Absolute Beginners (12 page)

‘No. You were desperate.’

‘Why was I desperate?’

‘Because you’d messed up your first marriage, and wanted someone to put you together again.’

‘So I messed it up.’

‘You certainly helped.’

‘Make a mess once, you can make another.’

‘You mean us? I don’t think so. Besides, I won’t let you mess us up.’

‘No? You won’t let me?’

‘No.’

As this little bit progressed, the loving pair got nearer and nearer to each other, till they were kneeling nose to nose, bawling each other out, and both clutching portions of the pride-and-joy.

‘Miriam,’ I said, ‘your product’s p–––g on the parquet.’

‘That’s not unusual,’ said his loving Mum, and they busied themselves with rescue operations.

As I gazed down at this domestic scene, all bliss, I thought the corny old thought, why shouldn’t all marriages be like this – a quarrel that goes on forever and ties the couple up in closer, tighter knots? And why can’t all mums be like Miriam, young and beautiful and affectionate – and all girls, for that matter? Old Mannie certainly was a picker.

‘You like a herring?’ he said to me, looking up from behind his son’s behind.

‘Naturally, boy.’

‘I get some. Don’t pin Saul to the floor,’ he told his wife, who gave him one of those ‘Oh, well’ glances, and started a little mum-and-son thing with the juvenile – we understand each other, don’t we, man-child-born-
of-woman
?

I heard Mannie beckoning me from outside the door, with a whisper you could hear down as far as Southwark bridge, and out in the corridor he said – as if continuing a conversation we’d already started – ‘So it’s a touch? You need a bit dinero? Five pounds do? Or three?’

‘No, man. Not me.’

‘Trouble? The bailiffs in? Got syphilis? The law? Need bail?’

‘
No
, man. This is a sociable visit.’

‘Girl trouble? Boy trouble? Horse trouble? Anything like that?’

‘Oh, well … no, not exactly – but you know Suze.’

‘Certainly, I do. Nice girl – a bit promiscuous, if you don’t mind a frank opinion.’

‘She’s marrying Henley, so she says.’

‘Yes? There’ll be a quick divorce, I prophesy.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Suze will discover, in the course of time, that
she’s
bringing more into the kitty than the rag merchant.’

‘Of course! I wish you’d tell her so.’

‘Not me! Never advise a woman – never advise anyone, for that matter.’

‘And till she finds out – I suffer?’

Mannie laid his hands upon my shoulders, like a rabbi blessing a young foot-soldier before a hopeless battle.

‘
She’s
got to suffer, son,’ he said, ‘before you can get her, and stop suffering.’

‘Nice lot of wasted suffering all round.’

Mannie looked at me with his great big oriental
seen-it
-all-ages-ago eyes. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll get that herring for you.’

Out in the kitchen there, I could hear him singing – there’s one, at least, I thought, who’ll never be a teenage vocal star. And back in the big room, Miriam got out some photographs to show me of Emmanuel, in a white shirt, collecting his award.

‘Splendid,’ I said. ‘He looks like that Shelley number, crossed with Groucho Marx.’

‘He’s sweet,’ said Miriam, running a finger down her husband’s photographic image.

‘Bad snaps,’ I told her. ‘Why didn’t you get me?’

She didn’t answer that one, and said – turning suddenly upon me that way women do, to catch you unawares, and as if
all
the conversations that they’ve had with you hitherto were meaningless – ‘You think he’s got talent, really? You think Mannie’s got real talent?’

The answer came out before the thought, which is the only kind of true one. ‘Yes,’ I said, and she said nothing more.

In came the herrings, and the poet.

‘The trouble about this country,’ he explained to us, picking up a train of thought he’d dropped somewhere earlier on and left to ripen up a bit wherever it was he’d dropped it, ‘is the total flight from reality in every sector.’

Miriam and I munched, waiting.

‘For centuries,’ this Southwark Shakespeare said, ‘the English have been rich, and the price of riches is that you export reality to where it is you get your money from. And now that the marketplaces overseas are closing one by one, reality comes home again to roost, but no one notices it, although it’s settled in to stay beside them.’

Short pause. Seemed that a question was demanded. And so,

‘And so?’ I said.

‘A rude awakening is due,’ Emmanuel said, smacking
his lips around his herring, and gobbling it down like a performing seal.

I took up the old, old cudgels.

‘A minute, Cockney boy,’ I said. ‘You talk of “the English” – aren’t you one of us?’

‘Me? Certainly. If you’re born in this town, you’re marked by it for life: specially by this area, you are.’

‘And so what happens to
the English
, happens to you too?’

‘Oh, positively. I’m booked on the same flight, whatever the direction.’

‘So long as I know,’ I said. ‘I want you to be around when the big bills come in for payment.’

The chat had taken on suddenly an ever-so-slightly awkward edge, as chats will do, particularly when the tribal drums start beating in the distance – and I wanted Mannie to understand I
did
think him every bit a local, just as much as me and more, and needed him, and only feared he might get tired of us, and skip. But now he had grabbed prince Saul, and clutched him like that Epstein thing up by Oxford Circus, and said to me,

‘I write in the English language, boy. You take that away from me, and the whole world it and I come out of, and you cut off my strong right arm and other vital parts as well – let alone my livelihood and hopes of fame. Three of my own grandparents didn’t speak a word of it. But me, I do, your speech is mine.’

‘Grandmother Katz spoke English very well,’ said Miriam.

‘Never to me, she didn’t.’

Here young Saul belched.

‘Listen,’ said Mannie solemnly. ‘I tell you a secret: England is dreadful, and the English – they’re barbarians. But three things of theirs I cherish most sincerely – the lovely tongue they thought up God knows how and I try hard to write in, and the nosey instinct of their engineers, and seamen, and explorers and scientists, to enquire, to find out why, and their own radicals that bounce up every century to flay and slay them, never mind the risk. So long as they have those things I’m glad to be with them, and will defend them … and everything else I can forget.’

Mannie said this so seriously, like he was taking an oath that might land him in a gas chamber, but he’d keep it. Admitted, he was a bit conscious of saying it all, and of us his audience (particularly Saul) – but me, I believed him, and was impressed. ‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ I said, and this time Miriam went out to get it.

M. Katz arose and stretched himself and said, ‘
Heigh-ho
– it’s the human element. It’s a wicked world.’

I by this time was wandering around this ghastly front abode – ghastly, I mean, in its furnishings and whatnot, which hadn’t caught up with the contemporary kick, but nice and cosy-comfy and well used, as front room furnishings not always are. Over in one corner, almost hidden like a chamber pot behind a curtain, was a small selection of select volumes, including several of Mannie’s two productions, one copy of each of these being bound in the hide of some rare animal, and enclosed in an outer covering of velours.

‘They’re not a bookish lot, your elders and betters,’ I suggested.

‘Not on my side,’ said Mannie K., stepping over to finger his thin, beloved books. ‘But come round to Miriam’s father’s place, and you’ll see a whole public library, even stacked in the kitchen and the mod. cons., and most of them in German and in Russian.’

‘Your folk are traders, Mannie?’

‘Yes, but we have
four
rabbis in the family, if you include cousins,’ he said with a ferocious grin, half pride, half horror.

‘They didn’t like it when little Emmanuel got on the writing kick?’ I asked.

‘There was a struggle. In Jewish families, Gentile boy, there always must be, over all major decisions, particularly about sons, a struggle. But as I went on working down the market, and in fact still do most of the week, they soon ungraciously surrendered. Especially when they first saw me on the telly.’

‘And Miriam’s lot?’

‘They liked it even less. You see, I was supposed to be a bad match for the girl, and they thought, well, even if he’s a peasant, at least he’ll make the girl some money.’

‘And so now?’

‘Oh, they approve. Miriam’s poppa’s translated me into German and into Yiddish – but he’s only got me published in the latter.’

‘And they nice?’

Mannie gazed at the ceiling, stroking his tomes.

‘I tell you one nice thing about them. The only three
questions they asked Miriam when she dropped her bombshell were, “Is he healthy, is he a worker, do you love him?” – in that order. They didn’t mention money till they saw
me
.’

Young Saul, feeling ignored, had joined us.

‘They’re pleased about this one, anyway,’ I said.

‘What? With twelve grandchildren already? Perhaps they’ll take a bit of notice when
we
have our twelfth.’

‘Not on your Nelly, we won’t,’ said Miriam, coming in bearing us the char.

So there it was: my visit to Mannie and Miriam had set me up, and given me the fortitude to have another bash at Crêpe Suzette. After all, even if it’s undignified for a man to chase a girl, what had I got to lose in my position? So I asked the Katz pair if I could use their blower, and called up Suze’s W2 apartment where, quite surprisingly – or perhaps not, because boldness often
is
rewarded – she answered quite politely, and said to me, why didn’t I come round and catch her before she left for the Lament performance down in SW3?

This time I took the metro, because I wanted to ruminate on what the best tactics would be to approach Suze – whether to try and force a showdown over Henley, or whether just to bank the fires, but keep them kindled till my turn came round one day. But this was a mistake, I mean the tube thing, because by the time I arrived outside her W2 address, I saw Henley’s vintage Rolls was parked there, and the lights blazing happily on Suze’s floor upstairs.

Suze lives in a trio of Victorian bourgeois palaces
that have been made over into flatlets for the new spiv intellectual lot, and on the old pillars underneath the porticos, instead of numbers 1, 2 and 3, or whatever it should be, they’ve written
Serpentine House
, this ‘House’ thing being the new way of describing any dump the landlords want to make a fast fiver out of. You press a bell, and a constipated voice answers down a loud-hailer thing (or sometimes doesn’t), and you state your business into a grille as if you were broadcasting to the nation, and then there are quite a lot of clicks, and buzzes, and in you go to a hall where your bollocks freeze, even in summer, and climb in an upended coffin called the ‘elevator’, and jerk up past blank walls like a pit shaft till you stop with a late lurch at the requested number. At the lift gates – which it needs a strong man to open, but which close themselves before you’re out – there, on the landing, rather to my surprise, stood Henley.

You’ll dig Henley straight away if I describe him as a
cold
queer: i.e. he’s not the swing-my-hips camp chatterbox variety, or a side-eyed crafty groping number, or the battle-scarred parachutist nail-biting type, but the smooth, collected, let’s-talk-this-thing-over one.

‘Good evening,’ he said politely, trying to help me out of the elevator contraption.

‘Well, and good evening to you,’ I said. ‘You’ve pinched my girl.’

Henley smiled just so slightly, and shook his head ever so slightly too, and said to me seriously, ‘Naturally, when we’re together, you can still come and see her.’

‘
Can
I!’ I said. ‘You think I’d go near her in those circumstances?’

‘Yes,’ he said gently.

‘Well, mister, then you don’t know me!’ I cried.

Hearing this frank exchange of greetings in the passage, Suzette herself emerged and stood there looking radiant: I mean, it is the only word to use that I can think of, she really shone, and wore a brittle Cinderella-in-
the-ballroom
-scene creation, one of those fragile things that girls, who really are so tough, as we all know, adore to climb into, to make us think they’re sweet seventeen in person (which, in her case, in fact she was). She saw we’d got off to a dodgy start in our conversation, so she came out and grabbed us both, one hand apiece, and pulled us into her apartment, and did all those things with drinks, and fags, and radiograms that are supposed to melt a polar situation.

But I was not wearing that.

‘You don’t mind, Henley,’ I said, crunching some pretzels and refusing the glass of Coke I hadn’t asked for, ‘if I speak my mind.’

The cat sat on an armchair, legs crossed, all laundry and hairdresser and dry-cleaner’s, looking like a superior footman on his day off, but still horribly polite. ‘Not a bit,’ he said. ‘That is, if Suzette doesn’t mind.’

‘We may as well have it,’ Suzette said, flopping onto some cushions, and opening up a 2,000-page Yank mag.

‘In the first place,’ I said, beginning with the least obvious weapon, ‘Suzette is working-class, like me,’

‘And me,’ said Henley.

‘Eh?’

‘My father, who’s still living, was a butler,’ the cat said.

‘A
butler
,’ I told him, ‘is
not
working-class. No disrespect to your old Dad, but he’s a flunkey.’

Suzette slammed down the mag, but Henley reached out what I think that he’d call a ‘restraining arm’, and said to me ‘Very well, I’m not working-class. And so?’

‘Those cross-class marriages don’t work,’ I told him.

‘Nonsense. What next?’

‘Suzette,’ I continued, warming up, ‘is young enough to be your great-great niece.’

‘Please don’t exaggerate. I know I’m much older, but I’m not yet forty-five.’