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First published 1950
Published in Penguin Classics 2012
Copyright © Alfred A. Knopf, 1950
Copyright renewed © John Ross Macdonald, 1978
Introduction copyright © John Banville, 2012
Cover photograph © Niels Busch; H. Armstrong Roberts/Getty Images.
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author of the introduction has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-14-196816-2
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born in California in 1915 and educated in Canada and at the University of Michigan, where he also taught, he published his first novel, The Dark Tunnel, in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award, as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Silver Dagger Award. He died in 1983.
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fourteen previous novels including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize, and most recently Ancient Light. He is a recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize and lives in Dublin.
At the opening of his essay ‘Twelve Notes on the Mystery Story’, of which he in fact provides twenty-five, Raymond Chandler asserts that such stories ‘must consist of the plausible actions of plausible people in plausible circumstances, it being remembered that plausibility is largely a matter of style’. Here in a nutshell is the manifesto of the new kind of crime fiction of which Chandler, along with Dashiell Hammett and one or two others, was the inventor.
Although he invokes the precept of plausibility four times, the real weight in Chandler’s dictum rests on the word style. As Chandler wrote elsewhere, ‘it doesn’t matter a damn what a novel is about … the only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words’. Ross Macdonald would surely have agreed. A direct heir of Hammett and Chandler, and a conscious stylist, he understood that an author’s intentions are always coerced by the insinuative power of language, and that fiction achieves its strongest effects not through discursiveness but by way of nuance: not what is said, but how it is said. One only has to notice the ingenuity and subtlety with which the theme of water trickles throughout the narrative of The Drowning Pool to know that here we are in the hands of an artist.
Ross Macdonald, the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar, was born in California in 1915 but as a child was transferred to Canada, where, after the abrupt departure of his father, he was brought up by his ailing mother and various relatives. Early on he read the works not only of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a strong influence on his writing, but also of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, and the Victorian mystery writers such as Wilkie Collins. He studied at a number of institutions in Canada, financed by a legacy from his father, who died in 1932, and in the year before the Second World War began he was at the University of Michigan, where W. H. Auden was a visiting professor. Auden, an admirer of detective novels, encouraged the young man, urging him that in the hands of an artist crime writing could be an art form.
At the end of the war Macdonald served for a year in the American navy in the Pacific, then returned to college and received a PhD for a dissertation on Coleridge. His first novel featuring the private investigator Lew Archer was The Moving Target, published in 1949. Archer was named not after a character in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, as some critics suggest, but, according to his creator, after his birth sign, Sagittarius.
In the course of the Archer series – there were eighteen novels along with short stories, as well as films, starring Paul Newman, and television adaptations – the character developed a detailed biography, including a date of birth, 2 June 1914, a brief career as a detective with the Long Beach police force, and a stint of wartime service, fighting at Okinawa. He lives in Los Angeles, is divorced, likes books, classical music and Japanese art, and has a keen eye, and a keen ear, for the natural world. Not your usual gumshoe, then; Philip Marlowe and he might have been pals had they not both been confirmed loners.
Hammett in his work tends to be stridently ‘American’, while Chandler betrays the slight moue of distaste of the erstwhile English public schoolboy forced to walk down America’s mean streets. For Ross Macdonald, or at least for his protagonist Lew Archer, America is just the country where he happens to live and work – he even likes Southern California, and defends its climate. His post-war world is weary, though; Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe may know all there is to know about the perfidious ways of the crooks, chisellers, corrupt politicians, bad cops, gigolos and good-time girls among whom they move, but Lew Archer has been to the Pacific, that most ill-named ocean, and has seen modern warfare and learned what it does to men.
Like Philip Marlowe, Archer is a disappointed romantic, and goes on being disappointed – disappointed, but not despairing – despite the consolations of literature, Japanese pots and birdsong. Also like Chandler he has no illusions about the fairer sex – in The Drowning Pool the women, like the Devil, get all the best lines. After, that is, Archer himself, whose disenchanted eye and mordant wit can fix a scene or a character in the turn of a phrase: ‘A week’s beard grew on his folded cheeks like the dusty gray plush in old-fashioned railway coaches’; ‘He smiled bleakly, as a monk might smile over the memory of an ecstasy’; ‘A police car in that company seemed as out of place as a Sherman tank at a horse show.’
For all his attention to style and nuance, Macdonald’s plots are intricate, ingenious and tight. What drives his stories, though, is not the urge to tantalize the reader with crossword-puzzle cleverness – Chandler: ‘I don’t seem to care who conked Sir Mortimer with the poker’ – but by the motivations, squalid, self-serving and frequently criminal, of his characters, those ‘plausible people in plausible circumstances’. The Drowning Pool is one of his most accomplished novels in this regard. It opens in classic noir fashion with the private eye being consulted in his down-at-heel office by a beautiful woman in distress. Maude Slocum may be d’un certain âge but she is still beautiful, and if she is troubled, it is obvious she is trouble, too. But then, trouble is Lew Archer’s business.
As usual with Macdonald, the mud at the bottom of today’s pool is stirred up by yesterday’s storms. There is hardly a character in the book without something to hide from his or her past. It is not a lengthy novel, yet the twists and unravellings of the plot give the reader the impression of being on a long, hot and perilous journey through the sun-scorched undergrowth of a once- innocent landscape scarred and stained by human sinfulness. Macdonald, who was an eco-warrior long before the term was coined, has his hero excoriate the greed that ‘built an urban wilderness in the desert’, and when Archer takes a swim in the ‘cool clear Pacific’ he feels he is ‘as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people’. But then, he does not know what awaits him in the drowning pool.
John Banville
To Tony
If you didn’t look at her face she was less than thirty, quick-bodied and slim as a girl. Her clothing drew attention to the fact: a tailored sharkskin suit and high heels that tensed her nylon-shadowed calves. But there was a pull of worry around her eyes and drawing at her mouth. The eyes were deep blue, with a sort of double vision. They saw you clearly, took you in completely, and at the same time looked beyond you. They had years to look back on, and more things to see in the years than a girl’s eyes had. About thirty-five, I thought, and still in the running.
She stood in the doorway without speaking long enough for me to think those things. Her teeth were nibbling the inside of her upper lip, and both of her hands were clutching her black suede bag at the level of her waist. I let the silence stretch out. She had knocked and I had opened the door. Undecided or not, she couldn’t expect me to lift her over the threshold. She was a big girl now, and she had come for a reason. Her stance was awkward with urgency.
‘Mr Archer?’ she said at last.
‘Yes. Will you come in.’
‘Thank you. Forgive me for hanging back. It must make you feel like a dentist.’
‘Everybody hates detectives and dentists. We hate them back.’
‘Not really? Actually, I’ve never been to a dentist.’ She smiled as if to illustrate the point, and gave me her hand in a free gesture. It was hard and brown. ‘Or a detective.’
I placed her in the soft chair by the window. She didn’t mind the light. Her hair was its natural brown, without a fleck of gray that I could see. Her face was clear and brown. I wondered if she was clear and brown all over.
‘What tooth is bothering you, Mrs –?’
‘Excuse me. My name is Maude Slocum. I always forget my manners when I’m upset.’
She was much too apologetic for a woman with that figure, in those clothes. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I am rhinoceros-skinned and iron-hearted. I’ve been doing divorce work in LA for ten years. If you can tell me anything I haven’t heard, I’ll donate a week’s winnings at Santa Anita to any worthy charity.’
‘And can you whip your weight in wildcats, Mr Archer?’
‘Wildcats terrify me, but people are worse.’
‘I know what you mean.’ The fine white teeth were tugging again at the warm mouth. ‘I used to think, when I was younger, that people were willing to live and let live – you know? Now I’m not so sure.’
‘You didn’t come here this morning, though, to discuss morals in the abstract. Did you have a specific example in mind?’
She answered after a pause: ‘Yes. I had a shock yesterday.’ She looked close into my face, and then beyond. Her eyes were as deep as the sea beyond Catalina. ‘Someone is trying to destroy me.’
‘Kill you, you mean?’
‘Destroy the things I care about. My husband, my family, my home.’ The rhythm of her voice faltered and ceased. ‘It’s dreadfully hard to tell you, the thing is so underhanded.’
Here we go again, I said to myself. True confession morning, featuring Archer the unfrocked priest. ‘I should have gone to City College and been a dentist and gone in for something easy and painless like pulling teeth. If you really need my help, you’ll have to tell me what with. Did someone send you here?’
‘You were recommended. I know a man who does police work. He said you were honest, and discreet.’
‘Unusual thing for a cop to say about me. Would you care to mention his name?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’ The very suggestion seemed to alarm her. Her fingers tightened on the black suede bag. ‘He doesn’t know about this.’
‘Neither do I. I don’t expect I ever will.’ I let a smile go with it, and offered her a cigarette. She puffed on it without relish, but it seemed to relax her a little.
‘Damn it.’ She coughed once over the smoke. ‘Here I’ve been up all night, trying to make up my mind, and I still haven’t made it up. No one knows, you see. It’s hard to bring myself to tell anyone else. One acquires the habit of silence, after sixteen years.’
‘Sixteen years? I thought it happened yesterday.’
She colored. ‘Oh, it did. I was simply thinking of how long I’d been married. This has a good deal to do with my marriage.’
‘So I gather. I’m good at guessing-games.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend you or insult you.’ Her contriteness was unexpected in a woman of her class. It didn’t go with hundred-dollar suits. ‘It isn’t that I think you’ll spread it around, or try to blackmail me—’
‘Is somebody else trying to blackmail you?’
The question startled her so that she jumped. She recrossed her legs and leaned forward in the chair. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t any idea.’
‘Then we’re even.’ I took an envelope out of the top drawer of my desk, opened it, and began to read the mimeographed enclosure. It informed me that the chances were one in three that I’d enter a hospital within the year, that I couldn’t afford to be unprotected by health insurance, and that he who hesitates is lost. ‘He who hesitates is lost,’ I said aloud.
‘You’re making fun of me, Mr Archer. But just what is the arrangement? If you take the case, you’ll naturally be governed by my interests. But if you don’t, and I’ve told you about this thing, can I trust you to forget it?’
I let my irritation show in my voice, and this time I didn’t smile, or even grimace. ‘Let’s both forget it. You’re wasting my time, Mrs Slocum.’
‘I know I am.’ There was self-disgust in her tone, more than there should have been. ‘This thing has been a physical blow to me, a blow from behind.’ Then she spoke with sudden decision, and opened her bag with taut white fingers: ‘I suppose I must let you see it. I can’t just go home now and sit and wait for another one.’
I looked at the letter she handed me. It was short and to the point, without heading or signature:
Dear Mr Slocum:
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Can you possibly enjoy playing the role of a complaisant cuckold? Or are you strangely unaware of your wife’s amorous activities?
The message was typed on a sheet of cheap white typing paper that had been folded to the size of a small envelope. ‘Is there an envelope to go with this?’
‘Yes.’ She rummaged in her purse, and handed me a crumpled white envelope, which was addressed to James Slocum, Esq., Trail Road, Nopal Valley, California. The postmark was clear: Quinto, Calif., July 18.
‘This is Wednesday,’ I said. ‘It was mailed Monday. Do you know people in Quinto?’
‘Everybody.’ She managed a strained smile. ‘It’s only a few miles from Nopal Valley, where we live. But I haven’t the faintest notion who could have sent it.’
‘Or why?’
‘I have enemies, I suppose. Most people have.’
‘I take it your husband hasn’t seen it. James Slocum is your husband?’
‘Yes. He hasn’t seen it. He was busy in Quinto when it came. I usually bicycle down to the mailbox, anyway.’
‘Is he in business in Quinto?’
‘Not in business. He’s very active in the Quinto Players – it’s a semi-professional theatrical group. They’re rehearsing every afternoon this week—’
I cut her short: ‘Do you usually read your husband’s mail?’
‘Yes, I do. We read each other’s – I hardly expected to be cross-questioned, Mr Archer.’
‘One more question. Is the allegation true?’
The blood coursed under the clear skin of her face, and her eyes brightened. ‘I can’t be expected to answer that.’
‘All right. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t true.’
‘On the contrary,’ she said.
‘And you want me to find out who sent the letter, and prosecute him or her?’
‘Oh, no.’ She wasn’t clever. ‘I simply want it stopped. I can’t stand guard over the mailbox to intercept his mail, and I can’t stand the strain of waiting and wondering—’
‘Besides, the next note might be handed to him personally. Would it matter so much if he read it?’
‘It would matter terribly.’
‘Why? Is he violently jealous?’
‘Not at all, he’s a very quiet man.’
‘And you’re in love with him?’
‘I married him,’ she said. ‘I haven’t regretted it.’
‘If your marriage is a good one, you don’t have to worry about a poison-pen or two.’ I tossed the letter on the desktop between us, and looked into her face.
Her mouth and eyes were tormented. ‘It would be the last straw. I have a daughter who is still in school. I simply won’t permit this thing to happen.’
‘What thing?’
‘A break-up and divorce,’ she answered harshly.
‘Is that what it means if your husband gets one of those?’ I pointed my cigarette at the scrap of white paper.
‘I’m afraid it does, Mr Archer. I could cope with James, perhaps, but he’d take it to his mother, and she’d hire detectives.’
‘Could they find grounds for divorce? Is there evidence against you?’
‘There must be,’ she said bitterly. ‘Someone knows.’ Her entire body moved slightly, twitched like a worm on a hook. For the moment she loathed her sex. ‘This is very painful for me.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘My wife divorced me last year. Extreme mental cruelty.’
‘I think you might be capable of it.’ There was gentle malice in her voice; then her mood changed again: ‘Please don’t imagine I take divorce lightly. It’s the last thing I want.’
‘On account of your daughter, you say?’
She considered that. ‘Ultimately, yes. I was the child of a divorced couple myself, and I suffered for it. There are other reasons, too. My mother-in-law would like it much too well.’
‘What sort of a woman is she? Could she have sent the letter?’
The question caught her off guard, and she had to think again. ‘No. I’m sure she didn’t. She’d act much more directly. She’s a very strong-minded woman. As I told you, I haven’t the slightest idea who sent it.’
‘Anybody in Quinto then. Population about twenty-five thousand, isn’t it? Or anybody who passed through Quinto on Monday. It’s a pretty tough set-up.’
‘But you will try to help me?’ She wasn’t too much of a lady to arrange herself appealingly in the chair, and dramatize the plea. There was a chance that she wasn’t a lady at all.
‘It will take time, and I can’t promise any results. Are you fairly well-heeled, Mrs Slocum?’
‘Surely you don’t reserve your services exclusively for the wealthy.’ She looked around at the plain, small, square office.
‘I don’t spend money on front, but I charge fifty dollars a day, and expenses. It will cost you four or five hundred a week, and with what I’ve got to go on it may take all summer.’
She swallowed her dismay. ‘Frankly, I’m not well off. There’s money in the family, but James and I don’t have it. All we have is the income from a hundred thousand.’
‘Thirty-five hundred.’
‘Less. James’s mother controls the money. We live with her, you see. I do have a little money that I’ve saved, though, for Cathy’s education. I can pay you five hundred dollars.’
‘I can’t guarantee anything in a week, or a month for that matter.’
‘I have to do something.’
‘I have an idea why. The person who wrote that letter probably knows something more definite, and you’re afraid of the next letter.’
She didn’t answer.
‘It would help if you’d let me know what there is to be known.’
Her eyes met mine levelly and coldly. ‘I don’t see the necessity for me to confess adultery, or for you to assume that there is anything to confess.’
‘Oh hell,’ I said. ‘If I have to work in a vacuum, I’ll waste my time.’
‘You’ll be paid for it.’
‘You’ll waste your money, then.’
‘I don’t care.’ She opened her purse again and counted ten twenties onto the desk-top. ‘There. I want you to do what you can. Do you know Nopal Valley?’
‘I’ve been through it, and I know Quinto slightly. What does your husband do with the Quinto Players?’
‘He’s an actor, or thinks he is. You mustn’t try to talk to him.’
‘You’ll have to let me do it my own way, or I might as well sit in my office and read a book. How can I get in touch with you?’
‘You can phone me at home. Nopal Valley is in the Quinto book. Under Mrs Olivia Slocum.’
She stood up and I followed her to the door. I noticed for the first time that the back of the handsome suit was sun-faded. There was a faint line around the bottom of the skirt where the hem had been changed. I felt sorry for the woman, and I liked her pretty well.
‘I’ll drive up this morning,’ I said. ‘Better watch the mailbox.’
When she had gone, I sat down behind the desk and looked at the unpolished top. The letter and the twenties were side by side upon it. Sex and money: the forked root of evil. Mrs Slocum’s neglected cigarette was smouldering in the ash-tray, marked with lipstick like a faint rim of blood. It stank, and I crushed it out. The letter went into my breast pocket, the twenties into my billfold.
In the street when I went down the heat was mounting toward ninety. In the sky the sun was mounting toward noon.
An hour north of Santa Monica a sign informed me: YOU ARE ENTERING QUINTO, JEWEL OF THE SEA. SPEED 25 MILES. I slowed down and began to look for a motor court. The white cottages of the Motel del Mar looked clean and well-shaded, and I turned into the gravel apron in front of the U-shaped enclosure. A thin woman in a linen smock came out of the door marked OFFICE before I could stop the car. She danced toward me smiling a dazed and arty smile.
‘Did you wish accommodation, sir?’
‘I did. I still do.’
She tittered and touched her fading hair, which was drawn tightly back from her sharp face in a bun. ‘You’re traveling alone?’
‘Yes. I may stay for a few days.’
She blinked her eyes roguishly, wagging her head. ‘Don’t stay too long, or the charm of Quinto will capture you. It’s the Jewel of the Sea, you know. You’ll want to stay forever and ever. We’ve a very nice single at seven.’
‘May I look at it?’
‘Of course. I believe that you’ll find it delightful.’
She showed me a knotty pine room with a bed, a table and two chairs. The floor and furniture shone with polishing wax. There was a Rivera reproduction on one wall, its saffrons repeated by a vase of fresh marigolds on the mantel over the fireplace. Below the western window the sea glimmered.
She turned to me like a musician from his piano. ‘Well?’
‘I find it delightful,’ I said.
‘If you’ll just come up and register, I’ll have Henry fill the carafe with ice water. We do try to make you comfortable, you see.’
I followed her back to the office, feeling a little uncomfortable at her willingness to tie herself in knots, and signed my full name in the register, Lew A. Archer, with my Los Angeles address.
‘I see you’re from Los Angeles,’ she said, taking my money.
‘Temporarily. As a matter of fact, I’d like to settle here.’
‘Would you really?’ she gushed. ‘Do you hear that, Henry? The gentleman here would like to settle in Quinto.’
A tired-looking man half-turned from his desk at the back of the room, and grunted.
‘Oh, but you’d love it,’ she said. ‘The sea. The mountains. The clear, cool air. The nights. Henry and I are awfully glad we decided to buy this place. And it’s full every night in the summer, no-vacancy sign up long before it’s dark. Henry and I make quite a game out of it, don’t we, Henry?’
Henry grunted again.
‘Are there many ways to make a living here?’
‘Why, there are the stores, and real estate, all sorts of things. No industry, of course, the Council won’t permit it. After all, look what happened to Nopal Valley when they let the oil wells in.’
‘What happened to Nopal Valley?’
‘It was ruined, absolutely ruined. Great hordes of low-class people, Mexicans and dirty oil crews, came in from gosh knows where, and simply blighted the town. We can’t let it happen here.’
‘Absolutely not,’ I said with a phoniness she had no ear to catch. ‘Quinto must remain a natural beauty spot and cultural center. I’ve heard quite a lot about the Quinto Players, by the way.’
‘Now have you really, Mr Archer?’ Her voice sank to a simpering whisper: ‘You’re not a Hollywood personage, are you?’
‘Not exactly.’ I left the question open. ‘I’ve done a good deal of work in and about Hollywood.’ Peeping on fleabag hotel rooms, untying marital knots, blackmailing blackmailers out of business. Dirty, heavy, hot work on occasion.
She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together as if she understood me. ‘I sensed you were from Hollywood. Of course you’ll be wanting to see the new play this weekend. Mr Marvell wrote it himself – he’s a very brilliant man – and he’s directing it, too. Rita Treadwith, a very dear friend of mine, is helping with the costumes, and she says it has great possibilities: movies, Broadway, anything.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve had reports of it. Where’s the theater they’re rehearsing in?’
‘Right off the highway in the center of town. Just turn right at the courthouse, and you’ll see the sign: Quinto Theater.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and went out. The screen door slammed a second time before I reached my car, and Henry came plodding toward me across the gravel. He was leathery and lean, beaten and parched by long summers. He came up so close to me that I could smell him.
‘Listen, friend, you mean it what you said about settling down here?’ He looked behind him to make sure that his wife was out of earshot, and spat in the gravel. ‘I got an income proposition if you’re interested. Ten thousand down and the rest out of earnings. Fifty thousand for the works, that’s twelve good cottages and the good will.’
‘You want to sell this place? To me?’
‘You’ll never get a better place at the price.’
‘I thought you were mad about Quinto.’
He shot a contemptuous yellow glance at the door of the office. ‘That’s what she thinks. Thinks, hell. She lets the Chamber of Commerce do her thinking for her. I got a chance for a liquor license in Nopal.’
‘Money in Nopal, I hear.’
‘You can say it again. The Valley’s lousy with money since they struck oil, and there’s no spenders like oilmen. Easy come, easy go.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested.’
‘That’s OK, I just thought I’d raise the question. She won’t let me put up a sign, or list the goddamn place.’ He plodded back to the office.
The men and women in the streets had the rumpled, sun-worshipping look of people on holiday. Many of them were very young or very old, and most of the former wore bathing-suits. The white Spanish buildings seemed unreal, a stage-setting painted upon the solid blue sky. To the left at the bottom of the cross-streets the placid sea rose up like a flat blue wall.
I parked in front of a restaurant near the courthouse and went in for a cold lunch. The waitress had a red-checked apron that matched the tablecloth, and a complexion that matched the coffee. I tipped her very lightly, and walked around the block to the Quinto Theater. It was two o’clock by my watch, time for the rehearsal to be under way. If the play was scheduled for the weekend, they’d be running the whole thing through by Wednesday.
The theater stood back from the street in a plot of yellowing grass: a massive windowless box of a building with its stucco scabbing off in patches to show the aged plaster. Two weather-pocked plaster pillars supported the roof of the portico. On each of the pillars a playbill announced the World Premiere of The Ironist, a New Play by Francis Marvell. On the wall beside the box office there was a layout of photographs mounted on a large sheet of blue cardboard. Miss Jeanette Dermott as Clara: a young blonde with luminous dreaming eyes. Mrs Leigh Galloway as The Wife: a hard-faced woman smiling professionally, her bright teeth ready to eat an imaginary audience.
The third of the glossy trio interested me. It was a man in his late thirties, with light hair waving over a pale and noble brow. The eyes were large and sorrowful, the mouth small and sensitive. The picture had been taken in three-quarters face to show the profile, which was very fine. Mr James Slocum, the caption said, as ‘The Ironist’. If the picture could be believed, Mr James Slocum’s pan was a maiden’s dream. Not mine.
A prewar Packard sedan drew up to the curb in front of the theater, and a young man got out. His long legs were tightly encased in a pair of faded levis, his heavy shoulders bulged in a flowered Hawaiian shirt. The levis and the shirt didn’t go with the black chauffeur’s cap on his head. He must have been conscious of the cap, because he tossed it on the front seat of the Packard before he came up the walk. The glistening dark hair frothed on his head in tight curls. He looked at me from eyes that were paled by the deep tan of his face. Another maiden’s dream. They pastured in herds in the California resorts.
Dream Two opened the heavy door to my left, and it swung shut behind him. I waited a minute and followed him into the lobby. It was small and close and dimly lit by the red glow of the Exit lamps. The young man had disappeared, but there was a murmur of voices beyond a further door. I crossed the lobby and entered the main auditorium. It was blacked out except for the stage, where there were lights and people. I sat down in an aisle seat in the back row, and wondered what the hell I was doing there.
The set had been erected, an English drawing-room with period furniture, but the players were not yet in costume. James Slocum, looking as pretty as his picture, in a yellow turtleneck sweater, shared the stage with the blonde girl, in slacks. They were talking at each other in center stage.
‘Roderick,’ the girl was saying, ‘have you honestly been aware of my love for you, and never breathed a word of it to me?’
‘Why should I have?’ Slocum shrugged his shoulders in weary amusement. ‘You were content to love, and I was content to be loved. Naturally, I did my best to encourage you.’
‘You encouraged me?’ She overdid the surprise, and her voice screeched slightly. ‘But I never knew.’
‘I took care that you should not, until you had passed the narrow line that lies between admiration and passion. But I was always ready with a match for your cigarette, a compliment for your gown, a touch of the hand at parting.’ He moved his hand in the air, and unconsciously underlined the corn.
‘But your wife! What of her? It seems incredible that you should deliberately lead me onto the dark edge of adultery.’
‘Dark, my dear? On the contrary, passion is radiant with the radiance of a thousand suns, luminous as the dayspring, shot through with rainbow splendors!’ He spoke the words as if he meant them, in a ringing voice which held only a trace of reediness. ‘Beside the love that we may have – shall have – the legal mating of the married is the coupling of frightened rabbits in a hutch.’
‘Roderick, I hate and fear and adore you,’ the girl announced. She cast herself at his feet like a ballerina.
He gave her both his hands and lifted her to her feet. ‘I adore to be adored,’ he answered lightly. Clinch.
A thin figure had been pacing nervously in the orchestra pit, silhouetted against the reflection of the footlights. Now he vaulted onto the stage in a single antelope bound, and circled the mugging pair like a referee.
‘Very fine,’ he said. ‘Very fine, indeed. You’ve caught my intention beautifully, both of you. But would it be possible, Miss Dermott, to bring out just a shade more emphatically the contrast between hate and fear on the one hand, and adore on the other? After all, that’s the very keynote of the first act: the ambivalence of Clara’s response to the Ironist, externalizing the ambivalence of his attitude to love and life. Would you take it again from “rabbits in a hutch”?’
‘Of course, Mr Marvell.’
Which made him the author of the play, as I’d suspected. It was the kind of play that only a mother or an actor could love, the kind of stuff that parodied itself. Phony sophistication with a high gloss, and no insides at all.
I turned my attention to the darkened auditorium, which seemed larger than it was because it was almost empty. A few people were clustered in the first rows, silently watching the actors rehash their tripe. The rest of the plywood seats were unoccupied, except for a couple a few rows ahead of me. As my eyes became used to the dim light, I could make out a boy and a girl, their heads leaning close together. At least the boy was leaning toward her; the girl sat straight in the seat. When he raised his arm and placed it along the back, she moved to the next seat.
I saw his face as he leaned sideways to speak to her: Dream Two. ‘God damn you,’ he said. ‘You treat me as if I was dirt. I think I’m getting someplace with you, and then you crawl into your little igloo and slam the door in my face.’
‘Igloos don’t have doors, you crawl in through a tunnel.’ Her voice was soft and prim.
‘That’s another thing.’ He was trying to whisper, but anger jerked at his vocal cords and made the words uneven. ‘You think you’re so damn superior, the big brain. I could tell you things you never even heard of.’
‘I don’t care to hear of them. I’m very interested in the play, Mr Reavis, and I wish you’d leave me alone.’
‘Mr Reavis! What makes you so bloody formal all of a sudden? You were hot enough last night when I took you home, but now it’s “Mr Reavis”.’
‘I was not! And I won’t be talked to like that.’
‘That’s what you think. You can’t play around with me, do you understand? I’m big stuff, and I got ideas, and there’s plenty of women I can have if I want them, see?’
‘I know you’re irresistible, Mr Reavis. My failure to respond is unquestionably pathological.’
‘Two-bit words don’t mean nothing,’ he cried in frustration and fury. ‘I’ll show you something that does mean something.’
Before she could move again, he was crouching in front of her, holding her down in her seat. She let out a stifled squawk and beat his face with closed hands. But he found her mouth and held on, with one of his large hands on either side of her head. I could hear their breath whistling, the seat creaking under the weight of their struggling bodies. I stayed where I was. They knew each other better than I knew them, and nothing could happen to her where they were.
He released her finally, but stayed bending over her, with something hopeful in the arch of his shoulders.
‘Dirt!’ she said. ‘You dirt.’
The words hit him hard, a spatter of mud in the face. ‘You can’t call me that!’ He had forgotten about whispering. His hands were groping for her shoulders, or her neck.
I was halfway out of my seat when the overhead lights came on. The dialogue on the stage had ceased, and everyone in the theater was running up the aisle, with Marvell at their head. He was a flaxen-haired man in Harris tweeds and a dither. The trace of an English accent fogged his voice:
‘Really! What on earth is happening here?’ He sounded like a spinster schoolteacher who has caught a pupil in the act.
The boy had scrambled to his feet and half-turned, leaning over the back of a seat. There was shamed awkwardness in his movements, but danger, too. His muscles were strained taut, and his eyes were black ice.
Slocum stepped forward and laid his hand on Marvell’s shoulder. ‘Let me handle this, Francis.’ He turned to the girl, who was sitting tense in her seat. ‘Now, Cathy, what’s been going on?’
‘Nothing, Father.’ Her voice was demure again. ‘We were sitting here talking, and Pat got mad, that’s all.’
‘He was kissing you,’ Slocum said. ‘I saw you from the stage. You’d better wipe your face, and I’ll talk to you later.’
Her hand flew up to her mouth. ‘Yes, Father,’ she said between her fingers. She was a pretty girl, much younger than I’d thought from the words she used. The auburn hair blossomed at the back of her neck into curls that were alive with copper glints.
The boy looked down at her head, and back to her father. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She had nothing to do with it. I tried to kiss her, and she wouldn’t let me.’
‘You admit that, do you, Reavis?’
The boy walked up to Slocum, and dwarfed him. With his thin shoulder-blades projecting under the yellow sweater, it was Slocum who looked like the youngster. He stood where he was, unbending and outraged.
‘Why shouldn’t I admit it?’ Reavis said. ‘There’s no law against kissing a girl—’
Slocum spoke in deliberate cold fury: ‘Where my young daughter is concerned, certain things are impossible and inconceivable and’ – he groped for a word and found it – ‘foul. No lout of a chauffeur—’
‘I won’t always be a chauffeur—’
‘You’re quite right. You’re not one now.’