Just then we heard the serious and sudden crunch of the driveway, a thoroughly satisfying sound that reminded me now of molars and nuts. This continuous grinding was caused by the broad tires of a brown Jaguar. Closer, it even sounded like a big-pawed animal hungrily padding through gravel.
“Hugh and Antonia,” Vidia said. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Jebb went to greet them. His voice was teasing and friendly but growly from his chain-smoking. He smoked French cigarettes from a blue pack.
The Frasers were introduced to me. I said, “I met you almost ten years ago, around Christmas.”
“I distinctly remember you,” Lady Antonia said.
I loved her lisp on the word “distinctly.” She had beautiful eyes and pale skin, and when she spoke, her tongue and teeth, slightly out of alignment, made her awkward, and sexier, and drew attention to her pretty mouth.
“Your book has done so well,” she said. “I’ve given copies of it away as presents.”
Hugh Fraser, hearing this, turned to me. He was very tall and slow in his movements, with a large, thoughtful face that looked both apprehensive and domineering. His shoulders were lopsided, one higher than the other, which gave him a weary posture. It was a letter from Hugh Fraser that Vidia the graphologist had once shown me, saying of his handwriting, “Look, even upside down it’s still tormented.”
“The Welsh are the only people who bring out my racial prejudice,” Jebb was saying to Lady Antonia.
Hugh Eraser’s bigness and aura of helpless authority filled The Bungalow. He was a Conservative member of Parliament, and he made me wonder why anyone so judicious and reflective had wanted to go into politics. I could not imagine him giving speeches or stumping for votes. He represented Stafford and Stone, in the Midlands. I knew those places from the train window, the stops before Crewe and Stoke, on the way to Liverpool. His was a safe Tory seat and the towns looked dreary, but that could have been misleading: riding trains in England was an experience of the back yards and open windows you rarely saw. And if you said to an English person that a certain place was dreary, he’d respond, with an indulgent chuckle, “Oh, the Potteries,” as if its dreariness were irrelevant.
“Sherry?”
Vidia was pouring and also describing the merits of this particular sherry, a suggestion of walnuts and oak.
“I always feel like Alice here,” Jebb said, and then he laughed and made a monkey face. “Of course, I feel like Alice in lots of places!”
In his overloud laugh there was a scream of disturbance, yet he was funny and much friendlier than the others.
“Stephen Tennant is the March Hare and the Red Queen rolled into one,” Jebb said, and cupped his hand close to his mouth and whispered in my ear in his affected American accent, “Faggot.”
Jebb’s breath against my head made me so uncomfortable I said, “He’s a recluse, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know whether I would call someone who goes to America as much as he does a recluse. He loves Bournemouth. He never misses the Christmas pantomime. Stephen is savagely peripatetic compared to Vidia, the true recluse.”
“This is a fantastic place,” Lady Antonia said. “It’s like a cottage in an enchanted forest.”
She was dressed like a shepherdess, her soft skin set off by a frilly lavender blouse and a velvet peasant skirt with brightly embroidered bib and shoulder straps. Her greenish-blue eyes were beautiful, as was her somewhat tousled blond hair. With her big soft lips she seemed half girl, half woman, laughing as she disagreed.
“If I lived here I would never leave,” she said. “You talk such rubbish, Julian.”
“About Stephen?” Julian pretended to be indignant, puffing pompously on his French cigarette. “I am probably the only person in this room who’s met him. I think of him as a sort of Oriental potentate. He greets all his visitors by lying on a lovely couch, draped in silk shawls. Something terribly Oriental about that — and of course something frightfully epicene too,” he said, cackling.
“There is something magical here,” said Lady Antonia.
“Stephen had the cottage built for himself,” Jebb said. “He never set foot in it. He’s just over there, you know, giggling over something very naughty.”
I wondered whether Vidia would tell Lady Antonia why the ivy-strangled trees were dead, but he said nothing. He had heard more guests arrive — the gravel again in the driveway. He was alert to the crunching. This was a taxi.
“Yes, yes,” he said, and went to the door. A young couple entered, and Vidia introduced them as Malcolm and Robin, visiting from New Zealand. Vidia had met them there on a lecturing visit. Malcolm had dark hair and a face so ruddy it looked like a higher form of embarrassment, the kind of color only English farm boys and some Scotsmen had — a naturally pale person’s rude health. Robin was sweet and square-shouldered, wearing a soft, unnecessary hat, as New Zealanders seemed habitually to do.
“Beaut book, Paul,” Malcolm said to me. “When we met Vidia in Auckland, I told him that it was a dream of mine to meet you when we came to England. So this is a pleasure.”
Jebb said mockingly, “A real fan!”
I ignored him. Being a pest was part of his humor. “My pleasure. Are you a writer?”
“I do some writing. I’m on the English faculty at the uni. I took Vidia around when he visited. Sort of smoothed the way.”
He was younger than me, and I knew exactly what his role had been, because it was the role I had played ten years before. I saw him as a Vidia protégé and seemed to be looking at my younger self, when I had visited England and Vidia had rewarded me for smoothing the way for him in Africa.
“It gets dark so early here,” Robin said. “And listen to that wind.”
If I had not heard New Zealand in her nasalized dahk I would surely have heard it in her weend. But I had made the same observation of English weather when I had first arrived.
“Quite right,” Hugh Fraser said, but he was speaking about something else to Vidia. He had stood up. His head was near the ceiling. He looked awkward in the room’s smallness, but then he probably looked uncomfortable in most rooms. “I knew him well,” Fraser said. “I would have given anything to work with him again. He always showed up in these sort of marvelous suits. ‘Got it in India,’ he’d say. ‘Made from the chin hairs of a certain goat in Kashmir.’”
“I felt I could eat that cloth,” Vidia said.
Who were they talking about? But I didn’t ask. Parties in England were full of remarks like these, about colorful people you’d never heard of.
“Instead, why don’t you eat some food?” Pat said, emerging from the kitchen. She greeted everyone and apologized for being preoccupied with the meal. She looked harassed, but I could see that she had help, a woman in a brown sweater and apron ladling soup into bowls.
Vidia poured the wine, saying, “I think you’ll like this. It’s balanced, it’s firm, perhaps a bit fleshy, but smooth and, I think you’ll agree, round.”
“We are taking no notice of Vidia’s diet today,” Pat said. “This is Mrs. Griggs’s oxtail soup.”
Vidia was served a plate of smoked salmon, which he had to himself, and I knew when I saw it that everyone else at the table would have preferred it to the brown soup.
Jebb said, “Vidia is such an absolute fanatic about food. There’s a new restaurant in London called Cranks, for vegetarians. I always think of Vidia when I go by. I’m usually cottaging in that area — see, no one even knows what it means!”
“One is thinking of buying a car,” Vidia said, abruptly changing the subject. “Tell me, what car should one buy?”