Old Acquaintance by David Stacton Read Free Book Online

how she felt made him feel a little lonely. They had the wrong kind of sophistication, he and she. It cut them off from everything that wasn’t real. Which is why we pretend all the time, he supposed. Or rather, why we pretend to pretend, which is sadder.
    He had forgotten her smile. He always did. What he remembered of her, and of very few people in this world, if you came right down to it, wasn’t what she looked like, but what she was. That nonsense jingle about Genesis did very well. “What is the rest of the world to do?” And yet we go on doing it.
    The little procession swept into the portico and left the lawn about the way it had looked before.

VIII
    LOTTE had accepted two duties. The first, and less important, was to make a small opening speech. The second, and the more so, was to present one of the prizes, the one for best actress, she believed.
    The stage was flanked by flags of all nations, or at any rate,of all nations which made films. The screen was concealed by a curtain hung in Vienna folds, like a window, though there was nothing behind it to see until the projectors came on.
    There were no chairs on the stage. The judges and speechmakers were seated in the front row and went up, when called upon, to be introduced by an M.C. That was just as well. One cannot be glamorous and a sitting duck at the same time.
    She was described as someone I am sure you all know and love.
    Equally sure that they did not know her, for she had always covered her tracks well, and that the love of stage-folk is merely a mutual conspiracy, Lotte walked to the stage with leggy assurance, though missing that theme song which had trumpeted her triumphant return from limbo in every major night club in the world. Alas, for La Vie en Rose one needs spectacles of the same color, and Lotte, who was myopic, faced her audience as though speaking into the background of a fantasy by Goya.
    Seeing them was like looking down on the world she had surmounted. She felt exactly like a mountain climber. There isn’t anything up there, but at least you can see how you got up, and the air is bracing (actually there was a cold draft coming from somewhere).
    Her little speech only took two or three minutes. She was gracious, bland, enchanting, her voice carefully plumped out with quiet laughter, kind, benign, and definitely an elder statesman.
    Then the show was on. Surely only a very foolish person would enjoy to watch himself lurching about up there, through a series of arbitrary dramatic hoops made out of celluloid. You have to be catlike to enjoy that sort of vanity, and Lotte was doggy. A puppy may bark at a mirror, but then he sighs and decides to ignore it.
    Lotte ignored it. She had seen films before.

IX
    AFTERWARDS the four of them had dinner. The starlet was not amusing, but one has a duty to be civil. She seemed both to be overawed by them and to regard them as irrelevant. They were too old and odd, and Paul, though attentive, was not a professional. It seemed unlikely she would ever be a star. Almost certainly, she would marry a shoe manufacturer and be replaced by someone else just like her. They did not worry about her and she did not worry about them.
    Charlie addressed himself to the wine list with a blank deceptive indecision, monocle and all, which would not have fooled a fly. Having been poor when young, he enjoyed these ceremonies all the more now he could afford them. Though he knew wines well, it was their names he ordered by.
    Beaujolais was good for certain late afternoons. It suggested a gentle, well-fed melancholy. Médoc (which he didn’t like) he ordered when he could, because the name fascinated him (something to do with Langue d’Oc, le prince d’Ac quitaine à la tour abolie, and all that. Thieves have their rhyming slang, and so do the extremely civilized, though no professor has yet compiled it in a dictionary in which to look themselves up). Chambertin was his favorite to drink, but he always forgot to order it,