The Holy City (16 page)

Whenever I turned on the radio it was never Herman's Hermits or the Animals now. It always seemed to be Stevie Wonder — unabashedly proclaiming his love for his
Cherie Amour, lovely as a summers day… distant as the Milky Way.
I grew to loathe it more than anything. More than anything I grew to despise that song.

And would find myself saying, my eyes smarting with anger and confusion and bitterness as I did so:

— Don't ever trust any of them. Niggers, they're notorious.

Why, I might have been Dr Henry Thornton, I laughed. Before weeping and chafing my knuckles again.

I tended not to sleep very much now. I didn't care much for the dances either. Slowly but surely the effect it all had on me was that I began to hate the times that I lived in, to loathe the decade I lived in called ‘the sixties'. And loathe it with a passion, despise it with all my heart. To hate who I was and what I had become.

How I wished I'd come of age in the twenties or the thirties. Even the threadbare fifties would have been better.
Infinitely so. But much much better than any of them, I now found myself considering on a regular basis — would never to have been conceived at all. As a half-Protestant bastard, in a barn or anywhere else.

Once when I happened to arrive home unexpectedly to the apartment, to my astonishment what did I discover, only Vesna doing a little private dance in the flat and playing a CD with a Lulu track on it — ‘To Sir With Love', as a matter of fact. I flew across the room and straight away tore the music-system plug right out of its socket. Then I wrenched the CD case from her hand. I gave her what for after that, I can tell you — I mean I had to, actually at one point pushing her down on to the sofa and lifting my meerschaum cane, on the verge of giving her a proper thrashing. But, as might have been expected, she hadn't the faintest clue what I was talking about, poor thing. How could she? She didn't even know who Sidney Poitier was, for heaven's sake. Much less be aware that he had co-starred in a feature film with Lulu, and which, in fact, had been a big hit back in the year 1969.

— I'm sorry, I said later. I didn't mean it.

I was still trembling violently. As Vesna gave me the puppy-eye look — Lord but she was good at that — nervously fingering the necklace I had given her as a present, some weeks before.

— I no understand iss just song, no?

I didn't say anything. I couldn't speak. The skeleton of the melody was still lingering in my ears.

— Lulu, I kept thinking, with uneasy tingles spreading all over my back,
Lulu.

As I scratched my head and obsessively paced the room. Repeating:

— Luh-luh-Lulu. Luh-luh-Lulu.

With her twirly red hair and lovely baby dimples.

— Luh-luh-Lulu, I kept on saying, as Vesna sobbed, begging forgiveness all over again.

I held up my walking cane and considered for a moment — then I simply put it away.

It was late March now, 1969, and it would soon be time for the play in the cathedral. There were posters for
The Soul's Ascent
pasted up everywhere.

But all that did now was fill me with bitterness. I no longer wanted to think about him or his part in a stupid and inconsequential amateur school play, which, at the end of the day, was all it was. More than anything, I disdained talk of the soul, and in particular the possibility of its ‘ascent'.

I wished I had never laid eyes on Joyce's
Portrait.
But one sentence, in particular, kept returning with a fierce aggression to my mind:
amid the tumult of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire, a film of sorrow veiled his eyes.

— You stupid little tabernacle of Christ, I moaned. What you have done to me.

If I heard Stevie Wonder on the radio, I'd fly into an inexplicable rage. Even the sight of
A Portrait
now had the effect of making me feel queasy.

I had tried telling Dolly I wouldn't be seeing her any more.

She was aghast, she told me — quite astonished.

— No, Mr Wonderful, tell me anything but please don't tell me that, she implored.

— My name isn't Mr Wonderful, I said, without feeling.

— You don't realise what you're saying. Please say it's a joke: is it, Mr Wonderful?

I found myself growing cold all over. Yet again, becoming so cold — only this time without realising it — I might have been Henry Thornton.

— I told you my name is not Mr Wonderful, I said.

She looked at me then — drawing back a little — quite afraid now, it seemed.

— It was you who took the envelope, wasn't it? You stole that letter out of my handbag.

I didn't say anything.

As her lower lip began to tremble.

— Now I see, she said, haltingly, reluctantly. It's not me you care about at all, is it? Oh my God.

— There's nothing further to say, I told her.

She dropped some things out of her handbag as she turned to go.

— Dolly! I called after her.

— Get away from me. Stay away — do you hear?

Yes, C.J. Pops, ‘real gone' grooving sixties freak. Just how would you describe what really was ‘his bag'?

By this point now, the performance in the cathedral had begun to draw near. Everywhere you went there were
conversations about it, with printed additions to the posters confidently predicting it would be the ‘event of the year'.

The Soul's Ascent: Saints You May Not Know, starring Marcus Otoyo as Blessed Martin de Porres.
There was a photo of him with a white halo set in place just behind his head: as he smiled faintly with folded hands and uplifted eyes, in his habit of brown and girdle of beads. Like an angel on the verge of ascending to heaven. To announce the establishment of the long-awaited ‘new Jerusalem'.

— The holy city, I repeated, grinding my teeth. The holy city of love gone wrong.

It's funny when you look back on things sometimes but if I had thought that the episode with ‘Dr Mukti the Midget' had been amusing, it was nothing to what took place only a few nights after the Beachcomber Affair. I had been away all day getting the ‘E-Type' serviced in Dublin and was exhausted by the time I got back to the Nook. So just about the last thing I was expecting to hear when I came in the door was music.

Especially music by Herb Alpert and his band. But there they were, delivering ‘Tijuana Taxi', in full flight. The sound appeared to be coming from the kitchen. I tiptoed tensely along the hallway. And sure enough, there they were. Not paying the slightest attention to me, I have to say, in their neatly tailored blazers and ribbed white-nylon polo necks.

Perched, almost treacherously, on the rim of a drinking glass. Surprising as it was, what could you possibly do but laugh? I hadn't even had anything to drink.

Bemused, I shook my head somewhat wearily before retiring to bed, with the next tune they'd just started already playing on my lips: ? Walk in the Black Forest', a perky upbeat jazz number, once again delivered in Herb's trademark mariachi style.

Probably the finest band I have ever seen playing in a pub — anywhere, I would have to say — is the group of youngsters, not one of them, I would say, over twenty, who deputise occasionally for Mike and the Chordettes in the Mood Indigo club and who style themselves (this ‘retro' thing remains ever-popular) after a famous combo from the sixties — Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Who were a very well-known outfit indeed, throughout the course of their career chalking up a considerable batch of hits. Numbers which included ‘Hold Tight', ‘The Legend of Xanadu' and, of course, ‘Zabadak'.

Another much-requested act is the Engelbert Humperdinck lookalike who always gets the crowd going whenever he appears, complete with gold medallion and impossibly hirsute sideburns.

Vesna liked him a lot too, and would flutter her thick black lashes at me as she cooed:

— You like me dance, Christopher my dear? You think iss good idea, hmm?

In the beginning she winced at the idea of me making suggestions — as to how she might dress, I mean. But whenever she got into it — I mean, on any given night
in the club you'd find at least two Dusty Springfields — she began to rather enjoy the idea. ‘Peggy Lee', I'd whisper, or ‘Ruby Murray' — as I squeezed her hand and kissed her lacquered blonde hair. By the time I was finished with her all trace of the seventies songwriter was gone, with the flared blue jeans discarded for ever. The same with the trendy peasant-style scarf and halter-neck top, now in their place spray-on sheath dresses and panda eyes, and expensive high heels that I bought for her on eBay. Which she dandled on her pretty foot as she sat beside me holding my hand, moving her lips in time to the music.

While I whispered:

— Miss Wonderful, it's you, and her body would vibrate with the loveliest little ripple of delight.

Yes, we made quite a couple and, more than anyone, Vesna Krapotnik from Croatia knew it. It's just a pity she had to go and spoil it, but there isn't anything that can be done about that now. We looked good dancing together too. And, just as he had once done in the Mayflower of yesteryear, old Roger McCool-Moore, alias ‘the Saint', would never pass up an opportunity to demonstrate his considerable ballroom-dancing skills — his cha-cha, his tango and his quickstep, Mr Twinkletoes the hoofer in his white Italian loafers, a Peter Stuyvesant, as ever, dangling louchely from his lips —
the international passport to smoking pleasure!

As he twirled his meerschaum cane with a smile.

*   *   *

Maybe the fact that I no longer bother going down to the club, now that I have more or less lost interest in going to Mood Indigo, is the ultimate indication that, at last, it has happened. That I have been cured, once and for all. And no longer feel the need to make an impression of any kind on anyone. Being capable of just being myself, content to live my life here with Vesna in the blissful tranquillity of the Happy Club. It helps, of course, that her affections are no longer in any doubt, for no relationship can withstand unremitting uncertainty and suspicion. In a way I like to think of our new-found contentment as a kind of brand-new version of ‘the Nook', on those nights when Ethel and my mother would arrive, under cover of darkness, bearing gifts. With one present, as always, standing out in my mind: that little golden treasury,
A Child's Garden of Verses,
by Robert Louis Stevenson. From which I continue to derive unlimited pleasure, turning its pages each night in the Happy Club, here in our love-nest. Sucking my thumb as I stare at the sky, where my old friends the stars wink back in approval — Joyce's blue fruit of heaven: Orion and Cassiopeia, and the infinite majesty of the Milky Way.

A life which we have been living for well over the best part of a year now. And one which, at least once upon a time, I would have considered impossible — quite literally unattainable. How wrong I was.

But back then, of course, things were immeasurably different. Yes, a year or so ago the relationship between
Vesna and me, well, it had not been going so good at all. There was no such thing as the Happy Club then. Which is hardly surprising — after all, I had caught her in the act of stealing from me. Sometimes, even yet — I get the eeriest of feelings whenever I think about it. Especially whenever I'm crossing the Plaza, passing the café where we two first met. It's a strange, hollowed-out, empty kind of sensation. And I must emphasise that I really don't like it. I don't like recalling catching my wife in the act, what husband would. I call Vesna ‘my wife', although strictly speaking, of course, she's not. It's just another of our private little games. We got married, you see, in a ‘Happy Club' ceremony, one night when we'd been drinking, and I played — quite convincingly, I have to say! — the role of the priest. Why, I was almost as convincing as Marcus Otoyo!

It remains difficult to believe that one's wife — whom one loves — would pilfer. But that is what happened. And I suppose the fact that I have never really accepted it is where those feelings come from. That sensation I get when crossing the Plaza, especially when I think of her lovely laughter. It's a kind of sickness, similar in nature to that which assailed me when I apprehended her on the landing, brazenly going through my coat pockets. Yes, the grateful lady I'd taken in off the street. That was what she did, I'm afraid. Madame Vesna the rifler. Yes, the much put-upon ‘immigrant', who, purportedly, had witnessed so many horrors. Who had somehow, miraculously, survived the most tragic conflict in Europe since
the Second World War. Vesna, poor Vesna: yes,
My fodder die he come bad man and hurt my mudder
etc. etc. Say hello to Vesna Pinocchio, from Dubrovnik in Croatia. Let on, that is.

I remember I had happened to arrive home early that day — as a matter of fact I'd been purchasing some cleaner for my computer — and had known instinctively that something was wrong. I mean, I knew she was there — and was wearing the Chanel No. 5 I'd recently bought her, I could smell it. What I had not expected, however, was this — going through my pockets. Although — I mean I'm not a fool — I'd suspected, and for quite some considerable time — ever since she'd moved into the apartment, in fact — that she'd been stealing from me. Indeed it had recently come to my attention that some items of note had disappeared from my study. And my credit-card outgoings were far in excess of any debt that I, personally, had incurred.

My voice, when I confronted her there in the kitchen, was toneless — rational, authoritative. Almost indifferent.

Very
Henry Thornton,
I am prompted to observe.

The poor girl. Already I knew I had overdone it somewhat. She was, in fact, terrified: sheet-white as she stood there, haplessly dropping coins and other disparate items.