The White Father (22 page)

There was a silence.

“But I’m not an anthropologist,” said Shrieve, at last.

“I know,” said the professor. He gave his studied twinkle. “You have my very deepest sympathy.”

“Outside your work, then, it’s all right to feel like an ordinary man?” said Shrieve, unable to control the bitterness in his voice.

“Oh yes,” said Adams brightly. “I’m as mean and kind, violent and gentle, as my neighbour.” He twinkled again. “And now I must go. I can’t thank you enough, Mr Shrieve, for coming and addressing us dull academics when you have so much to do in the real world where all is said to be so much less solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Your lecture was most illuminating. And I sincerely hope, for your sake, that some means will be devised for safeguarding your Ngulu.”

They said goodbye, and Shrieve left with Edward and Jackie. They stood for a moment on the pavement outside the College, below the ugly tower, and Edward said, “Wow, that was quite a spiel that old professor put out, wasn’t it?”

“I thought it was simply immoral,” said Jackie. “Really immoral. Worse, it was
wicked
.”

Shrieve looked at them, wondering. Whose was the evasion, his or Adams’s? It was true that without the British there might be no Ngulu left by now. But was it really right to keep them alive, defenceless, for eighty odd years, to interfere with nature, to control evolution?

He shook himself. Of course it was right. The girl had seen it at once. Adams was as bad in his way as Tufnell. One in the name of an abstract ideal called scholarship, the other in the name of an abstract ideal called freedom, they both ignored the real and palpable, the men and women, the flesh that breathed, that felt pleasure and pain, the minds that thought and dreamed and planned, however primitively. He had a vivid and blinding memory of Amy’s body against his, his mouth against her ear, her crooning, a meaningless sound that was neither song nor moan, speech nor music, but love itself on her breath.

Edward watched him, a small man with anguish in his eyes, a briefcase in his hand, and a badge in his buttonhole saying
SHRIEVE
. He wanted to put his arm round him and comfort him. But the arm was round Jackie, and Shrieve would be
alarmed, perhaps, certainly puzzled, by such a gesture. Embarrassed, Edward looked away.

Sensing that something was wrong, Jackie looked from one to the other, Shrieve caught her glance and smiled distraughtly.

“I’m not good enough,” he muttered. “I can’t cope with all these people. They’re too far away from me, from what I’d imagined. I’ve lost touch.”

Jackie said, “It’s they who’ve lost touch, Mr Shrieve.”

Edward looked at her gratefully. Shrieve raised his eyes to the tower of the College. Anthropology was one of the humanities, it must be. It was one of the things the great universities of Europe had developed out of their love for man. Surely this new College didn’t herald a new kind of learning?

“When shall I see you?” said Edward.

“Oh.” Shrieve collected himself. “I’m going to my father’s for the week-end. I’m seeing Dennis Moreland on Monday. What about Tuesday?”

“I’ve got my audition on Tuesday morning. But unless they decide to throw me straight into the wonderful world of pop, I should be free by lunchtime.”

“Good. There’s that letter to be got off, isn’t there? Come and have lunch. Come to the flat about twelve-thirty.”

“All right,” said Edward. “We’d better rush now. There’s a train in ten minutes.”

“Goodbye,” said Shrieve.

“Oh,” said Edward, “do take that nameplate off. People will think you’re a delegate to a conference or something.”

“I’d forgotten,” said Shrieve. He fumbled with the pin.

“Let me do it,” said Edward. He fought with the badge for a moment, then unfastened it. Jackie watched him, thinking that perhaps she did really like him quite a lot.

“Thanks,” said Shrieve. He put the badge in his pocket.

They said goodbye, and he watched them as they walked down towards the station, envious of Edward’s casual arm about Jackie’s waist, their easy young manners, their youth. He hadn’t, he realised, ever felt jealous of youth before.

*

The evening’s party was being held in what by day was a gymnasium in Fulham. The wooden horse had been pushed to the side, the ropes had been hauled to the ceiling from which they dangled like lianas, and the wall-bars had been decorated with bunting and paper-chains. People had been invited to come as they were, which had meant much
heart-searching
. The girls, it seemed, had spent the day, or at least the earlier part of the evening, slopping about in red, blue, green, yellow or black tights, sweaters, flared skirts and multiple bracelets. The men, equally, seemed to have had no very definite jobs from which to come, for few employers could be imagined approving of their skin-tight trousers, striped cotton sweat-shirts and peacock-hued sweaters. One or two striped shirts could be seen anticipating fashion. Those who wrote to the earnest papers about the spending of working-class teenagers would have been amazed to find that almost all of the hundred and fifty young guests who had gathered in the gymnasium to dance or drink had had public or grammar school, and in many cases university, educations. They could have been from Stepney or South Kensington, Paddington or Pont Street, for sartorially at least there was no class-consciousness among those who had grown up since the end of the second world war.

On a stand which was usually a boxing-ring, Pete Harrisson was calling the numbers to a band which included Edward and Greg Smith. A small knot of admirers preferred to stand in front and listen rather than dance. The noise was deafening. The host was offering red wine and soft drinks in paper cups.

“Take ten, boys,” Pete said to the band, in imitation of a famously awful band-leader of whom he and Edward claimed to be fans. Instruments were laid down and a record-player took over. Those who had been listening to the band trooped over to the speaker and listened to that instead.

“Great music!” shouted the host to Pete, waving a bottle in the air. “Grab a drink, you’ll need it. We’re going on all night.”

“I’m not,” said Edward to Greg. “I’ve had a hell of a day. I was up at some unthinkable hour this morning.”

“It’s great,” said Greg, looking round. Pete had had difficulty persuading him to come. Greg worked on Saturday mornings.

“I’m exhausted,” said Edward. He saw Judy and Jackie talking together by the wall-bars. He climbed up and sat above them, his drink precarious in his hand.

“What have you got there?” said Judy.

“Free. You can’t escape it. Even Shrieve’s anthropological conference was being paid for by Free.”

“There’s whisky for the band, if you want it.”

“Not yet, thanks. Tell me, Judy, do you believe in Mr Brachs?”

“I think so, yes. I think he sits at an enormous desk at the end of an even more enormous office, inscrutable as a Buddha. Oh, and he makes his visitors sit in terribly low chairs, so that he seems to loom over them menacingly.”

“D’you think I’ll be allowed to meet him?”

“Not till you’re top of the pops, dear. Then you’ll be invited into his office. You’ll have to walk across miles and miles of carpet, so deep that it’ll be like walking through a swamp. When you finally get to his desk, you’ll sink trembling into one of the low chairs and he’ll not even look up. After about two minutes he’ll raise his head and say ‘Well done’, and then you’ll have to walk across the miles and miles of carpet again, and you’ll probably be so frightened that you’ll trip over and sink without trace in the pile.”

“I think he’s probably rather sweet, really,” said Jackie. “He’s probably terribly lonely, and goes miserably to bed every night thinking how awful it is that no one loves him.”

“He’s right about that, anyway,” said Edward.

“Do you suppose it’s true that his bath-taps are gold?” said Judy.

“Oh yes,” said Edward. “I mean, what’s the point of being that rich if you don’t have gold bath-taps?”

“Would you have gold bath-taps if you were that rich?” said Jackie. “And gold lavatory chains and everything?”

“Of course. And gold thread in the sheets. And golden Byzantine ikons on the walls.”

“Do you suppose he likes pictures?”

They all thought about it a bit. Then Judy said, “No. Or if he does, they’re huge abstract ones in ominously deep colours. You know, like Mark Rothko. Vast, the size of the wall, and deep red, burgundy, that sort of thing. Pictures that make you flinch as you walk past.”

“Yes,” said Edward. “You shy away from them and fall into the carpet.”

They all laughed.

“Poor Mr Brachs,” said Jackie. “Nobody loves him.”

“Like me,” said Edward.

“Oh really, Edward.” Judy patted his ankle. “We all love you, honey.”

“Wait till you hear the world premiere of my song. It’s so sad, when I sing it I almost cry myself.”

“I shan’t cry,” said Judy. “If I hear that bloody song once more I’ll do my nut. They’ve been practising it non-stop for days, Jackie. It stinks, it really stinks.”

“It’ll probably be a big hit then,” said Jackie, smiling up at Edward.

He looked down at her, considering her features. Small nose, blue eyes, wide mouth, surprised little eyebrows. She was really quite pretty.

“Did you know your nose was small?” he said. “People look quite different from above.”

“Do they, now?” said Judy, eyeing him critically.

Pete called the band together again. He distributed some sheets of music and said, “You’d better be able to play this one, because it’s going to be top of the hit parade in six weeks.”

Then he adjusted the microphone for Edward, picked up his trumpet, gave a downbeat and they were off, without any announcement. The jazz fans looked baffled by the
introduction
,
soupy and sweet, and flabbergasted as Edward began to sing:

The recitative over, the band swelled and the rhythm increased in pace. Edward’s voice, transmogrified by the microphone, rose pleasantly above the crowd—like the smoke, he hoped, from a cigarette burning in an ashtray in a lonely room. He took an easy breath and moved into the song itself:

The band took up the tune. Pete and Greg wailed
pathetically
, the sweet melody, as banal and foolish as the words, coming out especially lugubriously from the tenor sax. The jazz fans were in consternation.

“What the hell is this?” Edward heard a boy in a black shirt with white buttons say to a girl in purple slacks. “What’s got into these kids, for Christ’s sake?”

Edward smiled over the crowd, feeling a great desire to laugh, a swelling at the pit of his stomach and a trembling in his shoulders, then he launched into the second verse, his voice still light and easy, with just a trace of vibrato for the higher notes, and behind him now Pete on the piano, and the soft brush of drums and cymbals. The crowd wasn’t exactly awed into silence, but no one was booing. For the reprise Pete
reverted to trumpet, keeping it still strictly pop, Greg loyally reading the music with his eyebrows raised.

The music died away, and the gymnasium seemed to Edward as silent as the grave. He looked anxiously round. After a few seconds there was a burst of loud applause from the wall-bars where Jackie and Judy were perched like two exotic birds.

“Bravo!” they shouted. “Bis! Bis!”

There was general applause, hesitant at first, then full of whistles and catcalls. Pete went to the microphone and said, “You’ve just heard the world premiere of ‘Tinder’, a new song by Edward Gilchrist and myself. We don’t care whether you like it or not, but fans, will it be a hit or a miss?”

Whistles and catcalls redoubled. A freshman from
Cambridge
, reading English, called, “A hit! A palpable hit!” Judy and Jackie cheered lustily, like girls at a football game who are totally ignorant of the rules but know which side their friends are on.

“O.K., O.K.,” said Pete, “and thanks. Now we’ll get back to some music. As a reward for listening to next month’s number one hit, we now give you an old favourite, newly arranged for our great tenor sax, Greg Smith. ‘Moonlight in Vermont’.”

There was applause.

“Thank God,” said the man in the black shirt.

Pete and Greg began to show off: a few rehearsals since the night at The Racket had made a big difference. The jazz
fans were happy. Edward, backing the horns comfortably through the opening chorus, was happy, too. He hummed the tune to himself as he played, relaxed now, released from the day’s tension, swinging the tune along, wrapping himself in the music like a warm blanket.

“Judy,” said Jackie, “it’s a hell of a life being attached to a
jazz man, isn’t it? I mean, you never get to see him at parties, do you, because he’s always busy?”

“It’s great,” said Judy. “We see each other all the rest of the time. Who wants to see her husband at parties?”

“Have you got married, I didn’t know?”

“No,” said Jackie. “I was speaking generally.”

“Oh. But it must be a bore at times, isn’t it?”

“I like it,” said Judy. “I can tell whether or not Pete’s happy just by listening.”

“Do you think Edward sings well?”

“Oh, I suppose so. Well enough, anyway. But he’s mad if he thinks he’s going to make it as a pop-singer. It’s just a lunatic dream he’s having.”

“Do you like Edward very much?”

Judy looked at her in astonishment. “Yes, of course. Don’t you?”