Gordon Williams (7 page)

That night George had been almost drunk. They were, as he kept saying, going through a “difficult phase”. In other words he was having one of his periodic attacks of virility trouble. Mid-week sex had gone by the board, now he was even having trouble on Saturday nights. He said this was a normal phase, but as far as she was concerned he was suffering from a very common complaint among men. He was tired of her. But would he admit it! Oh no, that would be something like high treason.

At first she’d snorted with disbelief when she saw Patrick Ryman,
the
poet. The bow-tie and the rumpled suit – and the hair! For a moment she felt deeply ashamed to be British in the same room. How could a
man
wear his hair like that, all dank and scurfy? No wonder he kept on scratching his head. Apart from the fact that she couldn’t remember a single line he’d written, she had no desire to speak to him, none at all. But inevitably they were introduced. She’d had four drinks.

“Did you hire that suit?” she asked, raising her left eyebrow in what she hoped was arrogant disdain. “Or did Dylan Thomas leave it to you in his will?”

“Oh, you’re the English woman,” he said, smiling boozily. “The wife said I should give all you academics a bit of a show. Dress dirty, Paddy, she says, it’s a sure sign of integrity. At home I wear stiff white collars, y’know. It’s difficult to know what you cultural parasites want from a visiting genius like myself.”

“You’ll do,” she said, maintaining her disdain. “You should now vomit on the rug – that’ll convince them you’re authentic.”

“I may do that, darling. After all, the man did say to treat this like my own home. Can I get you a drink? Or can you get me a drink? If I move my feet I may fall over.”

“Let me,” she said. “I’d like to see you on the floor.”

“Hang around, dear.”

She fetched him a drink from the trolley. The room was crowded, but most people were content, at this stage, to be briefly introduced to Ryman and then to talk among themselves.

“It’s like winning the bloody pools,” he said, taking a disrespectfully large gulp of Hal Saperstein’s Glen Grant.

“What is?” she asked, still antagonistic.

“Coming over here on one of these culture jaunts. One minute there I was at home, a bum with four kids and twenty barmaids to support – the next you’re supposed to be Clark Gable. D’you know something, Mrs. – what was it again – Macwhat? Is that supposed to be Scottish? Anyway, whatever your name is, I’ll tell you my mother used to tell me to put on clean underwear when I went out of the house, if yese git run down, Pathrick me bhoy yese’ll want clean underwear in the infirmary or yese’ll make me ashamet o’ye. Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, if they saw my underpants they’d deport me. D’yese fancy a look at them yourself like?”

“No thank you.”

“You show good taste.”

After a few more drinks she found herself laughing
with
him, in spite of herself. Everything he said seemed like a deliberate attempt to make her think he was a human disgrace.

“You’ve never read any of my stuff? Och, I shouldn’t bother between you and me and the gatepost, they’re hardly worth the effort, most of the good lines are pinched anyway. Jesus Christ Saviour of Little Children, are all these mighty men gathered here in my name? They must have empty fucking lives.”

He went on and on, talking to her as though she was a fellow
waster from a Paddington pub. The party became loud and noisy. People stood in the hall and in other rooms. There was coming and going from upstairs. George was nowhere to be seen. People came up to Patrick and said stupid things. She tried not to laugh when he insulted them with carefully polite replies.

“Am I familiar with Graves? Oh sure, most of my best friends are in them right now. Did you ever hear of the paper in Ireland that was reporting this funeral and they said Councillor O’Toole slipped and fell in on top of the coffin and the incident cast a gloom over the subsequent proceedings? You didn’t? It’s a well-known story. Very evocative, nay redolent.”

People smiled energetically and obviously didn’t understand him. She felt that they were fellow-conspirators. She later couldn’t even remember why it was they decided to go upstairs, but she remembered standing inside a dark room with her back against the wall and Patrick trying to talk her on to the bed. All they did was kiss – it must have been a farcical sight, for she was six inches taller than he was. She remembered him going on and on about how you could get quickie divorces in Mexico City and how he was small and ugly and women didn’t like him and his wife hated him because he’d got her pregnant in the first place and he wouldn’t drink so much only he was the loneliest man in the world and she was the first truly beautiful woman who’d understood him.

She didn’t remember going home with George. In the morning she had a terrible headache. The phone went about ten. Patrick wanted her to come over to his hotel. It was a fantastic effort, in her condition. She’d told herself she was only going to let him know he wasn’t as pathetic as he made himself out to be.

Of course she’d known why she was going, feverish with the
hangover, so depressed the house seemed like a soundproof cell.

“So there you are, all my sexual tricks from A to B,” he said when they finally stopped making love. “I hope you notice I had a shower in your honour? I knew you’d be used to hygienic men. I’d have cut my toe-nails but I’ve only got the one razorblade and I need to shave for my audiences. Is it true what they say about these Yanks?”

“What’s that?”

“Here, watch it, you shouldn’t speak with your mouth full, don’t you know any manners at all? You’re depraved! No, here, this girl I know, she’s telling me these American fellas do it like buck rabbits, up and on and quick batter and off again. Is that right?”

“You could say that.”

“For God’s sake, woman! Are you hungry or something? Jesus Christ Our Blessed Lord they’re funny people over here. Are you still going to Mexico with me?”

“Oh, you remembered?”

“Of course I remembered. I wasn’t drunk last night, you know. Sure, your honour, if you thought I was drunk last night you shoulda seen me on Saturday night. No, I’m serious, let’s piss off out of this and fly to Mexico. I saw it in a film, quickie divorces. The wife doesn’t even have to know.”

“You couldn’t afford me.”

“I never said I could. Could you afford me, that’s more like it.”

As the drink wore off it began to appear that he was serious, at least by his standards. Her natural impulse was to make jokes about it but there was no knowing with a funny man like him. He seemed so unbalanced.

“I think I might kill myself if it gets any worse,” he said at one stage. “I’m a burden to the human race.”

“We’d leave five children in broken homes,” she said, trying to bring him to reason, if only for the sake of the lunch at which he was to meet so many allegedly important people.

“Och, to hell with the children, I don’t like mine all that much if the truth be known. Think of that last moment before you die, you’ve done all the decent things all your life, you’re lying there kicking the bucket – do you think it would matter then?”

But she had left the hotel and if George hadn’t found one of Patrick’s letters she would have made herself forget the whole thing. Not that it was a love letter, more a series of childish jokes. George, however, had taken it badly. What he resented was the fact she could have a secret correspondence with another man. It spoiled his beautiful dream of togetherness. He took it for granted that she hadn’t even thought of going to bed with Patrick! That was even more annoying than if he’d gone berserk with jealousy. She told herself that only a very imaginative and intelligent woman could have seen beneath the seedy buffoonery Patrick showed to the world.

And that, she told herself as she lay staring at the ceiling, the unread book lying on her breast, was my big moment. Illicit romance, the only one of my whole life. I should have run away to Mexico with him. It wouldn’t have lasted – but I’d have done something wild and selfish – just for me.

Was it too late? Soon even fat little lonely drunks might not want me...

I guess I was in the wrong, George Magruder said to himself, sitting at his desk in the study. Was that ‘guess’ in the English or American sense? He didn’t
think
he was in the wrong. Life would be a whole lot simpler if a man could still put a pernickety wife over his knee and
give her backside a roasting. But he wasn’t that kind of man, even if Louise had been that kind of woman.

Like many academics he was conscious of, but unable to do anything about, an imbalance between the impressive depth and range of knowledge he had in his special field and the rest of his mental activities. His own secret – and somewhat childish – theory was that there are only so many brain cells and a man who filled an inordinate number of these cells with one subject has less room – literally – for anything else. It was hardly to be expected that one human brain could hold a vast store of information on English literature and then have equal capacity for other commitments of the same intensity.

Einstein, it was said, could not tie his own shoelaces. Nabokov ran about in fields with a butterfly net. A famous critic and lay theologian had a passion for playing croquet in the nude. In his own case, old films took the place of butterflies or seashells. A non-hobby he called it, requiring no more involvement than a good memory and a willingness to sit till after midnight in front of the television.

He could spot famous stars in early bit parts, he could put names to the faces of
second-rate
bit players. Did anybody else in the world have such knowledge of Hollywood’s immortal trivia? Stars interested him less than the anonymous faces who had down the years peopled the mechanical dreams from the fantasy production belt. He saw them as prototype personalities of the twentieth century... Elisha Cook (the twisted face of the third gangster, the little man who always cracked under pressure), Robin Raymond, Gloria Dickson, Adele Jergens, Charles Smith, Luis Van Rooten, Percy Helton, Russell Simpson (who stepped out of his grade to play the father in
The Grapes of Wrath
), Don Beddoe, Raymond
Walburn, Paul Harvey, John Litel, Tom Kennedy (monopolist of Irish New York cop parts).

If old films were his non-hobby, Westerns were his specialisation. He remembered the plots of innumerable sage-bush sagas starring Roy Rogers (with Dale Evans). He was a connoisseur of secondgrade cowboy stars, Rod Cameron, John Payne, Randolph Scott.

There was nothing surprising about all this, he often said – defensively, for there was something embarrassing about comprehensive knowledge of a subject which few other people are aware of.

“Great minds
like
simple things,” Louise would say reassuringly, in those days when she was still interested in reassuring him.

“There’s a peculiar and unexplored potency to mass subculture,” was another of his rationalisations. Yet... was John Wayne swapping punches with other giants any more ludicrous a fantasy than Branksheer’s bawdy England? Given the choice, wouldn’t any man prefer to know he could defend his land and log cabin against Shawnee war parties – instead of being stuck at a desk?

It was not an idea he could ever reveal to the people he worked with. It couldn’t stand up to severe analysis, but it was real. It had started as a joke and then grafted itself on to his consciousness; the frontier was no more and a man had to settle for the second-best. Like being a professor.

He couldn’t work. He went upstairs. Louise was reading on the bed.

“I want to say I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?” Her voice was huffy, a little girl’s voice.

“I’m
sorry
! I lost my temper unnecessarily.”

“Did you?”

“Come on, Louise, I’ve come up to apologise.”

“All right, so you’ve apologised.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Don’t you want to say anything?”

“No.”

“Look, I notice it’s always me who makes it up first. Aren’t you ever in the wrong, just a little bit in the wrong?”

“Probably.”

“Well then –”

“Oh shut up and leave me alone.”

“
Please
, Louise, let’s not be stupid, huh?”

He sat on the bed and took hold of her right hand, making her drop the book on the bedcover. She stared at him defiantly, as though he was threatening to strike her.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’m not going to hit you, silly.”

He smiled, as he thought, apologetically. Louise thought it was a coy little smirk.

“That’s what’s wrong with you.”

“What is?”

“You haven’t got the guts to hit me. Go on, try it, you’ll feel better. I deserve it. Go on.”

“Come on, honey, let’s not –”

“Don’t honey me, you all-forgiving bastard. What do you think being married is, the stupid PTA? God, you make me sick, look at you, all nicey-nicey smiles, you big sook. What’s going on in that great All-American head of yours? Eh? Be honest – for once.”

“There’s no need to –”

“Yes there is. I’m sick of it, the whole thing. What’s wrong with
you? One minute you’re whining and moaning you wish you were a big man – like Hemingway, ha ha, Hemingway’s just your type, little Georgie wants to be a grown-up man with a hairy chest! But little Georgie hasn’t got the guts to hit his own bitch of a wife.”

“All right, I’ll smack your teeth on the floor if it makes you any happier.”

“Don’t smirk at me! You can’t get round me that way. My mother was right, damn her, we should never have got married. I’m no good to you.”

“Oh shut up. It’s time you were getting Karen ready for the party. You’ll get over this, it’s only a mood. It’s affecting both of us living here. This isn’t our house, we hardly own a single thing in it. Maybe we made a mistake coming –”

“No, the mistake was a lot earlier.”

“Oh Louise, don’t say things like that. You’ll only regret them afterwards. I’ll go and find Karen.”

As usual she felt cheated and enraged. The saintly bastard.

When she and Karen drove away from the house she did not wave or smile to George, who stood on the little path at the front door, watching the car tyres send up little spumes of soft snow. Even after the car had gone out of sight up the lane he still stood there, snowflakes settling on his chest and shoulders...