Free St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler Page A

pinta, end it with a Horlick’s. Whom Guinness Was Good For. Backing Britain. Because Labor had Soul. Harry, urged to go to work on an egg.
    Into the crammed underground, old bastards gargling their phlegm (“We’re on our way, brothers!”) and mustachioed girls depositing their gum everywhere (Gala Is A Girl Like You), he was assailed again by posters of bikinied girls, their legs widespread for entry, enticing him to the beaches of Malta or Majorca. Girls clutching a bottle of sherry to their bare breasts, fondling it, beseeching him to “Drink …” Girls with the longest legs imaginable, lubricant girls, rolling nylons on like condoms. Girls snuggling into bras andrising from the bath, towel ready to drop, if only he’d hurry and join the queue outside the Old Compton or the new Windmill, unzipping and sliding his mac over his lap to whack off for the big scene.
    Yes, yes indeed, everybody else, everywhere else, was getting his. Everybody with money that is.
    Ascending at Oxford Street, squeezed into an escalator spilling over with tit and bum, with self-satisfied teenage girls in minis. Sleepy-eyed and no wonder. Grudging insolent shorthand/typists or shop assistants by day they were, but pill-crazed groupies by night, plaster casters maybe, the window ledges of their bed-sitters choked with the imprints of lumpenproletariat cocks. But with no time for Harry, born too late. Who didn’t strum the guitar badly or wear his hair down to his shoulders. Who just happened to prefer Beethoven to the Rolling Stones. Who had a social conscience.
    Drawn to the newsstand, buffeted as he vacillated, Harry, unable to pass it by as he had yesterday and the day before, not buying
Mayfair
, snatched it in a rage this morning, if only to see what lies they were purveying now. THE NUDEST NATHALIE DELON. SUSAN STRASBERG STRIPS. SCRUMPTIOUS SALLY’S ALLEY IS A SENSUAL PLACE TO BE . Stuffing the magazine into his briefcase, Harry turned into Soho Square, then the lift, off at the fifth floor and right to his cell, where basketsful of other people’s prodigious expenses awaited his incomparable fiddling.
    Come noon, Father Oscar Hoffman, A.F.A., A.A.I.A., breezed past, raining smiles like blessings, off to a two-hour business lunch at the White E.
    â€“ I’m told, Eisenthal says, his eyes watchful, that Triplex Tube is ripe for a takeover. What do you hear, Oscar?
    â€“ Bricks and mortar. Put it in bricks and mortar and you can’t go wrong.
    Harry, in a playful mood, invited the enormous Sister Pinsky to lunch, trying not to imagine how many pleats there were in herstomach and what agony it must be to support such pie-size breasts. “Come away with me, Sandra, we’ll pool our vouchers and have us an orgy.”
    â€œOh, you’re a terror, Harry.”
    A ton of flesh quaking away.
    â€œWould you drop your knickers to pose for a magazine, Sandra? Like Nathalie Delon?”
    â€œFor me,” she replied, heaving, “it would have to be a double-page spread at least.”
    Sister Pinsky was reading a biography of King Farouk, of all people.
    â€œFor me,” she said, “it symbolizes a classically misspent life.”
    Oh, Sandra, give me Farouk’s life, and I shall take his squalid death. Allow me thirty-room hotel suites, belly dancers, and beauty queens. Make me squander my nights gambling a hundred thousand pounds away. Let me know every call girl in Rome by name and pubis and you know what, darling, you can have my office to call your own. Everything in my building society account. My insurance. My pension scheme. My cameras. My past, my present, my future.
    Back to his cell and the never-ending other people’s bills and ledgers and fiddling.
    It was three thirty before a merry Father Hoffman sailed past, tacking to say hello.
    â€œDo you know who was sitting at the next table?”
    Harry attended with a smile.
    â€œWarren Beatty with a real