“What the hell do you mean by interfering?” he said.
“I mean what I say. Balls! You people who are so clever with words never allow yourselves or anybody else a moment’s peace. What is this all about? You two knew each other when you were young and you didn’t hit it off. So now we have all this gaudy abuse about vampires and rusty nails from Roly, and Magnus is leading him on to make a fool of himself and cause a fight. I’m enjoying myself. I like this subtext and I want the rest of it. We had just got to where Roly’s Mum was paying a visit to Sir John backstage. I want to know about that. I can see it in my mind’s eye. Colour, angle of camera, quality of light—the whole thing. Get on with it and let’s forget all this subjective stuff; it has no reality except what somebody like me can provide for it, and at the moment I’m not interested in subjective rubbish. I want the story. Enter Roly’s Mum; what next?”
“Since Roly’s Mum is such a hot potato, perhaps Roly had better tell you,” said Eisengrim.
“So I will. My Mum was a very decent body, though at the time I was silly enough to underrate her; as Magnus has made clear I was a little above myself in those days. University does it, you know. It’s such a protected life for a young man, and he so easily loses his frail hold on reality.
“My people weren’t grand, at all. My father had an antique shop in Norwich, and he was happy about that because he had risen above his father, who had combined a small furniture shop with an undertaking business. Both my parents had adored Sir John, and ages before the time we are talking about—before the First Great War, in fact—they did rather a queer thing that brought them to his attention. They loved The Master of Ballantrae; it was just their meat, full of antiquery and romance; they liked selling antiques because it seemed romantic, I truly believe. They saw The Master fully ten times when they were young, and loved it so that they wrote out the whole play from memory—I don’t suppose it was very accurate, but they did—and sent it to Sir John with an adoring letter. Sort of tribute from playgoers whose life he had illumined, you know. I could hardly believe it when I was young, but I know better now; fans get up to the queerest things in order to associate themselves with their idols.
“Sir John wrote them a nice letter, and when next he was near Norwich, he came to the shop. He loved antiques, and bought them all over the place, and I honestly think his interest in them was simply romantic, like my parents’. They never tired of telling about how he came into the shop, and inquired about a couple of old chairs, and finally asked if they were the people who had sent him the manuscript. That was a glory-day for them, I can tell you. And afterward, whenever they had anything that was in his line, they wrote to him, and quite often he bought whatever it was. That was why it was so bloody-minded of him to take it out of me about the proper way to handle a chair, and to make that crack about the shop. He knew it would hurt.
“Anyhow, my mother was out of her mind with joy when she wangled me a job with his company; thought he was going to be my great patron, I suppose. My father had died, and the shop could keep her, but certainly not me, and anyhow I was set on being a writer. I admit I was pleased to be asked to do a literary job for him; it wasn’t quite as grand as I may have pretended to Audrey Sevenhowes, but who hasn’t been a fool in his time? If I’d been shrewd enough to resist a pretty girl I’d have been a sharp little piece of glass like Mungo Fetch, instead of a soft boy who had got a swelled head at Cambridge, and knew nothing about the world.
“When my Mum knew I was going to Canada with the company she came to London to say good-bye—I’m ashamed to say I had told her there was no chance of my going to Norwich, though I suppose I could have made it—and she wanted to see Sir John. She’d brought him a gift, the loveliest little wax portrait relievo of Garrick you ever saw; I don’t know where she picked it up, but it was worth eighty pounds if it was worth a ha’penny, and she gave it to him. And she asked him, in terms that made me blush, to take good care of me while I was abroad. I must say the old boy was decent, and said very kindly that he was sure I didn’t need supervision, but that he would always be glad to talk with me if anything came up that worried me.”
“Audrey Sevenhowes put it about that your Mum had asked Milady to see that you didn’t forget your bedsocks in the Arctic wildernesses of Canada,” said Eisengrim.
“You don’t surprise me. Audrey Sevenhowes was a bitch, and she made a fool of me. But I don’t care. I’d rather be a fool than a tough any day. But I assure you there was no mention of bedsocks; my Mum was not a complex woman, but she wasn’t stupid, either.”
“Ah, there you have the advantage of me,” said Magnus, with a smile of great charm. “My mother, I fear, was very much more than stupid, as I have already told you. She was mad. So perhaps we can be friends again, Roly?”
He put out his hand across the table. It was not a gesture an Englishman would have made, and I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether he was sincere or not. But Ingestree took his hand, and it was perfectly plain that he meant to make up the quarrel.
The waiters were beginning to look at us meaningly, so we adjourned upstairs to our expensive apartment, where everybody had a chance to use the loo. The film-makers were not to be shaken. They wanted the story to the end. So, after the interval—not unlike an interval at the theatre—we reassembled in our large sitting-room, and it now seemed to be understood, without anybody having said so, that Roly and Magnus were going to continue the story as a duet.
I was pleased, as I was pleased by anything that gave me a new light or a new crumb of information about my old friend, who had become Magnus Eisengrim. I was puzzled, however, by the silence of Liesl, who had sat through the narration at the lunch table without saying a word. Her silence was not of the unobtrusive kind; the less she said the more conscious one became of her presence. I knew her well enough to bide my time. Though she said nothing, she was big with feeling, and I knew that she would have something to say when she felt the right moment had come. After all, Magnus was in a very real sense her property: did he not live in her house, treat it as his own, share her bed, and accept the homage of her extraordinary courtesy, yet always understanding who was the real ruler of Sorgenfrei? What did Liesl think about Magnus undressing himself, inch by inch, in front of the film-makers? Particularly now that it was clear that there was an old, unsettled hostility between him and Roland Ingestree, what did she think?
What did I think, as I carefully wiped my newly scrubbed dentures on one of the Savoy’s plentiful linen hand-towels, before slipping them back over my gums? I thought I wanted all I could get of this vicarious life. I wanted to be off to Canada with Sir John Tresize. I knew what Canada meant to me: what had it meant to him?
(6)
When I returned to our drawing-room Roly was already aboard ship.
“One of my embarrassments—how susceptible the young are to embarrassment—was that my dear Mum had outfitted me with a vast woolly steamer-rug in a gaudy design. The company kept pestering Macgregor to know what tartan it was, and he thought it looked like Hunting Cohen, so The Hunting Cohen it was from that time forth. I didn’t need it, God knows, because the C.P.R. ship was fiercely hot inside, and it was too late in the season for anyone to sit on deck in any sort of comfort.
“My Mum was so solicitous in seeing me off that the company pretended to think I needed a lot of looking after, and made a great game of it. Not unkind (except for Charlton and Woulds, who were bullies) but very joky and hard to bear, especially when I wanted to be glorious in the eyes of Audrey Sevenhowes. But my Mum had also provided me with a Baedeker’s Canada, the edition of 1922, which had somehow found its way into the shop, and although it was certainly out of date a surprising number of people asked for a loan of it, and informed themselves that the Govemment of Canada issued a four-dollar bill, and that the coloured porters on the sleeping-cars expected a minimum tip of twenty-five cents a day, and that a guard’s van was called a caboose on Canadian railways, and similar useful facts.