My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  Walking out of the station as he had done so long ago he paused to see the beggar sitting there with the black glasses and the cap containing its few pennies. But there was no beggar there now. He halted for a moment at the exact spot seeing himself at seventeen shaken to the core by the unintelligible enormity of beggary, by the blind vulnerable man who threw himself on the mercy of the world. To give him a coin was in some way to become a part of the system which perpetuated his poverty, not to give him one—conceding that he was truly blind and not pretending to be—was to become one of the proud ones, encased in a pitiless hauteur. He stood there, conscience-torn, and eventually walked away too ashamed to, after all, be charitable. Now he felt a certain pity for the embarrassed seventeen year old, emerged into the huge light of the city, standing there perplexed and moving on towards the future which was what he had become.

  Where could he go now? To a hotel or back to his old digs? A hotel would be better, because of its anonymity; he could visit the old digs later. So he flagged a taxi and was deposited at a hotel—all hotels had become much the same to him, boxes in which he could leave his case, boxes which could allow him a little freedom—and he left his case in one and walked and walked till he came—quite without intention it seemed—to the university which he had once attended. He looked at it—ivy clad in the falling darkness—imagining, posted on green baize, the results of distant examinations, and smelling the smell of new varnish on stairways. There had been that girl with mauve lipstick whom he had once seen outside the door of the History lecture room—and the History lecturer himself, precise and cold, reading his notes for the fiftieth time defending Mary Queen of Scots. He remembered sitting in the library reading his Donne while the tall woman with the ladder scaled the walls looking for a book for a customer. Images of various kinds and of differing clarity passed before his mind—footballers on the green field, rounders in the sun, sitting shirt sleeved in a lecture room while the green leaves rustled faintly against the windows.

  Now there were some cold lights in the university, and beyond stretched the green playing fields flat as billiard tables and more shining, more lush.

  Straight up the road, now drizzly and dark, he could see the very place down which he had walked once, years before, shouting to the crisp March air the lines from Othello:

  “Put up your bright swords or the dew will rust them”

  How could one recall the pristine freshness of those days, when literature seemed consonant with life and lines of poetry harmonised with the very light itself?

  There was the American student just out of the war—one of the many the American Command had shunted into university till they could organise an orderly demobilisation—a fan of Emerson’s with whom he had toured the city and the countryside taking photographs of old buildings, quarries, aerodromes, fields full of summer flowers and salted by the sea air. To him, after all those months, he had offered a book on Transcendentalism which had cost him a great deal of money; stiff lipped, the American looking at him strangely as if he had expected nothing. But he himself could not accept that free expenditure—those weeks, for instance, watching Gilbert and Sullivan in the plush theatre—without guilt. He remembered seeing him off on the train, uniformed in that fine almost silken American cloth. He had never found it easy to part from people and in that sense had been more like the crouching stone than the sparkling stream which moves from point to point without memory or desire.

  Looking back it seemed a world without responsibility, a world of poetry, a world unpenetrated by cares from outside itself. Arguments in that cafe in summer or at the back of it, under the green trees, sitting at yellow marble-topped tables while the cafe owner, a parrot who had picked up snatches of cultural information from the students, would shoot out quotations from Camus or Sartre.

  Looking back it was an effortless unquestioning passing of examinations watching other students—Medicals and Engineering—slaving all night over their thick pointless books which had neither poetry nor illumination, only information.

  Looking back it was a kind of wit, an expectancy that the world would be like that of literature, golden and beautiful.

  Looking back he could find nothing there but books, girls briefly met and quickly parted from, lecturers orating on Anglo Saxon and one boy in particular who had turned up, glanced at the paper and had then walked out after writing only his name and a spoof translation of an incomprehensible section from jagged and wiry Beowulf.

  Looking back it was distant, beautiful and useless. He could not find himself standing there in the cold drizzle. All he could remember was sitting white-flannelled in the park in the heat of summer eating ice cream while the neanderthal-browed Jimmy—now in computers and married with three children—and the slow Fred listened to his butterfly witticisms.

  It was a city of stone and light where, confined to his own circle, he had been protected from all that had not been transmuted into art and poetry. Wide eyed he had walked through it yet at the same time as if in a dream, walking the blue bridges at night, going to performances of Gilbert and Sullivan, sitting in poky cinemas where at one time one could buy a seat for an empty jam jar (lemon curd for the balcony?). It was a time of answering questions on Hume, Milton, Horace, Beowulf.

  Uneasily he looked about him at the slums in which the university was set, shuddering in the snow, a visitant from another planet, watching two students in long hair with books under their arms striding towards the bus stop, as far removed from him as Martians.

  What could he find in this place? Himself? Penetrated through and through by self disgust he waited as for some saviour, as if out of the library directly ahead of him there should emerge a figure who might tell him that his life had not been wasted, that art and poetry were in fact still present even in the middle of this desperate winter, that the lighted windows were sending out meaningful signals into the darkening evening.

  That book he had worked on … that era with Lorna. He shuddered again, invested by sickness, climbed by ladders of pain.

  A fat woman was standing beside him waiting for the bus, weighed down by parcels. For a moment he thought of the other woman, the one on the train, his Leech Gatherer: and even as he stood there he was thinking also of a poem he had once read by Seferis in which the latter had written of revisiting a place in which he had once lived and how his feet sank in the earth, and not only that but he was comparing it mentally with another poem by Lowell on the same theme. He saw only quotations around him everywhere, not a reality but a manuscript, a literary grid, with poems winking on and off.

  When he was on the bus a man who spoke with an Irish accent boarded it and tried clumsily to embrace the conductress, a confidant looking girl with blonde hair and a mini-skirted uniform. He slumped down on the seat and took out a wad of pound notes which he sprayed all round him like cards, some landing on the floor, he all the while regarding them owlishly.

  “A pound if you’ll talk to me,” he pleaded whiningly with the peroxided conductress aloofly waiting for his fare. “There you are now, a quid if you’ll talk to me.” The passengers turned their wintry faces on him and then turned away. The Irishman tried vaguely to retrieve the pound notes but in the middle of his effort fell into a drunken stupor leaving two or three lying on the floor among the bags, with the Christmas parcels and the groceries. Soon he began to snore though from time to time the vibration of his lips shaped the words, “If you’ll talk to me.”

  Mark heard himself saying again to the American: “I bought you this,” and the American saying, “I didn’t reckon on your …” and had then looked at the stiff honourable face and said:

  “Thanks a million. Just what I wanted.”

  But the gifts had been diminished just the same and the American—affluent, outgoing and free—had looked a little saddened like one coming across a stiff necked aristocrat in a disintegrating castle where only the pictures speak of a rich past.

  3

  Roman-nosed, a Caesarian s
lab, she stared at him from the open door. She doesn’t even remember me, he thought with resignation and a certain melancholy. And indeed standing there, compact and squat, assured of her own house, owner of it, with its large bow windows and its rather Victorian furniture and its lodgers bringing in six pounds a week or so each, she represented to him one of the unconscious ones who nevertheless make their way in the world since it never enters their heads that people like them should not do so, and that doing so is a laudable aim.

  “Don’t you remember me?” he said at last. “Mark Simmons.”

  Her expression which had been suspicious—would she after all now accept him as a lodger in his large brown coat and rather deranged scarf?—changed immediately to one of surprised recognition and effusiveness and he found himself being ushered through the hall into the deserted lounge which a tall long-haired boy left immediately without saying a word. She lit the one barred electric fire (the other bar not being usable).

  “That’s David,” she said, “do you remember David?” And he did remember him as a baby, thumb in mouth, standing in the lobby accompanied by a large white dog which duplicated his own large whiteness. He had never spoken to him or made much of him.

  “And what are you doing now?” she said, her small sharp sly eyes scanning him rapidly and halting for a moment at the bulging coat pockets, perhaps—he realised for the first time—thinking that they concealed a present such as a bottle of whisky for Christmas. He cursed himself for forgetting that it was Christmas-time.

  “Oh nothing much. I lecture.” He nearly said, “I have lectured,” but decided against it in the split moment that it took him to see her prosperous-looking thin grey jumper with the string of pearls at the throat. She was not the sort of woman to praise posthumous things.

  “A lecturer. Fancy that now. But you’ll like a cup of tea, I’m sure.” And so later they reminisced for she could afford the time, it being the calm before the lodgers came home for their meal.

  “Do you keep in touch with your old friends,” she asked.

  “You mean Fred and Hugh. No, I’ve lost touch with them though I heard Fred was now a doctor somewhere.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “He’s that. He’s got a lovely family too. They were here last summer travelling in a big blue car. His wife is English, you see, and he was showing her the place. He even took her out to the university. He was the one who was always coming in for the coal, I told his wife.” She spoke with a hint of malice as if he had done something illegal. He himself had never confronted her, coward that he was: but then again she had nursed him that time he was ill, hearing from his bedroom in a smell of oranges the hoover humming deep below.

  “Who’s for the North Pole?” Fred would say, looking up from his medical books. He was a squat dark sort of person, solid of speech and solid of behaviour, though after examinations he was liable to go out on boozing expeditions which took him from one end of the city to the other.

  Mark still kept the photograph of the three of them sitting on the lawn beside the house, all in white—white open-necked shirts and flannels, all except Fred who wore a utilitarian brown suit striped like a wasp. Looking at the photograph now, Mark thought that he himself looked rather ghost-like in the bright sun, as if he were either receding from reality or were entering it from some other world.

  “And I suppose you’re married yourself?” she pursued, seeming perplexed by something about him which she could not define.

  “I was,” he said briefly, letting her think what she liked.

  She paused briefly and then plunged on. “I still have the students though you wouldn’t believe what they get up to. They would be taking drugs if it wasn’t for me taking a firm hand. And their hair. You’ve never seen the like of it. They’re like girls. I swear you can’t tell the girls from the boys. One of them—would you believe it?—put a photograph of some heathen on his bedroom wall. I soon told him to pull that down. I think they’re all Communists.”

  Mark remembered the long discussions he and the other two would have late at night while Edmundo Ros was playing on the radio, obscure philosophical discussions about perennial matters such as Bertrand Russell and his pennies, continuing their debate in their huge beds upstairs (the three of them slept in the one room) while the moon shone in through the window on the ghostly bedclothes.

  “You were good at paying for your lodgings,” she said. “I must give you credit for that. Not like some of them. Do you remember Miss White? She’s a supervisor now.” Supervisor of what? he wondered. He had a vague memory of someone eternally knitting like that woman in Anouilh’s Antigone who had knitted all through the play and then got up at the end, having finished the row, and gone and hanged herself. Not that Miss White would do that. She was a dapper thirty-five year old in blue who was always picking the bones from kippers.

  “Did you know Harry had passed away?” she said. Harry was her husband, a vociferous taxi driver keen on football. She dabbed at her left eye delicately with a handkerchief which mysteriously appeared from somewhere. As a matter of fact she had been rather rough with Harry, as he remembered, for Harry wasn’t ambitious and kept pigeons which she didn’t like. “He came home one night and died in that very chair you’re sitting in. Sudden it was. I was making the tea at the time. You mind he was keen on football?”

  That had been a major part of his exiguous life, the thin man with the phantasmal moustache who was often to be seen trimming the hedges on a Sunday afternoon.

  She talked on and on and he said, “I’m sorry. You were saying?”

  “I was saying about the burn on the sideboard. It was Hugh who did that. Only he wouldn’t admit it. He’s in charge of a factory now in Yorkshire. I get a card from him every year at Christmas. He’s married down there with two children, a boy and a girl. Imagine poor Hugh. But he was a devil too. But you were the quietest of them. Fancy seeing you again. Do you remember the night Mr. Black smashed the car up? My, the police were busy that night. And you wouldn’t believe butter would melt in his mouth. Him a bank manager and going off climbing mountains every weekend. He was always singing the Messiah, do you remember? He was a good singer, he had a good voice. But you never did anything like that. You were a great one for studying. It was a pleasure to hear you talk. I often used to say to myself, ‘That boy will be a professor yet.’ But do you remember the day you and Mr. Silver had that bottle of port in the lounge (he was in the Customs, you mind) and when I came in Mr. Silver stood up and he said:

  “Madam I’ll set the table. Madam, I am quite capable of setting the table.” That was the only time he ever called me Madam, when he was drunk. I used to remind him of it. And, to top it all, he fell to the floor,” she said, still watching Mark carefully.

  “Yes, I remember Mr. Silver and Mr. Black.” Mr. Black was the one who would play the piano singing “All we like sheep,” the light glistening from his bald confident head.

  Their exchanges were beginning to lose energy now as if each was casting about for something to say. I was here once, he thought. I sat on this chair and yet it bears no stigmata. Who was it who was here? Was it me or a phantom of myself? It was strange and slightly frightening to think about it but at least his ex-landlady was solid enough, a stone in the flux.

  “Will you stay for tea?” she said carelessly as if she didn’t really want him to stay and adding almost immediately, “but I expect you’ll have lots to do.”

  “No, thanks, I shall have to be going. I just called for a minute.” She did not remark on the oddness of his calling out of the blue at that time of year. She got up (as if she had decided something about him) and so did he. She would certainly have kept Fred and Hugh and their large families and their medical talk and their factory conversation. She was nothing if not normal.

  “How very ordinary she is,” he thought. “Not at all the person I remember.” There was an indefinable air of ageing about her. He looked around him. The furniture imposed itself on him with an almost intolerab
le weight. He had often looked into that mirror there. Where did reflections go? Berkeley would know, as if it mattered.

  “Miss White is married now,” she said. “She’s in Wales. But all the wives work now even though their husbands may have good jobs. She was a clever woman. I never thought she would marry, though she could knit well.”

  As they were going out they passed the long haired David again.

  “This is the Mr. Simmons of whom I told you so much,” said his mother rather obsequiously.

  “Congratulations,” said the boy, brutally giving him one brief careless look before making his way upstairs. “Bastard,” said Mark under his breath but realising that he himself at the same age had been negligent and intolerant as well, brutal in argument and concerned only with that. He noticed it was still the same carpet on the stairs.

  “It was so good of you to come,” she said standing at the door. He mumbled something and made his way up the road. There had once been a small library there. He remembered entering one evening to see standing on top of a ladder a young girl in black showing fine long legs in the light which poured over the books. He remembered also another girl he had once met in a library, and taking her home one winter’s night and kissing her in the doorway. Her face was blue in the light. And finally he remembered another girl he had met on Christmas Day and seeing her home to a brutal slum where he had spent two hours with her mother playing Monopoly. Her mother had been mountainous and smelt abominably. The daughter was brutal in her language and mercenary in her ideas. He remembered her as pale and bitter. He passed the place where the library had been but now there was a radio shop. How terrible it was to feel an anachronism. A city made of silver yielded nothing to his digging. He had left no mark. Some negligence had irretrievably gone.