5

“SELF-EXPRESSION BE DAMNED,” MORTIMER SHOUTED. “This is his last term at that mockery of a school. I’m taking him out.”

“You’re taking him out? Doug is my child.”

“Ours.”

“I carried him. This is the twentieth century, darling, not the nineteenth. Any decision as to Doug’s education will be made jointly.”

“All right, then, jointly. But –”

“You’d better hurry or you’ll be late.”

Naturally Joyce had begged off. She wouldn’t miss Insult, the new BBC-2 interview program. So Mortimer had to lie to Miss Ryerson. He said they couldn’t get a baby-sitter.

“I am sorry,” Miss Ryerson said.

Too late Mortimer discovered that the farce he and Miss Ryerson had settled on for Tuesday night starred the West End’s most talked-about leading lady, the incomparable Mr. Danny La Rue.

Afterwards Mortimer acquiesced to Agnes Laura Ryerson’s high-spirited request for a pub crawl. Mortimer took her to Dirty Dick’s. She was enthralled with The Prospect of Whitby. But, alas, they ended up at a pub in Victoria, where burly six-foot Guardsmen habitually came to take more shillings, serving other queens. Mortimer devoutly hoped that Agnes Laura Ryerson was too innocent to comprehend the nature of the transactions going on around them, between Household Troopers and the flushed, affluent men who were buying them drinks. Miss Ryerson generously stood two of Her Majesty’s Guards to a round herself. “Here’s to the thin red line,” she said, raising her glass.

This made one of the Guardsmen chuckle. “Oh, my dear,” he said to his beribboned comrade, “did you hear that?”

Enough is enough, Mortimer told Joyce when he finally got home. “My only hope,” he added wearily, “is that Miss Ryerson returns to Canada with at least one of her illusions intact.”

“I couldn’t care less,” Joyce said, irritated.

“Well now,” Mortimer asked in his nastiest voice, “how was Insult? Groovy?”

“Mn. Not bad.”

Joyce was absolutely in touch, thoroughly with it. Unlike me, Mortimer thought. Unlike me.

His missing Insult tonight was typical; for he gathered from her self-satisfied expression that it was going to be the rage. A thingee. Like TW3. Keeping up exhausted and baffled Mortimer. He wasn’t totally uninformed, but his timing was badly off. Not that Joyce helped. Oh, no. The bitch let him go on reading Bernard Levin long after he had gone out of fashion. Then there was the case of Kenneth Tynan. He remembered very well how she had used to quote his theater reviews. Well, how was he supposed to know that you were not to read his film reviews? Mortimer quoted one of his film reviews at a party once and Joyce gave him that special look of hers. “Tynan is fifties,” she said. Like her favorite coffee bar of that decade, The Partisan.

“Would you care for a drink?” Joyce asked.

“I’m going to have a bath first.”

Mortimer, forty-two years old now, was still slender. He suffered no protruding belly and his hair had not yet begun to gray or recede. His features were regular. Yes, he had to admit, considering himself in the bathroom mirror, yes, yes, the sour truth is I’m tall and handsome. Conventionally handsome, as Joyce said again and again with unconcealed repugnance. Like the old-style movie stars. Gable, Taylor, Tyrone Power. An unused face, he had once heard Ziggy Spicehandler say. Clean-cut, he might have added, unmistakably WASP, like the smiling, sincere husband in the unit trust advertisements on whose forehead ran the slogan: “Investor at 35, capitalist at 60.”

Shit. Look at you. Just look at you, Griffin.

Ziggy Spicehandler, to whom he owed so much, had been the first to make him realize how truly repulsive he was. “Man,” he had said affectionately, tauntingly, pinching his cheek, “you look like one of those male models. You know, getting out of a sports car in the Esquire ads.”

Ziggy himself was short, hirsute, barrel-chested. His hooky nose had been twice broken and he had a thick neck and waxy tangled hairs protruded from his jug ears. His fingernails were black, there were warts on his broad square hands, and you could tell, just looking at him, that in other people’s houses he filled his pockets with cigarettes and peed without lifting the seat. Women found Ziggy Spicehandler exciting. Wherever he went, even at the most modish parties, they turned to look at him. Me, Mortimer thought, I can stand alone at a party for hours, nobody turns to look at me.

No. Once a sexy young girl had come up to him, “Well hullo there,” she had said a little drunkenly.

“Hello yourself.”

Swaying, she said, “You must be in advertising.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, you should be. You’ve got the face.”

Suburban, she meant. Ziggy, on the other hand, had an anti-suburban face.

The last time Ziggy had come to stay with them, Doug had been three. Ziggy, to Joyce’s amazement, seemed to adore the child, and offered to baby-sit time and again. He played ball with Doug on the Heath. Twice weekly he also took him to Regent’s Park Zoo, unfortunately timing these visits to coincide with feeding time in the reptile house, a matter of fascination to Ziggy. Doug was just learning how to talk then and Ziggy took him happily in hand.

“Apeman,” he would say, pointing out a priest to him; and he instructed him to say “kiss my ass,” fortunately coming out “kis’mas,” for “thank you.” To begin with, Joyce was baffled by Doug’s choice of words, but actually the boy was even more confused, for what Joyce taught him to call “nun” in the afternoon, Ziggy insisted was “baggy tits” in the evening.

Inevitably Joyce discovered that far from being retarded, Doug was being perversely misled by Ziggy, and this led to a scorching quarrel with Mortimer. A volte-face sort of quarrel, Mortimer, rather than Joyce, finding himself unwillingly defending the new. While Ziggy, he admitted, was behaving irresponsibly, she must understand that he was not sadistic. He truly believed that our parents had raised us on nothing but lies and to be untaught, so to speak, was the only way of liberating a child. Thereby leading him, as Ziggy would put it, toward a state of grace. Even so, Mortimer had to agree that it was off-putting and he regretfully prepared to tell Ziggy he must leave the house.

It never came to that. One day Joyce sent Ziggy to Dr. Schneider to pick up a prescription for her. Schneider, an overworked man, was in the habit of leaving prescriptions to be called for in a box on his outside steps. This, Ziggy discovered, was a fairly common labor-saving practice among National Health doctors. On a good day, riffling through prescriptions left outside here, there, and everywhere, he was able to accumulate a very nice supply of pills with an appreciable morphine or opiate content. This was immensely gratifying to Ziggy, who was not getting sufficient stuff from his own doctor, a sour Puritan; it also enabled him to acquire much-needed cash by selling his surplus pills to others in need. Eventually the police cottoned on to the traffic and began to keep a watch on Hampstead surgeries. Ziggy left for Paris.

Coming out of the bathroom, Mortimer asked Joyce, “Why do women find Ziggy Spicehandler so attractive?”

“I don’t.”

Liar.

“But,” she continued, “I’d say it’s that he has the face of a man who has visited the darker regions of hell and come back again.”

Mortimer grunted and flicked on the TV set to catch the late news. He was in time for the last item. The Star Maker, the newscaster said, would not comment on recent rumors that he was about to transfer his headquarters from Las Vegas to London. But earlier today he had made a successful take-over bid for a London publishing house, Oriole Press. In some quarters, especially in the City, the newscaster went on to say, this was taken as an indicator of future intentions. Then the Star Maker’s emblem was flashed briefly on the screen.

Two snakes coupling.