Symposium (2 page)

‘Yes,’
drawls William, not that he drawls by nature; he drawls now, probably, because
he is bored. ‘But we didn’t get the bag back,’ he laboriously points out. ‘The
documents were the important things. Margaret lost her passport and her Mastercard,
we had to go to the Consulate. All that.’

Ella
says, ‘What a waste of your time on your honeymoon.

‘It was
an experience,’ William says.

‘Yes,
but not an experience you would go abroad to look for, not a welcome one,
exactly.’

‘Hardly.’
William looks across at his wife with a slight twitch of panic that says, ‘Will
she go on like this?’ But Margaret isn’t looking his way. The woman on his
left, Annabel Treece, is absorbed with her other neighbour, Brian Suzy, and his
woes. She has a high forehead, a square jaw. She wears a blue dress with
pearls.

‘Do you
live in London?’ William now says to Ella.

‘We’re
often in Brussels for my husband’s job but I’m hoping to find a permanent
London flat. I’ve now got a job of my own, teaching at London University. I’m a
geographer and a cartologist.’

After
all, she is no fool. No one at the table is a fool. Hurley and Chris always
give a lot of thought to their guests’ level of intelligence when they give a
party. William looks more happily towards his wife, who smiles across the table
as she lifts a forkful of salmon mousse. She turns her attention to Roland
Sykes, the young man on her left. ‘Perhaps’, she says, ‘there’s some good in
robberies.’

Young
Roland Sykes, his carefully silver-greyed hair cut short like a brush, says it
is difficult to see what good can come of a robbery unless it be to the thieves
themselves.

‘According
to some mystics,’ says Margaret, ‘the supreme good is to divest yourself of all
your best-loved possessions.’

‘There
is a difference between divesting oneself and being robbed,’ says bright young
Roland. ‘Leaving apart the utmost moralistic point of view, from any ethical
viewpoint being robbed involves some form of crime, whereas the voluntary shedding
of one’s possessions doesn’t.’

Roland’s
cousin, Annabel Treece, is attempting to console her neighbour, Brian Suzy, by
persuading him that the thieves who had broken into his house were mentally
defective, easy victims of drugs, and therefore more to be pitied than blamed.

‘Oh,
but they knew what they were doing,’ says Brian. ‘They would have done worse,
if only they had known the value of what they didn’t take.

They
left a Francis Bacon on the wall, for instance.

They
left my wife’s guitar.’

‘That’s
entirely my point,’ says Annabel. ‘What they don’t take, not what they take, is
significant.’

‘Perhaps
they felt a picture would be difficult to turn into quick cash,’ Brian says.
‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if they left the guitar out of solidarity with
their own generation.’

‘Well,
the fact remains that obviously they are of rather limited mentality,’ says
Annabel. ‘Or maybe’, she says, ‘they are history-blocked.’

This
puzzles Brian Suzy. Annabel, who is an assistant television producer, is
greatly given to philosophical and psychological studies, on which she spends a
great deal of her spare time. She has evolved a theory that people are psychologically
of a certain era. ‘Some people’, she now informs Brian, ‘are eighteenth
century, some fifteenth, some third century, some twentieth. All practising
psychiatrists should be students of history. Most patients are blocked’, she
says, ‘in their historical era and cannot cope with the claims and habits of
our century.’

‘The
people who broke into my house must belong to the Neanderthal era,’ says Brian.
‘They pee’d all over the place.’ He speaks testily, even nastily, for he has no
mind to make allowances for the robbers, and Annabel herself has no prettiness
at all to wheedle a kindlier tone out of him.

The
plates are being taken away and the next course is being served. The young
graduate helper enters, tall and graceful, dark-locked with a thin brown face,
eyebrows that nearly meet and very good grey eyes. He bears a serving dish of
plump pheasant, small sausages wrapped in bacon, accompanied by peas and small
carrots. Arranging the serving spoon and fork he begins to serve, starting with
Helen Suzy. He is followed by the regular butler with a red wine from Bordeaux
with which he fills the glasses. The young graduate, having served Helen, moves
round the table bending over each of the women in turn. He then, as he has
been bidden, serves the men from an identical dish which has been waiting on
the sideboard. By the time all have been served with pheasant and wine, the
regular manservant has produced on the sideboard a serving dish of sauté
potatoes. The timing is as it should be, whether anyone has noticed it or not.
But when the sauté potatoes reach Ernst Untzinger, a clatter of the serving
fork takes place. It falls to the floor. ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ says Ernst,
‘I can use the spoon,’ which he proceeds to do. But in reality this little
accident has been caused by Ernst attempting to touch the hand of the young man
as he serves.

Ella
Untzinger is by now talking across William Damien to his left-hand neighbour
Annabel Treece, yet not quite excluding him. They have dropped the subject of
the robbery and are discussing the question of women’s careers.

‘I had
to have a job. Even married women need a career, everyone knows it,’ says Ella
to Annabel. ‘You, at least, as a single girl, don’t have to pick up their
pyjamas, brush their suits and iron their shirts.’

‘Do you
really do all that?’ says William. ‘I’m jolly glad I got married, if it’s true.
However, I doubt —’

‘It’s
true more than metaphorically, very often,’ says Ella.

Annabel
says, ‘It’s exciting for a woman to touch men’s clothes. Psychologically
speaking, extremely satisfying.’

‘If you
love the man, perhaps,’ says Ella.

‘That,
too, of course.’

THREE
weeks before the dinner party at Hurley Reed and Chris Donovan’s
house, Ernst Untzinger was arranging flowers in the furnished service flat he
rented for his visits to London from Brussels.

‘Ella’,
he told the young man who was sitting on the sofa watching him, ‘as you know is
looking for a flat to buy. She needs to settle in London for her job. I think
she will commute between here and Brussels, perhaps even alternating with me.
It’s rather an interesting situation. Ella loves irises with roses. If you can
get them they go very well together.’ He had come to the end of what he had to
say, but as the young man did not speak, he hummed the beginning of a tune. He
then said, ‘You know, Luke, Ella and I are really fond of each other. We met
when she was sixteen and I nineteen, after all. She comes from Manchester,
like me.’

Luke
said, ‘Ella’s a real fine woman. I wouldn’t deny it for the world.’ Luke was
doing a postgraduate course at London University having graduated from
Rutgers in the United States. His home was New Jersey. He had always found his
education through grants, and made his spending money by serving at table in
restaurants and private houses several evenings a week. He would be serving
three weeks hence at the dinner in Islington given by Chris Donovan and Hurley
Reed.

A key
sounded in the lock: ‘Hallo,’ said Ella. ‘Oh, hallo, Luke,’ she said. ‘What
lovely flowers. ‘Ella was tall, well-groomed, with her shiny, very fair blonded
hair hanging loose about her long face. She had small blue-grey eyes. Her age
was forty-two. She was obviously very pleased to see good-looking Luke. She
kissed both him and Ernst, who exuded a great deal of good humour on her
arrival.

It was
Ella who had introduced Luke to Ernst when a few months ago she had asked him
to supper in their rented flat; she had met Luke in the university library.
Ernst had arrived from Brussels that night. The young man appealed to Ernst, in
fact amused him, especially by his way of boasting about some of his perfectly
banal academic achievements at the same time as he was positively retiring on
the main question about which he could justifiably have put on airs: his
courage and independence in putting himself through his universities.

Ernst
was tall with partly grey hair, thick black eyebrows, rather glittering eyes so
dark that it was difficult to see what colour. He had a good, wide mouth, a
newly grown grey beard, a longish nose. It added up to good looks. He was
forty-five. He had thought at first that Luke was sleeping with Ella during
those odd days and weeks when she came to London on her own, leaving him in
Brussels. He had not greatly minded since he had thought it would be, anyway,
understandable. Now he thought it only, barely, possible that Luke could be his
wife’s lover since the young man showed such a decided disposition towards
himself.

‘We
should be careful not to spoil him,’ Ella said when Luke had become a very
constant visitor, especially during her husband’s absences.

Ernst
said, ‘Don’t give him money.

‘I
won’t. He hasn’t asked for any,’ said Ella.

‘Good.
Give him a drink, a meal, it’s quite enough. Let him lay the table and wash
up.’

‘He
generally does that. I’m hoping he’ll help me to look for a flat.’

Ernst
and Ella had one child, a daughter, recently married and now living in New
York. Luke was, in a way, filling the gap that she had left. Ernst, so clever,
so good at languages, with his Continental connections, preferred his life in Brussels,
but since Ella had determined to follow a career in London he was fairly happy
to see Luke on his London visits which sometimes lasted as long as a week.
Fairly happy the first month of their meeting and now, at the end of the second
month, he was becoming strangely delirious. The old madness, the old excitement
was affecting Ernst, all he did and thought, there lurking at the back of his
mind: young Luke; at those serious meetings and conventions, at those private
business lunches: young Luke. I am mad about him, mad, thought Ernst, slashing
on his seat-belt and driving away from Heathrow through the traffic towards
Luke, with Ella there also, in and out of the furnished flat: ‘What lovely
flowers.’ Sometimes they telephoned down to room-service for their meal,
sometimes they prepared it there in the flat’s galley-kitchen and ate it at the
kitchen counter.

‘Stay
for supper,’ said Ernst to Luke.

‘I
can’t,’ said Luke, looking at his watch. ‘I’m booked for a party, helping
behind the buffet, eight to twelve.’

‘How do
you get through your studies with all this evening work?’ says Ella.

‘I
don’t need to study much,’ Luke said. ‘It’s enough I attend the lectures. I
recall everything. A matter of a good brain.’

‘Well,
I admire you for doing these jobs,’ said Ernst. ‘Not all young people would do
it.’

‘A good
brain …’ mused Luke, admiring his own reflection in the deep pool of his
mind’s eye.

He was
far away from Ernst’s moral approbation. He was drinking a beer from a can.

Ella
left the room to take off her outdoor things. She came back in her blouse and
trousers, having changed into a pair of bright green shoes with four-inch
heels. Luke looked again at his watch. ‘I have to go.’

‘Oh,
what a lovely watch! It’s new, isn’t it?’ Ella said.

‘Fairly,’
said Luke. He kissed her, waved across to Ernst, and left.

Ella
took a dry martini. She sat down beside Ernst on the sofa. ‘Well!’ she said.
She leaned forward to arrange an iris better in the vase.

‘Well,
what?’ said Ernst.

‘The
watch,’ she said. ‘Patek Philippe.’

‘It
looked expensive,’ he said, tentatively, watching her.

‘You
should know,’ said Ella.

‘I do
know,’ said Ernst. ‘And no doubt you know better.’

‘You
gave him that watch, Ernst.’

‘No, I
imagined you did,’ he said.

‘I did?
You thought I did?’

‘Well,
didn’t you?’ he said.