Contact! (12 page)

Insufficient compassion

Scary beggars used to infest the centre of Alexandria. I was walking home in Alex one evening when I felt, rather than actually saw, a legless beggar observing my passage from across the street. He was strapped to a low wooden trolley, which he pushed along with his hands, and made an object at once heart rending and frightening to see: but I had no money with me, neither a pound nor a piastre, so I quickened my step self-consciously and hurried down Zaghloul Street towards my hotel.

Behind me I could hear the whirr of his roller-skate wheels as he pursued me through the town–a thump when he eased himself off the pavement, a clanking when he crossed the tramlines, a change of pitch when he left the tarmac for the flagstones. Faster and faster I walked through the evening crowds, but I could never escape those whirring wheels: over the low wall into Zaghloul Square, across the little garden, and I could still hear them skidding down the path, closer than ever behind my back, so that I could hear the poor man's panting breath, too, until at last, breaking into a run, I threw myself into the revolving door of the Cecil.

The wheels came to a sudden stop on the sidewalk outside, and a curse bade me goodnight.

Dignities

In the last years of the Iraqi monarchy the real power behind the throne was the Crown Prince Abdul Illah, a sallow but handsome man. I interviewed him once. He talked fluently and amusingly, and our conversation turned to the pictures on the palace wall, a galaxy of chieftainship. ‘What a splendid costume it is,' I said of a portrait of the great Feisal I in Arab dress. ‘Do you ever wear it yourself?' ‘Sometimes,' said the Crown Prince. ‘You would be surprised how comfortable it is.' ‘And it does make one look so fearfully dignified,' I said lightly. This was not a success. A chill seemed to settle upon our encounter, and the interview soon ended. The Crown Prince Abdul Illah, it seemed, needed no romantic trappings to give him dignity.

Iddums-diddums

Come with me, and watch a full-blooded beldame selling fish upon the waterfront of San Sebastian. She is flanked by cronies, sitting brawnily on kitchen chairs like a gangster's bodyguard. She herself stands in the middle with a microphone around her neck, wearing a blue anorak, a pink chiffon scarf, white ankle socks and a suggestion of innumerable underclothes. She looks as though no nuance of life has escaped her. Her face is heavy jowled, her wrists are muscular, and she is built like a boxer, but there is a rich urbanity to her voice as she intones the price of sardines. The crowd is altogether at her command. The seamen stumble in with their fish trays like acolytes in an archiepiscopal presence.
The cronies laugh at her every joke. Policemen sheepishly perambulate. Customers never dare to argue. But sometimes that empress of the fish market, pausing to scribble a price upon her pad, notices a baby in somebody's arms, and looks up unexpectedly with the sweetest of grandmotherly smiles, a twiddle of cod-scaled fingers and what I take to be the Basque equivalent of ‘Iddums-diddums.'

In the park

I woke early and walked across Chowringi into the green of Calcutta's Maidan, before the sun rose and the heat haze fell like a web upon us. It was lovely then in the park. Rooks cawed, kites hung, sparrows pecked, smiling pi-dogs padded by. Here and there across the grass white figures moved or loitered, and whenever I paused I was sympathetically accosted. ‘What you are seeing is the Theatre, built in honour of our great poet Rabindranath Tagore.' ‘If I may say so you would be more comfortable where there not so many ants.' Or: ‘Wouldn't you like a game of golf? I am teaching golf, you see. Here are my golf clubs.'

Tradition

‘Does he, do you think,' tactfully inquired the Bishop of Barrackpore, ‘expect a T-I-P?' But no, my guide was not ready for one yet, having high hopes of further services to be performed, so I joined the bishop on his verandah, where during a lull before evensong he was eating peanut butter
sandwiches with a kind Anglican lady in blue. He was all an aficionado of the tradition could ask: cassocked, distinguished, fatherly, concerned about that T-I-P. Soon, he told me, he would be retiring. Going home? I wondered, but as the lady replaced the tea cosy with a significant air he answered me in grave italics: ‘Staying in India–
for ever
.'

At evensong we sang the hymn that says the Lord's throne shall never like earth's proud empires pass away, and as I left the cathedral a Balliol voice called kindly across the transept–‘I say! Excuse me! You do know where we are, don't you, if you're coming to the children's dance drama in the parish hall?'

Arrival of the tourists

Down in the harbour of Capri I can see the morning vaporetto from the mainland, still hazy about the funnel, and here flooding into the piazza, pouring out of taxis, out of buses, out of horse carriages, out of the steep funicular that runs up from the waterfront–wearing floppy straw hats and rope-soled shoes and pink jeans and multifarious bangles–festooned with cameras, inquiring the price of swimsuits, unfolding maps, touching up their lipsticks beneath the campanile–talking German, English, French and every variety of Italian–young and old, blatant and demure, strait laced and outrageous, earnest and frivolous and thrilled and sick-to-death-of-it-all–here past my cafe table streams the first quota of the morning's tourists.

Teatime in Old Chicago, 1950s

I love to watch the customers at a carriage-trade Chicago restaurant at English Teatime, with Jasmine Tea and Toasted Muffins beside the goldfish pool. Its children behave with almost fictional decorum. Its daughters wear pearls. Its young mums look as though they have come direct from committee meetings of charitable balls. Its husbands look as though they keep fit by riding hunters through parks before breakfast. Its grandmothers, best of all, talk in throaty turtle voices, as though the words are being squeezed out from beneath the carapace and they are heavily loaded with inherited gewgaws, and are inclined to call the waitress ‘child', as though expecting pretty curtseys in return. ‘Would you care for some more Jasmine Tea, Mrs Windlesham? Do you desire another Toasted English Muffin?' ‘Why thank you, child–how pretty you are looking today!' ‘Thank
you
, Mrs Windlesham, it's always a pleasure to serve you and the members of your family.'

A separate sphere?

One evening at Akureyri, on the northern coast of Iceland, I heard the sound of solemn singing from a restaurant, and peering through its door I saw that a large party was in peculiar progress. I felt as though I were looking in at some utterly separate sphere of existence. There the Icelanders, men and women, sat in ordered ranks, their arms linked around the long tables, and as they sang what seemed to be some kind of sacramental anthem they swayed heavily from side
to side in rhythmic motion. The sight of them gave me a queer sense of secret solidarity. Everybody clearly knew the words of the song, and the whole assembly seemed to be in some sort of arcane collusion. I noticed that if ever I caught an eye, as the celebrants sang and swayed there at the table, after a moment's puzzled focusing it abruptly switched away from me, as if to dismiss an illusion.

‘Are they?'

Every evening at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul a string trio plays, attentively listened to by the German package tourists at their communal tables, and gives the place a comfortable, palm-court air. Two elderly gentlemen in Gypsy outfits are on piano and accordion, and they are led by a romantic Gypsy fiddler, adept at waltzes and polkas. I was sitting there one evening when suddenly there burst into the room, driving the trio from its podium and severely disconcerting the hausfraus, a team of ferocious Anatolian folk dancers, accompanied by a young man with a reedy trumpet and an apparently half-crazed drummer. The dancers were fairly crazed themselves. Apparently welded together into a multicoloured phalanx, they shrieked, they roared with laughter, they leapt, they whirled, they waved handkerchiefs–a performance of furious bravura, leaving us all breathless and aghast. They were like so many houris, come to dance over the corpses on a battlefield.

They withdrew as abruptly as they had arrived, and in the stunned hush that ensued I turned to the Americans at the next table. ‘My God,' I said, ‘I'm glad they're on our
side!' But a knowing look crossed the man's face. ‘Ah, but
are
they?' he replied.

Tyrant

A terrifyingly ambitious, inexhaustible girl supervisor works at one of the downtown McDonald's of Manhattan. Over the serving counter one may see the glazed and vacant faces of the cooks, a black man and a couple of Puerto Ricans, who appear to speak no English; in front that small tyrant strides peremptorily up and down, yelling orders, angrily correcting errors and constantly falling back upon an exhortatory slogan of her own:
C'mon, guys, today guys, today
…The cooks look back in pained incomprehension.

Divine merriment

We find ourselves lost on the edge of a deserted traffic junction somewhere east of Kranj, Slovenia. Helplessly we consult our map, hopefully we look for somebody to ask the way, and presently there somehow seem to sidle into our company half a dozen Slovene men and a very talkative Slovene woman. Between us we speak five languages, but we are fluent only in our own, and gradually our discussions descend into farce. It's that way, for sure, no it's the other, they haven't been through Preddvor, no, no of course they haven't, they came the Cerklje way–they should go back the way they came then, they should have gone by Duplice–no, no, no, look here, look at the map–and so, as the map gets
more and more crumpled, the arguments louder, the languages ever more incomprehensible, we subside into impotent merriment, shake hands with each other, clap one another on the back and, chuckling still, go our various ways. We ourselves are no wiser about our situation, so we leave the car on the grassy verge and go for a drink instead.

God habitually smiles upon Slovenia, and sometimes he laughs out loud.

Violetta down under

Go to
La Traviata
at Sydney Opera House and, my, what a robust Australian chorus will be attendant upon Violetta in the opening act, their crinolines and Parisian whiskers delightfully failing to disguise physiques born out of Australian surf and sunshine–while even La Traviata herself, as she subsides to the last curtain, may seem to you the victim of some specifically Australian variety of tuberculosis, since she looks as though immediately after the curtain calls she will be off for a vigorous set of tennis with the conductor, or at least a grilled lobster with orange juice and caramel.

The Leading Citizen's lesson

‘Have your fun, Jan,' said the Leading Citizen. ‘Sure thing, this is a Fun Town, but what we especially do not like is these comparisons with Sodom and such. What people forget is that here in Las Vegas we have a thriving civic-minded com
munity. We have 130 church buildings, Jan, in this city of ours. I think I could safely say that you won't find a more lovely home environment anywhere than some of our high-grade home environments here. What I want you to remember, Jan, is this–the Spanish Trail came this way, right over this very spot, before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic–that's what I always tell people like you, who come inquiring–before the game of roulette ever entered the Infant Republic of the United States!'

The Very Reverend

Almost at once I met the Dean of Wells, actually in the shadow of Penniless Porch. Eton, Oxford and the Welsh Guards, he was not hard to identify. With a splendid concern his voice rang out, as we sat there watching the citizenry pass by. ‘Good morning, good morning! Lovely day! What a success yesterday–what
would
we have done without you? Morning, Simon! Morning, Bert! Morning, John! (
John Harvey, you know, our greatest authority on church architecture
…)'In his cathedral, I was later disconcerted to learn, they habitually call him ‘Father', but I certainly could not complain about his authenticity
qua
Dean.

Our Gracie

On a bus in Capri I chanced to meet, I can't remember how, a man who introduced himself as Boris Alperovici, the third husband of Gracie Fields. She was a famous star of the past,
a Dame of the British Empire–‘Our Gracie', formerly a household name in her native England but by then somewhat forgotten. She was living in elderly retirement in her villa on the island. Boris took me along to visit her, and she received me graciously, and told me anecdotes of her theatrical life, and had coffee served to me by her seaside swimming pool. It was just as though the old lady were some great Hollywood actress at the height of her career, and she evidently enjoyed it as much as I did. When I got back to Britain I was surprised to meet other people, too, who had chanced to encounter Signor Alperovici on the Capri bus, but couldn't quite remember how, and had sat drinking coffee at the feet of Our Gracie.

The exchange

Wandering around the purlieus of the High Court in Madras, I took out my tape recorder to remind myself of some of its architectural peculiarities. At once I heard an admonitory clapping of hands, and a policeman with a nightstick beckoned me over.

‘What have you got there? What is this machine?'

‘It's a tape recorder.'

‘What are you doing with it here?'

‘I am reminding myself of some architectural peculiarities.'

‘How do I know it is not a bomb?'

‘You can speak into it yourself.'

‘What shall I say?'

‘Anything.'

‘I cannot think of anything to say.'

‘Sing a song then.'

‘What kind of a song?'

‘A Tamil song.'