The idea crossed his mind of joining the American army and fighting in Vietnam, rather as an earlier generation of men had signed up with the French Foreign Legion. A simpler way of putting distance between himself and his present life would be to hire a car and drive across the States from East to West, old-fashioned though that proposal also was.
‘Shall we call some of the other guys and chicks in here?’ Laxmi said, pinching out the joint.
The hired car broke down – or developed a malfunction, as the garage-hand put it – in the pleasant town of Waterloo, Iowa. The friendly young couple who ran the garage repair shop gave Billing a bed in their attic for the night. He stayed in Waterloo, Iowa, until the next spring, when the snows were gone and the wheatlands turning green from horizon to horizon. The couple with whom he became close were Ludmilla and Josef Jajack. They were of Czech origin. Their two identical old mothers were alive and dressed in gingham aprons. They ran a small market garden nearby. Ludmilla Jajack had beautiful grey eyes. She had never heard of ‘Side Show’.
All the furniture in the house had been manufactured from a creamy plastic only a year previously.
‘When I’m sixty, I’m going to sell everything and Ludmilla and me are going to visit Brno,’ Josef told Billing, more than once. ‘We’ve never been outside the States. When I’m sixty, we’re going to ride horseback in the High Tatras. Sound good to you, Hugh?’
‘Sounds good to me.’
He saw the beautiful grey eyes light up. He was sorry to leave them.
California had its compensations. It was easy to find a music job. He played trad piano in Santa Ana for a while, isolating himself from the crowd but listening to American dreams and aspirations, with which the air was thick.
‘Since he left me, I’ve done great. I really go for business. I market yoga equipment and bean curds and health foods, do all my own packaging. It’s creative, you know what I mean?’
‘The only money that means a thing to me is the money I make myself, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So I’m resilient. I have to be. I’ve always been the resilient kind. I never saw my mother since the age of three, except weekends in summer.’
Billings liked the look of the woman who had used the word ‘resilient’. She brought to mind his Jewish wife in the marriage that had lasted such a short while. An English woman would have said ‘tough’. In the word ‘resilient’ was stored all that rather squidgy optimism, not to mention euphemism, on which Middle America lived. He preferred it to the pessimism and the dysphemism of his own country.
When she came over to the piano for a request, he got to talk to her. She had a deep resonant voice. Her name was Robin Vandermeyer. She bought him a drink. She appeared formidable, commanding, and strode about in an outfit of suede. Even her complexion was leathery. When Billing visited her ranch-type house, he found Robin was soft and romantic inside. She showed him her doll collection. She believed that everything was going to be marvellous at short notice, despite all that experience had taught her to the contrary. It was idiotic but captivating. She decided Billing was artistic and offered him a job as a designer for a complete range of labels and promotional material.
Robin had another place up in the hills. They went riding there while Billing made up his mind whether to accept the job. In her bar that evening, drinking something pale blue, he found she had a number of Wilfred Wills records. Old fears returned. He jumped up and announced that he must go. Robin wept and threatened and snarled – all in a way that suggested she had been through this routine rather more times than she cared to tell – before driving him back into the centre of Los Angeles.
Billing soon caught the same obsession with acquiring an outdoor look as the rest of the male population. He lay about in the sun a lot. He became as brown and freckled as if he had been born that way. His moustache grew. He drank only local white wine, chewed gum and lived mainly off tuna salads. He studied the spaces of Los Angeles which, to his eye, were more astonishing than the buildings. The town was not, he decided, built for the automobile: it was built for the asocial. Its roads and freeways formed a cryptogram of isolation. He embraced the perception with pleasurable fear.
He practised looking either very friendly or very hostile. He had always had the reputation among his friends of being able to take care of himself.
But Billing was defenceless against the pale girl in the track suit whom he met in a branch of the First National Bank in Santa Barbara. She overheard his accent, accused him of being English, and then bought them both hamburgers with chillies, which they ate, knee to knee, in a crowded Spanish-type bar. She mostly laughed when she talked.
Cathy was a waif, a stray like Billing. Billing lived with her, or sometimes a friend of hers, for two years, mainly because of the short blonde hair, the fragrant little body under the track suit and her lostness. In all that time, he had no communication with England. Not so much as a postcard passed from him. The country of his birth sank below the horizon of his thought like an over-ripe moon.
Yet the moon still gleamed somewhere in memory, occasionally with brilliance. It outshone even the bright dusty Californian sun.
He sat one hot and nameless day in Choplickers, teasing a strawberry-and-passionfruit milk shake while waiting for Cathy. He was wrapped within his usual self-generated enchantment when realisation of his surroundings dawned. The little café was shrouded in darkness at midday, its low-wattage lights shielded by lead shades and aimed at the walls, as if its designer had previously worked only on war rooms. The one small window, against which Billing sat, was a blemish in its armour. With the air-conditioning, the temperature was just above freezing; yet most of the occupants wore dark glasses. Everywhere in Europe, in response to such fine weather, cafés would have spilled tables, chairs, trolleys, plants, and magisterial waiters out on to the sidewalks, in the fresh air.
Gazing through the window at the automobiles gliding by, Billing saw that they too had their windows tight closed against the heat. Like Choplickers, they were air-conditioned. In England, the car windows would be open, their drivers nonchalant, with bare elbows pointing out towards the traffic. He imagined un-American things like cyclists, pedestrians, roundabouts, horses and carts.
Oh, well, he thought, at least he had outrun Wilfred Wills …
What he wanted was a close friend to whom he could describe lyrically the delights of Cathy’s body, perhaps in particular the enchanting colours and contours of her buttocks; but he had never indulged in such confidences. Some elements of life remained obstinately unspoken and therefore, perhaps, unrealised; such deprivation was unfashionable on this shore of the Pacific, where telling formed a part of doing.
Inside his own air-conditioning, he was doomed to stay silent, with a quality of reticence which set him apart, even in the humble matter of Cathy’s bum, not from experience itself – far from it – but from the liberation that Californians relied on experience to bring.
He decided that he was reasonably content to view his life as an ambiguous artefact, since he saw all life as enigmatic. Being lost was an adequate substitute for finding yourself. There was to be no attempt to control the flow of circumstance. Just as there was never an attempt to get anything more from the women who loved him than that which they chose to offer.
His thoughts turned yet again to his mother. Those stories of hers to which June and he, when small, had listened so inattentively. Had they been of Wales or Egypt? Had they been true? While he waited in Choplickers for the girl who might never arrive, he wished he could recall them. The stories had been memorials to good times enjoyed by his mother when young, precious to her, meaningless to her children. And now lost for ever, even if they had been – like her goodwill – largely fake.