A Choice of Enemies (24 page)

“Are you going to leave me?”

“For months and months I’ve been dying for this lousy little card,” he said, “and now –” Charlie had the sensation that his heart like a match had burned, curled, and died. “– and now,” he faltered,
“Now is the hour when we.…”

“I would understand if you left me. I wouldn’t blame you.”

Charlie turned to her sorrowfully. “You poor kid,” he said. “Norman wouldn’t have you. Nobody would have me either.”

“We could make a fresh start,” Joey said.

“That’s supposed to be my line. Then you’re supposed to look into my eyes deeply as we walk off together into the technicolour sunset.…” He laughed. “But I’m fat and forty, darling, and, I’ve got news for you, you’re nobody’s dreamboat yourself any more.”

“I’m serious. We
could
make a fresh start.”

“It never works.”

“We have a lot in common,” she said emptily.

“Misery, failure, and lies. Don’t tell me. I know.” Charlie smacked one hand into the other. “Such a dirty place,” he said. “The world is such a dirty place.”

“Remember,” she said, “when you came to see me in the hospital with the proof of your short story. You were so shy in those days, Charlie.”

“I’ll never forget that officious young doctor,” Charlie said. “And you were so – You wrote me every day when I was in the army!”

“It worked once,” she said. “Don’t you see?”

“Yeah. But it would never work again.”

Joey embraced him fervently and dug her head into his chest. “Please,” she said, “please, please, please, don’t leave me. I couldn’t bear it.”

“You couldn’t – But I always thought that was what you wanted most. For me to leave you, I mean.”

Joey shook her head.

“I always thought you hated me for being such a fat, funny failure.”

“Oh, no. No Charlie.”

“But –”

“I love you, Charlie, I always have.”

“You love me,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

“How vulnerable,” she said, “how vulnerable we both are.”

“About Norman,” he said. “The other night, I mean. I –”

“Don’t. Let’s not go into that.”

“No,” he said, “I know you never went to bed with him, but – I hated him then. You and him. There was the script, you see. Oh, he’s always made me feel so inferior. Big, honest, principled, Norman. If he had made love to you – Oh, if you only knew how much I wanted to have something on him.… Why doesn’t Norman ever do something wrong or vulgar or stinking? What a cruel, remote bastard he is. Nothing affects him.… You know, sometimes I wonder if he’s human.”

He took Joey in his arms and stroked her head.

“You love me,” he said. “Imagine that.”

“We could try,” she said. “Couldn’t we try?”

Joey clung to him, not seeing a fat middle-aged failure, but remembering the man inside the others didn’t know or had forgotten. The young, hopeful man who had wanted to write beautifully. Here he was; Charlie Lawson was his name. He had been scorned, pummelled, and lied to, he had been knocked down, pulled apart and pitied, he had been used, and only she still retained an impression of the unfulfilled man inside. Charlie, she thought, Charlie, Charlie. They sank down on the bed together and, almost with reverence, helped each other to undress. When he considered her hard bony face, the breasts that had begun to sag and the thickening waist, it was with a fondness sprung from proprietorship.

“Oh, help me,” he cried. “Help me to live.”

Norman met them in a flat in Soho. The fat, rosy-cheeked man’s name was Morley Scott-Hardy. He wore a white monogrammed shirt and a purple corduroy jacket and grey flannels and brown suede shoes. His pale pulpy flesh gathered in knots about his face and body so that he was not so much fat as threatening to break out here and there. He had very little hair, a round wet mouth, and soft damp eyes. Scott-Hardy carried a gold-tipped walking stick. Yet behind the foolish façade there seemed to lurk a serious shrewd intelligence. His young friend was called Pip. A darkly beautiful boy, he was, it seemed, an illustrator of children’s books.

When Scott-Hardy and Pip invited him back to the flat they shared on Sloane Street he quickly accepted; he had no place else to go.

A framed picture of Sugar Ray Robinson hung over the fireplace. The parlour was dense with pillows and drapes. Scott-Hardy poured Norman a vodka-and-tomato-juice and excused himself. Meanwhile
Pip, who wore a black turtleneck sweater and pre-faded blue jeans, spread himself out on the rug like a sacrifice.

The table placed like a counter before the bookshelves was laden with little magazines rich with Scott-Hardy’s pronouncements on literature. From the back pages of one of these journals Norman learned that Scott-Hardy was thirty-one, a critic, and the author of two small volumes of poetry.

When Scott-Hardy returned he rubbed himself into the sofa like a cat pushing against a man’s leg and poured himself a drink. “I’m afraid I’m a little tipsy,” he said with pride.

Pip stared at Norman, his eyes big and bothered.

“You’re an American,” Scott-Hardy said. “That’s something to go on.”

“What do you think he does, Morley?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“Perhaps he was a lorry driver.”

Scott-Hardy’s rosy cheeks quivered.
“Tu pense?”
he asked.

“Or a wrestler?”

Norman rubbed the back of his neck anxiously.

“Here,” Scott-Hardy said kindly, “let me get you another drink.”

“He should have been here last Wednesday night,” Pip said.

“Pip!”

“What did I say now?” Pip turned and smiled wickedly at Norman. “Henry James was here Wednesday night.”

Norman turned inquiringly to Scott-Hardy.

“He’s a writer,” Scott-Hardy said.

“Oh. Oh, I see.
Last
Wednesday night?”

“Um.”

“We hold seances,” Scott-Hardy said.

“What did James have to say?”

“Not very much.”

“Go ahead.
Tell him.”

Scott-Hardy hesitated.

“Come on.”

“I asked James if he was the protagonist of
The American
and he replied, ‘Tut-tut, young man.’ I thought that was frightfully clever.”

Norman drained his glass of vodka.

“Last week,” said Pip, “we had a boy here who died of tuberculosis in Manchester in 1892, but he was illiterate and rather a bore.”

“Do you hold seances often?”

“Rather.”

“No. Not any more.” Scott-Hardy turned his glass round and round in his damp pink hand. “My confessor forbids it.”

“Tell him about Vanessa.”

“Pip!”

“Go ahead. Don’t be a bitch. Tell him.”

“Vanessa can make tables fly through the air.”

“He doesn’t believe you.”

“Pip!”

“He doesn’t.”

“Please tell Pip you believe him.”

“I believe you.”

Pip looked like he was going to purr.

“Morley’s turning Catholic.” Pip rolled over on the rug, played the dead dog, and then sprang upright swiftly. “May I have a drink too?”

Scott-Hardy hesitated too long. Pip grabbed the bottle and poured himself a quick one. One sip and the giggles broke from him like glass.

“I spy something with my little eye,” he said, “that begins with the letter Q.”

Scott-Hardy flushed. “Pip, that’s enough.” Ignoring the boy’s giggles he turned to Norman with a warm, milky smile. “You must be tired. Would you like to go to bed now?”

Norman shifted uneasily on the sofa.

“Ask him if he knows how to play botticelli?”

“Ask him yourself, you brat.” Again the warm, milky smile. “You won’t be annoyed, I assure you.”

“But –”

“Where would you go?”

“I have to get up early. I have an appointment at Waterloo Air Terminal.”

Scott-Hardy led Norman into the spare room.

“This is very kind of you,” Norman said.

But there was little sleep for Norman in the spare room. I can’t go on much longer without a name, he thought. His head ached. It occurred to him for the first time that the woman with the two children may have been waiting for him. He had gone to the air terminal without a ticket, hadn’t he? Obviously he had gone there to meet somebody.
Those two boys might be his
. Zurich. She had come from Zurich with the children. Yesterday it was. Surely they would be able to give him her name. That would be the key, he thought. Her name, if she was his wife, might be enough of a jolt to restore his memory. But if she wasn’t – He would ask to see all of yesterday’s arrival lists. On one of them there must be a name he would recognize.

Norman started at the sound of giggling like breaking glass. When he opened his eyes he was amazed to see Pip squatted at the foot of his bed. He seemed thinner in his pyjamas and rather like a bird. Norman felt sure that a little shake of his blanket would be enough to send Pip fluttering up to the ceiling.

“Morley has passed out,” Pip said.

“That seems to please you.”

“Um.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost four.” Pip, his knees protruding left and right like wishbones, made himself more comfortable. “What fun it must be to lose one’s memory.”

“I’m not enjoying it.”

“Silly clod. Think of it. Maybe you were unhappily married. Maybe your boss gave you the sack. Maybe all your life you’ve wanted to make a fresh start. Some people have
all
the luck.”

“What if I was happily married?”

Pip clamped his nose tight with one hand and pretended to pull a long chain with the other.

“You think that’s unlikely?” Norman asked.

“Um.”

“Perhaps you’d better go and see if Morley’s come to.”

“Do you like Morley?”

“Yes. I think I do.”

“He sends me up the wall, he does.”

“Why?”

“He’s not one.”

“He’s not ‘one’ what?”

“Oh, really, don’t try to take the mickey out of
me.”

“I’m serious.”

“One
. He’s not one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t believe all the talk myself at first. Gay people are such dreadful gossips, actually, and I had his word of honour that his relationship with Vanessa was strictly platonic. But she stays the night here occasionally and once I caught them at the funny stuff.” Pip held his nose. “Ugh!”

“You mean –”

“He’s a nasty normie, actually. The rest is all a pose.”

“A pose?”

“Um.”

“But why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to me, it isn’t.”

“Morley is madly ambitious.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Coo – Aren’t we naïve?”

“Perhaps.”

“He’s trying to pass because he thinks it’ll help him in certain circles.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Cross my little.”

Again.

The best ones were killed, Karp. Only the conniving, evil ones like you survived
.

With that the whole intricate structure of Karp’s plan for survival had toppled. No good the books on plant life, the acquired taste for sea food, and the cultivation of Gentiles. You were always a Jew. A blight if you perished, a blight if you survived. Norman, as sure as fire, had branded him again.

Karp wiped his eyes and bit through another cube of nut milk chocolate.

And there, in the outer darkness, was the gaunt face of Obersturmführer Hartmann. Karp shut his eyes, swallowed his chocolate cube, and the face became Norman’s face, smiled, and was Hartmann once more.

Hartmann.

Hartmann, the ace shot of the camp, had once tumbled a hundred men without even stopping for a smoke, but the worst, the most vividly remembered agony of Karp’s days as a Sonderkommando, was the young girl. Thousands, every day thousands by gunshot and fire and gas, and in all that time only the young girl had survived the crematorium. When the lights were turned off she breathed in a few lungsful of gas. Only a few, however, for her little body gave way under the pushing and shoving of others. It must have been by chance that she fell with her face against the wet concrete. Cyclon
gas doesn’t work under humid conditions: she was not asphyxiated.

While Karp and the other Sonderkommandos prayed, while they hoped, wept, and waited, the doctors worked on her. They brought her back to life. A miracle. Someone had survived. But even as they gathered round the frail, frightened young girl Hartmann came to claim her. “It’s impossible,” he said. “She would tell the others what she had been through. Discipline would collapse.”

A miracle, someone had survived, but – objectively speaking – you had to admit Hartmann was right. If the girl was sent to any of the women’s work camps, and told them what she had been through, discipline
would
collapse.

Obersturmführer Hartmann took the girl outside and shot her.

The next day Karp asked the doctor for a sure quick poison, but that was a standard Sonderkommando request, and of course it wasn’t granted.

Thousands, Karp remembered, every day thousands, but all that seemed to matter was the young girl who was brought back to life only to be shot.

Again.

The best ones were killed, Karp. Only the conniving, evil ones like you survived
.

After all I did for him, Karp thought, after I bathed and washed him in the hospital, this is my reward. All right, Norman. Splendid. Now I’ll show you a thing or two. You need a lesson.

As soon as Norman saw what had happened he rushed right over to the information desk. “Where is it?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

“The balloon,” Norman said. “It’s gone.”

“Balloon?”

“How did you get it down?”

“If you’ll just calm down, sir, and try to speak more slowly perhaps we can –”

Norman seized the clerk by the collar and shook him. “The balloon is gone. I want to know what happened to it. Is that clear?”

Somebody tried to grab him from behind, but Norman shook him off. “All I want to know is what happened to the balloon.”

Suddenly Norman’s arms were pinned behind his back. He struggled, but it was no use. There were too many of them.

“Is he drunk?”