"It's all right," he said stoically. He was on his knees, gathering up his leaflets, and I knelt to help him. The leaflets had a black-and-white drawing of an atomic bomb explosion, and the motto, KEEP THE WORLD FROM GOING UP IN SMOKE. "Banning the bomb?" I asked.
"Yes," he said gloomily. "Not that it's doing any good. But you have to keep on."
I looked at him more closely. He was wearing a black crew-neck sweater, which I found quite dashing. A melancholy fighter for almost-lost causes, idealistic and doomed, sort of like Lord Byron, whose biography I had just been skimming. We finished collecting the pamphlets, I fell in love, and we went for a drink at the nearest pub. That wasn't hard to maneuver: all I had to do was express interest in the cause. I would've preferred it if he'd had a British accent; unfortunately he was only a Canadian, like me, but I overlooked this defect.
While Arthur stood in line at the bar for my double Scotch and his Guinness - when he drank at all, he tended to drink things that were supposed to have health-giving minerals in them - I felt anxiously through my brain for whatever scraps of political lore might have lodged there inadvertently, like bits of spinach among front teeth. I'd presented myself as someone who was at least semi-informed; now I'd have to come across. I even took out the pamphlets I'd been handed and glanced rapidly through them, hoping for some hint or topic. Do you know that DOG spelled backwards is GOD? one of them began, DOG, apparently, was the fourth member of the Holy Trinity, and was going to be in on the Last Judgment. The other pamphlet was more orthodox: Armageddon was at hand and if you wanted to come out of it you had to lead a pure life.
When Arthur returned with the drinks I was ready for him. Whenever the conversation got too specific, I switched the subject to the plight of the Palestinian refugees. I knew quite a lot about this from my days in the U.N. Club at Braeside High. At the time, this area was obscure enough to catch Arthur's attention, and I was ashamed to see that he was moderately impressed.
I let him walk me as far as the Marble Arch tube station. I couldn't invite him home with me, I explained, because I shared a flat with a clerk-typist who was very fat and homely, and who became quite unhappy and depressed if I asked any men into the flat for whatever reason. It was best to avoid phoning, I told him, but if he could give me his number.... He didn't have a phone, but, even better, he invited me to a rally the next day. Faint with lust, I went to the public library - the same one where I got my costume books - and took out all of Bertrand Russell's books I could find, which caused some difficult moments with Paul when he came across them. "Communistic trash," he raged. "I will not allow them within my household."
"I was only doing research," I said. "I thought I might do something a little more modern this time, set in the twenties."
"It will not sell," said Paul. "If you raise the skirts and cut the hair, it will not sell. They prefer it if the woman should retain her mystery. As I do," he added, kissing me on the collarbone.
At one time I would have found remarks like this very European and charming, but they were beginning to irritate me. "Some mystery," I said, "if all it takes is a few yards of cloth and a wig. Men are mysterious too, you know, and I don't notice them wearing ringlets and waltz-length ball gowns."
"Ah, but the mystery of man is of the mind," Paul said playfully, "whereas that of the woman is of the body. What is a mystery but a thing which is remaining hidden? It is more easy to uncover the body than it is the mind. For this reason, a bald man is not looked upon as an unnatural horror, but a bald woman is."
"And I suppose a moronic woman is more socially acceptable than an idiot man," I said, intending sarcasm.
"Just so," said Paul. "In my country they were often used as the lowest form of prostitute, whereas a man with no mind, for him there was no use." He smiled, feeling he'd proved his point.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," I said. I stomped out to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. Paul was puzzled. He was also suspicious: he still couldn't understand my sudden interest in Bertrand Russell.
I had a lot of trouble with these books, and, I discovered, with theories and politics in general. I didn't want to be blown up by an atomic bomb, but on the other hand I couldn't believe that anything I could do would prevent it. I might as well be trying to abolish the automobile: if I got run over by one, I'd be just as dead, I reasoned. I thought Lord Russell had a very appealing face, though, and I immediately gave him a bit part in Escape from Love as a benevolent old eccentric who rescues Samantha Deane in Hyde Park by beating her assailant over the head with his umbrella. ("Take that, sir! Are you all right, my dear?" "How can I ever express my gratitude?" "I see you are well brought up, and I believe your explanation. Allow me to offer you asylum for the night.... My housekeeper will lend you a nightgown. Mrs. Jenkins, a cup of tea, if you please, for this young lady.") I even supplied him with a hobby - he raised guppies - which made me feel quite friendly towards all his frontispieces and able to tolerate his policies and the awe-tinged admiration with which Arthur regarded him.
If Arthur had known about my little dramatization of Lord Russell, he would've been appalled. "Trivializing," he would have called it, and did call it in later years, when I was less able to conceal this particular habit of mind. Also when I was less willing to simulate adoration of Arthur's hero-of-the day: Arthur was fickle, he changed allegiances, and after I'd been through this a few times I became wary. "What about Mrs. Marx?" I would say, or, "I bet Marx's wife wanted him to be a doctor." All I would get would be a disgusted look, so I would go into the kitchen and fantasize about the home life of Marx. "Not tonight, dear, I have a headache, you intellectuals are all the same, mooning around, why don't you get out there and make something of yourself if you're so smart, god knows you have the talent."
I thought of Castro as a tiger in bed though, with those cigars and that beard, which would explain his vogue in North America. But Mao was my favorite, you could tell he liked to eat. I pictured him wolfing down huge Chinese meals, with relish and no guilt, happy children climbing all over him. He was like an inflated Jolly Green Giant except yellow, he wrote poetry, he had fun. He was fat but successful and he didn't take any shit about it. The home life of Stalin was boring, too much was known about it, he was such a puritan anyway. But Mao, what a garden of delights. He encouraged jugglers and spectacles, he liked the color red and flags and parades and table tennis; he knew the people needed food and escape, not just sermons. I liked to think about him in the bathtub, all covered with soap, like an enormous cherub, beaming away and very appreciative while some adoring female - me! - scrubbed his back.
As far as I was concerned, it was impossible to love a theory. I didn't love Arthur for his theories, although they lent him a kind of impersonal grandeur, like a crimson-lined opera cloak. I loved him for the way his ears stuck out, just slightly; for the way he pronounced certain words - "aunt," for instance, and "grass." Being from the Maritimes, he said ahnt and grahss, whereas I was from Ontario and said ant and graass. I found this exotic. I loved his deliberate threadbareness, his earnest idealism, his ridiculous (to me) economies - he used tea bags twice - the way he stuck his finger in his ear, his farsightedness and the battered reading glasses he had to wear for it. Once I said, "I guess that's why you like me, you can't see what I look like up close." It was a little early to make this joke; he said, "No, that isn't the reason." Then there was a long, awkward pause, as if he was trying to think very hard about the reason he did like me. Or perhaps, I thought with a sinking of the stomach, about whether he liked me at all.
This was a problem. I couldn't tell what Arthur felt about me, if anything. He seemed to enjoy discussing the philosophy of civil disobedience with me, or rather telling me about it, for I was wise enough not to reveal my ignorance and mostly nodded. He allowed me to go around handing out leaflets with him, and ate with relish the sandwiches I would bring on these occasions. He told me about his background, his father the judge, his mother the religious nut. His father had wanted
him to be a lawyer, his mother had insisted he be a medical missionary at the very least. He'd thwarted both of them by going into Philosophy, but he hadn't been able to stick it through all the syllogisms ("A bald man is bald," he said, "what does that have to do with the human condition?" and for once I could agree without hypocrisy ... until I started thinking about it; what if you were a bald man?). He'd left after his third year, to take a break and meditate on the true path. (That was the difference between us: for Arthur there were true paths, several of them perhaps, but only one at a time. For me there were no paths at all. Thickets, ditches, ponds, labyrinths, morasses, but no paths.)
Then he'd gotten involved in the ban-the-bomb movement, which had absorbed him for two years. He'd devoted a lot of time and energy to the movement, but somehow he was still on the fringes, a leaflet man. Perhaps it was because he was a Canadian.
I radiated sympathy and understanding. We were sitting in a cheap restaurant, which smelled of lamb fat, eating plates of fried eggs, chips and peas, which was what Arthur mostly ate. He was running out of money; soon he'd have to take another occasional job, sweeping floors or folding napkins or, worst of all, washing dishes; either that or accept what he considered his parents' bribery and go back to school at the University of Toronto, which he hated with a cool, abstract passion.
His Earlscourt flat had a small kitchen, but he didn't like cooking, and the kitchen itself was a shambles. He shared the flat with two other men, a New Zealander who was studying at the London School of Economics and who ate cold, ketchup-covered canned baked beans and left the unwashed plates around like the scenes of tiny slaughters, and a gazelle-eyed radical from India who cooked brown rice and curries for himself and also left the plates around. Arthur was fastidious; he didn't like messes. But he was so fastidious he wouldn't clean them up, so we ate out. Once or twice I went over and tidied the kitchen for them, but this had no good effects and a couple of bad ones. Arthur was given another false impression about me: I wasn't at heart a kitchen-tidier, and he was disappointed later when he found this out. The New Zealander, whose name was Slocum, pursued me around the kitchen with pleas ("Be a sport, I haven't had one bit since I got to this bleeding cold-hearted country, not one bit"), and the Indian radical lost the initial respect he'd had for me as a politico of sorts and began to make cow-eyes and flare his nostrils. One could not, apparently, be both a respected female savant and a scullery maid.
Meanwhile, I couldn't get any further with Arthur than holding hands; and life with Paul was becoming more and more insupportable. What if he were to follow me, find me handing out leaflets with Arthur, and challenge him to a duel, or something equally upsetting? It was Arthur I loved, not Paul, I decided. I took drastic measures.
I waited till Paul had left for the bank; then I packed everything I owned, including my typewriter and the half-finished manuscript of Escape from Love. I scribbled a note for Paul. I wanted to say, "Darling, it's better this way," but I knew this was not dramatic enough, so instead I wrote, "I have been making you unhappy and we cannot go on like this. It was not to be." I didn't think he would be able to trace me, and I didn't really think he would try. Still, he was a great one for points of honor. Perhaps he would materialize in the doorway one evening with some grotesque, theatrical weapon, a paper knife or a straight razor. I didn't see him using the revolver; it was too modern. Before I could lose my nerve, I bundled all my luggage into a taxi, and unbundled it onto Arthur's doorstep. He would be home, I knew, I'd checked it out the day before.
"I've been evicted," I told him.
He blinked. "Just like that?" he said. "I think that's illegal."
"Well, it's happened," I said. "Because of my political sympathies. The landlord found some of those leaflets ... he's violently right-wing, you know. There was a terrible row." (This was a version of the truth, I felt. Paul was the landlord, sort of, and he was right-wing. Nevertheless I was an impostor, and I felt like one.)
"Oh," said Arthur. "Well, in that case...." I was a political refugee. He invited me in so we could consider what I should do, and he even helped me carry the luggage up the stairs.
"I don't have any money," I said, over a cup of tea which I'd made myself in the filthy kitchen. Neither did Arthur. Neither did either of his roommates, he knew for a fact. "I don't know anyone else in London."
"I guess you can sleep on the sofa," he said, "until you get a job." What else could he say? We both looked at the sofa, which was ancient and lumpy; stuffing dripped from its mangled side.
I slept on the sofa for two nights; after that I slept with Arthur. We even made love. I'd been expecting fervor of a kind, because of his politics, but the first few times it was a lot more rapid than I was used to. "Arthur," I said tactlessly, "have you ever slept with a woman before?" There was a pause, during which I could feel his neck muscles tense. "Of course I have," Arthur said coldly. It was the only direct lie he ever consciously told me.
Once I was there, installed in his own house under his very nose, Arthur began to pay more attention to me. He even became affectionate, in his own way; he would brush my hair for me, clumsily but with concentration, and he would sometimes come up behind me and hug me, apropos of nothing, as if I were a teddy bear. I myself was bliss-filled and limpid-eyed: the right man had come along, complete with a cause I could devote myself to. My life had significance.
There were difficulties, though: the Indian and the New Zealander were ubiquitous, opening our door in the mornings to borrow shillings from Arthur, the New Zealander leering, the Indian remote with the ascetic disapproval he'd assumed as soon as he found out we were sleeping together. Or the New Zealander would sit on the sofa, listening to his transistor radio and doing rapid calculations under his breath, while the Indian took baths, leaving the wet towels on the floor; he was fond of saying that no one understood the evils of the class system the way he did, since he'd been raised in it, but he couldn't get over the habit of regarding anyone who picked up a towel as a servant. Both resented my presence; or rather, they resented what they regarded as Arthur's good fortune. Arthur himself wasn't conscious of their resentment, or of his good fortune either.
The other difficulty was that I could find neither time nor space to work on Escape from Love. When Arthur went out, he expected me to go with him; and if by any chance I could avoid that, one of the others was sure to be there. I kept the manuscript in a locked suitcase, as I suspected the New Zealander of snooping in our room. One day I returned to find that the Indian had hocked my typewriter. He'd repay me later, he promised, but after that I resented every grain of brown rice he ate. I didn't have enough money left to get it out of the pawnshop myself, and I'd counted on at least two hundred pounds for the finished work. I grew daily and secretly more desperate. Arthur didn't know about this problem; he kept wondering why I hadn't yet got a job as a waitress. In the fictitious past I'd constructed for his benefit I'd included a few items of truth, and I'd told him I had once been a waitress. I also told him I'd once been a cheerleader, and we laughed together over my politically misguided past.
When I'd been with them three weeks I was almost broke. Nevertheless, one day I blew a few precious shillings on some remnant material for bathroom curtains, a red-and-orange floral print. They'd make the bathroom less chilly and cavernous, I thought. I was going to sew them myself, by hand. I'd never sewn anything before in my life. I came up the stairs, humming to myself, and unlocked the door of the flat.
There, standing in the middle of the parlor floor, was my mother.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
How had she found me?
She was standing, very upright, on the clay-colored rug, dressed in her navy-blue suit with the white collar; her white gloves, hat and shoes were immaculate, and she was clutching her purse under her arm. Her face was made up, she'd drawn a bigger mouth around her mouth with lipstick, but the shape of her own mouth showed through. Then I saw that she was crying, soundlessly, horribly; mascara was running from her e
yes in black tears.
Through her back I could see the dilapidated sofa; it looked as though the stuffing was coming out of her. The hair on the back of my neck bristled, and I leapt back through the front door, shut it behind me, and leaned against it. It was her astral body, I thought, remembering what Leda Sprott had told me. Why couldn't she keep the goddamned thing at home where it belonged? I pictured my mother floating over the Atlantic Ocean, her rubber band getting thinner and thinner the farther it was stretched; she'd better be careful or she'd break that thing and then she'd be with me forever, lurking around in the parlor like a diaphanous dustball or a transparent Kodak slide of herself taken in 1949. What did she want from me? Why couldn't she leave me alone?
I opened the door again, to confront her and have it out finally; but she was gone.
I immediately rearranged all the furniture, which was difficult as it was old and heavy. Then I went through the flat, checking for open windows, but there weren't any. How had she gotten in?
I didn't tell the others about this visitation. They were a little put out about the furniture; not that they cared, but they felt I should have consulted them. "I was trying to save you the trouble," I said. "I just think it looks better this way." They put it down to housewifely instincts and forgot about the incident. I didn't, though: if my mother had managed to get her astral body across the Atlantic Ocean once, she'd be able to do it again, and I didn't welcome the next visit. I wasn't sure that rearranging the furniture would keep her out. Leda Sprott had used it for unfriendly spirits, but my mother wasn't a spirit.
I got the telegram five days later. It had been sitting in Canada House for four days; I'd continued to get my mail there and I'd used it as my return address on the infrequent postcards I'd been sending my father, in case my mother should ever have taken it into her head to sleuth me out and hunt me down. I didn't pick up my mail very often, because all I ever got was the occasional postcard from my father, with a picture of the Toronto skyline as seen at night from Centre Island - he must've bought several dozen of them at once - and the message, "Everything all right here," as if he were sending me a report card.
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