Death Of A Hollow Man Page 3

  “Ach,” Rosa said exhaustedly, resting the back of her hand against her forehead, “quite horrendous. Joyce still hasn’t done a thing about my costume, David Smy is like an elephant loose on the stage, and the Everards—who play the Venticelli—are hopeless.”

  Earnest finished his cocoa, picked up his pipe, and tamped it in contented anticipation. He had his own dramas at work, of course. Complaints from the foreman, rows in the hut, occasionally a serious accident. But there was something about the activities at the theater. Rosa relayed them with such panache that they rose far above the ordinary pettinesses of his working day.

  “Harold says he’s going to strangle them.” (Rosa always opened her monologues with a flourishing bit of hyperbole.) “One at a time and very slowly, if they don’t pick up their cues.”

  “Does he now?” Earnest made his response deliberately noncomittal. Rosa’s attitude to her director was variable. Sometimes her loathing and jeers at his aflectations knew no bounds: At others—usually when Harold had a clash with some supporting actress—he had all her sympathy. Then they were coevals, talent burnished bright, swimming in harness in a sea of mediocrity. This was clearly going to be one of those nights.

  “The Venticelli open the show right? Just the two of them … quick fire … nonstop. Like Ros and Gil in that Stoppard play.”

  “The Vend … what?”

  “Venticelli. Italian for ‘little winds.’ They carry the news around.”

  Earnest nodded sagely and waited for further juicy details about the Everards, whoever they might be. The poor buggers had obviously better get their skates on if they wanted to survive the course. But his wife had now moved on to Boris, who, she said, had painted his face up to the hilt and was playing the emperor Joseph as a mad Bavarian hausfrau.

  The fact was that Rosa, like almost everyone else in the company, detested the Everards. Her tongue had no sooner alighted on their names than it winced and shrank away, as if tasting some noxious substance. They were well cast in Amadeus, for gossip was what they thrived on. They had been with the company six months, during which time they had dripped venom into more than one ear and mouthed spiteful tittle-tattle into many others. Esslyn alone escaped their rancor. They would slither and slide around him, their unforgiving eyes bright with admiration, like a pair of doting serpents.

  “And Boris moves like a camel!” Rosa cried, flinging her hands in the air. “Dragging himself all over the place. He seems to think that being stately is the same thing as being practically immobile.”

  Earnest nodded again and did a bit more tamping. And if it occurred to him to think it odd that never in the past two years, during which twelve plays had been produced, had Rosa’s tongue, so sharply dismembering performance after performance, ever once alighted on the name of her first husband, he wisely kept this observation to himself.

  “Ruined, ruined!” Avery ran through the carpeted hall, pulling off his cashmere scarf and dropping it as he went. Gloves fell on the Aubusson, his coat on the raspberry satin sofa. Tim strolled along in the wake of all this turbulence, picking up Avery’s things and murmuring “Bad luck for some” when he came to the gloves. He stuffed one into each pocket of the coat and hung it up in the tiny hall next to his own, amused by the contrast between the Tattersall check with its garland of turquoise cashmere and little chestnut fingers sticking beseechingly up in the air, and his own somber dark grey herringbone and navy muffler.

  Avery, already wrapped in his tablier and wearing his frog oven mitts, was pulling the le Creuset out of the oven. He put it down on a wooden trivet and eased the lid off a fraction of an inch at a time. While hurrying home, he had made a bargain with the Fates. He would not question Tim about the source and content of the previously mentioned phone calls if they would keep an eye on the daube. Avery, knowing the superhuman restraint that would be necessary to stick to his side of the agreement, had felt an almost magical certainty that the least the other party could do was to honor theirs. But running up the garden path, sure that he smelled a whiff of carbon on the cold night air, his certainties evaporated. And as he ran with quailing anticipation through the sitting room, he became firmly convinced that the bastards had let him down again. And so it proved to be.

  “It’s got a crust on!”

  “That’s all right.” Tim sauntered into the kitchen and picked up a bottle opener. “Aren’t you supposed to break that and mix it in?”

  “That’s a cassoulet. Oh, God …”

  “For heaven’s sake, stop wringing your hands. It’s only a stew.”

  “A stew! A stew. ”

  “At least we won’t be able to say there’s not a crust in the house.”

  “That’s all it means to you, isn’t it? A joke.”

  “Far from it. I’m extremely hungry. And if you were that worried, you could have come home earlier.”

  “And you could have come to the theater earlier.”

  “I was doing the Faber order.” Tim smiled and smoothed the irritation from his voice. With Avery in this state, it could be midnight before a morsel crossed his lips. “And the phone calls were from Camelot Antiques about your footstool, and Derek Barfoot rang asking us for Sunday lunch.”

  “Oh.” Avery looked sheepish, relieved, grateful, and encouraged. “Thank you.”

  “Look. Why don’t we use this spoon with the holes in-”

  “No! You’ll never get it all!” Avery stood in front of his casserole like a mother protecting her child from a ravening beast. “I’ve got a better idea.” He produced a box of tissues and lowered half a dozen with slow and exquisite care into the crumbling top layer. “These will absorb all the bits, then I can lift the whole thing off with a fish slice.”

  “I thought it was in the topsoil where all the goodness lay,” murmured Tim, going to the larder to get the wine.

  The larder was really Avery’s domain, but it had a deep, quarry-tiled recess with a grilled window onto the outside wall that made it beautifully cool and the perfect place for a wine rack. The tiny room was brilliantly lit and crammed with provisions. Walnut and hazelnut and sesame oils. Olives, herbs, and pralines from Provence. Anchovies and provolone; truffles in little jars. Tins of clams and Szechuan peppercorns. Potato flour and many mustards. Prosciutto, water chestnuts, and a ham with a wrinkled, leathery skin the color of licorice hanging from the ceiling next to an odoriferous salami. Tiny Amaretti and snails. Tomato paste and matron paste, cured fish and lumpfish, gull’s eggs and plover’s eggs, and a chili sauce so hot it could blast the stones from a horse’s hoof. Tim moved a crock of peaches in brandy, took a bottle from the rack, and returned to the kitchen.

  “What are you opening?”

  “The Chateau d’lssan.”

  Chewing his full marshmallow lip (the tiny drop of reassurance re: the phone calls having already vanished into a vast lake of more generalized anxiety), Avery watched Tim twist the corkscrew, press down the chrome wings, and, with a soft pop, pull the cork. Avery thought it the second most beautiful sound in the world (following hard on the easing of a zipper), while having a terrible suspicion that for Tim it might be the first. Now, looking at the flat dark silky hairs on the back of his lover’s wrist glinting in the light from the spot lamps, noticing his elegant hands as they tilted the bottle and poured the fragrant wine, Avery’s stomach lurched with a familiar mixture of terror and delight. Tim took off his suit jacket, revealing an olive-green doeskin vest and snowy shirt, the sleeves hitched up by old-fashioned elasticized armbands. Then he lowered his narrow, ascetic nose into the glass and sniffed.

  Avery could never understand how anyone who cared so passionately about what he drank was not equally fastidious when it came to what he ate. Tim would consume anything that was what he called “tasty,” and his range was catholic to say the least. Once, stranded for an hour in Rugby station, he had demolished cheeseburger and chips, several squares of white, spongelike bread, a lurid pastry with three circles of traffic-light-colored jam, two Ki
t-Kats, and a cup of pungent, rust-colored tea with every appearance of satisfaction. And he did not even, Avery had reflected while toying miserably with an orange and a glass of lukewarm Liebfraumilch, have the excuse of a working-class background. (Tim had declined the wine on the grounds that it was not only likely to be the produce of more than one country, but liberally laced with antifreeze to boot.)

  So why, Avery sometimes asked himself, as he leafed through his vast collection of cookbooks, did he labor so long and ardently in the kitchen? The answer was immediate and never changing. Avery prepared his wood pigeon à la paysanne, truite à la creme, and Jraises Romanof out of simple gratitude. He would place them before Tim in a spirit of excitable humility, because they were his supreme attainment, the very best his loving heart could offer. In the same manner he ironed Tim’s shirts, chose fresh flowers for his room, planned little treats. Almost unconsciously, when he went shopping, his eye was alert for something, anything, that would make a surprise gift.

  He never ceased to marvel at the fact that he and Tim had been together for seven years, especially when he discovered the truth about his friend’s background. Avery had always been homosexual, and had innocently supposed that Tim’s experience had been the same. Then he discovered that Tim’s understanding of his true nature had come painfully and gradually. That he had regarded himself as heterosexual as a teenager, and bisexual for several years after that. (He had even been engaged for eighteen months while in his early twenties.)

  The acquisition of this knowledge had thrown Avery into a turmoil of fear. Tim’s assurances and his reminder that this had all happened twelve years ago had done little to calm a temperament that was volatile by nature. Even now, Avery would watch Tim without seeming to, looking furtively for signs that these earlier inclinations were reasserting themselves, just as a showily colored plant occasionally reverts to its more pallid origins.

  Avery reasoned thus because he could never, ever, in a trillion zillion years understand what Tim saw in him. For a start there was the physical contrast. Tim was tall and lean with hollow cheeks and a mouth so stern in repose that his sudden smile seemed almost shocking in its sweetness. Avery thought he was like a figure in a Caravaggio painting. Or perhaps (his profile at the moment looked alarmingly austere) a medieval monk. Nicholas had said he thought that Tim, although emotionally lean, was spiritually opulent. This was not what Avery wanted to hear. He didn’t give a fig for spiritual opulence. Give him, he had replied, a nice filet mignon and a fond caress any old day of the week.

  Avery knew he cut a ridiculous figure when compared to Tim. He was tubby, and his features, like his personality, were sloppy and spread all over the place. His lips were squashy and overfull, his eyes a washed-out blue and slightly protuberant, with almost colorless lashes, and his nose, just to be different, was neat and small and seemed quite lost in the pale pink expanse of his face. His head was very round, with a fringe of curls, butter yellow and softly fluffy like duckling down. He had always been agonizingly conscious of his baldness, and until he met Tim, had worn a wig. The morning after their first night together he had found it in the wastebasket. It had never been mentioned between them again, and Avery bravely continued to live without it, treating himself and his scalp to a weekly going-over with a sun lamp instead.

  Then there was the difference in their dispositions. Tim was nearly always calm, while Avery veered excitedly between elation and despair, touching all the psychological stations of the cross on the way. And he reacted so dramatically to things. This had always seemed to amuse Tim, but once or twice lately Avery had noticed a twitch or two of impatience, a spot of lip-tightening. Now, draining his glass of Bordeaux, he framed in his mind the latest of many small vows. He would learn to take things more calmly. He would think before speaking. Take several deep breaths. Perhaps even count to ten. He turned his attention back to the Le Creuset. All the tissues had sunk without trace. Avery let out a scream that could have been heard halfway down the street.

  “Bloody hell!” Tim banged his glass down on the countertop. “What’s the matter now?”

  “The Kleenex have sunk to the bottom.”

  “Is that all? I thought at the very least you were being castrated.”

  “I meant them to soak up all the bits,” sobbed Avery. “Well, now you’ve discovered that they won’t. Knowledge is never wasted. We’ll just give it to Nicholas.”

  “You can’t do that—it’s full of tissue.”

  “Riley, then.” Riley was the CADS feline mascot. “Riley! There’s half a bottle of Beaune in there.”

  “So he’ll think it’s Christmas.”

  “Anyway, Riley’s a fish man, not a meat man. What are you doing?”

  “Toast.” Tim was slicing bread on the marble pastry slab. Now, he reached across Avery and switched on the grill. Then he refilled both their glasses. “Drink up, sweetheart. And stop flowing all over the furniture.”

  “Sorry …” Avery sniffled and snuffled and drank up. “You’re … you’re not angry with me, are you, Tim?”

  “No, Avery, I’m not angry with you. I’m just bloody starving to death.”

  “Yes. So-”

  “Don’t keep saying you’re sorry. Get off your backside and give me a hand. There’s some duck pate left over. And we could finish the mango ice cream.”

  “All right.” Still mopping and mowing, Avery crossed to the fridge. “I don’t know why you put up with me.”

  “Stop being ingratiating. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Sor—”

  “And if I didn’t, who else would?”

  This question, so casually posed, seemed to Avery no more than the simple truth. Awash with sorrow, he hung his head and pondered, looking down at his round tummy and chubby little feet. Then he looked up and met Tim’s sudden brilliant smile. O frabjous day! thought Avery, beaming widely in his turn. And then, to make things absolutely perfect and he and Tim equal in carelessness, the toast caught fire.

  “We can pretend they’re charcoal biscuits,” said Avery, draining the rest of his wine. Then, quite forgetting the earlier strictures about him being ingratiating: “I wish I were more like you. More calm.”

  “Good grief, I don’t. I’d hate to live with someone like me. I’d be bored to death in a week.”

  “Would you, Tim?” Magically the dolorous beat of Avery’s heart quickened. “Would you really?”

  “A drama a day keeps the doldrums away.”

  “Mm.” Avery helped himself to some more wine. “That’s true, I suppose.”

  “But we’ve had our ration for tonight. Now, we must get on.”

  “Yes, Tim.” Avery bustled happily about finding unsalted butter, celery, the pâté, and a white china bowl of tomatoes. Tim was quite right, of course. Everyone knew about the attraction of opposites. That’s why it all worked so well on the whole. Why they were so happy together. It was just foolishness for him to struggle to destroy the very characteristics that his partner found attractive.

  Avery took the hand-operated coffee grinder and put some beans in the little wooden drawer. Tim put more bread under the grill. He refused to use an electric contrivance, believing that the uncontrollably high speed overheated the beans, sent by mail by the Algerian Coffee Company, and impaired their flavor. The fragrance of the beans met and mingled with the succulent scent of the wine, and the very ordinary but always to Avery deeply satisfying smell of fresh toast. He sat down at the scrubbed deal table full of anticipation. This was the time he loved best of all. (Well, nearly.) When there was food and wine and gossip and jokes.

  Even if all they had done during the day was sell books and get on with the paper work, there was always at least one customer who was ripe for exaggerated mimicry or grotesquely imaginative suggestions as to how he got his jollies. But of course the nights that sparkled, the nights that offered the most superlative entertainment, were the nights when they had been to the Latimer. Then performances could be put through the mincer,
relationships scrutinized and surmises made and opinions mooted as to Harold’s precise degree of sanity (always open to question and anybody’s guess).

  But occasionally, if there had been “a drama” in the home, Tim might withdraw a little and affect a lack of interest in the theatrical proceedings. These were anguished times for Avery, who gossiped as easily as he drew breath, and with almost the same urgent necessity. Now, as he slathered butter all over his toast, he looked across at Tim spreading neatly, with a small degree of perturbation. But it was all right. Tim looked across at Avery, and his slatey eyes, which could look so cold, were warm with a sudden flare of malice.

  “But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln,” he said, reaching for the celery, “how did you enjoy the play?”

  When Joyce Barnaby entered the sitting room, her husband was dozing in front of the fire. He had been drawing a sprig of Hammamelis mollis, and his pencil was still cradled in his hand, although the sketch pad had fallen to the floor. He woke when his wife, standing behind his chair, folded her arms across his chest and gave him a hug. Then she picked up the pad.

  “You haven’t finished.”

  “I dropped off.”

  “Did you eat your lasagne?”

  Tom Barnaby gave a noncommittal grunt. When Joyce had come home from the casting evening of Amadeus and told him she was playing cook to Salieri, only the fact that a raging heartburn was running amok in his breast at the time had stopped him laughing aloud. He could never get over the fact that she ate her own cooking if not with relish at least with no evidence of distaste. He wondered sometimes if his genuine expressions of dismay at mealtimes had, over the years, assumed a ritualistic or even a fossilized stamp, and that Joyce had decided they were some sort of running gag. He watched her bend over the sprig of yellow flowers and inhale appreciatively.