Tornado Pratt (5 page)

“I was mistaken, monsieur. The Italian ambassador is unharmed.”

“What the hell was that all about?”

“Monsieur, on behalf of the flics and people of France, I
welcome
you to our shores. Friends, a toast to the Italian ambassador.”

And that’s how he always was, Horace, a kind of lethal joker whose most destructive pranks were reserved for himself. The closest I ever came to fathoming the nature of Gaspard Luria was one day when I caught him alone in the street because in the café he was always surrounded by an enthusiastic group. I came at him with:

“Cut the kidding for once, Gaspard, and tell me what you really think.”

“I think the world is a pimple, Tornado.”

“Are you jealous?”

“Yes.”

“See here, Gaspard—”

“There is nothing to see there, Tornado. What I do, I do for no reason because if there were a reason it would be unreasonable. Look at it like this, my life is the canopy which shelters me from the intolerable glare of eternity. How can I explain it to you, Tornado? I purchase my thoughts in the flea-market. They are second-hand but have the charming patina of age. One day,
Tornado
, I will die a hero’s death because I am a connoisseur of the banal.”

Gaspard had a room in the Hotel du Phare. It was a round room without windows, like the inside of a big cheese. It contained a bed with books stacked deep around it and nothing else. He slept in that room but he
lived
in the huge, baroque Café Balzac on the Boulevard St Michel. All day he sat there, reading, reciting poetry, receiving friends and courtiers. Sometimes he would say:

“Money—who can give me money?”

And, sure enough, someone would always get out a wallet and extract some old, garishly coloured French bank-notes that were falling to bits, and hand them over to him. When I left Paris, I handed him about five hundred dollars in francs. He smiled, said:

“Thank you, Tornado.”

And stuffed them carelessly in his pocket.

But what the hell, Horace, I haven’t thought about Gaspard Luria for years. Maybe I was reminded of him by that kid we saw this afternoon being shot by the firing squad. The way he
held his head on one side and smiled so that he looked composed and forgiving but then—just as we slipped past in the taxi—I saw his chin quiver and I could tell that kid was rotten inside with terror of the dark. Shut the door, Horace. This is the noisiest goddamm hotel I’ve ever been in.

In England, Horace, I went straight to visit Harvey’s brother, the Earl. And that earl was very taken with me and glad to have me remain in his palace in Huntingdonshire—was it?—for as long as I wanted. While I was there he asked my opinion about certain American investments and I was able to help him in this matter so that he made thousands of pounds in the next few months. With this money, he mended the roof, hired a new under-gamekeeper and paid one of his parlour maids handsomely not to make a fuss about a baby. I studied that earl, Horace, noticing the difference there was between him and Harvey and relating that difference to the fact that for the Earl life had unrolled like a red carpet while Harvey had had to hack his way forwards. This meant Harvey had grown into the better man. That earl was a worm of a man, self-indulgent and self-important. But his estate was the nearest thing to heaven I ever saw.

When I arrived it was velvet spring and the creamy breeze went rustling through his beeches and elms. Red squirrels clawed their way up those trees and then spied down on the flamingos in the reedy lake. Those flamingos had been imported from Africa and yet their gaudy plumes harmonized with the English green. In the walled kitchen garden, rows of succulent vegetables ripened. In front of the house, which had columns, was a great spread of lawn which gleamed with daffodils that danced away to meet a host of bluebells in the woods.

There was a great peace and elegance about that place and no matter who came there the house was big enough to take it.

The thing was, Harvey—Harvey? Harvey’s dead. He was hit by a truck in—early nineteen fifties must have been. Or sixties?
Anyhow
, the thing was, Harv—Horace! The thing was, Horace, most of that earl’s friends were too old and vicious to attract me but now and then someone called who took a shine to me and I to them. In this way, I went on to other country houses and soon I was running with fairy-tale people. There were lanterns strung in the gardens, Horace, and under them swayed the golden boys and
girls. I’d never met such a set before. They smiled and whispered things. Nothing shocked them and everything amused them. And I was their new toy that they kept handing round to prove it really worked. Those silver girls flitted in and out of my skin, Horace, dissolving into moonlight. I’d bounce into a circle of those favoured children, Horace, standing with hands linked but not enough energy to dance and I’d tug long streamers of them through woods to the sea and then whip them into the curling surf.

“My God, Tornado, don’t you ever let up?”

“Race you to the beacon, Sir Andrew.”

And off we’d go, drumming along the cliffhead, thrashing the wind with our winged elbows. Naturally, if I had anything like an equal amount I could lick them all on horseback. Then I’d do tricks for them like scooping up at a gallop the prettiest little Honourable, kissing her hard and then shooting her into a
haystack
as I went pounding past. In the sea, I’d leap and skim amongst them like a dolphin. But I began to sicken of them, Horace. Hardly any of them had any guts or any spine and,
having
learned at their finishing schools how to be perfect, were stuck like that forever. They began to impress me, Horace, as pretty china figures on a mantel-piece. I knew that any shock could shatter them—if you talked too loud or if you talked too real. But for a long time I went on prancing with them, Horace, because there was so much charm to be explored. But I began to get disgusted with myself and that made me drink and one day I woke up in a cell in a London police station, screaming from the pain of a horse-race taking place on my chest. I could see those ponies and their jockeys, Horace, and at the same time recognize I was in the grip of liquor-induced delirium. After a while two of those tommies or bobbies, with the big helmets, came charging along the corridor and into my cell.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Are you all right, Mr Pratt?”

They’d discovered that the bum they’d found sleeping in a shop doorway was a millionaire with fantastic connections and they nursed me like a pair of mothers.

After that, I cut myself off from the pleasure set and began making long phone calls to Chicago, making plans for my return. I figured I’d spend a couple of weeks in London, setting up, or just exploring, one or two deals and then get on a big ship back to the USA.

I was negotiating with Sir Vivian Bronson to sell him a few thousand steel “spiders”. These were meat-handling devices we’d invented and patented in Chicago. It wasn’t much of a deal,
profitwise
, but everyone said: Vivian Bronson is
the
man in London meat. Get him on your side and the sky’s the limit. The trouble I found was that this guy wouldn’t talk about meat. I came at him with:

“Cuts handling costs by a third. Improves quality of the carcass.”

He’d come busting back at me with:

“How would you like to see my father’s marbles?”

“I’d rather see a contract.”

“You’re a nice lad, Tornado, but something of a philistine. Aren’t you interested in the past?”

“No.”

“But you can’t understand the present, Tornado, unless you understand the past. All of today is locked in yesterday and
yesterday
is in the museum.”

“Do you want to do a deal, Sir Vivian?”

“We are doing a deal, Tornado.”

And I’d fume inwardly while he blathered on about his father’s marbles and his father’s flints and his father’s bronzes. You get the idea, Horace? Sir Vivian senior had been a great digger-up of things. As far as I could make out he’d gone snooping round the Mediterranean, digging little pits wherever he went. And wherever he put down his spade why he fished up some crumbling old head of a Roman senator or a Greek athlete. Sir Vivian pointed down from his office window:

“And they’re all there, Tornado. He left everything to the nation.”

Sir Vivian was pointing at the British Museum. He had a
tremendous
reverence for his father and his father’s achievement.
Thinking
back, Horace, it is clear that Sir Vivian wouldn’t talk about meat because he felt that it was inferior to marble and bronze. He figured that he’d let the family down by being a mere meat mogul instead of an archaeologist like dad. I still can’t figure out how he held his job because I sure as hell couldn’t get him to talk about meat. Finally, hoping it might lead to action, I agreed to inspect his father’s marbles and we shuffled off to the museum. While we were giving those marbles the once-over his secretary came mincing up to us:

“Telephone call for you, sir—from the minister.”

And, promising to be back soon, Sir Vivian went puffing away with his secretary. I took another glum look at the marbles. They were mainly isolated legs, mostly of horses and the truth is, Horace, I got no kicks from contemplating them. During the next eight years, with Nathalie, I learned to savour the beauty of the spun imagination and I became a collector of note but at that time I was still a goon about art. Anyhow, Sir Vivian not returning, I drifted out of that hall, thinking to follow him back to his office. In the next hall was a glass case and, for some reason, I paused to look in it. There were a lot of little bitty things inside, many made of ivory, things like needles, fish-hooks, crude forks and combs. I gazed at one rough needle and shook my head ironically at the thought of preserving such a thing in a glass case. I read the notice propped near it and learned that this stuff was all Norwegian and dated back to the eighth century. Then I eyed that deformed needle again and I got a shock like a steer’s hoof on the shin! Eighth century! This needle! More than a thousand years ago—a thousand years!—a woman had been sewing with that home-made needle. In Norway, a thousand years ago—dark and cold, glacier, pine, log cabin, primitive family—and through the long, dark winter that unknown woman had stitched together the life-giving furs for her man and her kids with—that very needle! I kept gazing at it, almost seeing the ghostly scene of that oh distant! winter
wavering
into vision, imagining somehow that the life which had once moved that needle still adhered to it. A little later, Sir Vivian taps me on the back and leads me to his office to sign the contract at last.

But the next day, Horace, I went back to the museum. This time I got hooked on an early Christian drinking glass made of slightly greenish glass. This item was more than twelve hundred years old and had been found in Cyprus. Who had drunk out of that glass and what had they drunk? More important, what had they thought and felt and done in that summer world? I gazed at that glass, Horace, and at two or three items in the case and when I looked up, damn near an hour had passed. It made me shiver with the realization of how the past, and dreaming of the past, could swallow up the present. Nevertheless, Horace, I found that I was trapped. I cancelled my boat ticket and every day for three weeks I went to the British Museum. After that, I got a little alarmed and I took out a few doxies I’d found wandering about the
corridors
of the Ritz where I had a suite. The idea was to shake off the glamour of that museum but it didn’t work, Horace. While
we dined in classy restaurants and danced in sophisticated
nightclubs
, I kept thinking about some crumbling bit of wood that was just recognizable as the ruins of a doll or of a little stone lamp that had feebly lit a hovel full of brutish ancestors. And the next day I’d be back in that terrible, passion-wracked theatre of time until:

“Isn’t it—Tornado Pratt?”

I looked round, Horace, and saw a sweet and diffident smile. I nodded and muttered:

“At your service, ma’am.”

But she was faint behind the roar of the past. Faintly, through that roar, I heard her murmur:

“Well, I won’t spoil your concentration.”

A dim memory glowed. I’d met her before—in Scotland—amongst a large party feasting beside a lake and noted then the sweetness of her smile. But now my mind was in ancient Crete. My heart was beating in jagged spikes and each spike was a barbaric pin stuck through the oiled locks of a Cretan princess. I saw Nathalie’s smile, rebuffed, contract slightly and then, with a little, self-deprecating quirk of her mouth, she strolled on and I turned back to my showcase. A minute later I was flying down the aisle after her and when I caught up, beside a canoe, I burst out:

“Ma’am, get me out of here!”

“You are impetuous, Mr Pratt. I’ve never known an American before.”

“Take me live, and rescue me from the dead. We’ll honeymoon in Wyoming because there are no relics there.”

“Are you proposing to me, Mr Pratt?”

“It appears so, ma’am.”

“Very well, Mr Pratt.”

She wasn’t really forward, Horace, my Nathalie. In fact, she was an old-fashioned girl in many ways. She was kind and didn’t feel any need to wrap it in irony. She had values—like nature and art and loyalty—that she would defend. She—but what I want to project, Horace, is how we clicked. I can’t remember when I really proposed, the second day, third day, but we walked out of that museum, gazing into each other’s eyes and transmitting a current of love and already with the yearning for marriage in our hearts. She looked at me like that for years, Horace, eight years if you want to know, before the great amoeba grew round her liver and shrank my Nathalie into a husk. When I’d turn on the swivel of my drive and glance at her standing behind me on the green, I’d
quicken to that lamp of love. When I came home, when she came home, when we flew together in the Starlight Room an eighth of a mile above Manhattan, at any level, at any latitude of earth, the air turned to musk and filled with petals when my Nathalie and I came together.