The Loved One (2 page)

“We had an unfortunate case some years ago of a very decent young fellow who came out as a scene designer. Clever chap but he went completely native—wore ready-made shoes, and a belt instead of braces, went about without a tie, ate at drugstores. Then, if you’ll believe it, he left the studio and opened a restaurant with an Italian partner. Got cheated, of course, and the next thing he was behind a bar shaking cocktails. Appalling business. We raised a subscription at the Cricket Club to send him home, but the blighter wouldn’t go. Said he liked the place, if you please. That man did irreparable harm, Barlow. He was nothing less than a deserter. Luckily the war came. He went home then all right and got himself killed in Norway. He atoned, but I always think how much better not to have anything to atone for, eh?

“Now you’re a man of reputation in your own line, Barlow. If you weren’t you wouldn’t be here. I don’t say poets are much in demand but they’re bound to want one again sooner or later and when they do, they’ll come to you cap in hand—if you haven’t done anything in the meantime to lose their respect. See what I mean?

“Well, here I am talking like a Dutch uncle while the missus is waiting for her dinner. I must toddle. So long, Frank, I’ve enjoyed our talk. Wish we saw you more often at the Cricket Club. Good-bye, young man, and just remember what I’ve been saying. I may look like an old buffer but I know what I’m talking about. Don’t move, either of you. I can find my way.”

It was quite dark now. The head-lamps of the waiting car spread a brilliant fan of light behind the palm trees, swept across the front of the bungalow and receded towards Hollywood Boulevard.

“What do you make of that?” said Dennis Barlow.

“He’s heard something. That was what brought him here.”

“It was bound to come out.”

“Certainly. If exclusion from British society can be counted as martyrdom, prepare for the palm and the halo. You have not been to your place of business today?”

“I’m on the night shift. I actually managed to write today. Thirty lines. Would you like to see them?”

“No,” said Sir Francis. “It is one of the numberless compensations of my exile that I need never read unpublished verses—or, for that matter, verses in any condition. Take them away, dear boy, prune and polish at your leisure. They would only distress me. I should not understand them and I might be led to question the value of a sacrifice which I now applaud. You are a young man of genius, the hope of English poetry. I have heard it said and I devoutly believe it. I have served the
cause of art enough by conniving at your escape from a bondage to which I myself have been long happily reconciled.

“Did they ever, when you were a child, take you to a Christmas play called
Where the Rainbow Ends
—a very silly piece? St. George and a midshipman flew off on a carpet to rescue some lost children from a Dragon’s country. It always seemed to me a gross interference. The children were perfectly happy. They paid tribute, I remember, of their letters from home, unopened. Your verses are my letters from home—like Kierkegaard and Kafka and ‘Scottie’ Wilson. I pay without protest or resentment. Fill my glass, dear boy. I am your
memento mori.
I am deep in thrall to the Dragon King. Hollywood is my life.

“Did you see the photograph some time ago in one of the magazines of a dog’s head severed from its body, which the Russians are keeping alive for some obscene Muscovite purpose by pumping blood into it from a bottle? It dribbles at the tongue when it smells a cat. That’s what all of us are, you know, out here. The studios keep us going with a pump. We are still just capable of a few crude reactions—nothing more. If we ever got disconnected from our bottle, we should simply crumble. I like to think that it was the example of myself before your eyes day after day for more than a year that inspired your heroic resolution to set up in an independent trade. You have had example and perhaps now and then precept. I may have counseled you in so many words to leave the studio while you could still do so.”

“You did. A thousand times.”

“Surely not so often? Once or twice when I was in liquor. Not a thousand times. And my advice, I think, was to return to Europe. I never suggested anything so violently macabre, so Elizabethan, as the work you chose. Tell me, do you give you new employer satisfaction, do you think?”

“My manner is congenial. He told me so yesterday. The man they had before caused offence by his gusto. They find me reverent. It is my combination of melancholy with the English accent. Several of our clientele have commented favorably upon it.”

“But our fellow expatriates? We cannot expect sympathy from them. What did our late visitor say? ‘There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn’t take.’ Yours, dear boy, is pre-eminently one of those.”

*

Dennis Barlow went to work after dinner. He drove towards Burbank, past luminous motels, past the Golden Gates and floodlit temples of Whispering Glades Memorial Park, almost to the extremity of the city, to his place of business. His colleague, Miss Myra Poski, was waiting for relief, hatted and freshly painted.

“I hope I’m not late.”

“You’re sweet. I’ve a date at the Planetarium or I’d stay and fix you some coffee. There’s been nothing to do all day
except mail a few remembrance cards. Oh, and Mr. Schultz says if anything comes in put it straight on the ice this hot weather. Good-bye”; and she was gone leaving Dennis in sole charge of the business.

The office was furnished in somber good taste that was relieved by a pair of bronze puppies on the chimneypiece. A low trolley of steel and white enamel alone distinguished the place from a hundred thousand modern American reception rooms; that and the clinical smell. A bowl of roses stood beside the telephone; their scent contended with the carbolic, but did not prevail.

Dennis sat in one of the armchairs, put his feet on the trolley and settled himself to read. Life in the Air Force had converted him from an amateur to a mere addict. There were certain trite passages of poetry which from a diverse multitude of associations never failed to yield the sensations he craved; he never experimented; these were the branded drug, the sure specific, big magic. He opened the anthology as a woman opens her familiar pack of cigarettes.

Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle.

“I wither slowly in thine arms,”
he read.
“Here at the quiet limit of the world,”
and repeated to himself: “Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world”… as a monk will repeat a single pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.

Presently the telephone rang.

“The Happier Hunting Ground,” he said.

A woman’s voice came to him, hoarse, it seemed, with emotion; in other circumstances he might have thought her drunk. “This is Theodora Heinkel. Mrs. Walter Heinkel, of 207 Via Dolorosa, Bel Air. You must come at once. I can’t tell you over the phone. My little Arthur—they’ve just brought him in. He went out first thing and never came back. I didn’t worry because he’s sometimes been away like that before. I said to Mr. Heinkel, ‘But, Walter, I can’t go out to dine when I don’t know where Arthur is’ and Mr. Heinkel said, ‘What the heck? You can’t walk out on Mrs. Leicester Scrunch at the last minute,’ so I went and there I was at the table on Mr. Leicester Scrunch’s right hand when they brought me the news… Hullo, hullo, are you there?”

Dennis picked up the instrument which he had laid on the blotting-pad. “I will come at once, Mrs. Heinkel. 207 Via Dolorosa I think you said.”

“I said I was sitting at Mr. Leicester Scrunch’s right hand when they brought me the news. He and Mr. Heinkel had to help me to the automobile.”

“I am coming at once.”

“I shall never forgive myself as long as I live. To think of his being brought home alone. The maid was out and the city wagon-driver had to telephone from the drugstore… Hullo, hullo, are you there? I said the city scavenger had to telephone from the drugstore.”

“I am on my way, Mrs. Heinkel.”

Dennis locked the office and backed the car from the garage; not his own, but the plain black van which was used for official business. Half an hour later he was at the house of mourning. A corpulent man came down the garden path to greet him. He was formally dressed for the evening in the high fashion of the place—Donegal tweeds, sandals, a grass-green silk shirt, open at the neck with an embroidered monogram covering half his torso. “Am I pleased to see you,” he said.

“Mr. W. H., all happiness,” said Dennis involuntarily.

“Pardon me?”

“I am the Happier Hunting Ground,” said Dennis.

“Yes, come along in.”

Dennis opened the back of the wagon and took out an aluminum container. “Will this be large enough?”

“Plenty.”

They entered the house. A lady, also dressed for the evening in a long, low gown and a diamond tiara, sat in the hall with a glass in her hand.

“This has been a terrible experience for Mrs. Heinkel.”

“I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to speak of it,” said the lady.

“The Happier Hunting Ground assumes all responsibility,” said Dennis.

“This way,” said Mr. Heinkel. “In the pantry.”

The Sealyham lay on the draining-board beside the sink. Dennis lifted it into the container.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind taking a hand?”

Together he and Mr. Heinkel carried their load to the wagon.

“Shall we discuss arrangements now, or would you prefer to call in the morning?”

“I’m a pretty busy man mornings,” said Mr. Heinkel. “Come into the study.”

There was a tray on the desk. They helped themselves to whisky.

“I have our brochure here setting out our service. Were you thinking of interment or incineration?”

“Pardon me?”

“Buried or burned?”

“Burned, I guess.”

“I have some photographs here of various styles of urn.”

“The best will be good enough.”

“Would you require a niche in our columbarium or do you prefer to keep the remains at home?”

“What you said first.”

“And the religious rites? We have a pastor who is always pleased to assist.”

“Well, Mr.—?”

“Barlow.”

“Mr. Barlow, we’re neither of us what you might call very church-going people, but I think on an occasion like this Mrs. Heinkel would want all the comfort you can offer.”

“Our Grade A service includes several unique features. At the moment of committal, a white dove, symbolizing the deceased’s soul, is liberated over the crematorium.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Heinkel, “I reckon Mrs. Heinkel would appreciate the dove.”

“And every anniversary a card of remembrance is mailed without further charge. It reads:
Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail.
”

“That’s a very beautiful thought, Mr. Barlow.”

“Then if you will just sign the order…”

Mrs. Heinkel bowed gravely to him as he passed through the hall. Mr. Heinkel accompanied him to the door of his car. “It has been a great pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Barlow. You have certainly relieved me of a great responsibility.”

“That is what the Happier Hunting Ground aims to do,” said Dennis, and drove away.

At the administrative building, he carried the dog to the refrigerator. It was a capacious chamber, already occupied by two or three other small cadavers. Next to a Siamese cat stood a tin of fruit juice and a plate of sandwiches. Dennis took this supper into the reception room and, as he ate it, resumed his interrupted reading.

W
eeks passed, the rain came, invitations dwindled and ceased. Dennis Barlow was happy in his work. Artists are by nature versatile and precise; they only repine when involved with the monotonous and the makeshift. Dennis had observed this during the recent war; a poetic friend of his in the Grenadiers was an enthusiast to the end, while he himself fretted almost to death as a wingless officer in Transport Command.

He had been dealing with Air Priorities at an Italian port when his first, his only book came out. England was no nest of singing-birds in that decade; lamas scanned the snows in vain for a reincarnation of Rupert Brooke. Dennis’s poems, appearing among the buzz-bombs and the jaunty, deeply depressing publications of His Majesty’s Stationery Office, achieved undesignedly something of the effect of the resistance Press of occupied Europe. They were extravagantly praised and but
for the paper restrictions would have sold like a novel. On the day
The Sunday Times
reached Caserta with a two-column review, Dennis was offered the post of personal assistant to an air marshal. He sulkily declined, remained in “Priorities” and was presented in his absence with half a dozen literary prizes. On his discharge he came to Hollywood to help write the life of Shelley for the films.

There in the Megalopolitan studios he found reproduced, and enhanced by the nervous agitation endemic to the place, all the gross futility of service life. He repined, despaired, fled.

And now he was content; adept in a worthy trade, giving satisfaction to Mr. Schultz, keeping Miss Poski guessing. For the first time he knew what it was to “explore an avenue”; his way was narrow but it was dignified and umbrageous and it led to limitless distances.

Not all his customers were as open-handed and tractable as the Heinkels. Some boggled at a ten-dollar burial, others had their pets embalmed and then went East and forgot them; one after filling half the ice-box for over a week with a dead she-bear changed her mind and called in the taxidermist. These were the dark days, to be set against the ritualistic, almost orgiastic cremation of a non-sectarian chimpanzee and the burial of a canary over whose tiny grave a squad of Marine buglers had sounded Taps. It is forbidden by Californian law to scatter human remains from an aeroplane, but the
sky is free to the animal world and on one occasion it fell to Dennis to commit the ashes of a tabby-cat to the slip-stream over Sunset Boulevard. That day he was photographed for the local paper and his social ruin consummated. But he was complacent. His poem led a snakes-and-ladders existence of composition and excision but it continued just perceptibly to grow. Mr. Schultz raised his wages. The scars of adolescence healed. There at the quiet limit of the world he experienced a tranquil joy such as he had known only once before, one glorious early Eastertide when, honorably lamed in a house-match, he had lain in bed and heard below the sanatorium windows the school marching out for a field-day.