The Road Home (18 page)

“Yes?” said Lev.

“Yes,” said Sam. “Poor mites that they are. They’re doing their level best to become beautiful, but nobody’s giving them much of a hand, except me.”

Sophie, who was wearing jeans and a tight cream sweater, explained to Lev that most of Sam’s hats were miniatures, like the one she was wearing to the pub tonight, a baby black topper, attached to her head by spangled elastic. She said, “Sam believes that the days of the unironic hat are completely past. Unless you have an exceptional face—which rules out ninety-nine percent of everybody. So she’s doing pastiches of old styles, in titchy form, and they’ve caught on amazingly. She’s getting rich now.”

“Yes?” said Lev.

“Not rich-rich.” Sam smiled. “Just comfy.”

“She goes to film premieres and all that shit. Don’t you, Sam?”

“Sometimes. I just treat them like personal catwalks. I go to parade a hat.”

“She had a big show at London Fashion Week.”

“Not big-big.”

“She’s an amazing star.”

“Not amazing-amazing. I still live in Kentish Town.”

The Amazing Star was looking Lev over. Her ferret eyes flickered from his newly washed gray hair to his mouth, and then to his left hand, on which he still wore his wedding ring.

“I didn’t know you were married, Lev,” she said, sipping the vodka and tonic Lev had bought her.

“I told you, Sam,” said Sophie quickly. “Lev’s wife died.”

“Oh yes. Wow, sorry. I forgot. I’ve got a show coming up and my brain’s gone into coma mode. Tell me about hats in your country, Lev.”

“Hats in my country?”

“I get inspiration from all round the world. Spain was fantastic. The mantilla is such a flattering idea. Virtually everyone looks good in it, because you can get the lace to cover half the face, if necessary. God, I’m nasty! But, to be fair, most women also look reasonably brilliant in those wide-brimmed hats the picadors wear. I’ve just adapted them a bit with trailing ribbons. I’ve never visited your country, but somehow I imagine women in head scarves. Am I right?”

“Sometimes,” said Lev.

“I don’t mean the full Muslim scarf thing, the
hijab
or whatever it’s called, but head scarves like the Queen wears, right?”

“Yes.”

“But things are changing now, right? Women are smartening themselves up. Are hats coming back?”

Lev conjured up a street in Baryn or Glic. He saw women hurrying through the rain, clutching cheap, flimsy umbrellas or holding magazines over their hair. He couldn’t see or imagine a single hat.

“No,” he said.

“Right. Not worth making the trip to Jor or somewhere, then?”

“Well,” said Lev, “in Jor, you can find some nice clothes, these days. Quite expensive . . .”

“No, I don’t mean for shopping. I mean to get a look at ethnic headwear. What about at weddings?”

Lev was about to reply that Ina kept in a drawer the embroidered cap she’d worn in 1959 at her wedding to Stefan and which Maya had once found and tried on. This trying on of her wedding cap had upset Ina for reasons Lev could only guess at and she had snatched it out of Maya’s hand. But as Lev opened his mouth to speak, Sam turned away from him to embrace a young man with floppy hair, wearing dark glasses. “Andy,” she said, “
darling.
How’s it going?”

“Good,” he said, removing the glasses to reveal narrow, sleepy eyes, which rested on Samantha’s skimpy cleavage. “How’re you, beautiful?”

“Insane,” said Sam. “Bloody show in two weeks. Look at my fingers. Raw with stitching.”

“Love the dress. Love the boots. And
love
the dinky topper!”

“Yeah? You do? Relieved about that, petal. But tell me about rehearsals.”

“We’re not in rehearsal yet. We’re still casting—or trying to . . .”

“Oh, who? Tell me who.”

“Well, long story, babe. We’d been pretty hot for Sheridan Ponsonby, but then we realized the posh arsehole just didn’t begin to understand the play.”

“Oh pants, Andy. I adore Ponsonby!”

“Really? I used to like his work. Now I think he’s a vain twat. He’s not Brain of Britain, I can tell you, Sam, despite going to bloody Eton. I mean, he kept saying the whole play was ‘transgressive’ and I had to keep reminding him, ‘That’s the whole fucking point, luv, this is a totally transgressive story. We’re testing good-taste boundaries, we’re testing audience shock. We’re way beyond
Jerry Springer—The Opera
.’ ”

“I
know
you are, darling.”

“Why are actors so fucking thick? But, fingers crossed, we’ve got Oliver Scrope-Fenton. We’re talking deals with his agent now.”

“Ollie Scrope-Fenton. Brilliant! I love him! It’s going to be such a totally groundbreaking piece of theater.”

“I hope. Who knows? Anyway, how’re you, sweetheart?”

“I’m good.” Sam turned again toward Lev and Sophie. “Sophie you know, darling. And this is Sophie’s friend Lev, who also works with G.K. Andy Portman, the extremely famous playwright.”

Lev held out his hand and the famous playwright, Portman, gave it a violent shake. “Hi, Lev,” he said. “How’s G.K. treating you?”

“Okay,” said Lev. “He calls me “Nurse.’ ”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Well, I keep everything clean . . .”

“Oh, right. Right.”

“
C’est le plongeur,
” Sam whispered to Andy, “
mais il est assez beau.
”

“Right,” said Andy again. “Drink time. Everybody okay?”

Andy Portman disappeared into the crush of people near the bar. Sam Diaz-Morant took a cigarette holder from her bag, looked at it longingly, caressed it for a moment with her lips, then put it away again. “I’d better explain,” she said to Lev, “that Andy’s written a brilliant play,
Peccadilloes,
which is being done at the Court. Alias the Royal Court Theatre. Opens in the new year. It’s going to be unlike anything the British stage has seen.”

“Peccadilloes?” said Lev. “What is that?”

“Oh, you know. Explain it to him, Sophie.”

“No. You explain it.”

“Well. Doing little naughties . . . Isn’t it, Sophie?”

“I guess.”

“Not the world’s most catchy title,” said Sam. “Confused it with
Piccalilli
when Andy first said it.”

“Piccadilly?” said Lev.

“No. Piccalilli—gherkiny table sauce my mum serves with cold meat.”

“I am confused . . .”

“Oh well, never mind. But what the play’s about is the extreme forms desire can take. It’s about the total infiniteness of the human imagination.”

“Is ‘infiniteness’ a word, Sam?” said Sophie.

“Well, ‘infinity.’ Whatever. I don’t fucking know. Anyway,
Peccadilloes
is a groundbreaking play.”

There was a silence. Sam Diaz-Morant adjusted the spangled elastic on her baby hat.

“Sorry,” said Lev. “Now I am lost . . .”

“Right,” said Sam. “Well, I guess it’s complex. Talk to Andy. He’s got a whole thesis on the subject. He’ll explain it to you.”

Sam turned away and Lev was left looking down at Sophie, who, he noticed, wouldn’t meet his eye. His vodka glass was empty and he began, suddenly, to feel the heat and noise of the pub as a desolate vibration in his heart. He set down the empty glass.

Sophie’s gaze returned nervously to him. “Sam and Andy are good fun,” she said brightly. “You’ll see, Lev. They’re ambition-crazed lunatics, but they’re also good company. We’re going to have a fun evening.”

Sophie reached up and stroked Lev’s cheek, and the unexpected touch of her hand on his face surprised and consoled him just enough to vanquish his longing to be away from there, out in the cold street. He took Sophie’s glass and his own and made his way to the bar and put the two glasses down. He took out his wallet. The price of vodka in England shocked him anew each time he heard it uttered.

He found himself standing next to Andy Portman. Portman wore a leather jacket very like Lev’s own. Lev stared at him. Then he said, “Sam told me you would explain your play.”

“Explain my play?”

“She said you had ‘thesis.’ ”

“A thesis? You mean on theater?”

“I don’t know . . .”

Andy sighed as he ransacked a bulging wallet for drink money. “I’m kinda tired of explaining all this,” he said, “but I’ll give you the short version if you want. Okay?”

“Sure,” said Lev.

Andy took his change from the barman and took a gulp of his pint of beer. “Imagine society as a house,” he said.

“A house?”

“Yeah.” Andy wiped foam from his lips with the back of his hand, dried the hand on a small towel set out on the bar top. “A house. With the usual rooms: sitting room, bedroom, kitchen, et cetera. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“Well, British drama, in the 1950s, was stuck in the sitting room—or what people liked to call the
drawing room.
Everything was decorous and unspoken and polite and full of lies. Then, in the 1960s, plays moved into the kitchen. Wesker, John Osborne, David Storey, and so on. We had honesty. We had working-class emotion. Then it crept into the bedroom. Did you ever see Pinter’s
Betrayal
?”

“No.”

“Okay, but you know of it. You’re following me, right?”

“Not well . . .”

“I’ll make it simple, then. I was going to do a riff about Stoppard and Frayn and their intellectual universes, about the clever-clogs vogue for whirling the play
outside
the societal and domestic space, but none of this fits too well with my analogy—and you probably wouldn’t get it anyway, right?”

Lev said nothing. He felt helpless and ignorant. Andy Portman’s eyes kept flickering round to where Sophie and Samantha stood among the roaring crowd, then returning reluctantly to Lev.

“Do you see where I’m going with the house thing?” he asked. “Can you tell me what little room has never really been visited on the British stage?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, think. The toilet, of course. What we in Britain term the
loo
. You know this word?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Well, I think it’s time we looked in there. It’s time we had the courage to look at the filth that’s never more than one or two rooms away from us—or, in other words, inside us. Don’t you think we should do that?”

The barman arrived in front of Lev at this moment and he ordered the two vodkas. He noticed that his hand holding a tenpound note was red and raw from its hours immersed in dishwater, like some uncooked root vegetable. And he thought, This is how these people see me—as a turnip with no intelligence and no voice.

“You don’t agree?” said Andy. “I guess you—like almost everybody else—just want to be presented with everything nice and clean and refreshed and made ready for you, and never notice how each one of us adds to the excrement pile?”

“No . . .”

“You wouldn’t be alone. That’s exactly what most people in the West feel, even if they don’t admit it. But I want to force them to look where they don’t want to look: at their dark side, because there is a dark side—sometimes a really seriously dark side—in us all.”

“Dark side?”

“Yup. And one of the things we have to own up to is that the stuff we crave can be absolutely transgressive. We need to look this straight in the eye. And people agree with me, or I’d never have got
Peccadilloes
on. I know it’s going to shock, but that’s the whole point. I guess maybe you come from a culture that isn’t yet aware of the need to shock.”

Lev knew the word “shock.” Managing a shallow smile, he said, “There has been ‘shock’ in my country, sir. Very much shock. Many, many years of —”

“Right. Absolutely. I hear you. But I’m not talking about political systems, Lev. And please, for fuck’s sake, don’t call me ‘sir.’ I’m talking about art.”

“Okay . . .”

“In your country, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, artwise. That’s fine. I completely understand. I’m sympathetic to that. But here in Britain, we’re at the cutting edge of things and the work has to be razor-sharp, otherwise it won’t fucking cut.”

Andy picked up his beer. He seemed about to walk away, but then he stopped and looked at Lev’s hand, tensed around the tenpound note. “You buying for Sophie?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Lev.

“We all love Sophie,” he said. Lev waited for the thing that would follow—some instruction or warning—but it didn’t come. Andy just held his gaze for a moment longer, then walked away. Lev looked back at where Sophie was standing, talking to Sam again, and he thought that Sam’s miniature hats were ridiculous objects and that they would never make a woman look beautiful, no woman in the world.

Lev paid for the vodkas and put the change into his jacket pocket, but he didn’t move from the bar. He tipped the ice out of his drink, and drank the vodka neat, leaning hunched over on the bar counter. He knew that, thanks mainly to Christy Slane, his loneliness had diminished in recent weeks, but now he felt it return as something else, as a feeling of inadequacy and rage. He longed for a cigarette. At his back, rough tides of laughter pushed at him and threatened to knock him down. He could feel the hard floor of the pub through a hole in his shoe. He had a desire to spit and see a gob of his own saliva arrive on the polished surface of the bar. Imagining this gob, this mark of himself, he suddenly heard his name spoken. Without turning, he saw Sophie arrive at his side. She took up her glass of vodka and poured tonic into it, took a sip, and put the glass down.

He didn’t want to look at her. He wanted to stay folded inside his own fury. Then he felt her soft hand on his neck, and the hand pulled his head toward her face, and he saw her mouth open and waiting and let himself be steered toward it. The kiss Sophie gave him was a violently sexual thing, and Lev felt her teeth clamping against his, trying to lock him to her, bone on bone.

In his rage and loneliness, he could have held her to him, could have let his arm go round her waist, let himself feel her breasts against his chest. But he didn’t do this. He resisted. He broke away from Sophie and walked out of the pub.

Now he was alone in his room in Belisha Road. Below, in the scuffed garden, the dog was whining.

Lev sat on his bed, smoking, staring at the plastic shop and its welcoming sign,
HI! MY STORE IS OPEN
. Then he got down on his knees and opened the shop door. Inside, a plastic storekeeper, a figure with a black mustache, was wearing a long Hessian overall, tied round his waist. On his face was a cheery smile, and he held out his hands, palm upward, in a gesture of innocence.