Absolute Beginners (19 page)

While our little lot were having gins-and-oranges, and triangular sandwiches with grass in them, of which I partook too, the Cobber one was busy with a stack of telephones, like the captain of a jet before his instrument panel, bringing the craft in for a tricky landing. I don’t know what it is that comes over so many numbers
when they use the blower: it must give them a power thing, like driving some tatty beat-up motor also seems to, because they take liberties on the blower they never would to anyone face to face. If they’re calling
out
, they tell their secretary to catch all sorts of cats, and keep them waiting at the far end, like fish on hooks, until they’re kindly ready themselves to say their little piece of nonsense. And if they’re being called themselves, they’ll never say, excuse me, won’t you, to whoever’s in the room, or tell the cat who’s buzzing them they’ll call back a little later, even if the number sitting in their office has something more important to tell them than the mug on the blower has. And when the damn thing rings, in any household, everyone flies to it, as if Winston Churchill’s at the other end, or M. Monroe, or someone, instead of the grocer about the unpaid bill or, more likely, a wrong number. We’re all too much set on gadgets, and let the damn things rule us, and that’s why, back home at Napoli, I’ve always refused to have the blower in, but using Big Jill’s or, if I don’t want her to hear the message, then the public.

Well, all was rare confusion, with Call-me-Cobber using six green phones at once, and secretaries and junior male products explaining the forthcoming scene to the dazed performers, when in came a female telly queen in a dark blue suit with bits of clean, white, frilly linen sticking out at various neat and vital points, and a big, slightly wrinkled brow, and a too-powdered face and thin lips and lots of schoolteacher’s calm, and a really dreadful smile, who evidently intended to straighten
things out, and put us all at ease, and somebody said, just as you might say here was Lady Godiva, that this was Miss Cynthia Eve, C.B.E.

And while Cynthia Eve spread calm about, giving everyone nervous breakdowns, I had a natter with the Hoplite on an air sofa that let out a fart each time you sat on it, or even moved. ‘You look glorious, Hop,’ I said. ‘You’re going to kill them.’

‘But an admiral! Baby, I shall
faint
!’

‘You don’t know your own strength, Hoplite. Just fire a few salvoes of broadsides at him.’

The Hoplite mopped his face, which was painted the colour of old orange peel.

‘And the Nebraska kid,’ I said. ‘Will he be viewing? Or is he around here somewhere?’

The Hoplite gripped my arm. ‘Oh, no!’ he cried. Didn’t I tell you, sweetie? It’s all over between he and me!’

‘Yes? It is? My heavens?’

‘Over and done with!’ cried the Fabulous with great emphasis. ‘From the moment I saw him in a
hat
.’

‘A hat, did you say?’

‘Yes, a hat. Imagine it! Baby, he wore a
hat
. The whole thing faded instantly. I’m heartbroken.’

But now the sad lad, and his group of weirdie colleagues, were hustled out for their rehearsal, and I went along with the other stage-door gum-shoes to a viewing room, where we could observe the act when it finally came on. I thought about the dear old telly, and what an education it has been to one and all. I mean,
until the TV thing got swinging, all we uncultured cats knew next to nothing about art, and fashion, and archaeology, and long-haired music, and all those sorts of thing, because steam radio never made them all seem real, and as for paper talk, well, no one in their senses ever believes that. But now, we’d seen all these things, and the experts and professors, and were digging their secrets and their complicated language, and having a sort of non-university education. The only catch – and, of course, there always is one – is that, when they
do
put on a programme about something I really know about – which I admit is little, but I mean jazz, or teenagers, or juvenile delinquency – the whole damn things seems utterly unreal. Cooked up in a hurry, and made to sound simpler than it is. Those programmes about kiddos, for example! Boy! I dare say they send the taxpayers, who think the veil’s being lifted on the teenage orgies, but honestly, for anyone who knows the actual scene, they’re crap. And maybe, in the things
we
don’t know about, like all that art and culture, it’s the same, but I can’t judge.

Which makes me admit, it’s all very well sneering at universities, and students with those awful scarves and flat-heeled shoes, but really and truly, it would be wonderful to have a bit of kosher education: I mean, to know what’s up there in the sky: just up above you, like the blue over the umbrella, and find out whatever’s phoney about our culture, and anything in it that may be glorious and real. But for that, you have to be caught young and study, and it’s a hard task, believe me, to try
to find the truth about it on your Pat Malone, because so many are anxious to mislead you, and you don’t know exactly where to turn.

Well, excitement mounted, and now came the
Junction!
thing. First came some trains rushing at each other, then some racing cars doing likewise, and then some aircraft landing on the tarmac, and a voice bellowed ‘Junction!’ in an echo-chamber, and we found ourselves face to face with Call-me-Cobber. Believe me, the number was transformed! If you didn’t know what an imbecile he was, you’d take him for a man of destiny, because he frowned and glared and spoke up so damn honest and convincing, just like W. Graham, and that nasal Aussie accent gave the exact tone of sincerity. He said life was a junction: the junction, he said, of composite opposites (he liked that group, and rifled it several times). From the shock of ideas, he told us, in this day and age, the light would shine! And the next thing we saw was the Hoplite with a cheery old geezer who’d obviously had four or five too many.

The Hop was terrific: boy! if they don’t sign that cat up for a series, they’re no talent-spotters. He hogged the camera – in fact, the damn thing had to keep chasing him about the studio – and spoke up like he was King Henry V in a Shakespearean performance. He told us that what he believed in was the flowering of the human personality, such as his own, and how could a personality flower in the boiler room of a destroyer?

At this point, Call-me-Cobber interrupted him – though he found it darn difficult, and for a while you
couldn’t tell who was saying what – and he brought in the old rear-Admiral. The ideas, as you’ll have dug, was that this nautical cat should sail in with guns blazing, fling all his grappling-irons on the Hoplite, explode his powder magazine, and keel-haul him before making him walk the plank. But all the time that Fabulous had been speaking, the old boy had been jerking his bald head like a bobbin, and punching himself on both his knees, and when he spoke up, it seemed he couldn’t have agreed more with all that Fabulous had said. He told us the navy wasn’t what it used to be, by God, no! In his day, it seemed, you ate salt fish for breakfast, and shaved in Nelson’s blood. What the fleet needed badly, he told the viewers, and the Board of Admiralty too, was a depth-charge let off under all their bottoms, and he was very glad to hear Hoplite’s constructive criticisms, and would welcome him aboard any ship that
he
commanded. Hop said that was okay by him, except for the uniform which was too much like an
old-style
musical, and couldn’t the admiral do something about streamlining it a bit, and getting pink pom-poms for bell-bottomed-Jack like those French matelots have got. They had a bit of an argument over that, with the admiral quoting Trafalgar and the Nile and something I didn’t catch about Coburg harpoons, I think it was, and all this while Call-me-Cobber was trying to chip in, but when he did, they both rammed him immediately, the admiral bellowing ‘Avast!’, and the Hoplite saying, ‘Keep out of this,
landlubber
,’ till eventually they had to fade the couple out, and move on to the Asian gooroo
and the Scotch steak-house products, though you could still hear Hoplite and the old admiral having a private ball somewhere off scene in the background.

Well, after all this, the whole circus (except for the cow) gathered in a reception room without any air or windows, and there was more booze on the house, and Cynthia Eve, C.B.E., clapped her hands together, and addressed us. The effort had been fine, she said. Magnificent, she told us. The viewers were buzzing in with complaints and congratulations, and she looked forward to seeing the viewing figures, and some of us must certainly come again (and she gave old Hop an eerie, dazzling smile). It wasn’t often, she went on, she used the word ‘magnificent’: if things just ticked over, all she said was, ‘Thanks so much for coming,’ but this time – well, she’d say it again – the only word that fitted was ‘magnificent’.

But the ghost at the wedding was old Call-
me-Cobber
. Maybe the cat was just tired out, which was understandable, but he seemed to be thoroughly wrought down, and I felt sorry for him, and wished the ex-Deb-
of-Last-
Year was there so he could weep upon her shoulder. Well, come to think of it, it must be sad to be a Call-
me-Cobber
: because without that little television box, you’re nobody; and with it, you’re a king in our society – a television personality.

Out on the road, though, Hoplite was a bit sad, too: the boy’s a born artist, I’m convinced, and this taste of the telly magic had disturbed him. There was also his emotional upset, and he said, ‘By the way, although it’s
all over with Nebraska, he’s asked me to visit him at his base, and in spite of all my pangs, I just can’t resist the opportunity. Will you come too? I’d love to see the occupation army.’

‘It’ll be air personnel,’ I said. ‘The army’s left.’

‘Well, tailored uniforms, and gorgeous work clothes, like their films of prisons. You’re not tempted?’

I told him okay, but I had to leave him just for now, because if I didn’t, I’d have to bed down there and then upon the pavement. Because the fact was, I was spent.

For our trip up the river, Dad and I decided that we’d settle for the bit in between Windsor castle and a place called Marlow. We chose the shorter run because we found that was about all we could manage what with travelling to and fro from London, and also because Dad’s health was certainly far from brilliant – and also because I’d discovered (but this was a secret that I kept from Dad) that Suze and Henley had a house down by the Thames at a village by the name of Cookham, and though I’d no intention of dropping in for tea and buttered scones, I certainly wanted to have a look at the place, as our pleasure boat sailed by, if that was possible.

There we were, then, up in the front seat, and passing under Windsor bridge. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a Tunnel of Love – I mean in one of those boats that wind along it in at the amusement parks – but if
you have, you’ll know the whole point is to get in that front seat, right up in the prow, because if you do, you have the sensation as you glide along, that you’re just hanging there over the water: no boat, just you and the surroundings. Well, this was the same (except, of course, that it was light, not dark – in fact, a glorious August day), the water sparkling so that I had on my Polaroids, the diesel chugging, and old Dad there, with his
open-neck
shirt and sandals, and his mackintosh in a roll (trust Dad!), and puffing away like an engine at his briar. Up there behind us, was the enormous castle, just as you see it on the cinema screen when they play ‘the Queen’ and everyone hustles out, and there out in front of us were fields and trees and cows and things and sunlight, and a huge big sky filled with acres of fresh air, and I thought, my heavens! If this is the country, why haven’t I shaken hands with it before – it’s glorious!

In fact, the only dark cloud on the horizon, was Dad himself. It’s like this. By means of nagging and prodding and persuading, I’d managed to get him inside Dr A.R. Franklyn’s consulting room in Harley Street. Honest, it was like getting a hip cat into a symphony concert, but I succeeded. While I waited outside, reading eighteen magazines from cover to cover, Dr F. gave my Dad a thorough go-over. But all he would tell us was that he
must
get Dad into hospital for a proper examination, which he couldn’t do there in Harley Street even if he’d wanted to, but Dad turned this down point blank, and said he wouldn’t go into hospital unless they’d tell him what was the matter – which, as I tried to explain to him
(but it was like talking to a wall), was exactly what they wanted to find out, if only he’d only go inside there for a day or two. But Dad said once they get you in hospital, you’re half dead already, and he wouldn’t.

Well, there it was. I tried to forget it, on this sunny summer day, but there it was.

At this point, we went round a great U-bend, honking our horn like a truck in the Mile End Road, and round in the other direction came two hundred or so little boats – I swear I don’t exaggerate – each with one kiddo in them, sitting the wrong way round, and rowing like lunatics: a club, it must have been, of athletic juniors, each in white vest and pants and brown legs and arms and a red neck – it was cyclists they made me think of, weaving their way at speed through the city traffic – and we, of course, had to slow down almost to zero as they shot by both sides of us in their dozens. And I got up and cheered, and even old Dad did. Wonderful kiddos on that hot-pot cracking day, racing downstream as if only the salt sea would stop them!

And as we went on, I was really astonished at all the different kinds of boats they had on this old river! Boy! There’s a great life on this Thames you’d never imagine, if you only saw it down in the city among the cargo ships and barges. Moored beside the stream there were square things like caravans, with proper chimneys and cats emptying slops over the side, and out in the fairway there were powered craft – some of them, believe me, you could have sailed in to South America – and occasionally we met a real old-timer, with a funnel and steam engine,
like the Mississippi things they show you on the LP sleeves. And a big surprise was that there were so many sailing boats: I mean, how did they do their criss-cross performance, like Saturday night drunks, in a river as narrow as old father Thames is up there? And canoes, of course, and eskimo boats with one oar made of two (I hope you dig), and even the craziest number of them all – a flat one like a big cardboard box the same size each end, where the chick sits on cushions in the front part, with a brolly, and her stud heaves the thing along with a hop pole, just like gondolas. And the biggest surprise of all, when we got a bit further up the river, was one really large sailing boat lying there in a sort of parking lot, which, according to Dad, must have been brought up there in bits and re-assembled – anyway, I can’t tell you how peculiar it was to see this big ocean boat sitting there right in the middle of the English countryside.

Surprises? Believe me, there were plenty. Did you know those river cats drive their boats on the wrong side of the water? I mean, no keep left nonsense at all for them? And dig this one. Did you know, when you go
up
stream – I do hope I make this plain – you go up hill, and so you have to use a kind of staircase, which is called locks? This is the spiel. You form up in a queue, just like at the Odeon, then, when it’s your turn, sail in at one end, into a sort of square concrete well, and they shut two big doors behind you, as if you were going away inside the nick, and there you are, like pussy at the bottom of the drain. Then the lock-keeper product – with a peaked cap, and an Albert watch-chain, and
rubber boots – throws some switches or other, and the water gushes in, and you’d hardly credit it, but you start going up yourself! I mean rising like in a commercial lift. And when you’ve got up there, you find to your amazement that the river on the far side is way up there too: i.e. at the same level as you’re at yourself now in the well thing. And the lock-keeper opens two more doors, by pushing against great wooden arms they have with his arse – and a lot of kidlets helping him to do so, or maybe hindering – and you get your release papers, and your civvy clothes back and your fare money, and see! you’re out in the stream again away to freedom, except that now you’re that much
higher
up! Boy! I certainly dig those locks! And most of them had little gardens, like in St. James’s, and tea chalets, and river cats and onlookers all jigging around and shouting, and having a great, noisy, lazy, watery ball!

‘What about a pint?’ said Dad, who the sight of all this water must have been making thirsty.

‘Why not? Come on, I’ll buy.’

‘You flush these days?’ Dad asked, as we made our way past the excursionists, and the skipper at his tiller, and the technical kiddo who helped him by sitting on the rail.

‘I’ve just had a sub,’ I answered, as we cracked our heads on the low door leading down into the saloon.

‘For doing what?’ he asked me, when I’d got the wallop and the Coke.

It’s weird, isn’t it, how your elders are always so suspicious when they hear that you’ve made money!
They just can’t credit that little junior has grown up a bit, and turned some honest coin.

‘If you listen, Dad, I’ll explain,’ I said. But it was hard to concentrate, because through the portholes just beside our faces we were exactly at the water level, and you found yourself unable not to watch, just like the telly.

‘I’m listening,’ Dad said.

I told him how a character I knew called V. Partners, who’s prominent in the advertising industry, had said he’d sponsor an exhibition of my photos if I’d agree he take the best of them to publicise a skin lotion he was marketing, called
Tingle-tangle
, which was targeted at the teenage market, and that he’d given me an advance on it of two times twenty-five.

‘That’s not much,’ said Dad – very greatly to my surprise.

‘You don’t think so?’

‘It’s not all you could have …’

‘You mean I should have asked more?’

‘Not that exactly, no. Did you sign anything?’

‘I had to.’

‘You’re a bloody fool, son. Also,’ Dad added, ‘he is, because you’re a minor.’

Well!

‘Listen, Dad,’ I said, quite a bit vexed, ‘I’ve not got your experience, but one thing I’m not, please, is a fool.’

‘Apologies,’ said Dad.

‘Apologies accepted.’

But I wasn’t pleased – no, not at all – the more so
as I thought Dad might probably be right. Vendice was very nice – and at any rate he’d listened to me, and not laughed – but of course he was in business for commercial purposes. I thought: I must get to know a lawyer.

‘What time we get there?’ Dad asked.

‘Marlow? You thinking of that already? About six.’

‘We might stay down there for tea.’

‘If you want to, Dad, but I’d like to get back to the smoke, if you don’t mind, because I want to take in a concert, second house.’

‘That jazz?’

‘Yeah. That jazz.’

‘Oh, all right. Where we have midday grub?’

I thought quick. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘we could have it here on the Queen Mary, or we could stop off at one of the little villages, and catch the next boat on.’

‘Our tickets let us?’

‘Oh, certainly. I’ve checked.’

‘Well, we’ll see,’ he said.

‘Okay.’

That brought back thoughts of Suze. And much as I love old Dad, taking him all in all, I couldn’t but wish that, at that very moment, he wasn’t there, but she. Glory! How fabulous it’d be to make this river trip with Crêpe Suzette! And why in creation didn’t I think of it, back in the earlier days?

Wow! I really had a shock! Because a face – a human face – flashed by a porthole, just outside. But then I saw what it was, which was a bunch of bathers knocking themselves out in the surrounding drink, and Dad and
I went upstairs to get a closer dekko. There they were – scores of them – diving off the bank, thrashing about in the river, and making the skipper swear at them by coming too near to his transatlantic. Yelling and splashing or, if they had any sense, roasting their torsos up there on the green, or just standing in plastic poses, watching. ‘Good luck to you!’ I shouted at an Olympic number who’d flogged it across the water in front of the ship’s bows. ‘Help! but I’d like to join them,’ I told Dad.

After this we passed a quieter bit, with big houses with their front lawns on the river, and sometimes quite lonely, with only an angler or two sitting like they were statues, and swans coming out to hiss at us, just like alligators when the paddle-steamer sails up the Amazon, or the Zambesi, or wherever it is, to gnash at the explorers. As we passed tall banks of rushes, they seemed to bow to us, because they sank several feet, then rose again when we’d gone by. And sometimes hills popped up unexpectedly – and what was even more peculiar, popped up again (I mean the same hills) in some quite different location, because we’d gone round several mile-long bends. There were little bridges we could only just get under, like in corny films about baronial Scotland, and beside each of the locks, were weirs with notices saying ‘Danger’, and roaring noises like Niagara, or almost. In fact, the whole darn scene was as good as Cinerama in continuous performance, and much fresher.

The most famous of these locks, so Dad informed me – and he must have been right, because the skipper left his wheel to a skilful kiddo I admit I envied, and
came along among the passengers to say the same – was one called Boulter’s Lock. It had a little bridge, like in Japanese murder pictures, and a big wooded island, and according to Dad, in the days of Queen Victoria and King Edward and all those historic monarchs, it was the top hip rendezvous for the dudes and toffs and mashers, and their birds. Personally (though naturally, I didn’t say so), I found it a bit gloomy – a bit sad and deserted and un-contemporary, like so many glorious monuments your elders-and-betters point out to you proudly from the tops of buses. And when we sailed on afterwards into a section they called Cliveden Reach (only you don’t pronounce it that way, because it’s a square thing to do with educated words), which apparently is one of the scenic glories of the nation, I admit I was considerably wrought down. It was like the canal at Regent’s Park, only, of course, bigger: I mean great woods of dangling trees like parsley salad, wringing themselves out into the river, all rotting away gradually, and
old:
which, of course, England is, I mean all those ancient cities, but it seems even the nature part of it can look like that as well.

But now I was growing a bit nervous: because I knew when we’d get out of this Cliveden lily-pond, the next stop would be the place called Cookham. Now, when I’d imagined the whole scene, lying back at home upon my spring divan, I’d thought – well, I know it’s foolish, but I had – I’d thought of Suze’s house being a little white thing set beside the river, and the boat going slowly by, and she coming out just at that moment (without Henley, need I
say), and seeing me there on the deck like the Captain in
H.M.S. Pinafore,
and throwing a kiss or two at me and pleading to me to alight, and the boat pulling in beside her garden, and me getting off into her arms.

Well, naturally, as the day grew older, I knew
that
wasn’t going to happen, but I’d put off deciding exactly what I should do: e.g. get off or not, and how to find Suze’s dwelling, if I did. But just after Cookham lock (which comes a bit before the place itself), while I was still hesitating about it all, and feeling kind of paralysed, and wondering if perhaps I even wanted to see Suze at all, it was Dad who came, unexpectedly, to my assistance – though in a very awkward way. Because when we’d set sail again after the lock thing, and I was already cursing myself for doing nothing, and we were just going to go underneath the metal bridge there, Dad slumped on to my shoulder, and passed out.

So I propped him up and ran and told the skipper, who wasn’t pleased and said we could hop off at the next lock we came to. But I said no, that was no damn good, that Dad was a sick man, under Dr A.R. Franklyn’s care of Harley Street, and that I had to get him to the Cookham doctor quick, and if he didn’t stop his boat immediately, I’d hold him personally responsible. And then I turned round to all the passengers, and said in a loud voice my Dad was dying and the skipper didn’t care a darn about it – in fact, as you’ve guessed, I became a bit hysterical.