rejection slips. Again and again he discovered the would-be author of the Great Canadian Novel and shipped him off to London, often at his own expense, only to discover that his hopeful had taken to gin or television writing by the time he got round to him again. But Hale was indefatigable. He didn’t know that the British didn’t care a damn about Canada. That, as far as they were concerned, somewhere out there between lost India and them lay the loyal Dominion of Canada, where Lord Beaverbrook came from. He also didn’t know what it was like to live in London.

The Canadians had come to conquer. They were the prodigal offspring of a stern father. Coming home again, however, they had not counted on the old man having grown feeble while they had prospered overseas. They were surprised that the island was great only in terms of memory or sentiment. The choice of coming to England, where the streets were paved with poets, rather than to the United
States, bespoke of a certain spiritual superiority, so they were appalled to discover that this country was infinitely more materialistic than their own, where possessions were functional, naturally yours, and not the prize of single-minded labour. They were surprised to discover that they had arrived too late.

Norman looked at his watch and wondered again where he could go.

I’m a bum, he thought. I have no more friends. Norman laughed at himself. In a few days this will all have blown over, he thought. Everything will be
O.K.

He got out of the taxi at Curzon Street and found a girl who pleased him. They went to a small hotel together.

There was something doing at the Winklemans that evening. Charlie was there, and so was Colin Horton. Horton had just returned from his tour of the People’s Democracies.

“They’re all familiar with the present climate of hysteria in the States,” he said. “People in Budapest were amazed at the way the
FBI
has been able to hoodwink the American public.”

Bella served hors d’oeuvres.

“Time and again I was asked why people like myself had left. I told them that there was such a drive towards conformity in America these days that not going to church was enough to brand you as a Red. The breadth and success of the witch-hunt astonished them. But when I explained that most of the informers were psychopaths and that one never got a chance to face one’s accuser they began to understand.”

Horton, who had to address the Anglo-Hungarian Friendship Society at nine-thirty, left early. As soon as he was gone the others got down to business.

Boris Jeremy was in trouble.

Tall, affable Boris Jeremy had been considered to be one of those on the way up in Hollywood until he had been called before the committee. At the hearing it had come out that Jeremy had not only contributed to the Spanish Aid Fund, but that his brother-in-law had died at Guadalajara and, what’s more, that Jeremy’s wife was a former
Y.C.L
. member. So Jeremy had come to England. Here, after much determined work, he had once more been considered to be a man on his way up. But when – after seemingly interminable negotiations – he was supposed to have signed a contract last week to direct his first big-budget film for a British studio, the deal had suddenly, inexplicably, gone ice-cold. This morning his passport had been revoked; he had been given six weeks to return to the United States. There was no doubt that, unless he was willing to become a “friendly witness,” he would not be able to get work there. Boris Jeremy had a wife and three children.