Absolute Friends Read online

  He likes getting up in the morning in his bedsit in Hampstead and catching the bus to Trafalgar Square. He likes his monthly paycheck and pottering down the corridor for a coffee and a natter in the canteen. He even likes the suit he has to wear. And he likes Crispin, whose job in Greeting Section he’ll be taking over as a way of cutting his milk teeth, just as soon as Crispin hits sixty—though actually, old boy, don’t tell personnel, it’s seventy, they got it wrong—as he confides to Mundy over lunch in the little Italian around the corner. In honor of the occasion, Crispin has donned the greeter’s full monty: the black homburg and the red carnation in the velvet collar of his coat.

  “Best job in the world, ducky. The hardest part is avoiding being promoted out of it. All one does is ride up and down to Heathrow in one’s slow but steady government limo—ask for Henry the driver, he’s a brick—flash one’s pass to the nice boy at the barrier, and make the hugest fuss of one’s distinguished foreign guest in the name of Her Maj’s government before dumping him in his cut-rate hostelry in King’s Cross. Pray the plane will be delayed so that you can have a little glass of something helpful in the VIP room while you wait. Pray his room won’t be ready when you arrive at the hotel so you’ll have to give him another in the bar. Hurry back to base to fill in your expenses with just the right amount of panache, and Bob’s your uncle. I say, are you paying all the bill? Oh, you’ll go a long way.”

  And Mundy will. In no time at all, he’s the best greeter in the business.

  “Well, what an honor, sir”—or señor, monsieur, madame, or Herr Doktor—he cries, sometimes twice in one day, stepping forward from behind the immigration officer’s desk and flinging up an arm. “No, no, for us, not for you! Never dreamed you’d accept our invitation—minister absolutely beside himself with pleasure—and may I just say what an enormous fan I personally am of your [fill in as appropriate]. Here, let me take that—my name’s Mundy, by the way, and I’m the minister’s humble emissary—no, no, just plain Mister, I’m afraid. I’m in charge of your comfort while you’re here and anything at all we can do to make your stay more enjoyable, here’s my card. The phone rings right on my desk. And here I am at home if ever there’s an emergency . . .” Or the same in German, or passable French. And a buttonhole like Crispin’s for that extra touch.

  But life in the British Council is not all greeting. Unlike Crispin, Mundy has his eye on higher things. For the right man, plum jobs abound, as the kindly lady in personnel, who seems to have taken a liking to him, makes clear at their first interview. There are British ballet and theater groups to be escorted to faraway places, not to mention painters, writers, musicians, dancers and academics of every stripe. Under her motherly encouragement, Mundy begins to form a vision of himself as a kind of cultural roving ambassador, nurturing the talents of established artists while discreetly cultivating his own. If a post is advertised that in Personnel’s estimation might serve him as a springboard, he applies for it—which is how within months he advances from mere greeting to the richer pastures of twinning, with the delicate task of forging cultural links between reluctant British communities and their more eager counterparts in the land of their former enemy.

  With the new job comes an office of his own and a map of Britain indicating the most stubborn pockets of anti-German resistance. In whistle-stop tours around the shires, he blandishes village elders, mayors and masters of the hunt. He acquires an opposite number in a reserved but amiable Frau Doktor of the Goethe Institute. British schools also feature large in his ambit. And thus it happens that without fanfare he meets Kate, a pretty, bespectacled North London deputy headmistress who teaches mathematics and gives up her spare evenings to licking envelopes for the St. Pancras Labor Party.

  Kate is fair-haired and practical. She is tall and topples slightly as she walks, a thing that touches Mundy in ways he can’t explain until he recalls the string-bean Irish nursemaid in the group photograph of the victorious Stanhope Family at Home. Her complexion is creamy and always slightly out of focus. Her hazy smile seems to stay on him after she has switched it off. A low sun beats through the nineteenth-century windows of her study at the edge of Hampstead Heath as Mundy makes his pitch. The Frau Doktor nods gravely at his side. The trick is in the matching, he insists: no good marrying a lame duck with a high flyer. And this marvelous school, Miss Andrews, if you don’t mind my saying so, is a high flyer if ever I saw one.

  “I say, we haven’t kept you from class, have we?” he cries in alarm, after administering twice his usual dose of charm. “Well, look here. Anything you’re worried about—the smallest thing—call me at this number. And here’s me at home if”—he does a double-take—“well, probably quicker just to pop up the road, turn left at the lights, it’s Number Seven, and ring the top bell!”

  “And here is my card, Miss Andrews,” the Frau Doktor murmurs, in case they have forgotten her.

  A courtship gets quickly under way. On Friday evenings Mundy will collect Kate from school, arriving early for the pleasure of watching her cope with swarms of multiethnic children. At the Hampstead Everyman cinema Kate pays for her own ticket. Over Dutch dinners at the Bacchus Greek taverna they laugh over Mundy’s tales of Council intrigues and Kate’s raging feuds inside the St. Pancras Labor Party. Mundy admires her for being a mathematician and says he can’t add for toffee. Kate respects his interest in things German, though she has to confess that, purely practically speaking, she regards languages as a poor investment, given that the whole world will soon be speaking English. Mundy confides to Kate his dream of promotion to Overseas Drama and Arts. Kate thinks he’s absolutely cut out for it. At weekends they walk on Hampstead Heath. When Kate’s school puts on an exhibition of artwork, Mundy is first on the doorstep. Her solid socialist values—in her family home they were the only ones to have—mesh comfortably with whatever remains of Mundy’s, and before long he too is giving up a couple of hours a week to lick envelopes for Labor. His posh voice and manners are at first a butt for the wit of his new comrades, but soon he has them laughing with him rather than at him. Away from headquarters, Kate deplores the infiltration of the party she loves by Trotskyists and other militants. Mundy judges that the moment is not yet ripe for him to confess that he once played roommate and batman to a red-toothed anarchist who stole his girl.

  A couple more months must pass before the pair manage to go to bed together. It is Kate who takes the initiative. Mundy feels oddly shy. She selects his flat, not hers, and a Saturday afternoon when downstairs are watching an international soccer match on television. It’s a day when Hampstead is bathed in the browns and golds of autumn. Their walk on the Heath has been a journey through sloping shafts of sunlight scented with woodsmoke. Closing Mundy’s front door behind her and putting the chain across, she takes off her coat, then continues to take off her clothes until she has none left. Then she buries her face in Mundy’s shoulder while she helps him off with his. It is afterwards a secret joke between them that they won their first match three-love. And yes, of course she will marry him. She’s been hoping he will ask. They agree that the Frau Doktor must come to the wedding.

  The great decision taken, everything else, as so often in life, slots neatly into place. Kate’s father, Des, provides the down payment on an unconverted Victorian house on Estelle Road. Des is a bruised-up former boxer turned builder, and a man of solid opinions, all rebellious. The house is an honest redbrick worker’s cottage, nothing fancy, one of a row in a street where dads of all colors kick soccer balls at their kids between inexpensive cars. But as Des remarks when they have their first look round together, it’s got all the trimmings and then some: the Heath and the lido just across the footbridge, a soccer field, swings and merry-go-rounds and even an adventure playground!

  The walk to Kate’s school takes her ten minutes and they’ve got the railway from Gospel Oak if they’re feeling like a day in Kew. And if we’re talking money, Ted, that house is a snip, believe me. Only last week, Number Sixteen over the way
went for twenty grand more than what yours ever did, and it’s got one bedroom less which is stupid, half the sun, and a living room you couldn’t swing a cat in, well, could you?

  Was there ever a time when Mundy’s life looked so good to him? He refuses to believe there was. He loves it all, his job, her family, the house and the sense of belonging. And when Kate comes home from the doctor grinning like the baby she’s just heard she’s going to have, he knows that his cup of happiness is full. At the wedding, he wasn’t able to whistle up a single relative to call his own. Well, just you wait till the christening!

  And to cap it all, only days later, Mundy’s good fairy Personnel comes up with her own little piece of good news. In recognition of his fine performance in the Twinning Department, Mr. E. A. Mundy is promoted to deputy field assistant, Overseas Drama and Arts, effective immediately. He will be away from home more, which they’ll both hate, particularly now Kate is pregnant. But if he keeps proper expense accounts for once, and lives small, he can help pay off the mortgage.

  And as if all that weren’t enough, to their shared delight his particular responsibility will be youth. Mundy’s days of directionless wandering are over at last.

  6

  BLOODY ANGELS, says Mundy. No honestly, darling, I mean it.

  Well, maybe not angels exactly, but the sort of kids you’d give your last rupee for, he enthuses to Kate in a hasty call from Harwich docks before he embarks. He’s speaking of the Sweet Dole Company, a bunch of volatile working-class kids from across the north of England, an ethnic free-for-all of black, white and caroline, Geordies, Mancunians and a couple of them from Doncaster where Kate grew up. They are his first twenty-five-and-under theater group, and from the day their psychedelic double-decker British Leyland bus lumbers onto the ferry bound for Holland they call him Pop.

  The oldest is a freckled gamine called Spike and she’s their producer, reckoned over the hill at twenty-two. The youngest is a soulful black Hamlet called Lexham who’s pushing sixteen, and costumes are the work of Sally the Needle, who is minute and Portuguese. Their stock-in-trade is potted Shakespeare on the hoof, and in their short existence together as an acting troupe they’ve played doss-houses, picket lines, soup queues, factory gates and canteens in the lunch hour, and they are Mundy’s gypsy family for the next forty days and nights of gigs, welcome and farewell parties, love tangles and bushfire dustups that flare and go out so fast he often doesn’t know they’ve happened till one fellow is wiping blood off his face with the other fellow’s handkerchief.

  Officially he’s their traveling representative and tour supervisor. Unofficially, he’s their codriver, wardrobe keeper, sparks, interpreter, prompter, understudy, stills man, multidenominational confessor, and—when Spike the producer is sent home in tears with glandular fever on day nine—willy-nilly her stand-in. Hooked up to the double-decker is a two-wheel farmer’s trailer for the props they can’t squeeze onto the top deck, and there’s a rack that runs the full length of the roof of the bus where they can lash the rolled-up backdrop.

  Their tour of Holland, West Germany and Austria is a sleepless march of heroes. Amsterdam and The Hague adore them, they enchant Cologne, win first prize at a youth Dramafest in Frankfurt and are cheered to the echo in Munich and Vienna before stiffening their backs and buttoning their tongues—thus Mundy’s exhortation on their last evening in the West—to cross the Iron Curtain for their swing through Eastern Europe.

  The troupe by now is beginning to fray, and the puritanical constraints of socialist society do not improve their manners. In Budapest Mundy must sweet-talk a drunken Polonius out of jail; in Prague, march Falstaff to a pox doctor. In Cracow he must interpose himself in a fistfight between Malvolio and a pair of plainclothes policemen, and in Warsaw receive the tearful confession of Ophelia that she is pregnant, probably by Shylock.

  Yet not even the sum of these misfortunes accounts, to Mundy’s watchful eye, for the mood of sullen resentment that has descended over the troupe by the time the bus pulls up before the cluster of flags, huts, sentry towers, border policemen and customs officials that marks the crossing point from Poland to East Germany, and they are once more ordered to dismount and line up along the roadside while their passports, possessions and the bus itself are subjected to the usual tedious examination.

  So what the hell’s got into them? Mundy wonders wearily. They stand about like prisoners, they visit the vile lavatories singly, come back and scowl at the ground. They barely speak to one another, let alone to Pop. What are they scared of? He suspects the worst. They’ve scored drugs in Warsaw. They’re waiting for the yell of discovery that will land them in jail.

  More extraordinary still, they scarcely notice the changing of the guard. Their beloved Polish interpreter and travel escort—nicknamed Spartacus on account of his spindly frame—is shuffling tearfully down the line, making his emotional goodbyes. Until now, they have treated Spartacus like a prince. They’ve flirted with him, adopted him, taught him all the worst English swearwords, showered him with cigarettes and invitations to Huddersfield. Now all they can muster is a few listless hugs and “Cheers, Sparts,” and the odd pat on his birdlike shoulders. His East German replacement is a heavyweight blond matron in a shiny black suit, yet not a single wisecrack or sotto voce wolf whistle escapes them. She has small quick eyes in big white cheeks, and hair plaited in a ring loaf. She delivers her English in a series of rapid-fire statements for the record.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mundy”—nearly breaking Mundy’s hand—“my name is Erna. I am from Leipzig. I am your official escort during your goodwill visit. Welcome to the German Democratic Republic.” After which, like an inspecting general, she requires to be presented to each member of the troupe in turn while Spartacus watches mournfully from the sidelines. And they submit. Nobody is cheeky. Nobody protests or comes up with a funny name for her. There is no impromptu performance of a piece of Shakespearean slapstick.

  And while they submit, East German frontier guards in fatigues storm their bus, ransack their trailer, scale the roof and bounce up and down on the rolled-up backcloth that is lashed along the length of it. And after that, like so many vultures, they savage their way through the troupe’s suitcases and rucksacks, even shaking pregnant Ophelia’s stuffed rabbit in case it rattles. But nobody protests, not even Lexham when they give him that extra bit of attention because he’s black. Everybody complies. Passively. Shiftily. And when they are finally herded back into the bus, the boom lifts and they enter the territory of their new hosts, not a single cheer goes up, which in Mundy’s recollection is a first. By now he is seriously concerned. Weimar is their last stand, their grandest gig, their prize number. In Weimar, cultural jewel of East Germany, it will be Shakespeare Week, and the Sweet Dole Company is the only British theater company invited. They will play to students, schools and Weimar’s hallowed National Theater itself before setting course for West Berlin and home.

  So why not cheer up? Why no song from Sally the Needle and her accordion? Why aren’t they trying to winkle a smile out of Erna’s frozen features as she towers massively at Mundy’s side on the box seat next to the driver, and glowers ahead of her at the pitted autobahn? On any other day, Lexham would by now have come up with a nickname for her: Moby Dick, Tinkerbell, the Sugar Plum Fairy. But not today.

  It is not until late the same night, when they have been settled into a grim youth hostel in Weimar’s Humboldtstrasse and, over meat and dumpling in the canteen, treated to an exquisitely boring address by a male representative of the Weimar Shakespeare Society on Socialist Harmony and the Healing Powers of a Shared Literary Heritage, that Mundy out of the corner of his eye catches sight of Viola secreting a chunk of meat, two pieces of bread and an apple in her Tibetan bag.

  For what? Who’s she feeding? Viola is famous for eating nothing.

  Is she providing extra rations for Ophelia who, like Kate, is feeding two?

  Or has Viola, who is mad about animals, befriended a dog? She can’t hav
e done. She hasn’t had time.

  Hostel rules require that boys and girls are segregated. Mundy’s bed is in a cubicle in the corridor between the two dormitories. At midnight he wakes from a half-sleep to the rustle of bare feet on wooden stairs.

  Viola.

  He allows her a moment, then follows her down the stairs into a rear courtyard, where the psychedelic bus is parked. Big stars, a warm moon, a scent of blossom. He is in time to see Viola, wearing only a short nightdress and her Tibetan bag, enter the bus and mount the spiral staircase to the upper deck. He waits. She doesn’t emerge. He climbs softly after her and discovers her, bottom up, on a pile of stage costumes. Closer inspection reveals that the costumes conceal a young, beautiful and naked Polish actor named Jan who attached himself to the troupe in Warsaw and insisted on following it around night and day wherever it went.

  In a tearful whisper Viola admits all. She is hopelessly, desperately, eternally in love with Jan, and he with her. But Jan has no passport. He is brave, and therefore hated by the Polish police. Sooner than be parted from him forever, she hid him in the costume chest and with the connivance of the rest of the troupe smuggled him across the border from Poland into East Germany. She regrets nothing. Jan is hers, her stowaway, her great love. She will take him to Berlin, to England, to wherever she needs to take him. She will never give him up. Ever, ever, Pop, and I don’t care what you do to me, I swear.

  Jan has about five words of German and none of English. He is small and vivid, and obviously packs up beautifully. Mundy disliked him in Warsaw, but dislikes him a great deal more now.

  Mundy must wait till morning rehearsal. In the afternoon they will give an open-air performance to conscripted schoolchildren. Their stage will be this patch of meadow in front of the ruined Tower of the Temple Lords in the historic park that stretches either side of the River Ilm. A jolly sun smiles on them, the park is alight with flowers. Erna who has no nickname roosts implacably on a long iron bench, knees apart, watching over her charges. For reinforcements she has the same official who last night bored the company to death with his speech, but also two sallow boys in leather jackets who have renounced facial expression. Their bench stands twenty yards from the improvised stage. Mundy rallies the cast around him inside the ruined tower, he hopes out of earshot and out of sight.