A Choice of Enemies (30 page)

The officials waiting to see Ernst were from the B’nai Brith, Kiwanis, and the Rotary Club. Ernst had won a thousand dollar reward for bravery. A league for Jewish-Gentile friendship was going to give him a citation. Yet another organization had promised to give him fifty dollars a week until he was able to work again.

“All right,” Trudy said to the photographers, “wait here. And remember,” she added, “I’m not promising anything.”

Ernst woke from a dream of Sally to find Trudy Greenberg smiling at him lavishly. “They’re coming,” she said.

Ernst glared at the system of weights and pulleys that tied him to the bed. Then he heard them approaching. There were the public officials, the reporters, the doctors, and three photographers.

“There he is,” a reporter said.

“God bless him.”

“Smile,” a photographer said.

“Hey. Hey, Joey, Look this way. Atta boy!”

Then Ernst saw her. Frau Kramer approached him with a thin smile. Ernst pulled despairingly at his leg, but it was no use. As she bent over and kissed him again and again the flashbulbs popped. Frau Kramer, her cheeks stained with tears, turned to face the others. “I’m his fiancée,” she said. “We are going to get married.”

The following day, Saturday, there was a photograph of Ernst in the
Star
. It was three columns wide. The image was clear.

Two weeks later Vivian took Norman to visit her mother. Mrs. Bell’s council flat in Fulham was damp and reeked of bacon fat. Everywhere you turned there were little tables adorned with crocheted mats and bowls of artificial flowers. The National Health Service had issued Mrs. Bell with a hearing aid and glasses and an upper plate that clacked when she spoke. She was a round, plump woman with grey hair and big blue eyes. Her rosy cheeks gave her an aura of constant blushing girlish surprise. Mrs. Bell, who was probably sixty-five, spoke in a poignant whisper of a voice.

Norman and Vivian ate supper with her in the parlour off blue plates which – once you had cleared them of roast beef and mashed brussels sprouts – revealed greasy and crackled likenesses of King George V and Queen Mary. Mrs. Bell spoke endlessly of Diana.

Vivian’s older sister Diana had been killed in the blitz, a week before she was to have played her first featured role in a film and two weeks before a famous artist was to have completed his portrait of her. After supper Mrs. Bell led them into Diana’s room. “Diana would have been thirty-five a week Wednesday,” she said. “Isn’t that so, Vivian?”

Vivian nodded.

“Vivian’s the practical one,” Mrs. Bell said. “Oh, had my Diana lived she would have had the world at her feet today. When I think of all the hearts she broke.… We were ever so close, you know. She used to tell her mummy everything. Why when she broke with Lord Dinsdale the poor boy took to drink, and do you remember Tommy Boswell, Vivian? There was a proper gentleman.” Mrs. Bell giggled softly. “He took Diana to a ball at Oxford, where they ate swan steak.… Isn’t that so, Vivian?”

The unfinished portrait of Diana hung on a wall in the room. The room, in fact, was full of mementoes – yellowed theatre programmes and pressed orchids, a warped scrapbook and frocks slightly moth-eaten – the room, in fact, was exactly as Diana had left it fifteen years ago, the night of her death, when she had gone off to the hunt ball with flying-officer Denis Graves. As Mrs. Bell led them out of the room again she said, “Vivian’s a bit ashamed of her mum, you know. I’m not one for reading and that’s the truth of it. But Diana and I were ever so close. Like sisters.…”

Vivian leaned close to Norman. “The family bought her off,” she said. “That’s why she broke with the Dinsdale boy.”

After Norman had walked Vivian back to the basement flat on Oakley Street she invited him inside for a nightcap. Kate was out. So this, he thought, is as good a time as any to tell her that I’m leaving the country.

“I think we’d better stop seeing each other,” Vivian said suddenly.

“Why?”

“You feel obligated to me because I took care of you while you were ill.”

Imitating a posture of Kate’s she stood beside the fireplace with one elbow balanced on the mantelpiece. Her loose, fluffy sweater was calculated to underplay her small bosom, and her tight skirt succeeded in forcing attention to her attractively broad hips. But the clothes, just like the boyishly smart haircut, were sadly out of character. Kate never should have tried to make her over, Norman thought.

“So,” she continued in an edgy voice, “I think it would be best if we didn’t see each other again.”

Norman fiddled anxiously with his glasses. “Would you like to marry me?” he asked.

Turning away from him, Vivian knelt and busied herself with the fire. When she turned to him again her eyes were moist. “Please go,” she said.

Norman started towards her.

“No,” she said. “I want you to go.”

But she followed him out into the hall. “Why do you want to marry me?” she asked.

“I love you,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes,” he said.

“All right, then. I’ll marry you.”

Norman kissed her on the mouth. She did not respond very warmly.

“Good night.”

“Good night,” she said.

He was wakened by the phone shortly after eight the next morning.

“You don’t have to go through with it,” Vivian said.

“With what?” Norman asked thickly.

“You asked me to marry you last night.”

“I thought that was settled,” he said. “I thought you said yes.”

“I did. But I haven’t told anyone yet. There’s still time for you to change your mind.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Let’s get married.”

A thoughtful pause. “I don’t even know your religion,” she said at last.

“I’m a Seventh Day Adventist.”

“Good Lord,” she said. “Are you?”

They were married in the Chelsea Registry Office on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Mrs. Bell, Kate, and Roger and Polly Nash, came to the ceremony. Bob and Zelda Landis sent a telegram. The Winklemans sent a bouquet of roses and a cheque for fifty pounds. Norman had no idea of how they found out about the wedding. But it was nice of them anyway, he thought.

Norman had not counted on the party afterwards. Roger and Polly Nash aside, he did not care for the people who came to the basement flat on Oakley Street. Vivian, of course, had few friends, and so most of the guests were friends of Kate. The party, a sort of surprise, had been arranged to take place in Norman’s flat. Downstairs Norman noticed that in the excitement of the last three days he had forgotten about his mail. He emptied the box of a few letters and bills and a rolled copy of the Saturday edition of the Montreal
Star
. Norman drank too much at the party.

All the gay, sophisticated men gathered in his flat could be divided into two groups. Those who wore extravagant waistcoats and those who went in for extravagant moustaches. The first group, it seemed, was made up of journalists, advertising writers, assistant film and television directors, and non-figurative painters. Most of them had been to minor public schools. They were, on the whole, amusing, clever, and with a tendency to get drunk as a matter of pride. The extravagant moustaches talked about their sports cars, past and present, with a mixture of energy, nostalgia, and passion that one usually associates with talk about one’s mistresses. They wouldn’t speak of their jobs. “You’ve got to earn a crust of bread somehow,” was about as concrete as one of them got with Norman. But, it appeared, they were mostly businessmen of one sort or another and they were far more political. They thought the country was going to pot. There was a dream of a Northern Rhodesian farm, an Australian sheep ranch, or an oil job in Saudi Arabia in their futures. They were shorter, redder, and more inclined to corpulence than the others.
Through their contact with the extravagant waistcoats they had acquired a taste for French salads, but nothing would make them give up tomato sauce. Most of the girls – actresses, models, dancers – were extremely attractive and, contrary to legend, far more decorative than their American or continental counterparts.

Roger Nash came down with a thud on the arm of Norman’s chair. “You’re being anti-social,” he said. “I thought Americans liked to be liked.”

“Do you really want to write film scripts?”

“I don’t really want to do anything very much.”

Vivian came to collect Norman. “There are some people I want you to meet,” she said.

They were, as he expected, extravagant waistcoats. But there were also three authentic friends of Vivian. Her friends were marked by beards and corduroy trousers. “I say,” one of them said, “are you and Vivian going to settle here or in Canada?”

“Here,” Norman said.

Kate passed with a tray of drinks and Norman poured two into one glass and took it. He kissed Kate on the cheek.

“Norman is going to write films here,” Vivian said to a bearded man. The bearded man managed a smile. “Cyril is a film editor for the coal board,” Vivian said coolly.

Norman was concerned because he realized for the first time that there was a streak of malice in Vivian. She had invited all these people here with cruel intent. She appeared to have told all of them that Norman was a King’s College man, a former
RCAF
pilot, and a successful film and thriller writer. Norman was dismayed because he did not care for these people and he was not interested in helping Vivian to get her own back. She didn’t seem to know that he wanted to settle down and return to teaching.

As Norman helped himself to another drink somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

The small, spare man with the black fuzzy hair wore horn-rimmed glasses and a cheesed-off smile and had no chin to speak of. Haig was a social scientist. He tapped Norman once, twice, three times on the shoulder. Norman whirled around drunkenly.

“I suppose you were in Spain?”

Haig had a high, scraping voice.

“What?” Norman asked.

“Vivian told me you were in Spain.”

“Yeah,” Norman said, “I was,” anticipating, not without pleasure, a little praise.

“Was that where you were wounded?”

“No. I was a pilot.”

“A
pilot
?”

“In the
RCAF
. I was shot down over the channel.”

Pretty girls predominated in the group around them so Norman was anxious to come off well.

“I don’t mean to be offensive,” Haig said, “but physical courage is a form of ignorance, actually.”

“Jesus,” Norman said. “I wasn’t a hero.”

Haig snapped his hand open like a knife and pointed a white blade-like finger at Vivian. “He was decorated,” he said, “wasn’t he?”

“It was only a formality,” Norman said. “After you’ve taken part in so many missions you automatically –”

“The fact remains that you were decorated.”

“Honestly, I can’t imagine anyone more remote from the heroic than myself.”

“You
were
involved in the Spanish fiasco?”

“Yes, but –”

“There,” Haig said.

“You’re right,” Norman said. “I’m a hero.”

Haig retired with a triumphant, waspish smile. And Norman grasped for the first time that he was a character, an ageing pinko,
ineffectual and a bore, and, as far as Haig’s crowd could see, the fossil of a sillier age, like the player-piano. Norman retreated to a comparatively unoccupied corner of the room.

Slumped glumly in the corner Norman recalled something he had once read in an atlas somewhere. Off Vancouver Island there was a vast area of sea known as the zone of silence. No sound penetrated this sea. A stillness prevailed. And since no siren or bell warned ships of dangerous reefs the floor of the zone of silence was strewn with wrecks. This, he thought, was surely an age of silence. A time of collisions. A place strewn with wrecks. This time of opinions, battle-stations, and no absolutes, was also a time to consolidate. This time of no heroes but hyperbole, where treason was only loyalty looked at closely, and faith, honour, and courage had become the small change of crafty politicians, was also a time to persevere. To persevere was a most serious virtue.

If there was a time to man the barricades, Norman thought, then there is also a time to weed one’s private garden. The currency of revolution is invalid as long as both tyrannies bank big bombs. Each age creates its own idiom. This was a time to drop a nickel in the blind man’s box and to recommend worth-while movies to strangers, it was a time to play
their
game but to make your
own
errors, a time to wait and a time to hope. The enemy was no longer the boor in power on the right or the bore out of power on the left. All alliances had been discredited. The enemy was the hit-and-run driver of both sides. The enemy, no longer clear, could still be recognized. His cause was just. He knew what was good for you and he was above small virtues. Charlie who hadn’t talked and Jeremy who had, Karp inside and Ernst out, Joey, the Winklemans, all moved unknowingly through the same ogre-like zone of silence, which made a necessary sacrifice of the Nickys and Sallys, leaving the less beautiful behind to pick at the bones of their discontent. So in this time of wrecks, Norman, at the age of thirty-nine, chose at last to lead a private life. Ernst was,
as he had once told Joey, the creation of their own idealism. So wherever he is let him go in peace. Let him be.

Without actually taking part Norman shook hands and waved good byes to his guests. See you Henry, so long Jori, thanks for coming Tony, good bye Derek, don’t mention it John.

Vivian kicked off her shoes and went methodically through the living room, emptying ashtrays. “The Jarrolds,” she said, “have asked us to dinner next Sunday.”

“You got out of it, I hope.”

“No,” she said. “I thought you’d like to go. They’re going to have some of the others around later. It should be fun.”

“Well,” he said, “maybe.”

“I was hoping you might be able to do something for Cyril, actually. He’s the one with the coal board. He used to write the cleverest film reviews for
Isis
and he’d so much like to get on.”

“You seem to have forgotten that my old friends are no longer interested in me, darling.”