Earthly Powers (82 page)

       "Talking," I said, "about Christian marriage—"

       "I've not thought about it," John said. "If that's what you mean. Not that I haven't," and he blushed. "I mean, it's expected. What do you think the other guys are doing right now except trying to get laid?"

       I was very pleased with him. I said, "As for money. It's pointless your having to wait till I'm dead. If you need money ... you three are all I have. Don't hesitate," I said.

       "Oh, there's the GI Bill of Rights. But thanks." He yawned. "Sorry. I wasn't yawning at that. I'm a guy needs a lot of sleep. The other guys laugh at me. No point in you waiting up for them. They're a good lot of guys. Mayer's a prick but he knows it. Tim McCreery has cinema coming out of his ears. He wanted trick camera shots, but Mayer said what we're doing is just recording history for posterity. Kind of pompous. McCreery taught me all I know about camerawork." He yawned again. "Sorry. Some day we'll do a classic anthropological movie. Female circumcision in the Upper Wangtarara. Stranger things have happened. Nothing's wasted." I sent him to bed.

       I woke next morning at eight to hear considerate whispers and padding around in socks. There was a smell that could not be muffled: fresh eggs and ham frying and coffee. I put on my endragoned gold dressing gown and went to the kitchen, where Mayer, McCreery and Schlitz, dressed but unshaven and crumpled, were dishing up. Wow, they said to the dressing gown. John slept still. Let the kid have his sleep. Chow ready, Mr Toomey. McCreery gave me vigorous information as he ate with his right hand, crumpling a piece of toast to crumbs with his restless left. Met this guy in a pub, USAAF colonel, taking a bomber back to the States tomorrow. Okay, he said, just hop aboard, plenty room, take off oh six oh oh hours, the base is at Orford, that's in the county of Suffolk, just ask for Jake Lyman and everything will be okay. Okay, there's plenty alternatives. You want passports? McCreery dug from his hip pocket three, of colours I had not seen before.

       "Where, if I may ask, did you manage to...

       "This one's Irish Free State, got into a fight with this big Irish guy in the alley next to this pub, where was it, Frank?"

       "Wasn't there," Schlitz said, chewing. "That was when I was off with this dame said she was Free Polish."

       "Polish, right, this one's Polish, you'd have to practice saying the name, look at it, for Christ's sake. It was this guy said he was diplomatic or some goddam thing. The other one I haven't seen before, some banana republic some place. You take your choice, Mr Toomey. This dame I was with, Baron's Caught or some goddam place, heard the trains all night, she said it was the Underground, hell, I said, that's no underground, she meant subway, a GI bride called herself, waiting for a passage, she had this British passport in her drawer, U. S. visa on it, but I thought hell that'd cause more trouble than it was worth, but there you are, sir, you make your choice."

       "It's awfully kind, really," I said, "but I think I'll have to do things in a more regular fashion. I lack your youth. I lack your freedom. But don't think I m not grateful. I take it you all had a reasonable night out."

       "Unreasonable," Lieutenant Mayer corrected, something of an intellectual. "Feast of unreason. We went our own ways and met at dawn in a coffee shop."

       "Lousy coffee," Schlitz said. "Not like this joe here."

       "London's okay," McCreery said sagely, "if you know your way around. Bulging with stuff. These eggs, that ham there. Went with this little dark guy, Lithuanian he said he was, to a garage some place. Crammed with it. Very hungry for dollars, this guy. I tell you, you can fix anything."

       "A Lady Bloomfield," Mayer said. "You ever hear of a certain Lady Bloomfield, Mr Toomey? Quite a girl."

       And then John came in, tousled and near cracking his jaw with a yawn. He wore only an army shirt. He took coffee like the kiss of life, wordlessly. John Campion, predestined martyr.

CHAPTER 58

It was not until after Vi Day that I was able to leave for New York. Warner Brothers in Burbank, in the talking person of a man called Buzz Dragon, came up with the notion of three or four little films based on short stories I had written, bound together into a whole called Troika or Foursquare or something, depending on number, with myself not only scripting but also linking the elements with a few well-chosen words. There had been a change of government in Great Britain. The old gang, led by Churchill, was out. The new world was for the workers, and I, as I loudly proclaimed in the corridors of bureaucracy, was one of them. I had the right to get out there to the States and start earning dollars, part of the export drive. The new world was also the world of the atomic bomb, and the prospect of everything blowing up fairly soon seemed to have a quietening effect on those official forces that might otherwise on principle have opposed my getting a new passport and an American visa and a passage on the Aquitania, New York outward bound from Liverpool.

       There were a lot of GI brides. There was also the Archbishop of York, quondam Bishop of Gibraltar and later Bombay. He had not changed much. Thin and boyish, his unthinning silver hair looking like an allochrome of blondness rather than grey, he greeted me cheerfully in the bar and said, "I take it you were first to get the news?"

       "What news?"

       "Milan has a new archbishop."

       "Ah."

       "It was on the radio this morning. They had it on in the breakfast room at that damnably grimy hotel. Why is everything so damnably grimy here? Look at that monstrosity of a Liver Building. The news, yes, not as important as computing the casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and naturally jazzed up a bit. Bishop Campanati, burly cigar-puffing freedom fighter who spat on the fascists and snapped his fingers at the Nazis. Very popular choice, one gathers. I suppose the red hat will come through at the next consistory."

       "I'd better go to the radio room. Send off a congratulatory cable. How are you, by the way?"

       "How am I?"

       "Do you still have trouble remembering the Athanasian Creed?"

       "What a memory you have, Toomey. That must be all of twenty years ago. A lot's happened since then, ah yes. Pretty little things, aren't they?" He meant the sororities of GI brides with their gum and nylons. "One of the functions of war, the promotion of exogamy. Biology moves in a mysterious way. You going stateside to lecture, film?"

       "Film."

       "I'm attending an international conference at Washington. On birth control. And these deliciously vulgar little creatures here are travelling in the service of natural increase. Their wombs are already at work manufacturing the postwar generation. Look at that one there, six months gone if she's a day. Ill-timed, this conference, when you consider how hard the major Malthusian check has been operating these last years. Millions dead, Toomey, scores of millions." He beamed.

       I had in my tweed jacket pocket a paperback edition of Thoreau's Walden. I took it out and flicked through it. "Listen," I said and read: "There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organisations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood."

       The archbishop did not now beam. "Rained flesh and blood, eh? Strong appetite and something or other health. Hm. A bit too eupeptic for my taste, Thoreau. Talking about the raining of flesh and blood, I heard some talk at high levels of your writing the big definitive book on the concentration camps."

       "That was Churchill's idea. But I don't have to bother now. The old bastard's out of office."

       "Weeping all the time at the ingratitude of the British people, they tell me. Emotional lability, Toomey, very embarrassing."

       "From now on," I said, with a sudden anger that surprised me, "I write books for myself only. You remember a particular book I was bludgeoned into putting together about the New Christianity? You were there, vox and nothing else like the nightingale, and Carlo bullfrogging back at you."

       "The great synthesis," he said with great sincerity. "We're on our way toward it, Toomey." He looked kindly again at the pretty lower-class girls who, as the ship boomed its first warning of leaving, prepared to enter the classless comity of the New World. Their accents were eclectic film American: one girl seemed to believe that the Bogart lisp was part of the general phonemic inventory, another had made herself Bette Davis southern jezebel. They would do all right over there. "We have to think," the archbishop said, "of the generation they and their coevals everywhere in the West are going to bear. The adolescents of the early nineteen-sixties. The new faith will be for them." I did not know at the time that my niece Ann, in an apartment on West End Avenue, was now quick with one of those adolescents.

       When we arrived at New York I went, straight after clearing customs, to the Algonquin Hotel. I would not claim as of right a room in my own flat, since Hortense must now regard it as hers. After a couple of whisky sours in the Blue Bar I walked up Fifth Avenue. The September heat was intense and the air was all woollen shirts aboil. The town was full of jumbo steaks and ice cream, the shops pleaded that we buy useless gadgets. This was not Europe. This was very far from being Europe. Victory in Europe and Asia confirmed the excellence of the American way of life. Strong appetite and inviolable health. The afternoon sun was higher here than in any town of Europe, forced upwards by the skyscrapers. The place was rife with life. The question punched me as I waited at a crossing, watching large cars rife with cheap gasoline hurl toward the East River or the Hudson: where was I now to live? Not England, no, not ever again. Look, we have come through. The world offered itself to me and I drew back from its giant tray of rich pastries. I was fifty-five, not too old, and a reasonable working life stretched before me, but I felt timid, dusty, a failure, unloved and unloving. And now, as I entered the apartment block and told the uniformed concierge I had come to see Mrs Campanati, I began to tremble.

       "Mrs Camper Neighty. Yes sir. Tenth floor. Number one oh fahve."

       I rang the bell, trembling worse, and the door was opened by a black woman who radiated warmth like a stove. "Dorothy?" I said with caution. "Dotty? I'm her brother."

       "You don't have to tell me, Ken. Just great to see you, great. Come right in." She was a very lovely woman in her late thirties, in a silk dress of screaming scarlet that would have etiolated a white woman to bled veal. Her hair had been straightened but lacquered to a becoming complication of billows and puffs and curlicues. Black is no colour, merely a brutal politico-racist abstraction, and it was the texture of her skin that struck before its indefinable hue, or rather was inseparable from it, the pleasure of the sight of it only, one knew, to be completed by the most delicate palpation: as if honey and satin were one substance and both alive and yet sculpted of richest gold. Hortense, I felt, should take to painting and devote her life to the exact rendering of this glorious creature's beauty. And now, in the salon that was not the salon I had known before the war, here was Hortense.

       She was dressed simply in a beige suit of kneelength flared skirt, low hiplength jacket with elbowlength sleeves, tailored belt with long gold buckle, welt pockets, tailored collar and revers. Her elegant legs were skinned in bronze nylon. I dared to look at her face. It was the left eye that had gone. She wore over the hollow a pad that matched her suit and wore a melleous wig with a tress flowing down to her cheek. I held out my arms, my eyes flooded. I grasped her, hugged, kissed her cold lips, sobbed my darling my darling. "Leave you two a while," Dorothy said. "Bring you some tea, real British style hot and strong in say ten minutes, okay?" Okay okay. Hortense held me loosely. She gave off a whiff of patchouli but also of raw gin.

       "I tried the moment I got Ann's letter. I went on trying. They made the war being over an excuse for not letting me go. My dearest sweetest darling girl, what have they done to you?"

       "What do you mean, they? I did it myself, didn't I? You always did talk wet, Ken Toomey." And she not only suffered my embrace but returned it keenly. I knew the first solid sexual response for years to a stimulus not merely imagined. She led me to a long russet couch with tossed humbugpatterned cushions. We sat close, my arm loosely about her waist. I took in distractedly deep grassgreen carpeting, Calder mobiles turning sluggishly in the conditioned current, her own metal sculptures of attenuated epicene bodies. The hard Manhattan afternoon light was on her, no longer a young woman, in her mid-forties, the chin thickening charmingly, the skin above and below the eyepatch puckered. She was hurt, aging, in need of protection, so my glands told me. She said, "What have they done to you? You're so grey."

       "Worrying about you." Distractedly, photographs of John in uniform on a white baby grand piano, probably Dorothy's. The noise of cups in the kitchen. Beefeater gin on the bar. "God, you're all I have." I had a base desire to see the inert horror under the beige shade, the shrivelled lids closed on nothing. My glands spoke of this desire. Jews in the ovens in Europe, corpses with stick limbs ploughed under, now this. It was of the same order, it provoked the same hopeless anger. "My dear angel. And I still don't know how it happened. Ann's letters just talked of an accident, very vague." I felt a shudder under my hand.

       "There's no point in going over it. It happened. Worse things have happened to others. Call it my contribution to the war." The voice was harder than I had known, and not only in stony reaction to long floods of wholly just self-pity, also roughened with gin and smoke, perhaps also assimilated to New York induration, the hardness of culture as well as of pain. She had no softness in her now; my embracing arm was discouraged. She leaned to the onyx cigarette box on the coffee table, a slab of marble set on piled thick slabs of black glass. I lighted up her Chesterfield with my gold Rocher.