Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [41]
“The salad bowl.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Rodney, looking around for the salad bowl.
“They call it the salad bowl now. Not the melting pot.”
“Do they indeed.”
“In a way, you could say that English blecks are posher than their American cousins.”
“How so?”
“How so?”
Here were two men living in a silent movie: when they were alone together, the millennium seemed about a century away. Rock was now about to speak of the historical past; but his urbanity faltered, and he suddenly sounded sober.
“Oh come on. We know a little bit about this, don’t we? The English contingent, they were shipped in after the war. To run the tubes and so on. And the buses. Contract labor. But not—but not like American blecks.”
“Same stock, though. One imagines.”
Rod and Rock: their family trees stood tall. Their family trees stood tall and proud. But what kind of trees were they—weeping willow, sallow, mahogany, ash? And something ailed or cankered them, shaping their branches all arthritic and aghast … The Peels had been among the beneficiaries when, on a single day in 1661, Charles II created thirteen baronetcies on the plantation island of Barbados. Rock’s lot, the Robvilles, rather disappointingly (rather puzzlingly, from Rodney’s point of view), didn’t go back quite so far. But the Peels and the Robvilles alike had flourished at a time when every English adult with cash or credit owned a piece of it: a piece of slavery. The place where Rock’s dad lived had been assembled by massive shipwright profits out of Liverpool, circa 1750. Intelligence of these provenances could never be openly acknowledged by either of the two men. Lifelong inhibition protected them: in their childhood it was like something terrible hiding under the bed. Still, Rock was a businessman. And he had never expected business to be pretty. He said,
“There’s not much in it, I suppose. But the English contingent were freed longer ago.”
“Yes, well,” pondered Rodney, “I suppose you can’t get much less posh than being a slave. But that’s to forget what they might have been originally.”
“Posh in Africa.”
“In a way. You know, Africa was quite advanced for a while. I mean, look at African art. Exquisite. Ancient, but immediate. Immediate. They had great civilizations there when England was just a sheep-dip. Ages ago.”
“What have you been reading? The Amsterdam News?”
“No. Ebony. But it’s true! We’re just upstarts and counterjumpers compared to them. Scum, Rock. Anyway I have a hunch my one came direct from Africa. The Sudan, quite possibly. Timbuktu was apparently an incredible city. Crammed with princes and poets and amazing houris. Jezebel was of—”
“Did you say amazing hoorays? Sorry? Oh never mind. What sort of accent does she have? Your one.”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
Rock paused and said, “Pray describe this relationship. How did you meet? Or don’t you know that either?”
“We met in a bar. But it wasn’t like that.”
They met in a bar but it wasn’t like that.
It was like this.
Rodney had just asked for a Bullshot. Consisting of vodka and consomme, a Bullshot is arguably a bullshit drink; but Rodney, his eyes lurking and cowering behind his dark glasses, badly needed his Bullshot. What he really felt like was a Bloodshot. He wore a pinched seersucker suit and a grimy cravat. He had spent the morning in a sepulchral brownstone on East Sixty-fifth Street, doing what he could with the long upper lip and ridiculously interproximate eyebrows of a Mrs. Sheehan—wife to the chat-show king.
“Worcestershire sauce, if you please, and the juice of at least one lemon.”
“You know something? I could listen to your voice all day.”
It was not the first time Rodney had been paid this compliment. Sequestered in a deceptively mild cocaine hangover, he said, “How sweet of you to say so.”
“No. Really.”
“So kind.”
This waitress at some point or other might have wanted to be an actress. She might have had the odd prompting toward