actors' noses are too big for kissing anyone head on.
'His name is Charles,' Esme said. 'He's extremely brilliant for his age.'
'He certainly has green eyes. Haven't you, Charles?' Charles gave me the fishy look my question deserved, then wriggled downward and forward in his chair till all of his body was under the table except his head, which he left, wrestler's-bridge style, on the chair seat. 'They're orange,' he said in a strained voice, addressing the ceiling. He picked up a comer of the tablecloth and put it over his handsome, deadpan little face.
'Sometimes he's brilliant and sometimes he's not,' Esme said.
'Charles, do sit up!'
Charles stayed right where he was. He seemed to be holding his breath.
'He misses our father very much. He was s-l-a-i-n in North Africa.'
I expressed regret to hear it.
Esme nodded. 'Father adored him.' She bit reflectively at the cuticle of her thumb. 'He looks very much like my mother--Charles, I mean. I look exactly like my father.' She went on biting at her cuticle. 'My mother was quite a passionate woman. She was an extrovert. Father was an introvert. They were quite well mated, though, in a superficial way. To be quite candid, Father really needed more of an intellectual companion than Mother was. He was an extremely gifted genius.'
I waited, receptively, for further information, but none came. I looked down at Charles, who was now resting the side of his face on his chair seat. When he saw that I was looking at him, he closed his eyes, sleepily, angelically, then stuck out his tongue--an appendage of startling length--and gave out what in my country would have been a glorious tribute to a myopic baseball umpire. It fairly shook the tearoom.
'Stop that,' Esme said, clearly unshaken. 'He saw an American do it in a fish-and-chips queue, and now he does it whenever he's bored. Just stop it, now, or I shall send you directly to Miss Megley.'
Charles opened his enormous eyes, as sign that he'd heard his sister's threat, but otherwise didn't look especially alerted. He closed his eyes again, and continued to rest the side of his face on the chair seat.
I mentioned that maybe he ought to save it--meaning the Bronx cheer--
till he started using his title regularly. That is, if he had a title, too.
Esme gave me a long, faintly clinical look. 'You have a dry sense of humor, haven't you?' she said--wistfully. 'Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humor.'
Watching her, I lit a cigarette and said I didn't think a sense of humor was of any use in a real pinch.
'Father said it was.'
This was a statement of faith, not a contradiction, and I quickly switched horses. I nodded and said her father had probably taken the long view, while I was taking the short (whatever that meant).
'Charles misses him exceedingly,' Esme said, after a moment. 'He was an exceedingly lovable man. He was extremely handsome, too. Not that one's appearance matters greatly, but he was. He had terribly penetrating eyes, for a man who was intransically kind.'
I nodded. I said I imagined her father had had quite an extraordinary vocabulary.
'Oh, yes; quite,' said Esme. 'He was an archivist--amateur, of course.'
At that point, I felt an importunate tap, almost a punch, on my upper arm, from Charles' direction. I turned to him. He was sitting in a fairly normal position in his chair now, except that he had one knee tucked under him. 'What did one wall say to the other wall?' he asked shrilly. 'It's a riddle!'
I rolled my eyes reflectively ceilingward and repeated the question aloud. Then I looked at Charles with a stumped expression and said I gave up.
'Meet you at the corner!' came the punch line, at top volume.
It went over biggest with Charles himself. It struck him as unbearably funny. In fact, Esme had to come around and pound him on the back, as if treating him for a coughing spell. 'Now, stop that,' she said. She went back to her own seat. 'He tells that same riddle to everyone he meets and has a fit every single time. Usually he drools when he laughs. Now, just stop, please.'
'It's one of the best riddles I've heard, though,' I said, watching Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two.
'May I inquire how you were employed before entering the Army?' Esme asked me.
I said I hadn't been employed at all, that I'd only been out of college a year but that I like to think of myself as a professional short-story writer.
She nodded politely. 'Published?' she asked.
It was a familiar but always touchy question, and one that I didn't answer just one, two, three. I started to explain how most editors in America were a bunch--
'My father wrote beautifully,' Esme interrupted. 'I'm saving a number of his letters for posterity.'
I said that sounded like a very good idea. I happened to be looking at her enormous-faced, chronographic- looking wristwatch again. I asked if it had belonged to her father.
She looked down at her wrist solemnly. 'Yes, it did,' she said. 'He gave it to me just before Charles and I were evacuated.' Self-consciously, she took her hands off the table, saying, 'Purely as a momento, of course.' She guided the conversation in a different direction. 'I'd be extremely flattered if you'd write a story exclusively for me sometime. I'm an avid reader.'
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn't terribly prolific.
