Then he put on his tweed overcoat, put up its collar, looked in the mirror again, and decided not to wear a hat. He went downstairs, through the lounge again, and out into the street.
He turned into Earl’s Court Road, and walked down towards the station. He passed the station and contemplated having a drink at one of the pubs on the right. No – he might miss her. It was a quarter past seven – she didn’t usually go out till about half past. He crossed over Cromwell Road, and looked up to see if there was a light in her flat. He couldn’t see one – but you often couldn’t if the curtains were properly drawn.
He hoped to God the front door wouldn’t be locked, as then he would have to ring, and be let in by that beastly woman. He felt curiously numb. He often did feel numb like this, just before meeting her.
No, the door was not locked. The passage was in darkness, but there was enough light on the first floor landing to enable him to see his way. Her flat was on the top floor. As he climbed up he saw there was a light on her landing. Then, as he climbed the last stairs, he saw that her front door was ajar, and, looking through, he saw the sitting-room door was also ajar, and he caught a glimpse of Peter, talking at the mantelpiece with a glass of beer in his hand.
He knocked with the brass knocker. ‘Bang-tiddy-bang-bang – bang, bang.’ He saw Peter look in his direction, and he walked in.
Chapter Six
‘Good evening, Chum,’ said Peter, who had been doing this Syd Walker stuff for a week or so now. ‘Here’s our old Pal, George Harvey Bone… Lumme – he don’t half get into some funny how-d’ ye-do’s – don’t ’e? ’
Though this was said in a superficially friendly and rallying way, he noticed that Peter betrayed, in his look, his dislike and scorn of him. He always gave him this look when he hadn’t seen him for a few days. It was a bullying, appraising, remembering look. He nearly always called him George Harvey Bone, too – and the tone in which he said this was appraising, remembering, bullying.
‘Hullo,’ he said, smiling and feigning heartiness. ‘How are we?… Hullo, Netta.’
He dropped his voice as he greeted Netta, and caught her eye shyly, and looked away again. When meeting her after a parting of any length he never dared to look at her fully, to take her in, all at once. He was too afraid of her loveliness – of being made to feel miserable by some new weapon from the arsenal of her beauty – something she wore, some fresh look, or attitude, or way of doing her hair, some tone in her voice or light in her eye – some fresh ‘horror’ in fact.
‘Hullo, Bone,’ she said from the depths of her armchair. The game of calling people by their surnames, like the Syd Walker business, had been going on for about a week too. He noticed that in her tone and her glance she also conveyed something of what Peter had conveyed in his. There was a difference, however. Where Peter had shown his scorn and dislike, she showed scorn practically without dislike. There was merely cold indifference, mixed, possibly, with a fear of being bored by him, and a slight resentment towards him for being the cause of this fear.
She uttered the word ‘Bone’ with an ironical firmness and emphasis which deliberately brought out the latent absurdity of the word – made you think of dog-bones or ham-bones or rag-and-bone men. This did not displease him at all, however. She had many moods worse than her ironical one. Irony, in fact, was usually a sign of fairly good weather. It might even burst forth into the brief, holy sunshine of kindness.
‘So you’ve got back?’ said Peter, ‘or so it appears.’
‘Yes, it seems I’ve got back.’
He smiled again, and looked at Peter so that he didn’t have to look at her – in very much the same way as a shy person, having been introduced to a stranger by a friend, looks hard at his friend while the three of them talk, makes his friend’s eyes his anchor.
Peter now stood leaning against the mantelpiece, the glass of beer in his hand, warming his legs at the gas-fire. Underneath his grey check jacket he wore a navy blue sweater with a polo collar. On top of this collar was his nasty fair face, with its nasty fair ‘guardsman’s’ moustache, which, in combination with his huge sneering chin, made him look not unlike the Philip IV of Velasquez. George could never look at Peter, after having been away from him for any time, without realizing what a formidable, sullen, brooding and curiously evil man this was, behind his off-hand yet fairly good-mannered exterior. Who was he, and where did he come from? He had always been there: he had known him as long as he had known Netta. And yet he knew nothing about him. Above all, what was there between these two, behind the appearance of there being nothing whatever? He believed, on the whole, that the appearance reflected the reality that there was nothing. But he never found them together without wondering.
He now glanced at Netta, to see if something in her appearance might enlighten him. But she gave nothing away as usual. She lay in the armchair holding a glass of beer on one of its sides, and looking into the gas-fire. She was hardly made up at all, and had an appearance of not having quite finished dressing. She was wearing her dark-brown knitted frock – one which contrived to give him, perhaps, more pain than any of her others – and instead of shoes she wore loosely some red slippers he had not seen before. These matched a red scarf she had put round her neck. He realized that the matching of these two – the red slippers with the red scarf – together with her dark brown dress, and dark eyes and hair – furnished the fresh ‘horror’ he had been awaiting. Although she was not made up, although she was untidy and not trying, she agonized him with the unholy beauty of her red scarf matching her red slippers on her dark self.
She looked, in point of fact, something more than untidy: she looked ill. And he had no doubt she was, very. She and Peter would certainly have been drinking heavily all over Christmas, and the hangover would now be at its dreariest. On countless occasions he had seen her like this, staring into her gas-fire at seven o’clock, waiting to go out and get lit up again. That gas-fire – what sinister, bleak misery emanated from its sighing throat and red, glowing asbestos cells! To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl’s Court.
On the mat in front of the fire was a quart bottle of Watney’s Ale. The room was in a state of disorder, and had not been dusted. There were ash-trays full of stubs all over the place, some unwashed, finger-smeared tumblers, and a tea-tray with cups full of old wet leaves. Mrs Chope had evidently not been in, and Netta never did anything for herself. The room, which she had taken furnished, contained a table, a sideboard, a radiogram, a large settee and two armchairs. A door led from it into her bedroom. You had to go out into the passage to the bathroom and a small kitchen.
‘Have some Pale Ale,’ said Netta, pointing to the bottle with a kick of her red-slippered foot, ‘you’ll find a glass somewhere.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and fetched a glass from the sideboard and came back to fill it on the mantelpiece.
‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘how’s Hunstanton? Bracing as ever?’
‘Most,’ he said. ‘Well – here’s how.’ And he drank.
‘And did your efforts result in pecuniary advantage,’ asked Peter, ‘as predicted?’
‘Yes. Most successful.’
‘How much?’
‘Ten pounds.’
‘Ah. Good work.’
They knew he had gone to Hunstanton to get money from his aunt – to ‘touch’ her. They had all, and that included himself, made a joke of it. But now, remembering the friendly kindly woman who had given him the money, who had offered him her seaside hospitality and tried to please him and be ‘modern’ by giving him ‘cocktails’, he was ashamed. That quite pleasant and not undignified little week-end was now lost and to be forgotten for ever – converted into a small, cynical joke, to be offered up to the beast Peter and the cruel, dissipated Netta on the altar of a gas-fire in Earl’s Court.
‘You must have been having one of your brighter periods,’ said Netta.
‘Yes. I was quite bright.’
‘Not in one of your famo
us stooge moods?’ said Peter.
‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘ “stooge” moods?’
He knew, of course, what Peter meant. He meant one of his dumb moods, his ‘dead’ periods. But he had to ask him what he meant out of politeness to respond to the fairly friendly raillery which Netta and Peter had begun.
‘Oh,’ said Peter, ‘just “stooge” moods.’
‘What is a “stooge”, anyway?’ he asked.
‘A dumb person,’ said Netta in her precise, firm voice. ‘A feed to a comedian. A butt.’
‘So I’m a stooge, am I?’
‘No. You’re not a stooge,’ said Netta. ‘It’s just that you have “stooge” moods.’
‘Well, I can’t help it.’
‘No, honestly, George,’ said Peter, pouring out some more beer for himself, ‘what are you thinking about when you go all dead like that?’
‘Dead like what?’
‘Yes,’ said Netta, ‘I’ d like to know what’s going on in his head.’
‘Going on in my head, when?’
‘When you go all dumb, and don’t talk, and look all vague and automatic’
‘Surely a fellow’s allowed to be a bit quiet and thoughtful at times.’
‘Quiet and thoughtful!’ said Netta.
‘He’s probably working out some abstruse mathematical problem,’ said Peter.
‘Yes,’ said Netta, ‘or perhaps he’s a Trappist Monk or something… Vows himself to periods of silence.’
‘No, it couldn’t be that,’ said Peter, ‘because he does answer. It’s just that he’s in a dream.’
‘A somnambulist,’ said Netta.
‘Well, first of all I’m a stooge, and now I’m a somnambulist,’ he said. ‘Which is it to be?’
‘Neither,’ said Netta, ‘just a bloody fool, generally.’
And at this they all laughed.
‘No, honestly,’ said Peter, ‘I wish I knew what went on in your head.’
‘Oh – I don’t know,’ he said, and by now he wanted to change the subject. For the truth of the matter was, of course, that he had not the slightest conception of what went on in his head at those times, and if he admitted as much to Netta she might think he was ill, or even a little mad. And if she thought that, she would be able to despise him as an ineffectual human being even more cruelly and destructively than she did already. He had to go on pretending that these moods arose from sheer preoccupation or indifference. Apart from all this, he was genuinely somewhat worried about himself in this matter, and, because he was worried about it, the subject was distasteful to him.
And he said, ‘Oh – I don’t know…’ and tried to change the subject. ‘Well, Netta,’ he said, ‘how have you been getting on?’
‘Excellently, thank you, Bone,’ said Netta, in that crisp, conclusive tone which she commonly employed when snubbing him, and there was a slightly awkward pause, as it was now clear to all three that he had been caught trying to change the subject.
‘Poor old George,’ said Peter, ‘I believe he’s getting livid with us.’
‘I suppose,’ said Netta, still looking into the fire, ‘that it’s because he’s so big that he’s so silly.’
A perfectly off-hand and unstudied observation, yet such was his state, it made his heart leap up in hope and joy. It was the kindest, most cordial thing she had said for weeks. It was the mention of his bigness which particularly delighted him – the naming and friendly admission of his one physical asset. In his very few successes with women in the past, the thing had always begun with his humorous disparagement of his bigness – he was ‘vast’, ‘huge’, ‘terrific’, ‘simply enormous, of course’. And now Netta had called him big and silly – a perfect combination in the language and tradition of flirtation. Could all be lost, if she could still call him big and silly? He looked at her again, trying to read his fate, to find some sign of change of heart, in some look on her face. But as usual there was nothing there: she put out her cigarette in an ash-tray on the armchair; and got up and began to adjust her hair in the mirror over the fireplace.
As he himself was standing at the mantelpiece she was now less than two feet away from him, and here was another ordeal. There was, he knew now, a definite sphere of sexual attraction, a halo, a field of physical and magnetic influence, which Netta carried about with her wherever she walked. This invisible yet palpable influence petered out at a certain distance, about two feet away from her body, which was its centre and source. So if he kept out of range, if he was more than two feet away from her, he was secure from its effects. But if he went towards her and into it, or she came towards him and either consciously or unconsciously smote him with it, he was made to suffer indescribable things. Within this appalling area his love and physical longing for her took on a frightful increase, underwent a complete qualitative change: giddiness supervened: he was in a world in which he could hardly breathe or think, in which he was choked by the mist of his sensuous anguish. And since the only means of abating this anguish, of turning it into delirious joy, was to seize her in his arms and crush her to himself, and since this means was not open to him, all he could do was to stand still in a state of paralysis and suspense, trying to compose his features, trying to appear normal so as not to give himself away, meanwhile praying that she would release him by walking away, he himself not having the physical strength to do so.
Whether she herself was aware of this two-foot emanation from herself, this imprisoning field of radiance, he never knew. Probably at times she did, and at times she did not. At any rate she now showed outwardly neither consciousness of what she was doing to him, nor any intention to release him at once. She adjusted her hair with deliberation and a serious profile, and then turned and leaned her back against the mantelpiece. She might have been going to stay there for hours. The next moment, however, she strolled into her bedroom, carrying her halo with her, several yards and a solid doorway now being between him and it.
Thus, having assured him, reminded him, warned him of her power, she allowed him to continue his being as before. The whole process had occupied a very short space of time, and was full of mystery. It was as though a policeman, in the night, had shone his lantern on to a dark doorway, held it there for a little while suspiciously, and then walked on.
Chapter Seven
He talked, quite casually and easily with Peter at the mantelpiece, skilfully emptying from his eyes the anxiety and perturbation caused in his brain by every movement and sound he heard from her bedroom – the shutting of a drawer, the opening of a cupboard, the falling of a shoe – and soon there was another ‘Bang-tiddy-bang-bang – bang-bang’ on the door, and Mickey came in.
Mickey was about twenty-six, short, with a small moustache on a pasty face. The romance and glory of his life were behind him. The romance was still the warm East, where he had been a clerk in a rubber firm, and the glory had been the divine facility of living, women and drinking. Now he was unemployed, and wore an overcoat along the hard, frozen plains of Earl’s Court, where he lived on and with his mother. His mother was generous, and he was famous for his drunkenness locally, being particularly welcome in drinking circles, such as the one surrounding Netta, because, by his excesses, he put his companions in countenance, making their own excesses seem small in comparison. Your hangover was never so stupendous as Mickey’s, nor your deeds the night before so preposterous. The follies of each individual were forgotten, submerged in his supreme folly; by his own disgrace he brought grace to others. For this reason, if he tried to live soberly, and in the desperation of his self-inflicted illness he was sometimes forced to do this, his friends at once revealed their cold dislike of his change of front, and by combined chaffing and indirect bullying soon forced him to return to the character in which he was of such service to them.
George did not dislike Mickey as he disliked Peter. First of all, he had no uneasiness about him in regard to Netta. Mickey was oddly but quite plainly not interested in her as a girl; when near her it
was as though he lacked a sense, he did not respond or vibrate in any perceptible way. George also sometimes thought he could discern in Mickey something of his own private loathing of the life they were all leading, and the same occasional, hopeless aspiration to live otherwise. Finally, he felt there was nothing menacing about Mickey, as there was about Peter (and about Netta, too, if it came to that, in view of her power over him). Mickey and he had, in fact, something in common, if only as two weak characters against these two stronger ones. There was, however, no real liking or sense of friendship between the two: they never met or talked save in a communal way in the presence of others.
Mickey shouted through the bedroom door to Netta, and obtained her permission to help himself to the remains of the quart bottle of Watney. Then the three men talked in a gloomy, desultory way about the defunct Christmas, and the prospects of war in the spring, until Netta came back. She now had on brown shoes and a glorious dark navy blue overcoat, but no hat (she practically never wore a hat), and seemed ready to go out. A few minutes later the electric light and the gas-fire had been turned out, and their voices and footsteps were resounding in the stone passage outside.
Now, as always at this precise historical and geographical moment of the evening, he thought only of manoeuvring for the desired position – a position in which he was either behind or in front, alone with Netta, and so could walk along the pavement talking to her and no one else. He was usually successful enough in his tactics, so successful that he could afford sometimes to do the opposite and force Netta to walk behind or in front with someone else, so as to snub them if they imagined that any manoeuvring went on. But tonight he wanted to speak to her alone (he might not get the chance again when once they started drinking); and when they were out in the street he managed to get behind with her while Mickey and Peter went on ahead. Then, as they came to cross the road, he took advantage of an approaching car, to put his hand on her arm and hold her back, while the other two crossed the road and went ahead completely out of earshot.
Hangover Square Page 4