The plan was to release the book on March sixth, a Monday. Ferguson would celebrate his twentieth birthday in Paris on the third, then take the boat train from the Gare du Nord on the night of the fourth and arrive at Victoria Station on the morning of the fifth. In his most recent dispatches, Aubrey had confirmed that interviews and events had been lined up as promised, including the Laurel and Hardy evening at the National Film Theatre, a program of shorts that would bring together the twenty-minute Big Business, the twenty-one-minute Two Tars, the twenty-six-minute Blotto, and the thirty-minute howler of the century, The Music Box, and once the NFT’s decision was passed on to him, Ferguson spent a full week composing one-page introductions to each of the four films, panicked by the thought of freezing up in front of the audience if he tried to wing it onstage without notes, and because he wanted his little texts to be charming and witty as well as informative, it took many hours of writing and rewriting before he was even remotely satisfied with the results. But what fun that night was going to be—and what a thoughtful and generous thing Aubrey had done for him—and then, just twenty-four hours after he finished the introductions, two advance copies of the book arrived in the afternoon mail on Wednesday, February fifteenth, and for the first time in Ferguson’s experience of the world, the past, the future, and the present were one. He had written the book, and then he had waited for the book, and now the book was in his hands.
He gave one of the copies to Vivian, and when she asked him to sign it for her, Ferguson laughed and said, I’ve never done this before, you know. Where am I supposed to sign it, and what am I supposed to say?
The title page is the traditional spot, Vivian said. And you can say whatever you like. If you can’t think of anything, just sign your name.
No, that won’t do. I have to say something. Give me a minute, all right?
They were in the living room. Vivian was sitting on the sofa with the book in her lap, but instead of sitting down beside her, Ferguson began pacing back and forth in front of her, and after a couple of backs and forths he left the area around the sofa and walked to the farthest wall in the room, turned right and walked to the next wall, then turned right again and walked to the next wall after that, and then he turned around and walked back to the sofa, where he finally sat down next to Vivian.
Okay, he said, I’m ready. Give me the book and I’ll sign it for you.
Vivian said: I think you’re the strangest, funniest person I’ve ever known, Archie.
Yeah, that’s me. A genuine laugh riot. Mr. Ha-Ha in a purple clown suit. Now give me the book.
Vivian handed him the book.
Ferguson found the title page and reached into his pocket for a pen, but just as he was about to begin writing, he paused, turned to Vivian, and said, It’s going to be short. I hope you don’t mind.
No, Archie, I don’t mind. Not in the least.
Ferguson wrote: For Vivian, Beloved friend and savior—Archie.
The earth spun around sixteen more times, and on the evening of March third they celebrated his twentieth birthday with a small dinner at the apartment. Vivian had offered to invite as many others as he wished, but Ferguson had said no others, thank you, he wanted to keep it in the family, which meant the two of them along with Lisa and the absent Albert, who was wandering around the South trying to track down members of his father’s family, and even though Ferguson knew it was ridiculous, he asked Vivian if they could set a place for Albert, in the same spirit as the place that was set for Elijah at Passover, and Vivian, who didn’t think it was ridiculous, asked Celestine to set the table for four. A moment later, she decided to increase the number to six so that Ferguson’s mother and stepfather could be included as well.
He had two days to live, and it was the last time he would ever talk to them, but the phone call had been arranged in advance, and one hour before he sat down to dinner with Vivian and Lisa on the night of the third, his mother and Gil rang from New York to wish him a happy birthday and good luck on his trip to London. Ferguson told Gil that he would be carrying along Our Mutual Friend with him (the ninety-first book on the list), which would keep him company on the two long trips across the Channel (eleven hours each), but he doubted he would have much time for it in London because his schedule had become so crowded there. In any case, there would be only nine books left after this one, and he and Vivian were planning to get through all of them by the end of May, but what a pleasure it was to be living inside that Englishman’s teeming brain, he remarked, and after he and Professor Vivian had polished off number one hundred, he wanted to catch up on all the Dickens novels he still hadn’t read.
Then his mother came on and started talking to him about the weather. England was a wet place, she said, and he should remember to carry an umbrella with him at all times and wear his raincoat and perhaps even buy a pair of rubbers to protect his shoes and feet. On any other day, Ferguson would have felt annoyed. She was talking to him as if he were a seven-year-old child, and normally he would have brushed her off with a groan or laughed her off with some droll and acerbic comment, but on this particular day he didn’t feel annoyed but amused, both warmed and amused by the unending motherness that continued to burn inside her. Of course not, Ma, he said. I won’t go anywhere without my umbrella. I promise.
* * *
AS IT HAPPENED, Ferguson left his umbrella on the train after he arrived in London on the morning of the fifth. He hadn’t meant to lose it, but in the scramble to gather up his belongings and rush out onto the platform to look for Aubrey, the umbrella had been forgotten. And yes, rain was falling on the city that morning, just as his mother had predicted it would, for England was indeed a wet place, and the first thing that struck Ferguson about it were the smells, the assault of new smells that entered his body the instant he left the air of his compartment for the air of the station, smells that were altogether unlike the smells in Paris and New York, a harsher, more stinging atmosphere charged with the mingled emanations of damp woolen jackets and burning coal and moistened stone walls and the smoke of Player’s cigarettes with their too-sweet Virginia tobacco in contrast to the bluntness of Gauloises and the toasty fragrances of Luckys and Camels. A different world. Everything utterly different, and because it was still early March and not yet spring, a new sort of chill in the bones.
And then Aubrey was smiling at him and throwing his little arms around Ferguson’s body, declaring that the bonny boy had alighted at last and what a good week it was going to be for both of them. Off to the cabstand outside, where they huddled together under the dome of Aubrey’s black umbrella and waited their turn, talking first about how happy they were to see each other again, but a few moments later Aubrey the publisher was telling Ferguson the author that the first reviews of the book had started coming in over the past days and that they had all been good except for one, an excellent piece in the New Statesman, a rave in the Observer, but nothing less than good with any of the others except for the pissy nonsense in Punch. How nice, Ferguson said, understanding how much those opinions meant to Aubrey, but he himself felt curiously detached from it all, as if the reviews had been written about someone else’s book, another person with the same name as his, perhaps, but not the person who was stepping into a London taxi for the first time, one of the fabled black elephant cars he had seen in so many films over the years and which turned out to be even bigger than he had imagined, another British thing that was different from American and French things, and how enjoyable it was to be sitting in the huge area in back listening to Aubrey rattle off the names of magazine editors and reviewers he knew nothing about and who were no more real to him than walk-on characters in an eighteenth-century play. Then the cab took off and started heading toward the hotel, and suddenly it was no longer enjoyable but disconcerting and even a bit scary. The steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car, and the driver was driving on the wrong side of the road! Ferguson knew perfectly well that the English did it that way, but he had never experienced it h
imself, and by force of long habit and a lifetime of built-in reflex reactions, his first ride through the London streets had him flinching every time the driver made a turn or another car approached them from the opposite direction, and again and again he had to close his eyes for fear they would crash.
A safe landing at Durrants Hotel at 26 George Street (W1), not far from the Wallace Collection and St. James’s Roman Catholic Church. Durrants as in currants, and Aubrey said he had chosen it for Ferguson because it was so quintessentially British and respectable, not Mod London but an example of what he called Plod London, with a wood-paneled bar on the ground floor that was so stodgy and spectacularly arcane that C. Aubrey Smith was a regular there, even though he had been dead for twenty years.
And besides, the ruler of the elves continued, the beds are ever so comfortable.
You and your dirty mind, Ferguson said. No wonder we get along so well.
Birds of a feather, my young Yankee friend. With dandy doodles in our pants and a fine pair of ponies to take us to town.
Aubrey helped Ferguson check in, but then he had to rush off and go home. It was Sunday, the nanny’s day off, and he had promised to stay with Fiona and the children until teatime, at which point he would return to the hotel for a pony ride and then take Ferguson out to dinner.
Fiona can’t wait to meet you, he said, but it won’t happen until tomorrow, alas.
As for me, I can’t wait until you come back this afternoon. When is teatime, by the way?
For our purposes, anywhere between four and six. You can rest up until then. Those Channel crossings can be brutal on the system, and you must be feeling fried—or at least sautéed.
Believe it or not, I managed to sleep on the train, so I’m good. Uncooked, as it were. Raw and fresh and raring to go.
After Ferguson unpacked, he returned to the ground floor and went into the dining room for breakfast, which was still being served at ten o’clock, and had his first taste of English cuisine, a platter that consisted of one sunny-side-up egg (greasy but delicious), two undercooked rashers of bacon (slightly repellent but delicious), two pork sausages, a thoroughly cooked cooked tomato, and two thick slices of homemade white bread slathered with Devonshire butter that was better than any butter he had ever tasted. The coffee was undrinkable, so he switched to a pot of tea, no doubt the strongest tea anywhere in Christendom, which he had to dilute with hot water before he could get it down his throat, and then he thanked the waiter, stood up from his chair, and trotted off to the gents’ for a long, unhappy session with his rumbling bowels.
He wanted to go out for a walk, but the mild rain that had been falling earlier had turned into a downpour, and rather than go upstairs and lock himself in his room, he decided to visit the famous wood-paneled bar and look for the ghost of C. Aubrey Smith.
The bar was empty at that hour, but no one seemed to mind when he asked if he could sit in there for a while as he waited for the weather to clear (sun was forecast for the afternoon), and because the porter was so friendly about it when he asked the question, Ferguson decided that he liked the English and found them to be a noble, generous people, not stiff in the way the French could be, not angry in the way Americans could be, but good-natured and calm, a tolerant folk who accepted the foibles of their fellow men and didn’t butt in or condemn you for speaking with the wrong accent.
So Ferguson sat down in the vacant wood-paneled bar and mused about the English for a while, in particular about C. Aubrey Smith and the nice but unimportant fact that he, the most English of all English gentlemen, the very embodiment of England for American audiences in countless Hollywood films, had been another ruler of the elves, in this case the elves of Movieland, and before long Ferguson had pulled out the little notebook he carried around in his jacket pocket and was writing down the names of British actors who had worked in California and, to a degree Ferguson had never considered until that morning, had helped create what the world now thought of as American movies. So many names, and so many films with those names on the list of credits, and as Ferguson wrote them down off the top of his head, or rather plucked them out from within his head as each one occurred to him, he included the titles of the movies he had seen those names act in and was astonished by how many there were, an avalanche of films and more films and more and more films, too many films, finally, an appalling number of films, and no doubt there were many others he had forgotten as well.
To begin with the first name on his list, the inevitable Stan, partner of Ollie, born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in the town of Ulverston in 1890 and then taken to America in 1910 with the Fred Karno Company as Charlie Chaplin’s understudy, more than eighty films seen with Stan Laurel in them, more than fifty with Chaplin, and at least twenty with C. Aubrey Smith (including Queen Christina, The Scarlet Empress, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, China Seas, Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Prisoner of Zenda), and hundreds more with Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone, Freddie Bartholomew, Greer Garson, Cary Grant, James Mason, Boris Karloff, Ray Milland, David Niven, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Vivian Leigh, Deborah Kerr, Edmund Gwenn, George Sanders, Laurence Harvey, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Lynn Redgrave, Robert Donat, Leo G. Carroll, Roland Young, Nigel Bruce, Gladys Cooper, Claude Rains, Donald Crisp, Robert Morley, Edna May Oliver, Albert Finney, Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Robert Shaw, Tom Courtenay, Peter Sellers, Herbert Marshall, Roddy McDowall, Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Alan Mowbray, Eric Blore, Henry Stephenson, Peter Ustinov, Henry Travers, Finlay Currie, Henry Daniell, Wendy Hiller, Angela Lansbury, Lionel Atwill, Peter Finch, Richard Burton, Terence Stamp, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, George Arliss, Leslie Howard, Trevor Howard, Cedric Hardwicke, John Gielgud, John Mills, Hayley Mills, Alec Guinness, Reginald Owen, Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and Elizabeth Taylor.
The rain stopped at two, but the sun didn’t come out. Instead, the cloudy sky filled with more clouds, clouds so thick and voluminous that they started to sag, slowly descending from their customary place in the heavens until they touched the ground, and when Ferguson finally stepped out of the hotel for a short walk around the neighborhood, the streets were a labyrinth of fog. Never had he been given so little to see in what was supposedly still the daytime, and he puzzled over how the English could go about their business in these sodden, vaporous murks, but then again, he said to himself, the English were probably on intimate terms with clouds, for if he had learned nothing else from Dickens, it was that the clouds in the sky over London came down for frequent visits among the people, and on a day such as this one it looked as if they had brought along their toothbrushes and were planning to spend the night.
It was a few minutes past three. Ferguson decided he should start walking back to the hotel to prepare himself for Aubrey’s return, which could be as early as four or as late as six, but he wanted to be ready at four in the hope that Aubrey would be able to detach himself from his family early rather than late. A bath or a shower first, and then he would put on the birthday presents Vivian had bought for him in Paris last week, the new pants and the new shirt and the new jacket that made him look like a million bucks, she had said, and he wanted to look like a million bucks for Aubrey in his new clothes, and then the clothes would come off and they would climb onto the bed to do what they had done at the Hôtel George V, and no, he wouldn’t feel guilty about it, he said to himself, he would enjoy it, and as far as Albert was concerned he would console himself by imagining that Mr. Bear was doing the same thing with someone else and enjoying it just as much as he was, and as he walked along thinking about Aubrey and Albert and the differences between them, not only the physical differences between light and dark and large and small but the mental differences and cultural differences and the differences between their outlooks on life, the somber depths of Albert’s heart as opposed to Aubrey’s whimsical good cheer, Ferguson marched on in the direction of the hotel, suddenly shifting his thoughts to the interview he would be doing with som
eone from the Telegraph tomorrow morning at ten, the first interview of his life, and even though Aubrey had told him not to worry and just relax and be himself, he couldn’t help feeling a little worried, and what did it mean to be himself anyway, he wondered, he had several selves inside him, even many selves, a strong self and a weak self, a thoughtful self and an impulsive self, a generous self and a selfish self, so many different selves that in the end he was as large as everyone or as small as no one, and if that was true for him, then it had to be true for everyone else as well, meaning that everyone was everyone and no one at the same time, and with that thought bouncing around in his head he came to the intersection of Marylebone High Street and Blandford Street, at the spot where Marylebone turned into Thayer just around the corner from the hotel on George, and even though the fog was pressing in and wrapping itself around him, Ferguson could make out the blinking red traffic light looming in the blur, a blinking red light that was the equivalent of a stop sign, so Ferguson stopped and waited for a car to pass, and because he was lost in his reveries about everyone and no one, he turned his head and looked to the left, that is, did what he had always done when crossing streets throughout his life, the reflexive, automatic look to the left to make sure no car was coming, forgetting that he was in London and that in English towns and cities one was supposed to look to the right and not to the left, and therefore he did not see the maroon British Ford sweeping around the bend on Blandford, so he stepped off the curb and started to cross the street, not understanding that the car he hadn’t seen had the right of way, and when the car slammed into Ferguson’s body, it hit him so hard that he went flying into the air, as if he were an airborne human missile launched into space, a young man on his way to the moon and the stars beyond, and then he reached the top of his trajectory and started to come down, and when he touched bottom his head landed on the edge of the curb and he cracked his skull, and from that moment on every future thought, word, and feeling that would have been born inside that skull was erased.