oooooooooaaaaaah · · · · · worn edge · · · · · mahogany · · · · · worn · · edge · · mahogany · · ooooah · · · · · careful · · carefully lift head · · aaaaah · · not so bad, not so badly · · the head · · this morning · · if it is this morning. Arm · · lift arm, asleep, still, the arm, with the watch, yes, after nine, missed breakfast, no matter, not hungry, can wait till midday, yes, but look forward to it, not feeling sick, though still the headache, still that, I’m almost used to it, accept it, bear it, but I’m over the sickness, for the moment, I feel, how marvellous, yes, this happened the first time I was seasick, I seem to remember, the only other time I have been seasick, between Penzance and St Mary’s, going across to the Scilly Isles, yes, with the Cypriot girl, whose name was · · · · · Eva, yes, Eva, who was sick too. We had come down to Penzance on my old motorbike, a BSA 250 it was, pre-war model, which I loved, but she could really only do sixty, and I always lied about her age, as too about Eva’s who was twenty-eight to my nineteen, and married too, to a Cypriot who sent her to England occasionally to live with her mother, for cheapness, since he could not afford to keep her in Cyprus,—no, I am deceived, misled, it was Malta, she was Maltese, I used to buy her sweets and she’d say I like Maltesers and I’d wittily reply, I know, you married one. But she was only Maltese, herself, her mother was English, that was why her husband could send her home to England sometimes, for months at a time, and it was one of these times that I had met her, Ian and I had picked up her and her sister at Richmond Ice Rink one evening, and I had gone for the older one, thinking it was time I found someone experienced, and she was, though she was not wearing a ring, and she never let me have it, the cow, never brought herself to adultery, I suppose, being a Catholic, though that mattered in this special instance very little, with Eva. She and her sister were left alone at the time we met them in this house at Twickenham, the mother was off abroad somewhere with the father, who worked for a foreign airline, El Al perhaps it was, or Air India, Near or Middle East, I forget which, as a mechanic: and I would go over many nights, on my old BSA, after working in an office all day, and sit with her, Eva, or go to the pictures—some picture about Lourdes was one we saw, I remember, shit I thought it was, but it pleased her: and I was always trying to please her. When we came back, or when we were alone, sooner or later, we would kiss deeply, tonguing and sighing, and I would feel her breasts, which were good, and then slip my hand between her knees, and so up her skirt and over the elastic of her panties and—it was all very juvenile, I realise—work my finger on her clitoris until she had had enough, I never knew whether she came or not, probably she did not, I suspect: but she never returned the pleasure, for me, when I embarrassedly indicated that she could, that I would welcome at least that, she said once I knew where I could go if I wanted that sort of thing, up Piccadilly. Whether we should have it properly was decided very early on, as I remember: one Sunday afternoon, after she had cooked spaghetti for lunch—she taught me how to cook a good spaghetti—I offered to wash up and she went upstairs to rest, she said, in her room, and of course I later followed her. She seemed partly drunk, and indeed we had had some wine with lunch, but not much, and I lay with her on the bed, and fondled her, and she said Take me: yes, just like that, it was, and I being nineteen and unpractised, thought hard and was prepared contraceptively, and went outside to the lavatory: and while I was there, just about to put the thing on, this lodger came in, downstairs, and went into the room next to Eva’s, and somehow I could not with him there, and I went downstairs again, and sat and stared at the photo of a nude baby on a plump cushion that was Eva young and nearly cried over my innocence or lack of experience and knew that we would never, just knew. When later she woke up, she asked why I had not taken her, and cowardly I told her I had no contraceptive, and she did not want to have a baby, did she? And she was horrified, or pretended to be upset, about my thinking of using a contraceptive on a Catholic girl. And there sexually we stayed for months, she not wanting me to use protection and me not willing to risk committing myself with her to the extent of starting a baby. We even went on holiday together, that summer, it only lasted spring and summer with Eva, down through Devon and Cornwall to Penzance, where we stayed the night and left the BSA and crossed next morning to the Scillies. The ship looked quite big when we first saw it beside the quay at Penzance, but even before we were off Land’s End it seemed very small compared with the waves. I was seasick within perhaps half an hour, after eating an apple and seeing someone else sick, and was led down far into the ship, where I lay down and was slightly better. But I can remember still the pulse of the engine, faster as the screw came out of the water, slowing as it was immersed again, and the slowness of time passing. Five hours it took, that day, I think, and it was a rough passage: in any case, it was a rough stretch of sea, for seven currents we were told met in those straights between the Scillies and Land’s End. Eva would not let me have it on the Scillies, either, of course, though we had an interesting enough holiday. I was such a fool, an innocent, really, for standing for it: it taught me not to, later, though. The voyage back to Penzance was calm, I was not sick, and remember recovering very quickly from the outward trip · · Not here, as there is never a chance to be still, three weeks of movement, my body never still. · · Eva’s face. . . . · · She had a flat face: oh, that is not to say that her face did not have its promontories, its protrusions, its irregularities, for it did, but it seemed flat, her face, flatness was the impression one gained from looking at her face, that I gained · · ah, a face just like · · rather like · · the green pro · · · · · the cow · · made my left eyelid twitch, Terry noticed it drooped after that shame, my two eyes became different from each other, I noticed it twitched, could feel it irritating, but could not see it in the mirror when I tried to catch it doing it, so no one else can have seen it, and · · good, I have not noticed it doing it since I came on board, this trip has at least rid me of that, so far, of my left eyelid’s twitch, that was upsetting, so it must be therapeutic, this facing of the past, of all of the past, must be, I’ve lost my twitch! Good! · · · · · That face like Eva’s. Eva went back to her husband on Malta, as soon as the summer was over, she did not like the English climate, Eva, returned on a mailship from Southampton, where I saw her off, was surprisingly allowed the day off from the asbestos firm where I worked, wept as I left her, yes, wept at our parting, like a woman or a child, she must have been embarrassed, but I left her before I need have, she wrote nastily afterwards, a card from Lisbon, or Gibraltar, that she had hours to wait on her own at the ocean terminal, because I had rushed off, weeping, could stand it no longer, and her one or two other letters much later were nastier, she was having a baby by this useless husband, and wanted nothing more to do with me, at which I felt sorry for the last time, then swore at her, and determined to learn by this experience, from which I had little else, that I would always take at least sexual satisfaction from such as she, as Eva, with her flat face, or give them up, did too, yes, Laura, for one instance, Laura was more a success, I did make love to Laura, yes, very satisfactorily, perhaps as a result of my experience with Eva, some two years later, perhaps eighteen months, not that she was not keen, or that I had to push it very hard, for she was, and I did not. She was the first I ever had without the sheath, it was good, I remember her for that, Laura, I do remember her for that, at the very least. And for what else? She hurt me, too, had me on the rebound from an Arab student, who returned, saying he would send for her, to marry her, which he did, in the end, and not so very long afterwards, though she had to pay her own fare. She used me in a sort of revenge, a sort of cocking an English snook at the Arabs, I suppose, for committing her to them. She worked on Wages in the same office as I did, and the physical attraction between us was such as I had never known before,
like that of a magnetized steel bolt for its appropriately polarised nut: so much so that I do not remember any real preliminaries, like going to the theatre, or to the pictures as being necessary—yes, we did, we went to see Hedda Gabler, at the Westminster, I think it was—but this was merely for the sake of form. Very quickly, it seems, she had invited me round to her room, which she occupied as if it were a bedsitter, in her parents’ house in Kensington, and we were immediately kissing as soon as I had arrived. Suddenly she broke away and muttered about changing into something more suitable, a readymade phrase, that, from any number of romantic stories, and I stood there fingering my stand, and she came back quickly, from the bathroom, I think it must have been, with only a long, loose, nearly transparent dressing gown on, and stood up against me, and dragged my flies apart and undid my belt and slid my trousers down and pulled at my briefs as I took my jacket off: and took in both hands those this disinvestiture had all been directed to: then pulled back her dressing gown and lodged me between her legs and threw her arms about me to bring it to her closer and keep me close: and at one point it slipped out, as I was taller and it had of course a natural bent upwards, and she eagerly, yes eagerly, pushed it back again and then shortly decided this initial coquetry was unnecessary and pulled me down on to the bed and at once sought to take me between her thighs, who had expected more preliminaries, but was not by any means insisting on them, she pulling up my shirt so that our flesh met the more closely and introducing me all unsheathed as I stood into the soft sheath of her vagina: a stroke, a second, and I came, so had I been excited, so could I no longer contain myself: but still stood, I was surprised to feel, so kept on with my stroke until, it seemed a long while later, she said, Have you finished, then? And it was all slightly embarrassing as I stood up, pulled my shirt tails down, and searched for my pants, elastically reduced to an easily-lost article: but she eased the embarrassment, Laura, gracefully indicated she was satisfied with my as if tyro performance, while at the same time giving me security in the continuance of our loving, by saying And next time take your shirt off! · · The other times were eight, I counted them, we lasted only three or four weeks: and still unsheathed, she using Gynomin, herself. Usually I would come round in that time, those three or four weeks, after the Latin lesson I had in the evenings with a tutor in Holland Park, perhaps at eight or so, and she gradually became less and less interested in me and she talked about her Arab and took a part-time job as an usherette to earn more money to pay her fare out to him while yet denying to me that she was doing this. And though after the fourth or fifth or sixth time I did not exactly have to force her, once she said, How did that happen? afterwards, as if she had decided not to let me any more but her will had been too weak. And she would not take her clothes off or help me in many ways, so that I had to push her briefs down at the front as she lay and insinuate myself into her: which was not uncomfortable or difficult, I was surprised and pleased to find. But soon her will held, and she would just not let me, and I was of course, angry, and ruined whatever bases of a real relationship there were. I see now it was wholly physical, on my part too, and that she grew tired of it sooner than I: but at the time I wanted it to be a lot more, a lot more, and was hurt and bitter when it finished, for it was love, of a kind, and not to be rejected as I thought she had rejected it. Obviously it would have been intolerable to remain working in the same office as Laura, so I used a slight cold as an excuse to take a few days off from those commercial bastards and found myself another job in another office but far away from Hammersmith, in the West End: a better job, too, and I had been meaning to leave for a long time, but had not done so, out of laziness, inertia, and so it was good in a way that this trouble with Laura forced me out into a new job: not that I stayed in it long, for I did not, the new job, as within a year I had taken my Latin and been accepted to do an English degree course. But that last evening with Laura hurt! My parents—I had had some duty visit to make with my parents—to the country, my father drove us in a hired Vauxhall— · · What interest is that? · · I had an attack of herpes on my lip, at the corner of my mouth, felt the small vesicles swelling and irritating all day long, tried to reduce the unsightliness at a pub we stopped at for a drink in the early evening on the way back, but succeeded only in making the sore place bloody, suppurating and more obvious. He dropped me off at Kensington High Street, my father, and I walked the rest of the way to Laura’s, said my good evenings to her military father and stunted mother in the hall with the first middle-class pleated silk lampshade I ever saw, and went up to her pine-partitioned bedsitting room. She would not kiss me because of my herpes: it was as simple as that, this temporary ugliness was made the reason for the unwantedness of myself, for her. There were ugly words said as well, and an ugly scene, to complete the romantic cliché of it all, to end the same sort of affair a million million others have had. And I left, after forcing on her my ugly herpes in a kiss that smeared her with the harmlessness of my blood, the ugliness of my lymph. Trite, the affair with Laura, casual sex, if anything ever deserved the cliché: but I wanted it to be more, I wanted it to be more! She made it that, kept it small, not me, she! I was even prepared to offer her, did offer her, that I would give up my Latin, abandon hopes of going to university to do an English degree, if she would stay with me, which meant marriage, and I swore I would become a successful accountant, as then I was a clever accounts clerk but contemptuous of everything to do with it, if she would stay with me, not go to her Arab, marry me. It was as well she did not, of course, I too would soon have exhausted the physical side, and she was dim, of course, of ‘good’ parents, middle-class Presbyterians, she after an expensive education took a job as a cashier at a serve-yourself in Kensington High Street, which is where she met her Arab, ah, the whole thing bloody disgusts me! · · · · · But the sex was good, at first, I’ll say that for her, Laura · · · · · I soon made sure I recovered from that wound, having learnt from Eva, yes, I took too a lesson from Laura and her Arab, went straight out on the romantic rebound and found another girl for myself, picked another up within days when out with Jerry in Edgware Road, Joan her name was, lived in Sussex Gardens, went back with her the first night— · · I’ve been through all that once, not again, · · the cupboard bathroom and the missing letter—no. Yet now I think of it, why did I not think, remember, that I had had it without the sheath with Laura, when I was with Joan? · · Oh, what matter. · · I counted with Joan, too and I only managed it nine times with her, as well, for ages that haunted me, that record, that with no one woman had I ever managed it into double figures, no, a strange intercession at this last digit of those invented by the Arabs—no, that too could be no more than coincidence, with Arabs! But I still felt pain at the defection of Laura, as I saw it, for years afterwards, could remember her small face and the way she slightly dropped each shoulder in turn as she walked, for years, and that first way she came into her room in the loose dressing gown and how she almost sucked me into her, took me naked deep into her woman’s mysteries: such expressions. · · · · · Yet thinking of what I so easily term her betrayal, it may be I am too harsh: she told me right from the beginning she was involved with the Arab, I cannot complain of deception, and what I do complain of is perhaps no more than that she did not do always what I wanted, was not always or even ever what I desired. My fault if anyone’s: again. · · And did I love her? Certainly, no one till Gwen did I feel so hurt about, and certainly I loved Gwen, certainly. · · At last I come to think about Gwen, who have tried so long to put her from my mind, now, four years later, have succeeded this far, in not thinking of her on this voyage at all: she was a wound, yes, an area of pain, a death of a certain part of me, of course, but not consciously, no, just as so much smegma under the prepuce of my consciousness— · · what am I doing, I ramble, when this should be important, this should be selective, I should not just think of Gwen generally, of the happin
ess, for there was happiness, of the love, for there was love, I did love, no, but of the significant, of the meaningful, of that which has since formed me, influenced me, twisted me into a solitary, if it has, that force which has set in train the constant movement of this voyage, and my mind, my self. For her leaving was far worse than Laura’s returning to her Arab, saving her fare in shillings to fly to Iraq or Lebanon or wherever it was, far worse than Eva’s going, which I could weep over, sincerely: for Gwen’s failure was such that I could not weep, was beyond crying, wanted only to be on my own to celebrate this death within me. So think: only those things relevant, and happiness, such joy as there was, is not relevant, not important to me now. So think, selectively. · · The German Tour. Something of a release from that useless study of Anglo-Saxon, a tour lasting perhaps three weeks, to German and Danish universities with a play, Shakespeare, of course, Much Ado About Nothing, good title, not my choice, chosen by academics in both England and the countries we were to visit, but I was chosen to produce it, or direct it, as I preferred to call it. My first real experience of the isolation of command, the only time since those early attempts to lead in the landscape of my evacuated childhood. And I did not enjoy it this time later, either. For it was not as though they were professional actors who could be replaced if they would not be disciplined, who were used to discipline: they were students who had to pay £25 each towards the cost of the tour and who saw it therefore as much as a holiday as a performance: and who were undisciplined as most students are, seeing this period as their last chance of real freedom before the iron gate of responsibility clanged to after them. And I have no taste for authority, for ordering: the acquisition of it does not interest me, and the exercise of it bores me. I agreed to direct this play because I thought that having to study the mechanism of it in such practical detail would show me how it was done, how it worked, that I might learn from it something of use to me: in this I was mistaken, for it taught me nothing that I did not know already, and for weeks put me in an exposed, isolated situation of great anxiety and self-doubt. And before it was over I felt humiliated, too, by some attitudes of unreasonableness, I felt, on some of their parts— · · This becomes woolly, tortuous: pull it together. · · Gwen was my Beatrice, then, and because of a late defection I was compelled to play Dogberry, the fool to her beauty: which was in many ways a true reflection of our relationship, for I was foolishly in love with her. That is, was made foolish, to look and act, by the singularity of my love for her. People said I had given my mistress or lover or girlfriend the lead in this play out of partiality: but I am sure that she was the best actress of those available: and also that she did the part very well. And if being director did isolate me, she at least had other reasons for being on my side, at least had other reasons not to disregard my orders: which orders were only in the interests of producing the best performance of that mediocre, oldfashioned play which was possible in all the circumstances. But many of the cast were just not interested in that side of it, were irresponsible. · · · · · —Oh, how miserable and unworthwhile the whole thing seems to me now! What embarrassment, shame, and humiliation it recalls, the German Tour!—bloody get on with it, then, selectively. · · · · · It is a measure of . . . something . . . that I was so in love with her, perhaps, of course, that I cannot remember the cause of this great row we had, Gwen and I, at this place called Hald, in Denmark, an old house not like an old house, in wooded grounds, largely, where we were to perform before students (Hald was a student organisation) yet I remember it as the row which finally established that we would never be closer, even though we went on for four or five further months, I in my delusion, she taking what she needed from me and deceiving me for the rest— · · Oh, this remembering is not only so painful, but so boring to me, I have no enthusiasm for it! · · · · · · · · Hald, I must remember Hald. At least I can do the bloody scenery. At least. A fairly large house, red brick, stone facings, Dutch gables, a circular drive to the door, entering and leaving on the same road through an ungated pair of piers—“and when I say piles on piers I do not mean ’aemorrhoids hon the harse-holes of the haristocracy”, the old joke about elm and its uses, from Gordon. There were many wooded areas, few open ones, a goodlooking lake, with a ruin on one side, not romantically, it was not a romantic place: the trees being firs mainly, occasionally deciduous: were they, I don’t know, why should I know the trees, have taken note of the trees of this student guesthouse in the middle of Denmark? I am not like that. The house itelf was good, of a kind, pine panelling, a fine hall and staircase kept rich and authentic. Elsewhere the rooms were students’ functional, the same as students’ rooms all over Europe. But there was auxiliary accommodation in sheds, huts, whatever, away from the main building, students’ rough ironframe bunks: and perhaps what started my bad luck from which the row led, was it, was that I was one of only three men who ended up in this inferior bedding, I, who, without standing on my dignity, or perhaps it was being pompous, to expect as director and as leader (when anything awkward needed leading) I should have slept in the house, more comfortably. · · I still cannot remember what the row was all about, but it was violent, bitter on my part: I feel sure it was that she would not do something that I felt she should, that it was her duty to our love to have done: or to what my concept of our love doubtless was. But I do remember walking out into the night, burning with the injustice of her action, indignation riving my self, out into those cold woods, wet with dew, or rain, my brain hardly containing the frustration of it: for what could I do? I could not break with her there and then, as I would or might have done at home, privately, could neither leave the tour nor publicly break with her—ah, no, I had not the courage to do either: preferred to isolate myself within my self, bad, ah, bad! And anti-romantically I preferred not to stay wet out in the dank woods, so came in and went to bed early, very early, and this was our first night at Hald, to shiver under insufficient blankets, rage hammering at my sanity, my rightness put in jeopardy by her wrongness, her stubbornness—how odd that I can remember so well the state and not the cause of it! There must be something relevant in that, there must. · · And that uneasy place to sleep: sleep is important to me, I can endure a lot when I know I have a place to sleep easy. And I could not sleep for hours, in that place, listening to sounds from the house, of music, of dancing, like a servant in the outhouses hearing the junketings of the great in the great house, and this was added to my resentment, that I was excluded, to my bitterness against her, for causing it. And the embarrassment of knowing that the others knew, that one of the two who slept near me would nod at my buried shape on the bed, and grin, knowing I had quarrelled with her, and would be glad, for one envied me, perhaps, or because to another I was the representative of authority or power or something. But the other, in fact, the only one who did come while I was awake, was kindly when he did come, sat on my bed and talked to me about ordinary things, served to remind me there were ordinary things, suggested without saying that he sympathised, was good to me, in short, for which I was grateful, and afterwards I, who was so meanly prone to keeping myself to myself, went out of my way to repay him, Patrick, yes, whose qualities I just because of this began to notice, more than I would have otherwise done, and am grateful to him—I was a mean bastard then—for they are fine qualities— · · I ramble, I ramble, my constant fault, these are irrelevancies. Think what it was I rowed with Gwen over: it makes it laughable if I cannot know what caused so much pain! · · · · · · · · I cannot: it is laughable. · · · · · · We met next morning at breakfast, Gwen and I, and— · · Oh, the pain, the pain!— · · and the only thing I thought of to avoid making the courageous steps of either leaving the company or ignoring her for the rest of the tour was to climb down, to make the overtures, even to pretend it was my fault, even, even, to humble myself before herself, with her wrongness, her solitariness · ·�
��Ah, that is it, THAT IS IT! · · No, anyway, she saw the advantages of this approach, of this solution, for she was in the same situation, then, really, now I come to see it, and gave in with little grace, who had great grace, and knew that something had been established, and that even if it had not been then the same battle (whatever it was) could be fought again on more favourable ground at a more favourable time. So we were one again, ha-ha, and had a brief scene that morning in the room she shared, locking the door, that no others could disturb us, in which we both said we were lonely, would always be lonely, and that therefore we could never really love anyone: that sounds romantically silly, now, and at the time I was concerned only with expediency, with making it up, so that a face should be put on things, until we were home. And I forgot about that declaration of mutual individuality immediately afterwards, lapsing into my illusion again, that we did love, that she loved me, rather, for certainly I loved her, certainly that was no illusion: it is an indication of my love for her that I could delude myself about her part of it, her reciprocation. But later she was to say, when I was bitter at her failure, that she thought all had been made clear at Hald— · · I have been through some rough old emotional times, it becomes clear, yes. So have the women, to be fair. Always I was trying to make them conform to some concept I had of what a relationship could be. If I could conceive it, then it should be attainable: a dangerous concept, I see, if applied to many things, to any other thing, perhaps, demonstrably untrue, in fact, but I certainly believed it to be true of something I could see between man and woman, and still believe it, still search for it. And Gwen conformed when it suited her petit-bourgeois mind, and deceived me when it did not. Circles, I go round in circles. So then: what else about Hald? · · · · · · · · The performance we gave was poor, as I remember: the stage had no more than a twelve-foot opening, and the amateur conditions gave rise to an amateurish performance when we were capable of doing much better, did do much better, in other places, on proper stages. · · Running heavily through the woods in my thin cheap gold and black dressing gown to bathe in the lake, with her and Patrick and others: the pine-mast, if that is the word, yielding dankly under our feet, the same slimily present as we entered the lake, shallow at this point, unpleasant underfoot, that we were glad to breaststroke off, kick our feet clean of that slime. And there were leeches, too, that’s right, when we came out there were leeches cupped on our feet, not painfully sucking, but loathesome enough in their possibilities, and Patrick made erudite jokes about medieval medicine, which made it more beara ble. And the ruins we visited, too, taking photographs of each other in the ruins, on the walls, one of Gwen where her bathing costume was so similar in tone to the sky as backcloth that she appeared to have nothing on, until you looked very closely. · · · · · What else? Dining room scenes, with announcements in several languages, which we actors parodied, once, quite funnily, to us, yes, but not probably to them, perhaps even embarrassingly, I don’t know. That will do about Hald. · · Anything else on that tour? · · · · · Photographs taken there too, in Hamburg, · · could look them out, if I had them here, to help with the memories, to establish the causes, manufacture the reasons, evolve the bases, confirm the findings, oh Christ this is getting tedious! But it must be exhausted, the subject, of its possibilities, in case the key, the whole point, is there for my finding. · · · · · · · · In Copenhagen there was a party for us in an upstairs room at some students’ union, where we all were drunk on Carlsberg and akvavit and where Gwen and I came closer, enjoyed at a window throwing telephone directories to a Welsh member of the company outside who took them, ran, dummied, and kicked for touch. Where some sort of local police came and enquired what was going on, as was their duty, and being honestly answered that it was a student party, left us civilly to become drunker, after accepting each a bottle of lager themselves. Where the Raven, one of our rustics, made a spectacular exit through a door, theatrically crawling backwards to gain attention, having forgotten that there was a steep flight of stairs immediately outside that door. And where Stuart and I fought a duel through the streets of that capital, holding our blunt prop Naval ceremonial swords by their wrong ends, laughing all the way. Eventually to collapse on to student bunk beds where on the bottom of the one above mine I cut my knee badly, after bouncing, felt no pain, but woke in the morning to guilt about the blood low on the sheets, as if I had been raping dwarf virgins all night. · · · · · The performance at Copenhagen was disastrous. We acted on a bare dais in a ceremonial panelled hall, with blackouts instead of curtains, and two poor entrances: one was a door with a step down and behind it a landing of a marble flight of stairs, the other door was at the foot of these stairs, after passing through which the actors mounted by a wooden flight of steps to stage level. This flight had a handrail on one side only, and I suppose it was lucky that only one actor throughout the whole performance chose to step down on the wrong side of that handrail in the dark. The blackouts confused the props men too, who, altering scenes, were often caught in jeans and shirtsleeves in renascence Italy. For no reason that I knew, during the second act this ornamental staircase—green travertine and bronze balustrade— became flooded with water: that is to say, water came from the upper storeys, gently, half an inch deep, taking the stairs as a formal waterfall, just wetting to our uppers, and continued down into the basement where a dance orchestra played just loudly enough to be overheard in the auditorium. But the audience, such as it was, fifty poor Danish souls or so, took it very well, quickly entered into such spirit as we were able, considering the wrongness of everything, to assume, and clapped the itinerant sceneshifters as they were caught, who took a bow, appropriately, and thought themselves very Brechtian, and at the end we were clapped mightily, several blackout calls as if we had given Much Ado About F.A. the finest, most definitive performance ever, and we went out on a final appropriate note by half the cast being caught for an unexpected call. This lighting was by a man called Chance, Lighting by Chance, it said on our programme, and so it bloody was that night. · · · · · Whereas at Hamburg everything went well, the right size stage and neutral setting for our scale of acting and paucity of props, a good audience and efficient control of things of which we were glad to have been relieved. And at the beginning, since I was not on for some time, I quietly went round to the back of the hall and there watched part of the play, and was pleased at what was my production, seeing it distanced, my only real moment when it was all worth while during the whole tour. And Gwen was really so good as Beatrice, she gave a new kind of life to Shakespeare’s fustian lines, for me, made his oldfashioned overwrought convoluted phrases sound like sense even to Germans: which was more than I could relatively do for the plot, or anyone could do for it, for that matter: Shakespeare is a great poet but a useless dramatist on today’s stage. · · And in Hamburg I was at peace with Gwen, for some reason, this city was the setting for one of the good times, and even when a man called Falke—My name is Falke, he said, Like Falcon in English: and he flapped his arms—even when this organiser of our visit kissed her theatrically, in a fatherly manner, I was not jealous, for the first time, who was generally jealous if any man so much as looked with more than general interest at her: a sign of my insecurity, of course, and in this case of my temporary sureness of her and of our love. And in Hamburg of course we went to the Reeperbahn, as all tourists do, after our performance on the first night, and went to a jazz club where the sharks let us listen to the jazz for buying one drink, which cost a great deal of my little money, but did not bother us after that. A Swedish band it was, I remember, and the drink was not real alcohol or even real Coke with it: which latter annoyed me, but not Gwen. Oh, and before we went into this jazz club, we went into a pintable place and an attendant asked me if Gwen was over eighteen, in English, we must have stood out as being English, and we laughed, for of course she was, but afterwards she was s
lightly annoyed rather than flattered by this. · · · · · And on our way home, or back to our digs, hers in one and mine in another, place, that is, on a tram, a disturbing, Kafka-esque thing happened to us. First of all, the tram seemed not to pass through the place where we were sure it would, had been assured it would, where we wished to get off: and then, on the first time past this posited place, I glanced at the conductor a few seconds after I had looked at him before (or so it seemed) and it was a completely different man! All sorts of rational explanations for this came to us then and later, but none really explained it. And, after the third trip on that same number tram, twice in the original direction with once in the opposite direction in between, we gave up and took a taxi, first to her digs and then I took it on to mine. · · I still remember Hamburg with affection, as being the one town I saw to which I would like to go back, to spend some time in, in Germany, except perhaps for Munich, yes, but Hamburg! And one member of our cast went sailing for an afternoon on the something See, and overturned and had to be rescued by the local water police or whatever they were called, and they came round to our digs the next day demanding some sort of fee for rescuing him: I do not remember how that ended, whether he paid them, or stalled them off until we were on our way to wherever next, which I believe was Munich, far down in the south, in Bavaria, the tour was not very well organised geographically, there were these great long train journeys in between. But Munich as a city I took to at once, as so many do, I find, its great wide streets, Baroque churches, beergardens and halls, and the great Rubens in the Alte Pinakothek. We swam in the brown Iser race by a footbridge, one afternoon, I remember, and one morning were invited by the Mayor to breakfast in whatever the German equivalent of Parlour is, the City Hall, anyway, the whole company. Where I sat next to the Mayor, who showed me how to deal with the fat white hot sausages we had for this odd meal at eleven: he cut his in the middle, stuck his fork in the end thus exposed, of one half, cut straight along the skin towards the tied end, and then, holding down one flap so formed, rotated his fork to peel the skin neatly off. I was impressed, and cut decisively across my sausage as I had seen him do: a jet of hot white water shot a good eighteen inches into the air, most of it returning to my plate. Ha! said the Mayor, nothing more. These sausages were made of tripe, I supposed, or that at least was the only reasonable thing I could think of to account for their colour. They tasted quite pleasant with the stein of beer each of us had as well. Gwen I could not talk to, we had been separated by some kind of protocol. · · · · · They made us very welcome in Munich, and I still feel guilty that the standard of our production was not really worthy of them, or of me. · · · · · God knows where we went from Munich. This is all out of order. Back to Cologne, probably, where we spent our first night, on the way to Frankfurt, in a converted air raid shelter, built of massively thick concrete in the shape of a church, hopefully to escape the attention of bombers which in any case at night could hardly distinguish between houses and factories, offices and churches. When our party arrived there that night it was interesting how those men who were paired off with women already quickly arranged to take double rooms together so that a later change could easily be made to allow the pairs to sleep together: it was an automatic pairing, without any previous arrangement being necessary, an instinctive decision, as we saw that another man’s thoughts were the complement of ours. And the girls did the same. I thought little about anything except sex, at that time, at that age, twenty-five, and nor it seems did others: in that at least I was with them. As a result of these arrangements, Gwen and I shared a cell-like room without windows, tired after the train journey from London. And the performances there on the way back were mediocre, the whole stay in Cologne was boring, mediocre, being the fag-end of the tour, all of us tired of new things constantly, the one- or two-night stands in strange cities. · · As I am now tired of remembering the whole thing, which brought me so little in return for the great amount of emotional energy, time admittedly willingly filched from my degree, love, yes, love, wasted on a poor play and an uninterested cast. Forget it. · · · · · No. Finish off Gwen. · · · · · · · · As soon as we had returned, in the train from Dover to Victoria, in fact, when we were all reverting to being our own individuals again, I relapsed into very painful anxiety for us, for our love, and also worried, that she might see again an old boyfriend whom she had confessed had broken her heart— · · How trite this all seems now! Good! · · —during the rest of that summer vacation: which disturbed me greatly, and all the peace we had had, for despite the quarrel at Hald we had been together more continuously than at any other time, as if in marriage—this now disappeared and was replaced by unease and a foreboding of future pain and loss: through which I could feel myself already achieving a kind of piety. It was agreed that we would marry the next year, after finals, in almost exactly a year: and I knew that the test of those coming months, and the ultimate test of whether or not she would actually marry me, were going to be very painful indeed, for me. And somewhere, very small, all but disregarded, I also knew that I was not quite sure of our love, or that she was what I wanted, that she would be the answer to my questions about sex, about love, about art. Yet what else was there to do but proceed as though she was in love with me as indeed she said often enough she was, and that it would work out well? At the Tivoli in Copenhagen one evening we exchanged money for disc tokens to gamble on fruit machines, and, when we unexpectedly won and went back to the woman who gave change to convert our winnings, the woman’s face showed scorn, such enormous contempt, at our hope for this, without needing to use a word of rejection: from that moment, I feared seeing that scorn on Gwen’s face, that I should expect her to keep her word, to mean what she said about loving me and marrying me. · · There were several months of that fear before I did see that scorn, that contempt, before she betrayed me, Gwen. And still I went on seeing it, during that uneasy period between love and hate after betrayal, and into hate, for five years of hate, until now, when I begin to feel indifferent, certainly do not hate, no, merely want to understand. For years it was with me, as, hearing accidentally of some new betrayal, or realising some new betrayal, I would think of what I was doing while she was betraying me: and however good that thing was, this betrayal would ruin just the memory for me, the memory even tainted by it. When I heard of her taking up a job after we left college it came as a shock: I had not liked to think of her as having any life at all outside me: the effect of which was to set me worrying in a further way, I had the hell of the thought of her marrying and of the news of her marrying being given to me at a moment when I could not take it, would break under it. · · And once, when I went to stay with a friend in Cambridge, a friend of hers spotted me and followed us into King’s College Chapel, stood talking to us, I hated him, questioning me at length as to what I was doing now, presumably to retell to Gwen: and said I would not have liked Cambridge, which was full of pseuds, should be glad I had gone to London: whereupon I enquired how he should know what suited or did not suit my character so well, and he replied that he knew my character because he knew what Gwen was before she met me, and what she was now. This hurt me, that she should take from me so without giving what I needed in return, what I felt I had a right in all equity to receive in return! And I hated any conversation in which she was mentioned, it disturbed me, sullened me, especially in this place, whose late perpendicular would now always be associated with this mean man, who said also that Cambridge students of engineering would not come into the Chapel since no one could understand logically how it still stood, stupidly, as though we were tourists; and associated with that woman: Gwen. · · · · · So, not in mitigation of past love and enmity, just-passed hatred, of her for what she did, but because this is as much hers as mine, something we had, or seemed to have. . . . · · This is woolly, indeterminate. · · · · · I must try to analyse more, not
just go over things, over and over things, the past, glorying in, almost, rather than analysing, now the hurt is past, over, enjoying the sex, vicariously, too much on sex, perhaps, no, it is important, so little else seems really relevant, though there were of course long periods without girls, or with useless girls. · · · · · Time? I ought to get up. Time? Headache still, always, but not sick, ten, half-past, yes, get up, wash, watch the gutting for an hour, or so, lunch, they call it dinner, will give me a good excuse not to stay out on that cold deck in this cold weather, for longer, unless I choose, can stand it, no. · · · · · Up then, no trousers to put on, sleeping in them, just a sweater, just as well, there’s a lot of movement on her today, weather must be rougher, blowing up, I suppose, but I’m used to it now, more or less, which is not to say I cannot be thrown about, was yesterday, in the galley, returning a plate late, was thrown by a sudden movement, barked my forearm on a vertical girder, yes, still hurts, head just missed, legs folding under me, plate and spoon took off across galley, felt a fool, though only galley boy there, who was nearly thrown as well, so neither of us laughed. So careful! The price of safety is eternal vigilance, in this case, again, the verity of the cliché. So one hand out for self, holding on, up the steps, through the hatch into alleyway, along, along, on to the engineroom gratings, along past the dully bright cylinder-head cover, the asbestos-covered pipes, the blasting warmth of the silver-lagged boiler, to the officers, quarters under the Skipper’s suite, where I am allowed to use the washroom and lavatory. · · One hand holding for self, again, it is difficult to pee like this, with the target moving, or the projector moving, ah, reminds me of pissing on people’s lavatory seats when a kid, to annoy them, to pay them back for whatever it was: no room for such gentility here, it is beside the point, marginal, every time someone leaves the porthole open, forget to secure the brass butterfly nuts, a sea splashes in and cleanses it out, the Great Jakes, the sea, and so on, and so forth, as I said before. So: now wash, easy enough to do with one hand, yes, shaving would be almost impossible for me, though the others all shave, it seems to me, not every day perhaps, but certainly they are not noticeably growing beards, as I am, as I decided to, though she did dare me before I came to grow one, and keep it for her to see; scratchy, it feels, of course, prickly, growing slowly after an initial sprouting, twelve days now, (is it?), hairs grow in all directions so that it looks most random, untidy, sloppy, unseamanlike, and though it started off fair it has now turned a kind of reddish brown, as if I had not fathered these hairs, illegitimate hairs, hirsute bastards: but it does feel good upon my upper lip, to brush back gently with the pads of my index finger and thumb, to feel the length of my moustache: and the hollow beneath my lower lip, too. Ah, evacuate, and piles, too, pain, pain, as if this voyage were not already enough of a paradigm of the human condition, piles, the unmentionable condition, so many people have them, they say, but no one talks about them, paradox, merely suffer them, treat them with suppositories, like these, the best shape, this make, like bullets, dum-dum bullets, really, not allowed by the rules of war but very comforting to those fundamentally afflicted, dum-dum, roundheaded, but tapering from the shoulder so that, pushed in a little way, they go the rest themselves, a most accommodating shape, made by Messrs Boots the Chemists, very well, the most shapely of all the suppositories I have come across. But nevertheless difficult to insert, they all are, need both hands really, but judge the pitch, allow for the roll, made it, hole in one, but one of these days something unexpected is going to happen, like yesterday in the galley, and I shall be found dead or unconscious in a very peculiar situation indeed. · · · · · · · · So out, to walk the thoughtful walk of the man with piles, in these noisy oilskins and slummocky rubber boots, to stand alongside the men gutting, among the pounds, though not to use a knife myself. Ah, the sea is getting up, the weather is noticeably worse than last night. Hang on to the strung cable, do not touch the warp, directed round the double drums of the fairleads, across the deck, stand just ouside the pounds, announce I have come to read the entrails, smile: Festy, Mick, Stagg, Scouse and the deckie-learner do not smile, but look up, seem glad of any diversion, though, rib me about my seasickness, the while gutting. · · · · · At closer quarters, the gutting impresses me even more with its speed. I time Scouse on one of the bigger fish, a sprag, he calls it, which is a medium-sized cod, small ones are codling, and really big ones, of which we seem to have caught few, are presumably cod: it takes him nine seconds to despoil this great fish of its intestines, throw the liver into a basket, and hurl the remaining twenty pounds or so fifteen feet through the air into the washer. · · There is an athletic dedication about Scouse’s gutting, a certain sadistic pleasure in his cutting strokes. But Stagg stands there stolidly, cloth capped, gutting automatically, economical of movement, saying nothing, thinfaced, gaunt even in the artificial bulkiness of his yellow skins, just as he probably has done the last forty years, or more, from a boy of twelve. Mick talks as he guts, intermittently, usually to rib the deckie-learner, often quite harshly, intending to hurt a boy of sixteen, for what reason I cannot think: none of the others reproves Mick for it, and certainly I cannot interfere. Yet suddenly, when Stagg notices a metal marker on the tail of a jumbo haddock, and hands it without a word to Festy, it is Mick who insists that the fish, worth five shillings for the evidence of its travelling when taken to the fisheries research laboratory on shore, be given to the deckie-learner, insists it is his by tradition or some sort of right. Then a moment later he throws a catfish across at the boy, a cruel joke, since the fish has a wide mouth vicious with pointed teeth which can wound dangerously. Festy tells me about this catfish, since it is the first I have seen, long and somewhat eel-like with a fluttering continuous dorsal fin, mottled darkly on olive, the squat head nearly all mouth: says some trawler-men will deal with it by offering it the warp to bite, which it will do tenaciously, and then it is hanging in an easy position to gut. The deckie-learner, however, picks it up through its gills in the usual way, in its turn, avoiding the savage mouth, guts it efficiently, and throws it away from him, all without apparently noticing Mick. · · Festy points out such other curiosities as there are in this haul: several half-halibut, not really halibut but a bastard breed produced by some miscalculated union in pre-history, which are worth keeping, however, for the reasonable price they fetch; something like an overblown version of the catfish, but bigger and black and called a jellycat, which Festy stabs cruelly in an orange-coloured eye and heaves overboard, saying we would only catch it again and even for fishmeal it is not worth keeping, as so much of it consists of water; dab, small flatfish which are not kept; and small skate, which Festy says they call ginnies, and which he shows me to have genitals to copulate to reproduce like mammals: speaking of this with a delicacy which contrasts oddly with the dirty stories he tells me at other times, and saying also that he thinks the Skipper is wrong not to be keeping these small skate this trip, as they are worth something, are very sweet to eat, and he throws the one he was showing to me into the basket which goes to the cook for our meals, for there is fish as a choice at every meal: I must try a ginnie, which has another meaning for me, but not now to think of that; and a great, squat, green, lumpish, bulge-eyed concertina’d parody of a fish, which Scouse seizes, balances on one hand with the other held flat at right angles across the thing’s eyes, a mime I do not understand until Festy explains it is a camera-fish, and Scouse says he has taken a snap of me with it, before he pitches it weightily overboard; there are, too, lumps of a cream-coloured petrified substance which Festy tells me they call duff, and he looks round for the mate, as it too is like suet-pudding, some vegetable matter which grows on the seabed in this area and of which the net can become full if the Skipper does not avoid those patches experience has shown him it grows on. The other fish I know: cod, handsome, gleaming olive green, most unlike the sad grey slabs I have seen hitherto at fishmongers, for cod seems t
o lose most of all in appearance by being long out of water: haddock, with thumbprints either side of the neck and a black line down each flank; redfish, their great deepsea eyes burst, their mouths bloated with a bubble formed from some depressurised intestine to make them look as if blowing bubblegum, their spiky fins perhaps raising perchlike once or twice before they, sooner than most, die; and coley, or saithe, long, snouted, plump, dark green, handsome. I ask about dogfish, seeing none, ask if they come over the side barking, at which, surprisingly, they laugh, but are rather disgusted when I say I eat it often in London, that as rock salmon or rockfish it is popular, for to them it is a scavenger, looks like a small shark, is of that family, and therefore not acceptable to them when there are so many clean fish to be had. Their favourites are the small codling or baby haddock, eighty or a hundred fillets of which the cook must prepare, fried in egg and breadcrumbs, or batter, every day. Stagg and Scouse, gutting in the deepest pound, fish up to their knees, now slide with their boots sideways a mass of fish towards the others. Mick raising a pound board to allow them to pass under. Flat on the deck lies a huge skate, four feet across its wings, and I remember now seeing it caught up in the mouth of the trawl earlier, and the Skipper assuring me it would be washed down into the cod end sooner or later: this haul, in fact I see now. Stagg guts it where it lies, white belly upwards, then gestures for Scouse to help him throw it into the washer. Peering at the mass of guts and green excreta which now begins to outbulk the remaining fish, I notice that there are small fish in amongst them, far too small not to have slipped through the five-inch mesh of the net, and upbraid Festy jokingly for catching the small ones: he looks at me, does not answer, but seizes the largest of the sprags still lying near his feet, rips at its belly, then cuts delicately and removes from the sprag’s stomach a small haddock, perhaps weighing half a pound, the silver of whose scales has only just begun to be dulled by the sprag’s digestive juices: which he hands to me with a grin, watching my fascination and disgust. This gives Scouse an idea, for he says, Come and look at this, pleasuretripper! And he fiddles carefully with the guts of a flat brown bastard halibut, snicks twice into the thick mass and then lays on the flat top of the pound board a bloody piece of gut, which I quickly see to be pulsing and very soon afterwards realise to be a heart, still beating, beating, a fish heart still with some kind of life left in it. I’ve known a heart go on beating for half an hour, says Festy: Three hours, during the whole time we were gutting, says Mick: A whole watch, says Scouse: and I know they are kidding me. I peer at this entrail, watch its life beating away, interested and disgusted yet moved: and think of several different omens this particular sacrificial object could portend. · · I feel the cold, as a result or not I cannot tell: but I feel cold. I cannot understand how these men can tolerate the cold for long stretches like this, gutting on an open deck on a day like this, when an occasional wave will break hard against the side and send spray like a shroud over them as they work in the pounds. Obviously they are used to it—yet yesterday Scouse said that no fisherman ever gets used to it—accept it, at any rate, for the money it brings, they say, but there must be more to it than that. Perhaps they are all that physical type which can withstand pain more easily than others, is relatively unaffected by it, simply does not feel it: but, to look at, these men are physically so disparate. · · · · · From down a hatch to the fishroom a voice bellows Is the pleasuretripper up there? And Duff’s head follows it, just his head, like Jokanaan from the green cistern, but grinning, alive, a little red tam o’shanter on his head. And he invites me to inspect his fishroom, which I am quite glad to do, imagining at first it must be warmer down there than on the deck, then remembering that the fish are packed in ice. Down through a coalhole-like hatch, dropping straight on to a pine fish-slimy inclined chute, fortunately just four or five feet long, landing on my feet, crunching ice: a great sprag nudges me in the back immediately afterwards, kicks once, and is then seized both handed through the gills and round the base of the tail by a man whom I have not seen before, which seems incredible, did not know he was on board: perhaps he lives down here: no, impossible. He lays the sprag neatly next to others, of a similar size, packs ice round it, and sockets into place a wooden board. I see now that part of the fishroom is skeletal, with metal supports which are made into compartments with boards, some wooden, others of corrugated aluminium: here are packed layer upon layer of fish in ice, according to size and according to kind, the cod with the cod, the haddock with their kin: solidly, we stand on one eight-foot layer, we have caught that many, and are now filling a second layer, perhaps another eight feet deep, the width of the ship and half its length: a great many fish, measured in kits, each of which equals ten stone, packed like sardines, ha-ha, sometimes still kicking in the ice as they are put down: occasionally if such movement annoys a man at his neat shelving he will bash the head with a piece of ice or the end of a board. The other one of Duff’s assistants is Joe, an older man I have seen before, who silently shelves haddock, methodically, tidily, mechanically. The area for working in is relatively small, since the space without fish in it is packed with ice: as the ice is taken for the fish, so more space is exposed, more skeletal forest, for use as storage. Duff asks me if I am cold, sees I am, and hands me a pick and grinning points to the ice wall forward, behind the chute. I take the tool and, bracing myself carefully against a support and timing my blows within the movements of the ship, I begin to break down the ice, crushed originally but now adhering together in a mass, into fragments which form into mounds at my feet. When the freed ice is nearly up to the top of my seaboots, I take a shovel and send it in great arcing showers to the feet of Joe and the other man: and soon I am very warm, take off my scarf and skins, work in sweater and trousers like the others. For a breather, I watch the care with which they pack, remember someone saying before I came that this mate has a great reputation for the condition in which he brings his fish to market: talk with them about this method of storage, presumably the best, for some reason, though to my eyes packing the fish at once in boxes or kits at this stage would save the trouble of it being all unpacked from the ice by fishlumpers in port and then put into boxes. · · I am well warm by the time Duff calls me off for dinner. · · · · · · · · The Skipper is worried about the weather, says we shall have to give up fishing for a while if it worsens at all. I say that I have noticed the occasional bad roll which submerged the concrete scuppers alongside the rail, even submerged the top of the rail—submerged it, not just broke over it: and Duff reassuringly says he has seen it do that up to the engine room skylights, which are up on the boat-deck and on the centre line of the ship: Mind you, he adds, I was bloody scared at the time. Fear of this ship sinking is one thing I do not have, cannot conceive even, for she is so demonstrably well fitted to her element, to her job, that I cannot imagine what conditions could overcome her: she rides all the seas I have seen—and we had force nine across the North Sea and off the Norwegian coast—as successfully and confidently as I, a landsman, could wish. I can see why Corb took some of his examples, parallels, from ships: this trawler is indeed a machine for going to sea in, a machine for catching fish; shipshape; and in this bare functionalism lies her beauty. Certainly, she has no conventional beauties, for me, which is to the good: she has a very narrow beam for her length, for her less than eight hundred tons, but function, function, function! The whole ship is dedication to the concept of function and that is what makes her so beautiful to me. Except when, as now, she throws custard about, soaks my trousers with the sweet thick custard from the enamel jug as I attempt to pour, both burning and messing me: simultaneously from the galley through the hatch the sounds of two voices cursing as she threw something at both the cook and the galley boy. · · · · · I retire to my bunk to change the trousers, wash off the custard, hang them in my very efficient airing cupboard, and then decide to spend a while in my bunk in case of further accidents in this weather.
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