The Great and the Good Read online

  ‘So that’s it!’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  His head between his knees, Getulio was silent. When he sat up, the blood was returning to his cheeks.

  ‘You should have asked me sooner. Don’t go bothering Augusta. She’s getting married … oh, not for love, but she and I, as you probably guessed, are going through hard times. She wants them to be over, but I’m worried that she’s sacrificing herself for me, so that I can carry on my studies. I begged her to wait. In July we’ll have the money from the sale of an estate of my father’s in Minas Gerais. Till then I’m sending her my poker winnings.’

  ‘What about your losses?’

  Getulio laughed loudly.

  ‘I never pay my debts at cards. I can tell from your expression that you find that dishonest. Arthur, you have to start looking at life in a different way. People with scruples are going to have a very hard time of it in future. Why do you want to see Augusta again?’

  He remembered what Elizabeth had said.

  ‘She’s unique.’

  ‘Yes, that’s certainly true. There may be women ten times more beautiful than she is, but as soon as she appears Augusta becomes the sole attraction.’

  ‘Who’s she marrying?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, there are two suitors in the picture. We haven’t decided.’

  ‘What do you mean, “we”?’

  ‘I have a say. I’m her big brother, almost her father—’

  ‘– and a bit her pimp too, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘No, you’re very much mistaken, and you understand nothing with your middle-class French psychology.’

  ‘What if, on the contrary, I understand everything? Come on, Getulio, give me her number.’

  ‘Never. What for, anyhow? You don’t even have the wherewithal to go to New York for a weekend.’

  Arthur turned his back on him and jogged away down the path that ran round the campus. When he passed the bench again, Getulio waved a scrap of paper at him.

  ‘If you’re really in need of love, why don’t you go and see Elizabeth? Apart from your ties and socks, she thinks you’re quite attractive.’

  Arthur was easily offended. How could he defend himself by revealing the truth, that it was his mother who bought him his socks and ties? He had suspected her of having bad taste for years, but he would not tolerate anyone making fun of her for believing that she could, by choosing his clothes for him, keep the child who had become a man dependent on her. Arthur loomed threateningly over Getulio, who pulled back, offering his bird-like neck to the hand that gripped it, hard.

  ‘I hurt your feelings,’ he said in a strangled voice.

  ‘If Elizabeth wants to tell me, I’ll let it pass. But not you.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me … well, she nearly told me. Stop, you’re hurting me! We’re not going to fight, are we, for heaven’s sake?’

  The tall, handsome Getulio in his blue tracksuit, slumped breathlessly on a bench, could not provoke bad feeling for long. In fact, without his good looks he was pitiful, his eyes widened in fear that Arthur might squeeze even harder. His neck reddened. He swallowed saliva, making his Adam’s apple bob up and down ridiculously. A pack of a dozen runners in shorts and singlets passed them. From their measured breathing and lengthened stride, they were training for the 1500 or 3,000 metres. None of them turned his head. They disappeared behind a grove of trees and reappeared beside an artificial lake where their reflections wobbled in the black water without disturbing a pair of swans.

  ‘We look absurd,’ Getulio croaked.

  ‘Who did she tell?’

  ‘Augusta told me.’

  Arthur let go of Getulio’s neck. Men always misimagine what women say about them. When they discover the truth, they find out what a lethal view women have of their weaknesses.

  ‘It doesn’t mean she agrees with what Elizabeth said.’ Getulio rubbed his neck where it was reddest from the pressure of Arthur’s fingers. ‘Take Elizabeth’s phone number anyway. Go and see her in New York, when you can afford to.’

  ‘I can afford to already. All you have to do is pay back the hundred dollars I lent you the morning after the ball.’

  Getulio raised his arms beseechingly to the sky.

  ‘Dear Lord, how can he say this to me? I thought you were the last honest man on this earth of liars and cheats, and now I find you asking me to return money that came from Elizabeth. I saw her give you the hundred dollars. She was paid back a long time ago. I owe nothing to anyone.’

  ‘You didn’t pay anyone back. I stake my life on it.’

  Arthur pocketed Elizabeth’s number without another word and walked back to his room. He had been giving occasional French lessons to two social-science students, and had just enough for a train ticket. He called Elizabeth.

  ‘You forgot me. I shan’t be able to see you much, we’re rehearsing. But you’re a big boy, you can look after yourself. I do have a bed for you.’

  ‘What about your invisible man, your George?’

  ‘George? Oh, he’s not around any more. It was too comfortable for him to think, and he never washed. You do wash, don’t you?’

  Arthur almost backed out. Eventually he took the plunge. Not to start washing – he already had a sportsman’s attitude to cleanliness – but to find out where Getulio was hiding Augusta. He arrived at Elizabeth’s apartment on a Friday evening during rehearsals.

  ‘Go up to the mezzanine and watch if you like. We’re nearly done.’

  Sitting on a pouf, with his legs dangling between the balusters, Arthur watched a scene that to him was more comic than unsettling. Halfway up a stepladder, a woman with luxuriant curly black hair, wearing a figure-hugging evening dress, was playing opposite two other actors, one in battledress with a submachine gun slung over his shoulder, the other in overalls and wearing a workman’s belt full of tools. ‘Playing opposite’ was a slight exaggeration, as Arthur rapidly became aware that the female lead was endlessly repeating a mantra of which he could only make out two syllables, ‘mammon, mammon …’ The play’s deep symbolism could not have escaped the most intellectually challenged member of the audience. As the worker and the soldier exchanged incendiary slogans about war and peace with each other, their attractive counterpart on the ladder mumbled and shook her head, her face half hidden by her long, thick curls. Behind a high desk Elizabeth beat time like a conductor. A deep monotony descended. Suddenly the woman stopped muttering ‘mammon’ and began stripping off her costume jewellery, her sheath of black satin and her underwear, which the two men then fought over until they succeeded in killing each other. Having stepped down from the ladder, the woman turned the inert male figures over with her foot and danced over their corpses to a savage rhythmic accompaniment. Darkness was falling, obscuring the buildings outside. The spotlight lit up the acacia, whose branches were already in bud. Arthur saw to his regret that the woman of mammon, posing with her legs apart, one foot on each actor, was not actually naked, although her flesh-toned leotard left little to the imagination.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Superb.’

  He was thinking more of the curly-haired woman than the scene itself, of which he had understood nothing except that the flesh triumphed over the trivialities of life.

  ‘Who wrote it?’ he felt obliged to ask.

  ‘Nobody wrote it. Theatre is dying under the weight of writers. You’re watching a collective work that exists beyond words.’

  The actors congratulated each other in terms that Arthur thought excessive. The curly-haired beauty wrapped herself modestly in a dressing gown. Her name was Thelma and she came from San Francisco. The two men, Piotr and Leigh, who had been vegetating in walk-on parts in plays that Elizabeth described as ‘backward-looking’, had discovered ‘theatre vérité’ under her leadership, a new form that was going to sweep away bourgeois entertainment. Permanent members of the troupe that Elizabeth had been at great pains to assemble, they were both waiting for stardom, one
working part time as a valet and chauffeur, the other as a cook, while Thelma helped with the housework. Piotr brought a bowl from the kitchenette full of simmering wild rice. They ate on paper plates, sitting on the carpet Without asking, Thelma poured a glass of milk for Arthur. He protested.

  ‘I’m very sorry but I haven’t quite got to that stage yet.’

  Elizabeth opened a bottle of Chilean wine, under the disapproving gaze of her troupe. For a while the conversation remained stuck in various professions of allegiance to vegetarianism and a macrobiotic diet. The rice turned out to be inedible. Arthur took out a packet of cigarettes, to the consternation of both the men present. Thelma ran to open a window. A gust of cold air blew into the loft. Elizabeth explained that her French friend had come from old Europe, which was lagging behind in the march of progress. She was so persuasive that her friends began to look at Arthur with kindly pity. There was nevertheless an awkwardness that refused to go away, and that eventually became sufficiently noticeable for Thelma to make a move to leave, followed by the other two. Elizabeth shut the window and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I’m not the only sinner any more,’ Arthur said.

  ‘No. And you can go and open another bottle.’

  She turned down some lamps and the apartment’s edges disappeared in the dim lighting.

  ‘I made them run away.’

  ‘That’s fairly easy when they’re not hungry any more.’

  ‘You don’t take any prisoners, do you?’

  She shrugged, got up to put on a record, and went to the bathroom. Arthur felt melancholy creeping up on him. Why, at this time of day, put on the sublimely beautiful Mahler, who trailed such clouds of irremediable sadness in his wake? Elizabeth came back in the dressing gown Thelma had borrowed, her face still damp and shining, bent over Arthur, unknotted his tie, unbuttoned his collar, and threw a sweater at his head.

  ‘Take your jacket off. Won’t you ever allow yourself to loosen up?’

  ‘With you it’ll happen in a flash.’

  Sprawled on the Mexican mattresses, they talked, smoked and drank more Chilean wine. Arthur said, ‘Your friends are weirdos. Sweet, but weirdos. Are there many like them?’

  ‘A handful, but they’re all evangelists. There are religions that started with fewer apostles. They’re not in a hurry. Give them twenty or thirty years … by the end of the century they’ll have come out on top and human beings will be living in a state of harmony and well-being.’

  ‘That’ll be exciting.’

  ‘Mm. I won’t fit in.’

  Later she put on some jazz. Her taste was eclectic: Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Ornette Coleman. They listened as they drank more of the rough Chilean wine accompanied by slices of chorizo that took their heads off. Elizabeth lay across a cushion, her head on Arthur’s thigh.

  ‘I know why you came to New York.’

  ‘Do you? And what are your orders?’

  ‘Not to give you Augusta’s address at any price.’

  Arriving at Elizabeth’s apartment, Arthur had forgotten about Augusta. Now she returned. Why couldn’t you, just by pressing a button, set in motion the scenes you wanted to think about, banish them offstage, arrange intervals for them, and pick up their threads in your memory when you felt like it?

  ‘So you won’t give it to me?’

  ‘Of course I will. But she’s in Washington for a couple of weeks and you don’t have time to go there. Give me your hand.’

  She took his hand in hers and slid it into the opening of her dressing gown, between her breasts.

  ‘I badly need a man to feel my heart beating tonight.’

  ‘It’s beating. Feel better?’

  ‘Yes. We can talk about Augusta as much as you like.’

  Arthur was not sure he wanted to. Although his experience of love was limited, he felt that one couldn’t dig deeply into the life of the object of one’s love with impunity. Elizabeth had the brutal directness of a spoilt child; she could easily reduce Augusta to nothingness, leaving just some lovely pieces of wreckage, but wreckage all the same.

  ‘Don’t say anything bad about her. I don’t want to know what she is, I want to keep her the way I imagine her, the way I first saw her on the Queen Mary’s promenade deck with you and her brother—’

  ‘And in the cabin? When she showed you her bottom! That I didn’t expect.’

  Arthur hadn’t expected it either. In his daydreams about Augusta he berated himself: instead of standing with his mouth open on the second occasion when it had happened, more intentionally, in the hotel room at Beresford, he should have thrown her a towel to show his disapproval and make clear to her that he had different, not purely physical feelings about her.

  ‘Oh, stop worrying!’ Elizabeth said. ‘I never say bad things about girls like her. Or men like Getulio. I’m friends with them both. When I took the train to Le Havre, the first thing I saw was the perms of a dozen of my old aunts, my mother’s cousins, making their way home after a tour of the Paris jewellery stores and a lot of dinners at Maxim’s. That was their idea of Paris. I started to panic, and then I saw this bizarre couple. I thought they must be married. Getulio wears a wedding ring sometimes, Augusta too. It’s their smokescreen, their way of saying “Leave us alone!” That’s all: there’s nothing ambiguous about it, don’t worry. They just don’t want people asking questions. And did you notice how Getulio’s so set on being the only source of information about them? No contradictions, things so easily verified that you never think about bothering to check them. And there she is, in perfect unison, but watch her carefully and you’ll see her eyes start to glitter whenever Getulio goes too far with his boasting. Never forget, none the less, that the two of them are in cahoots and even if she’s aware of her brother’s showing off, she’ll always stand by him. One day when he really needs some money, he’ll marry her off handsomely. Which is a way of saying that you’re not the man for her. I like them, yes, I really like them. On the train, and on the boat, they opened their arms to me, as if we’d known each other for ever. Right now our paths are intersecting in a way I’m hugely enjoying: they’re entering American society and I’m doing my level best to escape from it. They haven’t quite arrived, and I haven’t quite freed myself. As their elevator goes up, mine’s going down. We’re at the same floor, but Getulio’s dying to push the button.’

  ‘Just tell me one thing.’

  ‘What? I can’t promise I will.’

  ‘Is it true that she’s going to get married?’

  ‘How could you believe that?’

  Concannon was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his head supported by a large pillow, the sheet tucked under his arms. A tube connected his right arm to a drip. His immobile left arm ended in a half-open wax-coloured hand, as if the blood had stopped circulating in it. The professor’s face, its veins usually flushed with the first glass of alcohol, had taken on a grey-mauve pallor and yet, crowned by his flossy white hair and accentuated by the line of his bushy black eyebrows, his features seemed singularly calm, although at each exhalation his cracked lips swelled barely enough to open and make the whistling sound of a steam engine about to come to a final stop after a few last pathetic hiccups.

  Summoned by a bell, the nurse left Arthur alone with him. The room’s lowered blinds diffused the bright orange-red rays of the setting sun.

  ‘Professor!’

  Could he hear, lost amid the confused images that filled his sleep? Arthur held his waxy left hand and squeezed it. The nurse had said, ‘We don’t understand. The haemorrhage is localised on the left side and shouldn’t have affected his language or thought processes, but the patient is apparently aphasic.’

  ‘Professor, it’s Arthur Morgan,’ he repeated in the ear of the motionless figure.

  An eyelid fluttered open, revealing an unmoving blue eye, veiled but more lively than might have been expected. The lips tensed into a smile. Concannon extended his right hand as far as the drip would let him. The fingers flickered, beckonin
g Arthur closer.

  ‘I’m … dying …’

  Arthur had no time to protest.

  ‘… I’m … dying … of thirst.’

  A muffled laugh set off a horrible mucous cough. Arthur handed him a glass of water and a straw without getting up.

  ‘Sweet heaven! Ugh!’

  The voice was dramatically hoarse.

  ‘Either it’s a miracle, or you’re putting on an act with the doctors.’

  ‘Hush!’ Concannon said, opening the other eye.

  ‘I only found out when I got back last night. I was in New York.’

  ‘With her?’

  ‘No. With Elizabeth.’

  How could he think about that in the state he was in?

  ‘Why are you refusing to talk to the staff?’

  ‘Nurse too ugly … doctor an idiot … want them to leave me be … Not you … I’ve always liked the French …’

  He closed his eyes after the extreme effort. Arthur tried to think of something to say. Sunk into himself, Concannon let out a long, deep sigh. From out of his self-imposed darkness his words came more clearly.

  ‘I knew, very early on, I’d end up … gaga …’

  ‘You’re not gaga at all.’

  ‘I’m pretending to be gaga … it’s worse. I feel sleepy …’

  ‘I’ll leave you to rest.’

  Concannon shook his right hand so abruptly that the drip came out.

  ‘I’ll call the nurse.’

  ‘Did you know … I was the best dancer … in the whole university?’

  ‘Yes I did. But I prefer to hear it from you.’

  Concannon started to snore, so noisily that it sounded like wheezing. Arthur pressed the call switch and the nurse appeared immediately. She was, as Concannon had said, a woman of average physical looks but an incontestable authority.

  ‘This is the third time he’s pulled the drip out.’

  ‘He’s started to snore.’

  ‘With lungs as clogged as his are, I’m not surprised.’

  She put an arm around Concannon, and with unexpected strength lifted him to plump his pillow and settle his head, which was lolling.