“Did ‘e ‘it yer Charlie?” the attendant said. “Did ‘e ‘it yer on the nose?”
“Good heavens no,” Peter said, backing away nervously.
“This is a convenience,” shouted the attendant. “A respectable convenience!”
“I’m sure it is,” Peter said, stumbling over a mop and pail.
“Wot’s up?” yelled the attendant, putting his mouth about an inch from Charlie’s ear. “Wot’s up with yer face, Charlie?”
Charlie muttered into an enormous brown handkerchief that he had produced from his pocket and was now holding clasped upon his nose.
“The bar slipped,” I explained. “It slipped and scraped his nose.”
“It did, did it?” yelled the attendant. “Slipped and scraped his nose, did it, slipped and scraped his nose?” He repeated this at the top of his voice.
“That’s right,” Peter said, but was unable to make himself heard.
“I’ll give yer slip and scrape yer nose,” reiterated the attendant.
Just then Charlie removed his bloodstained handkerchief from his face and uttered another great bellow. Peter was walking round him patting him anxiously on the back, but the attendant sprang forwards and this time really let himself go. “ ‘Ush it up, Charlie,” he roared: “For Christ’s sake ‘ush it. We’ll ‘ave the cops down with all this bloody noise.” The sound of his voice in the enclosed space was like a landslide.
And then, as the echoes cleared, there was the sound of heavy boots descending the steps. The attendant acted with speed. He pushed the bleeding Charlie back into his cubicle, slammed the door on him, and turned to us, saying, “In you go, quick, I don’t want no trouble in this convenience.” Propelled by his whisper we made a rush for two locked doors and pushed against them futilely. “No pennies,” Peter said. “Charlie’s got the lot.” The attendant whirled us round and pushed us into a cubicle at the end which was unlocked. “Into the free,” he whispered viciously. “It’s the free that’s good enough for some.” He slammed the door on us. “And others too,” we could hear him adding, repeatedly, as the policeman or whoever it was arrived at the bottom of the steps.
I was laughing so much I couldn’t breathe. I leant against the wall and Peter pulled out a handkerchief to mop his face, but he seemed to remember Charlie’s, so he put it away again hurriedly. We could hear the policeman’s footsteps going sedately along outside, and I was holding my breath so tightly that I thought the wall would fall down. After a long pause I let my breath out quickly, and then couldn’t get it in again. Peter leant over and whispered very seriously, “I say, what’s a free?”
I couldn’t answer. I sat on the seat and wondered if I should ever get my breath back and then Peter whispered again, more loudly, “What did he mean by a free?”
I tried to speak, but after a few syllables my whisper cracked into a squeak but I was able to go on laughing. “What a wonderful idea,” Peter said. “Why doesn’t everybody come here?” He was peering round trying to read the writing on the walls. From somewhere on our right I could hear Charlie’s interminable mutter; but the sound, all steam and rumblings, seemed to be in keeping with the place. I was more concerned with my laughter, which seemed liable to explode again at any moment. Outside, the policeman was talking to the attendant: we could hear his boots creaking as if he was standing still. The attendant was putting him off cleverly, uttering high-pitched grunts of innocence. I was beginning to breathe more easily when Peter leaned over towards me again. “I say,” he said, “do you realize that it is a criminal offence for two Englishmen to be found together in a lavatory? It is the only thing the public cannot stand.” And then we were both laughing.
I don’t know how long we stayed there, but eventually the policeman went, and the attendant came to let us out. We wanted to see how Charlie was doing, but the attendant would not let us. He drove us out, heedless of our apologies. In the sunlight we felt very stupid and exhausted. As we walked away we could hear the attendant and Charlie greeting each other below the earth. The noise they made was like the beginnings of a water-spout.
Peter was meeting Annabelle for tea, and I went with him. As we walked I asked him, “Do things like that often happen to you?” and he said, “They seem to,” and after a while he added, “They do if you look for them, you know. They seem quite often to happen to me.”
And I suppose they did. Looking back on the days that I spent at this time with Peter and Annabelle and Marius, it seems that something like that was always liable to happen; wherever I went with them the expectation of an extraordinary incident followed us like a ghost, even quite normal occasions being turned by this sense of anticipation into moments of oddity. It was all happy at first, while the laughter of the ghost was a benevolent laughter. It was only later that the ghost, as if in the passing of time he had grown tired of such childishness, became malevolent. It was then, as Alice had said, that life demanded to be taken as a business. But we were all young when I first knew them, and we did not look ahead to the future.
As I walked with Peter I thought of how it seemed that whenever I was in the presence of any of them I ceased to be conscious of myself as an individual and became, for the moment, a working part of the function in which we were engaged. And it was in this guise that the feeling of myself as an individual, as apart from consciousness, became actual. Going up the street through the sunlight I existed as a movement of the passing afternoon, but the existence was a real one, an experience that demanded neither thought nor question, a certainty that was very different from the dreams and self-enquiries of my moods when I was alone. I wondered if this was what Alice had described as fun, but the function of childishness would not have been fun to her. And then there were moments when the oddity was too mysterious for laughter.
Peter led the way into a store in Regent Street, up in a lift to the restaurant where the air was warm and scented, and as I looked around me turning with the heat of the room I saw Annabelle sitting with Marius at a table for four. We went across and sat opposite them, Peter facing Marius and Annabelle facing me, and Peter began telling Marius the story of the man with the iron bars. There was a band playing wearily in the corner, and Peter’s words seemed to swim among the music like a child splashing gaily in an oily sea. Annabelle was not listening to the story, nor to the music, and as I watched her her eyes went down from Peter, down to the table-cloth which was blue and chequered and on which two knives lay, and she took one of the knives in her smaller pointed fingers and spun it, carefully, so that it flashed under the light like a catherine wheel. I was watching her hands and her wrists as they disappeared into the sleeves of her dress, and all the time she was looking downwards so that the lashes of her eyes were visible like fringes against her cheeks. Peter was saying, “A free lavatory, just think of it, a free lavatory,” and Annabelle was leaning forwards with her hair falling down over her forehead and the neck of her dress open slanting against her throat. The warm oily water of the restaurant lapped around us, and Marius was laughing at Peter as he splashed, and Annabelle and I were floating like two bubbles in the sea. As she sat I had the impression that her clothes were quite separate from her, they were drapings of a statue unveiled and alone. At the centre there was darkness, the darkness of a cave: and as the sea broke over her, as the bubbles were devoured, the openings at her wrists and throat were yet caverns which the waves dared not enter, chasms of infinity in which the swimmer might drown. I wished that all might dissolve, become one with the waters; and Peter was saying, “No, not comic, tragic: just think of the tragedy of that poor man’s nose.”
“The irony of it,” Marius said.
“Oh Marius,” Peter said, “what a dreadful joke!”
The sea and Annabelle. Somebody laughed. “I saw Alice the other day,” I said to Marius.
“Oh did you? I wondered which one of us she would continue with.”
“Who is Alice?” Peter said.
“One of your enemies . . . ”
> “I have no enemies,” Peter said. “Perhaps she is in love with you, Marius.”
“Oh always love . . . ” Annabelle began.
“I have only those whom I understand and those whom I don’t understand. Is Alice old?”
“Not very. She is someone who tries to keep one jump ahead of you like an electric hare.” Marius gave a short description of Alice.
“That is what I don’t understand. Isn’t it extraordinary how they behave?”
“This silly ‘they’,” Annabelle said.
“But it means something. ‘They’ are the one-jump-ahead people—the gay, the superficial, the successful. I envy them. They deal exclusively with ambition and seduction.”
“Alice is an oddity,” Marius said.
“I envy them. I understand no one except ourselves. Everyone else I have met belongs to ‘they.’ They think about power, bed, clothes, and servants. Why? One might as well collect matchboxes. They are the army of the great irreligious.”
“Are you religious?” Annabelle said.
“I think about it. I wish I didn’t. I tell you I like these electric hares. Life must be very pleasant for them. But they must be distinguished. It is not good pretending that someone who is obsessed with power and bed and clothes and servants is the same as someone who isn’t. Do you know, they often fly a hundred miles for a game of cards and a thousand for a horse-race?”
“Would you like that?” Annabelle said.
“I should like to enjoy it. I am afraid it would depress me terribly. But I should like to study them, perhaps to get one jump ahead of them. What do they think about in the aeroplane? I should like to ask them that.”
“It is too much of a battle,” Marius said. “A whole-time job.”
“That’s why they do it. They have no other whole-time job. I have never had a job in my life, but I should never have time to play cards.”
“Big battles,” Annabelle said, “and war.”
“Nobody has a whole-time job anymore. Only a few have a whole-time life. The rest have to kill time. Have you ever thought what a good phrase that is—killing time?”
“A frightening one,” Annabelle said.
“Yes. But I should like to meet this Alice. Why not ask her round?”
“She wants to meet you,” I said.
“She does? Perhaps we have a glamour for them too. We will have a battle. Is this the first jump?”
“And who’s the greyhound?” Annabelle said.
“I told you she was in love with Marius.”
“Perhaps she is in love with you,” Marius said.
“With me? How spectacular!”
“No.”
“Oh, well then, how spectacular for you,” Peter said to me.
“I feel quite fond of this Alice,” Annabelle said.
“Why, are you too?”
“No . . . ”
“Well that’s a pity.”
“Well yes, but I mean . . . ” Annabelle was suddenly blushing.
“Of course,” Peter said.
The people at the next table were watching us. There was a heavy blond woman with an enormous hat who sat very still so that it would not fall off, and two neat, reserved men with careful clothes who nevertheless looked shoddy. Every now and then they would raise a cigarette-stained finger to their faces to smooth some feature—a moustache, a lip, or an eyebrow—and then they would go on looking at us out of their musty, impassive eyes.
“Alice has much in common with the communists,” Marius said. “Do you remember what we were saying? They have the same obsessions. Opposites often resemble each other. If you want to pick sides you will not find many people on your own.”
“All the more space to jump,” Peter said.
“You will not even find the religious. Catholics and communists and social-conventionalists will all join hands to fight an individual. They all have a ready-made version of truth, and with this in common they can respect each other. The one thing they never respect is a person who has no truth, who is searching for it. This is the devil that is anathema to all of them.”
“You said that Alice was expecting something from our meeting,” I said.
“Yes, but on her terms, you see, and when it was not on her terms I suppose that she would have rather that we had not met at all. Alice at heart is such an idealist.”
“And now?” I said.
“Perhaps she wants it even on our terms, but I don’t think we’ve got any.”
“No terms?” Peter said.
“The trouble is,” I said, “that if one has no terms then this one-jump-ahead business is so bewildering one cannot even pretend to be a greyhound.”
“I’ve got plenty of terms,” Peter said.
“But do you want to be a greyhound?” Annabelle said.
“I am a greyhound,” Peter said.
“No,” I said. “But one has to be something. And Alice makes it difficult for one to be anything.”
“You might be one of those men who walk behind the greyhounds with a shovel,” Peter said.
“That’s the game,” Marius said. “That is how she is able to be something herself.”
“They wear bowler hats,” Peter said.
The people at the next table were listening to us. The woman had a hand up to the corner of her open mouth and was scratching it with a long scarlet finger-nail, and the two men had their elbows on the table, their hands clasped, discreetly.
“You see,” Marius said, “the greyhound never does catch the hare. If it did, the whole purpose of the game would be destroyed. And the hare would be destroyed too. So no one ever does catch Alice up.”
“No one ever loves her?”
“But love means something different to someone like Alice. It’s a part of the race.”
“Like a French novel,” Peter said. “The hero chases the heroine for the first half of the book, and then they find they have changed places and she is chasing him. And so on till they drop.”
“What happens when they pass each other?” Annabelle said.
“The usual,” Peter said.
“But I mean, that’s all right.”
“No, because the one who’s being chased is so dazed at being passed that she doesn’t get back into her stride again until she’s doing the chasing.”
“But then . . . ”
“Then the boot’s on the other foot; or rather, the bowler hat is on the head of the man with the shovel. He’s behind you see.”
“What happens if the man with the bowler hat catches the hare?” Marius said.
“He’s electrocuted,” Peter said.
“Who is this man with the hat?” Annabelle said.
“Well, he has to go behind you see with a shovel in order to . . . ”
“I know, but what is he to Alice?”
“As a matter of fact, she says there always is someone behind her,” I said.
“There you are then.”
“Where?”
“In the dung-cart,” Peter said.
I could see the people at the next table becoming annoyed with us. The two men were leaning towards each other nodding their heads and making derogatory noises in their throats, and the woman was looking rather forlorn like a lost baby.
“The point is,” Marius said, “that if the races ever stopped then several thousand people would have nothing to do in the evenings. So they go on, and time is killed, and a few other things are killed in the process.”
“The heart is killed,” Peter said.
“Yes, but you see, the heart of the hare would be killed anyway, so the hare dare not stop. That is what is frightening.”
“What has happened to the heart of the hare that it should ever have started running?” Annabelle said.
“But Annabelle,” Peter said, “you cannot expect the hare not to run when the dogs are after it.”
“Then it is you who are the dogs,” Annabelle said, “and it is you who have taken away the heart of the hare.”
&
nbsp; “Is it?” Peter said. “Is it I who have asked it to be a hare?”
“It is no good blaming anyone except yourself,” Annabelle said.
“You said once that we can never know about ourselves,” I said.
“No, but yourself is the only person that you can blame.”
Peter looked sad. “I cannot blame myself for the pride and seduction and prostitution of others,” he said.
“Perhaps not, but you cannot blame the others either.”
“I don’t,” he said. “You know I don’t.”
“You are such a terrifying moralist,” Marius said.
We stood up, preparing to go. The people at the next table looked down at our feet. Annabelle wore no stockings, Peter had a hole in the leg of his trousers, and Marius wore enormous brown shoes that were curiously flat like kippers. The men looked pleased. As we went down in the lift Peter said, “Why not ask Alice round to-morrow?” and Marius said, “Alice has had a rather heartbreaking life, you know.” Peter said, “Why?” and Marius said, “Well, you must wait till you see her,” and Annabelle and I stood with our arms close in to our sides, not touching. In the street Peter said, “Shall we expect you to-morrow?” and I said, “Yes,” and as I walked away she did not look at me and it was as if there was some string between us that was breaking.
A Garden of Trees Page 9