I would have to laugh. I thought as he began the sad little classic of the vicar and the prostitute, I would have to laugh aloud. A smile wouldn’t be enough. Keep him happy, Brown had said, give the old bastard everything he wants. Antagonize him and you antagonize me. . . . No, he hadn’t said that. But it was true. Tiffield was Brown and Brown was Tiffield. Tiffield weighed about eleven stone and hadn’t bought a new suit since 1930, Brown weighed about fifteen stone and made regular visits to Savile Row and Bond Street; but these were only surface differences. They were the same person; an old man with power over me, an old man whom I had to keep happy at all costs.
The voices mounted, matches struck, cigarette-lighters clicked, ice tinkled, money passed; I was two hundred miles away from home, listening to a rich old man in a pre-war fifty-shilling suit tell a story I’d first heard at Dufton Grammar School. Word for word, almost; though he didn’t tell it so well as Charles.
“I’ve tried it that way, she said, and it always gives me the hiccups.” Tiffield exploded into laughter – it was a desiccated laughter, old dry tissues forcing themselves into a kind of dance. I echoed the laughter as best I could, and to cover its falseness told him the one about the elephant and the nun. He laughed so hard that he began to cough. The cough wouldn’t stop; it seemed to have picked up his skinny body by the scruff of the neck in a determined effort to shake the life out of him. His face turned a dull red; I became seriously worried. He hadn’t signed the contract yet and his was the only signature which counted. If the old swine had to die now, it wouldn’t help me at all. I was wondering whether to loosen his collar when suddenly the cough let him go. He pulled out a big red spotted handkerchief, of the kind that workmen used to wrap up their dinners in.
“My boy, you’ll be the death of me,” he said. “Where did you hear that one?”
“From an actress friend,” I said. Jean had told me it at the Rinkmann’s party on Saturday; she’d also told me her London telephone number. And she’d be in London now. And I was in London. And surely Tiffield would want to go home straight after dinner. The voices were as loud as ever and I was still in the American Bar and two hundred miles away from home; but the voices didn’t matter any more. And Barbara had stopped singing.
“From an actress friend,” Tiffield repeated. “If only I were young . . .” He cackled. “I think I’d do with another of these Martinis. In fact, I deserve one. You young men have actress friends and we have a drop of gin, that’s the way it is . . .”
“Are you sure—”