Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

“It’s just a house.”

“There are no houses up there. Only works of art. Tell me, does he have a piece of the Parthenon in it? Like Mr. Valentino?” Deprecating the taste of the Hollywood aristocracy is one of Rachel Gold’s favourite pastimes. “Is it foundering under a great weight of Louis Quinze furniture and Sheraton chairs? Does he have dozens and dozens of Fabergé eggs? And what does he serve them with? Did you hear the latest? One of our leading ladies was recently complaining that the caviar she bought smelled like fish. Chaplin said, ‘What did you expect? Because it was eggs, it would smell like chicken?’ ”

I laugh. “No, Chance’s house is nothing like that. He seems to live in the few rooms that Adilman decorated before he sold it to him. It’s mostly empty.”

“Well, we can’t take the measure of the man from that, can we? Next and most pertinent question. Houseboy or butler? Remember when Mickey Neilan got the Oriental houseboy and you weren’t anyone unless you had a Japanese or Filipino flunky? But now the pendulum seems to be swinging. Genuine English butlers are all the rage. They’re better at teaching you what fork to use. I’ve heard you can’t get a booking on an ocean liner – the transatlantic traffic in Jeeveses is filling all the cabins. Rumour is, they’re even stacking all those stiff, English pricks like cordwood in the holds to fill the demand. So which side of the question does Chance come down on in the momentous domestic question, East or West?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“And you call yourself an intimate of the Great One. Fie, fie.”

“I never called myself anything. You did.”

Rachel changes gears, abruptly. “So what’s the picture, Harry?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Big secret?”

“You might call it that.”

“So why you? How come you’re privy to the big secret?”

I’m tempted to answer: intuition. But I don’t. “You’d have to ask Mr. Chance.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Rachel says. “You’re not a scenarist, you’re a title-writer.”

That stings. “Maybe somebody thinks I’m capable of more.”

“No, Harry,” says Rachel with great seriousness. “You’re a title-writer. And for that you can be thankful.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s my secret.” She pauses. “Come back soon, Harry. I miss you.”

“All right,” I say. Rachel hangs up.

I miss her, too. But not in the way she misses me. There’s no point to the way I miss her.

Shortly after Rachel leaves the line, the phone rings again. It’s Chance. Unequivocally delighted with my results. We must mark the occasion with a small celebration, a late-night buffet. Could I drop by the house about eleven tonight?

Chance greets me at the door and, offering his warmest congratulations on my success, leads me through his stark mansion. After all the barrenness, the dining room comes as an anomalous relief with its high coffered ceiling and walls of dark wood, its tapestries, its long trestle table floating islands of candles, serving dishes, wine coolers, bouquets of freshly cut flowers on a sea of starched white linen, its fire of logs in a fieldstone fireplace.

“This was as far as Mr. Adilman got in decorating his house before I purchased it,” says Chance, guiding me around the room. “The table is reputedly thirteenth-century English.” He raps it with his knuckles before he directs my attention to the walls. “Mr. Adilman was particularly proud of these Flemish tapestries which he acquired the year before war broke out in Europe. The château in which they had hung for three centuries was destroyed by German shelling in 1914 – like the medieval library of Louvain, he was fond of reminding everyone. To hear him talk, his purchase of these works of art was an act of clairvoyance and disinterested philanthropy. He was extremely disappointed when I did not dicker over the price of the furnishings, item by item. Apparently, he now entertains dinner guests with my naivete, laughing that he turned his Flemish rags over at a hundred per cent profit.” Chance ponders the tapestries for several moments, then says, “Some day I will pull them off the walls and let Fitz wipe his boots on them.”

I am examining one of the scenes depicted on the tapestries when he utters this bleak statement. A wild pig bristling with spears is in its death throes, red embroidery threads trace showers of blood. Impassively viewing its agony, a noble sits on a white horse, while peasants armed with hunting spears and billhooks crowd around his charger’s flanks, apparently cowering in fear of the tusks of the boar.

Chance lays an arm over my shoulder and sets us moving toward the table. I see it is laid with two places. I ask whether Mr. Fitzsimmons will be joining us tonight.

“No, Fitz would be bored with our conversation. Don’t misunderstand me when I say this – because no man ever had a more stalwart friend than I have had in Fitz – but his mind is not tuned to abstractions. ‘The Hermit of Hollywood’ ” – he puts the words in self-deprecating quotation marks – “sometimes finds his isolation heavy. A little intelligent conversation centred upon the higher realms is always welcome.”

An extraordinarily handsome young Oriental who bears a strong resemblance to the actor Sessue Hayakawa pushes a trolley loaded with food into the room.

“Ah, Yukio,” exclaims Chance. “This looks very good, splendid.”

We seat ourselves and Yukio begins to deftly lay dishes of shrimp, smoked salmon, oysters on the half-shell, salad, sliced roast beef, warm rolls and butter. Chance lifts his eyebrows, a signal he is about to impart a confidence. “You need not worry about Yukio,” he says. “His English is very poor, just the rudiments of housekeeping pidgin.” Chance points to the roast beef and says loudly, “Roasty beefy? Top good roasty beefy?” Yukio smiles a beautiful smile and nods energetically. “You need not fear that anything you say in front of Yukio will ever leave this room,” Chance assures me.

I am about to tell Chance that such a fear had never crossed my mind when a champagne cork pops and Yukio is filling our glasses. Chance raises his in a toast. “To an enterprise well and truly launched. Thanks to you, Harry.” From his chair, he salutes me with a stiff, truncated bow.

We drink. Maybe it’s just the first flush of success, but I feel the need to emphasize the difficulty of finding Shorty McAdoo. Eyes modestly fastened on the bubbles spurting in my glass, I say, “Well, Mr. Chance, I won’t pretend it was easy. A bit like locating a needle in a haystack. I know Fitzsimmons was losing patience with me but I really don’t believe he understood…” I look up; my voice trails away to nothing.

Chance isn’t listening to me. He’s snatching up platters and sweeping food onto his plate, one dish following another with an assembly-line efficiency fit to gladden the heart of Henry Ford. Now my own voice has fallen quiet, I am aware of the frantic scraping of cutlery on china, the muffled thud of discarded plates dropping on the linen tablecloth. Chance’s nose is almost in his food, the silence broken only by the crackle of rolls tearing apart in his hands, the soft whistle and pant of his breath as he stuffs his mouth, the clatter of his fork and knife. His face is beginning to glisten with sweat; his bright blue eyes moistly bulge as he chews.

There is nothing to do but eat, but my eyes keep sneakily rising from my dinnerware and snatching glances at my boss. All at once, he primly crosses his knife and fork on his plate. It’s as if a machine had finished eating. Yukio whisks it away. I signal the houseboy to take my plate, too. The firelight pulses on the walls, dances on the silverware and crystal. Chance sits completely still, his eyes fixed where his plate has lain, face as blank as the spot he regards. Behind him, an impassive Yukio stands at attention in starched white coat, the only movement in his face the reflected play of the flames leaping and crackling on the fire irons. When Chance finally does lift his eyes to me, there is scarcely a glimmer of recognition in them. His absent-minded smile is the smile of someone politely easing his way by a stranger in the crowded aisle of a trolley car. “The years of study that lie behind this picture,” he says.