I was glad that I had a drink in my hand, at that moment; there was a sudden and urgent need for a different taste. I read the column again, more analytically, feeling a little sick and a little chilly round the conscience. Then I poured another drink, and turned off the hi-fi set, and gave the matter some serious thought.
The report was considerably dated, as far as history was concerned; yet, amazingly, this was the first time Susan and I had appeared in print as a team, explicitly or otherwise. I had always been expecting something of the sort, though not perhaps so viciously angled; but there was an enormous amount of competition in this area, from New York’s perennial crop of public lovers, and writers as a class were of less amorous interest than Hollywood apes, French poodles and imported English stallions.
So far, in spite of a less-than-discreet progress all around the town, we had been left off the form-sheet; we had remained technically anonymous.
It was difficult to judge if this anonymity had now been breached. Kate might never read the paragraph, nor hear about it; and if she did, she still might not take it seriously. It was, I thought suddenly, couched in her own kind of prose, the kind she and her gossip column had thriven on, in the distant past; and she must know that a lot of such ‘revelations’ were balanced on a very slender wire of fact, if they were sustained by anything at all. She might decide to take the professional view that fire and smoke, so often unrelated, were in this case part of the same mirage.
I was still speculating about this, an hour and several drinks later, when the phone rang. It was Susan, Susan in a serious mood.
She began immediately. ‘Johnny, there was a terrible thing in one of the papers last night. Shall I–’
‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I heard about it.’
‘Who told you?’
‘The doorman. Who told you?’
‘People have been calling me up all morning,’ she said excitedly. ‘Well, three people, at least.’
‘What people?’
‘Girls in the show. Johnny, what do you think?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ I told her, and after about twelve straight drinks this was fundamentally true. ‘I think we’ve been damned lucky so far, that’s all. Now we’re not.’
‘Are you angry?’ she asked after a moment.
‘Not with you. Why should I be? You come out of it all right, anyway. They said you were stunning and low-cut. What more do you want?’
‘You
are
angry,’ she said. ‘Johnny, I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have this happen for anything in the world. Aren’t people awful?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s awful but us.’
‘Would you like to come back here and talk about it?’
‘I don’t think so. At the moment I’m in conference with a bottle of Comrade Smirnoff’s best. Stunning and uncorked. I’ll make out with that.’
‘Darling, isn’t there anything I can do?’
‘Not a thing.’ I gathered a few stray thoughts together. ‘Susan, don’t worry about this. It’ll either blow up in our face, or it won’t. Probably it won’t. There are hundreds of these damned gossip items every day, and they’re forgotten in twenty-four hours. Who reads the bloody paper, anyway? Doormen, and stunning old show-girls, and pimps, and truck-drivers, and Broadway drunks, and all our best friends.’ I realised that my thought-gathering had not been too successful, and I tried to sum up, in a common sense verdict. ‘Kate may never read it, anyway. By the time she gets back, they’ll be libelling someone else instead.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘With every fibre of my being.’
‘It
is
libel, isn’t it? Can’t you sue them?’
‘Oh sure. Just let me get my trousers on … Susan, it isn’t libel, and no one is going to sue anyone, and with luck she won’t hear about it, and that’ll be that.’
‘I wish you’d come over, all the same.’
‘I’m lying low,’ I said. ‘Eliot Ness gave me the signal. Goodbye.’
When I woke up, it was with a wonderfully dry mouth, but in other respects I felt better all over. Already, the gossip item which had so downcast us was out of date; already, there must be another issue of ‘Show Biz Confidential’ on the stands, and people would be reading and talking about some other sordid couple. There was nothing plucked so featherless and forlorn as yesterday’s love birds.
Tonight, with luck, Susan and I would start to be forgotten again. And perhaps Kate, six thousand miles away, burying her head, counting her loot, would never hear about it anyway.
But that guess turned out to be wrong. Kate did hear about it; in fact she must actually have read the column; some prompt and kindly friend must have sent a helpful cutting winging southwards within twenty-four hours. Three days later, I had a cable from her:
Returning in about ten days. Who is stunning Susan Crompton, or can I do it? Love Kate.
It was a fair warning, a very fair warning indeed.
Waiting for her (and it was strange to realise, after so long a separation, that ‘her’ meant Kate), I went to several parties, by myself, in a kind of reverse effort to stay out of the limelight. It seemed possible that if enough people saw me moping unaccompanied round the town, they would begin to think:
Poor old bachelor Steele – he must be pining his heart out
… But the price of this ingenious stroke of camouflage was, for my own taste, rather high.
The six-to-eight cocktail circuit, as established in any city where more than a quarter of a million people huddle together for urban shelter, always seemed to me a prime example of the stupidity and self-delusion lying in ambush for group behaviour of any sort.
It was as if someone, ignoring the law of diminishing returns, had worked out that if four people could enjoy themselves in one room, forty could have a real whale of a time, and four hundred could touch dizzy heights of ecstasy. And if one were really shooting for the moon, there was still the regal or presidential bash for four thousand.
The result, in cities like New York, or Washington, or London, or San Francisco, or Paris, or Rome – all highly civilised places where people should have known better – as well as in vulgar carbons such as Toronto or Johannesburg, was the conviction, deeply embedded, already sacrosanct, that a party could never hope for the higher ratings unless there was no room to move, no way of talking save to scream against the uproar, no time for anything but banality, and no way to survive except by burying the nose deep inside a glass, and dulling all the other senses as quickly as possible.
The idea that only an idiot would prefer to stand and shout when he could sit and read, or listen to music, or dine with six friends who were prepared to take turns at talking, seemed to have gone the way of the crinoline.
Yet I launched out upon this tormented sea nonetheless, and did my share of elbowing, and shouting, and grinning, and gulping, like any compulsive good-timer. The outcome, though negative for fun, was at least instructive.
I learned that no one seemed to give a damn what I was doing with my spare time, or which bed I was bouncing on, or where I hung my hat. A few friends asked: ‘Where’s Susan?’ and a few others: ‘Where’s Kate?’; neither group used any special or distinguishable tone of voice, and neither group waited for an answer, which they could scarcely have heard in any case.
It was an effective illustration of the fact that, by and large, in spite of the grinding gossip wheels, other people’s love affairs were really the dullest topic in the world; and that the type of exhibitionist whose peculiar pleasure it was to perch high on the headboard and crow to the world: ‘
Look at me – I’m loving the daylights out of Liz
,’ had only his own pointing finger as the emblem of success.
However, there was one exception to all this, one chance-encountered man who did take a personal interest in how I was spending my time. This was Hobart Mackay, my publisher, whom I met at a literary-and-stage gathering in one of the big party rooms at the St Regis.
Hobart went to a lot of such parties; he could not have enjoyed them, since he was essentially a quiet and studious character who did more thinking than doing. But he probably felt it necessary to keep an eye on other publishers and authors, to ensure that the former did not steal from his own stable, and the latter, if they felt like straying, knew that they had a comfortable home to go to.
He was a small man, about fifty, with short sandy hair and a blue bow tie; he looked like a university professor who had not changed his basic style since his own student days. We saw each other by chance across the jam-packed room – he was not an easy man to see at such a party – and he raised his eyebrows comically, as if in despair at the company we were keeping. Then he was lost to view behind a massive man with a bushy white beard, who really did look like a writer, and then we finally came together, in an eddy of traffic beside one of the St Regis potted palms.
‘Hallo, Jonathan,’ he said, with a slightly harassed smile. His glass was empty, and he could not have been farther from the bar, which was at the opposite end of the room, and under fierce and continuous siege by crowds of much larger guests. ‘It’s nice to see you, but I wish you were a dry martini … I didn’t know you came to this sort of circus.’
‘But I love them,’ I said, insincerely. ‘They keep me in touch with the world of achievement. And of course I’ve got nothing else to do.’
‘I hope that’s not true.’ He was looking at me carefully, as he always did; to him, writers were people, not names or labels, and he liked to find out what sort of mood and shape we were in, though, as a spectator of the human comedy, he was rarely disposed to do anything about his findings. ‘How’s my book coming along?’
‘Slowly,’ I said. ‘You know I’ve been working on this
Pink Safari
thing.’
‘How’s
that
coming along?’ he asked, with markedly less enthusiasm.
‘It’s pretty well finished. But I’m staying on to help with the production.’
‘Book!’ he said suddenly. ‘When do I get a book?’
‘In the new year, I hope.’
‘Really?’ He was still watching me, with clinical interest. ‘That’s good news. Can you say when, in the new year? It’s time we published you again.’
‘I honestly don’t know, Hobart.’ I wasn’t going to worry too much about this examination; I had been working hard on Erwin’s musical, and did not feel guilty of waste of time or effort. ‘You know how some things go fast, and then they go slow. The book got stuck, but one of these days it will come unstuck again, and land on your desk.’ A waiter, squirming his way through the throng with a tray of someone else’s drinks, passed close to me, and I reached out and abstracted two glasses of what looked like very strong Scotch and soda. I had been drinking vodka, but a thirst was a thirst. ‘Courtesy of the house,’ I said to Hobart, handing him a glass. ‘Never say I don’t look after you.’
‘Oh, you look after people, all right.’ He sipped the drink, and made a face, and stared at me intently, over the rim of his glass. ‘This seems to be rye and ginger-ale … When is Kate coming back?’
Unlike other inquirers, he was actually interested in the answer, and I told him as much as I knew. ‘In a few days,’ I said. ‘She got tied up in South Africa, but that seems to have been straightened out.’
‘I’ll be very glad to see her again. You must have missed her.’
‘Very much.’
‘Seven months must have seemed a long time.’
‘Infinity.’
He took another sip of his drink before saying, in a gently censorious tone: ‘I’m sure it will be good for you to have her back in New York.’
There was no mistaking the subject of this, and though I did not resent his interest, since he was a good enough friend to be allowed the latitude, the idea of baring secrets and sharing the confessional made no appeal at all. I was not seeking a father figure, however small and discreet, even though I had taken a $40,000 advance on my patrimony.
I looked away from him, as any keen party-goer might, and glanced round the packed room. The uproar, aided by a low ceiling and a rising intake, had now reached a fearful level of decibels.
‘If New York were all like this,’ I said, ‘Kate would be better off in South Africa. Luckily it isn’t.’
Hobart had not quite finished.
‘When she comes back,’ he said, ‘you must bring her to dinner.’
‘We’d enjoy that.’
‘Like old times.’
The phrase, in this context, rang particularly false; we always dined with the Mackays three or four times a year, and we would no doubt be doing so again. If this was a revival of ‘old times’, so was renewing one’s driving licence. But in the interests of peaceful co-existence, I said again: ‘We’d like it very much.’
‘If you won’t find it too dull.’
‘Now why should I find it dull?’
He gave a very small wave of his hand, the only kind feasible with the amount of room we had to spare.
‘Well, you know – the theatre crowd. I thought you might have developed a taste for fast living.’
I had had enough of this little contest. ‘You’ve been reading the wrong papers, Hobart,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t changed, and I don’t intend to. Anything else is a cowardly smear circulated by my political opponents.’
With that, he seemed to be satisfied. He smiled, much more easily, and said: ‘Time for me to go,’ and promptly poured the rest of his drink into the potted palm, with the courage of small men who know what they want and what they don’t. Then, without disguise, he slipped the empty glass into his side-pocket.
‘Only way to deal with it,’ he said, noticing my expression. ‘I give it to the doorman on the way out.’
I was still surprised. ‘After that, anything I do will seem normal.’
‘Mind you keep it that way,’ he said, and with this cautionary farewell he made for the door.
I moved slowly after him, ready to leave also; I had done my duty for the night, and the small exchange with Hobart Mackay had been vaguely unsettling, the first hint of its kind from a man who had always seemed to view other people’s habits, as distinct from their writing, with the blessed unconcern which one could bestow on other people’s children.