Live a Little, page 25
“They’ve been doing their homework on you,” she tells Shimi.
“Who?”
“Who do you think? MI5? My boys.”
“And what have they found out?”
“They’ve uncovered your Russian connection. They know about your spying.”
“Do they know I play the balalaika and married Solzhenitsyn’s daughter?”
“I’ve told you, everything.”
“I bet they don’t know I solved sliding tile puzzles in a cellar on the Seven Sisters Road for most of my life, close to the pub where Trotsky and Lenin drank warm beer, reading Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies?”
“Where Trotsky and Lenin read The Water Babies?”
“Where I did.”
“That’s, if anything, even more bizarre. The Water Babies! You! You grow more interesting by the hour. Why have you not told me this before?”
“I want to eke out my secrets.”
“Well you’ve certainly eked out this one. I know where you were born and brought up, I know where you went to school, I know your mother’s drawers, inside and out, I know the air-raid shelter where you learnt to resent your brother, I know your Chinese restaurant, I know your bathroom, I know your Widow friends, but The Water Babies? Why? Did you have a water birth?”
“In a manner of speaking, I did. It had been a stinking hot summer. My mother was bathed in sweat when I was delivered. The tarantula, presumably, was looking for water.”
“Tarantula. What tarantula?”
“The one that ran over my baby feet. It’s a story I tell.”
“So it’s a lie.”
“Define a lie….If I remember a tarantula there was a tarantula.”
“You’ll tell me next it ran off with the afterbirth.”
“It did actually.”
“And so you sat in your cellar solving sliding puzzles and reading The Water Babies? What a gift for pathos you have.”
“As did Charles Kingsley. I loved that book. It was an heirloom of the heart—my mother’s very own copy. She used to read it aloud to me or we would look at the illustrations together. They showed a little Victorian chimney sweeper swimming with grown-up fairies. They took him in their arms and gently washed the filth of his occupation off him. Is that all a bit obvious?”
She says nothing.
But she has a thought. Is that the role she has been appointed to play in the tainted life of Shimi Carmelli? Is she one of the fairies armed with a bar of soap?
* * *
—
“I AM VERY glad,” remarked Euphoria bringing in hot chocolate, “to see that Mr. Shimi is looking better.”
The Princess peered long and hard at Mr. Shimi. “I’ve told you about encouraging familiarities with the staff.”
Euphoria took two steps back.
“I want them to feel relaxed with me, that’s all.”
“Why should they feel relaxed with you? They don’t feel relaxed with me. You aren’t, I hope, planning some Leninist shake-up of the domestic arrangements just because you were both admirers of The Water Babies.”
“I don’t like ‘Mr. Carmelli’—‘Mr. Carmelli’ was my father.”
“It’s not the mode of their address I object to. It’s their assumption of intimacy.”
Euphoria feared it was all her fault. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Beryl,” she said.
“Just address your concerns about Mr. Carmelli’s health to me in the future, and stop talking to my sons.”
“I’m not the one who talks to your sons, Mrs. Beryl.”
“Then we know who that leaves.”
Euphoria hesitated.
The Princess subjected her to a searching look. “I sense the enormity of some moral struggle in you,” she said. “Are you thinking of betraying Her Majesty’s secrets?”
“She isn’t only talking to them in the kitchen, Mrs. Beryl,” she said.
“Who isn’t? The Queen?”
“Nastya, ma’am.”
“So where is she talking to them?”
Euphoria wondered if she had already gone too far, and took two steps back. If she could have backed out of the apartment and down into the traffic she would have.
“Come on, child, spit it out.”
“In the street, Mrs. Beryl.”
“My sons are meeting my staff in the street? Have you seen them together?”
Euphoria nodded.
“Is money changing hands?”
Euphoria shook her head. She hadn’t seen any. But she did think they were taking photographs.
“Of one another?”
“No ma’am.”
“Of this building?”
“No ma’am.”
“Then what on earth of, child?”
“Of the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet Restaurant, Mrs. Beryl.”
The Princess and Shimi exchanged looks.
“They are being good sons,” Shimi ventured.
“How does photographing the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet Restaurant make them good sons? Do you suppose they are planning to take me for a birthday meal? They wouldn’t know how old I am. For which I can’t entirely blame them. I’ve never known how old they are.”
“My guess is that they’re photographing my place in order to ascertain whether I can keep you in the manner to which you are accustomed.”
“And can you?”
“No, ma’am.”
* * *
—
ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, the Princess thinks it’s time everyone got to know one another. “There are members of my family who haven’t met for over half a century,” she says. “Some haven’t met at all and others I have never met myself. Introducing you provides me with the perfect excuse to make their acquaintance.”
“What if I don’t want to meet any of them?”
For someone who has never experienced such an emotion, the Princess does a wonderful imitation of wounded motherhood. “But they are my family!”
“That doesn’t make them mine.”
“I met your Widows.”
“The Widows don’t count.”
Shimi isn’t letting her see he’s feeling bad about Wanda Wolfsheim. She has been on his conscience. Another person wronged. He’d written apologising for collapsing on her floor before the raffle and she’d written back formally hoping he was well and being cared for. There had been no phone calls.
The Princess reads his mind. I am the real cartomancer in this relationship, she has often boasted, and I don’t need cards. But she’ll humour him. If the Widows don’t count, the Widows don’t count. “All the more reason,” she says, “for you to meet the people who do count for me.”
Shimi peers at her. “I am flattered that you think they should count for me. But isn’t meeting the family usually preparatory to a wedding?”
She peers back at him.
“You don’t think I’m proposing to you?”
“I certainly do not. As I recall we have ground rules as to matrimony.”
“We have ground rules as to romance.”
“And it is out of the question to have one without the other?”
“Strange you should ask that. Are you thinking of proposing to me?”
“I wouldn’t know how. I have no experience.”
“Then I hope you are not toying with a susceptible woman’s feelings. There is such a thing as breach of promise, you know.”
“At our age?”
“A promise is a promise at any age. And at our age it might be considered particularly cruel. We are unlikely to propose or be proposed to again.”
“Again! For me, remember, it would be the first time.”
“Then you can be the one who wears white.”
He flushes. She knows why. Were his mother’s bloomers white?
Another day, another tease. But not, for some reason, this day.
“This subject has become tedious to you,” she says in her kindest voice. “I knew it would.”
“I fear it’s I who have become tedious to you,” he says. “I don’t play as well as you.”
“You libel yourself. Just because your face is long and you hide your watery eyes from people it doesn’t mean that you’re in earnest. You are as much a comic construct as I am. Nothing you say means what you say it means. You are entirely theatrical. You are your own hyperbole. I am better suited to understand this than anyone.”
“Because you had an earlier encounter with it in Ephraim?”
“Ephraim? Good God, no. Ephraim was a literal-minded joker. He said ‘Have fun with me,’ and so one did. You say ‘Have no fun with me,’ and that’s an altogether more enticing proposition—at least for a woman like me.”
“Then I’m lucky to have found you.”
“There you go again, not meaning what you say.”
“But I do mean it.”
“It’s too late. You’ve made such an art of gloom that no one will believe there is a lighter, more hopeful you.”
“I am not hopeful. Just appreciative.”
“As am I. But we are both stuck with the parts we learnt to play a long time ago. We are anachronisms—not just because we’re old but because we’re both actors who cannot accept the literalism of our times. I have sons who are admired for being true to themselves—one with whom people identify, God save us, and another with whom they don’t, but at least, they say, they know where they are with him. As though a knave who shows you his true self is preferable to a virtuous man who dissembles! We couldn’t be alive, you and I, at a worse time. In an age of authenticity, what business do dissemblers like us have crawling between heaven and earth?”
“Well, we will be gone from here soon.”
“That’s what they want to hear us say. We’ll be off in a minute—the last relics of the age of irony. As though it’s our job to step aside and make life easy for them. Well, I have news for them: as long as we are here we are going to rub their noses in their condescension. One day they’ll thank us for it. We keep the back door open for them. We enable the fresh air of the past to blow through.”
“Shall I say that to them when I pass them in the street? We’re hanging on to spite you, and one day you’ll thank us for it….Not that they see me when I pass them in the street.”
“Of course they don’t see you. To anyone but themselves the young are impervious. That’s what believing the past should be wiped away does to their faculties—it makes them blind and deaf. But we still owe them an example, no matter how little they deserve it. We owe them double-dealing, subterfuge, deviancy—”
“Deviancy?”
“Hush—I’m doing this without a thesaurus. Deviancy, yes. And pretence, fiction, sarcasm—the past’s great masquerade of insincerity.”
“And what do we owe ourselves?”
Their eyes meet, frivolous and rheumy. Roguish even.
“The game of happiness.”
“We should get married, then.”
“Should? Under whose compulsion? The God of Love’s?”
She waits to hear what he’ll say to that.
Since they’ve been photographing the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet Restaurant, the Princess decides that’s where she should take them for their getting-to-know-you-all banquet.
Shimi is surprised she means to go ahead with this. He thought it was conceived spontaneously in response to her sons’ meddlesomeness and that she would forget about it the next day.
“Far from it,” she says. “I want to show you off, introduce you to the hungry generations.”
“What as? Bait?”
“I’ll think of something. How do you feel about being described as my intended?”
“Depends on your intentions.”
* * *
—
RAYMOND HO HAS proposed his largest round table in a private room and promised a spread to end all spreads. He wonders if Shimi will be performing for the guests. Shimi tells him that the last time he shuffled the deck he ended up unconscious on the floor of someone’s private ballroom and is under doctor’s orders not to converse with fate again. Besides, he is being introduced to the family of a woman with whom he is “keeping company”—he is pleased with the expression: there is even something vaguely Chinese about it, he fancies—and is expected to make a good social as well as conversational impression. “Maybe don’t even mention the cards, Raymond.”
Raymond taps his temple and moves on to the question of dietary fads. Shimi has already discussed this with Beryl Dusinbery who says she has no idea what her children and their children eat and doesn’t care. They will eat what they are given or they won’t. “I have a passion for sweet-and-sour pork with Singapore noodles,” she says, but admits it is a while since she ate in a Chinese restaurant and accepts that menus might have moved on since. Shimi assures her that with his contacts sweet-and-sour pork shouldn’t be out of the question.
It is agreed that she and Shimi will be there a good half hour before the others. As at the Widows’ Ball, only this time she’ll be with him and he won’t be taking pills.
“You will sit at my right,” she says, “otherwise it’s immaterial where the rest go. But I have told them to arrive at different times. I don’t want the lot descending all at once. That way, too, there is a better chance of my remembering who any of them are.”
She is Joan Crawford tonight, hard as nails in a jet-black feather boa that would have served Mephistopheles as a cloak. The River Styx did not run with blood redder than her lips. She can’t trust her hair so wears a small fur Cossack hat at a tilt. “Don’t wear yours,” she warns Shimi. “We don’t want to look twinned.”
“You’re making a big effort for this,” Shimi said, when she first appeared before him, “considering it’s only family.”
“There is no only family. Those boys of mine have been trying to get power of attorney for the last ten years. I’m reminding them who they’re dealing with. ‘Don’t fuck with me, fellas.’ ”
Shimi didn’t pick up the film reference but got the gist.
He too is dressed to make a big impression. “I want you in your Horowitz concert bow tie but can you try looking less hangdog?” she requested. “Think Paderewski more.”
To which end she loans him a frock coat once worn by a minor pianist whose name escapes her so she claims it to have been Paderewski’s own to save explanations. Before they leave the house she runs her fingers through his hair. “Imagine it’s red,” she says. “Think Polish maestro. Breathe fire. My sons think they’re separated by an unbridgeable political gulf but, in truth, like all politicians in this country they’re Little Englanders who go to pieces in the presence of Continental genius.”
Whether by chance or cunning, they arrive together. Sandy and Pen. The Princess has prepared Shimi for this meeting by telling him to think he’s meeting Laurel and Hardy.
“Which is which?”
“You don’t know what Laurel and Hardy look like?”
“Of course I do. What I don’t know is which of your sons is Laurel and which is Hardy.”
“The greasy one is Laurel. The morose one—”
“No. Their names. Their parties.”
“You’ll work it out.”
Though he knows she has sons beyond pensionable age, Shimi is surprised when he sees them in the flesh. Whichever is Laurel and whichever is Hardy they look older than their mother. He thinks he has seen them before, without knowing who they were, casing the Finchley Road like a pair of bailiffs. Now he must assume he was the reason for their presence. Having spent so much of his life underground, Shimi has a poor understanding of what’s been going on in the world above. Being entirely without political preference, it pleases him to think that their divergent systems have come together in suspicion of him. But his ignorance of politics leaves him at sea when it comes to identifying them by ideology.
“I’m Shimi Carmelli,” he says, shaking their hands in turn. “Your mother has told me all about you but I am unable to work out from your appearance who is the reactionary and who the revolutionary.”
“Well I am not the reactionary,” says Stan Laurel.
“And I am not the revolutionary,” says Oliver Hardy.
“Thank you, that narrows it down,” Shimi says.
“And you,” Sandy says, looking Shimi up and down, but finding it difficult to take his eyes off Shimi’s virtuoso dicky bow and Paderewski frock coat, “what would your politics be?”
“Anarchist,” Shimi says, remembering the Princess’s instructions. “But not a bomb thrower.”
The three men exchange rancid smiles. Not knowing what to say next they are all relieved when the Princess beckons Shimi to her side.
“Do you think we should ask for the windows to be opened?” she whispers. “The air gets so stuffy with these two in a room.”
“I know you’re saying that only to conceal your pride in them,” Shimi whispers back.
She leans in closer and mutters something he cannot make out. Then he realises she is deliberately speaking nonsense in order to exasperate her sons with a display of unbecoming intimacy. Is the old girl blowing in his ear?
Shimi wonders if he ought to reciprocate by blowing in hers. He moves in still closer, nodding, smiling, laughing at the gibberish.
They both get the real joke together: this could be a metaphor for their relationship.
And it’s when they get the real joke together that they exasperate the brothers in earnest.
Shimi is momentarily sorry for them. It can’t be any fun watching your mother canoodling with a man who isn’t your father. How would he have felt? He thinks of the Princess with Ephraim. That’s how he’d have felt.
