My Last Duchess

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “This is what I miss,” he said. “You can’t do this in my landlady’s. Nobody can. Nobody could. When Mrs. Walton says Wednesday was made for mince then God himself couldn’t convince her otherwise. She is the triangle of the universe.”

  Lorna laughed, showing white teeth in a brown gipsyish face and then attacked her steak again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really hungry.”

  He left his own steak and wandered back into the room they were in before asking, “Who is this reproduction by? The one on the sofa here.”

  “Bacon,” she said through a mouthful of steak. “I bought it recently.”

  He sat down on the sofa again and drank more whisky.

  “You certainly do knock it back,” she said half admiringly. “I could never drink like that though I have a cousin who does. He’s always being picked up by the police. Bailing him out is getting monotonous.”

  “Is that true?” he asked.

  “Of course. Why not? He’s a cruel bastard really.” She curled up on the floor again and burst out laughing.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Nothing much. Just wondering what the other girls would think. I suppose they play hockey.”

  “Just like Wilkinson,” he said.

  “Who’s Wilkinson?”

  “Oh, nobody you know. He’s an enemy of the spirit.”

  “And does he play hockey?” she said perfectly seriously.

  “You know,” he said in a blurred voice, “people are always telling me I ought to get married. They say that people aren’t taken seriously unless they are married. It is one answer I suppose.”

  “Of course it is. My mother is always telling me the same thing.”

  “Why don’t you send out for another half bottle?” he said. “Lift up the phone and tell the local hotel to send a flunkey along with a silver tray.”

  “I don’t need any.” She started talking again. “You know, when I was in Venice they knew all about this college, all these purple women. They all called me honey because they couldn’t remember my name. And one day we practised life-boat drill. They all staggered along on their crutches. You should have seen the fine young English officers all present and correct and all trying to seduce me. You would probably have known all about the life-boat drill. You’re rather clever, I think. My parents go everywhere you know. As long as they give me money they think that I’m no longer their responsibility.”

  She looked at him gravely and said, “Look, if you’re getting pissed, I’ll drive you home to Mrs. What’s her name and decant you there.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, “we shall not go near Mrs. Walton in my present state. I shall creep back under cover of night. Tell you what, we’ll go out somewhere. Let’s spend all night drinking. I think I have some of my cheque still left. And in the morning we shall return, as Macarthur said.”

  “Macarthur? Who’s that?”

  “A Scotsman. Just like Makarios.”

  She laughed at that for she had heard of Makarios. “All right then, we’ll go out and find a hotel and you can spend the remains of your cheque if that’s what you want. But I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t stay here.”

  “No, we won’t stay here. For the reason that we’ve run out of drink. And we’ll drive till we find an inn and drink wine and pretend we’re in Venice just like Henry James. Did you know that Henry James wrote a story set in Venice, though I can’t remember it at the moment. It’s about a manuscript, I think. And then we’ll gather hyacinths just like that girl in The Waste Land, Eliot’s hyacinth girl.”

  “I’d better get my coat then.” He swayed a little as he got on to his feet but he didn’t feel at all sick, merely blurred in a satisfactory manner.

  As they were going out the door Lorna paused looking out at the sunset. “I like this place,” she said. “I adore it.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just said, look at these colours. If I could only paint them.”

  And indeed, even to his blurred vision, the sky with its purplish cinders at the heart of a large expanse of fire was breathtaking in its splendour.

  “Another Troy for her to burn,” he thought with his aptitude for quotations. Perhaps Helen was rather like that, free and brown and gipsyish and not at all lissom and tall and blonde. A cat ran past them and she bent down and petted it. Its large eyes stared up at them and it purred round her legs. Mark ignored it, negotiating the steps with great care. He felt in fine fettle though his vision was a bit blurred. In fact he preferred the world like that, sometimes. They drove off in the direction of the splendid sunset looking for a pub, or better still a hotel.

  2

  He had been growing discontented with the college for a long time, situated though it was in a small lovely town by the sea, one of those small towns elegantly laid out with trees arching the avenues and middle aged spinsters riding along very upright on bicycles with the messages in baskets in front of them. Their terraced house—his and Lorna’s—was a little on the outskirts—not far from a large manorial boarding house which stood on the corner, and also not far from a hospital which was led to by winding gravel paths. The street proliferated with Bed and Breakfast signs that summer, and indeed every summer, and landladies woke to an exciting fresh day of telling their guests which famous spot to visit, what to do during the course of the day, and what the significance of tower or ivied ruin was. Permanent lodgers who had lasted out the winter found themselves in annexes and children fresh out of school were sent off to stay with relatives so that their rooms could be used. Hotel owners and boarding house keepers complained that “this was the worst season ever”. No-one could decide whether the visitor wanted a lovely unspoiled place or whether he wanted a miniature version of Blackpool and so there were rows in the Council which were reported reasonably objectively in the local paper. Mark’s neighbours, so far as he knew them, were a doctor and his wife who kept themselves to themselves and he was quite pleased about that.

  He could not understand why he was growing discontented but he felt it had something to do with the lack of intellectual content in his life. The girls were pleasant but in the end uninteresting and unenthusiastic. Most of the teachers had been there for a long time and had resigned themselves to staying. He himself had been there for a long time but hadn’t resigned himself. Year after year he felt flutterings of departure—especially in late spring and early summer—but hadn’t moved. Why hadn’t he? At one time, in the beginning, he had found the place, especially in summer, visionary and radiant: it was as if in those early days the leaves of the trees and the leaves of the books duplicated each other or rather were echoes of each other as if literature itself could bring news of spring. In those days he was like a missionary who entered a classroom to bring the gospel to his students. Looking back now he realised that these transformations had been effected by himself, they didn’t reside in his students who were ordinary and dull. It was he who had been the alchemist transmuting the lead into gold. The energy had been all his, the radiance had been his.

  And his colleagues too in those early days had been like missionaries. Now however he saw them as tired and disappointed people. Wilkinson he began more and more to despise. He was one of those energetic men, tall and thrusting, who have warm handshakes and irremediably medicore minds. He played golf, a game which Mark thought stupefyingly boring, and unsuited to the intellect which God or evolution had conferred on man.

  Mark felt more and more that he was caught inside a web of manoeuvring. These people weren’t interested in literature or anything else except how to get the best for themselves. If Shakespeare could be betrayed for a mess of pottage then he would have to take his chances. There was one man—not in the English Department—who was always ordering books for the library and who kept up a running feud with Miss Diamond who was in the English Department and had been assigned the job of librarian. This Maitland—the head of the Geography Department—who had taken an instant and inveterate dis
like to her, was coming in day after day with long lists of the most expensive American titles, none of which was in the library but which he was determined would be. He had a flash bristly moustache and talked in the most maddeningly reasonable way which had the effect of almost driving Miss Diamond insane. The Principal of the College was a small man who whenever you met him put his hands on your shoulders and gazed into your eyes saying with great conviction and the most lucid honesty, “My hands are tied.” The result was that nothing was ever done and head of departments regarded him with open contempt.

  It was not a large college and sometimes Mark regretted that he had not stayed on at University in order to get a Ph.D., for such work might have suited him better, given him more space and scope. The atmosphere was more like that of a school and the girls were in fact very schoolgirlish and unformed in their opinions and attitudes. As they walked about the streets of the town they seemed to sport phantom uniforms and to recall ghostly hockey games.

  Many of the lecturers too had become characters. One of them who taught in the Maths Department was famous mainly for his skill in solving the Ximenes crossword and another for his ability to play bridge. Nothing that had been done by anyone was ever forgotten and was likely to be cast up to him years afterwards. For instance, one of them had once gone home in his gown and this story or legend was transmitted from generation to generation. Or if someone had driven a car in the wrong direction round a roundabout then this too was remembered.

  At first Mark hadn’t noticed these things. He was too busy with his lecturing and also with visiting his girls who delivered their practice lessons in schools in the adjacent city offering their little poems (“The Daffodils” for instance) like bouquets to pupils whose small beady eyes were more concerned with what the girls were wearing than with anything that they could teach them. Not of course that he saw the worst of the pupils for from some obscure sense of fair play they were on their best behaviour when he was sitting there taking notes, knowing that the student was on trial. He shuddered to think what it was like when he wasn’t there. How could literature bear the assault of these eyes, these destructive forces?

  Mark himself was torn between the calm of the college and the torment of the city. He felt obscurely unclean as if by staying in the college he was sheltering from the “real” world where transactions with evil continued. Like the sophisticates of early centuries who were enmeshed in the idea of the Noble Savage, he felt that his exploration of the world was not deep enough, that his real job ought to be pacification at the very centre. If he had thought that what he was doing was important—or if he had been able to enter into the lives of those who lectured in the college—he wouldn’t have felt so disappointed and especially so at the time when he was staying in digs. More and more he was beginning to sense that the day of literature was over, that in a hedonistic time the superficial was king.

  What distressed him was the smallness of his colleagues’ horizons and the fact that so many of them had surrendered. There was for instance a little man at the head of the Psychology Department who had a small prudent beard and cultivated a vague likeness to D. H. Lawrence. This man offended the students by his megalomaniac attitude and his continual recourse to a book which he had himself written—a yellow book in the series, “Modern Ideas”—and which concerned itself with methods of study and for which a noted psychologist had been induced to write a flattering foreword. There was also an Australian who took the Education Classes and who went in bright and unprepared, simply saying to a class of about eighty girls, “And what do you wish to discuss today?” whereupon there would be a long period of silence gradually punctured by giggles and conversation. And then there was the legendary Speech Specialist who many years before had pointed to the area which produced the glottal stop only to be interrupted by a voice which had shouted gleefully, “And very nice too.”

  But what Mark missed above all was any sense of dedication to the subject as such. Of course if he could have got into a university this situation would not have arisen. But mainly because of the interruption of National Service he had found himself in that place and had been at first too fascinated to move. But there was no denying the loveliness of the town.

  In summer it was quite enchanting with its wide lovely streets, its sparkling air, the fine clean water, the hills seen across the strait. He had in fact fallen in love with it as if it had been a kind of Eden, all the more so as he had just come back from the frustrations and inanities of National Service, with its tedium and ennui, and periods of lying on a barrack bed watching the fall of the rain. True, there had been the terrible Mrs. Walton but in the early days there had also been young lecturers with whom he could discuss literature. But they had all gone, he himself had grown older and was left behind till eventually he had met Lorna.

  To marry her was inevitable: there was nothing else he could do. Tired of Mrs. Walton, of digs, he had erupted into a life with Lorna and the more easily because she was alone. If she had brought in her unpredictable wake flotillas of parents, aunts and cousins he would have sheered down the quieter cove to which he had grown used, but in fact, apart from one long haired cousin whom he had never seen, she had brought no retinue with her. The wedding had not been a church one, he had been adamant about that. There had really been a dreadful scene which had ended with her crying helplessly but his honesty had prevailed.

  “Why not?” she had shouted. “Why not a church wedding?”

  “For the simple reason,” he explained patiently, “that I don’t go to church. And I don’t like to ask favours of anybody.”

  “What favour? What favour? Other people don’t go to church and they have church weddings.”

  “I’m not other people. I want to be honest about this. If I don’t go to church then I won’t be dishonest enough to ask for a church wedding. In any case it’s all a lot of nonsense. I don’t want photographers aiming their cameras at me and people gawking at me in my hired tails which are too long for me.”

  “I haven’t been going to church,” said Lorna, “but I want a church wedding. I want to have photographs to look back on. I want to wear a gown.”

  “You! But you’ve made fun of the church. I’ve heard you.”

  “I know but that’s different. I want to be a bride, a real bride.” And indeed she did: she wanted to prove that she could be beautiful and radiant like all the other girls she was always talking about—the beautiful models she had met in London, girls with chic, girls who were proud of their bodies, the self worshipping narcissi of the metropolis. Her reading of women’s magazines was merely another aspect of what he considered her romanticism.

  “No,” he repeated obdurately, convinced that he was right. If one wasn’t intellectually honest then one wasn’t anything. For one terrifying moment he was afraid that she would call off the whole thing (he had visions of returning to the mince and shady rooms of Mrs. Walton), that she would disappear out of his life altogether, that she would simply write to her parents asking for a colossal cheque and take the next train to London. It seemed to him that the parting hung on a hair: but she didn’t make the break. Most of the time he couldn’t understand what she saw in him anyway. Sometimes she seemed to think that he was an intellectual giant and that nothing was beyond him. Sometimes in the evenings as she sat on the sofa, legs drawn up, watching TV in one of her few moments of perfect stillness he would wonder about it.

  She liked running the house. Standing at the cooker, hair all deranged, wearing what looked more like an artist’s smock than anything else, she seemed so happy that he often teased her.

  “Where do you get this recipe from?”

  “I can read, you know. I followed the instructions. That’s one thing about your New Statesman, there is nothing so common as a recipe there.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen you reading them with your tongue hanging out of your mouth.”

  Actually, when she was drawing, this was what she did, her tongue did really hang out of her mo
uth, like a child concentrated on what it is doing. But at the same time he often felt that she was judging him. After all she had been everywhere, she was a global being, she had met many interesting people and he envied her that. He envied her that early freedom, these gipsyish peregrinations. She wouldn’t, however, talk about her early days except when they quarrelled, no matter how much he probed, and he felt that she was protecting those years from him in order to nurse them in her memory. But when they quarrelled she would say things like, “Why have you taught all these years here then?” And, “You’re never been anywhere. What would you know?” Or she would try and make him jealous by saying things like, “You should have seen those officers on the ship.”

  When they had the painters and decorators in she was in her element. She could establish a rapport more quickly with them than he could. She was always running about making cups of tea for them so that the whole operation became more expensive than it would otherwise have been. Once she sat on the stairs with one of them for a whole hour discussing the diabetes from which the painter suffered and examining the intricacies of needles and fluid. As for himself he didn’t quite know how to speak to them and wandered from room to room with his transistor listening to the Test between England and Australia.

  “You know,” she said, “the tall one has been all over. He was an engineer at one time. He was telling me all about Port Said.” He could imagine what he might have been telling her.

  He himself had started the book which Wilkinson had always been urging on him and was involved in a course of reading novels in order to prepare himself. It was to be about Frith whose work he had chosen because he had read a lot of the novels. Actually most of the novels were about wife and husband relationships and could be considered in their entirety as variations on this theme. One, for instance, was about a writer who had been prevented from attaining his full power because of the nice wife he had married after a period of spiritual abyss, and had as its epigraph the quotation from Hopkins: