I nearly slipped off the seat at the idea of the great Claud Moggerhanger spilling his past every Tuesday and Thursday on a headshrinker’s couch. In fact, when the humorous point had gone, it actually disturbed me to think of it. ‘What does he go there for?’
She took the cigarette I offered. ‘Maybe to relax, to pass the time. He’s nowhere near barmy, believe me. But he likes to keep up to date with the fads. All the Moggerhangers do.’
‘Even you?’
‘You just tell me what you want out of life,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll tell you.’
‘I don’t want to have to wonder what I want,’ I said, doing my best. ‘I want to live so that I never have to stop to ask myself what my ambition is or what I’m going to do. That’s what everybody does. They want this job or that house or a car. They want to become a foreman, a director, or a manager. They have hopes of owning this or that, or they set their target on marrying a certain woman who it looks impossible for them to get. And when they have all these things they’ll want something else, and when there’s nothing else for them to want, or their spirit is so broken that they can’t want or strive for anything in any case, they have a convenient accident and die, or just die. To want is the Devil’s own trick. To live without wanting is God’s blessing – though I don’t believe in God or the Devil. Yet it was a black day in my life when I switched from not wanting to wanting, and I don’t know when it happened. Probably before I was born, when I was still in my mother, or during the few minutes before my first feed. But I still only swing between the two like a skinned monkey looking for its skin. One minute I want, and the next minute I’m full of innocence. It’s all mixed up mostly, because often when I want so that I’m ready to die getting it, that’s when everything is hopeless and there’s not a chance of me getting it. When I’m in the agreeable mood of not wanting, all I want to do is to stay alive. In the wanting frame of mind I’m so much full of want that I don’t know what I want, or if I do it’s so many things that I don’t know what to try for first, and so end up not trying for any of them. So I get blown around like a straw, and in the meantime live more or less all right by doing as little work as possible.’
‘It doesn’t seem to me that you’re telling me the truth.’
I laughed. ‘It doesn’t seem so to me, either. But I’m trying, though. You tell me what truth is, and I’ll give you an everlasting lollipop. I won’t know what I want till I’ve got it, and that’s the truth, but it frightens me. It means I’ve got no control over my life, and though I’ve no right to have any because I’m so lazy, the fact gnaws at my craw nevertheless. What I often want is to have a few thousand pounds every year so that I could buy a small house and live there without worrying or doing any work.’
‘That’s not much,’ she said. ‘You could easily get that.’
‘Could I?’ I was encouraged.
‘It doesn’t seem too much to me. I’m surprised you want so little.’
This flummoxed me, and for a while I didn’t know how to go on. We got to Chillon, and didn’t go to the castle but sat at a café and went on talking while we held hands. First we were outside, but then a great thunderstorm burst over the lake, and we went in, to get more cream cakes and coffee down us. The sky was pink, and a flash of lightning split it like a pomegranate. Then it turned suddenly metal-blue, and a ripple of far-off thunder exploded into a great noise, shaking the floor under my feet.
‘The greatest torment in life,’ I said, ‘is not to know what you want out of it, but I don’t know what I want out of it because I don’t know what it can give me. That’s what education is for, I suppose. It doesn’t teach you much, I’m sure, but it tells you what you can get, or expect. And the fact is that I don’t want any career or job that can be offered to me. Apart from the fact that I’m not fit or qualified to get anything that might appeal to me, I don’t trust any of them to do me any good. It’s not that that sort of thing isn’t for the likes of me, so much as that I’m not for the likes of them. The fact is that nothing I could do is of any value to people, though even if it were I still wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to be used, and I don’t want to use, so you can see how difficult it is for me to tell you what I want out of life. I can easily tell you what I don’t want. Maybe I won’t always feel like this, but I certainly can’t tell at the moment. A long-term policy isn’t my cup of tea. All I’d like right now is for us to be back in my room at the hotel, so that we can be alone together.’
She showed her milk-white teeth in a laugh, which made a great contrast to her dark ringlets. ‘You’re just greedy,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know what you want out of life you just end up grabbing all the small things, and getting nothing big and worthwhile.’
‘That’s a good philosophical point,’ I said. ‘But if you live well until you’re ninety, then go out with a hallelujah on your lips, what bigger thing do you want than that? The best life is one that doesn’t give you time to think. My life is already ruined by talking like this. Yours will be too if you aren’t careful. We’re birds of a feather, in a way, and after so much thinking we ought to enjoy it and not bother too much with what we want out of life. So let’s get away from this view of walls and water and go back to my room at the hotel.’
‘I know I shouldn’t,’ she said, to my surprise, putting her arm through my arm, and squeezing it so that I got the warmth of her body, ‘but I feel like that as well.’
We walked back towards the bus, and I felt like a hero, as if all I lacked was a pipe in my mouth, and I was back at the age of fifteen, a firestone dip to centuries ago. If every year seemed like a hundred I really would live for ever. I was embarrassed at the tiddlywink leaping around inside my trousers, but the golden coat hit it safely till it quietened down a bit. We necked a few kisses in the bus, but the honest Swiss stared, so we left off and sat, almost glumly, not able to say much, now that we had committed ourselves.
It started to rain, and I wondered if she wanted to back down, but she didn’t. Nobody said anything at the desk when I asked for the key and we went up to my room, not like in deep-blue puritanical old England, or so I had heard. As soon as we got inside and I’d seen to the lock we gobbled all over each other under the roof and the rain, to the tune of the wet pigeons warbling outside. It was afternoon and almost evening, and our naked bodies skimmed about like a couple of snakes, and I swamped her before even getting in. We didn’t seem to mind which end was which, and Polly Moggerhanger did as much gobbling as I did, which I wasn’t used to at all up to then. Not only I knew what I wanted (in this, at any rate) but she did too, and I hadn’t met such an even match before. It was the sort of lovemaking that pulled my backbone out of place, seemed to heave my spine off centre. Yesterday’s colossal expenditure of energy had put me in the way of showing Polly what was what, because I felt as if I’d been worn down to a pole so that not much of my body was left to feed off me. It had only itself to look after, and so could give all its attention to the present requirements, a perpendicular mangonel stiffening my attacks so that at some moments she was both delighted and frightened.
Four hours later we crept down to the dining-room for refuelling, both of us bruised and wacked-out, and quiet as we sat looking at each other, waiting for the food to come, which we then went into with the same gusto as had been previously used in attacks on each other, not talking much during the whole meal, as if our first prolonged time together had accounted for fifty million words that we need not now ever say.
Even so, it wasn’t exactly like a church between us, and I had to keep my end up by telling her stories out of my rich past and varied family. She enjoyed those most about my drunken Irish grandparents, so once on to this line I could go on for a long time without running short of material, and I found myself making up stories, recounting them as if they were true, because she could never know the difference as long as my voice didn’t hesitate or change tone. Music was playing in the background from The Merry Widow, or some such Viennese slop,
and I said: ‘Do you remember, darling, how we climbed the Matterhorn in 1905? What a lovely time we had – though it was a pity when our ten guides fell two thousand feet and were never seen again. What a beautiful view from the top! I shall never forget it, because this music reminds me of it. Fortunately, the guide carrying our portable gramophone wasn’t one of those who slipped, and we put on this record and listened to it while we drank our champagne.’
I made up fantasies of what we’d done during the life we’d been together, trekking across deserts that had killed all but one of our hundred camels by the time we walked into the last oasis (where our Rolls-Royce was waiting), sweating through jungles where two of our children had been eaten by tigers (she laughed aloud at that one) and I had been brought to the edge of death by a savage dose of Blackhead Fever. We sat over our wine till the waiter brought the bill as a gentle hint that the place was about to close down, and then we went up to my room again, and made use of the night for as long as we could keep awake.
We travelled back to London on the same plane. I thought this was a bright idea in case any of the customs men remembered my face. If they did, and wondered why I was going out, they would know the reason if they saw me coming back with a beautiful young woman. And if I left through the airport next week they might think I was only off on the same dirty errand again. I felt that William Hay would approve of this bit of bluff. The long bus of a plane was only half-full, and after the light went out about removing our safety belts, and the long climb towards heaven began, I told Polly to come with me to the back of the plane. ‘I want to go to the toilet,’ I said, giving a wink, ‘so keep me company on the way.’
There was no one around the doors, so I opened one and told her to get inside. Then I followed in, and snapped the catch behind us. ‘What an idea!’ she said, ‘I’d never have thought of it. I suppose you’ve done this often with your casual pick-ups?’
We closed in a bout of hugger-kiss: ‘I just thought of it. There’s no other place except the baggage compartment and I don’t know how to get to that – unless I ask the pilot for a key. But I’m so much in love with you that I can’t bear not to be able to touch you in the right places. Anyway I’ve got a question, and it’s the sort I can’t ask unless I’m able to kiss you while I’m doing it.’
She leaned against the sink. ‘What is it?’
‘Will you marry me? I know it’s absolutely potty to ask, but I’m doing it without too much thought, because that would spoil it. Don’t answer me. I don’t want to know yet. I just want to say how I can’t bear for us to come back to earth after these few days. If you’ve no wish to see me again, I’ll understand. But I don’t feel like that, and don’t want you to think I do, even if you decide you want to feel that way. I’m not spoiling it, either, by asking you to marry me. You don’t know me yet. Maybe you never will, but you will with every minute you stay with me. I just want you to know when you walk off this plane how intensely I feel, and I can’t think of any other way to tell you than this. Even asking you to marry me isn’t the end of it. It’s only as serious as a passionate kiss, but that is very serious with me.’
Her full and pretty face was turned to me, and I could see my own face in the mirror behind her, full of pain and confusion, greed and lies and love.
The plane dropped a few feet, and she clung to me. ‘So don’t answer,’ I went on. ‘That’s not what I want, not urgently. I’m saying this so that you’ll know I’m honest and am telling no lies. It’s something I suddenly wanted to say. I’ve never said it before, and I’ll never say it again, not to anyone else. Just remember it, sweet Polly, and tell me anything you like for an answer, but don’t talk about what I’ve just said, unless you absolutely must because it’s burning its way out of you. Then I’ll hear it and wallow in it, because I feel about you as I never have for anyone else before.’
We went beyond speech, touched and teased each other, sometimes her eye’s closed, sometimes mine, as we kissed and struggled to get our way in that impossibly furnished room. Fortunately the engines made enough noise, due to those superlative modern designs that put them near the tail, and our cries weren’t heard. The door handle rattled when we were too far gone to take much notice, and presumably whoever wanted to use the place for its proper purpose had found the opposite one vacant or had waited till it was. Polly got her full coming, because she finally sat on me and worked herself up and down, and I got it too, a fountain of thick elixir shooting into the flesh-filled sky of her.
When we crept back to our places the stewardesses gave us funny looks as they handed our trays of food. One of them smiled at me on every trip up and down the gangway, and she was so much Polly’s opposite that I was quite attracted by her, and wanted to take her up to the back as well in my beastly and incorrigible fashion. But we tucked into our second breakfast as if we hadn’t eaten for a week, and this time I ordered a full bottle of champagne, which the stewardess presented to us with exaggerated ceremony as if we had just been married and were going to England for our honeymoon. I began to wonder whether the captain himself wouldn’t be down to congratulate us and wish us long life together as part of the airline’s service, because certainly the engineer gave us a knowing gaze as he went to the back of the plane, as if the girls had been talking about us up front and spilling what they’d thought we’d been doing.
Polly ate with her head down, all modesty, and I thought that maybe she was reflecting on our adventure and, caught in the public gaze because of it, was holding it against me and wouldn’t want to know me any more when we’d landed. But she said: ‘I remember that when we first met you said you never told anyone that you were in love with them, that it wasn’t the sort of thing you did, that you just let the relationship develop, and never used the word love.’
‘I’ve been waiting for you to bring this up. It’s true. I don’t know what’s come over me since then. This is so new, I haven’t felt such a thing about anybody before, and that’s why I say it. Obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ she said.
‘I talk too much.’
‘I don’t mind at all,’ she answered. ‘I like it in fact. All the boys I’ve known don’t talk. Not the way you do. They say things, but they don’t talk. Your sort of talk makes me feel human, but theirs just makes me feel more and more apart from them. Not that I believe everything you say. Belief doesn’t come into it. But people aren’t together unless they talk.’
‘Or do the other thing.’
‘You’re mostly silent then.’
‘My mouth is otherwise occupied,’ I said, feeling slightly disturbed by her new mood of seriousness.
‘I don’t believe anything,’ she said, ‘when it comes to talk. I’ve been let down so often, except by my own father, and he isn’t a man who talks very much, not to me, anyway. I only believe things when they’ve happened, and then I know whether I’ve been let down or not. I’m so mixed up, Michael, I don’t know what to say.’
I felt sorry for her, and in some strange way for myself as well. Just after making love was a bad time to strip oneself down to the fibres like this, though God knows there didn’t seem any other time when it might be possible to do it properly. She was right, I suppose, in choosing to do it now, though I might have been the one to start it if she hadn’t. I’d noticed before that the worst quarrels, or the most intense talk, only come after a wonderful bout of love.
‘I’ve had more of a sheltered life than you imagine,’ she said. ‘The people I should have been staying with in Geneva have already phoned my father to say I haven’t been seen these last two nights. In any case he’ll be waiting for me at the airport when we land, so maybe you’d better not come out with me, especially since he knows you.’
I was only too willing to accept her advice, not wanting to tangle with Moggerhanger a second time. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I had been strenuously advised by William Hay not to get into trouble during my run of smuggling trips. It was a pity though that I couldn’t go thr
ough the customs with Polly on my arm, which had been the reason for my arranging to travel back with her. I gave my telephone number, and took hers, neither of us knowing when we’d be able to contact each other again, never mind see each other. The light went on to douse fags and fasten seat belts, and we suddenly broke through the clouds to see Battersea Power Station below, without having had any time at all even to get properly stuck in to the unresolved questions that were starting in earnest to eat us away.
I went down the steps behind Polly, feeling like one of the walking wounded as I let her get far in front. But I ran and caught her up, and we kissed wildly before turning into the arrival lounge.
‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I held back from saying it, but I do.’ She went to the ladies, and I walked up and down. Half in fun I glanced at the messages rack, and saw an envelope with my name on it. I took it down and tore it open, thinking it was for someone of the same name but curious to see what it said. ‘Number nine is good today. Hope you had a successful trip to Leningrad.’ So I let Polly get her luggage first, and she went through the customs with only a brief question from them and a half-smile. And I went through Gate Nine as instructed, though I saw no reason to do so because I only said I had nothing to declare, which was the truth for once, and then I was through and out of the place in time to see Moggerhanger’s head going down the steps to the floor below.
I hung around a while, then went below and got the bus back to town.
William was waiting at the flat, himself just back from a quick trip to the Lebanon. He sat on the living-room couch in his dressing-gown, and Hazel came in with a tray of coffee. She was a whore from Soho, with a hard face and voluptuous body, who visited him now and again, and he gave her the wink to clear out while we were talking. His cigarette smoked from a ridiculously long holder, and he sat back to hear my story, which I supposed he might deliver later to the Jack Leningrad Organization. Either that, or I had too big an idea of their thoroughness, and if this was the case then I must already be getting too outsized for such an outfit.
A Start in Life Page 29