Joshua Then and Now (37 page)

Wet snow had begun to fall before the fireworks display in the garden, but it did not detract from its splendor. Everybody oohed, everybody aahed. Catherine wheels. Exploding stars. Whooshing rockets. Sprinklers. Cracklers. Chasers. Raining comets. And, finally, the
pièce de résistance:
A rubber-booted Charlie moved out to light a long fuse attached to an elaborate frame, retreated, and a moment later everybody applauded; there were even some defiant cheers, as the unmistakable images of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip leaped and spluttered before they illuminated the troubled skies of loyal Westmount, a colony besieged.

In the opinion of some, this last display was needlessly provocative, considering the times. Izzy Singer sought out the
Star’s
society columnist and drove her into a corner.

“I’ve already got your name,” she said impatiently, “
and
Mrs. Singer’s dress. A sheath of cerulean blue printed silk.”

No, no, Izzy pointed out, this time he emphatically didn’t want his name listed among the guests.

A bad business, somebody else suggested. After all, Trimble’s neighbors did include a Parti Québécois cabinet minister.

“Oh, let him get stuffed,” Trimble said.

And then Trimble, who had seemed to be everywhere at once, was suddenly nowhere to be found. The lights dimmed and knowing guests began to giggle, explaining to newcomers that it was time for his number. One year, memorably, it had been “Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner That I Love London So.”

Wait. He’s really something else. Hilarious. Wicked. A card. And now, incredibly, he was sashaying out there, even as the Lambeth Walk played a fanfare. Garishly rouged, his cupid’s mouth smeared with lipstick. Wearing a wig. Trimble in drag. My, my. His gay nineties gown uplifted by enormous balloon breasts. Strutting in high button boots. The jowly, hard-eyed Trimble, leering at his squealing guests and singing in a cockney accent:

As the lights had dimmed, Joshua caught a glimpse of Jane burying her head in Kevin’s chest, in mock or possibly even real horror. But now, as the lights brightened again to appreciative laughter and applause, she was standing alone. Kevin had gone. And Pauline was not to be seen anywhere. Jane waved a hand at Joshua and drifted to a corner of the room, waiting for him to join her. “They’re in the library,” she said. “Having it out. About time too. You haven’t told me how lovely I look tonight.”

“I was saving it for a more intimate moment.”

“She can’t stand not being his games mistress any more. ‘Kevin take a giant step, Kevin don’t.’ If I were unkind –”

“If you were what?”

“– I might even venture that she’s somewhat chagrined to find him standing on his own two feet at last.”

“Don’t ever underestimate my wife.”

“Everybody’s getting into Coral. Abbott, Hickey, McTeer, the Friars … They were holding off, frankly dubious, but now they’re falling all over themselves to invest.”

“Possibly,” Joshua said, “nothing breeds forgiveness or makes Westmount’s heart palpitate quite so much as the smell of quick money.”

“Oh, but here comes Pauline,” she said, brightening, leaning over to kiss him tenderly on the cheek as she approached.

Pauline had been crying and wanted to leave immediately.

Once they were in the car, she said, “He’s buying a condominium downtown. A hundred thousand dollars. He’s looking at properties on the lake. Oh, and he and Jack are considering going into film
production. Something to do with tax shelters. He wanted to know if you had any script ideas?”

“Gee,” Joshua said. “Golly.”

“And lookee here,” she said, handing him a folded envelope, as they pulled up in front of the house. “Repayment in part.”

There was a check for $5,000, and a certificate declaring her the owner of another $5,000 worth of Coral shares.

“He says the shares are already worth better than eight thousand and that I should hold onto them. I think I’ll do just that, but you can have the check if you make me forget that I’m a mother of three tonight.”

G
OOD NEWS
.

The next morning’s mail brought a letter from his American publisher, suggesting the time could be ripe for another edition of
The Volunteers
, if only Joshua was willing to return to Spain to gather material for a new introduction.

The Volunteers
, eight years in the making, had finally been published in 1966. The Canadian edition had sold some six hundred copies; the American, nearly five thousand; and the British, more than three. But there had been a gratifying number of translations. Reviews had been surprisingly widespread and, for the most part, flattering. And, best of all, two weeks before the book was to appear in England, Pauline and the kids had presented him with an airplane ticket to London, so that he could be there for publication.

London, demented London, already pronounced swinging in 1966, the party in full flow.

Jean Shrimpton yielded to Twiggy; the Beatles to the Rolling Stones. Germaine Greer, reviewing a cookery book in the
Spectator-Consuming Fassions, A History of English Food and Appetite
– rebuked the author, Philippa Pullar, for saying “not a word about the charming practice of marinading fish between the vulvae to make a delicacy for a lover.” Which was a long way from the schmaltz herring Morty Zipper’s grandmother used to make for them.

Strolling down to The World’s End, once his local pub, the very morning of his arrival, Joshua was struck by the transformation of this once flaking street into the most saucy of boulevards. Tarted-up junk shops were now offering “antiques” at insanely inflated prices. The surly King’s Road chemist of blessed memory, the greengrocer and sweets shop proprietor who had struggled for years, realizing a small annual profit, had finally struck an unexpected bonanza, letting their leaseholds go for a ransom to Le Drugstore, boutiques called Skin, Just Men, or Take 6, and to frightfully in restaurants and clubs such as Alvaro’s and Dell’Aretusa.

Joshua learned that Alvaro Maccioni, the former waiter who ran both places, had appointed a committee of fifteen social savants to pronounce on applications to join Dell’Aretusa. Only the rich, only the famous, need apply.

“It’s not,” Alvaro told a reporter, “that I choose these people because I think they are better, but because they have things to talk about. The man who gets up in the morning and goes to the factory every day to produce some tool or something – what does he have to tell me of life? I have nothing against the poor devil, but you can’t make conversation with him unless it’s about football or women.”

Joshua had come to the King’s Road, at Margaret’s request, to take his godson to lunch. Murdoch’s boy Ralph. Ralph was in trouble at St. Paul’s. He had been caught smoking pot. Murdoch hadn’t helped matters any by telling the headmaster that he was a bloody hypocrite and that in any event pot would soon be legalized. Waiting for Ralph in The Eight Bells, Joshua leafed through one of the new magazines,
Climax
, that he had picked up in a neighboring newsagent’s shop.

For the sake of Ralph’s generation, Joshua, Murdoch, and the others had once won a famous victory. After Ypres, following the Battle of Britain, never had so many adolescents owed so much to so few libertarians. When our St. Crispin’s Day came, Joshua thought, we certainly held that thin red line. Writing intrepid letters to the
Times and
taking the stand as indignant witnesses, they had seen to it that the ban on one of the most tedious novels written,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, was lifted. And lucky Ralph’s inheritance was now
Climax, Forum
, and the porn flicks.

Ralph and his kind had not been raised on crippling Jewish, Calvinist, or Catholic lies. Self-serving lies. Unlike their fathers, they had not been shackled by the manifest hypocrisies of either church or synagogue. Ralph had been brought up to masturbate not in fear of being struck blind, but with pride in his stroke. There were no forbidden foods in his heritage. Or original sins. Liberated from a stultifying class system, he was attracted by a society built on caste. Which is to say, his was a free and questing spirit, impressed more than anything with the wisdom of the East, the inner peace he sensed among the swollen-bellied, starving masses of India. Ralph was also fascinated by pagan rituals. Although Joshua hadn’t seen him in years, he immediately recognized him as he came swaggering into the pub. Ralph had grown into a tall, gangling young man, with Margaret’s crooked teeth and Murdoch’s weak, squinting eyes and lank, unruly hair. He wore a velvet blouse, unlaced to the navel, bellbottom trousers, and sandals. He twitched, he bit his nails.

“Are you taking me to Alvaro’s, Joshua?”

“I’m not a member,” he said, telling him about Alvaro’s interview with the
Standard
. “Besides, most of the writers I know only talk about women or sports. And if it’s not that, it’s royalties. We’d never do.”

Joshua took him to a decent but unfashionable Italian basement restaurant instead, and there Ralph told him that he wished to become a writer. “But my father says I shouldn’t call myself Murdoch. He says critics would only compare my work to his, to my disadvantage.”

“Your father has many endearing qualities, but he can also be an oaf. Call yourself anything you like.”

“I don’t dig his stuff, anyway. You both write about how groovy it was to be born poor. But that’s superficial. All that kitchen-sink stuff has become a bore.”

“How were we to know?”

“And he’s writing very badly now. Margaret can’t get him the advances he once got. The Americans are no longer interested in him.”

“I understand that you’re in some kind of trouble at school.”

“Oh, shit, it was only pot. And they’re taking me back. They only throw you out if you’re caught pushing. Besides, Margaret smokes with her boyfriends. Or my uncles, as they once were,” he said, smirking. “I want to go to America.”

“Sure. Why not? But finish school first.”

“Can you help me get into films?”

“I thought you wanted to be a writer?”

“I want to direct my own scripts.”

“One of the few directors I know,” Joshua said stiffly, “began as a clapper boy. Are you willing to do that?”

Ralph’s smile was pitying. “Man,” he said, “but you and my father make a pair. You no longer work your way up from the bottom floor. Those days are past.”

“How do you get to direct your own scripts then?”

“You make yourself a reputation.”

“And how do you do that?” Joshua asked, paying the bill.

“I’m going to be in next week’s
Private Eye
. They found out about St. Paul’s and they’re giving me a mention.”

“And that’s a start?”

“Yes,” he said, grinning.

Before they parted, Ralph borrowed £10. Margaret had warned Joshua that he tried to borrow £10 here, a fiver there, from all her friends, and not to give him anything. But such was Joshua’s distaste for Ralph that he could not deny him.

“Thanks, Uncle,” Ralph said with a meaningful smile, and then he was gone.

At a dinner party the same evening, Joshua discovered that the lady seated next to him had just returned from Ibiza. Such a darling place.

Had she been to San Antonio, Joshua demanded, excited.

Yes.

Had she run into a German there? Tall, sorrowful. A Dr. Dr. Mueller.

No.

What about the Casa del Sol?

Good heavens, but there were so many hotels there now, it was difficult to remember the names.

In the morning, Joshua stopped at a travel agency on Sloane Square. “Is it possible for you to book me a hotel on Ibiza?” he asked.

Certainly, sir.

“The Casa del Sol,” he said.

But she could find no listing for it.

“It’s in San Antonio,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. I simply can’t find it.”

“But I’ve stayed there.”

“When?”

“Nineteen fifty-two.”

“Well now, that was fourteen years ago, wasn’t it? There have been a good many changes on Ibiza since then.”

Seething, Joshua turned into the King’s Road and promptly split his trousers down the backside. He tried to buy another pair, but in all the fabled boutiques of Chelsea he could not find a pair without bellbottoms. All at once, he was filled with a fierce resentment
against style-making London, the new, modish foolery. And his indignation was compounded by an especially mindless week, which had seen a new pronouncement in the
Evening Standard
by Mary Quant. Think pink, Miss Quant cooed, and suggested that next year’s clothes could do more to highlight the inherent loveliness of pubic hair. Furthermore, Miss Quant revealed that her mate diverted himself after a hard day at the office by trimming her own pubic hair into a heart shape, making her vagina a living valentine, so to speak.

Joshua retreated into the nearest pub, drank a large gin, and another, and another, and then phoned Pauline. “I’m coming home,” he said.