‘Captain Snegiryov,’ I said, after a long long silence; and then louder: ‘Of course! Captain Snegiryov!’
‘Who?’ asked Susan sleepily. ‘What?’
‘Captain Snegiryov. The man who said “Forgive us, we are of humble origin!”’
‘God damn you!’ said Susan. ‘I’m not interested.’
At the very same moment, I wasn’t interested either. Not in her, not in anything in the world.
‘Then I surrender, dear,’ I said. ‘I’m a talented coward. It’s the only kind to be.’
Not speaking anymore, a talented coward to the last, I turned away from her, and thought secretly, scarily: This had better be the last time.
I walked back, on a damned cold December morning, nursing an imperial hangover, trying not to dwell on the phoney symbolism involved in my long zigzag retreat up town, from West 54th Street to East 77th. I suppose I must have looked a bit wild, judging by the stares of passers-by; but God bless us every one! had these early-shopping matrons never seen a returning reveller with a creased suit, yesterday’s stubble of beard, and two well-earned circles under his eyes? Just how insulated can you get?
Of course I was pale and wan, and a little rocky when it came to walking a straight line. What did they expect me to be? It was ten o’clock in the morning – a gentleman’s dawn, having no connection with the sunrise. I had my rights, the same as any other card-carrying wino.
High as a kite, low as a flat heel, blinking like a lighthouse, feeling like hell, I plodded my way north-eastwards, towards home and beauty. Policemen gave me cold looks and a measured swing of the night-stick. Women averted their well-bred gaze. Dogs relieved themselves pointedly – especially poodles. Home was the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill he never climbed.
Kate – up early, like any percipient wife – said not a word when I got back. Obviously she was not fighting; if she were going to win at all, it was not by fighting. Though this was a change, it was not the most welcome change in the world. The least you could say to a returning dog was ‘Bad dog!’ and to a man, ‘For God’s sake wipe your feet.’ All I got was silence, and a face of purest marble, and music, music, music. The guitar had started again, and its sad and searching loveliness plucked at the air, and at all defenceless things, and at me.
Pursued by several kinds of taunting ghost, head aching, feet as sore as sandpaper, I went upstairs.
I went upstairs, to be taken, in solitude, by a drenching despair which would not leave me, nor yield to the half-bottle of champagne I had to have, nor relent in any way. This really was all wrong, and I was beginning to know it … If it needed a sickening hangover to tell me that I had been wandering a sordid by-path, then a hangover might well be part of every man’s first aid kit … Susan was a dear girl, and a lovely one, but I must not go to that tainted well again.
Suddenly I began to need Kate, with all the old hunger; I began to feel the conviction, deeply disquieting, almost terrorizing, that in spite of the rough edges and the smooth invigilation, I would never be happy with any other person. It was a totally confusing thought, and crossed up by a drinking man’s morning miseries, and a fornicating man’s remembered impotence, and the backlash of a glass of champagne which was not doing its appointed work; but in essence I could see that it came down to marital politics, which were the same as any other brand – the art of the possible.
If what we had got was not perfect, if the terms were tough and the prospects wounding, then the thing might be renegotiated. But it must not be abandoned, while life was still in it.
In love and war, it seemed, you did best – or at least you were not disgraced – if you took all the ground you could get, but gave all you had to give in payment. And if panic were persuading me to this, then panic could have the credit. I wasn’t using any credit cards that morning.
I was on the point of going downstairs to give Kate a very cautious slice of this, as a matter of concealed urgency, in the most guarded terms available to a man feeling his way from one pitch dark vault to another lit by a single candle, when the phone rang in my dressing room. It was Erwin Orwin.
‘What happened to you, Johnny?’ he asked immediately.
‘I’m sorry, Erwin,’ I told him. ‘I’ll be along soon.’
‘You got held up?’
‘No. I had a hangover.’
‘That’s what I like about the British,’ said Erwin. But whether he meant their hangovers or their transparent honesty, I did not know, and there was no time to inquire. ‘Now listen,’ he said forcefully. ‘Are you happy with
Safari
?’
It was a startling word, one I had not thought to hear that morning. ‘Happy?’ I said. ‘Yes, I think so. Why?’
‘Here’s why,’ he said. ‘Things have been happening to a couple of other shows. You don’t need the details, but one of them wants longer on the road, and
Josephine
is starting to sag, here in town. What I aim to do is cancel the out-of-town tour of
Safari,
and open it cold in New York.’
‘When?’
‘About five weeks.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said, though with an alarming sense of misgiving which was not related to the show. ‘We’ve done our best with it. I think it’s about ready to go, whether you put it on in Boston or here.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Erwin. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be taking this sort of chance. But it won’t be easy. We’ll have to work like crazy.’
‘OK.’
‘No more hangovers.’
‘Oh, come on, Erwin – this was the first one.’
‘It’s the first one that got into the record books. I’ll want you all the time, Johnny. How soon can you get down?’
‘Half an hour.’
‘I’ll be looking for you.’
I put the phone back, with a feeling that something beyond price – some healthy limb, some conviction of piety – had been ripped from me while I was off-guard. God, how did a man ward these things off, and still get a little sleep … For now I had my urgent assignment, and it wasn’t going to be Kate after all. Erwin’s call had seen to that.
Now I was foul-hooked elsewhere, and I had no choice save to follow the wrenching drag of the line. For a thousand reasons,
The Pink Safari
had to have all the priority; I was doomed to give Kate second place again, and in our present wasteland the demotion might be fatal. This was the one priority she would never recognise.
But there could be nothing else on the list, till the show was mounted. And if, after that, there were no list left to turn to, I might be foul-hooked forever.
Erwin Orwin’s after-the-first-night parties were never geared for failure, and the party he put on for the premiere of
The Pink Safari
was no exception. It was, as always, held on stage, as soon as possible after the fall of the curtain; he kept the set as it was, except for taking out the backdrop, and filled the vast available space with tables, bars, an enormous buffet, and a throng of people to match.
It was part of Erwin’s touch-of-Napoleon technique that he never followed theatrical fashion, neither in this particular area, nor in most others. He did things his own way – and thus, after a first night, he did not go to Sardi’s. Sardi’s, with bulging hampers, a fleet of heated trolleys, and crate after crate of the right stuff, came to him.
The curtain had rung down, reasonably near to schedule, at eleven-thirty; by twelve o’clock, the stage was jumping again. It was a merry charade, because we thought we had cause to be merry – the show had romped through without a hitch, the audience had seemed to love it, and everyone was saying, between drinks: ‘They can’t pan this one …’ These were famous last words, of course, and Broadway was littered with expensively embalmed theatrical corpses to prove it; but this time, this time it seemed they really
couldn’t …
So we celebrated, with a good heart, steady nerves – until the time for the reviews drew nearer – and most of the stops out.
An orchestra played for us, and in between times Teller’s mother’s cousin took over at the piano, pounding out the
Safari
tunes which people were already beginning to hum. The guests danced – there were loads of pretty girls available, all with hair like Susan’s – and ate a lot, and drank more, and gathered into knots and wandered around the set, arguing, or melted into the shadows for a brisk clinch.
There was probably some kind of esoteric message in the fact that this celebration party, held on stage, put some people into the full glare, and others wandering in and out of the wings, and others nowhere to be seen. Life, my boy, life … Myself, I had the glare, and it was beginning to blur a little at the edges.
It was a theatrical crowd, the famous and the infamous jumbled together like differing grades of egg; the only grade not represented were the critics on the dailies, absent with leave, crouched even now, with the knives or unguents of their trade, over the prostrate body of my brainchild. There were moments, many moments, when I did not care what they did with it; moments when this whole evening seemed to slop over into absolute falsity – a falsity presented in specific terms by our own
Safari
cast who, ruthlessly coy, delayed their various entrances until the moment seemed propitious, and then swept back upon the stage, ready, they hoped, to take the best curtain call of the evening.
Actors … But I could not deny that they deserved it. They had all been wonderful, and they knew it, and we knew it, and thus they were entitled to this little extra slice of nonsense. Dave Jenkin, attended by his raucous girlfriend, was especially prominent, prancing around the stage like a compatriot boxer at the moment of victory; but he had risen to the very top of his form that evening – agile, cheeky, sometimes very funny, and always timing to perfection – and he now had, as far as I was concerned, a free hand to put on any kind of an act he chose. He had proved himself a star. Let the star gyrate a bit.
I was gyrating myself, though in smaller and smaller circles.
People congratulated me. I congratulated people. Erwin Orwin held court behind a massive corner table, piled with food. Teller’s mother’s cousin gave of his best. On my side – it was a night for remembering that there were two sides to everything – I had Jack Taggart, looking all-competent, and Hobart Mackay, looking out of place, and beautiful Susan Crompton, looking just fine.
Beautiful Susan was excited, but full of the pangs of remorse, for something really important. She had fluffed one of her only two lines, though with an air of such ravishing incompetence that the audience had roared with laughter. (I could imagine Erwin saying, out of the corner of his mouth: ‘We’ll keep that one in.’) But Susan, at the moment, was not to be consoled. It was obvious that she would talk about this setback for many months to come.
‘I thought I’d die, right there on the stage!’ she declaimed, as soon as we had met, and I had told her how wonderful she was. ‘And I’d rehearsed it so many times!’
‘It didn’t matter,’ I assured her. ‘Really it didn’t.’
‘It did, it did!’ she wailed. ‘It was awful! And what will people think? What will
she
think?’
‘She?’
‘Your wife!’
I felt able to promise that Kate would not, for this particular reason, think any the worse of her. I had no doubt that this was true. I couldn’t check it with Kate, because I couldn’t see Kate, at that moment. I was not in good shape, for all sorts of reasons. It had been a long evening, a raw evening. I had spent a lot of it with Kate, but now, in the midst of the crowds and congratulations and the merry merry fun, I was finishing it alone.
It had been very exciting; one could not be blasé about an evening which had gone with such a triumphant swing, the glittering culmination of nearly a year’s hard work. Like Dave Jenkin, I felt entitled to my own little prance of victory … I had sat in a box beside Kate, with an unauthorised row of drinks close to hand, and watched the thing unfold, so well and so smoothly that presently I stopped sweating, and drank only to success, and for pleasure.
Safari
had been funny, as I hoped it would – wildly funny, bitterly funny, cruelly funny on a cruel strand of the world’s multiple troubles. I enjoyed it, and nodded when bits of it went especially well, and glowed a little when people laughed, and glowed even more at the final applause. But all the time, I could guess what Kate must be thinking. Indeed, I knew. Was racial strife ever funny? Were there jokes to be made out of side-by-side squalor and affluence? What had happened to
Ex Afrika
? What – that famous old conundrum, the despair of the leading
savants
of two continents – what had happened to me?
Her main reaction to the play itself had been silence; in fact, we had only spoken to each other twice during the entire evening. When Susan came on, Kate said: ‘So that’s your Miss Thing.’
‘She was,’ I said, with a slight extra emphasis.
‘Well done.’
It was rather too elliptical for me.
Later she had seemed to have a moment of tears, though for what and for why I did not know. Was it when the Negro child died, and a single sad guitar theme picked its way out of the jungle of the native-location music? Or was it for other things? For me, for herself, for us? I could not tell, I did not know how to ask.
At the second interval, she put a curious question: ‘Do you remember “God is black”?’
I did remember, though I could not see why she had recalled it tonight. It had been something long ago, in Johannesburg, when I had told her: ‘If you want to know what it feels like to be a native in South Africa, go along to the steps of the Town Hall, and take a look at the pillar at the far end.’
I would not tell her why, so she had gone to look, and found what I had found earlier that day – the words ‘God is black’ scrawled in chalk on one of the civic pillars. When she came back, she had asked: ‘But what does it mean?’
‘Despair and hope, in three words.’
It was a hot day, and she was rather cross. ‘You might just as well have told me what it was. I never walk as far as that.’