You and your dirty mind, Ferguson said. No wonder we get along so well.
Birds of a feather, my young Yankee friend. With dandy doodles in our pants and a fine pair of ponies to take us to town.
Aubrey helped Ferguson check in, but then he had to rush off and go home. It was Sunday, the nanny’s day off, and he had promised to stay with Fiona and the children until teatime, at which point he would return to the hotel for a pony ride and then take Ferguson out to dinner.
Fiona can’t wait to meet you, he said, but it won’t happen until tomorrow, alas.
As for me, I can’t wait until you come back this afternoon. When is teatime, by the way?
For our purposes, anywhere between four and six. You can rest up until then. Those Channel crossings can be brutal on the system, and you must be feeling fried — or at least sautéed.
Believe it or not, I managed to sleep on the train, so I’m good. Uncooked, as it were. Raw and fresh and raring to go.
After Ferguson unpacked, he returned to the ground floor and went into the dining room for breakfast, which was still being served at ten o’clock, and had his first taste of English cuisine, a platter that consisted of one sunny-side-up egg (greasy but delicious), two undercooked rashers of bacon (slightly repellent but delicious), two pork sausages, a thoroughly cooked cooked tomato, and two thick slices of homemade white bread slathered with Devonshire butter that was better than any butter he had ever tasted. The coffee was undrinkable, so he switched to a pot of tea, no doubt the strongest tea anywhere in Christendom, which he had to dilute with hot water before he could get it down his throat, and then he thanked the waiter, stood up from his chair, and trotted off to the gents’ for a long, unhappy session with his rumbling bowels.
He wanted to go out for a walk, but the mild rain that had been falling earlier had turned into a downpour, and rather than go upstairs and lock himself in his room, he decided to visit the famous wood-paneled bar and look for the ghost of C. Aubrey Smith.
The bar was empty at that hour, but no one seemed to mind when he asked if he could sit in there for a while as he waited for the weather to clear (sun was forecast for the afternoon), and because the porter was so friendly about it when he asked the question, Ferguson decided that he liked the English and found them to be a noble, generous people, not stiff in the way the French could be, not angry in the way Americans could be, but good-natured and calm, a tolerant folk who accepted the foibles of their fellow men and didn’t butt in or condemn you for speaking with the wrong accent.
So Ferguson sat down in the vacant wood-paneled bar and mused about the English for a while, in particular about C. Aubrey Smith and the nice but unimportant fact that he, the most English of all English gentlemen, the very embodiment of England for American audiences in countless Hollywood films, had been another ruler of the elves, in this case the elves of Movieland, and before long Ferguson had pulled out the little notebook he carried around in his jacket pocket and was writing down the names of British actors who had worked in California and, to a degree Ferguson had never considered until that morning, had helped create what the world now thought of as American movies. So many names, and so many films with those names on the list of credits, and as Ferguson wrote them down off the top of his head, or rather plucked them out from within his head as each one occurred to him, he included the titles of the movies he had seen those names act in and was astonished by how many there were, an avalanche of films and more films and more and more films, too many films, finally, an appalling number of films, and no doubt there were many others he had forgotten as well.
To begin with the first name on his list, the inevitable Stan, partner of Ollie, born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in the town of Ulverston in 1890 and then taken to America in 1910 with the Fred Karno Company as Charlie Chaplin’s understudy, more than eighty films seen with Stan Laurel in them, more than fifty with Chaplin, and at least twenty with C. Aubrey Smith (including Queen Christina, The Scarlet Empress, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, China Seas, Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Prisoner of Zenda), and hundreds more with Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone, Freddie Bartholomew, Greer Garson, Cary Grant, James Mason, Boris Karloff, Ray Milland, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Vivian Leigh, Deborah Kerr, Edmund Gwenn, George Sanders, Laurence Harvey, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, Robert Donat, Leo G. Carroll, Roland Young, Nigel Bruce, Gladys Cooper, Claude Rains, Donald Crisp, Robert Morley, Edna May Oliver, Albert Finney, Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Robert Shaw, Tom Courtenay, Peter Sellers, Herbert Marshall, Roddy McDowall, Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Alan Mowbray, Eric Blore, Henry Stephenson, Peter Ustinov, Henry Travers, Finlay Currie, Henry Daniell, Wendy Hiller, Angela Lansbury, Lionel Atwill, Peter Finch, Richard Burton, Terence Stamp, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, George Arliss, Leslie Howard, Trevor Howard, Cedric Hardwicke, John Gielgud, John Mills, Hayley Mills, Alec Guinness, Reginald Owen, Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and Elizabeth Taylor.
The rain stopped at two, but the sun didn’t come out. Instead, the cloudy sky filled with more clouds, clouds so thick and voluminous that they started to sag, slowly descending from their customary place in the heavens until they touched the ground, and when Ferguson finally stepped out of the hotel for a short walk around the neighborhood, the streets were a labyrinth of fog. Never had he been given so little to see in what was supposedly still the daytime, and he puzzled over how the English could go about their business in these sodden, vaporous murks, but then again, he said to himself, the English were probably on intimate terms with clouds, for if he had learned nothing else from Dickens, it was that the clouds in the sky over London came down for frequent visits among the people, and on a day such as this one it looked as if they had brought along their toothbrushes and were planning to spend the night.
It was a few minutes past three. Ferguson decided he should start walking back to the hotel to prepare himself for Aubrey’s return, which could be as early as four or as late as six, but he wanted to be ready at four in the hope that Aubrey would be able to detach himself from his family early rather than late. A bath or a shower first, and then he would put on the birthday presents Vivian had bought for him in Paris last week, the new pants and the new shirt and the new jacket that made him look like a million bucks, she had said, and he wanted to look like a million bucks for Aubrey in his new clothes, and then the clothes would come off and they would climb onto the bed to do what they had done at the Hôtel George V, and no, he wouldn’t feel guilty about it, he said to himself, he would enjoy it, and as far as Albert was concerned he would console himself by imagining that Mr. Bear was doing the same thing with someone else and enjoying it just as much as he was, and as he walked along thinking about Aubrey and Albert and the differences between them, not only the physical differences between light and dark and large and small but the mental differences and cultural differences and the differences between their outlooks on life, the somber depths of Albert’s heart as opposed to Aubrey’s whimsical good cheer, Ferguson marched on in the direction of the hotel, suddenly shifting his thoughts to the interview he would be doing with someone from the Telegraph tomorrow morning at ten, the first interview of his life, and even though Aubrey had told him not to worry and just relax and be himself, he couldn’t help feeling a little worried, and what did it mean to be himself anyway, he wondered, he had several selves inside him, even many selves, a strong self and a weak self, a thoughtful self and an impulsive self, a generous self and a selfish self, so many different selves that in the end he was as large as everyone or as small as no one, and if that was true for him, then it had to be true for everyone else as well, meaning that everyone was everyone and no one at the same time, and with that thought bouncing around in his head he came to the intersection of Marylebone High Street and Blandford Street, at the spot where Marylebone turned into Thayer just around the corner from the hotel on George, and even though the fog was pressing in and wrapping itself around him, Ferguson could make out the blinking red traffic light looming in the blur, a blinking red light that was the equivalent of a stop sign, so Ferguson stopped and waited for a car to pass, and because he was lost in his reveries about everyone and no one, he turned his head and looked to the left, that is, did what he had always done when crossing streets throughout his life, the reflexive, automatic look to the left to make sure no car was coming, forgetting that he was in London and that in English towns and cities one was supposed to look to the right and not to the left, and therefore he did not see the maroon British Ford sweeping around the bend on Blandford, so he stepped off the curb and started to cross the street, not understanding that the car he hadn’t seen had the right of way, and when the car slammed into Ferguson’s body, it hit him so hard that he went flying into the air, as if he were an airborne human missile launched into space, a young man on his way to the moon and the stars beyond, and then he reached the top of his trajectory and started to come down, and when he touched bottom his head landed on the edge of the curb and he cracked his skull, and from that moment on every future thought, word, and feeling that would have been born inside that skull was erased.