The Society of Others

by William Nicholson

  Onto this image of languid invitation I must now superimpose the memory of a small front room where a tired girl sits asleep on a chair. It’s not something I’ve given much thought to, but in the nature of things whores work mostly at night, and do a lot of waiting around. Not so easy to get up that bright-eyed enthusiasm the gentleman caller expects. I revisit her waking look and understand it all too well. Her expression says, Alright, let’s get it over with.

  “Okay,” she mumbles. “Okay, okay.”

  The chill dank day fades into a freezing night. Imprisoned with my companions in our back room, I let myself be drawn into a long evening that unfolds in the most unexpected way. Here I am in a brothel, where the working girls join us when business is slow, but the night’s delight is not sex. It’s poetry.

  The matter of what to do with me has been discussed and settled. Eckhard will go with me part of the way, as far as the village where he has urgent business. There the Society will provide a second guide, who will take me to the border. We will travel on foot. We are to leave in the morning.

  Now Eckhard produces a small dark-blue volume that turns out to be the Oxford Book of English Verse, an old and well-thumbed India-paper edition from 1930. He shows me the dedication.

  To

  The President Fellows and Scholars

  of

  Trinity College Oxford

  a house of learning

  Ancient liberal humane

  and my most kindly nurse

  He asks me to read this dedication aloud. As I do so, tears form in his eyes.

  “A house of learning,” he repeats softly. “Ancient. Liberal. Humane. For you, this is ordinary. For us, it is the city on the hill, the earthly paradise. We too wish such a kindly nurse.” He intones aloud, savouring each syllable with a reverent longing, “Trinity—College—Oxford.”

  The old man points towards the book and speaks to Eckhard. Eckhard nods and turns the pages. Here and there I see pencilled comments in English, scribbled in the margins by some long-dead former owner. He hands me the book open at a poem called Exequy on his Wife, by Henry King. I can’t pronounce the title, let alone understand it, but it seems the old man’s wife is dead, and so is the poet’s.

  Sleep on, my Love, in thy cold bed,

  Never to be disquieted.

  My last good-night! Thou wilt not wake

  Till I thy fate shall overtake:

  Till age, or grief, or sickness must

  Marry my body to that dust

  It so much loves; and fill the room

  My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.

  Stay for me there: I will not fail

  To meet thee in that hollow vale.

  And think not much of my delay:

  I am already on the way,

  And follow thee with all the speed

  Desire can make, or sorrows breed.

  Each minute is a short degree

  And every hour a step towards thee …

  ’Tis true—with shame and grief I yield—

  Thou, like the van, first took’st the field;

  And gotten hast the victory

  In thus adventuring to die

  Before me, whose more years might crave

  A just precedence in the grave.

  But hark! my pulse, like a soft drum,

  Beats my approach, tells thee I come;

  And slow howe’er my marches be

  I shall at last sit down by thee.

  The old man’s eyes are streaming with tears by the time I’m done, and though it’s no barrel of laughs even I get a small buzz from it. They all clap, in a genteel poetry-loving sort of way, and after this there’s no stopping them. They’re shy of trying their English on me directly and speak through Eckhard, but they seem to understand the poems as I read them.

  I’ve never been much of a one for poems. I can’t really see the point. Actually it’s more than that. My instincts tell me the emotion in poems is fake. I mean, suppose you love a girl and she dumps you. Do you write a poem about it? Like, for who? The answer is, for a book. Poems are for showing how clever you are, and for putting in books, and for making people write about in exams. They’re just another way to make people like me feel stupid.

  This long-ago guy who owned this particular anthology is wonderfully bossy. I catch his comments as I peel the pages. Beside a poem by someone called John Cutts he puts, As vulgar as Tennyson at his worst. At the end of a poem by Thomas Campbell that goes, “Now joy, old England, raise!” he scrawls, Oh dear! oh dear! And poor old Edgar Allan Poe gets this: The vulgarity of Poe is positively shattering.

  So partly it’s this feeling that I don’t have to admire the poems just because they’re collected here, and partly it’s the feeling I get from looking at the faces of my companions as they listen, but this time it’s different. This time the poems are making sense to me. I mean, I can see how you might want to read them, even if you weren’t studying them in some class.

  There’s this poem by Leigh Hunt called Jenny Kissed Me.

  Jenny kissed me when we met,

  Jumping from the chair she sat in;

  Time, you thief, who love to get

  Sweets into your list, put that in!

  Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

  Say that health and wealth have missed me,

  Say I’m growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.

  That’s not so terrible. At least I can understand it. I have this idea, maybe I’m wrong, that Jenny’s this kid, around seven or eight years old. It’s nice when kids do that.

  I’m amazed how well these people know this anthology. It seems English poetry books aren’t encouraged under the state of emergency. They’re not exactly banned, but if you go round reading them in public they think maybe you’re part of the thought-climate that needs to be eradicated. This makes the poems dangerous and exciting.

  Eckhard says they want me to choose a favourite poem of my own to read to them. I’m about to tell them I don’t know any poems when my page-turning fingers come to a stop at some lines I know very well indeed. They’re printed here as this anonymous poem, but I know it as a song. I read it to them, hearing as I do so my mother’s sweet voice singing as she drives me and my sister to school.

  O waly, waly, up the bank,

  And waly, waly, doun the brae,

  And waly, waly, yon burn side,

  Where I and my love wont to gae …

  But had I wist, before I kissed,

  That love had been so ill to win,

  I had locked my heart in a case of gold

  And pinned it with a silver pin.

  I want so much to be home, and to see her again. I want to thank her for singing to us in the car, and for showing us the pictures she loves. Slowly, from a long sleep, I am awakening.

  Now they call for Wordsworth.

  “The great Ode! Please, the mighty Ode!”

  This turns out to mean the Intimations of Immortality, which I read at school. Now, reading slowly and carefully for my listeners’ sake, I discover it for the first time.

  Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

  The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

  Hath had elsewhere its setting

  And cometh from afar:

  Not in entire forgetfulness

  And not in utter nakedness

  But trailing clouds of glory do we come

  From God, who is our home:

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close

  Upon the growing boy,

  But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

  He sees it in his joy;

  The youth, who daily farther from the east

  Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,

  And by the vision splendid

  Is on his way attended;

  At length the man perceives it die away

  And fade into the light of common day.

  T
hey’re all weeping. Actually so am I. Here are these people living in real and constant danger and what they’re hearing is how everything comes to an end but along the way there’s stuff worth having been born for. Even the woman with the theorbo for God’s sake is sitting listening to me like this is going to save her life. Petra said about Vicino, like it was self-evident garbage, “He tells us to fight torture with poems.” But she’s the one holding the red-hot stair rod. Give me Wordsworth any day.

  “You must be so proud,” says Eckhard. “Your country has so many great poets.”

  So now I’m proud.

  TEN

  Eckhard and I set off in the morning, though not together. He directs me which road to take out of town, and tells me to keep my eyes down as I walk. If I look too interested in the scenery it marks me out as a stranger. A mile or so out of town I’ll come to a filling station. I’m to wait for him there.

  So I find this filling station and it has only one pump. While I’m waiting I stare at the pump and ask myself what kind of filling station has only one pump. It’s an old pump, an industrial antique, the kind you expect an attendant in overalls and a cap to operate for you. A tall thin pump that looks like a person with a big head and no arms. An out-of-date pump for out-of-date vehicles. Only now does it strike me that the cars in this country are all old. This is where all our rich-country cars go to die. Not that there are any to be seen on the road right now. This is not a country with a traffic problem.

  I get the feeling that the little hut by the pump is empty. I peer in its window. There are signs that it’s in use: a mug hanging on a hook, a small television. But no attendant. This is a ghost filling station.

  Eckhard shows up at last, with an army-style kitbag on his back and a wool hat and scarf to protect his face from the cold. He’s seen me looking in the hut window.

  “They’ve taken him away,” he tells me.

  Now they’re rounding up filling-station attendants?

  “He reads books.”

  I’m getting the picture. Books are the source of ideas. Ideas make you think. Thinking makes you ask yourself if maybe the authorities are running the country in their own interests rather than yours.

  “Television is okay with them?”

  “Of course. Everything on television they put there. Television is the babysitter for the people. You who watch television, you are the baby.”

  He doesn’t mean me personally, though I have been known to watch TV, and do not feel in any way infantilised by it. Actually I find his anger at TV hard to fathom. Okay, so it’s not high culture, but you can’t be burning rocket fuel all week. Sometimes you need to coast.

  “It is better,” says Eckhard, “to look at the wall. You look at the wall, you have your own thoughts. You look at the TV, you have the thoughts of the state.”

  “Not where I come from,” I say. “We don’t have state-controlled television.”

  “You have the thoughts of corporations who want your money. That is no-thoughts.”

  I’m not arguing. I’m the one who watches TV with the sound off. It’s my living mural. I read once about this hip hotel in Los Angeles where they have TV-screen-shaped holes in the walls, and as you go by you see soft flickering light. If you put your head in the hole there’s a TV down there alright, only you don’t see it as you go by, you just see the colours bouncing off the white paintwork. So all those eager people telling you all those urgent messages end up as a jiggle of cyan, a jiggle of magenta. I really liked that. I don’t tell Eckhard. Somehow it seems like it’s going to take too much explaining.

  We have left the road and are hiking across country. We’re following a well-worn trail. Eckhard says this is the way the drovers bring the flocks of sheep in the spring and autumn.

  He starts to tell me about this novel he’s writing.

  I should have guessed. People who hate TV always turn out to be writing a novel. They don’t like the competition. They don’t like the way everyone watches TV and no one reads novels. So why don’t they go and write for television? Because they’re not smart enough. You can work on a novel for years and all that time you can tell yourself every day you’re a genius, but go work in television or movies and pretty soon someone wants to see what you’re doing and then of course you’re fucked because it’s actually crap. People who write novels never show them to anybody. They’re like ageing women who’ve stopped looking in mirrors. That way you’re always young, always beautiful.

  Eckhard’s novel is about a writer who’s in the middle of writing the greatest novel in history when he falls in love with this girl and she gets pregnant and he has a dilemma. The dilemma is: does he ditch the greatest novel in history and get a job so he can look after the girl and their baby, or does he ditch the girl? Eckhard tells me about this with ferocious passion and multiple hand gestures. The choice, it seems, is impossible. The hero is as it were pregnant with his great work and can’t abort now. However he loves the girl with all his heart and soul, and she too is past the thirteen-week mark.

  So what does he do? I’m on the edge of my seat. Fast forward to the denouement. I run through the plot options in my head. He abandons the novel, blames the girl, grows bitter, and leaves her. He kills himself. He kills the girl. A Mayerling-style love pact in which they die together.

  None of the above. He puts the novel aside, marries the girl, and gets a job as a teacher.

  This is when I realise the novel is autobiographical. Eckhard’s urgent business which makes it impossible for him to take me all the way to the border is his own wedding, scheduled for tomorrow. Since it seems I will be on site at the time of the wedding, would I honour him and his bride by reading an English poem at the ceremony?

  “Her name is Ilona, which is the name you call Helen. There is a poem to Helen. By Edgar Allan Poe.”

  The vulgarity of Poe is positively shattering. Yes, I’ll read his poem. The honour will be all mine.

  “So you’ve stopped writing your novel?”

  “Yes,” he says. “The same day my Ilona told me the baby was to come, I went back to my job as teacher. Now the baby is my great work.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No. I love my Ilona very much. I love our baby very much. These days we are afraid, you know. But I am so happy.”

  I can see it on his face. When he speaks about his fiancée and his baby, his face glows. I think of poor doomed Egon, who said, “We make the good world for the children.”

  “Everything is changed for me.” Eckhard waves his arms up at the sky as we walk. “I see clouds and I think, I will show my child such clouds. I will tell my child how there is a country in the clouds, and how when the sunbeams reach down from the clouds to the earth, the cloud people ride down them on sleds to visit us. That is what my father told me. I believed it was true, for many years. Maybe I still believe it is true.”

  He gives me a quick smile, afraid that I will laugh at him for this.

  “I wish my father had told me that,” I say.

  “And when my child is older,” says Eckhard, happy now in my approval, “I will read him the poems I love. Then he will love them too.”

  “Your child will be a boy?”

  “A boy, or a girl. It is equal. I will so love a daughter also. She will look like Ilona, I hope, not like me.”

  “Is Ilona beautiful?”

  I ask him this to make him happy.

  “You will not think so,” he replies. His voice goes quiet with reverence. “But to me she is beautiful. She has dark hair, and a light face. A quiet face. You will see. Her beauty will remain. Sometimes when I watch her, I can see how beautiful she will be when she is old.”

  This is quite a testimonial. I can see how the novel can’t compete. Why write it when you can live it? Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio, right? Either be silent, or let your speech be better than silence.

  It hits me then that something like this must have happened to my father. Not quite the same sequence, because h
e’d already written The Mercy Kiss when my mother got pregnant with me. In his play Judas rejects martyrdom, saying, “I will not die for what I believe in because what I believe in is life.” Martyrdom comes in many forms, and suffering for the sake of art could be said to be one of them. Is this the choice my father also made, and made with deliberation, even pride? I’d always supposed he went into movie-writing to pay the mortgage, and that was the end of his great dream. But maybe it was the start of another dream. Maybe he’d looked at the clouds too and thought how he’d tell his child stories about the sky. Not that he did, since I’m the child in question, and I would know. But the general point holds. Maybe he loved me more than he loved being a famous writer. Maybe he still does. Only now he’s got Joey too.

  All this gives me peculiar feelings in my intestines and I start to look around for somewhere that offers privacy and to wish I’d thought to carry toilet paper. However before I can act on this I hear the sound of distant engines.

  Eckhard has stopped. His face has gone white.

  “Police,” he says.

  I don’t see how he can know, but here they come: two motorbikes approaching, bouncing over the sheep trail.

  “I will speak with them,” he says quietly. “You do not speak.”

  “They may not stop.”

  “They will stop.”

  I pull my coat close around me and as I do so I feel the heavy weight of the gun which has been in my coat pocket all this time. I slide one hand into the pocket and clasp the gun’s handle. In the other pocket, with the other hand, I feel the pliers. I register Eckhard’s extreme fear, and realise that it is caused by my presence at his side. I endanger him. They won’t hurt me, because I’m a foreigner. They’ll hurt him. That makes me feel angry.