I'm Dying Laughing (41 page)

‘Get things to stretch the food,’ he shouted. He told how he and his brother and sister had been brought up. ‘We’re living like the American army, with garbage cans overflowing with roast turkey, steaks and pork-chops.’ At his home Father asked each one, starting with Mother, ‘Will you have fish soup or cabbage soup? Then, ‘Will you have a slice of roast beef or shoulder of mutton or stuffed veal?’ as the case was. ‘Mother asked, “Will you have creamed turnips, boiled potatoes, sauce?” as the case was. Anyone who hesitated even a moment, lost his rights. If we hesitated we had no appetite.’

‘That’s why you’re dyspeptic now.’

‘In England in the old public schools they let the brats eat out of a trencher in which they have sardines, stew, bread and blancmange.’

‘That accounts for the graveyard look of Englishmen.’

‘Our kids have to have discipline and some austerity. I want them to be like youngsters from a rich family, not kids who wolf every mouthful because they think it may be their last.’

Emily said, ‘I despise the way your family eats. Leaving half a plate, not touching the lobster mousse because they just haven’t the appetite, finding a plate of soup is enough tonight and taking a thin slice of mutton and nibbling the dessert, and just half a glass of the best Pommard.’

‘You’re simply greedy.’

‘So was Rabelais.’

‘I’ll bet. Shakespeare was dyspeptic’

‘OK, Shakespeare.’ She burst out laughing.

‘Now don’t run off. Stay here and worry with me. It fills up an empty life for me. Besides, we’ve got money. We’re living off our nest egg. I’ve got to get down on my rheumaticky knees and crawl to Anna. That will be my manly part in our economy.’

‘Well, do it, Stephen. They’ve got it. Why not?’

She went upstairs, and they still shouted exchanges with each other till she shut the door. Then she took several pages of a long letter from her bottom drawer and put it in the typewriter. It was to ‘Dear Anna’ and began, ‘My darlings, it is now four days after the famous dinner party and I am a criminal writing to you but I must keep you up-to-date. After this, Wilkes melancholy, which is what I call my working-mood. We entertained at that dinner brilliant Cold War Society. With my French teacher, who was in the Resistance, I am studying André Malraux and de Gaulle. Just fancy, they are no longer kosher. Stephen is miserable with dismal wails about the budget and indeed it took us more than we thought to settle down. But I think he will be all right with a little intellectual and political
vie sociale.
He must find the right friends; then he will cheer up. He is miserably unhappy, a martyr because we are feeding social-democrats and ex and not so ex-collabos. Why do we meet them, when we come abroad, dear Anna, as you know, to preserve our revolutionary honour? Well, that is life, as Stephen says. And then no doubt if there had been no social-democracy, no doubt the communists would have invented it. Joke, eh …?’

She kept writing just as she thought and as she and Stephen talked to each other. Then she put away her unfinished letter and went on with her work.

Meanwhile, Stephen had told Fernande not to send lunch in: he would be out for lunch.

He studied the city map, packed a satchel with some of his writings and evidences of former standing and good faith and walked from the rue de Bellechasse all the distance to the room of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party in the rue Lafayette. There he asked to be received by some member of the committee. His card, with a carefully written inscription in French, was taken in; and then he was invited to see a man who, though friendly, was watchful. Stephen’s French failed him but he tried to say that he had come to France with his family and wished to work for the Party in any capacity, to work as a volunteer in any way, as an outside contributor till they got to know him. He had the good fortune to be in the office when there came in a celebrated Italian communist, who spoke five or six languages well, among them English. Stephen caught the name as ‘Vittorio, our well-known comrade Vittorio.’ He was unknown to Stephen.

Vittorio was a middle-sized man, soft-bodied, with thinning, sandy hair, surprisingly ugly, ugly as a seamed, sunburned claypatch, and that was his colouring. He had been gashed twice over the side of the face, past the ear to the jaw and from the brow to the jaw on the same side, cutting the eye which was now a blind blue and turned upwards. When he opened his thick, light-red lips, he showed a magnificent set of large creamy teeth. It almost seemed that there were too many of them; in some parts of the jaw they were set double; but they appeared in a beaming, affectionate, charming smile. Vittorio’s fleshy face lighted up with an expression of love and he came forward and held out to Stephen a large hand. He limped slightly, one shoulder had been injured and he was partly deaf; he shouted.

‘How ugly,’ thought Stephen. But Vittorio seemed unconscious of his appearance. He came to Stephen with eager friendship, generous confidence. He told Stephen again who he was; he was cultural director in one of the largest Italian cities. The Party there was now housed in a magnificent old palace, three sides of a courtyard, and the workers and Party workers climbed the carved stairs where formerly gloomy, sour and wicked landowners had climbed. He said enthusiastically, ‘You must come and see it. It’ll cheer your heart up. You must come and see me.’

He knew all about the Howards, mentioned the names of their books; and when Stephen said deprecatingly that he feared they were in bad odour now with the American comrades, Vittorio only laughed enthusiastically, waved his hand and shouted, ‘That’s of no importance. You came to us. Talk to me about America.’

He bent his head forward as Stephen spoke and listened attentively. Stephen became more and more explicit. The other man in the room, young, strong, dark, with an ironic smile, also listened and took notes. When Stephen stopped, the other man said, ‘I’m making a speech tomorrow evening and I will use some of these details.’

Stephen was astonished, flattered at being believed; he felt like a messenger from a far land. He said, ‘I’ll write some articles for you if you like. I have someone who would translate them.’ He meant Madame Suzanne.

‘This will come later, we will see,’ said Vittoria, cheerily.

Then he said they must meet again, they must fix it now; and thus it happened that Stephen himself fixed the date for the next dinner party.

Vittorio said he was sorry that leading members of the committee were not there then, but Stephen would meet them soon.

Stephen walked home swinging his satchel, stopped to gaze lengthily at the beauty of the Champs-Elysees, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Seine. He was speaking to Emily in his mind, ‘And you were the one who was beating the breast the other night, because you had brought me abroad. I am being fulfilled, I’m going to be justified. If this is the way we’re received, then they’re getting ready to sink the American Party.’

He drank in the mild, cool spring air, was grateful, felt younger and more mature.

‘A man is less apprehensive than a woman, who sees corpses hanging from every bough. You take a decisive step and all the phantoms fade. Emily will be happy for me.’

He ate his lunch in a small restaurant at the corner of the rue du Bac and on the quay, was surprised at the prices but found the cooking very good. He walked back to the house in happy mood. Emily was to be seen next to the window upstairs. She peered at him with his satchel, waved, and went back to her machine.

She was not writing a chapter of her book at this moment, nor even a ‘pork-chops’ boy-meets-girl story. She was writing a sketch, something amusing that had happened to her, the history of a really fat person who, though always dieting, keeps getting fatter; one who, alas and of course, loves to eat. She had run away from home, left school at fourteen, got a job and attended night-school. At the same time she wanted to take up dancing to meet boys. She had been valedictorian, voted the one most likely to succeed. A snap in the school paper showed her with her mouth open, a bright, malicious wrinkle to her mouth, her eyes sparkling, a lock of hair streaming down one cheek, folds of adolescent fat around her short solid neck and chin. Making her speech, prepared beforehand, she had not stuck to the text but had gone on, laughing, joking, carrying the school with her for nearly an hour, and with everyone then getting more restive she became imperious. At last someone spoke. She turned and shouted, ‘I am Sir Oracle and when I speak, let no dog bark!’ It had no success: no one knew it. Fired by this, she had prolonged her speech. In the end, she caught the eye of a boy she admired, saw his sneer, blushed and stopped. Like many another ambitious, gifted and healthy girl, her first love was a mean second-rater, a crawling careerist who kept referring to his unworthiness, only to get help and climb another half-inch higher. She only knew this later.

‘And all because she was fat,’ she now wrote, telling this story.

While writing this she had had another idea and made a few notes on it before she gave up for the day. She also meant to work at least one hour on her next funny chapter. She knew she was wasting time, financially speaking, and yet she took such full joy in trying one thing and another. ‘I like a full quiver.’

But this afternoon, Stephen kept shouting, ‘You’ve done enough, come down, come down, you don’t know when to stop.’

At last she came down, protesting. Stephen told her all that had happened. They were excited, charmed by Vittorio’s friendly advances. What did it mean? That they had friends in the USA who had written? That Vittorio had written to the American Party and found out their situation and now from his European viewpoint, sympathized with them? For if it meant that they were forgiven, no, that their cause was taken up by the Italian and French Parties, that these repudiated the position of the American Party and were anxious for ammunition to pounce on and set right the political and theoretical errors not to say crimes of the American Party, and were ready to pursue farther the path opened up by Jacques Duclos, then it might mean that the Howards were in a way supported even by the Kremlin and that in the end the thunders of the Kremlin would be directed against, would even demolish those in University Place who had led them to shame, disgrace. Stephen was so joyful and Emily so proud of him, Emily so triumphant and Stephen in such a gay teasing mood that they decided to leave the children, the work and even Suzanne’s lessons and go out for dinner to a very dear, very ‘rayshershay’ place they knew, Véfour. Madame Suzanne had been in the house since ten o’clock. They went to explain to her that they would take the afternoon off.

But Madame Suzanne knew Vittorio very well, by name, reputation and by sight. And what wonders she told them of him! In the first place, before the troubles in Europe, he had been a society lawyer, sought after by all the society men and women for their difficulties. He had charmed endless women. ‘Charmed! Charmed women!’ Stephen almost shouted.

Madame Suzanne nodded her head. ‘Oh, yes, I assure you. He was very seductive. I don’t mean he created scandals. Women fell in love with him. He had an enormous practice out of it. And he himself is an odd type. He used to fall violently in love and go through agonies for the beautiful women he met. To love and be loved by Vittorio was an adventure every society woman wanted. Or most wanted.’

‘Women loved him?’ said Stephen, still astonished.

‘Of course, he has changed, he is dreadfully disfigured. But women still love him. He can still charm and win them. He had been married four times.’

‘I don’t understand it. But then I never did know what women wanted,’ said Stephen.

And she told them much more about him. How brave he was, how, once convinced, he had dropped his fashionable practice, joined the Party and done their legal work, organized their cultural work, how good his memory was, infallible, freakish, how he sacrificed himself, how he was sought after by the police, what he had done in the Resistance, how he had been caught and put into a camp, where he was ill-treated. Much more. The Howards were entranced by their capture, their new friend. They must have him at the house as soon as possible, and they began to discuss with Madame Suzanne or as she now already was, Suzanne, what sort of people they could invite who would not hurt the feelings of this hero. She said she knew many such people; she could easily fix up a congruous party for them. They went out for their walk enraptured. They sat on a café terrace later, took a taxi to Véfour in the Palais-Royal and liked it so much that from then on they called it their Véfour, ‘our dear Véfour’.

Emily was delighted with the character of their new friend. It was pleasant to know that such a hero, a man so highly regarded all over Europe, had once been a man of Stephen’s own background. Emily said, ‘At last you are vindicated! Now you realise that what you did had meaning and worth. You really fought for freedom and theoretical purity. I always believed in you, Stephen. I let you down at times and wished you had not touched the theoretical questions, but now I see you were right, we have not only got out of the whole mess, but with clean hands. Oh, I am so happy and proud! Oh, my dear, dear husband! You are really wonderful. I’m deleerious, this is the new life. God bless Vittorio and Jacques Duclos and all the people here. I am so enchanted and excited. It proves this wasn’t just an escape. It always hurt me bitterly that they called us escapists and Bohemian adventurers. I was discouraged and now I’m in a dream-world of glorious joy. Oh, what a gamble! It seemed like a gamble, worse, a delusion; but even for us it’s worked out perfectly. Oh, what a cave of Adullam we escaped from. And to come straight into the arms of the Party here—in Paris, the loveliest city in the world; and I have everything straight at last, and am happy.’

Stephen said with a proud, repressed smile, ‘I wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about it until we can check up. A few facts won’t hurt us. But you, Emily, don’t need facts to work on, only enthusiasm. However, I feel a lot better. He’s in such a high position in the Party that he couldn’t, wouldn’t visit us unless he thought we were clean. He couldn’t do it for his own reputation! No need for us to be hangdog any more, though. What a smack in the nose for the old die-hards of University Place.’