‘What’s wrong, lad, has the cat got your tongue? You’re being awfully coy. Don’t let me down now, answer the Doctor, he wants to know what you young people get up to with your limitless freedom.’
I decided it would be best to lie. In order to make those grown men green with envy, which is what they wanted: to be amazed and to bemoan their having been born too soon. To arouse the imaginations of the two thirty-something women, who would see me as an indefatigable near-child, possibly a demon between the sheets. To please my employer, who had deemed me worthy of being present, along with the grown-ups. After all, we were there to have a good time, it was a jolly occasion.
‘Well, in a good month, as you put it, Doctor,’ I said at last (despite his protests, I addressed him as ‘Doctor’ at first, although not, of course, once he started accompanying me to places where he would never have gone alone), ‘I’ll have seven or eight, never less than that. In a slow month, three or four.’ And I think I must have visibly blushed, more at my own brazen deceit than for any other reason. They probably thought I was blushing at this confession of my own greed.
There was a murmur of voices around me, the odd whistle of astonishment, I was, for a moment, the centre of attention. The bullfighter and the actor must have felt their own glorious past lives as ladykillers somewhat diminished. Muriel, I thought, looked half-surprised, half-pleased (‘That many, eh?’ he said paternally). The two women exchanged glances, raised their eyebrows, and then uncrossed and crossed their legs at the same time (a flash of thighs), as if this were a dance routine they had rehearsed or as if they were twins. Van Vechten’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets and he repeatedly tugged at his tie and then again at the knot in order to straighten it, it was a gesture he made whenever he was agitated or excited at some interesting prospect or promise. Most striking of all was that no one showed the least scepticism, they clearly didn’t know the world, however long they had been in it, or knew only the world of their youth, the only one we understand naturally and effortlessly: in life we experience a little of what will happen after our death, when time leaves us behind at such incredible speed and transforms us into the remote past and lumps us together with the antiquities. When still alive, we realize that we cannot possibly keep up, we get left behind and waste our energy and begin to grow weary of so much change and tell ourselves: ‘This is where my age ends, I’m not going to bother with the next one, it doesn’t belong to me; I’ll pretend as best I can, but I’m fast becoming an anachronism and outstaying my welcome.’ Things would have been minimally different had Professor Rico been there. Not because he knew the world any better, not at all, but because he would never have allowed himself to appear to be impressed with witnesses present and would have come out with some scornful comment: ‘Ha, a mere bagatelle’ or ‘Is that all?’ or even ‘And you call that a good month, young De Vere? I thought you were more competent, more adept.’ But he wasn’t in Madrid that night, and so no one called my bluff, and Van Vechten, the most inclined to believe what I had said and impressed by the sheer scale of it, tried to draw me out, with the acquiescence of the others as a background rumble.
‘Come on, then, tell us all,’ said the Doctor, highly excited, as if this were the beginning of another party. ‘Ages? Places? Settings? And where do you pick them up?’ The expression ‘pick them up’ betrayed his view of these encounters, the old world to which he belonged. ‘Do you stick with girls your own age or are you happy with anyone who isn’t actually old? I imagine you have your limits. When you’re spoiled for choice, you have to, at least that’s how it was for me when I was your age.’ He glanced across at the two women, some comment dancing on the tip of his tongue, I feared the worst, some unpleasantly vengeful remark, because they gave no response, either visual or verbal. I was afraid he might say something like: ‘Those two lovely ladies over there, for example, would have seemed old to me at the time, but now I’d quite happily screw them.’ Fortunately, he said nothing, but, given the context, that glance in itself seemed crude and inappropriate. They were quite attractive, those two ex-lovers of the actor or the bullfighter, one rather coarse, the other more delicate. They didn’t deserve to be belittled like that, not even hypothetically or retrospectively. They had noticed Van Vechten’s sidelong glance and understood its meaning. They exchanged another subtle look as if to check that they were in accord, then they uncrossed and crossed their legs again, not, this time, as a mark of their approval of me, the young man, but as a reproof to that man in the autumn of his years. The Doctor was often impertinent and expansive and not fully aware of his age because it was not as yet apparent on his still unlined face or on his still agile body; his lack of tact meant that one had to give him more than the usual amount of leeway.
I was not prepared to continue along the path he was suggesting. It was one thing to lie briefly about numbers, as a joke and so as not to disappoint, but quite another to provide detailed descriptions and accounts, continuously, inevitably, boastfully, even if it was all invented. There was something unpleasant and unsavoury about his questions, however jovial or jokey his tone; a lack of respect for women which, even though it was pretty much the norm in many areas of life, both Spanish and non-Spanish, both then and now, nonetheless troubled me. Not that I didn’t occasionally slip into that mode myself (I’m not going to pretend I’ve always been the perfect gentleman), but he went too far, he teetered on the edge of abuse, or, rather, that was his normal mode. Having daughters cures one of that involuntary or reflex disdain that far too many of us men inherit. In the Doctor, it was deliberate; even though, as I found out later, he himself had sons and daughters, he had never moved on from that instinctive disdain.
I smiled apologetically:
‘No, Doctor. I’m sure you’ve had far more success than me. I just catch what I can, like most people. What I didn’t tell you was how many women I try it on with, and if I were to total them up, I’d definitely have far more failures than successes.’
The actor and the bullfighter and Muriel and a few other men laughed, even though what I said was also a lie, because I wasn’t the kind who went around making a play for women left, right and centre. The first two must have felt slightly relieved, thinking that nothing very much had changed and that, regardless of the times, any success is always the result of skill, luck and effort. Van Vechten didn’t laugh, or only belatedly, reluctantly copying the others. He looked at me as if I were wilfully concealing useful information, as if I had whisked away from him the anecdotes he had been so looking forward to hearing, perhaps hoping to learn something about the new world that lay just beyond his grasp. He once again immersed himself in the poker game, but with a look of puerile resentment on his face.