TESSA'S COCKTAIL.

The hotel stood a hundred yards up from the bank of the river. Ivy gripped and sucked at the flight of steps, down which with such a deceptive wildness it seemed to be flowing like a cascade. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. The famous group of writers were taking cocktails in “The Literary Bar”. It was what the hotel liked to call “Happy hour”, often a misnomer for both words.

“Isn’t it a piece of fiction short enough to be read at one sitting?” said Nadine in her clipped matter of fact South African accent.

“I think it’s probably more than that,” said Elizabeth plumb in mouth sherry in gloved hand.

“One needs to have been seduced as the sun set its light; slowly melted the landscape, till everything was made of fire and glass.” She paused for dramatic effect. “ One needs ..…. Irishness.”

“I’ll drink to that Miss Bowen,” said Joyce raising his glass of Guinness. “Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!” he uttered in corrupt Gaelic as a toast, the white froth sticking to his top lip.

“Chin chin.” Kipling tilted his London gin and let the exciting Indian tonic bubbles dance beneath his moustache.

“Novellas, a frenzy of writing, French language and a first-person narrative. They clothed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was for, it was to get me started. When it was gone I would have to get more, if I wanted to go on.” Beckett was being obscure.

“True words.” Borges cut in. “ If I had written in French they’d all be reading me enthusiastically in bad translations.” The Argentinean paused like a mathematician working out a problem and then re-emerged from his thought labyrinths. “ On page 278 of his book La Poesia , Bari, 1942, Croce, abbreviating a Latin text of the historian Peter the Deacon, narrates the destiny and cites the epitaph of Droctulft; both these moved me singularly; later I understood why.”

“London in the blitz did it for me of course and Boar’s Hill.” Elizabeth cut in. She was slipping back to memories of Oxford. Kipling nearly choked on his drink.

“Please reassure me my good woman that you are not alluding in any way to my stories from the Civil and Military Gazette, Plain Tales from the Hills.”

Elizabeth smiled.

“Why certainly not my dear Mr Kipling or may I call you Rudyard?” Kipling waved his arm with approval and Elizabeth continued. “ Far from boring. A colourful collection of stories in deed.”

“I tried. One of the many curses of our life in India is the want of atmosphere in the painter’s sense.” Kipling sipped at his gin.

“If I’m not mistaken” said Elizabeth “your collection is dedicated to the wittiest woman in India.”

“Argh yes madam. All things considered, she was under an obligation, but not exactly as she meant.”

“Mr Kipling makes exceedingly good fakes if you ask me.” No one in the room was but Nadine gave her opinion anyway.

“Nobel of you my dear” said Kipling generously.

“Nobel for us both” said Nadine.

“Snap!” said Beckett. The others laughed politely with the trio of winners.

James Joyce cradled his nearly empty beer glass and held it up to the light and studied the remnants of the black brew as it swirled under its white top. He spoke through his glass almost suggesting another toast.

“Gazing up in to the darkness” he took the final swig “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger. I’ll have another Guinness.”

“Shall I fetch you another Joyce?” Beckett got up and headed for the bar a small gold coin shone in the palm.

Nadine lent across the table and grabbed a handful of nuts. She knew that Kipling had been to Africa and she was in name-dropping mode.

“The party was an unusual one for Johannesburg. A young man called Derek Ross had white friends and black friends, Indian friends and friends of mixed blood, and sometimes he liked to invite them all to his flat at once.”

Kipling tutted gravely.

“A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.”

“I agree Rudyard.” Elizabeth was trying to flirt. “Why not pick on some place where you know someone?” She aimed at Kipling with Nadine as the target.

“We were living in the Congo at the time, I was nineteen.” Nadine replied through a mouthful of nuts. She seemed to slip into a trance. “It is another world, that dream, where no wind blows colder than the warm breath of two who are mouth to mouth.” Nadine looked close to tears. The group fell silent for a moment and then Elizabeth struck.

“He was the password, but not the answer: it was to coarse finality that she turned.” Elizabeth was perhaps jealous of the way that Nadine had managed her sexuality. Politics too. Like the ivy on the steps one clung to the other with inseparability in Nadine’s plot.

Borges fingered his wine glass like a detective and put it down on the glass-topped table. He spoke like an educated Spaniard, his rich soothing tone a tonic for Nadine’s emotion.

“True also was the outrage she had suffered: only the circumstances were false, the time and one or two proper names.”

“Not Orphee.” It was the first time Alice Munro had spoken for a while. She pulled up a chair and joined the others placing her tumbler of Canadian Club on the glass tabletop.

“No. Never him” she reflected almost to herself. Borges seemed to consider the interruption but then carried on.

“Perhaps the stories I have related are one single story. The obverse and the reverse of this coin are, for God, the same.”

Beckett returned with two refilled glasses. “Always the poet Jorge Luis, always the poet. But then dear fellow I could not imagine sharing a prize with any one so worthy.”

“I can hear you Samuel but I’m damned if I can see you. Perhaps that’s the way you want it?” Borges eyes were not as sharp as his wit.

“Oui, C’est vrai.” Beckett started in French, then ran on in English. “The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on. Here’s your ale Joyce.”

Alice Munro took some nuts. She had some other “big” names of her own.

“Dear R.” she looked at Kipling in an all too intimate way. “My father and I watched Kennedy debate Nixon.” Kipling looked as though he couldn’t have cared less.

“It was like the crowing of the cock.” Elizabeth laughed and her earrings wobbled in appreciation.


“Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and centuries. Nixon sucks.” Borges didn’t like American politics. Kipling was less direct.

“To rear a boy under what parents call the ‘sheltered life system’ is, if the boy must go into the world and fend for himself, not wise.”

Nadine agreed and nodded furiously. She didn’t often agree with Kipling’s view of separate development.

“It is not generally known – and it is never mentioned in the official biographies – that the Prime Minster spent the first eleven years of his life, as soon as he could be trusted not to get under a car, leading his uncle about the streets.”

Joyce was moved and in moving spilt some white foam from the top of his pint glass. It spewed down on to the glass-topped table and ran off on to the page with the typing on it. Joyce dipped his finger in the liquid trail and brought it up to his lips. He then uttered these words like an old soldier standing at a war memorial or as some dear friend might eulogise at a funeral.

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Joyce’s beer had made the words distort on the white page.

“I do not know which of us has written this page,” said Borges picking it up and waving it dry.

But had they looked carefully they would all have understood that each of them had had their part in Tessa’s cocktail.