I said: But if God had just voted for Islam why did she marry your father?
But they were madly in love, he said. He sounded as though he’d never heard such a stupid question in his life.
He laughed. And anyway the Hungarian was part of the sign, so it was obviously God’s will.
I liked this piece of logic but I was glad Sibylla wasn’t there to hear it.
He said: You laugh, but you’re still missing the point. The point isn’t that she saw what God wanted and did it because he wanted it, like a simpering little dévote. She saw which way her luck lay. She wasn’t going to argue with that and neither was my father. I can see you think that’s frivolous, but if you’d got out of as many tight spots as I have with no better protection than a diplomatic immunity you’d invented five minutes before you’d take luck a damn sight more seriously than any arguments.
I still didn’t want him to kick me out so I put a couple of pastries on my plate and tactfully changed the subject and said:
How did you like Seven Samurai?
And he said:
It is a terrible film. Terrible.
And I said:
But it’s a work of genius.
He had lit another cigarette and now he raised it to his lips with the suavity of a dandy of Meiji Japan. He said: That is precisely my objection to this terrible work.
He said: I was at university at the time, in pursuit of a very beautiful, very earnest girl. I persuaded her to go out with me, but she was very serious about her studies and could only leave them for something even more serious. Seven Samurai was showing at the Phoenix for one night, and one night only: she proposed we go to that.
Consider my dilemma! That was the night of the University Bridge Club, and I had faithfully promised my partner to be there. A first-rate player, but a very short temper, and matters were at a very delicate stage—all the world had run mad for revolving discards, and Jeremy wished to follow fashion—he had devised a system of fiendish intricacy which was to be ours if I could not somehow persuade him to abandon it. The worst time in the world, in short, to annoy him, or leave him open to the influence of the fools in the club who favoured the wretched system.
But this was a chance which might not come again, and I’d been after the girl for weeks. She wouldn’t take me seriously, you see, and this was a girl who, if she could not take you seriously, would not take you at all.
Well, I knew I was a fool, and certainly in the grand scheme of things bridge was a great deal closer to my heart than this wretched girl, but I agreed anyway. We went to see Seven Samurai. I knew as soon as it began that I had made a terrible mistake.
Scenes, black and white, of peasant misery rose upon the screen, and superimposed on them dreadful visions of all the appalling results to which the discard system might lead. Hand after hand flashed into my mind—nightmarish hands in which our opponents, in easily defeatable contracts, made unmakable slams doubled redoubled and vulnerable—had unearned overtricks poured into their astonished laps—and where was I while disaster loomed? Fiddling while Rome burned.
Still, there was nothing to be done about it now—I might as well try to enjoy myself.
Cast your mind back to this film for one moment. Identify, if you can, a suitable moment at which to place your arm around the shoulders of your companion and kiss her. You cannot? No more could I. After half an hour, no suitable moment presenting itself, I chose an unsuitable moment—I was rebuked. With nothing to distract me, my mind returned with ever greater foreboding to my partner, at that very moment imbibing pernicious heresy from the lips of our fellow club members. The beautiful face of the girl stared raptly at the screen.
To my unutterable chagrin, I realised that I was completely superfluous to her enjoyment of the occasion; and that for all the good it did me I might as well have spent the evening profitably ridding my partner’s mind of error. In fact I could easily have gone to bridge club, left a little early, and met the girl at the end of the film.
There I was, however, trapped, while it ground inexorably on.
It ended at last. I walked the girl back to her college. She was pensive, silent; I at a loss for words.
Reflect now upon my predicament! The film portrayed a group of down-at-heels warriors who fight, many to die gallantly, amid circumstances of hardship and squalor. I could not but see that I cut no very heroic figure by comparison—and how could I expect that this girl, of all girls, would turn from heroism to my frivolous self? Remember, too, that the only love scenes in the film are presented in a very artificial, unpleasant way—I knew only too well that the girl would now be seeing herself through the clinical camera of Kurosawa, rather than through my own dazzled eyes.
We reached her college. She said that she wanted to think about the film. We kissed and parted.
A complete fiasco—and what a price I had to pay! Jeremy would scarcely speak to me. He sulked for two weeks—I could do nothing right. I am by nature an optimistic bidder; in the face of cold disapproval optimism withered on the vine, we played with only mediocre results. At last I could bear it no longer. I was forced to agree, against my better judgement, to his mad system of discards. The result was exactly as I had foreseen. We came third in the national championships when we might have come first, and all because I had squandered an evening watching that abominable film.
Where did you go to university? I asked, for the obvious possibility had occurred to me.
I was at Oxford. I know what you’re thinking—it’s a delightful thought, but surely most unlikely. How old is your mother?
36.
Well, it’s not impossible.
What was the girl’s name?
I think it was Rachel. What is your mother’s name?
I told him my mother’s name.
Are you sure it was Rachel?
No. If your mother goes home after parties and is nice to men of whom she thoroughly disapproves, however, she has changed out of all recognition from the girl I knew, or more likely is someone quite different who would have been a much more agreeable companion, and whom I did not have the good fortune to meet. What does she look like?
She has dark hair and dark eyes.
It’s not impossible. You said she was pretty?
In my mind I saw the beautiful girl glowing in the light of the film. If Sibylla had always watched Seven Samurai she would always have been beautiful, but there is more to life than art.
She’s not really pretty, I said. She’s beautiful. When she’s excited. When she’s bored she looks like someone who’s got two weeks to live. Someone who’s got two weeks to live & is going to spend it begging the doctor for a mercy killing.
He shrugged. You could say that of any woman. They are moody creatures, up one minute down the next—it is what makes them so exasperating and delightful.
Do they all want to die?
They have all said so at one time or another, but whether they mean it! There is not a woman in a thousand who has not said she wanted to die; perhaps one in a thousand has tried to do something about it—and for every thousand who try perhaps one succeeds. There is not much logic in it, but if they were more logical they would be rather dull.
I would have liked to hear him talk this way longer. I would have liked to hear him talk this way about anything, as if you could be impervious to sorrow just by being a man. I said:
It’s not illogical, though, not to act on a desire one thinks immoral. It’s not illogical, having failed to commit an action which may be wrong, to resist the temptation to try again. It might not even be illogical even if one did not think it immoral; one might wish to act with generosity.