He was dressed in a small silk bathrobe, his legs bare. It was three years since I had seen him last and he looked considerably older. The black hair was beginning to thin at the back and his face looked puffier. His normally dark chin was peppered with stubble. His waist was thicker and there were the beginnings of a paunch. At the top of his cheeks was the slight flush of burst veins, but the eyes above them still had the same sleepy alertness. He smiled. The teeth were dazzlingly white.
‘Come in,’ he said. I could hear the water running for a bath.
To describe his flat is to describe David, for it is here that the fantasies of his mind are projected as it were onto a living screen. They are inseparable, for David has become this idea, a man who has invented himself rather like one of those collages that were fashionable in the sixties. People made them by cutting out adverts and pictures of pop idols and film stars. He had pieced himself together out of the glittering hardware of consumption and commerce, deliberately, and what is more had lived it out, had seized the ‘boom’ by the throat, had listened to its extravagant claims with a wry and tuned ear and adopted them as his own. He had set about their acquisition with a clear-headed and practical application; to possess, you needed wealth, and wealth came from a shrewd understanding of how it was made, and of being ahead of those other rivals who were baying for the neon moon. In essence it was simple – you acquired something for considerably less than others were then prepared to pay you for it. An inventive mind and a single-mindedness of purpose open the cave to the magic lamp. It involved effort, treachery, dishonesty, lies, cruelty, flattery, deviousness, but David was nothing but a realist and such demands were not so much the price you had to pay but rather the explicit conditions of play, mere formalities. Morality is in any case merely its practice, and practice, as is well known, makes perfect. Thus he could make his own any of the numerous pieces of gadgetry that our panic-stricken technology is driven to produce. He was like Lot in our modern lottery, ever moving forward, never looking back for fear that the loved one turn to salt – though to be sure in our times someone of enterprise would market her saline remains. But David could acquire and, having acquired, relieve the itch and turn his attention to something else.
Thus although his flat bears testimony in all its extravagant lines to a fantasy, it is already a fantasy that has been laid to rest. His attention is now elsewhere. The flat is more like the remains of the past, a living and centrally heated tomb of Tutankhamun. The walls are lined in a rich gold, and a deep green carpet with a sheen like velvet covers the many-levelled floor. Soft, plump sofas in brown invite the weary visitor to rest. Paintings by some of the best young artists soothe or excite the eye. Lamps occupy corners and tables like preening metal birds, boxes shelter drinks, cases books. The hi-fi envelops you in multitrack sound. Through an arched door the bedroom invites seduction, glittering with wall and ceiling mirrors, reflecting, refracting, in triplicate, quadruplicate, the one solitary six-foot-square bed with its white mink coverlet. Behind its glassy walls, which slide apart at the merest touch of a switch, are lined his suits and jackets, a hundred shirts, a hundred shoes, leather from the hide of alligators, suede from the antelope, silk from the worm, cotton from the loom. The marble bathroom foams with Badedas, and perfumes, green, yellow, rose, propose the elixir of eternal youth.
But for all that, there pervades a mood of disinterest. As I pad my way into the living or ‘dying’ room I hear the sound of ‘Mares eat oats’ synthetically syncopating from the colour tv set, which shows the red face of a child. The ashtrays burst with butts, and the glasses that are strewn about the room, some half full, indicate the drinking of the night before. On the sofa The Times is scattered and on a low table the remains of his breakfast, a banana and a broken egg shell. Out on the terrace which commands a panoramic view of London is an improvised washing line which flaps incongruously with a pair of jockey pants and nylon socks.
He says, ‘I’m just going to have a bath. Have a drink.’ He scratches his hair and lopes bathwards.
I poured myself a whisky and soda – the first for a long time –ice from the fridge in a heavy glass, and drank. I could see him disrobing through the open door and he got into the water with a contented moan. I read the paper, he soaked and scrubbed and we exchanged remarks that would be of little interest to the reader. It is sufficient to say that some twenty minutes passed before he appeared in a pair of tan trousers, white moccasins and a purple silk shirt. He poured himself a drink and lit a cheroot.
‘George, I got trouble,’ he said. ‘It’s nice but it’s trouble.’ As if to give emphasis to his problems he sank back into the welcoming cushions of the sofa.
Rich, young, powerful and still there are problems! How complex is this life we lead. I raised an eyebrow, indicating a desire to know more.
He exhaled smoke and rubbed his eye, and went on. ‘It’s a girl. A woman really.’
There had been many women over the years, actresses, models, hairdressers, dress designers, one Olympic hurdles finalist, air hostesses, publishers, theatrical agents, students, a simple heiress or two, and all in their turn had been treated to the overwhelming vitality of his charm, had received telegrams, letters, flowers, gifts, supplications to dine, to dance, to holiday abroad, whatever whim or ruse had entered his head at the time; yet any calculation on his part was only secondary, a sort of inevitable process that ticked over, a knowhow that was always there in half-conscious action, to the genuine feelings that he expressed for them.
For a time at least. In four days of romantic magic, there was nothing that he would not do for his latest paramour. And after an hour of his wit, his attention, his honesty above all, for everyone remarked what an honest person he was about himself and all things, he had, emotionally speaking, bound them hand and foot and there was nothing they would not do for him. Usually his demands were little, and shortly, now inflamed with love for him, the girl would part her inevitably trim and shapely legs on the very white mink spread that covered the six-foot bed next door. In time, usually after some forty-eight hours, the self-induced dream dispelled itself, and he found his Cinderella a thing of rags and tatters on the stroke of midnight and he did not even bother to pick up the glass slippers left behind. If it was slippers he wanted, he could have bought up a whole factory manufacturing them!
But to be fair, he always felt guilty about his sudden change of heart, always blamed himself, fell silent and shifty for almost an hour before he broke the news in an apologetic way. Sometimes so guilty was he that he could not even face the soft bright eyes of his fallen idol, and left the country for a week, for the girl’s sake of course, so that she could recover the more easily, free of the tormenting knowledge that he was there in the very same city. But still they came, fresh reinforcements, one after the other, and if you find in my thinking a certain puzzled cynicism with regard to the fairer sex, then I will cite the experience of David Adler by way of explanation. And indeed with the knowledge of all this, it is no wonder that when he spoke to me, I choked a little on the whisky I was drinking and raised the other brow.
He went on, ‘I’m mad about her. I can’t get enough of her, I want to fuck her every single minute of the day.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand the problem,’ I said, and though I have chosen for myself a different sexual course, or rather a non-sexual course, for I have opted for celibacy after more years of aggravation than I would care at this stage to describe, I am nevertheless puzzled when a fellow human being appears to be enjoying a surfeit of lust.
He looked at me sheepishly, then lowered his eyes, as if deliberating whether he could trust me enough to divulge the burden that lay so heavily on his mind. He hesitated for a moment, then under the pressure of his ill-ease he finally coughed and said with a kind of astonishment, ‘But she’s really rather ugly.’
Now there is a problem, for if you believe that beauty is, if not truth, then certainly like butter, best, and if you have based most of your thinking life on the predatory acquisition of the best, the fastest car, the loudest hi-fi, the most expensive flat and the most glamorous women, if you worship the appearance and not the essence of things, as most of us do, then indeed the very foundations of that life can creak with insecurity