My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  So the conversation continued. Mark made no move to go. He didn’t want to face his hotel. He did however make one attempt which was shouted down. After that Harrison got on to rockets and nuclear war. It turned out that he was as knowledgeable about rockets as about many other things.

  Finally, Mark found himself alone with the mother, at midnight.

  “You’re very unhappy,” she said. “It can’t be as bad as that.” And for two hours he talked to her in the small warm room, able like the Ancient Mariner to speak at last. He remembered later her small serious face, the whisky he drank, and at last being ushered into a small bedroom from which he rose at seven in the early grey morning illuminating his watch by a match and arriving at his hotel in the cold snowy air after walking all the way.

  PART TWO

  1

  He taught girls in a small college which was where he had met Lorna, in the middle of introducing them to The Waste Land which they, in their invincible normality, didn’t like, complaining that it was all very gloomy, though he himself liked it enormously, mainly because it allowed one to talk about so many other things apart from the poetry, such as fertility rites, (The Golden Bough, which he had never really read) and Communism. He had been brought up on poetry where you had to use your mind and where there was a certain puzzle element and despised the kind of thing that they on the whole liked, an undemanding, luscious, vague pop stuff. The girls of course listened, never dreaming of arguing with him, looked pretty, took notes and didn’t understand a word of the poem, which he discovered when he had a look at their essays where everything he said was wrongly emphasised and connected, rather like events in a bad newspaper. He had to learn therefore to be very simple and repetitive (a thing which he found increasingly difficult) for these girls weren’t at all interested in literature, only in getting a ticket which would take them out to teach. Looking at them, so young and fresh and pretty, he vaguely understood why they didn’t like Eliot, though he would put the thought away from him.

  He was quite a good teacher and reasonably witty with a sort of easy with which appealed to the girls and which they understood. His favourite lines from The Waste Land were the ones about the typist and the drying combinations set against a red romantic sunset. He thought this rather funny and so did they. He was no authoritarian though at times their cowishness irritated him, their placidity got on his nerves. He was happy with literature at the beginning: he didn’t believe that it had anything to do with politics, though, according to the papers, most university students were followers of the egregious Che Guevara, and actually had pictures of him on their bedroom walls. The girls at the training college certainly hadn’t heard of him. He himself had never been rebellious in university and was happy to get drunk on Shakespeare’s poetry, which would have been considered rather odd nowadays as far as he could understand.

  Of course the girls in the college weren’t rebellious either. Nor were the teachers. A training college was different from a university. They were all transmitters of an old culture and therefore conservative: it wasn’t their job to question things and in any case the pace in the small town was such that protest would appear ridiculous, rather like seeing a man driving along the local street, not a very long one, at a hundred miles an hour.

  One day Lorna had impinged on his notice. He was in the middle of talking about the fertility imagery in The Waste Land and explaining how the central theme of the poem was fertility and barrenness, including even the sequence in the pub, when an empty milk bottle rolled down the wooden steps on to the floor in front of him. He stared at it in amazement (was the milk after all something to do with fertility imagery?), the book in his hand, and then across the desks to where Lorna in her untidy coat was leaning forward as if preparing to retrieve the bottle, trying not to giggle. Suddenly she made a little rush to the front and then with a queer little bow rushed back to her seat again while all the girls looked at her and then at him. He didn’t say anything at all, only she had been brought to his notice.

  She wasn’t at all what one might call beautiful or even pretty. She had high cheekbones rather like those of a Red Indian and she looked rather untidy and awkward, the sort of person who might very well be carrying milk bottles around and letting them roll down steps in classrooms. But what she did give was an impression of animation a sort of scattered liveliness.

  Ever since then he had noticed her more and more. She would come to the front after the class was over and ask him questions about Eliot, for example whether he was married, and where he had got his fertility symbolism from. It was quite clear that not only was her interest in literature minimal, but that she had in many ways the mind of a child. An essay of hers stated that Eliot was keenly interested in Indian religions and that his use of Sanskrit showed a very modern intelligence as did his knowledge of John Donne. Every statement he had made was returned to him like the reflection in a spoon, distorted and fattened and absurd. He had tried to explain this to her but she wouldn’t or couldn’t understand. She seemed to be implying: Why can’t Eliot say what he means straight out, as she did herself?

  In the middle of term she went away on holiday and wrote to him from Venice a breathless letter in very large round script. She seemed to have plenty of money—or rather her parents had—and as far as he could understand she had been all over the globe whereas he himself had never left the country. So she had a certain helter-skelter exotic quality which appealed to him, and this breathless negligent air was reproduced in her letters, which were quick and observant. She described beautifully the old woman she had met in Venice with the lorgnette and the canals and the guides. (“You wouldn’t have liked the guide, he smelt abominably.”) Her glancing exquisite prose, unpunctuated and misspelt, made a great impression on him because of its brightness, its sudden flickering movement and its sheer power of observation. It was full of parentheses and postscripts and was very long as if she had spent a week on it. In fact it was ten pages long and the best part was the one describing the practice life-boat drill with one dowager explaining that she couldn’t go into the boat without her maid who happened at the time to be seasick in her cabin. He had received it one morning while mooning over his porridge in Mrs. Walton’s lodging. He couldn’t help contrasting his own narrow life with the spaciousness of Venice and the gipsyish Lorna with the green faced Mrs. Walton, whose main occupation seemed to be to watch for him when he came in at night. Lorna wrote of champagne and giggling parties and trying to learn Italian and her adventures in the market place, reproducing fragments of Italian like a miraculously gifted bird. She was like one of those bright young things of the thirties because of her carelessness both as to dress and manners among the other dedicated and serious girls who were all wanting to become teachers in primary schools.

  He was rather surprised at getting the letter, and immensely flattered too. He was hoping he would get another one (she didn’t put an address on the letter) but one day she appeared at the lectures again as if nothing had happened. He found himself more and more inventing witticisms that would please her and thinking of her as distinct from the other members of the class.

  As a matter of fact he had been thinking he ought to get married for he was getting rather old now and a bit tired of digs. Mrs. Walton infuriated him not by anything she did but simply because she was there at all. He wanted more freedom and more space. He wanted in theory to be able to lie down on the embroidered bedspread in his dirty shoes. He wanted to come in drunk at three in the morning without running into a strategically placed umbrella stand but knew that this wouldn’t be possible for her will was stronger than his and her silences more secure.

  The Head of his Department—a man called Wilkinson—had mentioned the idea of marriage to him. Sometimes he would be invited to call at Wilkinson’s house and he would arrive there and pull the bell which was attached to a long rope and wait for a bit, casting his eye round the garden and the gravel till Wilkinson loomed against the glass door. Wilkinson had
a rather plump wife with crinkling eyes who would listen to her husband talk in his ranging confident mediocre manner as if he were saying things of the greatest importance. He was the kind of man you might start a discussion on evil with only to find at the end that you were talking about a delinquent milkman. All philosophical discussion turned into anecdote under his unremitting bland mind. To argue with him was like playing with an inferior chess player: you lost the game mainly because your opponent did all the wrong things.

  Wilkinson would often say things like: “I wonder whatever happened to Shaw. He used to be with me at university. He was a man who got straight A’s in his literature but he wouldn’t do any Anglo Saxon. The last I heard of him he was teaching English to the Congo mercenaries.” And he would shake his head over the wastefulness of brilliance. Or he would say, “I don’t think Murray made the right move. He should have applied for that job six years ago.” Yet Wilkinson was a man of great sincerity and probity. One knew where one was with him and the answer was nowhere. He had written one book about dress in the Middle Ages but otherwise he had no real passions, only enthusiasms.

  At the end of the evening he would show Mark to the gate, their feet crackling on gravel, and he would stand there talking to him and saying that he ought to get married. “People who aren’t married aren’t taken seriously, you know. I’m saying that for your own good.” And Mark would listen and then set off for his digs under the stars, passing on his way a loch with two swans on it, drooping their heads among the reeds. He often wondered how deep the loch was after a conversation with Wilkinson.

  One day he came out of the college with some books over his arm. It was a fine sunny day, one of those days which remind people of Paris and the Champs-Elysées or an American campus with young green fluttering trees winking their leaves all around. He didn’t know what he was going to do that afternoon or for that matter that evening. As he stood there he heard what sounded like an explosion and there was Lorna driving along in her antiquated car. She stopped and leaned out of the window, her hair blowing slightly in the slight breeze.

  “A lift?” she said in her careless rather aristocratic voice. Without hesitation he went forward and entered the car and they drove off past a number of girls who were watching them with interest. But he didn’t care, he just wanted to be out of there for a while.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “I thought,” she said, “you might come along to my flat and I could offer you a steak. I’m not a great cook but you look half starved most of the time.”

  It didn’t surprise him in the least that she should be as abrupt as this: in fact it was what he would have expected from her.

  “You must be tired of those bloody people,” she said, careering past a car with a fat man in it who gestured vaguely after her.

  “All right,” he said. “Only I must buy a half bottle of whisky. I’ll have to contribute something.”

  “If you like but I warn you I won’t drink anything.”

  They got out at a pub to which he sometimes went and he bought a half bottle after which they continued and eventually stopped at a large rambling house with a rambling garden.

  “I rent a flat here,” she said. “There’s no-one but me and the owner who’s a perfectly foul person but I never see him except in the morning. He’s always repairing engines.”

  He climbed the steep steps and entered the house: it occurred to him afterwards that in a perfectly typical fashion she had left the door unlocked. He found himself in a room decorated in black and red and sat down on a black leather sofa beside a pile of newspapers among which were the Observer and The Times. She followed him in and then went into the kitchen. He took out the half bottle and poured some into a glass which he found on a sideboard, shouting to her whether she wanted any.

  “No, thanks,” her voice came back from the kitchen. “None at all. I’ve given all that up. I used to drink but there’s no point to it.”

  Beside him he saw an open book by Henry James and wondered whether she had left it there for his benefit: there were also a number of records by people he had never heard of. She came back in while he was thinking about this and curled herself up on the floor in her black tights and black jersey, looking cool and remote, not even wearing lipstick.

  As he drank his whisky rather quickly he made small conversation. “How much do they charge you for this?”

  “Oh, about seven or eight pounds a week. I don’t know. Something like that.”

  “How do you like it here yourself?” she said.

  “Oh, I’d better not say anything about that. I’ve been here for about twenty years, no, slightly less. That ought to answer your question. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t.” He was astonished to find himself in the flat at all, and drank more whisky.

  “Do you drink a lot?” she said. “My relatives drink a lot. No, that’s not quite true. My aunt doesn’t. I mean my London aunt. Down south of course it’s drugs now. You would be amazed at the kind of lives they lead. The place is rampant with homosexuals. They send each other flowers.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t drink a lot. It’s just that tonight I couldn’t stand going back to the digs, and that’s why I am here. I don’t like whisky all that much. It’s got an appalling taste. But I shall drink it just the same. I see you’re reading Henry James,” he added.

  “I’ve only started. I always feel that I ought to read more. But I’m terribly ignorant. In any case I don’t like him. He’s very slow. He goes on and on about people’s souls.”

  “What do you do when you’re not up here? I don’t suppose you really want to be a teacher.”

  “Good God, no. I just thought it might be a good racket for a while. I’m in London most of the time. I meet all sorts of what you would call superficial people, horrible people. Then there are the beautiful girls down there. Models. They take everything off and remake themselves. Some of them are quite lovely. They are like paintings. I feel so ugly beside them. So clumsy.”

  “Why should you feel like that? You are not at all ugly,” and he drank some more whisky.

  “Oh but I am. I’m clumsy. I can’t help it. I look like a squaw or something. These girls are all tall and blonde and lissom and they haven’t got a brain in their heads. What do you do with yourself?”

  “Me? Nothing. Nothing at all. When it comes down to it I do nothing at all.” He drank some more whisky and the extraordinary thing was that it didn’t seem to have any effect on him. And all the while she was kneeling on the floor in her fine black clothes, cool and distant.

  “I’m sure you could write a book,” she said. “I wish I was talented but I’m not. I have no talent for anything. Don’t you think that’s terrible? But you can at least talk about Eliot.” And she laughed a little. “He sounds an old bore but perhaps he wasn’t.”

  “But you’ve travelled everywhere,” he said.

  “Oh yes I have, but I remember nothing of it all. South Africa, Italy, Greece, the lot—you name it, I’ve been there. And I can’t remember a thing about any of these places. Not a thing.” She got up suddenly. “I’d better put that steak on and warm it up.” She disappeared and he drank more whisky, feeling that he would like to stay in that room all the time, it was so huge and the paintings were so bright, and everything was thrown about so negligently.

  After a while she came back and knelt as before on the floor.

  “You’re not at all ugly,” he said. “I don’t know where you get that idea from. You’re interesting, which is more than can be said for those other cows. It’s appalling the way they sit there and feed on stuff they don’t at all like. Why don’t they have the guts to tell me to go to hell with my T. S. Eliot?”

  “As I might do, you mean?”

  “Yes. But perhaps that’s not fair. You’ve got money and they haven’t, so it’s easier for you.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was easier. You don’t know much about me. Isn’t that sunset lovely?” she said l
ooking out of the window, where indeed there was a technicolour sunset irradiating the sea, among a lot of purple clouds.

  “Oh, it’s beautiful here,” he said carelessly.

  “You said that as if you had something against it.”

  “Not really. Well perhaps it’s a bit like the Garden of Eden. One feels the ennui for violence. There’s some French expression for it, I think.”

  “I’ve seen quite a bit of that, one way or another,” she said quietly.

  He stared into the burning sunset against which her black clothes stood out clearly, like coal about to be burnt and he said:

  “I think perhaps Italy is the place I would most like to visit if I could bring myself to go anywhere.”

  “It’s quite sordid really. People with delusions of grandeur, you know. I didn’t like it. I like quiet places. I like this place. I don’t know why but I do like it. The people are very kind. I remember one night I went along to a local concert and they were very nice. This woman talked to me all night and invited me to see her. I think I shall go.”

  “By all means do,” he said, drinking some more whisky. Suddenly he leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips, which were very chaste and cool like those of a child.

  She rose and they went in and ate the steak which was not at all badly cooked though he only vaguely dabbed at it, for he still had the whisky glass in his hand. As a matter of fact he didn’t drink all that much but he felt rather nervous. He hadn’t met anyone quite like Lorna before and also he had a fine feeling of freedom with her, as though most things people would do didn’t surprise her. She was clearly worried about the uselessness of her life. “After all,” she said, “I’m twenty-four and I’ve done nothing.” He thought that at times she sounded rather wistful. But she certainly had seen far more than he had ever seen. She had met quite a lot of people whose names were known to him from books and could tell him intimate details about them which she had picked up in random gossip.