Live a Little, page 12
“No, Mrs. Beryl,” she says, returning to her duties in the kitchen.
Mrs. Beryl, meanwhile, wonders whether she is correct in saying she never had a sister.
* * *
—
SHIMI’S PART-TIME employment at the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet Restaurant came about as a consequence of a falling-out with Raymond Ho, the restaurant’s proprietor. No sooner did Shimi move out of Stanmore into a flat above the Fing Ho than he began to complain about the smells. Of course you must expect smells if you live above a restaurant but there had to be something seriously wrong with the Fing Ho’s extractor fans because Shimi could not only smell the familiar plume of garlic, sweet chilli, and ginger, he could smell the bean paste, he could smell the pak choi, Mr. Ho I can smell the individual bamboo shoots. Raymond Ho responded with a complaint that dirty water from Shimi’s sink or shower or washing machine or perhaps all three was leaking onto his customers. Shimi invited Raymond Ho upstairs to smell for himself and inspect Shimi’s appliances. A polite and curious man, Raymond Ho looked at Shimi’s bookshelves and saw several volumes on cartomancy. He wondered if Shimi was interested in maps. That’s cartography, Shimi explained, cartomancy is fortune telling using playing cards. When he was a boy working in his father’s restaurant, Raymond Ho told him, it was common for a magician or fortune teller to entertain the guests, a table at a time. For one reason or another this custom had fallen into disuse. Shimi remembered the table magicians from the Chinese restaurants of his youth in Stanmore. They embarrassed his mother, he recalled, but delighted his father and Ephraim. Magicians are like clowns, they fill some people with delight and others with terror. Shimi was of his mother’s persuasion. Table magicians came too close for both of them. After an hour of these and similar reminiscences it was somehow agreed that Shimi would come into the restaurant three or four nights a week and read the fortunes of Raymond Ho’s customers. Initially there would be no fee, but they would see how it went. In return Shimi could join the staff at the end of the evening and eat as much as he liked. Since Chinese was his favourite cuisine, and Chinese people with little English his favourite company, Shimi gave this extraordinary offer more consideration than perhaps it merited, and finally, precisely because it was the wrong thing for a person as morose as he was to do, he agreed to do it.
It turned out better than he could ever have imagined. Very quickly he learned the lesson known to people in the entertainment business that the best way to hide yourself is to put yourself on show. Certainly he was more of an enigma here, an aged but erect gentleman, possessed of arcane gifts, unfathomably from somewhere else, moving soundlessly and mysteriously between tables, with a silk handkerchief flowing from his jacket pocket and the knowledge of everybody’s future in his hands, than he’d ever been while solving Uncle Raffi’s sliding puzzles. Had the sphinx turned up at the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet with a pack of playing cards it would have excited less surprise than Shimi Carmelli did. Even the Chinese found him inscrutable. And then, when everybody but the waiters had gone home, he would settle down at a big round table with them, enjoying their badinage of which he understood not one word and helping them to polish off the leftovers. They laughed and laughed and it mattered not a jot that he didn’t join in the laughter with them. He found a benign expression he didn’t know he had and that was enough. The women touched him to make him feel loved. Li Ling, the prettiest waitress, even flirted with him a little—he thought. “You smart,” she told him, fingering his jacket. And the men laughed riotously when he said something they didn’t understand. This was life stripped of its superfluities, its comprehension, and its verbs.
Shimi had thought he could only be happy in a cellar; this wasn’t a cellar but I’m happy enough here, Shimi decided.
The Princess is lucky to be the age she is. Gadget free, she accepts boredom as a boon. Boredom becomes her.
But she has never liked the five o’clock part of the evening. It is too neither here nor there for her. It presses down on her with its indeterminacy, like an unwelcome guest.
It’s the nothing hour when people pour themselves a drink to get them through to the something hour. She was a five o’clock drinker once herself, but she gets too drunk too quickly now and knows what getting drunk too quickly can do to a person. She has unhappy memories of drink, and of course those are the very memories that hang around longest.
Memory is a sadist.
You can shuffle memory like a pack of cards and the things you don’t want to remember always come out on top. Shuffling is itself an admission that you can’t pick and choose. You have to take the bad with the good.
She would love a drink. She’s heard that said before. “I would love a drink, Beryl.”
The things you don’t want to remember always come out on top and the only son you would like to call you mother doesn’t. That’s the law of the shuffle.
It’s no picnic trying to keep your life in order. But then it’s no picnic not knowing where anything in your mind is. The sliding slabs of memory are up to their tricks again. They make themselves evident visually at first—spinning plates, like discuses imprinted with half-familiar faces and events, whizzing past her, stealing what’s hers; and then, from the other direction, shapes she can’t describe, rotating more slowly, as though inviting her to hop aboard, returning something to her, not the faces and events she’d lost, but the act of recollection itself, the recollection of recollecting. It is as though she is at the centre of a silent War of the Worlds, where what is being fought over is not territory but dimension, the very meaning of where and when.
She knows what has to happen, the space must clear, the rotating discs must slow and meet and become as one, like a total eclipse. Then she will be back in the present, knowing where things are, confident she can navigate herself again not only through her memory but her apartment, knowing which room is which and which direction she must go in to find it.
She lays down her stitching. Her eyes are tired. She unscrolls one of her school photographs but sees no one she recognises. It’s because my eyes are tired, she reassures herself. Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be different.
She calls Euphoria to bring her tea. To her sense, Euphoria has never looked more beautiful, voluptuous, and shining. It might be the dress she is wearing. An African print.
“Are you in love, Euphoria?” she asks.
“No more than usual, Mrs. Beryl,” she answers.
“Do you know what Winnie Mandela said when she first met her husband?”
It occurs to her that Euphoria might not know who Winnie Mandela is or was. No doubt it’s racist of me to think she should.
“No, ma’am.”
“She said Yes.”
Euphoria doesn’t know how to reply. “That’s nice,” she says, after a moment.
In the silence that follows she plumps up the cushions on the bedroom chair. They are gold and show a sylvan hunting scene.
“They met at a bus stop,” the Princess pursues.
Euphoria goes in search of another cushion to plump.
“It’s a great love story. Let me correct that—it was a great love story.”
“Did something bad happen, Mrs. Beryl?”
“Of course. Something bad always happens. But for a while, a long time ago, they were the future, they carried all our hopes, even mine and I had no hopes.”
Unusually for her, the Princess smiles, remembering the hopes she was too grand to entertain. “Do you know,” she continues, though she isn’t really talking to Euphoria now, “we all went through a phase of standing at bus stops where another Nelson Mandela might find us. That was where I met Pen’s father. At a bus stop in Trafalgar Square. I had come up for a CND demo. I wasn’t especially against nuclear weapons—I could imagine them coming in handy—but I wanted Sandy to see what a demo was like. He was about six and turning into his father. Already he believed in abolishing inheritance tax. It was time, I thought—in so far as I thought about it at all—to broaden his education. This is a demo, that’s Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and pacifist, those are people, this is a bus. Pen’s father had been addressing the demo earlier in the day and came across to the bus stop. I can’t say what brought him over. Maybe the slutty way I was standing, like a tart looking for business, regardless of the little boy whose hand I was holding. He seemed shy without a loudhailer and spoke to Sandy rather than me. ‘So, young man, have I persuaded you to join the campaign?’ he asked him. ‘No,’ Sandy answered. His father would have been proud of him.”
“Where was Mr. Pen?” Euphoria wondered.
“He was a concept as yet to be commodified in his father’s consciousness.”
Euphoria didn’t understand.
“Not born yet,” the Princess explained.
Euphoria looked embarrassed. The Princess imagined that she was picturing the conception of Pen there and then at the Mandela bus stop, with little Sandy looking on.
“Don’t look so worried,” the Princess said. “I’ve had a messy life but it’s all worked out well in the end. Did I mention they made me Mother of the Year? You can go now. I just wanted to tell you that you look very fine today and remind me of a beautiful African woman. Winnie Mandela, if you’ve heard of her.”
“I heard of her from you, Mrs. Beryl,” Euphoria says.
“When?”
“Two minutes ago.”
The Princess falls vacant.
Two minutes, two years, two hundred years…Why has she been talking about Winnie Mandela?
In fact, Euphoria wasn’t far off the mark in imagining a hasty coupling at the bus stop. It wasn’t love at first sight, but things were meant to happen after demos. It was how you knew you were having some effect. Pen’s father accompanied the mother and son onto the bus, went home with them to their hotel, and went to bed with her….
Two minutes, two years, two hundred years…
The Princess gets out her diary.
It began, as it was to continue, as slumming. Was this my first bus ride since the war? Couldn’t have been. But it was certainly my first bus ride since Piston Pete put his hand in his pocket to cover Sandy’s travel expenses through life and, by maternal extension, mine too. A settlement, it was called. It gave him visiting rights, he thought. Visiting rights to me too. Droit de seigneur. Fair enough so long as I was in the mood. I didn’t stand haughty on my modesty. Though I did think that once in a while he might have done more than bring boxing gloves for Sandy and go a round with him. Once he even knocked him out. “And now for you,” he said, turning to me and fluffing up his chest feathers. “What, with the boy lying there?” “He’ll be all right,” he assured me. He believed that coming round from unconsciousness was a rite of passage in a boy’s life. “And finding his father pistoning his mistress?” “Why not?” “He’s five,” I reminded him. “The sooner the better,” was his answer.
Where was I? Buses, that’s right. Funny, the role they’ve played in my erotic life.
Cyril—I must give Pen’s father his real name finally, and since I can’t better ridicule it than it ridicules itself, Cyril it will remain—Cyril was perfectly happy to queue at the bus stop with me. He caught buses as religious men light candles. Buses legitimised him. Crowded buses in particular. He loved giving up his seat. If he had to stand for an hour he was in heaven. He coincided with my Shoreham-on-Sea period which made it difficult for him, as a principled non-driver, to get to me. I’d have bought him a bus with the Duke of Smegma Magna’s money if he’d allowed it. But owning a bus was not the same as catching one and he averted his face whenever I mentioned it, as though to spare his nose affront, like a vegetarian sniffing a barbecue.
It amazes me to think now that I ever gave him the time of day. But these were the sixties. We all put up with nonsense from one another then. And he had looks of a sort. It was a dirty age for men, but he was like a green shoot. In retrospect I think of him—and for cheap political effect I speak of him—as smelly. He was no such thing. His views were but he wasn’t. He told me once that he never perspired and I believed him. That in itself was no reason to fall in love with him, and I didn’t, not exactly. You can’t love a man who is niggardly with his sweat. But he didn’t revolt me either. I can best describe what I felt for him as provisional attraction, as though I didn’t at the time, but might one day, get the point of him as a man. It was neither admiration nor pity, neither warmth nor indifference, but a sort of considerate condescension. Which it turned out was exactly what he thought he was showing me. And the rest of humanity, come to that.
I came clean that first evening and told him there were two reasons I’d been standing at a bus stop: the first, to give Sandy the experience of riding in something other than a Roller; the second—because even I wasn’t proof against popular romantic myths—in the hope of encountering another Nelson Mandela. “Which you have done,” Cyril said, showing his little teeth. Joking? Yes. But then again not.
I had no choice but to ask, “And how do I measure up to the Winnie you had come to the bus stop to find?”
It was a risk. But we were in bed by that time and I am a rival for any woman when my hair is down and my shoulders are bare.
“I find it helps,” he said, “not to bring too many expectations to a relationship. It is unfair to the woman.”
I’d have vomited had there been a bucket handy. The way these men of the left pronounce the word “woman”! As though, in the magic moment of their pronouncing it, all risibility flees the universe.
Abracadabra, bim salabim—WOMAN—now mirth be gone!
I could have called him a pious prig then and there and saved me a pregnancy, him expense, and us both unnecessary grief, but I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he’d improve on further acquaintance. “It is unfair to you, too,” I said.
He did something oddly self-effacing with his face, wrinkling his nose and pulling back his upper lip like a horse. I couldn’t tell if it was a simper of apology or a suppressed bark of triumph. Later I came to understand that it was a simper of triumph.
I’d invoked the Mandelas for a bit of fun. Cyril didn’t do fun. I’ve never met a man with so little flamboyance who valued himself more highly. His was the supreme arrogance of the introvert. In his view it wasn’t colour of skin or quality of courage that separated him from Mandela; it was merely the intensity of the struggle. Mandela had had all the luck. He’d been dropped into a grander cause, that was all. True, he’d survived tough times on Robben Island, but making one’s way up through the ranks of the Croydon Labour Party hadn’t been a cakewalk either.
He’d bring his vests for me to launder. Not me, personally. Piston Pete had provided me with a person to do the washing. When Cyril discovered who was paying for his vests to be laundered he went into a blue fit. Well it’s that or you’ll go back home with them less odoriferous than you like them, I told him. This was a major test of his principles. Not my still letting an old lover keep me, and love me, come to that. If Cyril had felt any jealousy he would not have dared admit it. What he couldn’t accept was benefiting in any way from money that was “unearned.” “What exactly does this ex-lover of yours own?” he wanted to know. “The country,” I told him. “And how much does he pay the woman who does your laundry?” “Not just my laundry, yours as well.” “Yes, but how much?” I had to make it worse than it was. “A pittance,” I said. “And for that he expects sexual favours as well?” “Aha.” “From her or you?” “From both of us.”
Had I not been big with his child he’d have bussed out on me.
On a whim of mine—I had to dirty him up somehow—we made Pen on a pile of vests.
He was a considerate lover. Not passionate, but watchful and polite. It was as though he’d read how to go about it from a textbook. “Don’t impose yourself. Respect the other person. Sexual intercourse is the bedrock of a healthy society, and as such must be understood as an act of mutuality and cooperation.” Whatever you signalled you wanted, he endeavoured to give you, which was all very well if you knew. Call me an ingrate but in the end such deference makes you not want anything.
Cyril was as wrong about women as he was about everything else. You can over-principle sexual relations. Men who’ve systemised sex wear you out with their attentiveness when all along it’s something else you crave. What is that something else? Ponderosity, I call it. The pleasure of unthinking weight, the bodily evidence that something grave is happening.
Just by the by, my preference for ponderosity over ecstasy has bemused most of the men I’ve ever slept with. They took it for docility, then quickly discovered their mistake. It isn’t passivity that’s driving this predilection, I had to tell them in case they thought they had to start slapping me. The weight of a man upon me was a purely animal necessity, a sort of challenge to me to reciprocate pressure, such as I imagine a horse must feel when ridden confidently. And whatever the rider thinks, the horse knows she can throw him at will.
My only regret is how infrequently this shared experience of power was achieved. Even as I flung myself down and burned up at them, clasping their flanks with my strong hands, I could sense their confidence ebbing. And decade by decade I sensed it ebbing further until it vanished altogether. I no longer speak from experience but I imagine the modern man to be all but weightless.
Cyril, anyway, to get back to him, was no horse rider. He disapproved of all cruel sports.
He left me, as he had to—and the irony was not lost on me—for Winnie Mandela. Not her exactly but in the ball park.
