As Far as You Can Go (11 page)

Various other people gave Harold advice. Mr Scott assured him he wouldn’t like the country, though there were some nice people, especially on the east coast. Mr Crocker said he’d been in Colorado during the war, and the Americans had no idea at all about how to live. They knew nothing of wine, for instance.

Harold’s father’s advice had been more oblique. He seemed suddenly to feel the need to be paternal, and gave Harold a very uncomfortable half-hour about prostitutes, following it by an enthusiastic recommendation that Harold shouldn’t let a good opportunity slip by. But he had behaved well, Harold considered, when he heard the news. Instead of regarding Harold as mad, ingrate or wicked, which his son had expected, he had made a great show of letting the boy do what he wanted, and not getting in the way of youth. He made little effort to discover exactly what Harold was going to do, and told his friends that his son had got the chance of a lifetime really to get ahead.

Mrs Barlow had been rather upset.

“How long are you going to be away, Harold?” she had asked. “I mean, if you’re going for good, I’ll give your room to Timothy, and turn Timothy’s into a bathroom. We’ve never had enough bathrooms.”

“But, Mummy, I shall probably only be gone six months.”

“Are you sure? You may meet a girl and decide to stay over there. How can you tell?”

“It’s really most unlikely in so short a time. I shall be travelling a great deal, too.”

“I don’t expect you’ll come back,” she said, and
continued
to behave as though Harold’s departure was final, telling her friends, as far as Harold could judge from their startled questions, that he was going to emigrate. Her
conviction
cast a gloom over the household, and Timothy, on vacation from Oxford, took the line that she was going to have another baby and didn’t yet realize it. Certainly she wandered round the house like a cat looking for a suitable place to give birth, and talked restlessly of the alterations she was going to make now Harold was going.

“She’s making herself a nest,” said Timothy.

“No,” said Harold, “she’s throwing me
out
of the nest. It’s quite different. And it ought to have happened years ago.”

“Are you going to come back, by the way?”

“Of course. What on earth makes you think I won’t?”

“I don’t know. Mummy’s intuitions are right sometimes, aren’t they? I mean, she did have that feeling the night Granny died. And if you make her feel you’re not coming back,
perhaps
you won’t. Perhaps she knows better than you.”

“Really,” said Harold, “you’re supposed to be an educated man, not a superstitious old woman. If you spent more time at your books and less on the golf-course, your judgment might be more reliable.”

“I don’t see that there’s any need to be offensive, simply because you can’t tell a golf-ball from a cricket-ball.”

The brothers’ conversation tended to be desultory.

Harold had sailed from Southampton on January 4th, and his mother had cried seeing him off that morning at
Peter-ham
station. This had caused a good deal of consternation in the family, and as a result of the fuss Harold had been able to fade into a secondary figure, to his great relief. Dennis had met him in London and they had had a drink before going to Waterloo.

“Remember never to offer an American a cigarette. It’s simply not done over there, and they might think you were being ironical. And there are no public lavatories, so if you’re caught short just go into an hotel and ask for the men’s room. They’ll understand. The policemen
are
armed, so don’t ask them the time without really wanting to know it. They drive on the
right
over there, too, so remember to look
left
first before crossing a road. And you can be fined for
jaywalking
.”

“Where on earth do you get all this information?”

“I read the papers, Harold. That’s another thing. The
New
York
Times
is about a hundred pages long every day. Don’t attempt to read it all. And you can break an arm trying to lift the Sunday edition. So be careful about
newspapers
.”

“All right. Do stop giving me advice, though. I’d much rather find out all these things for myself.”

“Really? Yes, I suppose you’re the type that won’t believe anything till he’s found out for himself. Very modern, and yet curiously old-fashioned. Basically, like all people of your generation, you regard your parents and all teachers as responsible for the bloodiness of life, so you don’t believe what they tell you. Very healthy. The basis of the
Aldermaston
March. Old rebellion, new setting. Politically, you know, you represent a very important facet of modern England.”

“I represent absolutely nothing,” said Harold. “I do wish you wouldn’t keep classifying me. As soon as I’ve got myself comfortably settled in one pigeon-hole, you’ve whipped me out, turned me upside-down, and put me in another.”

“You’ve got to keep up to date, you know. And we’d better go and catch that train. I don’t think Uncle Edward would be very impressed if you missed it.”

His luggage was one suitcase. Two suits, three pairs of shoes, an assortment of shirts, the Dangerfield photographs, a file of notes on the portraits and where they were likely to be found, socks, toilet articles, pants, a dressing-gown, ties—that was about it. Anything else could be bought later. There was no problem about money at all.

They put the suitcase on the rack, then came out of the train and stood on the platform. Harold felt suddenly very lonely.

“Do you think I’m mad to be going?” he said.

“Absolutely not. You’re doing the right thing, and you’ll be doing it very well, I’m sure.”

“But I don’t know anyone in America at all.”

“The Americans are a very friendly people.”

“Dennis, I don’t want to go.”

Dennis looked at him, patted his shoulder and said, “There, there, little one, you’ll be back soon. Just think of it as going back to school. You know you’ll enjoy it when you get there. Get in the train, it’s about to start.”

“But it isn’t what I want to do at all.”

“My dear Harold, you know very well that only a few of us are sufficiently clever and dishonest to do what we want to do. And you’ll find you do want to do it once you’ve started.”

Harold got into the carriage and lowered the window. “I really didn’t intend to take this job, you know. I wanted to do something—something big, I suppose. This seems very small.”

“Never mind,” said Dennis. The train began to move. “You’re still young, you know.” He walked along beside the train. “Remember to write, won’t you? Have a swinging time. Good-bye.” He stopped trying to keep up, and waved, shouting, “Give my love to old Broadway!”

It was raining when Harold reached Southampton and got on board his ship. It seemed enormous and very nasty and only about a third full. The few passengers seemed
overwhelmed
by the size and tastelessness of their surroundings.

The voyage was uneventful, though very rough, but he was a good sailor and spent most of his time in the bar testing the imagination of the barman. Between them they created a new cocktail, involving crushed ice, curaçao, bitter lemon, white rum, sloe gin, Irish whiskey and sour-mash bourbon. It tasted revolting, and they called it Mal-de-Mer. They tried it out on a passenger on the third day. He was a small man with white hair brushed flat across his scalp who had stayed in his cabin for the first two days. After one glass of Mal-de-Mer he returned to his cabin, and Harold next
observed
him on the dock in New York looking distinctly shaky, his hair no longer neatly brushed, but straggling. Otherwise there was nothing to do, and no one to talk to. The few passengers who made it to meals played bridge with each other and talked about bridge at the table, ignoring Harold, who made it clear on the first night that he couldn’t tell one no-trump from another. He was very bored, and spent all the
time he wasn’t drinking in the cinema, going to all
performances
of all films, irrespective of the class they were being shown to.

The New York skyline was hidden by snow-clouds as the liner moved to her berth. In an attempt to bolster his courage and assert his independence Harold muttered a line from Auden to himself: “The lie of authority, whose buildings grope the sky.” His courage remained low, in spite of the recital of this charm. The Customs were immovable in their determination to look into every case. The longshoremen spoke to each other in an incomprehensible accent. Snow was beginning to fall. It was cold.

At the hotel in which Mr Dangerfield’s secretary had booked him a room he was awed by the number of floors. He was on the fourteenth. No doubt up at the top they were enveloped in cloud. His room was warm, though, and it had a television set.

That night a full blizzard descended. In all the advice he had been given before coming to America, no one had told him it would be so cold outside the hotel. Snow lay thick on the sidewalks, hurling itself at pedestrians with an arctic rage, riding the back of a fierce cold wind.

Abandoning the idea of sightseeing, he took the advice of the clerk at the reception desk and went to a bar at the top of a skyscraper. As the snow swirled silently outside the
enormous
windows, it was like being in a lighthouse. Into the storm the restaurant threw feeble and baffled rays, revealing nothing but snow, and still more snow, driving fast and
noiseless
down into the darkness and nothingness below. In fact, of course, there were streets and buses and even a few cars down there, but invisibly distant now. After two drinks Harold was overcome by an intense feeling of isolation and loneliness, and returned to the hotel for dinner. It was a depressing welcome to the continent.

The storm blew for two days, after which he was able to
emerge into streets unusually straight, with huge
snow-ploughs
moving slowly up and down, depositing vast mounds of grey wool beside the road, like the heaps of waste outside factories. From gratings in the street rose wisps of steam—from the subways, Harold supposed, uneasily. It was as though New York were built over a vast lake of boiling liquid, and at any moment one of the frail gratings might be blown into the air as the liquid erupted and appalling animals from the subconscious emerged lumbering into the light of real day.

He described this fantasy to the helpful young man from the dealers who had originally sold the Dangerfield portraits. He was tall, with very short fair hair and bright blue eyes, and he wore a large signet-ring on the little finger of his left hand.

He smiled a straight white smile, like Eddie Jackson’s, and said, “Well, I guess if New York’s built over hell, it won’t be for nothing. Some people call it New Sodom.”

Harold looked surprised.

“The great thing about this city,” said the young man, “is that everyone says it’s hell on wheels, but no one can ever bring himself to leave it. There’s everything a man could want here, if he’s prepared to look for it.”

He gave Harold a list of good restaurants, told him where to buy a thick overcoat, what bars and night-clubs to
patronize
, how to call a call-girl and other essential information, as he considered it. But although he was most helpful in this way, he was quite unable to help Harold with the portraits. The firm had had no further contact with the Dangerfield pictures after the original sale. The young man also paid an exaggerated respect to Harold’s mission, which Harold
considered
possibly mocking, though always polite.

“You Britishers,” he said, “you’re so wild about tradition. We really envy you over here, you know.”

Harold, who disliked tradition, but realized that this was not the time and place to say so, merely smiled.

But he liked New York, the crisp (though dirty) air, the hustle and bustle, the constant surprise of the skyline as he came round a corner, the bridges and enormous roads, the muddle of Wall Street and the rigid street-plan of the uptown districts. And he was glad to get back there after an
unhelpful
visit to Cincinnati. He had been welcomed by the Art Gallery, he had been shown the Holbein and the alleged Zucchero which had been bought from the 1929 sale, as well as the pictures previously donated: but of the remaining portraits the gallery knew nothing.

The auctioneers of the 1929 sale operated from a steel and glass skyscraper on 36th Street. Harold was given an extremely good lunch there by one of the partners, and looked out over the Jersey shore to the marshes beyond as he drank coffee afterwards. The auctioneers were able to help him
considerably
, supplying him with the names of all those who had bought pictures at the sale.

“I’m most grateful,” said Harold, as he left.

“It’s been a pleasure, Mr Barlow.”

Americans always expressed their pleasure at having been of assistance. It was both pleasing and unexpected, somehow. Harold had been taught to think of Americans as cut-
and-thrust
businessmen with little time for social graces. In
practice
he found them better mannered than the British. It was just one of a number of readjustments he had to make.

The biggest of these was to his sense of scale. As he
followed
the trail of the pictures across America he could hardly fail to notice the sheer size of the country, nor the enormous variety of landscape. America was not only big, it was also beautiful, as he discovered from long train-journeys through snow-stilled Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin on his way to Minneapolis; from air-trips to St Louis and Boston; from drives along the roads
designed
for driving to
Washington
and Cleveland.

The process of discovering the pictures led him to discover
a good deal about America, too. The sameness of which some Americans spoke—identical hamburger stands beside identical freeways—did not depress him with its supposed conformity: on the contrary, after the wildness and, by European standards, sparse habitation of America, it was something of a relief to an alien to find something he could think of as “typical” amidst so much variety. Suspecting that Americans might think him perverse in this, he made the mental reservation that Americans might be pleased by pubs
as
such,
in the same way that he was pleased by hamburger stands. It wasn’t an aesthetic question at all: more, perhaps, of a
process
of adaptation.