Her Name Was Lola

  A nurse called Laura takes Max’s temperature, blood pressure and pulse. She gets an oxygen reading from a thing clipped to his finger. ‘How am I?’ says Max.

  ‘Blood pressure’s a little low,’ says Laura, and writes up his chart.

  ‘You’ve got to expect that sort of thing from time to time,’ says Max. Lying on the bottom and maintaining silence, he waits for the depth charges, feels the shock of the explosions, sees the water spurting in as the plates buckle.

  30

  Phone Talk

  ‘Seven three eight five, seven two seven seven,’ says a male voice, very refined.

  ‘I’m calling Lola Bessington,’ says Max. ‘Have I got the right number?’

  ‘Miss Bessington’s calls are being diverted to this number,’ says the voice.

  ‘Whom am I speaking to, please?’ says Max.

  ‘This is Poole,’ says Poole.

  ‘Poole is where I’m calling from. This is Max Lesser.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Lesser. Was there anything else?’

  ‘Can you tell me how she is?’

  ‘No,’ says Poole. ‘I am not able to do that. Goodbye.’

  ‘Chambers,’ says a crisp female voice answering Max’s next call.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Basil Meissen-Potts, please,’ says Max.

  ‘Who’s calling, please?’ says Ms Crisp.

  ‘Max Lesser.’

  ‘Mr Meissen-Potts is out of the country at present.’

  ‘When do you expect him back?’

  ‘Try again in two weeks.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Max, and rings Poole again.

  ‘Seven three eight five, seven two seven seven,’ says Poole.

  ‘Max Lesser again,’ says Max. ‘Can I speak to Lady Bessington?’

  ‘Lady Bessington cannot be reached at this time,’ says Poole.

  ‘Lord Bessington, then?’

  ‘I’ll have to put you on hold for a moment,’ says Poole. Silence. No music.

  The next voice has a Victorian moustache and wears a sola topi. ‘Bessington here,’ it says, switching a riding crop against its boot.

  ‘Lord Bessington,’ says Max, ‘this is Max Lesser. I was hoping to talk to Lola.’

  ‘Yes, no doubt you were.’

  ‘Can you at least tell me how she is?’

  ‘I’m a rather busy man,’ says Lord Bessington, ‘but if you’d like to speak to my secretary I’ll try to squeeze you in for a horsewhipping.’

  ‘Would that make you feel better?’ says Max.

  ‘Yes, it would give me the comfort of knowing that at least one of us has behaved correctly.’

  ‘If you’ll allow a personal question, Lord Bessington, have you ever behaved incorrectly?’

  ‘Yes. At the age of eight I brought my pony back to the stables without cooling him down and I was thrashed for it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Max. ‘I have nothing further.’

  ‘Hello,’ says Vicky at the Coliseum Shop. ‘Coliseum Shop.’

  ‘Hi,’ says Max. ‘Max Lesser here. Any word from Lola?’

  ‘Only that she’s quit her job and gone away.’

  ‘Did she say whether she … Did she say how she is, you know, physically?’ says Max.

  ‘All she said was what I just told you.’

  ‘Nothing about where she was going or how long she’ll be away?’

  ‘Nothing. I have to go now.’ She hangs up.

  ‘Our child,’ says Max to his mind, ‘is it alive or dead?’

  ‘I can’t help you,’ says his mind.

  Max dials the speaking clock. ‘At the third stroke,’ says the clock, ‘the time, sponsored by Accurist, will be fifteen thirty-three and ten seconds. Beep. Beep, etc. Every hour wounds; the last one kills.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ says Max.

  ‘Every hour wounds,’ speaks the clock; ‘the last one kills.’

  31

  Lola Lola

  April 1997. Poole Hospital. ‘Ich bin die fesche Lola,’ sings Max’s mind. ‘Tee-tumty-tumty-tum.’

  ‘Ah!’ says Max. ‘Haunt me, Lola!’

  The memory that haunts him is from February, shortly after he and Lola did the I Ching. They’d arranged to meet at his place, and when Lola arrives she says, ‘Excuse me for a moment.’ Then she heads for the bathroom with her Nike sports bag that she uses for an overnighter. In a few minutes she knocks three times on her side of the closed door.

  ‘Who’s there?’ says Max.

  ‘Lola Lola,’ says Lola. The door opens and here she is in a black corset, frilly black knickers, suspender belt, black stockings and black high heels. She strikes a pose with feet apart, hands on hips.

  ‘Wow,’ says Max. ‘Dietrich never looked this good.’

  ‘Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison. Ich hab’ ein Pianola zu Haus in mein Salon,’ sings Lola, with her upper-class English accent. ‘I am the dashing Lola, the darling of the season. I have a Pianola at home in my salon.’

  ‘Is that where you got your name?’ says Max.

  ‘Not really,’ says Lola. ‘I had a grandmother named Lola, but Daddy has always been a big Dietrich fan, and when I was little he used to bounce me on his knee and sing me that song from The Blue Angel. He only knew the first line but he’d tumty-tum the rest and give me a kiss at the end. Actually he still sings it to me now and then.’

  ‘With the knee ride and the kiss?’ says Max.

  ‘No, he stopped the knee rides when I was about fourteen.’

  ‘About time, too,’ says Max. ‘What about the kiss?’

  ‘Well, you know – fond parent, only child.’

  ‘On the mouth?’

  ‘Yes. Have you got a problem with that?’

  ‘Maybe. I won’t ask about his tongue.’

  ‘A notable show of restraint,’ says Lola. ‘Would you like to help me out of this corset?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Max in his bed in Poole Hospital. The essence of Lola is feeding into him as it were intravenously. Never until now has he felt the charm of her, the strangeness, the sweetness and the pathos of her running in his veins like this. ‘Lola, Lola, Lola,’ he whispers.

  ‘Did you call me?’ says Nurse Laura, approaching on sturdy footsteps.

  ‘Just talking to myself,’ says Max.

  32

  Earth Work

  April 1997. Max has no luck with his attempts to speak to Lola on the telephone, nor can he find out anything about her when he tries other people. All he has now is the absence of Lola. This is a presence in its own right, a Lola made up of what he can remember. And Max remembers more than he knew. His mind gives him details of things he hadn’t been aware of noticing. The blue Guernsey, faded jeans and denim jacket she was wearing on the day of their picnic (she hadn’t dressed warmly enough for a cold March day). The hiking boots with the kind of wear that comes from actual hiking. How her hair looked blowing in the wind. A dab of mustard on her chin. An opal ring. A hand gesture. The way she walked going up and coming down. The sky around her. ‘Primula,’ she said when he asked the name of the little yellow flowers by the path. ‘Primula,’ says Max in his hospital bed. ‘Primulola.’

  When Max is discharged from hospital he’s not yet ready to leave Dorset. He gets a taxi to take him to Maiden Castle and wait for him while he climbs to where he and Lola had their picnic. First he has a look at the information boards: an artist’s impression of Maiden Castle in the Iron Age; then HILL FORTS; MAIDEN CASTLE (maps of it in successive phases); THE NEOLITHIC AND BRONZE AGE PHASES; IRON AGE PHASES I, II, III, and IV; and AFTER THE ROMAN CONQUEST. Max backs away hastily from this glut of information that tries to get between him and the Mai Dun that was Lola’s and his.

  Here it is with its green and brown and tawny grasses, its eminence of centuries. Mai Dun does not impose itself on the sky, it lives with it as the sea does. Its stillness is full of life and listening with the ears of all its dead. ‘Absent friends,’ says Max as he (a little weak in the legs) sta
rts up the brown path. He wishes he’d brought champagne so that he could pour a libation to those friends as Lola did. He feels that he needs all their goodwill now. Here are little white daisies and yellow primulas, this year’s new flowering on the ancient earth. The grass smells sweet, like a childhood memory.

  He makes his way to the inner rampart where he and Lola had their picnic. Today he doesn’t see the Ark and the raven. The sky is dull and grey. Looking to the south, past the outer ramparts and ditches, he takes in the tree-lined fields and meadows undulating in easy sweeps to the blue distance. Here they sat. Here is the ribbon she tied to the grass stem. It’s blue, fluttering in the same wind. It’s realer than it was when she put it there, it’s more than itself. ‘What is it?’ Max says to his mind. ‘Is it that reality isn’t real to me the first time around?’

  ‘What it is,’ says his mind, ‘is that you aren’t always real the first time around. Now that she’s gone you’ll know what she was to you. More and more.’

  Max knows that he can’t change anything, knows it right down to his bones. But he says to himself, ‘If Lula Mae hadn’t … If I hadn’t … What? And here on Mai Dun, what exactly did I say, what did Lola say?’

  ‘What’s the use of going there?’ says his mind. ‘Let it be.’

  ‘We said the names of the seven stars of Ursa Major,’ says Max. ‘We said, “Max and Lola. Lola and Max.” We looked at Hale-Bopp. I said, “You seem to be good friends with the stars.”

  ‘She said, “Yes. I’m pregnant.”

  ‘I said, “Wow.”

  ‘She said, “Say more.”

  ‘I said, “Speechless.” We hugged and kissed.

  ‘She said, “So you’re happy about it?”

  ‘I said, “Like crazy.”’

  Max pauses, lies down with his face to the ground. He smells the earth, the ancient grasses, the summer suns, the winter rains, the cookfires of the dead.

  ‘But then,’ says Max’s mind, ‘in the car …’

  ‘She said, “You said you’re happy about it but you don’t seem happy.”

  ‘I said, “It’s a lot to take in.”’

  ‘Right there,’ says Max’s mind, ‘is where you should have stopped. Skip to the part where the shit hit the fan.’

  Max says, ‘She said, “Wait a minute – do I smell Lula Mae Flowers again?”’

  Max’s mind says, ‘That’s where I told you to deny everything. And what did you say?’

  ‘“I cheat but I don’t lie,”’ says Max. ‘Then Lola said, “So you’ve slept with her,” and I said, “I’m afraid so.”’

  ‘Because you don’t lie,’ says his mind. ‘You just kill people with the truth.’

  ‘Lola said, “Say more,”’ says Max, ‘“I need to know the whole thing so this day can be complete.” So I said, “She’s …” and Lola said, “O my God. Don’t say it. Say it.”

  ‘“Pregnant,” I said.’

  ‘Stop already,’ says Max’s mind. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Now I’ve lost Lola,’ says Max. ‘And maybe she’s lost the baby. Lost our child.’

  ‘I have nothing to say,’ says his mind.

  33

  Victorian Attitudes

  April 1997. ‘Jesus,’ says Lula Mae. ‘You look like you’ve been dipped in shit three times and pulled out twice.’

  ‘Something like that,’ says Max. They’re at The White Horse again, drinking pints of Bass.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ says Lula Mae. ‘I’ve been calling you and getting the answering machine for the last two and a half weeks.’

  Max tells her where he’s been, who said what, and what happened.

  ‘Poor Lola!’ says Lula Mae. ‘Is the baby all right?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been able to talk to Lola or find out anything about her.’

  ‘So what’s going to happen now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Evasive posture.

  ‘You’re tiptoeing across that road like a possum caught in the headlights.’

  Max lets a What-Can-I-Say? expression appear on his face. High overhead an aeroplane passes, trailing a banner: SAY SOMETHING, MAX.

  ‘I’ll make it easy for you,’ says Lula Mae. ‘You’re only a little bit in love with me, no more than that. And I’m only a little bit in love with you. We’ve given each other a lot of pleasure. That first time at my place you recited “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy Bo” while we made love. It was weird and it was wonderful and we hadn’t ever had anybody like each other before but doing it more times didn’t really take us any further. You know and I know that we haven’t got marriage and a family and growing old together in us. What I do have in me is being a single mum and doing my own thing in the place where I feel best, which is Austin.’

  ‘That was fast. No sooner am I a father-to-be than both my kids-to-be leave me. Is this a record?’

  ‘“There never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, there never was a cowboy that couldn’t be throwed.”’

  ‘True. I guess you did give me fair warning.’

  ‘This is not a sad ending, Max – we’re simply accepting that you can’t pour out of a jug more than you poured into it.’

  ‘There’s no use crying over spilt milk,’ says Max, ‘and certainly a stitch in time saves nine.’

  ‘There you go, and bear in mind that I’ll keep you up to date with letters and photos, plus you can visit as much as you like or even move to Texas if you want to keep an eye on Victor or Victoria.’

  ‘You’ve chosen a name already?’

  ‘Well, I believe any kid of ours will be a winner, so I thought Victor for a boy and Victoria for a girl.’

  Max sees, as in those stop-motion films of flowers unfolding, Victor/Victoria growing from infancy upward. He hopes the child will have Lula Mae’s looks and her brains as well. Tears seem to be running down his cheeks. ‘I’ll help with money,’ he says.

  ‘We can work out the details later,’ says Lula Mae. ‘Maybe the next round should be double scotches. My shout.’

  ‘I hear you,’ says Max.

  ‘Ah,’ says a nearby drinker as Lula Mae’s going-away view passes.

  ‘I know,’ says Max.

  34

  Levy Unburdened

  April 1997. Work has always been the sovereign remedy for Max. Riven as he is by guilt, shame, remorse, doubt and general funk he returns to his Moe Levy pages.

  ‘You took your time,’ says Moe.

  ‘My time took me,’ says Max. ‘Be with you in a moment, got to do the epigraph.’ He gets a book from the shelf and copies the following:

  Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

  Willa Cather, My Antonia

  ‘If I believed that I’d give up right now,’ says Moe. ‘Where are we going with this?’

  ‘Do you want to put down the dwarf or not?’ says Max.

  ‘Not if it means living in the past with nothing to look forward to,’ says Moe.

  ‘Maybe you don’t deserve anything to look forward to,’ says Max. ‘You’re not a good man.’

  ‘So why bother with me? Why not write a nice guy for your protagonist?’

  ‘I work with the material that comes to me and I go where it takes me,’ says Max. ‘Anyhow, no more dwarf, he never happened. We’re scrapping whatever I’ve done so far. This thing now has a title: Her Name Was Lulu.’

  ‘Is that the first line of a song?’ says Moe.

  ‘No,’ says Max. ‘Chapter One is WHEN MOE MET LULU.’

  ‘OK,’ says Moe. ‘Give me good things to remember.’

  ‘More than you deserve,’ says Max.

  ‘Maybe a little mercy along with your justice?’ says Moe. ‘Even bad guys can have things to look forward to.’

  ‘All I can promise is that I’ll explore the material,’ says Max, and he starts typing at a pretty good rate of knots. He met Lola towards the end of December 1996 and he last saw her on the 22nd of March 1997. In t
hose three months they spent a lot of hours together so there’s plenty of material to explore for Moe and Lulu. Moe will fall in love with Lulu when he meets her at the Coliseum Shop and they’ll have many pleasant days and evenings before Moe’s wandering eye gets him into trouble.

  As Max works, his mind is busy sorting words and pictures along with sounds, smells, and the taste and feel of everything in his times with Lola. Just as witnesses under hypnosis recall more than they think they noticed, Max finds details he hadn’t remembered until now. The memories are fresh and vivid, realer than themselves. Like the ribbon on Mai Dun and the mustard on Lola’s chin. There was the time in St Martin’s Lane when they found the drawings of Heinrich Kley in two paperback volumes in the Dover Bookshop. Turning the pages past elephants and crocodiles on ice skates and showjumping centaurs Lola comes upon a naked giantess who is a luxurious landscape on which tiny men climb up and slide down and variously enjoy themselves. ‘What do you think of that?’ she says to Max.

  ‘I’ve always known that women are much bigger than men,’ says Max.

  ‘Discuss,’ says Lola.

  ‘Have you ever seen the Whitbread Brewery horses parked outside The Duke of Cumberland in the New King’s Road?’ says Max.

  ‘Are you going to compare women to horses?’ says Lola.

  ‘In a particular way,’ says Max. ‘I was passing there once while the barrels were being trundled into the cellar. It was raining and those great horses were standing there with the steam coming up off their backs. They have something prehistoric about them, something from before Coca-Cola and McDonald’s and Walt Disney. That’s why people want to be thought well of by horses. They give the Whitbread horses apples and lumps of sugar and they talk to them respectfully. Women have that prehistoric something also. Some men like it, others are scared by it. I like it.’

  ‘Even though I’m smaller than a brewery horse and I’m not much good at pulling a dray?’

  ‘You may be small in beer haulage but you’re big with me,’ says Max.