It seemed like a conjuring trick, out of the power of the rest of us, or like an adventure of Vautrin’s. I once told him that if our positions had been reversed, and I had had to become a refugee in Berlin, I should — if I had been lucky — have kept myself alive by giving English lessons, and I should have gone on giving English lessons till I died. Azik gave an avuncular smile. Obviously he thought rather the same himself.
He was not in the least like my old March friends. They had become indistinguishable, by my generation, from rich upper middle-class gentile families, rather grander Forsytes. Azik was not indistinguishable. To begin with, he went to synagogue, whether he believed or not. He was a devoted Zionist. He would not have considered anglicising his first name. Unlike the Marches, who, in common with their gentile equivalents, had taken to concealing their money, Azik enjoyed displaying his. Why not? He was an abundant man. No one could be less puritanical. So long as he could leave young David — Rosalind, late in life, had given him a son, by this time ten years old — well off, he liked splashing money about as much as making it. Anyway, he created his own rules: he wasn’t made to be genteeclass="underline" sometimes I thought, when people called him vulgar, that in following his nature he showed better taste than they. As another oddity, he was politically both sophisticated and detached. He made large contributions not only to Israel but to the Labour party: and in private treated us to disquisitions as to what social democratic governments were like and exactly what, if we got one next year, we could expect from ours.
His entertainments were no more understated than the rest of him. He had a passion for the theatre, and he had a passion for trade. So he mixed the two up. Theatre boxes, plus this gigantic running supper: snacks before the play, snacks in the intervals, snacks after the play. Other people went to ambassadors’ parties: ambassadors got used to going to his. There were several present in the private room that night. It was no use being finicky. There was more Strasbourg pâté on view than I remembered seeing. One waded in, and ate and drank. It bore a family resemblance to a party at a Russian dacha, when the constraints had gone, the bear hug was embracing you, the great bass voices were getting louder and the lights appeared to be abnormally bright.
While listening with one ear to a conversation on my left (a Hungarian was asking Azik what effect on world politics Kennedy’s assassination would have — it had happened a fortnight before), I talked to Rosalind. Once she had made up to me because I was Roy Calvert’s closest friend: all that was forgotten. I was one of many guests, but she liked to please. How were my family? Like a businessman, or a businessman’s wife, she had docketed their Christian names. She always read everything about us, she said, with a dying fall. That was more like old times. At close quarters she looked her age: the skin under her eyes was delicately lined. (I heard Azik saying robustly that he didn’t believe single individuals affected world politics. Whatever had been going to occur before Kennedy’s death, would occur, for good or bad.) She was using a scent, faint but languorous, that I didn’t recognise. Even before she married her first rich man, she had always been an expert on scents.
“Unless I get another glass of champagne, I shall just collapse,” she said, with another dying fall. That was still more like old times. Soon she was talking about Azik, with adoration, but her own kind of adoration. Except that the name happened to have changed, she might have been talking about Roy Calvert thirty years before. To an outsider’s eyes, they seemed distinctly different men. A good many women had thought Roy romantic. He had been gifted, but he had had to struggle with a manic-depressive nature, often so melancholy that he detested his own life. He had been, at least potentially, a great scholar. Rosalind had adored him. She had learned something about his profession, and could talk as the wife of a scholar should. When she spoke of him, there was no one else in this world: and there was also, in the midst of the worship, a kind of debunking twinkle, as though she alone could point out that, though he was everything a woman could wish for, he could do with a bit of sense.
On the other hand, Azik was not a romantic figure, except in the eyes of someone like Balzac. It would be stretching a point to suggest that he had an over-delicate or tormented nature. But once again, when Rosalind spoke of him, there was no one else in this world. Once again she had learned something about his profession, and could talk as the wife of an international entrepreneur should. And once again, in the midst of the worship, there was a kind of debunking twinkle, as though she alone could point out that, though he was everything a woman could wish for, he could do with a bit of sense.
It was a great gift of hers, I thought, to fall in love so totally just where it was convenient to fall in love. Though she wasn’t an adventuress, she had done better for herself than any adventuress I had met. Roy had been well-off, at least by our modest academic standards of the time (I had seen his father’s name over a hosiery factory when I walked to school as a boy): Azik was perhaps ten times richer. She had loved each of them in turn. She herself said that night, in the sublime flat phrase of our native town: “No, I can’t say that I’ve got much to complain about.”
In the throng of the party Muriel joined us, Roy Calvert’s daughter, born a few months before he was killed, so that she was over twenty now. I had seen her, intermittently, in the last few years. As a child she promised to get the best out of both her parents’ looks, but by now, though she had a kind of demure attractiveness, that hadn’t happened. Her nose was too long, her eyes too heavy-lidded. Usually those eyes were averted, her whole manner was demure: but when she asked a question, one received a green-eyed sharp stare, perhaps the single physical trait that came from her father. No, there was another: her face one wouldn’t notice much, now she was grown up, but when she walked she had his light-footed upright grace.
Rosalind chatted on about Azik’s exploits. Muriel, eyes sidelong, put in a gentle comment. On the face of it, she thought Rosalind was underrating him. Whether this was Muriel’s way of amusing herself, I didn’t know.
The bells were ringing, we went into our box. Azik’s passion for the theatre was an eclectic one, and we were seeing a play of the Absurd. Within a few minutes I tried, in the darkness of the box, to make out the hands of my wristwatch: how long before the first interval? In time it came. Back into the private room. Back to more champagne, the table restocked, dishes of caviare brought in. But back also to a sight I had had no warning of. One of the diplomats had taken charge of Margaret, I was in another group with Azik — when I saw, in the corner of the room, dinner-jacketed like the rest of us, my nephew Pat. He was talking, head close to head, with Muriel. I put my hand on Azik’s massive arm, and drew him aside. I indicated the couple in the corner, and in an undertone said: “How do you know that young man?”
“It was impossible to fit him into the boxes,” said Azik, misunderstanding me, as though apologising for not doing his best for Pat. “So I asked if he would not mind to join us for our little drink—”
“No,” I said. “I meant, how did you come to know him?”
“I must say,” replied Azik, “I think he presented himself to my wife. Because his father was such a great friend of Calvert.”
He moved his great moon face nearer to mine, with a glance of friendly cunning. Did he have any suspicions about that story? In fact, it was quite untrue. Martin had known Roy Calvert only slightly: they might have walked through the college together, that was about all. Of course, it was conceivable that Pat had picked up a different impression. Family legends grow, he must have heard a good deal about Roy both from me and his father. As for Rosalind, I doubted whether she had known, let alone remembered, many of Roy’s Cambridge friends.