One More River, page 7
Prinsengracht, where the canal is broad, up towards the Brouwersgracht. Expensive but not all that; nice little flat, only two rooms but Dutch-style, window top-to-bottom, flooded with light and a balcony too. Maybe I’ll make something out of this, I don’t know yet. I’ve always liked this town. No longer as modish as a few years ago, when it became insufferable. The fashionable-intelligence, as Dickens calls it, has moved on to Prague. Poor Prague.
Behind him he left a France of westerly winds and driving rain showers, of dark cloud masses that came rolling up behind one, slow-seeming, unhurried, but however fast the little man went, scuttling in the fast lane, they always caught one up. The newspaper at lunchtime was filled with ghastly tales of huge relentless rainfalls bucketing down upon the eroded plateaux of the south, of kindly picturesque rivers bellowing like maddened bulls, snatching cars and trees and houses and flinging them about.
Very pleasant, to pass the frontier and find that the physical realities of a northern folk, speaking a Germanic language and building in brick, meant a weather change much more startling, of wind-still calms and foggy frosty breaths, of pitch-black waterways with shiny crinkly skins of ice upon them, of shaggy white pine trees like vegetable polar bears, of prim grey and silver fields and black crows flying.
Flattened under this iron-heavy sky Holland was smaller even than usual, a mediaeval landscape of Brueghel or Avercamp, full of hooded dwarfs sinister in shapeless padded jackets.
“Had quite a drive, haven’t you,” said the woman at the desk, her painted nails picking at the keyboard; indifferent, not looking for an answer. “I’ve a notion you just got in in time, the forecast is freezing rain and black ice.”
Dutchly different and pleasurable (he likes this country, these knuckly obstinate people) the cosy coffee-shop womb, the Scottishly varied breads at breakfast, tender and crunchy, baps and beschuit, you won’t find an English word for either—nor French, ‘biscottes’ so much nastier … Sitting on a Dutch lavatory pan, ‘wrong way round’ with the exit at the front … the enormous bony girls …
“Koffie?” asked the house-agent’s young woman, nodding at the percolator on her desk. “I could have something quite nice for you and it’s almost next door.” These interiors glowing with heat, grey-painted but with masses of flowers; they’ve flowers here the way the English have pint milkbottles, the way the French have rude little women.
‘Just as well if it is next door.” Black ice has coated everything in gleaming treachery. An Amsterdam quayside switches disconcertingly from cobbles to cement paving to sand-bedded bricks at the best of times. Since dawn the busybees have been at work with sand and sawdust—salt is not earth-friendly but girls use it to get that glibber-glatter off the steps, I don’t intend to get sued for any broken hips.
“Give you the key to look, shall I? Oh, and the heating’s turned off but you’ll find the temperature-control just inside the door.”
One has known it seal a car totally, so that neither door nor window will open, just as for a publicity photograph a bottle of vodka can be enrobed in a cylinder of ice. It has not occurred to one to try and imagine the view from the inside outward, because there isn’t any. He flicked a hallway light to verify the mains, turned the heating switches to their maximum; the smell of stagnant air was to be expected. In the empty living room he wondered whether the Dutch, betimes a hideously clever people, had invented a new sort of venetian blind, almost as though candlewax had gutted down the panels. It took a good moment to realise that the rain, on the outside glazing of the bay … so that the feeling of being on the inside of the iceberg—easily one might be struck by a claustrophobia, hammering with a crowbar, hoping to find a weak spot; there, where a little light trickles through—the ice can be no more than a centimetre or two thick.
It was not altogether unpleasant. The silence. Quiet would be the most expensive of luxuries. Country quiet, which he had lost, was a romantic delusion and surely always had been. The cocks had crowed and the dogs had barked. The wheeled cart had been as noisy as the tractor, and the blacksmith’s hammer as irritating as a chain saw. War and plague had always threatened; the clank of armed men or the scuttle of rats as sinister as the racket of a scouting helicopter. He had known the flutter of a trapped butterfly against a windowpane to be as maddening as a pneumatic road drill.
Town quiet—oh yes, to be sure; high above the ground, in a seventeenth-century house in the Ile-Saint-Louis, traffic-free; a modernised apartment triple-glazed; a building with polished parquet even on the fourth-floor landing, where occasionally one’s path crossed that of academic old ladies in quilted dressing-gowns. ‘And how is Madame de Sévigné this fine morning?’ A little chat, some hot gossip, the very-latest from ‘my son-in-law, who is Chef de Cabinet to the Minister’ and then a long lamentation about those damn pigeons again, making messes on the balcony.
Amsterdam—here looking out over the water, upon one of the oldest, most civilised canals in the city—if one could get those windows opened the racket would be deafening.
He stood looking at the wall of glass, where the guttering trickle had stiffened into a stalactite of three metres’ breadth, sealing him in, as though he had fallen into the crevasse of a glacier.
He was on the inside of a candle. Those candles that Sibylle used to buy for the children towards Christmastide, the time of candles. Square, cunningly devised, a softer wax within which burning down illuminated the harder outside crust into a magical semi-tranparency. Some were scored or scratched on the exterior and the flame lit lacy wavering patterns.
Others again had little windows, with scraps of transparent coloured paper stuck on, to imitate stained-glass, gothically lit by the moving flame within.
So that I remembered Proust’s magic lantern, lighting Golo riding to the castle, and Geneviève of Brabant.
I am inside the candle. Out there, in the murderous sharp-spiked daylight of an Amsterdam winter, is perhaps my enemy. Across the canal, it might be, with a rifle. He cannot see me. Between us is this mask, a thick-trickling treacle of ice over the glass panels, sealing too the aluminium joins. I cannot open them, I am a prisoner, I cannot walk out there on the balcony, saying, ‘Here I am. Go on then. Try.’
What am I doing here, anyhow? This is all wrong, this is not the city for me. I want to feel people close to me, I wish for street sounds and smells, I want to reach out, to touch, and be reassured that I am still alive.
When he thought of it then it was astonishingly easy. Out in the street—give that girl back her keys—John had only to raise his eyes. The sky, this wonderful winter sky, and there above the Leidseplein, floating in it, graceful, as silent as a glider, the big jet, planing down in the spiral towards Schiphol. That, now, would serve his purpose; that is what the thing is for.
This northern land, Rhine land, was wrong. He had wanted to sit in some stuffy, dark café, drinking gin, surrounding by whores? There behind his back, only ten minutes walk, in the harbour quarter—he was going the wrong way. If a winter destination, then Danubian.
It had been much too long a time, since a girl had been in bed with him.
A Danubian journey should be made in autumn? Lazily, leisurely, stopping to see how this year’s grapes would turn out, pausing over a series of sun-flushed silky-limbed girls. Past Ulm and past Passau; Linz and Wien and Bratislava.
Not in winter. He had driven all the way up here, wasn’t about to turn round and go back again. He would pick up the car and drive, yes, as far as the airport. That is what they are for. Straight through to Budapest
First, a phone call. To my old mate Kollo. One has lots of acquaintances, but few more suitable to the present state-of-mind.
Kollo is to be sure a disgraceful character. So are most of one’s acquaintances. So am I.
“Business or Economy?” asked the ticket girl. “Will it be as cold down there as it is here?”
“Drier,” said John, happily. “More snow, less ice.” All these kind friends in KLM. They might be a bit late with the take-off. Don’t want any black ice forming on our wings. One wouldn’t think about this bit—skip straight to the café table, in Budapest.
“Doctor Faustus in the garden, that’s me.” Kollo had said.
“Doctor Who?” I wasn’t used, then, to his style.
“Little fellow there in the corner, applauding, Aphrodite’s getting it on the carpet of buttercups and daisies.”
“Priapus perhaps?”
“What I said, no? You’re in a lousy business, I’m in a good one, the roxy is the best there is.” The first time we’d met and we’d both drunk too much Hungarian champagne.
“Porning become Electra.”
“Aphorism, schmaphorism. You are Thanatos, I am Eros. I dance upon the grave of President Codswallop.”
His language is inventive, often comic. You can’t call us friends but you can say we’re friendly, nicht wahr, Herr Cockswallop?
“Like every other business we’re drowned in these cheap miserable imitations. Be it soft, tit in a cloud of muslin, or that hard camera looking straight up her hole, it’s so boring. First I ever saw, death-in-the-afternoon, I suppose I was fifteen, they’re under the shower for three-quarters of an hour, suckyfucky WahWah, died of boredom, said, ‘I can do better than that’, look, you want another bottle, catch the eye of Rosybottomed Aurora over there?—no?—no. Come over to my place, then I show you.”
Budapest is the capital of the industry. This sounds like the opening line of a novel by people I know. Be brisk, move the action about. Chapter Two, ‘Sydney is not all bridges and opera houses’. This impression of wind in the hair encourages the pop readership; said to prevent the feeling of wind lower down, which is practically the only joke John Galsworthy ever made. I like a book to be a less breathtaking affair. I want my breath taken, I’ll apply to Kollo. One reason for coming here, maybe. Are there any assassins trailing after me? We’ll see, and if there are they’re running up quite a petrol bill. But Budapest, delightful, is also within the Charles circuit.
There is indeed something special about the girls. Hungarian mistresses were a feature in Hapsburg times and before then, but it isn’t only dipping into doxies. Kollo gets passionately technical. ‘Cambrure’ translates as rather more than ‘camber’. I’d suggest ‘carriage’: how she walks, sits upon a chair or a horse. Her ‘ensellure’ has a specific reference to her lower back. ‘What!’ says Dumas’ Gorenflot. ‘Disturb ourselves to look at other loins than loins of mutton—never!’ Kollo’s girls don’t have loins.
“It’s the boys—the boys that are the problem.” And earnestly (sounding like Nabokov), “The ugliest, but the very ugliest penis I ever saw.” Good taste; yes, I too thought the phrase absurd in the context at first
“I won’t have zoos. I will not use children, and well may you say that you’d hope not indeed, there are plenty who do. What do we make of that?”
“That it’s a very dirty world, in any business you care to name, and you are less rank of hypocrisy than—oh, banks.”
“The other big problem is humour. Mustn’t have any humour in commercial roxy.” Alas, and in most movies there’s not much room for humour. “Stay away, Fay. Come to the studio in the morning and you can see how it works in practice.”
The particular pleasure in the meeting had been Kollo’s use of the identical phrase quoted by Marguerite Yourcenar, citing her two maiden aunts who kept the bordel in Ostend; roughly, that there are only two trades really worth practising, ‘la bouffe et l’entrejambe’. Food in the stomach, and satisfaction lower down.
It took a little time, next morning, before one began to grasp. Small crew used to working together. Fat cameraman and Kollo in symbiosis. You can get effects to lift your roxy out of the ruck by imaginative use of simple detail rather than by spending a lot of money.
He was looking at a blonde. It wasn’t the pleasure it ought to be; one was conscious of curiosity; a tinge of morbidity to that, maybe. Perhaps this was the effect aimed at.
She was thin, seemed young. The bony pallor brought only anaemia to mind: one couldn’t call her pretty and to his eyes she wasn’t sexy either. She was standing, eyes downcast, greenish. She had straight fair hair, fine and thin, cut an inch below her ears. She wore a crumpled cotton T-shirt and hip-high jeans. What was the point? Kollo and the cameraman muttered together.
She put a hand in her pocket. The side of her trousers dragged a little and suddenly the ensemble was not innocent at all. All that showed was waistband, of white schoolgirl knickers, and abruptly this was vicious, as a showgirl stripping in a bar never ever is. A tension instantly extreme; what would she do next? If her navel is this magnetic … John understood that porn is like politics. Shaking hands with everyone is known as ‘pressing the flesh’; this is unending but in Kollo’s eye there’s rather more to it. There are politicians who look imbecile, and are gifted at the work. John is desiring this horrid skinny girl the way Bill wants to be President.
“And he-she-me,” said Kollo. “And also Ho Chi Minh.”
“Listen, matey, I’m phoning from Amsterdam, I’m bored. I’m also half dead, what have you got that’s life-enhancing?”
“I gotta Castle.” In a high squeaky voice, much as though Kollo had decided to become a eunuch for the kingdom-of-heaven’s sake. “I gotta new car too, to show you. Come on over. Like Brits say, the air here is like wine. Water a bit cold, we’ll have Daffodil break the ice with her foot, man, her frostbitten nipples, sensational.”
“Did you say Castle?” unbelievingly.
“This time round, we’ll make it the nunnery.”
“I’m laughing all the way to the plane.”
“Revolutionise the roxy is Kollo’s motto.” In roxy-terms, the convent is nothing very new. A Hungarian Castle is something else.
Big big Cuban cigar in flossy new office with a view of the Danube bridges. Everyone else’s industries are on their last legs but not The Industry; doing better than ever. John has refused to abandon Cuban cigars, and hopes for a few earthly pleasures-still-remaining.
Now castles; yes, decrepit aristocracy, hard times, family property recovered from post-communist régime, can’t afford to keep it up, feeble-minded notions about country-clubs and health institutes, Man, the Roxy Steps In, nobody else got any hard currency. “Terrific garden this one has,” putting in the cigar to free his hands for expressive gestures.
“Can’t film there in winter surely?—cold, no?” Buda and countryside around were under twenty centimetres of snow; nice powder snow, yes, but still?
“You’d be surprised; you’re going to be surprised. The inside is terrific too, the very best kind of castle, eighteenth, maybe seventeenth century Lustschloss on top of mediaeval fortifications, long Gothic passages, sinister cells, a Nunnery scenario, not to speak of dungeons, torture chambers and a moat with waterlilies. The cherry on the surprise is going to be Daffodil.”
“That her name, is it?”
“Who knows? Who cares?” One had to leave the reins loose upon his back when in this mood, being expansive. Gilt-edged, the Daff; a new stud too, lovely boy, just out from a stretch in the hokeycokey, learned some manners there too; won’t last, little bastard’s got the Porsche already. “But this is going to make me the HEAD screwdriver a twelvemonth from now. I’m going to ring up now, say we’re on the way.”
The new car had a fridge, with champagne in it. And Man—a picnic basket, Fortnum and Mason, the cream, mate, think we were going to Glindyburn or wherever.
“Castle’s got a private chapel … We’ll be doing the nunnery when the weather’s warmer. The Daff looks great in those starched white things. Coifs … Wimples …”
There was a new, Polish cameraman. Mister Charles, I tell you, think we were Ingmar Bergner. Look—sunlight. Marvellous the blue shadows. Virgin snow, Daff’s a virgin, can’t waste it.
“She’ll scream.”
“Let her scream. Lay her in the snow, snow’s warm, or she’s only got to think it is. Teenagers, game of hide and seek in the garden, he’ll chase her. It’ll be lovely and warm in the caravan and what the hell is she paid for? Lose her cherry in this lovely stuff among the rhododendrons, got to get it right on the first take but that’s the spontaneity, see you?”
“Carried away.”
“Don’t get it all that often ackshally, the carrying away.” It was warm in the sun (they were quite high up, here) but in the shade of the heavenly rhododendrons one did get uncarried fast. But funny, yes. ‘The children’ got crosser while everyone else got weaker from laughing. It’s for this he likes Kollo, who yells, cajoles, guffaws. Isn’t it the terrible seriousness that makes revolting-roxy?
“Want to see to it that they’re enjoying themselves. Can’t do any more, or not till it snows again; all trampled. Back to the barn; boring auditions this afternoon. Like Daffodil, do you? Fancy her for the night?”
“Rejuvenating lotion.”
“She’s a nice girl.” Fondly. “She’ll do your back. Kind.”
“Does she get a little present?”
“No, no, no, one’s forever telling her; wipe the corner of your mouth; been at the After Eights again, be sure she doesn’t overeat at breakfast, every ounce on that tumtum costs me.” It was like having a stable of boxers; only hungry are they any good.
A nice hotel room. They know me?—they pretend they do, which is just as good, making a fuss of is everything as you like it, Mr Charles? Sloppy, but it’s always agreeable to have one’s fur stroked the right way, the vanity flattered. I must mention this because a lot of people had pottered in and out; chambermaid with another pillow, and perhaps a thicker quilt if you like to have your window open? Waiter to see whether there was beer in the fridge. It’s an old place, full of faded glories; row of bronze bellpushes to summon valets or whatever, none of which work, fairly typical of central european communist régimes. Large rooms and plenty of sitting space, mahogany whatnot to press your trousers, Biedermayer wardrobes whose doors won’t shut and whose drawers don’t open: I was very comfortable. Quite right not to modernise these bathrooms, though doubtless some idiot shortly will.
