Press Party

By ROBERT ROBINSON HE man who received the invitation can't use it because he is coitering an exhibition of spirit paintings. How is it you t. ot ono ? " Jackie Sharpshoot. We were on that weekend round the coalfields. He knows them.' ' Ah.' So he gives it to me. YOU ARE INVITED TO DRINKS ON THE OCCASION—it says on the roneoed sheet, the invitation. Well, I do not know Jackie Sharpshoot. I shall probably know none of the people who are drinking. I am not sure I know how to get there. The place is somewhere in the City. A policeman points: 'You see where that gentleman in the striped trousers. . . I think, can I go into somewhere where gentlemen in striped trousers are drinking, on the strength of a roneoed sheet of paper given to me by a man who knows Jackie Sharpshoot ?

But the man in the striped trousers turns a different corner, and I pull up in a row of dignified dirty buildings which are Probably Counting Houses. The spirit of the street alarms me: that roneoed sheet, if it comes to a dispute 1 think I shall not produce it at all. 'This person says ho knows a man called Sharpshoot. Not on 'Change, I. think. It will be best if he leaves immediately. . .

When I find the entrance, I go in. I am not expecting a Young lady in pirate's tricorne and tights to thrust herself at me and stick a small label into my buttonhole. But she does. I catch sight of heavy men in library-frames welcoming people, ever more praising them, and saying: 'Glad you could slip off the leash, old boy, and get along. Grape-juice over there, real stuff at the other end.' I have been here before.

In a room bright with arc lamps set up to facilitate the Newsreel, gentlemen of fifty in dark double-breasted suits and big silvery ties, with faces cast in red marshmallow, are Perpetually meeting each other. They stand with their elbows , crooked, and shatter each other with laughs that sound like tumultuous sneezes. I know that it will never become quite Clear who they are. The whiter-haired among them, those who look most like cigar advertisements, make a point of shaking hands with the international ballet stars who are here in sensible shoes, of hailing the TV personalities in the blazers and tea-gowns: and when they are doing neither, they are slipping their arms over the shoulders of short, wriggling, flattered associates.

The waiters in fancy dress look like members of the Bullingdon, and stand behind tablefuls of drink. The ladies in the tights are making a progress, with canapes. There is a three-piece band. There are lots of other people. There are blonde bedsocky Chaps in tweeds, and dark Hebrew clever-looking men. There are people who look as though they might be lawyers with rich feature-page concessions in the evening newspapers. There are people who are probably agents. There are a lot of men with large oblong boxes hung round their necks on cruel straps who do not look as if they have the Vote: these are photo- graphers. Behind each film-star stands a man who may be a domestic chaplain, if he is not an accountant. And the rest of the people are the Press.

I see one I know, and cry : Stetson, whose is the advantage, why are these things given ‘? '

How do you mean ? '

I mean, does someone think everyone is going back to write direct, " laudatory, explicit paragraphs saying. I was drinking today at the show-rooms of those self-effacing people? . .

Yes.'

But they don't, they never do.'

That's right.'

I can't understand it, then. They keep on giving them, time and time and time again. Things like this, or other things. And no one ever does. I can't understand it.'

'No.'

I wonder if Jackie Sharpshoot is here. He pervades the occasion like an all-fathering all-presence, he who has toured coalfields. eaten chicken puffs to launch hair-styles, sipped gin in the interests of American crooners, who has had one for the road at exhibitions of component parts.

One young man from a university stands beside me, talking to another young man from a university : 'I see your column.'

'You're still with the agency ? '

'The way we live ! '

Better than office stuff.'

'Better than that.'

Suddenly there is a pause: perhaps we have all gone down with simultaneous strokes. A foreign gentleman is delivering an address, a vote of thanks, a funeral oration, a humorous monologue. But the pauses at this party are artificial.

Would all you good people care to pause again ? ' says the man from the Newsreel. While we have the peroration over.' Zer love of laughter amongst other sings halping towards a heppy and united. . . I think carefully, with a glass in my hand, there is nothing real anywhere. But my eye lights on the waiters. They have stopped opening bottles and stand with their arms folded the way other people compress their lips. That's the lot, sir.' They are cruel rocks in a cosmopolitan sea, heirs of all the footmen who ever snubbed the ungenuine article. I realise suddenly that I have drunk quite a lot. I say confidentially to my acquaintance: There is a man I am most anxious to meet, whose acquaintance would mean a lot, a very great deal, very much to me. I refer to old Jackie Sharpshoot. Is it possible that you are in a position to afford me, to bring me where, confront. . . . '

But I do not think he can. I sail away, tacking through the double-breasted dark-grey sea, down silvery necktie channels, by well-cut navy-blue lagoons, to the door.

A man is shaking hands with everybody as they leave.

'Fine, old boy. Lovely to have you with us. Wonderful. Great. Fine. OK. Fine. Old boy. OK, old boy. Wonderful. Fine. Old boy.'

I say to him : I had hoped to run into my old friend Jackie Sharpshoot, we met upon a tour of a fashionable coalfield, no doubt you were on it yourself. . .

I go out into the banks and the rain, smelling like the Duke of Clarence, and pass through the City land of low brick walls, wondering if I am pursued by a flying figure, Sharpshoot, striding ghostly over the little walls, his bow-tie spinning, and the thin hair streaming away beneath his porkpie hat.