As if by Magic Read online

  “Yes, she is lovely looking, our Ally, isn’t she? And as to all this,” Zoe copied Concepcion’s gesture, “I’ve got more than enough for two. Anyway the young men don’t like it. But sleep! Dear Concepcion, I really truly am grateful to you for loving Alexandra. But I’m not a careless mother. Honestly, truly. Sleep! That’s the last thing you want at that age. With all the reading to do for her finals. And she has to fit that into travelling with this mime show. And talking! All the talking that we did at Cambridge! Sleep! Did you sleep at that age? Yes, well, of course you did. With all that back-breaking work in the fields and getting up at five. But I’m sure Manuela doesn’t want to sleep much. Manuela no quere dormire. What do they tell you about Manuela in the dancing class?”

  “Lady teacher say very good, but afraid Manuela grow so big, too big to dance.”

  Now this really was serious; not the sort of undergraduate nonsense of Alexandra’s mimes. Here was a girl, a possible Fonteyn—the school had committed itself, when she had agreed to pay the fees—and growing in the extraordinary way that talent did out of such utterly dusty soil. It was a classic case and neglect would be criminal. She paused in her dripping of the oil into the mayonnaise. She frowned. To stop growth. It was such a hideously ironic need in this stock stunted by centuries of bad feeding. Nor was it easy to see what could be done. Yet medical science these days . . .

  “Look, you’re not to worry, Concepcion. I’ll talk to Dr. Powlett. There must be something they can do with hormones. Oh, Lord, who would have children?”

  But thinking of how few she had had and how many Concepcion, she turned to more general things.

  “I think your church soon agree with birth control. Very good. We have two Catholics on the Clinic committee. They really do seem hopeful.” And, as Concepcion did not respond, she explained, “Pope agree you use pill.”

  Concepcion said, “No,” and added, “Priest tell.”

  But Zoe, thinking now of something more important for a woman of Concepcion’s age, went briskly from the room and returned with a small pink card.

  “There,” she said, “you put name here. I arrange you go to Clinic this month.”

  “What for card?”

  “They give you test. Not worry. All women our age must have test.”

  She saw no way of easily and quickly explaining cervical smears.

  Concepcion said, “I ask Carlos.”

  To forestall this, Zoe opened a dresser door, and put the card on a shelf with some seldom-used liqueur glasses.

  “We talk next week.” But she feared for the survival of the card, since Concepcion, to whom the order of her kitchen was paramount, was eyeing its place among the glasses with much disapproval.

  Zoe finished off the mayonnaise.

  “Will you pack everything, please, Concepcion. Oh, and put the pieces of pheasant on the top where Mister can get easily. I drive. Mister eat in car.”

  She smiled as she foresaw Perry’s greedy, greasy, bone-picking. “Now I must go pack suitcases. Alexandra’s godfather’s coming. Mr. Langmuir,” she explained.

  “Ah! Mr. Langmuir! Good man.”

  Concepcion had been told once of Hamo’s work on cereals for the developing countries.

  “Yes,” said Zoe, submitting to a certain Topsy Eva tone to sustain this valuable ethical point, “Mr. Langmuir make rice in Concepcion’s home very big.”

  “No rice in Galicia.”

  The agronomic lesson was delivered firmly but kindly. “Well, whatever crop you do have. Mr. Langmuir go now all round world, making bigger crops.”

  She stored up the image to tease Hamo out of his usual devout silence.

  “Mr. Langmuir no wife?” asked Concepcion.

  Zoe stood for a moment by the door in silence, before saying, “Mr. Langmuir not like women.”

  Concepcion laughed loudly at the absurdity. But Zoe was determined.

  “Mr. Langmuir like making love men.”

  For a moment Concepcion looked at Zoe with affronted horror, then, when she saw the resolutely happy look on Zoe’s face, she began to laugh, and, slowly, with one hand on her hip and the other arm held delicately in the air, she swayed her large figure from side to side in a mincing walk.

  “Marica,” she announced.

  Zoe frowned. She didn’t feel happy with this response. She took down the Spanish dictionary she kept handy on the dresser shelf—“Marica,” she read, “A magpie. A thin head of asparagus. A molly-coddle.” The first, although elegant enough for Hamo, suggested thieving. The second, if not completely zany, sounded faintly obscene. The third, though clearly the origin of the trouble, very ill described Hamo’s stoicism. She decided to refute the first.

  “Mr. Langmuir not marica,” she said firmly, “very honest man.”

  Concepcion was clearly pleased that she had been mistaken.

  “Mr. Langmuir no marica,” she repeated, “good man.”

  Zoe went out of the kitchen quoting to herself one of her grandfather’s mumbles, “So much to do, so little done.” She had no clear memory of Cecil Rhodes as having been a force for good, but she sympathized with his dying feelings. No wonder the young, like Alexandra, refused to be bothered with the past. There was so much to do in the present.

  *

  Perry said, putting down the receiver, “God, I’d like to buy the ghastly Whizz Kit at his price and sell him at my own.”

  And while his new secretary nodded her meaningless, moronic miniskirted affirmation, he reflected bitterly that, in fact, Zoe and he had money enough and more to pay even Kit Coates’s high estimation of himself; or, what was equivalent, he had no monetary need to do this exhausting, demanding, trivial job where he must listen to the arrogant demands of ludicrous star interviewers like the Whizz Kit, even try to meet their nonsensical needs.

  “It isn’t as if he didn’t know,” he said, noticing the vulgar stupid prettiness more closely—where did they find them? “Kit Coates has been working for the Corporation for at least six years. He knows perfectly well the expenses allowed to camera crews, and the accommodation agreed when they’re on location. And if the B.B.C. wasn’t as mean as hell over such matters, if it really was the maternal employer it claims to be, there would still be Union regulations. Regulations which, of course, are too lowly for Mr. Coates, who has taken the mickey out of every Trade Union leader in England, to bother about. And ‘can I be sure that the Erawan at Bangkok has “tub baths” as well as showers? His secretary is very English.’ Just so that we shall know the great Whizz Kit himself is as phonily mid-Atlantic as his accent. And he’s heard that ‘the only place with proper sea bathing at Colombo is the Mount Lavinia’, so will I see that his camera crew are quartered there? ‘His crew’ and ‘quartered’! This is a happy ship, I’m glad to say, Lord Hill.”

  “Faraway places,” said the secretary—she had rather a fetching grin when she relaxed. “We can’t all be stars and millionaires, can we?”

  It occurred to Perry to explain that he and Zoe had thought of going to Ceylon for his annual leave two years ago, but he had decided that the Seychelles would be less tourist-ridden. However, if pride would not let him use Zoe’s money to buy his liberty to write, he was not going to let vanity betray him into enjoying vicarious income prestige. All the same, the suppression made him more cross than before.

  This Susan Nebble (or was it Nipple?) didn’t improve matters by looking at her watch, and saying, “Well, he’ll have to wait until Monday, won’t he?”

  He disregarded the remark. “Get on to Mr. Forbes’s secretary and arrange an interview with him for me first thing on Monday. I’d better see him personally. I might just be able to fiddle something with him about the rooms at the Mount Lavinia. And then get on to Travel and ask them (a) does the Erawan Hotel in Bangkok—it’s in Thailand in case you didn’t know—have baths repeat baths, and not only showers, with the bedrooms; and (b) don’t let them palm you off with half answers. They’re inclined to.”

  She looked so
surprised that he said, “Getting things done for people, however bloody silly they are—that’s what administration means.”

  Her expression told him that he might just as well have said, “You see, I’m a sort of superior office boy.” The conceit of these half-educated girls with nice suburban backgrounds! If he had had no creative powers, then the most valuable occupation he could imagine would be exactly this one—to see that things were done well and quickly. Far better than all the pseudo-creativity that went on the box—the degrading clowning that passed for creation in the so-called new media.

  As it was, he intended to be both. He had a whole chapter planned for writing this week-end and he knew it was going to be good. But he dared not think of it until he was quite free of the building. Just let that bloody phone ring again.

  After she had telephoned to Forbes’s grim woman—she did it, he had to say, most efficiently—she said in a slightly too casual voice (but the girl was, after all, a secretary not an actress): “I wonder they’ve never made a teleplay out of Above His Station. A serial, I mean. It’s got such super dialogue.”

  There were a hundred reasons why not, applying to his novel and to most others, and she must know them; but that didn’t matter beside her saying it. The sudden pleasure made him catch his breath, but he did not look up.

  “Do you? Flattery has the opposite effect in this office.”

  “I just hoped it might make you a little less cross. Anyway, it wasn’t flattery. Above His Station was the best of the ang——”

  “Say it. Let’s have the whole thing. Better than Amis or Wain or Braine or Osborne. ‘Why didn’t it sell, Mr. Grant?’ ”

  “Didn’t it? I suppose it couldn’t have done or . . .”

  “Or I wouldn’t be here. You’re a great half-giver of offence, aren’t you?”

  “I wish I’d never mentioned the bloody novel.”

  She was very pretty and on the verge of tears.

  “Oh, don’t take on. I’m very grateful to you. Most people have forgotten the book. It didn’t sell because it didn’t flatter the middle-class book buyers by sufficiently distancing them from real working people—in the Midlands, or in the North, or in some other region of absurd accents, or among freak out-of-work actors with sweet stalls. In fact, among anybody they could patronize. It was just about working people in the South—right where they live.”

  “I know. It was about Seaside Road, Eastbourne. ‘The wrong end of the town.’ ‘Where we get our maids from.’ That’s why I found it so real. My grandmother lived there, when she wasn’t out in service.”

  “But my grand——”

  “I supposed so from the book.”

  “But I never . . . I mean . . . Of course, you’d be much younger.”

  “I doubt it. But I only visited Grandma there as a kid, so we wouldn’t have seen each other. My mother moved to Brighton. Kemptown. She served at the Co-op. Now we’ve gone right up. She’s got her own café.”

  “Café! My mum’s are licensed premises. She started as a barmaid.”

  “Oh, really. Quite a coincidence, as they say.”

  Yes, you have gone right up, you snooty little bitch; she had delivered her comments with her back to him, busy with a filing cabinet. But this had its compensations. Miniskirts were a good thing.

  “Why haven’t you followed it up?”

  For a moment he could hardly believe his ears, but then he found relief from disappointment in explanation.

  “Oh, I have. I’m writing now. That’s why doing a job is so important. If I’d made the royalties the angries made, I’d be writing about commuting adultery among the sailing set, or ghosts, or the sex lives of film directors. As it is, I can still feel what the real world is like.”

  “Has it a name?”

  “Yes. I’m calling it Seasmell Terrace.”

  The very slight puckering of the flesh around her eyes as she turned to him was exactly Zoe’s reaction; and he knew Zoe too well to mistake distaste when he saw it. As with Zoe, he pushed on into defensive explanation.

  “It’s purposely crude. Like the old seaside dirty postcards.”

  She asked, as Zoe had stated, “Do you mean the kind that intellectuals send to each other on holiday?”

  All his fury against Zoe welled up in him and, mingled with it, a delicious vision of this girl’s (for he still must call her so) thighs and buttocks stripped naked. Very deliberately he cleared his desk of some papers, locking them in a drawer; then pointing to those that remained, “Get rid of these, will you? And don’t forget to ring Travel. Don’t take no or any vagueness for an answer. Good night. You know about locking up.”

  If the little bitch’s body should come between him and a week-end’s solid writing, he’d have her fired the following week. He registered his thought with a swaggering gesture, and so was able to accept it.

  *

  Brian gone, Hamo turned on his bath and while he waited checked his packed suitcases, one, two. Then he looked over his notes for Mrs. E. How good to feel that he had the perfect technical assistant to go with him and the perfect housekeeper to leave behind. The thought occupied him pleasurably as he put into his pigskin dressing-case first his ivory monogrammed hairbrushes, then his silver shoe-horn (paternal heritages), only to realize with acute annoyance that he would need them after he had bathed. He took them out and irritably replaced them on the dressing-table.

  He left the case with its silver hasps and hinges open, only taking the precaution of seeing that the new reports on the IR.8 rices from Manila were available for reading during the flight. He also, with a certain delight, carefully fitted among the folds of his Paisley dressing-gown the two pages of amino acid records of pennisetum typhoides that Erroll had failed to reclaim from him for filing.

  He could not but look forward to rebuking his perfect assistant for such an unusual forgetfulness—perhaps, the result of another triumph with what he called “a chick”. He found himself wondering why he always hoped that Erroll’s affairs with girls should end as male victories—it was not, he was sure, anti-feminism, rather that Erroll’s successes added to his own hoped-for sexual masteries. To the weak, the wall.

  He plunged into his bath with a gurgling and splashing that he had maintained since boyhood, as he had the huge lemon-coloured natural sponge which he now soaked and squeezed out over his thick curly hair.

  But, as if a complete déménagement was not enough upset, the telephone rang. Ordinarily he would have ignored it, but it might be Sir Alec with some last-minute wishes. Depressingly out of touch with the realities of their work though the old man had shown himself during their recent interviews, instructions from seniors were after all, as all matters of order, a necessary obligation. He put on his bath-robe, slipped his wet feet into his sandals and made for his study.

  “Yes. I have. And you had. Well, let’s hope there are no other important papers missing from the files. And at what time are you proposing to be at Heathrow? No, that will not do. I do not intend to board every plane—and that means, on my computation, during the coming months, between fifty and sixty, leaving out routine changes—with my peace of mind and capacity to think agitated, if not wrecked, by your hair’s-breadth arrivals. I am going to visit some friends to say good-bye. In point of fact my god-daughter and her parents. I shall have a hired car waiting to pick me up from there to take me to the airport. I suggest that you come by taxi to my friend’s house. Number 8 Dames Road. It’s between St. John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage. Arrive at no later than 7 o’clock. That’s exactly why I am making it so early. If by some chance, you do arrive on time, the Grants will give you a drink. You will like each other, I believe. Then I’m afraid you will have to make those good-byes shorter than you intended.”

  It seemed, as he let out the now tepid bath-water, in keeping with this wretched anarchic afternoon that he should have arranged for one part of his life to meet with another. All these Sir Alec-type introductions! “You will like each other”—who cou
ld possibly predict human likings, and, if the prediction were true, what purpose would it serve? Travel, it was clear, disordered the mind, even when, as in this case, months of careful preparation had been made to ensure that the enterprise ran smoothly.

  He dried vigorously, then put on newly laundered pants and vest, a clean shirt with links inserted for him and fresh socks with toes pushed in ready for his feet. All had been prepared by Mrs. E. His only task was to unscrew the trouser press inherited from his grandfather, which sentiment, he had to admit, had made him use up to this last minute, for he would not have it with him in the many months to come when these lofty rooms made for gentlemen used to spacious privacy, would, no doubt, be exchanged for air-conditioned, strip-lighted boxes. He took out the shoe-trees. With the aid of the shoe-horn, he eased his feet into the highly polished brogues. A puff of spray on his moustache and he was ready for air travel.

  But, before leaving the flat, he made sure of the few locked drawers that he was leaving behind. Valuables he had left at the bank; but there were private things he preferred to leave locked up here—a few mementoes of his parents, some school photographs, some college dining-club menus, Leslie’s few letters. He had not been unaware of the highly increased risk of death that the months of air travel held for him; he had deposited a duplicate set of keys at his lawyers where Perry, as his executor, would find it, in order to act on behalf of Alexandra, his sole heir. If the eventuality should occur, Perry would be discreet. Or would he? He would not, of course, be directly indiscreet. But—he had been forced to notice it—both Perry and Zoe, so wonderfully taken up with each other, were not of course negligent of Alexandra, but inclined surely a little to give her responsibilities beyond what should be asked of a young girl. He was willing to accept this whole family world into which he had been miraculously admitted (the miracle, of course, being that Perry was Leslie’s brother) as a mystery, or rather a skill to which he had no key. Many parents, no doubt, were more skilful than Perry and Zoe, as some few plant geneticists were more skilful than he was. He had no means of judging. He must simply thankfully accept their acceptance.