I'm Dying Laughing (31 page)

‘Don’t say that, for God’s sake. That would put the cap on. There’s the toast burning.’

He had the mail open, including Emily’s letters, and he handed her her letters, commenting variously upon them. One of her stories had been rejected by a high-paying magazine, not funny enough. Another was a letter from Gordon Pymble saying that he was not accepted for a Wall Street press job which Maurice had suggested for him; but that he thought he could offer it to Stephen. Stephen’s experience was good, his reputation high, even thought his books were progressive, his family background so good that ‘even during the present witch-hunt’ they would like to have him. It was a mere suggestion; but he had happened, as a friend, to hear them complaining that now Stephen had no occupation and was troubled by it. Stephen just glanced at the letter and threw it aside.

‘Listen, darling, you might like this; just listen, darling, it’d be wonderful if you could work in Wall Street.’

‘Why? They wouldn’t take a man with my record.’

She cried, ‘Oh, damn and blast it, you can listen.’ Then she softened, ‘Poor old Gordon: it is decent of him. It’s 4.30 p.m. to 11. Bad hours of course, but still—you could drive home or get a room in a hotel. It’s a high-sounding title, Foreign Financial Editor. Not bad eh? You’d be the New York man. There are foreign financial correspondents in Paris, London, Tokyo—ah’hm, maybe elsewhere. And the idea is that the man in New York would co-ordinate the dispatches, edit the currency quotes, translate them into dollars, write a daily leader to go on the financial pages for financial events abroad; and of course, you’d be syndicated. Wow! A coast-to-coast name in Wall Street, that’s damn good. Your family would respect that.’

‘Thanks! You think that shnook Gordon Pymble knows what it’s all about? All he knows is that he didn’t get it.’

She stuck out a rebellious underlip. ‘Why, I think it’s decent of him. He’s trying to pay us back for helping him with the house and the money loan and Uncle Maurice.’

‘What a crawling bastard, trying to shove me into a desk job and thinking it’s wonderful. Well, I guess I deserve it. Who am I to criticize? Probably they all, including this masterpiece of slime, go about thinking I’m a snake, toad, living on my wife. Why not?’

She said gently, ‘Listen, Stephen, I know it sounds dull. I’ve done newspaper work and plenty. I’ve worked hard for a lot less than this and it’s the same pay as you got on the workers’ paper. It’s $90 weekly, chicken feed right now in NY financial papers, and damn cheap and low; and he says he knows it is a lousy outfit to work for, poor pay, rotten hours, no security, no gratitude, bosses hate you and treat you as Senegalese hirelings and—still Stephen, you wouldn’t be planning a career with them; it’s a dead alley, everyone knows it. I mean I know, darling, you know about eleven million times as much about foreign finance and finance in general and about general conditions than they’ll ever print; and you’ve got even a sort of knowledge of rewriting cables, making the deadlines, what? They couldn’t hope to get another man like you.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself. There are a hundred men in Wall Street who know more than me; who’ve spent their days there since they started at fourteen carrying packages, and know the Big Board standing on their head and can do arbitrage asleep, things I just know the names of. I don’t even know about stocks, and bonds. Even as a rich man’s son, I’m a failure.’

‘Oh, Stephen! I wonder if life is worth living. Our life, especially. You don’t have to stay there. Tell them you’re wildly interested and stay as long as you like.’

Stephen was absorbed in a letter; and merely threw Emily a postcard. She whooped with joy.

‘Oh, goody. And he’s a gourmet. Of course, we’ll go.’

It was an invitation from Uncle Maurice to a restaurant in town to celebrate the birthday of dear Anna, his sister, Stephen’s mother; and it was for the following evening. They expected a very lively cousin of Stephen’s, Lilias, and with her a famous English journalist; Maurice’s friend William; some other members of the Howard-Tanner family.

I
T WAS A RESTAURANT
for the rich, built in a horseshoe, with room for the floor-show. Everyone was there but Lilias and her escort.

‘She’s late as usual,’ said Stephen, ‘just to show she had a good many other appointments.’

‘I don’t think that’s very funny,’ said Anna.

‘No, I don’t either,’ said Stephen.

The others were drinking their cocktails. Uncle Maurice had been directing two waiters and looking at the wines and, after pinning a flower to Anna’s dress, he looked brightly around.

‘Well, we won’t wait for Lilias and Des. They’re at a reception at the Russian Embassy. It may be any time.’

‘The Russian Embassy? Lilias at the Russian Embassy?’ said Stephen.

‘Well, I know those, the mink coats torn in the rush for the caviar. And the caviar! Pyramids of the real McCoy piled in cutglass dishes the size of washbowls. They won’t leave till dawn. Ah, me. Gone are the days,’ said Emily.

‘Des? Is it Des Canby?’ said Stephen.

‘Yes.’

‘Des! Oh, marvellous,’ cried Emily, clapping her hands. ‘We haven’t seen Des Canby since the UNO meeting in 1945. Is he here? Why didn’t he call on us? Oh, he must come home and stay with us. He’ll tell us whether you can go to Europe and when.’

‘Lilias wants to meet you. She read Uncle Henry,’ said Maurice, politely, to Emily.

‘It gets me down the people who want to meet me because I’m selling stories by the piece or pound, like sausages. I’m always embarrassed with such people. I’m gladsome, I grin and all the time I’m thinking, I’d gladly choke you.’

‘Why should you feel that? Surely you like admiration,’ said Charlotte, the English cousin.

‘Now you help out in hospitals, voluntary work; why do you do that? Is it for admiration?’ said Emily.

Charlotte indifferently was eating hors-d’oeuvre. She took a little white wine. A thin string of diamonds which she wore only in the family ran softly round her faded olive neck. Emily’s eyes gleamed. She began to laugh, slewing her eyes at Maurice, who was dressed, slim and neat, by a French tailor. She said, ‘Then Lilias does not care for you at all, Maurice? You haven’t had a single best seller. Only an honourable mention in scholarly papers. And footnotes in the standard works.’

Maurice smiled and said in his discreet, chattering style, ‘Lilias asked me why I wasted my time on that old stuff. If I must write, why write about archaeology? Why not something modern? Something people are interested in, that would sell better. “Why don’t you write in the magazines, so that I can show my friends?” she said.’

Dr Edward Tanner, a cousin, said, ‘Well, you know, there might be something for you to do Maurice, about our most recent ruins. All Europe’s a ruin now. And plenty buried, bones and jewels. They’re all antiques now.’

Maurice did not like Edward Tanner. He said softly, ‘But surely, Tanner, Europe’s out of date, horse-and-buggy. You wouldn’t read about it.’

Edward drank his second glass of white wine, ‘Oh, surely, that’s wrong. I go to Europe every year when there’s peace, we visit the medical congresses and the British Association. Surely you can’t claim they’re wholly behind the times. I would lay it down as a general rule that Europeans invent but we manufacture, use, develop and apply. Take penicillin and radar and DDT.’

Emily objected, ‘Surely you can’t mean those has-beens invented penicillin and radar and DDT. Those are pure American inventions.’

Edward laughed and said otherwise.

Stephen said, ‘You read a Russian encyclopaedia and you’d find they invented them, no doubt.’

Emily said, ‘I can’t believe it. They maybe got some little angle. But Ed, the diagram of a steam-engine isn’t a steam-engine and the fantasy of Odysseus flying through the air, I mean Briareus—’

‘Icarus,’ said Stephen.

‘Isn’t aviation.’

But now Lilias and Desmond Canby appeared, and all began to rejoice.

‘Let’s have lobster mousse and more wine,’ said Maurice.

‘Oh, we have enough,’ objected Anna.

‘No, let’s have more.’

Emily laughed, ‘Quite right, what’s the purpose in moderation? What shall it profit a man if he eat a sour crust and gain a long snout? Oh, I should love to be joyous. Bless you, Maurice. It’s so miserable to calculate, cut corners, suppress, deny and yawn. It fills me with fury. What I have to take in humility, I give out in pure fury, pure rabid hate. Let’s have everything in quantity. Maurice, you know communists believe in that. They think the world’s a granary and why shouldn’t we all eat?’

Lilias, a big young woman dressed in white lace, said, ‘Like rats. They want to eat what doesn’t belong to them and what they didn’t grow.’

Emily burst out laughing, ‘Well, doesn’t the world belong to the rats?’

‘Rats are rats,’ said Lilias.

Emily said seriously, ‘Roaches are older than rats. I read somewhere that they are the oldest living things, ginkgo trees, too.’

‘Ugh’, said Anna.

They were serving out the lobster mousse. Maurice said, ‘Let’s see how you like this, Emily. I thought of you! Stephen, I never count on. He always has something wrong with him, but you’re the dream of a man who wants to give a banquet. Lobster mousse; later you’ll have chicken. I know you’ll stay the courses.’

‘And there’s the champagne,’ said Lilias.

Emily kept giving out creamy laughs, ‘Oh, I know I shall go out looping the loop. But I shall do justice to your splendid, poetic, wonderful banquet, Maurice. I love you, Maurice: you’re appreciated in this quarter. Oh, dear, if I am a sort of candidate for the tumbrils in the end, still it is worth it. I can see why they did it.’

‘Why are you a candidate for the tumbrils?’ enquired Charlotte.

‘Oh, dear, the company I keep. You dear people, in fact; and the things I eat. The workers will get me yet.’

‘You are a donkey, Emily,’ said Stephen, beginning to laugh.

‘Why, what are you laughing at?’

‘At the way you see an ordinary birthday party.’

‘Lobster and champagne. There was a time when I had them every night; but that was when I was working the fashionable restaurants. I see behind the scenes. Why shouldn’t I see both sides? Tumbrils coming and going.’

Emily began to laugh heartily, the three other women seemed less amused, and Lilias said angrily, ‘The workers in America are really just capable of anything, of any crime, to be greedy and lazy and I don’t believe you know what you’re talking about. I do. They’re vicious and dangerous and I think you’re crazy to go to these meetings and even go anywhere near them. I told Des so. You’re just children playing with fire.’

Edward Tanner said, ‘No, writers see, but they can’t do anything about it; so they fret about it more. We’re professionals, or people running businesses; we govern workers and it’s a practical problem every day.’

Emily said with admiration, ‘How ingenious! There’s a lot in that.’

Lilias said, ‘Well, take my opinion. I’ve met official Reds and people who know them. I know the embassy crowd in Paris and what they tell me would make your eyebrows turn purple. And Americans are bad enough but when it comes to Europe, especially the French, what they need is discipline, hard treatment. As soon as the Germans quit, the French start rioting again. They’re monsters and you’ve no idea of what goes on over there, in Belgium and France.’

‘She hears the tumbrils, too,’ said Emily grinning.

Charlotte said, ‘I don’t believe in tumbrils. The French had them but no one else will. I really see the people, more than you do, Lilias. I went all round England in wartime and for the most part, they’re quiet, too quiet and easy to deal with. Well, I mean the English people. I think it’s a question of dealing with them. They do anything we tell them to, in the main.’

Edward said, ‘The trouble is there are too many of them. It would not be a bad idea to spread a few biological diseases that would gradually weed out the weak ones. We need strong workers. Take places like South America, Puerto Rico. Get rid of them and start again. They are such poor stock, if all the money in the USA were turned to treating them, you’d get nowhere. With the US counselling and aiding, we should start again there. We could even send our own Negroes who have been reared here in the United States’ conditions and plant them there. We’d get rid of our problems and make South America healthier and easier to deal with. They’d understand us. Instead of sending all the State Department health visitors, the journalists and professors. They just get infected with the moral diseases down there. I’ve been down there with a medical party and I assure you there’s nothing to be done except to treat them as a museum of pathology. Apart from their clinical value for us, they have no reason for living. It’s not worth all the time it takes to go through medical school and all these years of experience to make a slight improvement in a case of yaws. It’s a waste of medicine and men. Let’s bomb them out with some germ easy to die with and restock the place. We can do it.’

‘By golly, Ed, I call you a regular Nazi,’ said Emily.

Charlotte wagged her head and fixed Edward with her deep, tired eyes. ‘I grant this biological warfare has its uses. Why not wipe out all the germs that are no good, that our children can catch, infantile paralysis and diphtheria and whooping cough, lice and roaches. Why I think it’s degrading for us to let them live. You could wipe out the ants and bugs, but other people, Edward, I wouldn’t subscribe to that. Even the Nazis didn’t do that; well, not entirely.’

‘If you wipe out people where do you stop?’ enquired Emily loudly.

‘What I like about you communists is you’re such romantics, it’s the human race first last and always, even criminals and diseased natives,’ said Lilias furiously. ‘And then you parlour reds, like Des and you and Stephen, you make things worse by letting them think they have friends among decent people; that gives them encouragement. I don’t know what the FBI is doing. I don’t sleep at night. I wake up, get into a sweat and walk up and down. I wonder what the hell it’s all about. I wonder if I’m crazy or you are. Look, you kids don’t know, that’s all, what the workers are like. They like the way they live. You give them more money, they spend it on drink and joy-rides. They don’t want to live decently like us; it would kill them.’