The Old Man and Me (5 page)

Weekends through October and November all spent with him at his college, and finally, the engagement ring. The diamond big as the Ritz, my roommate had called it. She always referred to it in that way. It caught on, became a kind of campus joke. That was a couple of weeks before Christmas vacation. And before the vacation came the Junior Prom at our college. And after that came the end.

I was all wound up now, carried away. I hardly noticed the changing of the plates.

“What do you mean the end?” interrupted C. D. “What happened?”

“My roommate. She stole him away from me. And it was easy as pie! It was Friday afternoon and she’d met him for the first time. She picked a fight with her own date, saw to it that he left in a huff, and then she flung herself upon the mercy of mine and that kept the three of us stuck together like glue for the rest of the weekend. That apparently was all the time she needed—”

(
Fascinating, but fascinating! I, the me, the real me, had forgotten all this until now. Wiped it out of my mind completely
.)

“It was the ring that got her!” exclaimed Honey to C. D. now with a sudden flash of perception. “My diamond ring—you know, as big as the Ritz? Up till that she’d been—well, as I said, she seemed so happy for me. But that ring changed everything. She couldn’t bear the sight of it. She kept on and on about it. She wanted to know how I could stand someone with such vulgar taste. She said she’d expected more of me than that I’d throw myself away on one of those joke Texans with a ten gallon hat and spurs and twelve identical sports cars. Every time I tried to defend him she’d point to the ring and say that anyone who would give me a present as vulgar as that must be vulgar himself.

“So you can imagine my astonishment when, upon finally meeting him, she managed to twist the whole thing around against
me
. I stood there, stupidly rooted to the spot, listening to her going on to him about how utterly unlike my description of him he was, how she’d been led to expect one of those joke Texans with a ten gallon hat and spurs and twelve of everything. I tell you I couldn’t believe what was happening. I didn’t know how to handle it. I tried denying it and I tried laughing it off but it was no use. She was on to something—something she’d caught from his letters: he was a big man in the West but he still felt like a little boy in the East. He could still be thrown by remarks like that. Well—that was the kick off, and somehow after that everything collapsed around me—” (I paused, half for effect, half to re-savour this extraordinary experience of someone else’s pain so completely taking over my own emotions. It was like being on both ends of a see-saw: half-for-effect, ping! Honey’s pain, pong! Ping! Pong! Ping!

“I don’t understand,” C. D. was saying. “What possible motive did she have for behaving that way?”

“None really, that was what was so awful. Or, at least, none that made any sense. Simply that she was seized with an overpowering urge to spend some time with a man who had that much money. Anyway, that’s what she said. Not that she even wanted to spend the money herself. She didn’t want anything. She just wanted to see how it was spent. It was apparently spent that Christmas, the two of them together, on dining and dancing at the El Morocco and the Stork Club and a string of orchids and she got disappointed—or disillusioned. Or bored. It didn’t last long, the two of them together. It meant so little to them both. I think that finally was what flipped me. That she did it out of idle curiosity And the last letter I got from him—it almost killed me—saying what he’d done to me had at last made him realize the sort of person he really was, that maybe he was never meant to be anything but a rich Texas playboy. Well, maybe it was true—you can see his picture in the papers every day now with a different movie starlet but the thing is we never got a chance to find out. Such a waste. And I loved him so much. You see, he was only
half
spoiled when I knew him.” Tears sprang to my mind, seeped down into my eyes and ran warmly along my cheeks. I didn’t brush them away until they began to tickle.

“So I went home for Easter vacation and I slept all day and I cried all night and somehow I never got around to returning to college. In fact I didn’t do anything for the next two years except sit around the house. And mope. Until finally I got myself up. And I came over here.”

(
Only you didn’t, Honey, I thought sadly. I came. And whatever became of you? Are you sitting there still?
)

Listen, dear reader, I know what you must be thinking, I can almost hear you now. “What’s going
on
for chrisakes? Stories within stories and about her roommate yet. I mean Jeez, who
needs
it? Flashbacks are bad enough, but stories about stories, man, what is
that
?”

And I know, I know, but what can I do? That’s the way it was that sunny day in the rich, red-carpeted, high white-ceilinged dining-room of the Half Moon Hotel at 2.15 p.m. in the afternoon. I told my little tale and I swear, out of the corner of one eye—cunningly aslant (the other fixed sturdily but uninterestedly on the Filet de Plie Orly which discovered itself to be an old piece of fish with some white stuff on it), I gleaned a glimmering of one solid fact: the Old Man was definitely picking up on me, you dig? I mean he was flapping around. Half hooked.

Look: all I’m trying to say is that there comes a crucial moment in a relationship in which one person is moving towards the other—passing from stranger to acquaintance to something else—when (to be precisely
Précieuse
for the moment and get out Mademoiselle Scudéry’s
Carte de Tendre
that I used to study in French class) when one must make the perilous journey from, let us say, the
Ville de la Curiosité
to the
Ville de la Compassion
without falling into the
Lac d’Indifférence,
and C. D. made it via the tale I spun. No question about it, it was the Main Event of that lunch (far more than his waiter-baiting, for instance, of which there was a great deal more, like his handing his umbrella to the cloakroom attendant with a lordly “And refurl it for me, please”). And the reason it was the main event was because the guilt and confusion and melancholy I had felt in the telling, being genuine, added immeasurably to the quality of my performance, enabling us both to melt into an ecstasy of sympathy for the betrayed Honey.

C. D. was staring into space unconsciously tearing at the soft insides of the fresh new rolls, kneading them into pellets.

“Two whole years to get over someone as worthless as that. What folly.” His eyes trailed across the tables as though with a view to rearranging them. But it was his thoughts he was rearranging, for when he finally spoke again it was from the depths of one troubled soul to what I am sure he felt to be another. “It is possible,” he said with soft emotion, “that before our paths separate I shall owe you many things, not the least being the salutary effect you’ve had today of reminding me of my age—”

“Oh but I don’t think of you as being—” I began protesting.

“I mean, you remind me for how many layers of years the habit of cynicism has been drying and encrusting my sensibilities. I had forgotten that the young are still young where it matters most—in years. They are still new to experience.” He broke off and gave me his burst-of-sunshine smile. “How strange and delightful to be new to experience! But that isn’t very helpful to you, is it? I’m expressing myself badly. I’m trying to explain my shock—and mind, I’m saying this against myself, not you—my shock at having caught a glimpse of what lies underneath a nature I had thought remarkable mainly for its self-possession. As I say, the habit of years, my dear, can you forgive me? I’m truly touched by your rotten luck, believe me. You’re not eating?”

“Guess I don’t feel very much like it,” I said wanly. How did he think I could talk as much as that and eat at the same time?

“Mightn’t the Coupe Othello cheer you up? Have it, do. All children love ices for a treat, don’t they?”

I managed a smile and accepted.

“Good. Meanwhile I shall feed you up on quotations. How about ‘He that made you bitter made you wise’?”

“Who said that?”

“Can’t remember right now. Or, to paraphrase poor Dylan, ‘After the first deception there is no other’?”

I managed another smile less wan and looked away. Oh isn’t there, Old Man, oh isn’t there? Wait and see—the hostile thought had forced itself upon me but I pushed it firmly to the side before it was able to do any harm, gazed gratefully into his eyes, and our sympathy continued.

“The perfidy of roommates, the treachery of best friends,” C. D. spoke almost wistfully, looking down at the spoonful of chocolate ice-cream halfway to his mouth as if coming across some long-forgotten nursery rhyme. “Does it still go on?”

I thought of Jungle-gyms and slides on the school roof, of milk and crackers at eleven, lost mittens, and a tiny little girl in a green jacket, my “best friend” in first grade, and laughed outright.

“You were right about one thing,” I said with absolute sincerity. “You are wonderful with stretcher cases.”

And when we rose to leave there was a rapport as warm and comforting as my tears enfolding us. I felt for the first time since I’d met him a complete calm; the sublimely passive action of being borne unresisting along (back to the
Carte de Tendre
) the
Fleuve d’Inclination
into—ah but wait—into the
Mer Dangereuse
! For without warning, as we were passing through the lobby, he swerved us abruptly off course with so brusque a pressure of arm and body that I broke step and almost fell flat on my face as he hurtled me towards a side door where we gained a breathless exit into the street.

“What in the world—?”

“Someone I wished to avoid.”

“Who is she?” Out of its corner my eye had caught the striking image of a woman, tall, pale, and brooding, seated by herself along our intended path in the lobby.

He looked at me but quite without surprise, as if to show again how totally he was accepting me into his life. “Lady Mary Hare-Vermelli. I couldn’t let her see me because I’m not to know that she’s back in England. I didn’t,” he added, holding back nothing.

We walked along the pretty lane in silence for a while, and then I said, for there was no need to ask, “You’re in love with her.”

“Oh, everyone is!” he replied with a touch of exasperation. “Has been since her sixteenth birthday. She’s a Hare.”

“A what?”

“One of our great families. Old but impoverished. And so—”

“And so?” I encouraged him for the next thought seemed to have stopped him mid-air.

“And so they married her off to the wicked Baron Vermelli. It’s quite a fairy story. An enormously rich upstart whose father made shoelaces in Naples.”

“Golly, do those things really happen?”

“This is England,” he said, not without a note of pride. “Vermelli treated her vilely, I suppose you’ll be delighted to hear, ran through his money and had the appalling taste to die practically penniless. ‘Anyone can buy nobility,’ she said to me soon after, ‘but who can buy money?’ That, she felt, was the lesson her family ought to have learned from it all and she is determined they’ll not forget it. She’s turned her back on what’s called polite society and now takes up only with the most frightful cads, smugglers, and spivs, and I don’t know what, really dreadful types. Everyone’s terribly worried about her but she seems bent on having her revenge. I wonder who she’s—? Some gigolo, I expect. Pest!” He had stopped walking, shifted his umbrella and buttoned his portly frame into his overcoat. “I feel like a big fat house with everybody dead inside it,” he declared suddenly, looking quite haggard.

“We must comfort each other.” I put my hand on his arm, gently reminding him of my own sad plight.

“But of course! That is the reason we have been brought together.” He responded as quickly and joyfully as a child given back its lollipop. “I’d like another glimpse of that new Rolls I saw in one of the showrooms along Berkeley Square,” he said a minute later, quite happily tucking my arm in his as we made our way up South Audley Street, first stopping off at a National Provincial Bank (looking, I thought, more provincial than national) where he cashed a cheque I was able to count out as £50 before he pocketed the sum, and then continued onwards to Berkeley Square entering a showroom where large Rolls and Bentleys glistened and gleamed.

“Good afternoon, sir!” sang out the car salesman, springing forward zestfully, bursting with high-spirited gaiety.

“We’ve come for another look at that Rolls.” (
We
. So I was to be party to this extravagance too!)

“Of course, sir. Let me see. That would be our Silver Cloud, wouldn’t it? If you’ll step this way. We’ve moved her over to this corner to make way for another new Rolls,” he explained chattily as we followed. “Ah, here we are. She’s a real beauty, isn’t she?”

“I wonder if we might be allowed another peek into the luggage compartment. Want to be sure there’s enough room. Well, what d’you think, Honey? Come here and have a look.”

I found myself peering thoughtfully into an empty hole. What did I think? I thought nothing. I thought: this looks like an empty luggage compartment, so what? Luggage? What luggage—whose luggage?

“Umm—nice,” I said lamely. But then I realized he had actually called me Honey for the first time and I had plenty of thoughts about that.

He seemed satisfied and stepped back a pace or two the better to take in the car as a whole. “Nice lines,” he commented.

“Oh, lovely lines,” I agreed enthusiastically. “And lovely colours. Black and tan. Wonderful idea.”

“Let’s get in. I want to get the feel of the wheel once more.”

“Certainly, sir!” exclaimed the salesman. The slightest pressure of his hand set off the suggestion of a well-oiled click and the heavy gleaming doors flew open as we climbed up on to our great leather-upholstered high horse.

“And try those springs, Madam,” the man gleefully exclaimed.

“The springs?” I looked nervously over at C. D. from my corner of the monster machine.