‘A good exchange is no robbery, I believe? Harar acquired some delightful wall-paintings in the early manner of your humble servant and the gifted mother of your ambassadress. Oh! How we were happy and busy, painting these enormous frescoes – perhaps the happiest days of my life. Everybody was so pleased – the Fuzzie-Wuzzies greatly preferred our bright and lively work to the musty old things which were there before.’
‘We don’t say Fuzzie-Wuzzies,’ said Sir Harald.
‘Indeed?’
‘No. Like your foreign policy, all this is old-fashioned.’
‘Hélas! I am old-fashioned, and old as well. C’est la vie, n’est-ce pas, Mees?’
‘When are you going to fall again?’ said Northey. ‘(Golly, my neck is aching!) We never see you, it’s a bore.’
‘With the assistance of the present company it should be any day. What are you preparing for us, Harald?’
Sir Harald became rather pink and looked guilty.
Hector Dexter, who had pricked up his ears at the word frescoes, said, ‘And where are the Harar paintings now, M. le Président?’
‘Safe in the cellars of the Louvre, thanks to me, where no human eye will ever behold them.’
‘I have a client in the States who is interested in African art of unimpeachable provenance. Are there no more ancient frescoes at Harar or in its environs?’
‘No,’ said Sir Harald, ‘the Frogs swiped the lot.’
‘We don’t say Frogs any more,’ said Bouche-Bontemps, ‘it’s old-fashioned, like taking away other people’s islands.’
There was a little silence. Ice clicked in the glasses, people swallowed, Mrs Jungfleisch handed round caviar. Sir Harald turned from Bouche-Bontemps to the opposite side of the pouf and said, ‘Now, Geck, we want to hear all about Russia.’
Hector Dexter cleared his throat and intoned: ‘My day-to-day experiences in the Union of Soviet Socialist Russia have been registered on a long-playing gramophone record to be issued free to all the members of the North Atlantic Treaty. This you will be able to obtain by indenting for a copy to your own ambassador to N.A.T.O. I was there, as you may know, for between nine and eight years, but after the very first week I came to the conclusion that the way of life of the Socialist Soviet citizen is not and never could be acceptable to one who has had cognizance of the American way of life. Then it took me between nine and eight years to find some way of leaving the country by which I could safely bring Carolyn here and young Foster with me. It became all the more important for me to get out because my son Foster, aged now fifteen, is only ten points below genius and this genius would have been unavailing and supervacaneous, in other words wasted, behind the Iron Curtain.’
‘Why? There can’t be so many geniuses there?’
‘There is this out-of-date, non-forward-looking view of life. They have not realized the vast potentialities, the enormous untapped wealth of the world of Art. They have this fixation on literature; they do not seem to realize that the written word has had its day – books are a completely outworn concept. We in America, one step ahead of you in Western Europe, have given up buying them altogether. You would never see a woman, or a man, reading a book in the New York subway. Now in the Moscow subway every person is doing so.’
‘That’s bad, Heck,’ said Mr Jorgmann, heavily.
‘Why is it bad?’ I asked.
‘Because books do not carry advertisements. The public of a great modern industrial state ought to be reading magazines or watching television. The Russians are not contemporary; they are not realist; they exude a fusty aroma of the past.’
‘So young Foster is going into Art?’
‘Yes, Sir. By the time my boy is twenty-one, I intend he shall recognize with unerring certainty the attribution of any paint on any canvas (or wood or plaster), the marks of every known make of porcelain and every known maker of silver, the factory from which every carpet and every tapestry –’
‘In short,’ said Sir Harald, ‘he’ll be able to tell the difference between Rouault and Ford Madox Brown.’
‘Not only that. I wish him to learn the art trade from the beginning to the end; he must learn to clean and crate and pack the object as well as to discover it and purchase it and resell it. From flea-market to Jayne Wrightsman’s boudoir, if I may so express myself.’
‘I should have thought that sort of talent could have been used in the Winter Palace?’
‘There is too much prejudice against the West. The Russians do not possess correct attitudes. It was an unpleasant experience to discuss with individuals whose thinking is so lacking in objectivity that one was aware it was emotively determined and could be changed only by change of attitude. Besides, hypotheses, theories, ideas, generalizations, awareness of the existence of unanswered and/or unanswerable queries do not form part of their equipment. So such mental relationships as Carolyn here and I and young Foster Dexter were able to entertain with the citizens of Soviet Socialist Russia were very, very highly unsatisfactory.’
‘But, Geek,’ said naughty Sir Harald (I remembered that the Russian alphabet has no H), ‘one doesn’t want to say I told you so – not that I did, only any of us could have if you’d asked our advice – why on earth did you go?’
‘When I first got back here some four or three weeks since, I could have found that question difficult, if not impossible, to answer. However, as soon as I arrived here in Paris I put myself in the hands of a brilliant young doctor, recommended to me by Mildred: Dr Jore. I go to him every evening when he has finished with the Supreme Commander. Now Dr Jore very, very swiftly diagnosed my disorder. It seems that at the time when I left this country some nine or eight years ago I was suffering from a Pull to the East which, in my case, was so overwhelmingly powerful that no human person could have resisted it. As soon
