The Last Samurai

Six hours went by. I was starving. I forced myself to read H. M. Rosenberg, The Solid State. I tried not to think about food.

At about 11:00 Szegeti came out. He was with another man. The other man was saying: I just thought if I led the king it would open up the diamonds.

Diamonds?

It was the only suit they hadn’t bid.

Neither they had, said Szegeti with a sigh. One would not like to think the spirit of adventure had wholly died out in the modern game, but when one considers the unaccountable, indeed the apparently insuperable reluctance of the average player to bid a suit on a void or singleton! Not to mention the pusillanimity of the partnership de nos jours which meanly settles for a suit where it has found a fit rather than moving on to explore uncharted waters. We live in a degenerate age.

Last time you said I should obviously have led the king.

Did I? Then I take it all back. You must certainly lead the king every chance you get. No need to mull over your lead if you’ve a king in your hand. If anyone looks surprised you may say that you have it on my authority that to lead the king is the quintessence of sound play. But here is my taxi.

He got into the taxi, and it drove off.

I had no idea where it was going.

The man left behind was staring after it. I ran up behind him and said breathlessly:

Excuse me! I was told to deliver something urgently to Mr. Szegeti at his club and now I’ve just missed him—do you know where he’s going?

Haven’t a clue. He’s gone off Caprice; you could try Quaglino’s. Do you play bridge?

No. Where’s Quaglino’s?

Oh good Lord, you can’t—that is, he’s in a filthy mood about something or other and if he’s meeting someone he won’t want you barging in. Why don’t you leave it at the club?

Where’s Quaglino’s?

Isn’t it rather late for you to be out?

Where’s Quaglino’s?

He probably isn’t there anyway.

Then it doesn’t matter if you tell me where it is, does it?

No, well, Bury Street, if you must know.

Where’s that?

Miles away.

I went back to Green Park. The Tube would close in an hour. He would probably go off in a taxi again and I would not be able to follow because I only had my Travelcard and a pound. Still, maybe something would turn up.

I asked at the assistance window where Bury Street was and the man said it was just around the corner. I looked at the local area map and sure enough it was just around the corner, about a ten-minute walk from Half Moon Street. Would anyone take a taxi for that kind of distance? But it was my only lead so I walked up Piccadilly and down St. James’s Street and over to Bury Street, and I looked at Quaglino’s but you couldn’t see much from the outside. I couldn’t tell whether anyone in a white suit was inside or not.

I sat on a doorstep across the street from Quaglino’s and tried to read The Solid State, but the light was too bad. So I started reciting Iliad 1. I am planning to learn the whole thing in case I am thrown in jail some day.

People went in and out of Quaglino’s. I finished Iliad 1; it was still only 12:30. A couple of people stopped and asked if I was all right. I said I was. I started going through weak Arabic verbs. My favourites are the double and triple weak verbs because they practically shut down in the imperative, but I made myself start with initial hamza and work through.

It was a good thing I did. An hour went by; I thought he must have gone somewhere else. I might as well go home. But I’d reached my favourite verb in the whole language & I thought I would go through that first and give it just a little longer. The strange thing about is this: here is a triliteral verb in which all three letters are ya; a verb which only occurs in Form II, with the middle ya reduplicated (unfortunately this means the final ya is then written alif, but you can’t have everything); a verb which means ‘to write the letter ya’ (Wright) or ‘to write a beautiful ya’ (Haywood and Nahmad)! This has got to be the best verb in the language—and Wehr doesn’t even bother to put it in the dictionary! Wright, believe it or not, only mentions it to say he isn’t going to discuss it because it’s rare! Blachère doesn’t even mention it! Haywood/Nahmad is the only one to give it decent coverage, and even they don’t give the imperative. They do give the jussive, which apparently is yuyayyi; I think this means the imperative would be yayyi. So I sat across from Quaglino’s saying yayya yayyat yayyayta yayyayti yayyaytu quietly to myself, and I thought that if he didn’t come out by the end I’d go through Form IX (which Blachère calls nettement absurde) just for the fun of it & maybe Form XI which is the intensified form of IX & presumably so absurd it’s off the charts. IX is for colours & deformities & XI is to be blackest black or whitest white. The painter would have liked that. He could do a piece called Let IX = XI. Let Deformity = Colour. Forget it.