As Far as You Can Go (26 page)

Then he wrote to Dennis and told him about both of them, and about Eddie Jackson. Then he went to bed.

Next morning there was a letter from Mrs Bannister of Denver. She hoped Harold would come to look at the picture very soon, as she and her husband would be going to Europe in June and wouldn’t be back till September.

He read the letter twice, wondering what he ought to do. It was the second letter he had had from Denver in the last two weeks. Mrs Bannister seemed to be in a hurry. He
certainly
ought to go there as soon as possible and settle the fate of the last full-size picture.

He rang Henry Washburn and said that he had told Diane about the offer, and that Diane might or might not tell Mrs Washburn about it. He hoped not, but there was nothing he could do about it, and meanwhile, why didn’t Henry go ahead and try, anyway? Washburn said he’d do that. But he also gave a little light laugh when Harold said, “I hope you get it, Mr Washburn.”

“I doubt it very much,” he said. “But it does seem a pity you should have come all this way for nothing, Harold.”

“It wasn’t for nothing,” said Harold.

Then he called Diane and said, “I have to go to Denver, darling. Shall I go today? I might as well get it done as soon as possible.”

“What for, Harold?”

“Another picture. How did you sleep?”

“I slept all right. Honey, you know what I think? I think I want a couple of days to think in.”

“It might be an idea,” said Harold. He wanted to see her again, he wanted to see her that very moment. “I love you, Diane. I don’t want to go away without seeing you.”

“Look,” she said. “I haven’t said anything to Grandma yet. I hate to say this, but I might stop feeling dizzy if I didn’t see you for a couple of days. You know—
reculer
pour
mieux
sauter.
That’s French. I was good at French.”

He laughed and said, “Right, I’ll fly today if I can get a ticket. Give my regards to your grandmother.”

“Don’t make bad-taste jokes,” she said, but she giggled.

Things had certainly come a long way in a short time.

“Well, try for me, darling,” said Harold. “I’ll call you as soon as I get back.”

“Do that,” she said. She sounded relieved.

“You’re not glad I’m going away, Diane? You’ve not suddenly decided I’m not a gentleman or anything, have you?”

“I don’t know about the gentleman bit,” she said. “But I am glad you’re going away—yes. It’s best to be honest, isn’t it? I want to
think,
Harold.”

“Do a little feeling, too,” he said.

She laughed, and he felt a little better. “I’m not
reconsidering
everything
,”
she said. “I think it’s good for people who imagine they love each other to be alone and think about it, don’t you?”

“Maybe,” he said.

They made cooing noises at each other, and then rang off.

There was an aeroplane that afternoon, and he
telegraphed
Mrs Bannister that he would be in Denver the
following
morning, ready for business. Then he booked himself a hotel room in Denver, packed his bag, and sat down to try and get on with
The
Ambassadors.
But he kept thinking of Mrs Washburn’s hands laid quietly across the jewel-box, and of Diane’s face, the tears falling, and of her body, relaxed at last, beneath his hands.

M
RS BANNISTER
was all smiles and helpfulness. Yes, she would be glad of the money, though she felt it was a shame the family had ever parted with the pictures in the first place, and it would be a marvellous gesture if all Americans gave back the pictures and furniture that rightfully belonged to English houses. The Anglo-American alliance was the basis of the free world, and sometimes in spite of the common language, misunderstandings did take place. A really
generous
gesture like that would show that whatever the surface disagreements of politicians, and she didn’t trust any of them, of either party, the two people had a common heritage.

“We should respect the British,” she said. “They gave us so much. And what do we give them in return? Ingratitude, and Marshall Aid. Well, I guess Marshall Aid’s a good thing. But we owe so much to England, Mr Barlow. England was the cradle of liberty. The home of Parliamentary democracy. We had a talk on Parliamentary democracy last week at my club. It was really interesting. Your country has a great past, Mr Barlow.”

“Yes,” said Harold. “But I’d say the future belonged to you in America. You talk about England in the past tense, you know.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Mr Barlow. I guess we do tend to think of England that way. With your
traditions
and all. Your cathedrals. But you’re not dead yet. You put up such a fight in the war, with that great man, that very great man, Winston Churchill at your head.”

“Oh, there’s life in the old dog yet,” said Harold. “But the lively people, the ones with vitality, they emigrate or they
sit at home and tell everyone how gloomy and second-rate
England
is. There doesn’t seem anyone on the other side, really.”

“Now, surely, Mr Barlow, Winston Churchill——”

“Winston Churchill is a very old man, Mrs Bannister. And it’s hard to think of Harold Macmillan or Hugh Gaitskell as men of quite the same calibre.”

“Well, you may be right,” she said. “Here comes Mr Bannister now. Right on time.”

Mr Bannister was a corporation lawyer and prosperous, but his wife, Harold gathered, was the one who had the big money and the lech for culture. Their house had a superb view of the Rockies, particularly now, in the evening, but one wanted to look at the things inside as much as the ones on the horizon. Among the Manets (three of them), the Renoirs (two), the Titian, the Tintoretto, and the alleged Van Eyck, the Dangerfield Lawrence seemed rather brow-beaten. But it appeared that Mrs Bannister was not quite as fluid in her assets as she looked. Her husband, Harold gathered, had been investing with a certain lack of caution recently, and she didn’t want to have to miss her trip to Paris, which was why she had written asking Harold to come soon.

She was a big woman with glasses that turned up
elaborately
at the ends of the frames, and her husband was small and white-haired. He spoke with a Southern accent. They discussed world affairs at dinner, and it seemed that Mr Bannister thought that if Richard Nixon didn’t win the forthcoming election, that would be the end of the western world. Democrats, it appeared, were all class-traitors, like Roosevelt. After dinner they watched the last of the sunset over the Rockies, and Harold felt a strong urge to be back where the sun would still be shining, in California. He told them he liked California very much, and found the climate delectable.

Denver, Mr Bannister retaliated, was the fastest-growing business community in the U.S.A. Mrs Bannister looked bored.

Next day they arranged for a dispatcher to collect and pack the picture. The day after, in response to Harold’s cable to Dangerfield, a large sum of money was deposited in the Bannister account in the First National Bank of Denver. The Bannisters asked Harold to dinner again, and looked rather sad at the gap on their walls, but the Jack Daniels bourbon was excellent afterwards as they stared, at loss for conversation, at another fine sunset.

The next day Harold flew back to Los Angeles. The
airport
was a long way from Beverly Hills, and as he drove there he wondered what had happened in his absence. No one was expecting him back so soon. He had been away exactly four days. His thinking about the general situation, far from clearing things, seemed merely to have muddied them.

When he got to the hotel he bought a paper and went to soak in his bath and see what had happened in his absence. Nothing. There was a teenage girl who swore she had been abducted by a movie star. There was another who was
declared
by her mother to be out of control. There had been a huge pile-up on the Harbor Freeway and six people had been killed. Someone accused someone else of political
corruption
. There had been a brush fire in the Hollywood Hills which had threatened a movie star’s home for a while, but it had been put out. The paper said it was the third fire of the kind this year and had been caused by a small boy
playing
with matches. There had been a hold-up at a liquor store and a policeman had been shot dead. In the world news there was no mention of England at all, except for a short humorous paragraph about something dull that had
happened
to the royal family: some council had painted some derelict houses on the route of a royal visit to make things look better for the monarch’s eyes. A school principal had given a lecture on the dangers of lung-cancer (to get back to the real news) to his school, and been pelted with
cigarette-ends
for his pains. Juvenile delinquency was said by an
authority to be on the upswing. The Dodgers had lost their third game in a row to the Pirates.

Thinking about the Pirates reminded Harold of the
evening
he and Eddie had gone to see Lou, and of the black leather jackets of Pete’s gang. Juvenile delinquency wasn’t on the upswing, it was on the rampage. But for overgrown juvenile delinquents like Eddie there could be no pity. He was a most peculiar man, one of those who assumed he could get away with anything and usually did. But he had a fascination, he’d read quite widely, if ignorantly, he didn’t let you settle down. And perhaps that was a good thing. With Eddie around the place you could never tell what might not happen next. The thing was not to let him be around the place too often. Harold hoped that he hadn’t taken advantage of his absence to go and see Diane. Not that Diane wasn’t to be trusted, but that Eddie and Diane should never have met in the first place. They belonged to different worlds, and both worlds were really of Harold’s making: his feckless London world, where he didn’t care what happened, and his Californian world where he did.

He hadn’t thought about it before, but it was true that he took things a good deal more steadily, more seriously these days. When he thought about Helen, which he tried not to, he wondered what kind of moral and physical lethargy he had got into to let that dismal affair linger on so long. It was all part of feeling so well here—of not having anything to get up for in the mornings except what he liked doing. No Fenway, Crocker and Broke. No bloody old Blackett. No Mrs Fanshaw, no Craxton Street. He rose to fine mornings and the thought of Diane, and the prospect of another tussle with Mrs Washburn.

He got out of the bath and dried himself slowly, in order to delay having to open the letter from Dangerfield which was waiting for him in the next room. It might say anything. Dangerfield might be winging his way across the Atlantic
right now. He might be dismissing Harold with a curse. He might be pleased. He’d certainly said nothing while Harold was in Denver. The only sign of life had been the money and a cable saying, simply, “Good work”. But then he wouldn’t have got the letter Harold had written by then, or would he?

It was no use delaying. He put on some sexy red underpants, which he had recently bought, and went to open the letter.

“My dear Harold,” it said, “I don’t know how to thank you for what you have already done. I am very glad that you have been able to identify the miniature at last. Don’t come home without it. That’s all I’ll say. Yours ever, Edward Dangerfield.”

Harold swore for several minutes, marching up and down the room and pulling at the elastic of his underpants. Then he went and lay down on his bed and asked for the Wash burns’ number.

Diane answered the phone.

“Hallo, darling, it’s me.”

“Harold! Where are you calling from? Are you in Denver?’’

“No, I’m back in Beverly Hills. I couldn’t stay away from you any longer, Diane. What’s new?”

There was a pause.

“I told Grandma about Uncle Henry.”

“Oh. Does that mean I can’t come up there any more?”

“Oh, no. She just laughed. Why don’t you come up and see her? Are you busy this evening?”

“Of course not. I’ll be up around five, is that O.K.?”

“Marvellous. Honey, I’m so glad you’re back.”

“Me, too.”

They made gurgling noises at each other and Harold felt better. Over his sexy red underpants he put on a pair of sexy black trousers, thoroughly unenglish in style and cut, and for top dressing he decided on a white shirt with a red
bow-tie
. He looked at himself in the mirror and was delighted.
There was nothing like the mountain air of Colorado for making one feel ready for a little advanced sex-play.

He was admiring himself and striking a few attitudes when the phone rang.

It was Eddie. “Hi, Harold, welcome back.”

“How on earth did you know I was back?”

“I get to know everything. Did you have a good trip?”

“Yes, thank you. I refuse to answer any more questions till you tell me how you know I’m back.”

“I guess you’re not the observant type, Harold. You
remember
a guy called Chuck? At that party?”

Harold searched for a face. Chuck was a vaguely familiar name, but it might well be “chick”.

“No,” he said, “I don’t. Was he the one that tried to rape me?”

“No one tried to rape you, Harold. What gave you that idea? You were raping Teresa, remember? Chuck was a guy at the party, anyway. And he does some kind of job around your hotel. And I call him once in a while to see how things are going. I’m kind of fond of Chuck.”

“Yes,” said Harold. “I seem vaguely to remember you saying something about that before.”

“Well, I just called him, and he said you were back.”

“O.K., O.K. Well, why did you call
me
?”

“I had an idea. You being an Englishman, you don’t really understand about America, I guess. Not the real America. I’ve got a piece of one hundred per cent real urban American culture to show you. I’ve written a poem about it, do you want to hear it?”

“Is it very long?”

“Yes, I guess it is. I’ll show you later. When do you want to go. Now? Tomorrow?”

“It’s a little late today, isn’t it? I’m going to see Diane soon. What’s the time?”

“Four o’clock. No, we couldn’t make it.”

“I thought it was nearly five.”

“You’re probably still on Denver time.”

“You’re quite right, I am.”

“You should never wear a watch. A watch ties you down to Time. There are more neurotics walking around because they think they’ve got to know what time it is than there are ex-virgins. Time is a figment.”

“All right. Shall we go tomorrow, then? We could take Diane. I’m sure she’d like to go. What is this one hundred per cent place called?”

“It’s called the Watts Towers. Now tell me you’ve seen them. I bet Diane hasn’t even heard of them.”

“I’ll ask her. Tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah. Around eleven, then.”

“O.K. Tell me, Eddie, what
do
you do for a living?”

“I don’t do anything. I just hang around. If I want a meal I go with a chick. They always feed you afterwards.”

“Good God,” said Harold. “All right, then. See you
tomorrow
around eleven.”

“Keep swinging,” said Eddie, and rang off.

Harold wondered what he was going to do with his extra hour. He looked for the Watts Towers on his street-map, and found a place called Watts, miles away, far beyond the
airport
. He assumed that the Towers, whatever they were (and they were probably just a block of apartments with nothing at all but glass, or no glass at all, or one of those gimmicks), were there. It was typical that Eddie had chosen something as far away as possible to go and see.

He folded the map up again and rang for a drink. One of the very best things about America was that they always gave you masses of ice, and in a gin and tonic they always put lime instead of lemon. Really well-iced gin and tonic with lime showed that people like Crocker were all wrong to think that the Americans had no sense of taste. He went into a quiet dream about American food and drink. There was the
meat, to start with. After a few months of American steaks, French cooking seemed simply a lot of sauce, very good sauce, admittedly, hiding not so good meat. He thought of rare steak, with a potato in its jacket the way they did it in Texas, with masses of sour cream and chives and bacon fried very crisp and chopped very small. His mouth began to water. Then there was American ice-cream. And then there was bourbon, to say nothing of Californian wine. You could buy huge quantities of the very cheap wine for practically nothing. It was fairly nasty, of course, but no nastier than that muck you called
vin
du
pays
and thought you were so smart to drink beside the road in France. And then there were the good ones, which were really very good. And then there were American vegetables. All those different kinds of squash. And the sea-food in New England and along the east coast and in the South. Why on earth did people in Europe think that Americans had no sense of taste? Mrs Bannister was right. A common language simply hindered things. When an American ordered steak he expected to get steak, and in Europe, on the whole, he didn’t.

He rang for another gin and tonic with lime, threw away his newspaper, savoured his drink, looked out of his window at the roofs of some houses which all looked very rich and pleasant, with swimming-pools and station-wagons, no doubt, outside the door, and everyone inside them complaining about conformity. Too bad, really. Better to conform in comfort than be individual in poverty.