Russell Hoban: Come Dance With Me

By then I was feeling very American and very defensive. I am, after all, a US citizen. I didn’t want a war with Iraq but I wouldn’t have minded if John le Carré were to be given a one-way ticket to Baghdad.

When I came out of the Underground at Fulham Broadway I heard a helicopter very close, then farther away, then close again. I looked up but couldn’t see it. I walked to my house, and when I got inside I saw The Sunday Times on the kitchen table where I’d left it folded back to the page on which was a famous photograph that had first appeared in Picture Post in 1938: two girls on a rollercoaster. The skirt of the pretty blonde on the right had flown up to flash her stockinged legs, suspenders, knickers and a bit more. When I looked more closely I saw that her right hand was inside the skirt, lifting it. In one of my books there’s an old engraving of a young woman putting the Devil to flight by doing that very thing. The girl in the photograph was clearly glad to be alive and confident of giving pleasure to everybody while embarrassing the Devil. Under that section of the paper was the front page of last Saturday’s Times with a photograph of another young woman, a Navy guard with a rifle and radio and the Union Jack fluttering behind her, patrolling HMS Ark Royal as it took on supplies at Portsmouth before heading for the Gulf. She looked utterly reliable but I doubted that her rifle and HMS Ark Royal would rout the Devil more effectively than the girl on the rollercoaster. That girl would be in her eighties now.

On the coffee table in the living room was a hospital directive that I still hadn’t read through: IN THE EVENT OF CHEMICAL OR BIOLOGICAL ATTACK. My mind was singing, ‘Tomatoes are cheaper, potatoes are cheaper, / Now’s the time to fall in love …’ Back in the forties my father used to sing that song from the thirties. Tomatoes and potatoes must cost thirty or forty times what they did back then. He also sometimes sang, ‘I Love To Spend This Hour with You’, the theme song of the Eddie Cantor radio show. All his hours are long gone now.

I poured myself some Courvoisier, sat down on the sofa, took my shoes off and put my feet up on the coffee table. As I drank, the cognac gave me a warm centre, only a very small part of the world but better than nothing. I knew that Christabel Alderton was going to stay in my mind but I didn’t think she was likely to phone me.

22 January 2003. Why had I brought the Erlking into the Royal Academy? Or did he find his own way there? I thought of The Cyclops and I almost threw up again. Why? I don’t know. Sometimes I get tired of being me. When I said that line from ‘Herr Oluf’ to Elias Newman I was attracted to him but at the same time I think I wanted to warn him off. Of course he wouldn’t have taken it as a warning if he hadn’t known the song. And somehow I knew he would know it. How’s that for weird? Being me is confusing, and as I’ve said, I do a lot of stupid things.

And that dialogue in the loo! I don’t know how to be with civilians any more. I’m OK with the guys in the band and my cat Stevo. He doesn’t travel with the band but he’s a rocker too. He’s a good-looking orange-and-white tom, tiger-striped. He stinks up the place a little with his spray and he’s gone for days on end and comes back looking the worse for wear but I’d never have him neutered. We understand each other. My neighbours Victor and Hal look after him when I’m away and when I get back he comes out to meet me, tail sticking up with a crook in it like an umbrella handle, and he runs up the steps ahead of me and waits at the door with his engine idling like an E-type.

The day after the Royal Academy do I was still thinking about last night’s conversation and I wanted to listen to ‘Herr Oluf’ but I couldn’t find my Hermann Prey recording of Loewe ballads. I spent a lot of time looking for it and the day was beginning to slide out from under me so I rang up HMV at Oxford Circus and they had one copy. ‘Please hold it for me,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right over.’ But when I got there I was told that although the CD had appeared on the screen it was gone before it could be put aside for me. Thinking I might go for something else I went to the Hermann Prey section and there was, you guessed it, Elias Newman.

‘Hello,’ he said, ‘this is a lot better than a phone call.’ He showed me Loewe Balladen sung by Hermann Prey. ‘Don’t tell me you were looking for this too?’

‘I was, actually.’

‘Have this one. My treat. I’ll find another somewhere.’

‘What is this, anyhow? Am I following you or are you sending mental messages to me?’

‘Relax. I guess our conversation last evening made us both think of this recording. That’s not surprising, is it?’ He had blue eyes and an air of always telling the truth. A quality that I tend to back away from because it usually causes trouble.

‘You might be a little too strange for me,’ I said. ‘You said your mother’s German. Did she sing “Herr Oluf” to you?’

‘I’ll tell you about it,’ he said. ‘Come have a coffee with me.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘If you’re hell-bent on dancing I won’t stop you.’ He paid for the Loewe and I took his arm as we left HMV. What is this? I thought as my breast made contact with his arm and I felt him being aware of it. Are we suddenly a couple? It felt good and it felt strange. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself as we crossed the road to Coffee As You Like It. The waitresses all wear doublet and hose and the cups have Shakespeare quotations. There’s a forest of potted trees and the January daylight came through the leaves as if it didn’t know that Oxford Street was on the other side of the glass. The coffee smelled good, the crockery made a cheerful rattle, and the background voices came forward and drew back like distant surf. Very atmospheric and no dry ice although I was in black leather and looking as if I’d just crawled out of a box of Transylvanian earth and jumped on my Kawasaki. He was wearing jeans and a black polo neck and some kind of army surplus jacket but he didn’t look as if he dressed that way very often. Too respectable maybe. I had espresso, he had caffe latte. His cup said, ‘O, how full of briers is this working-day world!’

‘Maybe they’re trying to warn you about me,’ I said. I asked our waitress (the name on her badge was Rosalind), ‘Did you choose these cups?’

She shook her head. She had long fair hair and it swung across her face in a way that wasn’t wasted on Elias. ‘They take them from under the counter as they come,’ she said. ‘I don’t see them until they fill them and put them on my tray’

I watched her walk away and so did Elias. But he was also watching me. ‘What?’ he said.

‘They must hire these girls for their legs. She’s got no right to be so young and beautiful.’

‘Shit happens. You’re not young but you’re beautiful.’

‘Do me a favour, don’t insult me with crap compliments, OK?’

‘It wasn’t crap — you don’t know how you look to me but OK, no more compliments. What does your saucer say?’

‘ “Sweet are the uses of adversity, / ”’ I read ‘“Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in its head.’”

‘Tell me about your adversity,’ he said.

‘Not on the first date. How old are you, Elias?’

‘Wait a minute, I don’t know what to do on dates.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. It’s not a date but how old are you?’

‘Sixty-two. What about you?’

‘Fifty-four. You haven’t asked my name.’

‘You’re Christabel Alderton. I knew the name but I’d never seen you. Some friends told me who you were. You’re famous.’