James Salter - All That Is

“The books. That’s what she said. She’d wanted to be a teacher but she had these children. She was a disappointed woman. She said, you come from decent, hardworking people. Serious people.”

Serious was a word that had haunted his life.

“She was trying to tell me something. Like all proud people, she didn’t want to say it directly. If you didn’t understand, that was too bad, but she wanted to pass this thing on. It was a heritage. We didn’t have a heritage, but she believed in it.”

His name was Keith Crowley. He was a slight man who looked to the side when he talked. Bowman liked him and liked his writing, but his novel didn’t sell, two or three thousand copies was all. He wrote two more, one of which Bowman published, and then dropped from sight.

He woke in darkness to a fierce rattling. It was rain, the drops hammering against the window. He’d been born in a storm, he was always happy in them. Vivian was curled beside him, deep in sleep, and he lay listening to the sheets of rain. They were leaving for London that evening, he and Baum, and it rained throughout the day, a wet mist streaming from the great wheels of trucks alongside as they drove to the airport, the windshield wipers of the taxi going. Bowman’s expectations were anything but dampened. He was certain, he felt, to like England and the city he had dreamed of in college, the rich, imagined city with its legendary figures, its polished men and women out of Evelyn Waugh, the Virginias, the Catherines and Janes, narrow-minded, assured, only dimly aware of any life other than their own.

They sat beside one another on the plane, Baum calmly reading the newspaper as the engine noise swelled and they began to move, the takeoff with the plane trembling and the roar, water blurring the cabin windows. London, Bowman thought. It was early May.

In the morning there was England, green and unknown beneath broken clouds. They drove in from Heathrow in a cab making a sound like a sewing machine with the driver offering occasional comments in a language difficult to understand. Then there were the outskirts, drab and interminable, becoming at last streets at odd angles and buildings of Victorian brick. They turned onto a wide avenue, The Mall, with the dense green of a park alongside and black iron fence peeling past. At its end, far off, was a great pale arch. They were driving swiftly on the wrong side. Bowman was struck by the proud, outdated character of the city, its irregularity and singular names. The most important thing, its separation from the continent, was not yet known to him.

Though it was more than fifteen years after the war, the ghost of it was still present. England had won the war—there was hardly a family, high or low, that had not been part of it—through the early disasters when the country had been unprepared, the far-off sinking of warships that were thought to be indestructible, symbols and pride of a nation, the absolute catastrophe of the army sent to France in 1940 to fight beside the French and then find itself encircled and trapped on the Channel beaches in the hopeless disorder of men without equipment or supplies, everything abandoned in the retreat, and only by last-minute effort and German forbearance be brought home in every boat that could be found, large or small, exhausted, beaten. And still the task remained, the seemingly endless struggle, the unimaginable scale of it, the desert war, the determination to save Suez, the reeling war in the air, great walls collapsing in darkness, entire cities on fire, calamitous news from the Far East, casualty lists, the readying for invasion, the battles without end…

And England had won. Its enemies stumbled through ruins, went hungry. What was left of their cities smelled of death and sewage, the women sold themselves for cigarettes, but it was England, like a battered fighter somehow left standing, that had paid too much. A decade later there was still food rationing and it was difficult to travel, currency could not be taken out of the country. The bells that had tolled the hour of victory were long silent. The ways of before the war were unrecoverable. Putting out a cigarette after lunch, a publisher had said calmly, “England is finished.”

They first stayed at the house of an editor and friend, Edina Dell, on one of the small enclaves that were called terraces, with a brick-walled garden and some trees outside the dining room, the bottommost room of the house. She was the daughter of a classics professor but seemed with her irregular teeth and offhanded manner to have come from a larger life, some great country house with paintings, worn furnishings, and known indiscretions. She had a daughter, Siri, the result of a ten-year marriage to a Sudanese. The daughter was a soft, seductive color, six or seven years old and filled with love for her mother, she often stood by her mother’s leg with her arm around it. She was a gazelle, her eyes dark brown with the purest whites.

The man with whom Edina was involved was a large, elegant figure, Aleksei Paros, who came from a distinguished Greek family and was perhaps married—he was vague on the matter, it was more complicated than it seemed. He was an encyclopedia salesman at this stage, but even in his shirtsleeves, walking around the house looking for cigarettes, he gave the impression of someone for whom life would work out. He was tall and overweight and could charm men as well as women with little effort. Edina was drawn to men like him. Her father had been this type and she had two illegitimate brothers.

Aleksei had been away, in Sicily, and had just come back by way of a London club the night before. He was known there, one of his habits was gambling. He liked to stroll about carrying his chips in one hand, stroking them unconsciously with his thumb. He had no system for gambling, he bet on instinct, some men seem to have a gift for it. Passing the chemin-de-fer table he might suddenly reach in and impulsively make a bet. It was a Mediterranean gesture, rich Egyptians did it. Except for his looks, Aleksei might have been one, a minor playboy or king.

He stood at the roulette table listening to the sound of the ivory ball as it circled, a long, decaying sound that ended in the fated clicking as it glanced off partitions between numbers and abruptly dropped into one. Vingt-deux, pair et noir . Twenty-two, the year he was born. Numbers sometimes repeated, but he did not have that feeling. There were some younger people at the table and a man in a worn suit keeping track of which numbers had come up on a card in his hand, then making a small bet on red or black. Faites vos jeux , the croupier was saying. A few more people arrived. Something invisible drew them to a particular table, something in the stale air. Faites vos jeux . A woman in an evening gown had pushed in, a younger woman, and people were standing sideways between the chairs. The baize cloth was thick with chips. As soon as someone bet, two more would follow. Rien ne va plus , the croupier was calling. The wheel was turning, now it was turning faster, and suddenly the ball shot out from an expert hand and began to circle fast in the opposite direction just beneath the rim, and at that moment, like someone jumping aboard as the ship pulled away, Aleksei placed fifty pounds on the six. The ball was making its beautiful circling sound one could listen to forever, a sound of immense possibilities, he stood to win eighteen hundred, and for five or six seconds that seemed much longer he waited calmly but intently, almost as if the guillotine blade were being raised, then the slowing and sinking of the orbit until the final instant when there was a steely hopping and the ball fell definitively into a number. It was not six. Like the practiced gambler he was, he showed no emotion or regret. He bet fifty pounds several times more and then moved to another table.