“I’m car-blind,” Jebb said. “I can’t tell them apart. I can’t even drive. I hate them, really. I’m car-bored, rather.”
“We once made the finest motorcars on earth,” Hugh Fraser said. His voice was solemn and slow. We waited for more. “And no doubt we shall again.” He paused and added, “Perhaps you should wait until then, when these paragons of British workmanship are once more rolling off the assembly lines.”
“How do you like your Jaguar?” I asked.
“It’s a bit of a tired old warhorse,” he said. “Like its owner.”
“Except when you’re out on the road and speeding and calling out, ‘Eat my dust!’” Jebb said, slipping into an American accent again. Then Jebb said to Malcolm with intense interest, “Isn’t there a fabulous native name for New Zealand?”
“I think you mean Maori.”
“I suppose one does,” Jebb said. He was smoking at the table, while everyone else was eating.
“Aotearoa,” Malcolm said. “It means, The Land of the Long White Cloud.”
“Or, The Land of the Wrong White Crowd, more like,” Jebb said. He turned his back on the New Zealanders and smiled at Lady Antonia, who hadn’t heard.
“There is nothing I would love more than living on one of those islands,” Lady Antonia was saying to Pat Naipaul. But they weren’t talking about New Zealand. They were engaged in a separate conversation, about the West Indies. “I would adore being absolutely idle.”
“You’d get tired of the heat.”
“I’d adore the heat.”
“You would be so bored.”
“Not at all,” Lady Antonia said. “I would love it. Flowers. Heat. The sun. The sea. It’s my idea of heaven.”
This lovely woman, naked under a loosely fitting white dress with frilly sleeves and a big floppy bonnet and a white parasol, came smiling towards me in a tropical garden while I sat on the verandah of a yellow stucco plantation house at a table set with tea things, including marmalade made from my own oranges. A jovial parrot squawked in a big cage and sunlight blazed from the blue sky, showing the veins in the large green leaves of my anthuriums and Lady Antonia’s body silhouetted in her thin lacy dress. I was pouring tea for her and she was utterly at peace and fragrant with pheromones. Heat, idleness, and contentment were the combination that produced sensuality.
“I love those hot islands,” she was saying to Pat as my temperature went up. “I love doing nothing.”
“You’re the busiest woman I know,” Pat said. She had gotten up to pass the plates for the second course, poached fish and buttery leeks and salad.
Lady Antonia was protesting, but I didn’t care. I had already eloped with her, and I was barefoot on the verandah in my planter’s shorts and straw hat, living out my fantasy of bliss in a coconut paradise.
“How is your wine?” Vidia asked me.
“You were right. Fleshy. Round. Smooth.”
Jebb said, “Are you talking about Princess Margaret?”
“Afterwards we’re all going to try some snuff,” Vidia said, cutting him off.
“Harold Macmillan took snuff,” Hugh Fraser said. “One was perpetually badgered to try.”
“I won’t badger you,” Vidia said.
“I want to try,” Lady Antonia said eagerly.
On our tropical verandah she was always saying yes to my wild suggestions, and she needed only to sigh and twitch her dress with her fingers for me to say yes. I looked up and saw Mrs. Griggs collecting the plates and realized that my fantasy had possessed me so completely, lunch was over.
“I’ll have a go,” Malcolm said. “Robin?”
Robin nodded, yes, she would try some snuff.
“What a pathetic lot of sheep,” Jebb said. “I will not put that vile substance up my nose. I’d rather have a fag. Oh, look at Paul! He’s so shocked.”
I said, “I know ‘fag’ means cigarette, Julian.”
“But I mean the other kind of fag,” Jebb said. He laughed at me, and in his American accent said, “Faggot.”
The correct response, I knew, was to let yourself be teased and not get riled, and then merely smile in pity at the teaser to make him feel childish. Or else to say, You may well be right!
“That snuff just vanishes up Vidia’s nose,” Pat said.
“Aren’t you supposed to sneeze?” Robin asked.
“Vidia never sneezes,” said Pat.
“I love to sneeze,” Lady Antonia said. “I wonder why that is.”
This was my chance. I said, “The reason it’s so pleasurable is that there is erectile tissue in the nose — even a woman’s. The nose is also a sexual organ. It’s very sensitive. I mean, it can become aroused and swollen. There are some people who can’t breathe through their nose when they’re sexually excited.”
Everyone stared at me.
“It says so in Krafft-Ebing,” I went on, blabbing. “Psychopathia Sexualis. Sneezing and sex.”
Lady Antonia smiled, but her husband was frowning in contemplation at his big hands, and his face was darker as an uneasy silence descended on the table. I had probably said too much, but I didn’t mind. I was thinking of nakedness on a hot island.
“That sounds like the voice of experience, Paul,” Jebb said.
“If it sounds that way it’s because I am boasting,” I said. “But haven’t you been told you have a virile nose?”
“All the time, but fortunately for me I am impotent,” Jebb said. “I am ‘The Maimed Débauché.’”
Malcolm put his elbows on the table, and his pink face grew pinker as he recited:
So when my days of impotence approach,
And I’m by pox and wine’s unlucky chance
Forced from the pleasing billows of debauch
On the dull shore of lazy temperance…
“That sounds so lovely spoken in New Zealandish — is that right?” Jebb was puffing energetically and blowing smoke. “Or do I say ‘Kiwi’?”
“That verse is terribly familiar,” Lady Antonia said. She was dabbing her pretty lips.
“John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” Malcolm said.
“Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation was about the Augustans and court wits,” Robin said. “I typed every word, so I should know.”
“Rochester is delightful,” Lady Antonia said. “Do you still read him, Vidia?”
Before Vidia could answer, Malcolm stuck his pink face into Antonia’s pale one and said, “‘Delightful’ is a strange word for porno.”
“I don’t find Rochester in the least pornographic. You New Zealanders must be rather easily shocked.”
I liked that. We would read Rochester on our verandah, Lady A. and I. Instead of giving her a direct reply, Malcolm propped himself up on his elbows again, a beaky Kiwi in the throes of pedantry, proving his point to the Poms, and declaimed:
By all love’s soft yet mighty
powers It is a thing unfit
That men should fuck in time of flowers
Or when the smock’s beshit.
“I think you’ve just proved my point — you’ve certainly revealed something about your own shockability,” Lady Antonia said. “Rochester is a moralist, really, and very funny for being a wee bit naughty.”
“A wee bit naughty!” Malcolm cried. Speaking in his New Zealand accent he could not make much of a point; he sounded as if he were satirizing himself. He angrily recited again:
You ladies all of merry England
Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,