“No,” she said.
“But you must do, you got in touch with him last night.”
“Oh did I?” she said.
“Yes.”
“He is staying in Grosvenor Square, I believe, with some friends.”
“Oh,” I said. I had not imagined him as living there. “Do you know the friends?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Marius isn’t . . . ?” I began.
“Isn’t what?”
“Nothing,” I said. For a moment, and for some inexplicable reason, I had wanted to ask if Marius was married to Annabelle. But knew that he wasn’t.
There was a silence. Alice’s heavy beautiful face looked unutterably sad. While I had been wondering about Marius I had not thought of what she might be wanting herself. As she looked out of the window I could see the reflections of the traffic in her eyes.
“Darling,” she said, “for God’s sake say something, can’t you tell me about last night?” She looked so tired.
“We went round to Grosvenor Square,” I said.
“Oh you did?”
“Yes. I can’t think why I didn’t tell you about that before.”
“That doesn’t matter does it?”
“What?”
“But what happened, darling?”—I could not quite discover what we were saying.
“Isn’t it strange to live in Grosvenor Square,” I said.
“Is it?”
“I mean I didn’t think anyone did now . . . ” I said, and then I talked off, lost, and Alice went on staring out of the window with her heavy blue wax-work eyes.
We ate in silence. Plates were removed and fresh ones came, and I still did not know what Alice was wanting. I tried to talk of inconsequential things, but the sadness remained around us like damp and I could not deal with it. I remembered what Alice had once said about it being impossible to learn anything about people by talking to them, and I realized that this was at least true when applied to her. I could not ask her what she wanted, and I could not tell without asking what it was that made her sad or happy. I thought, perhaps, that I really knew nothing about her at all.
“You would like Marius’s friends,” I said at random. “They are a brother and a sister, and I am sure you would get on well if you met them.”
“I’m sure I would, darling,” she said, turning her eyes on mine.
And then it was all right. By this time we had finished lunch; before I left her, I had promised to arrange a meeting between her and them. Alice was smiling, letting her eyes rest on me, and she talked with a quickening energy that I had not seen in her for years. But I did not know what it was all about, what the lunch was about—whether she had arranged it and been pleasant merely in the hope of this promised meeting, or whether we had really made some contact in the things that mattered between ourselves. I did not know whether it was my effort to be nice to her that had been successful—but as we were about to leave each other in the street and I was thanking her for the lunch, she turned to me suddenly and said, “You are getting quite good at businesses, darling: perhaps you are growing a little older after all”; and then she squeezed my arm and walked away.
For a few days I saw no one. I stayed in my room and tried to write, but what was there to say when people were such mysteries? The sun shone and the children shouted in the streets, but men and women were shuttered in basements behind the light.
Men and women were like shops, with their goods in the windows, what they had bought and what they offered to sell. The display was all that was visible, the display of words and behaviour in which they trafficked and grew rich and sometimes grew bankrupt, the figures of their businesses recorded in ledgers around the shelves; but what the men and women were like, were really like, apart from the businesses, was never known. The customer never penetrated through to the back parlour where the shop-keeper lived, the shop-keeper so courteous and impassive, where he took off his smile and slept. The customer never got down into the basement where the efforts were weighed, the businesses balanced, where the question was judged, finally—this is or this is not what matters, this has or has not been worth while.
And Alice was a dealer in mysteries: this I knew. It was her way of dressing the shop window, of introducing novelties, of keeping the public amused. To cloak her pretences she used to patter like a conjuror, to catch the audience guessing she made slips with her hands. But the slips were false slips, they were pretences at pretending, the reality was behind them and the audience was fooled. Trying to understand Alice was like trying to work out a sentence with too many negatives; the sense became lost, baffled, in the cancellation of meaning. In Alice there were layers and layers of possible cancellations, but the audience never knew what was intended and what was not; how much she was bluffing others and how much she was bluffing herself.
And it was not only professional conjurors who played tricks with their audience. Every audience was at a distance demanding to be amused, and everyone, in this way, was a conjuror. The tricks were demanded and the tricks were performed, but the audience was supposed not to see the reality. The only difference between the professional con-juror and the amateur was that the professional at least knew himself how the trick had been played and why; while the amateur did not.
All amateurs, I thought—and that included Annabelle and Peter and Marius. But with them, somehow when they were among their audience, the tricks appeared no longer as tricks but rather as demonstrations of a reality that lay behind them. When they produced a rabbit out of a hat they did so because they wanted a rabbit; when flags came out of their mouths instead of words the words were not needed and the flags were used to wave with; when pigeons flew out from their coat-tails it was because they wore coats that pigeons lived in. With them what they acted was an expression of what they felt. In their shop windows lay only that which they loved, and so it was not a shop, for there was no buying and selling. They only gave and received, and lived there, and the shop and basement were one.
And I, in my room, a hired room, a washstand disguised as a writing desk, a curtain for a cupboard, a gas fire demanding shillings that I seldom possessed, a chest of drawers, two beds, a table in the middle, the walls the colour of brown papers, the covers of the chairs and divans like the woven remains of dust—this was my basement, my home, the cell wherein I slept. But this was not where I could live—(were the basements of others the same?)—there was nothing of myself in this solitude—(was there anything of themselves in others’?)—were all basements then a sham and was there nothing but the windows? Lying on my bed and watching the gradually yellowing ceiling where it ran into the frieze above the walls I knew that it was not here that I could work. And now in the evenings, out of doors, I could not yet go round to see Annabelle and Peter. Because, if the world is a dressed window and the eyes of the customers go no further than the window it is not as a customer that one should ask for more than the world. If I went to Annabelle and Peter and knocked at their door I should be approaching as a customer, my smile would be the smile of consciousness and their welcome would be frozen by the formality of my words. Going like this, being accustomed to the world, we could not have helped it. For me, at least, having grown so rooted into loneliness, it would have been inevitable. So that in hoping for more than the world, hoping for reality, I looked for a different approach. And I could find no other approach, because the entrances to reality are through the world’s windows.
In Grosvenor Square, when the sun shone, the typists came out from their offices to eat their lunch beneath the statue. They sat on the parapets with their paper bags, and soldiers came in twos and threes to sit opposite them. Mothers arrived with their children, prams were handled up the steps, straps were unfastened, the children ran, clattered, splashed in the fountain, hurried about their business of having fun among the stones. A man lay on his back with a handkerchief over his face: a woman with thick legs took her shoes off. A soft silence of sweat rose dropping through
the light, and here I came for lunch to eat my sandwiches.
A small boy was riding a bicycle up the path. The place was different in the daylight. A tiny bicycle, like a toy, a fat tiny boy with a peaked cap and spectacles. I looked up to where the façade of the block of flats where Annabelle lived rose pink and pale and majestic. The small boy swerved, some typists screamed, he straightened himself: he was like some turn at the circus, imperturbable and whirling on his jerking wheels. There was a window high up in the flat pink surface where a curtain hung limply into the daylight. The silver wheels twinkled, the soldiers joined in: lurching between their legs he was like a rabbit dodging trees. I did not know which was Annabelle’s window: I did not mind.
Sun and solitude and nothing to do. I will sit here, I thought, until something happens. The small boy was arrested by a keeper. One of the windows was hers: out of the door there was a chance that she might come. A paper bag exploded like a pop-gun. I could sit here for years, I thought: there is nothing to stop me. An old woman like a Rembrandt was being photographed: some Americans were focusing in groups of three. A wave of laughter ran through the crowd. A soldier was inflating another bag, his eyes were like cherries, his cheeks blown tight. As he burst it the girls put their hands to their ears and wailed. Her eyes will be like an animal’s, I thought. The soldier beckoned towards the girls, he moved his body with his hands along the parapet, he patted the vacant stonework by his side. She will be dressed in red, she will have her hands in her pockets, when she walks she will not appear to be moving. The girls squirmed, protested, placed their fingers in front of their faces in reproof. Then one of them rose, advanced tentatively, was pushed from behind, and collapsed uproarious upon skirted knees. She will not appear to be moving. Then another girl made the attempt, stepped gingerly, held her skirt like a paddler. She was half way across and then suddenly, with a rush, was beside the soldier with a bun from his bag. She stretched her legs out in front of her, lay back on her elbows. The two sides cheered. It was like a game of French and English.
“If she comes out of the door”: but she might never. The soldiers and the girls were intermingled now—so easily. What were they saying? Nothing. The words were cries without the necessity of meaning. A lunch with sandwiches, a seat on the stone, and they were no longer strangers. So easily. An arm was slipped round a waist, a body leaned sideways, hair fell downwards on a shoulder. That evening they would meet again, they would go dancing, in alleys of darkness they would see each other home. The façade of the home where Annabelle lived was as impersonal as a factory. That evening they would touch, skirmish, circulate in couples. Suddenly the high-up window with the curtain hanging out was closed, silently, and now there was nothing to suggest that the surface had any more depth than a photograph.
I stood up. There was no reason that she should ever come this way. They were munching sausage rolls from communal fingers. No reason at all. To get together you have to have paper bags, you have to burst them, you have to deal in giggles and the arching of eyes. I moved away from them. They were arm in arm beside the fountains. She might never. It was not possible for me to go up because formality was necessary, and it was not possible to stay because to others it so apparently was not.
I walked to the National Gallery. The street was cluttered with the crowd. I minded now. Stepping on and off the pavement it was as if there was someone by my side. A string of bubbles descended from an advertisement: they were iridescent and oily like drops from a melted rainbow. In Trafalgar Square the fountains again were playing. They were soft and spectacular, the mist hung whitely, the scene was extended to a faintly distorted size. Here the stones were black, the groups in hundreds, the pigeons thick and myriad like ants. It was as if the lunch-hour picnic by the statue had been commercialized into the feeding of a thousand waiting mouths.
From beneath the great portico the birds chattered clamorous and invisible. Inside there was silence, and the vision of wings. A dim brownness, a watery stillness, an aquarium of eternity looking outwards to the light. The light was on the walls, the people were fishes, observing their observers they were sleepy like the sea. Paintings do what churches do, by stressing one’s insignificance they make possible self-repose. Squares of light, windows of eternity, solitude supported upon golden tides of foam. Swimming through the stillness I came upon a red velvet chair like coral. I sat in it. Sleepy with opaqueness I closed my eyes. When I opened them again I saw standing in front of me a girl whom I thought was Annabelle.
Of course it wasn’t. It was just a girl in a red coat looking at a Michelangelo picture and standing there with some of the poised intensity of the figures in the painting, a poise which I had recognized as being characteristic of Annabelle. She was standing with her weight on one leg and her head turned over her shoulder, the whole force of her seeming to be concentrated upon the point of her hip. I got up and walked round her to see her face, and it was a sad face, rather old and puffy, but it was the girl in the red coat who made me realize how much I loved Annabelle. It was funny, I thought. A stranger in a red coat with dark untidy hair.
So I walked away. I walked out down the steps with the chattering of birds beginning again, and in front of me the traffic like a furnace of machines. I wondered where I could find her, where I could come across her as if by accident. In the street it was dirty, there was a hammering of metal, a noise of steam and scorching and the arid smell of dust. I walked past St. Martin-in-the-Fields and down into the Strand. Where I could touch her, stand beside her, watch her face as it turned. But the noise was too insistent. It was enveloping, ferocious, like a forest fire. I could not think. I turned back furiously the way I had come, the afternoon like smoke and my body choked to breathe it, and then, as in a shaft of daylight, I saw Peter on the other side of the road.
A click of vision. The noise retreated. Quietly the cars ran gliding on their way. He was on the edge of a small crowd at the back of the National Gallery, an audience collected to watch the street performers’ turns. I could hear a man shouting his patter to get the crowd to give him money. Peter was throwing him pennies. I crossed over to him. He was leaning forwards, impatiently, like a child at a circus. “Oh look,” he said, “have you got any pennies?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do lend me them, you see, this is a man who bends bars on his forehead.”
I gave him what I had. He threw them all with a clatter onto the pavement, and the man picked them up like a sparrow hopping for crumbs. Then he held them up warily to the light and examined them. “Like a five pound note,” Peter said: “What an extraordinary man!” The man had thrown his cap down on to the ground and was jumping up and down on it, and all the time he was gasping out his thick unintelligible patter when suddenly, with no change in his voice, he picked up a large iron bar, rolled up his shirt sleeve, and began beating the bar heavily against his forearm. The flesh on his arm turned yellow, and then blue, and gradually the bar became bent. He was now making a noise like a boiler before it bursts. Then he stopped, just as suddenly, rolled his sleeve down, put his cap on his head, picked up the assortment of bars, mostly bent, which were on the pavement beside him, pushed his way hurriedly through the crowd, and disappeared down the steps of a gentlemen’s lavatory. I could see a policeman coming sauntering towards us.
“But his forehead!” Peter said. “He didn’t do it on his forehead!”
“Does he beat it on his forehead?” I said.
“No,” Peter said. The crowd was shuffling away before the policeman’s advance. “Do you think he can beat it on his forehead?”
“I don’t suppose so,” I said.
“He just bends it, you see.” Peter was standing scratching his head, and the policeman was viewing us suspiciously. “But we must find him,” Peter said. “You can’t possibly go away without seeing his forehead.” He moved towards the lavatory.
I followed him. A desire to laugh was like an itch in my throat. Going down the damp stone steps Peter said, “
he must bend them back again, I suppose, sometime, unless he has a great many bars.” Inside the lavatory the cubicles were spaced out along one wall like a row of miniature loose-boxes. There was no sign of the man. “He’s engaged,” Peter said. We stood in the middle of the floor peering at the notices on the doors. The lavatory attendant came out from his room and stood watching us over his spectacles. He was a small bald man in a dirty white coat. “Perhaps he lives here,” Peter said. “Perhaps he stays here and bends all these pipes.” The attendant came forward and stood behind Peter, his head coming up to Peter’s elbow. “Here he is,” Peter said: “He’s at home.” We went up to one of the doors and knocked.
“’Ere,” said the attendant.
“I want him to bend them back,” Peter said.
“Who?” the attendant said.
“I will give him ten bob,” Peter said.
“You will?”
The attendant worked his spectacles up and down on his nose with a movement like someone eating spaghetti. Then he went over to the door and banged on it loudly. “’S all right Charlie,” he said. “’S not the cops. Bloke ‘ere wants to give yer ten bob.” A cautious utter came from inside the door.
“Ten bob to bend ‘em back again,” said the attendant. “Take it or leave it.” He strolled back to his room by the entrance. There was a noise of an exploding boiler again and then the man emerged defensively from his cubicle with a cluster of bars in each hand. He looked like a prehistoric plumber. He was a savage square man whose neck was about twice as thick as the top of his head, like the hero of a strip-cartoon. The veins on his forehead stood out softly. Peter tried to explain what he wanted, while the man stood opposite us whistling through his nose. Then he took the ten shilling note that Peter offered him, stuffed it into his pocket, and selected a bar about half an inch thick. He handed this to Peter, who took it and tried it out once or twice on his knee without making any impression on it and handed it back politely. The man braced himself, threw his head back, raised the bar ceremoniously and placed it on his forehead. The veins bulged horribly. He clasped and clasped his hands several times on the end of the bar like a mountaineer feeling for a hold on a rock, and then he jumped with both feet off the floor, uttered a muffled grunt, and heaved. The bar straightened considerably. He paused, jumped again, and heaved; and this time the bar slipped coming scraping down the front of his face and taking skin off his nose. Peter said, “Good heavens!” and the man stared stupidly in front of him. He hit the bar once or twice like a petulant child, and then smacked a hand on to his face sending blood splashing in drops around his ears. He held his hand up staring at it. Then he smacked his hand on to his face again, and finally uttered a tremendous bellow. The attendant came hurrying out of his room.
A Garden of Trees Page 8