St. Urbain's Horseman Read online

  “Me neither. Would you care for a drink?”

  They talked about Luke’s play transferring, a script Jake was considering, Senator John Kennedy’s chances, and whether, futile as it seemed, they should squat in Trafalgar Square with the others next time. They talked about everything but Nancy. Finally, Jake asked, “You didn’t stay with her very long, did you?”

  “Left almost immediately. She had a headache.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Yeah. What did you think of her?”

  “Not much. You?”

  Which, over the years, evolved into a private joke between the three of them. One of the moments that bound them together.

  The next evening, Nancy remembered, Jake arrived early, early and contrite, expecting to find her in a temper.

  They flew to Paris together in the morning and only there, as she lay in his arms, did Jake reveal that if she had reprimanded him for ruining her evening with Luke, or threatened to send him away, he had planned to pretend to slip his disc.

  “Then I would have stayed a week – helpless in your bed – unable to resist your most perverse designs on my loins.”

  Remembering, Nancy smiled to herself in the taxi.

  1959 it was.

  Now there was Sammy. Molly. Ben. Eight years swallowed whole.

  Oh, Jake, Jake, my darling, why did you have to go and make such a fool of yourself? And me.

  As Luke swept into the Duke of Wellington, late and breathless, his head bobbing over the other drinkers, it was an instant before he espied Nancy, and in that instant she saw him through Jake’s jaundiced eyes. Luke’s once oblong head rounder and wrinkled, fleshy, thinning flaxen hair buttressed by sideboards and a Fu Manchu mustache. Luke wore a yellow turtleneck sweater, a brown suede jacket, and punishingly slender hipsters with patch pockets that could only have been tailored by Doug Hayward. Our friend, the Trendy, Jake would say.

  Well, why not, Nancy objected, resisting Jake’s opprobrium, resentful that after eight years his prejudices should impinge first of all, even in his absence. Luke, she argued with herself, was still a delight, he likes me and always remembers my name, unlike so many of the others. Besides, they’re all fighting forty now.

  Luke gathered Nancy to him. “How did it go yesterday?”

  “Let’s not talk about it yet. How was Canada? Were you lionized everywhere?”

  No, not everywhere. But all their old friends in Toronto, he said, had wanted to know about Jake’s trouble, oozing sympathy but hungering for dirt. “Now look,” he added hastily, “there’s something I want to make clear. I don’t think for a minute Jake is going to be sentenced to anything more than an embarrassing reprimand; but you are not to worry about money. I can tide you over without even feeling it.”

  The understatement of the year. All the same, Nancy was touched. Tears welled in her eyes. “Yes, I’m sure you would.”

  “Are you being sarcastic?” he asked testily.

  “No. Honestly. But I couldn’t. Jake wouldn’t like it.”

  Luke didn’t insist. “It’s crazy,” he said, “the whole business. I don’t believe a word of it. Do you?”

  Nancy looked at him sharply. “I didn’t think you’d be in need of reassurances.”

  “Hell, no, we shared a flat for three years, remember? I know there’s nothing kinky about his sexual proclivities. If anything, he’s a prude.”

  “Yes. But he’s not in this mess alone.”

  Harry had been to prison twice already, once for blackmail, and she told him about it.

  “And what does Jake say to that?”

  “He thought Harry was bragging, and when he discovered it was true, he was impressed. It seemed so inventive and bitter,” and saying as much, she had to laugh too. So did Luke. “Who would have thought Hershel had the nerve, Jake said.” Harry, she added, had already approached News of the World to sell them the inside story after the trial.

  “And what did Jake say to that?”

  “He’s endlessly amused by it. Harry fascinates him.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  Nancy tightened.

  “I’m joking. I mean it, well, affectionately. The whole damn thing is ridiculous. The lawyers will explain how he has always collected strays, that he was Harry’s benefactor, and how he had just flown over from the funeral in a distressed state and you were in Cornwall with the kids and –”

  “What if he wants to go to prison?”

  “Oh, come off it, Nancy.”

  “But you hardly know him any more, Luke.”

  “He made it impossible. The jokes got more and more gritty. About my girls. My style of living. Everything. O.K., to put it coarsely, I’ve made it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m corrupt. To see him was to apologize for myself. Especially the so-called name dropping. Hell, I’m no name dropper. I just happen to see those people all the time.”

  “But he doesn’t.”

  “We were like brothers once, you know. Shit. Would you care for another drink?”

  “I mustn’t.”

  “Try to think of it as funny.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “It isn’t now. I know, I know. But once it’s over – Oh, hell. We were young together,” he thought aloud, “full of hope and promise.”

  “Not all the candidates pass.”

  Which is what Jake had said.

  8

  MRS. HERSH RAPPED ON THE WINDOW, SUMMONING Molly from the garden, and the two of them ate eggs and toast together, boiled not fried, because she knew better than to so much as touch the First Lady’s omelette pan again, it was so oily you could skate in it, but to have once given it the scrubbing it needed with hot water and soap was a criminal offense in her books.

  Then, once she had settled Molly into bed for her afternoon nap, Mrs. Hersh, still enduring hunger pangs, prepared herself a cup of instant coffee. She just happened to be standing by the living room window, she was not spying no matter what Nancy thought, when the car pulled up. A low-slung, very, very expensive type sports car. The man who slid out and walked around to open the door for Nancy (you bet she couldn’t turn the handle herself, the little tzaske) was taller than Jake, a skinny one, a loksh, with straw-colored hair and glasses.

  A goy.

  He embraced Nancy, he stroked her long black hair.

  “Everything’s going to work out.”

  “I mustn’t lose my milk.”

  Luke held her tight.

  “If I lose my milk, I’ll hate him.”

  “You won’t,” he said, rocking her. “You couldn’t.”

  “I’ll hate him no matter what, if I lose my milk.”

  Then, instinctively, Nancy looked up, saw her mother-in-law’s ashen face peering out of the window, and froze.

  “Fuck!”

  Oy veh iz mir. Mrs. Hersh retreated to the kitchen and sank into a chair, overwhelmed by hot flushes, her heart pounding. She heard the front door open, Nancy slip out of her coat, taking ages to hang it up, and then drift into the living room. Now there was the clink of a bottle against the glass-topped Italian table with the gold-painted flowery base. A cigarette lighter flicked, failed. Flicked again. Finally, Yankel’s Princess floated into the kitchen, delicately holding a glass in a hand with long silvery fingernails. Three children and still she managed the hairdresser once a week and witch’s fingernails. Nancy reeked more of the hard stuff now than perfume. Her eyes were swollen.

  “Were the children any trouble?”

  “How could they be any trouble, they’re my precious darlings. I live only for them.”

  “I love them too, Mrs. Hersh, but I certainly do not live only for them.”

  You. You whore. Mrs. Hersh shoved the open, smelly can at Nancy. “What’s this?”

  “Dog food.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought. I said to myself, it’s dog food. But you haven’t got a dog.”

  “No.”

  “You had one then?”

  “Never,” Nancy said,
beginning to enjoy herself.

  “I opened it by mistake. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I’m in such a state, just thinking of him in court right now. Naturally, if I’d read the label …”

  “But there was no label. There’s no label on any of the cans in his attic.”

  Tears filled Mrs. Hersh’s eyes and, all at once, Nancy relented. Her tone softer now, conciliatory, she said, “Don’t you know that everything in his office is kept in a special order. He can tell if anything has been touched.”

  “What’s it for, my God, the dog food?”

  “For Ruthy.”

  “Ruthy?”

  “Mrs. Flam. Harry’s betrothed, as it were. It’s of no importance. But please don’t go through his things, Mrs. Hersh. For your own sake, please don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t in a million years –” She rose, stumbling. “It’s the flushes. I think I’ll lie down.”

  “Let me help you,” Nancy said, taking her arm.

  9

  JAKE’S PAST, WHICH HE HAD ALWAYS TAKEN TO BE characterized by self-indulgence, soaring ambition, and too large an appetite, could at last be seen by him to have assumed nifty contours. A meaningful symmetry. The Horseman, Doktor Mengele, Harry, Ingrid, all frog-marching him to where he was to stand so incongruously, stupefied and inadequate, on trial in Courtroom Number One at the Old Bailey.

  Yesterday the case against him had looked shaky, very shaky, but today, Friday, Harry was to be summoned to the stand for the first time. Harry, the idiot. And Jake, fear enveloping him, recalled their first meeting or, rather, what he had ruinously taken to be their initial encounter, the aggrieved Harry correcting him before leaving the house.

  “You don’t remember having met me before, do you?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Not to worry. Very few people notice me. I’m used to it, don’t you know.”

  But even then he hesitated at the door.

  “You say you haven’t got the money, Mr. Hersh, and that even if you so desired you couldn’t spare it. A pity, that. For is it not a fact that at the moment you are being paid more monthly not to work than I take home in a year?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I put it to you that you have lied to me.”

  “Where have we met before, Harry?”

  “I take it you are implying that we couldn’t possibly move in the same circles.”

  “Inferring,” Jake said, the nastiness rising in him.

  Harry’s cheeks bled red.

  “Now tell me how come you know,” Jake asked, “or think you know about my private affairs?”

  “If you lied to me about that, I say you are also prevaricating about your cousin. You know the present abode of Joseph Hersh. Or de la Hirsch,” he added snidely, “and you are protecting him.”

  Standing in the dock, Jake, in his mind’s eye, conjured up Harry as he had struck him on his first visit to the house.

  Sneering, ferret-like Hershel. A Londoner born, a Londoner bred. National Health had been enacted in time for the steel-rimmed glasses, but too late to mend the crooked tartar-encrusted teeth. Harry’s brown hair was thin and dry, his skin splotchy and almost as gray as his mac, and there were little tufts of hair spurting out of his ears. From the dampness, probably, Jake had thought at the time, like the shoots that grow in potatoes if they are abandoned under the sink.

  Bony little Harry, a veritable bantam, wore a pullover under his jacket and a CND badge on his lapel. The badge was redundant, for his manner bespoke sufficiently of inherited discontent exacerbated by experience. Black, wintry experience. Jake immediately recognized in him the deprived man seething at the end of the bus queue in the driving rain. As he hurtled past in a taxi. It was Harry who called on his way home for a gallon of Esso Pink and lit the Aladdin before setting out the Birdseye frozen potato chips and Walls sausages for his solitary supper. While Jake upbraided the butcher at Harrod’s, demanding and getting a thicker, better-hung slice of Scotch rump. Harry who joined the Christmas club in July and endured tallymen and was not chagrined by the cutback in bank overdrafts. Or the waiting list for Jaguars. Or the ski conditions at Klosters. Or the punitive capital gains tax. Harry whom the world insulted. His gray eyes were perfervid and brimmed with rancor. When he settled into the new winged armchair from Heal’s, Jake couldn’t help noticing the shine on his trousers and the leather strips sewn into his cuffs.

  “Nice. Very nice,” Harry said, taking in everything in the living room. “Ruthy would fancy a place like this.”

  Ruthy who was still collecting points on the council waiting list.

  “But she can’t afford it. Between you Yanks and Rachmanism the rents have been forced up everywhere.”

  “I’m a Canadian.”

  The world seemed especially ordered to tantalize Harry, mock and inflame him. Wakening, the morning after his first visit to Jake’s house, to light his smelly heater and wait for the kettle to whistle, he read on the front page of the Express of the latest goddess to descend on Heathrow, Gina Lollobrigida, snug in her coat of jaguar and silver fox. “In addition to the coat La Lollo the Magnificent wore on arrival, she brought another three – a tiger, a sable, and another jaguar. And security staff at the Savoy Hotel were guarding the star’s suite last night.” There was also a photograph of the latest in Avenger girls, stooping to reveal a deep enough cleavage to ram it into, given a chance. Then there was a picture of some Swedish bit, the wind billowing her mini high as her cunt. Oh, to stir it into a swamp, and plug it once and for all.

  And Harry only had to flip the page, making a mental note to drop off his seed-stained sheets at the laundromat en route to the office, before other people’s good times obtruded.

  MY LIFE AND LOVES

  By Air Canada Steward on Sex Charge

  Air Steward Paul Crane of Kingston Hill, Surrey, accused of raping an air hostess, told yesterday of the women in his life.

  He said he had his regular girlfriend at Surbiton and he would take out air stewardesses between flights.

  There was his girlfriend at traffic control and he also took out one or two other stewardesses.

  His counsel asked: “How many-of them do you sleep with?”

  Crane: “I sleep with nearly all of them.”

  Those stewardesses, Harry was well aware, were not picked for their language skills but were selected for tit size and enthusiasm for taking it from behind, driving it in themselves, impaled on the captain’s lap at thirty thousand feet while the plane was on automatic pilot. Which you could tell just sniffing it on them as they hobbled out of the flight cabin to the loo for a rinse, and if you so much as asked them if there were any cartons of fags or flasks on sale, even if this was the yabbo’s cheap midnight flight to Paris, they gave you the I-know-you’re-dirt look and said, “I’ve only got two hands, haven’t I?” And Harry knew what they’d just been at, tuppenny whore.

  Harry, enjoined to begin his day with a pinta, end it with a Horlick’s. Whom Guinness Was Good For. Backing Britain. Because Labor had Soul. Harry, urged to go to work on an egg.

  Into the crammed underground, old bastards gargling their phlegm (“We’re on our way, brothers!”) and mustachioed girls depositing their gum everywhere (Gala Is A Girl Like You), he was assailed again by posters of bikinied girls, their legs widespread for entry, enticing him to the beaches of Malta or Majorca. Girls clutching a bottle of sherry to their bare breasts, fondling it, beseeching him to “Drink …” Girls with the longest legs imaginable, lubricant girls, rolling nylons on like condoms. Girls snuggling into bras and rising from the bath, towel ready to drop, if only he’d hurry and join the queue outside the Old Compton or the new Windmill, unzipping and sliding his mac over his lap to whack off for the big scene.

  Yes, yes indeed, everybody else, everywhere else, was getting his. Everybody with money that is.

  Ascending at Oxford Street, squeezed into an escalator spilling over with tit and bum, with self-satisfied teenage girls in minis. Slee
py-eyed and no wonder. Grudging insolent shorthand/typists or shop assistants by day they were, but pill-crazed groupies by night, plaster casters maybe, the window ledges of their bed-sitters choked with the imprints of lumpenproletariat cocks. But with no time for Harry, born too late. Who didn’t strum the guitar badly or wear his hair down to his shoulders. Who just happened to prefer Beethoven to the Rolling Stones. Who had a social conscience.

  Drawn to the newsstand, buffeted as he vacillated, Harry, unable to pass it by as he had yesterday and the day before, not buying Mayfair, snatched it in a rage this morning, if only to see what lies they were purveying now. THE NUDEST NATHALIE DELON. SUSAN STRASBERG STRIPS. SCRUMPTIOUS SALLY’S ALLEY IS A SENSUAL PLACE TO BE. Stuffing the magazine into his briefcase, Harry turned into Soho Square, then the lift, off at the fifth floor and right to his cell, where basketsful of other people’s prodigious expenses awaited his incomparable fiddling.

  Come noon, Father Oscar Hoffman, A.F.A., A.A.I.A., breezed past, raining smiles like blessings, off to a two-hour business lunch at the White E.

  – I’m told, Eisenthal says, his eyes watchful, that Triplex Tube is ripe for a takeover. What do you hear, Oscar?

  – Bricks and mortar. Put it in bricks and mortar and you can’t go wrong.

  Harry, in a playful mood, invited the enormous Sister Pinsky to lunch, trying not to imagine how many pleats there were in her stomach and what agony it must be to support such pie-size breasts. “Come away with me, Sandra, we’ll pool our vouchers and have us an orgy.”

  “Oh, you’re a terror, Harry.”

  A ton of flesh quaking away.

  “Would you drop your knickers to pose for a magazine, Sandra? Like Nathalie Delon?”

  “For me,” she replied, heaving, “it would have to be a double-page spread at least.”

  Sister Pinsky was reading a biography of King Farouk, of all people.

  “For me,” she said, “it symbolizes a classically misspent life.”

  Oh, Sandra, give me Farouk’s life, and I shall take his squalid death. Allow me thirty-room hotel suites, belly dancers, and beauty queens. Make me squander my nights gambling a hundred thousand pounds away. Let me know every call girl in Rome by name and pubis and you know what, darling, you can have my office to call your own. Everything in my building society account. My insurance. My pension scheme. My cameras. My past, my present, my future.