Zoo Time (19 page)

And was Poppy the Vicarious in on it?

All good questions – gasp gasp, rub rub, scribble scribble.

Out on the street, Poppy realised she had mislaid her pashmina – a beautiful white-and-gold concoction, light as air, spun from eyelash of Himalayan goat, which had been a present to her from me. Pashminas of this quality were a Wilhelmina speciality. Vanessa, too, had several. ‘You probably left it at the roulette table, on the back of a chair,’ she told her mother, with one eye on me, making it clear whose job it was to retrieve it.

Was it deliberate? Was I to slip back in so he could slip back out?

I didn’t refuse, anyway. You have to go with the story. I knew I should consider myself lucky to be in the company of two such expert manipulators of plot.

In the event I found the pashmina just as Omar the croupier found me. ‘Guy!’ he said. ‘It is Guy, isn’t it?’

I stared into the scarab’s eyes. He had beautiful eyelashes, long and fine. You could have spun a pashmina from them. So where had I seen him before since he was so certain that he had seen me? Not in Egypt; I had never been to Egypt.

‘It is Guy, yes,’ I answered tentatively. Had Vanessa put him up to this for some reason of her own? Get me to like him? Get me to invite him back? Get me to lend him my wife?

He put an arm round my shoulder. ‘Boychick!’ he said. ‘Well, fook me,’ his pronunciation distinctly now from round here.

He waited for me to recognise him. Or to say ‘Well, fook me, boychick’ in return.

‘Well, fook me, boychick,’ I said in return.

But he could tell I didn’t know him.

‘I’m Michael.’

I stared.

‘Michael Ezra.’

‘Michael Ezra! Fook me!’

I had palled out a bit with Michael Ezra at school. He had been part of the Jewish clique to which I hadn’t quite belonged, one of those who gave me that
we are all in this shit together
look and could no more do metalwork than I could. He’d been good at maths, though, I remembered. And poker. The prerequisites of a good croupier.

‘Long time,’ he said.

‘You can say that again,’ I agreed. ‘I would never have picked you for you. You look –’

‘Egyptian, I know. Turns out I had an Alexandrian great-grandfather. My skin turned half black when I was twenty-one. My parents had been expecting it but it was a bit of a shock to me, as you can imagine. Mind you, the birds like it. Not that –’

‘I bet they do,’ I said. ‘You look like –’

‘Omar Sharif, I know. To be honest, the moustache is what does it. Anyone with a black moustache looks like Omar Sharif. You, though – you haven’t changed. You still look like the Pope.’

‘The Pope! Which Pope?’

‘How many Popes are there? The one that’s against contraception.’

‘That doesn’t exactly narrow the field, Michael.’

‘The Polish one, for fook’s sake. Waclaw or Vojciech, I don’t know. You look like him anyway. Younger of course.’

‘It’s the paleness. Anyone who’s pale looks like a Polish Pope.’

‘Yeah, well, you always did. But you’re famous now. And that gets the birds, doesn’t it? A famous writer – who doesn’t want to fook a famous writer?’

‘Almost nobody,’ I lied. ‘About the same number who don’t want to fook the Pope.’

‘I believe it. I clocked you with your beautiful wife. What a stunner.’

I inclined my head. What else did he expect? my gesture implied.

‘And her daughter, too. Also a knockout.’

I couldn’t decide whether that was an insult or a compliment to Poppy, an insult or a compliment to Vanessa, or an insult or a compliment to me. But the mix-up, following hard on the heels of the flattery – knew I’d written a novel! thought me famous! – aroused me in a way I suspected it shouldn’t. Had this been Vanessa’s plan – to embroil me in one of those erotic confusions she knew I would never be able to think my way cogently out of ?

‘So what time are you on until?’ I asked, assuming ‘on’ was the right preposition for tending a roulette wheel.

He looked at his watch. ‘Another hour.’

I looked at mine. ‘Well, listen, why don’t you come around to the Midland? We’ll be in the bar. It would be great to catch up. I want to hear about your Alexandrian grandmother.’

‘Grandfather.’

‘Him too.’

Men look at you strangely when they think you might be pimping your women. Invariably, I find, they touch their wallets to be sure you haven’t begun fleecing them already. But his eyes flashed black light. ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said.

‘What do you know – your croupier chum and I are old school friends,’ I told them in the taxi back. ‘Looks like an Arab warrior but comes from Wilmslow. I’ve invited him to the hotel for a nightcap.’ I squeezed Poppy’s hand. ‘He thinks I’m married to you,’ I said. Then I squeezed my wife’s. ‘And you, Vee, are the daughter. Let’s go along with it.’

‘Why?’ Vanessa wanted to know.

I made an experimental shape with my hands. ‘Oh, for the fun of it.’

Poppy looked at Vanessa, Vanessa looked at me. She didn’t say ‘On your own head be it’, but I read the warning in her expression.

So what was I doing? Trying to pair Vanessa off with Michael Ezra so I could have time alone in the Midland with her mother? Or was I simply interposing myself in whatever had been going on in order to claim authorship and control of it? Guy Ableman, ringmaster. Not nice, but it beat being Guy Ableman, the dancing bear.

It would be satisfying to report that the four of us repaired to the biggest bed the Midland had to offer. And that I saw and did things there that would have made Satan’s devils howl with shame and envy. But the great Olympia Press debauch I had been waiting for from the minute the Eisenhower girls showed up in Wilhelmina’s – the rouging of nipples, the anonymous removal of wisps of lace, no one knew whose or by whom – failed again to materialise. Poppy made her excuses and retired soon after Michael Ezra turned up. ‘No, no, you stay down here and talk to your friend,’ she insisted, smiling at me sweetly. ‘I’ll be asleep when you come up.’ Vanessa, on the other hand, made free with the opportunity which not being thought of as the wife afforded her, throwing back her head, arching her throat, and on one occasion running her fingers along Ezra’s Egyptian moustache to see if it was as diabolically silken as it appeared.

‘Oh, it is!’ she said, withdrawing her hand and shuddering. It was as though she had put her fingers to a place the like of which they had never been before.

Later that night, I knew, she would put them to my nose.

She said she needed air and would see the croupier into a taxi. ‘Go to Mummy,’ she ordered me.

Ah, if only.

Michael Ezra and I clasped hands. ‘Fook me!’ he said, shaking his head.

‘Fook me!’ I agreed, shaking mine.

Vanessa, standing watching us, shook hers.

She took his arm and they left the hotel together. If it truly was a taxi she was escorting him to, she for some reason ignored those waiting outside the hotel.

Was she unable to wait until they were out of sight before giving him one of her famous street blow jobs, or was she merely stooping to brush something off his trousers?

How men deal with such uncertainties when they are not poets or novelists I have no idea. Do they, without the redemption of art, go mad?

God knows what blind Homer supposed was going on in front of his nose, never mind behind his back, but we owe the
Iliad
to his ignorance and the
Odyssey
to his suspicions. What lesser writers who never made it beyond a couple of short stories would have given for a Vanessa and a Poppy to torment them into creativity! Never let it be said I am not grateful to them myself. Before they ruined me, they made me. And out of ruins, too, can come deliverance.

18

Going Cuckoo

There was not time, not by so much as a preliminary shiver of a tremble, to gauge Poppy’s reaction to the hand I’d let descend on her tautened thigh like a falling star from the Monkey Mia night. I no sooner made contact than I was upstaged by a rival. Who, at such a hair-trigger moment in my relations with my mother-in-law, was not a rival? My other hand, had it stirred, would have been a rival. This intruder, though, was not fanciful. It was the powder-blue boatman from the parvenu yacht, the one who had a phone ringing in every pocket. He made a beeline for our table as though he had seen us while on deck and from that moment wanted nothing more from life than to be in our company.

He came very close to us and bowed low. The gold chain he was wearing round his neck clinked against our wine bottle. He had sunglasses hanging from him too, which dangled in my drink. Purposely, I suspected, so that I would go to the bar and get another glass, and when I returned all three of them would be gone.

Not fanciful?

Well, he is no fancy of mine. Whether his outlandishness came out of a tropical sailor catalogue or simply his own imagination I cannot say, but his gold chain, the sunglasses he gratuitously dangled in my drink, his grossly obvious intentions, were no more of my making than was the extravagance of the night.

To me he presented the closed face of an implacable rival. To Vanessa he was elaborately courtly. But to Poppy he was as a man who had taken leave of his senses. The impression he gave of having seen us, that’s to say having seen
her
, and then formed a desperate resolution to be among us, that’s to say among
her
, was precisely the impression he wanted to give. She was, however, even more lovely than he had been able to tell through his binoculars.

‘You’ve been looking at me through binoculars?’

‘All evening, madame. We both have.’

She seemed not to hear ‘both’. ‘I haven’t been here all evening.’

‘All day, then.’

‘I haven’t been here at all today either, I’ve been out tickling the stomachs of dolphins.’

‘I know. We watched you. It can’t be necessary for me to tell you how envious we were of those fortunate creatures.’

She inclined her head to him. A woman accustomed to receiving the most preposterous of compliments. But if she was deaf to the boatman’s salacious pluralising, this late into drinkies time, Vanessa most definitely was not. She signalled to a couple of empty chairs. ‘Won’t you join us?’

He bowed again. ‘I, alas,’ he said, ‘cannot. But there is someone else who would like nothing more.’

Vanessa touched her face as though she were carrying a fan. Intrigue bubbled up in her voice like some cheap sparkling wine. Lambrusco, was it? ‘And who would this “someone else” be?’ she asked.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Vee,’ I muttered, in operatic sotto voce. I, too, I wanted them to know, could descend into melodrama.

He, however, did it better. He looked around to see if anyone was eavesdropping and dropped his voice. ‘My employer.’ It sounded sinister. Even sexual. Something made me think of those ambiguously homoerotic South China Sea desperadoes that crop up in Joseph Conrad’s novels. ‘The owner of . . .’ And he gestured with his shoulder to the boat Conrad wouldn’t have been seen dead in.

‘Ah,’ I said, with unaccountable satisfaction, ‘so it isn’t yours.’

‘Only to play with.’

‘And who, then, is your employer?’ Vanessa wanted to know.

At which moment, as though he’d been hiding all the while behind a palm tree – I don’t know why I say
as though
: he had indeed been hiding all the while behind a palm tree as his employee broke the ice – there appeared a spectral figure, uncannily elongated but with big hands like a goalkeeper’s, dressed in a worn rugby shirt and long, discoloured baggy shorts through which it was impossible to mistake the bell-like sway of sexual organs even bigger than his hands. Had he been older I’d have said they had begun their geriatric descent; but as he was roughly my age, I took him to be preternaturally over-endowed, as was sometimes the case with emaciated men.

‘Dirk,’ he said, extending his hand to each of us, though he might as well have been extending us a choice of genitalia. ‘Dirk de Wolff.’

Poppy threw her head back and laughed. ‘What’s your
actual
name?’ she asked.

He allowed the parchment of his face to crease, though not quite into a smile. ‘What would you like my
actual
name to be?’

Poppy looked to Vanessa for inspiration. I held my breath. They might say anything, these women.

‘Wolf de Wolff,’ Poppy suggested, uncrossing her thighs, but Vanessa spoke over her, answering de Wolff ’s challenge with a challenge of her own. ‘So why do you need someone else to do your dirty work?’

‘Was that what you were doing, Tim?’ de Wolff enquired of his lackey who had been stealthily backing away from us, the chinking of his jewellery growing fainter. ‘My dirty work?’