17

ANOTHER SLEEPLESS, OPPRESSIVE NIGHT, FOLLOWED by another vile day. Coming out of the toilet, The Times folded under his arm, Mortimer ran smack into Joyce, who said in her special icy voice, “Forgot something, didn’t we?”

Mortimer was baffled, caught off-balance, until she thrust the tin at him: deodorant spray. “Oh,” he said, taking it and returning sheepishly to spray away his smell.

Mortimer wasn’t angry. Hygiene, he knew, was her obsession. She simply couldn’t tolerate stale food or body odors or a speck on her sheets or insects in the house, even one little fly, which she would hunt down if it took her hours, armed with yet another deadly spray. Joyce’s horror of filth extended to secondhand books. She wouldn’t let him keep them in the house on the grounds that the previous owner might very well have been a smallpox carrier. Or syph-ridden.

Oh, well. Mortimer dropped Doug off at his wretched school and then continued to Oriole House. In the parking lot alongside Oriole, he ran into the so recently rejuvenated Lord Woodcock.

“Can you take the chair at the conference this morning?” Lord Woodcock asked. “Dino Tomasso is indisposed.”

Remembering the two black-suited motorcycle riders, Mortimer asked, “Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Eye trouble. A minor operation. Can you or can you not take the morning –”

“Certainly, sir.”

“That’s marvelous, Mortimer. We’re counting on you, you know.”

How well Lord Woodcock looked, Mortimer reflected, as the saintly old man strode to his car.

Only a year ago Lord Woodcock had seemed to be withdrawing into feeble and melancholy dotage, which was easier to comprehend if you remembered the trials and deceptions that British radicals of his generation had endured: Ramsay MacDonald, Spain, the Stalin-Hitler Pact, Hungary, Nye Bevan’s untimely death, Nkrumah … Mr. Woodcock, as he was then, was understandably disconsolate, even bitter. Almost alone among surviving old socialist hellions of the thirties, he had not been ennobled. Again and again, he was overlooked on the Honours List, increasingly cut off from old comrades who now read Tribune and formed ginger groups in the bar at the House of Lords. Then, miraculously, Woodcock was offered a peerage, the Star Maker came into his life, and the transformation in the old man was heartening to behold. At Oriole Press, once more he rode with the young, possibly even a step ahead of them. On the terrace of the House of Lords, he was reinstated to the company of old radicals, once again able to reminisce about the hunger march and even to take the micky out of old Oxbridge enemies, peers of the wrong type, the hereditary type, who had served on the opposite side in the general strike. Old leopards, to hear Lord Woodcock tell it, never change their spots. Defiantly, he explained to Mortimer, the Labour lords rented their ermine at Moss Bros., cracked naughty jokes about the Queen, and insisted on being called by their first names at the party conference. These men who wrote revolutionary pamphlets during the Spanish Civil War now honored their radical past by scribbling anti-establishment graffiti in the peers’ toilets. It’s there, Lord Woodcock said, chuckling, for all the other lords to see.

Counting on you. This was the first indication Mortimer had had from Lord Woodcock in months that, like Hy, he was still a candidate for the big job, once Dino Tomasso returned to Hollywood.

Following the morning conference, Mortimer cornered Hy in the hall. “Hy,” he pleaded, “let’s bury the hatchet. We’ve been friends for years. I –”

“Any time you’re prepared to meet me in the gym, baby, you just let me know.”

“Hy, for Christ’s sake. It’s soon going to be Christ –” Mortimer stopped himself, flushing.

“Christmas? Thank you. Thank you very much,” Hy said, slamming his office door after him.

Grudgingly, Joyce started on her shopping for Christmas dinner, going to Monty’s, on Haverstock Hill, to place her fruit order well in advance. Fortunately for Monty, who abhorred serving Joyce above all his other customers, he saw her coming this time and quickly bolted out the back door, obliging Archie, the new assistant, to take her order.

“Sprouts?” Archie asked brightly, pencil poised.

Joyce said a pound would do.

“And what about new potatoes? Lovely they are.”

“Where are they from?” Joyce demanded suspiciously.

“Italy.”

“All right, then. I’ll have three pounds.”

“Now just feed your eyes on these pineapples. From British Guiana they are. Flown –”

“Where they are holding Dr. Cheddi Jagan in detention?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Would you have any Cuban pineapples?”

“Sorry, no. But let me slice one open for you. These are ever so good.”

“That’s hardly the point at issue. What about your oranges?”

“Spanish navels. Del-icious. Just in.”

“Spanish navels. Did you say Spanish fascist navels? Where is Monty?”

“Gone out. Oh, look here, we do have some Jaffas, if you like?”

Israeli; now there was a poser. “No.” Not since Dayan. “Have you any dates?”

Archie flashed a box of Nigger brand at her.

“Where is Monty? I insist on seeing him.”

“Hello, dear! Kiss?”

“Up your ass.”

“Oh, my. Bad day?”

“Übersturmführer Griffin sucked up to me again at the office. Chicken-shit bastard,” Hy said, slipping into a shuffle, his lightning left jab stopping just short of Diana’s breasts, “think he doesn’t know? One wrong move and I’ll flatten him. Like this,” he said, his right hand suddenly flashing upward toward Diana’s chin.

It was a feint. But Diana, taken by surprise, stupidly raised her guard, presenting Hy with a splendid opportunity to bury a right hook in her belly.

“Ooof,” went Diana, staggering backward.

“Sucker,” Hy hissed, following through with a hammering left to her kidney. A zig, a zag, and then a rat-tat-tat to her ears.

Finally, Diana flicked him off her. “Would you care for a drink before dinner, luv?” she asked warmly.

“I’m going out for dinner.”

“Alone?”

Heh-heh. He didn’t answer. Instead he shuffled backward, lunging, thrusting, shadowboxing his way into the bathroom. Hy stood on the bath stool, got his mouthpiece out of the medicine cabinet, and growled at his reflection in the mirror. Hyman Rosen, after all, was merely his goy-given name. Actually, he thought, baring his teeth at the mirror, I am Chaym ben Yussel, one of a great pugilistic line, which includes Black Aby, Cat’s Meat Gadzee, Ikey Pig, Ugly Baruk Levy, Little Puss Abrahams, The Yokel Jew Sodicky and, above all, Daniel Mendoza. Mendoza! On January 9, 1788, Hy remembered, the great Mendoza, his ankle broken, fainted from pain, and his archenemy, the brutish Gentleman Dick Humphries, stood over him and shouted, “I have done the Jew!” The hell he had. For on May 6, 1789, Mendoza met Humphries again and reduced the braggardly goy to a bleeding pulp. Grrr, went Chaym ben Yussel. Grrr.

Oh, dear, Diana thought, recognizing the mood, Hy’s Jewish-avenger mood. In such a state, he was inclined to rake the streets, searching for covert Jew-haters; testing people in bus queues, telling them to get fucked; charging after young couples coming out of espresso bars, cursing them in Yiddish; and spitting at old men out walking their dogs. All the same, it wasn’t easy for Hy to provoke a fight. Most people had a too-well-developed sense of fair play to hit back at the crazed little man. If he persisted, they made sport of him. But kicking, punching, his flow of obscenities unceasing, Hy was, on occasion, difficult to ignore, and once or twice he was badly mauled.

Grrr.

Mortimer hurried, late again, to catch up with the group he had joined at Paddington Station.

“Have I missed much?” he asked Agnes Laura Ryerson.

“Not to worry,” their leader said, intervening, his grin infectious. “But I think you’d best sit this one out and catch your breath, don’t you?”

Mortimer had chosen Paddington over Waterloo and other stations after considerable deliberation because he was not likely to run into commuters known to him there, which could be hellishly embarrassing. Not that he hadn’t taken precautions. He wore dark glasses and was known to the others as Jim. All the same, he thought, I shouldn’t be doing this. God knows what Joyce would think. Andv she’d be right, as usual. It’s commercialized, the brotherly-love bit oozes smugness. The parties, an excuse for the worst sort of promiscuity, are good business and tax deductible. The gift-giving aspect is phony and even most of the cards you get are not from friends but from other firms. Still, Mortimer was a sucker for Christmas. Even before the decorations had gone up on Regent Street, he’d caught the fever.

Last year, damn it, it had been touch and go with Joyce over having a tree. “With so-called Christians bombing Viet Nam? Hypocrisy,” Joyce cried. “I had to live with it as a child, but not in my own house.”

Mortimer could remember his anguish walking the streets of Hampstead with Doug and staring enviously at the enormous Christmas trees in all the other homes. He decided to have another stab at Joyce. He pointed out that Mrs. Cohen from next door had been giving him filthy looks. “It may seem to the Cohens,” he said, “that we don’t have a tree in our window because we resent theirs. We are, if only by omission, rebuking them for intruding on the celebration of the birth of our Saviour.”

Saviour. Joyce immediately hardened.

“Look here, it’s not as if we’re bringing a bloody cross into the house. It’s just a tree. A pagan symbol.”

“Yes, but –”

“Look at it another way. He was a Jew, wasn’t he? Naturally I don’t accept any of that Immaculate Conception crap –”

“All those women washing his feet must have given him an erection.”

“Absolutely. But the fact is he was a great Jewish radical leader.”

“All the same –”

“Ignoring his birthday, well, it could, you know – it just could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.”

So Mortimer got his tree and even Joyce, he liked to think, came to enjoy it.

This year, however, was something else. This year, Mortimer felt, he was already in trouble, walking the most hazardous of tightropes, with three weeks still to go until Christmas. All because of the group he had joined for Agnes Laura Ryerson’s sake.

Joyce, encouraged by Dougie, thought he was coming home late from the office two nights a week because he was having it off with Rachel Coleman. His job was to nourish this suspicion without ever offering Joyce proof positive. Joyce would be frightfully displeased if it turned out he was having an affair with another woman, but at least she was colored, which made the prospect interesting, even progressive, and so she would not be humiliated before her friends. Even so, Mortimer was ashamed of the deceptions he had practiced in order to conceal his real lapse and feed Joyce’s belief that he was being unfaithful. On Tuesdays and Thursdays after he had taken leave of his group, Mortimer sneaked off to a pub and knocked back two hasty brandies, acquiring a liquored breath. Or he stole a pack of Durex from his hoard, discarded the prophylactics in a convenient toilet and forgot the empty pack in his jacket pocket. He had also once asked Miss Fishman to kiss him on the cheek and then rubbed her lipstick into his handkerchief.

Joyce could not be unstuck from the TV set on Wednesday nights. Insult night on BBC-2, with the celebrated inquisitor, Digby Jones. Last Wednesday Dig had made a young Tory backbencher, one of the most independent and progressive in the House, his target. He was shown, by astute questioning, to be something less than an idealist. “He is,” Dig asked, turning to his studio audience, signaling for what had become the weekly battle cry, “what, fans?”

“No better than the rest of us.”

Tonight, which was to bring Joyce the last Insult before Christmas, was vintage stuff. Somehow or other tricksy old Dig had cajoled Sister Theresa, a nun renowned for her goodness, to appear on his show. Breaking Sister Theresa down slowly, leading her on by paying tribute to the fact she lived in self-imposed slum conditions in Brixton, taking in old lags, giving succor to meths men, maintaining an orphanage for unwanted children, he suddenly lashed out at her: “But can you tell me, Sister, if you have ever had intercourse with a man?”

“No.”

“With another woman, then?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it possible, then, that your goodness, this meddling into the lives of the poor, is not divinely motivated, but borne of sexual frustration?”

“I think not, Mr. Jones.”

“You think not.” Dig scowled at the studio audience, choking their laughter. “But if one may lapse into street argot, you’re not getting it regular, are you?”

“No.”

“Tell me this: Does helping unwed mothers and alcoholics, taking the unwanted to your bosom, metaphorically speaking, make you feel good?”

“It makes me feel useful.”

“Does it make you feel good?”

“Well, it doesn’t make me feel bad, certainly.”

“In other words, helping the oppressed affords you … pleasure?”

Sister Theresa sighed; she nodded weakly.

“Would it be altogether unfair, then, to describe you not as suppressed – but as a sexually diverted nymphomaniac? A pornographer of the do-good?”

As the unlying camera zoomed in on Sister Theresa’s sobbing face, Dig demanded, “What is she, fans?”

“As shitty as we are!”

Winding up for the Christmas break, Dig looked into the cameras and repeated his invitation to the Star Maker to appear on Insult. Five previous invitations had gone unanswered, even though the Star Maker no longer had a valid excuse for his absence, the sight of his bad eye having been miraculously restored.

Swaggering down Kensington Church Street, his shoulders bent forward, his bloodshot eyes narrowed and menacing, fists ready inside his belted mac, Hy Rosen was totally unaware that he was being shadowed by a towering shiksa who held a field hockey stick inside her coat. A tall, gray-haired man came strolling toward him. Immediately Hy slammed into him, using his shoulder as a wedge.

“You drunken idiot,” the man said. “Look where you’re going.”

“Drunken idiot? I’m as good as you are. Better, probably.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Why, you fucking anti-Semitic whoremaster. You –”

Hy ducked under the tall, gray-haired man’s clumsy right and, eyes jammed shut, let rip with a looping left of his own.

“Oooo,” the gray-haired man moaned, sinking to the pavement.

Heh-heh. I’ve done in another Jew-baiter, Chaym ben Yussel thought, unperturbed to look up and see three teenagers come charging toward him. “Hey, we saw you,” one of the boys shouted.

“Come and get me,” Hy called back, leading with his left.

But the boys ran past him, round the corner. “Hey! Hey you! Stop!”

Chicken, Hy thought, immediately giving chase. “Here I am, you bastards! Here I am!”

“Joyce? I’m home.”

But she was already asleep. So Mortimer settled down on the sofa with his Evening Standard, where he read that the Star currently in London filming for the Star Maker had once more refused to see reporters about his rumored romance with a famous British duchess. As it happened, one of the Star’s old movies was showing on TV, the late movie, and so Mortimer flicked it on. It was uncanny, truly amazing, Mortimer thought, but looking from the Star’s photograph in the Standard to his fifteen-year-old image on the TV screen, he hardly seemed to have aged at all in the years between.

Following the movie, Mortimer stayed up for the news, which was how he first found out that the dreary Labour politician, who was the subject of the first biography in the Our Living History series, had killed himself, with publication day only ten days off. The politician had been found dead in his Hampstead flat. He had hanged himself with a black silk stocking from a chandelier in a room replete with two-way mirrors, rhino whips, dildos, and other erotic paraphernalia.

God damn it. Dino Tomasso, stupidly lucky, Mortimer thought, had obviously got himself a best seller, but he was bound to burn his fingers with the next title in the series, the faded film star’s biography.