My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Jaunty and perky and keeping smiling, the comic cradled the microphone in his two hands, leaning into it as if he were speaking to a lover, sometimes stepping backward in his maxi coat to execute a miniature dance and pouring out joke after joke to which the audience, puppet-like, responded with shouts of laughter which sounded almost like snarls.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, “if you took all the coloured people out of Britain we’d have an extra hour of daylight. But see, this is Christmas time, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Christmas. Well, I’ll tell you a Christmas story. This woman went to steal from a shop, see, from a shop. She’d take a pair of panties and she’d stuff them down here”—indicating the left side of his breast—”and then, see, she’d take another pair”—his voice was hushed now—”and she’d stuff them down here”—indicating the right side of his breast. Well, there was this supervisor and she saw this happening, this supervisor, a big, fat woman, and as the thief was going out the door she shouted to her. ‘Hey, come back here with that chest of drawers.’ Great what people will do at Christmas, init?”

  To the left of him Mark saw three unmarried women—unringed at any rate—sitting together, helplessly laughing and gazing at each other with sidelong glances as if to make sure that the other two were laughing as well. One of them reminded him of Mrs. Walton. At that moment the comic burst into song. “The Bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle” sung with throbbing voice and inflated red cheeks (puffed out like balloons) soared to the roof and raised with it (to the plaster angels) girls, men, boys, all who had come into the circle of light from the outer darkness and the eerie snow, all who existed from moment to moment, those who had stumbled down frosty steps and those who had not, including the flat-capped comic himself.

  He remembered how he and Lorna would sometimes watch “Dixon of Dock Green” on the telly and her delighted laugh when he’d salute at the end after his bit of moralising was over, his face serious and respectful and worn with defending the public from his cut-price, shoddy, mindless villains. She waited for this moment all week, dragging Mark in from his book; sometimes she’d only put on that bit with the salute and nothing else, so endearing was it in its old world innocence, so different from the hard, real efficiency of “Softly, Softly” where everybody devoured everybody else.

  He passed his hand across his eyes. The comic, like life, was still there, insisting on being noticed, his voice hoarse from telling the same jokes over and over in theatre after theatre, shouting into the darkness which erupted now and again with laughter and, like the sound of shore water, showing that he was still in contact with land; still surviving, that in the middle of the howling waters his light was still flashing. What would Lorna have made of this? Perhaps she would have liked it. She still had that childish quality of those who, quite innocent of cruelty, like to see the man with the umbrella slipping on the banana skin in the radiant day when the street is full of light and sparkling bicycle wheels and men leaning down outside shops to examine boxes of oranges and apples or sharpening their knives in butchers’ shops.

  He himself had liked the Goons and the Monty Python Show—those comedies which existed in incoherencies and hints and unfinished ideas taken up and dropped as carelessly as Lorna might drop a cup or a plate and he might say “Oh, not again,” the endearing clumsiness not so much a joke, and she would look at him in a queer way, sometimes laughing it off, sometimes beginning a shrill quarrel. Strange how these shows, admired for their incoherences—as of life itself, not art—seemed more threatening and prophetic, now that he himself was existing from moment to moment, one of the many into whose face a microphone might be thrust in the middle of the street to elicit for the bright eyed interviewer a contribution not from a human being but a type, a type as funny and pathetic as himself, or that comic who was now telling a sick joke about somebody’s grandmother which was interrupted from behind Mark by the pure gay crystal laugh of a child, not perhaps as a consequence of the joke but simply a spark of spontaneous self-delighting joy such as he himself had often felt when young, creeping conspiratorially about the house, where his parents were still lying asleep.

  He rose suddenly and made his way down the large plushy empty stairs past the woman at the desk in the foyer who was polishing her nails and into the large white night whose coldness immediately struck him in the face. He trudged along—he had never learned to drive a car, though Lorna, in spite of her clumsiness, had—and he came to a pub which he entered: He ordered a rum to keep out the cold and stood around the wooden trough inside which the white-coated barman was.

  He looked around him but there was no-one he knew and he felt again the warning inner trembling. There were pairs of men in discussion amid clouds of smoke, and students discussing examinations on the leather seats running round the room. The door of the lavatory was decorated with holly, and he thought this rather funny as he sipped his rum, feeling its radiant coils running all round his body. He took it over to a table and sat down.

  He thought of their last holiday and how they’d sit on a bench by the sea in that small town inhabited by retired left-overs of a vanished empire, living on their pensions, being taken out for walks by their slim yellow dogs, and how for the first time the Fair had managed to break its way in, with its outdated music-hall decor, its little cars, and the man standing straddle-legged in the middle while the children shouted and screamed.

  He remembered watching her from the ground as she drove her little car round and round, bumping into a large stolid man with a moustache who smiled and waved, with a large cigar in his mouth. He saw her mouth forming words which because of the music and the shouting he could not hear. He heard himself making some remark about bingo as later they walked along in the calm evening, she stopping now and then to spin a flat stone across the water, a trick which she had learned somewhere on her travels.

  The last night they had been there had been a really beautiful one with a red sky ahead of them and shops illuminated by it casting their shadows in the water where children played with dogs. The tide was at its fullest, covering the black wiry tangle of seaweed with a silken smoothness. The young girls walked to their assignations and he thought that Lorna looked at them with a certain sadness. Once two girls in green on horseback clattered down the street and he had made some remark to Lorna only to find that she was not listening but was following them with an intense yet abstracted gaze. The night held the first taste of autumn, a hint of iciness. He felt—reading his spy story—that Lorna shivered a little and told her without raising his head that she should put her scarf on. They had talked—or rather Lorna had talked—to an old man who was ninety-six years old with all his faculties intact and could remember the days when that town had been connected with the city twenty miles away by a tram line. Lorna was interested in all that, asking questions, some stupid, some not, while he himself had read on in his book, throwing it when finished into the green bin at the side of the seat.

  He bought another rum and sipped it slowly.

  “I said you’re very quiet. Don’t you want to speak to me?” said the drunk scarfed man sitting in front of him at the opposite end of the table.

  “Don’t you want to speak to me? I’m not good enough for you, am I? Is that it? Eh?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mark automatically (he had noticed often that if he hadn’t been listening to what someone was saying he would say, “I’m sorry”). “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.”

  “Didn’t see me, eh? That’s no excuse. You haven’t answered my question. That’s no answer to my question.”

  “I didn’t hear you ask a question.”

  The fuddled eyes bore up slowly like a howitzer being levered and the mouth said:

  “No excuse. Not see me, eh? Not good enough for you, am I? That’s what you said. And you didn’t answer my question. Why didn’t you answer my question? Not good enough for you, eh?”

  The monotonous inanity of the drunk jarred and at the same time threatened him. He rose and stood ove
r at the other side of the bar watching the drunk who was pawing vaguely at some money which had fallen to the floor. On an impulse he bought him a drink and laid it on the table beside him. The drunk looked at him as if from underwater and then deliberately (he was sure it was done deliberately) upset the drink all over the floor. “Don’ wan’ charity,” he said, “wan’ you to talk to me.” Mark stood there for a moment trying to think of something to say, while the barman in silence came over with a cloth and wiped the table. Then he left.

  A hotel. He needed a bed, he needed a room of his own, a place in which he could draw the curtains and turn the key in the lock. A hotel. That was it. A room where he could sleep after he had taken his pills to quieten the drum that was steadily beating in his head. The door swung two or three times behind him as he left.

  2

  The hotel, though from the front it appeared small, turned out to have a large number of rooms. The number on his key was 501. It was given to him at the desk by a pallid girl in a gold miniskirt while behind, swinging her legs on a chair, was another who was saying into a phone: “Certainly, Mr. Dixon, a table for two. On the 27th you said.” The hotel did not give the impression of great business but he remembered that it was Christmas-time when all self-respecting people would be with their families drinking their sherry or port or whisky, when dour-looking Scrooges like himself ought to be behind chained doors peering rancorously at the carol singers. A porter conducted him (with his orange case which he had retrieved from the left luggage at the station) into the lift which deposited him on the fifth floor not far from the door of his room. There seemed to be no-one on the landing but himself and he familiarised himself with the position of the Toilet and the Bathroom before entering the room and locking the door. It was like any other hotel room with a bed with a pink counterpane, an old wardrobe, a dressing chest, a wash basin with a rack for hand towel and bath towel, and amber-coloured curtains which did not quite reach the floor. The hotel’s insignia were stamped on the mirror (would anyone steal a mirror?)

  He lay down on the bed fully clothed and shut his eyes, hearing from outside the roar of the traffic, and from the hotel itself the movement of feet and the rushing of lavatory water. After a while he sat up and looked at his watch—a present from Lorna—which told him it was eight thirty. He decided to go to bed, and undressing and shivering, put on a pair of clean pyjamas he took from his case. He noticed that there was a hole in his sock and, not knowing what to do about it, smiled sourly. He laid his clothes over the back of the chair, not bothering to use the wardrobe. The coat clinked hollowly with coins and keys and the ring, which he had at one stage put into an empty aspirin bottle but, the bottle breaking and cutting his hand, he had removed the ring and left it in his pocket.

  He put out the light and lay back on the bed. In the darkness of the room he felt for a moment as if Lorna was present, emerged from the darkness, but his heart-beat quietened after a while. She had been used to hotels before she married him, travelling all over the world in her affluent harum-scarum way, inheriting much money from her desiccated aunts and uncles who always seemed to be on ocean liners while she was packed off to schools here and there. Once she had sent him a letter written in a large round scrawl from one of these liners, off hand, vivid in spite of or because of the negligence, feverish describing the correct officers and the old ladies with their sticks and smoked glasses leaning back in their cane chairs. But since then they hadn’t been in hotels much: in fact he was little used to them, was in fact much less at ease than she would have been when, in her large-gestured way, she would have all the waiters at her feet, because she, after all, was one of the chosen ones, conversant with all the right knives and forks and spoons and serviettes, by training long become instinct, and she would treat them with the casual effrontery that they immediately recognised as if by application of a tuning fork.

  That had been their first quarrel when he had said that she must take no money from anyone but him, not from her relatives, not from anyone, and she had looked at him first with surprise and then with love. He had thought that the battle would be a bitter one—he with his dour Calvinist conscience—furniture pared to the bare minimum, as indeed, he reflected amusedly, the furniture in the hotel room was: and the battle had been fought in the hard light of the as yet unshaded bulbs in the house he had bought or at least had begun to pay for. (He remembered the two of them, with ladders and paste, scraping walls into the late pale hours of midnight, she wearing the blue slacks which she wore when painting.) The fight had not been as hard as he had thought it would be, or at least at the time it did not appear hard. He had been prepared for a savage rending duel—but no, she had given in and had then gone on to glance through a copy of Woman or some such magazine which at that time she used to hunt through for recipes, and whose love stories she also read with great interest, while he himself, of course, read the Statesman and Nation and the Listener. Even now he could see her—legs outstretched in front of her—glancing rapidly and with her quick nervousness through the magazine. She never read much and nothing very deep.

  As he lay there in the darkness he saw straight ahead of him, suspended above the cold city, a huge Christmas tree between the two open curtains one of which was drooping from one corner, and thought of the hermit whom Lorna and Mrs. Carmichael had in unison invaded and begun to help, a substitute perhaps for feeding the starving in Biafra or Vietnam. (He himself after a period of liberalism found himself going over to the side of the conservatives who wrote regularly in the Spectator attacking the leftist liberals.) The balloons on the tree swayed in a slight breeze and the lights flickered on and off.

  The Christmas tree—ornate as it was—seemed to comfort him, to companion him in the otherwise dark night. He imagined for a moment what it might be really like—a tree with on it the crucified Jesus with slack yellow legs as in mediaeval paintings and the head with its crown of thorns fallen inertly on the narrow chest. His mind shied away from the concatenation of images—the crown, the sponge, the vinegar—and steadied on the lighted tree. He remembered just before leaving the house finding underneath a pile of clothes the Christmas card she had been going to send him, an abstract angel descending over an abstract crib. She liked Christmas for there was a lot of the child in her. She liked buying presents and dressing up: her wandering extravagant childhood had seen to that. She liked surprising him with cufflinks and scarves (which he said she ought not to have bought) and handkerchiefs of pure white Irish linen. At Christmas time she was for ever rushing to the letter box (her hearing was much better than his) and coming back with her cards. She was always sending cards to people she had known but briefly, people who had been at various schools with her, acquaintances even (if she could discover their addresses). One of their few friends was a bachelor—a lecturer in History, a spectacled, dry man—who never sent cards on principle (he had taken up Hinduism instead) and she couldn’t understand this at all, she distrusted him instinctively.

  “I’m sure his Hinduism has something to do with his being a bachelor,” Lorna would say. She came out with sudden flashes like that which disconcerted him, made him a little wary of her, which made him wonder perhaps whether in her own wandering disorganised way she might not be brighter than himself.

  It was strange to find that he—the arch disbeliever, the one who never sent Christmas cards—should in this small room be comforted by the Christmas tree with all its swaying coloured worlds. At the level at which he lay there was nothing else that he could see. The thin skins of the big balloons swayed in the high wind. Lorna had been afraid of storms. One night after returning from a useless boring departmental meeting he had found her huddled inside a cupboard while sheet lightning illuminated the room and a window banged, she having been afraid to shut it. He had been a long time quietening her down, but had eventually laughed it off, seeing it as a joke.

  “It’s no joke to me,” she had said. However, in the radiant morning which followed the storm she was happ
y again moving among the modernities of her kitchen.

  She had a long time ago insisted on a Christmas tree, though he didn’t like such things. Her liking for Christmas seemed to him to be on a par with her reading of Woman’s Own with every appearance of pleasure which to his New Statesman mind (slightly stained by the Spectator) was like coming across a Wasp in his living room. (He would have had more respect for her if she had learned to read Nova, which was at least literate.) Yet she loved these stories of nurses and doctors in hospitals, concerned with their own love affairs more than with their patients. She was immune to the barbaric prose which he could not read without retching and she’d say to him:

  “What’s wrong with you is that you aren’t human. Really.”

  “It’s because I am human that I can’t stand that Christmassy junk.”

  Then there had been that argument with that uncle of hers, who raised cattle in the South of England after making money in the diamond mines in Africa and later on in oil in Saudi Arabia where apparently one was not allowed to drink alcoholic liquors at all.