green · · · · · green · · green the green pro · · · · · green green pro · · · · · It must be · · No · · that is too painful, I cannot go over that. · · · · · I must. · · · · · · · · Picked her up in a pub, went all the way to the bank at lunchtime for the money · · went back to the pub · · · · · how sordid! · · She had on a green beret sort of hat and a green costume top and I picked her up in a pub and took her back to my digs, then, in the early afternoon and she wanted the fire on and · · · · · · · · I was very low at this time. · · Excuse myself to myself, but it is not as though anyone else will ever know about this. · · · · · except Terry, I had to tell someone, who knew already of the depths to which I had sunk. · · So I put the fire on and she undressed down to her woolly and stood barearsed and shivering before the gasfire and with her back to me as I undressed · · · · · and I · · could · · · · · · · · not · · · · · · · · raise · · · · · · · · · · · What relevance has this? What use going over such pain? · · · · · For I knew this was likely to happen, knew that it was really no answer, and my body merely reflected that, oh, that is not to say it did not make some attempt, did not swell to somewhat more than its normal girth, for it did, flaccidly, but would stand no farther, so that it was impossible for it to enter, no, that is not true, it would enter, once or twice, but attempts to establish regular movement ended in it slipping out and no satisfaction was to be had and she kept on wanting to get it over with and leave because she did not like it in other people’s places, and kept saying Come on, let’s have a do. · · · · · · · · And I could not. · · · · · Her feet, her dirty feet had dirtied my sheets afterwards I noticed, turned them over afterwards as it was not yet the end of the week for clean sheets. · · · · · Though she wanted to leave as quickly as possible she was yet an honest tradeswoman, wanted to give value for her · · two pounds, I think it was, so she worked manually at my flabby member until the teat end of the sheath she had provided filled opaquely. · · There was little pleasure, I remember, obviously, in the circumstances. · · · · · And she dressed her smallboned dirty limbs. · · · · · · · · Ah, getting that out of me was a relief! It is a long time since I would let myself think of the green pro, since Terry told me about the drooping left side of my mouth, perhaps, about the twitch, over a year ago now, I was very low at that time, have perhaps come lower since, but did not try that way out again, perhaps through fear of another failure, no, certainly because it is not an answer, I knew it was not an answer before I even did it, but know it now, even better, so trite, really, since Daedalus, yet we move so slowly, so slowly! Ah. · · And Terry was understanding, I could not have told anyone else about this, as I had to tell him about this. And once I saw the green pro in the street, by chance, just once, and she looked at me but did not recognise me, or gave no sign of it, at least, and I looked away quickly, ashamed, yes, ashamed! · · I would not have thought it after Daedalus, no, no.
It was while I was working at the oil company that I had the phone call about my tutor. They had rung me up once or twice before to cancel a lesson because he had fallen ill, and that is what I thought it was this time when I heard this secretary’s voice. I have some bad news for you, she said: and I wondered for a moment. Then she told me he had been found that morning dead beside his bed, had had a heart attack getting out of bed. My mind saw him immediately, the gross, short, figure dirty in bursting striped flannel pyjamas, for some reason, heaving himself up out of bed, and collapsing on the floor. I was curiously at the time unmoved by it, disappointed that I was not to have my Greek lesson that evening, and even a little embarrassed. Yet later I felt it, his death, and remembered what he had meant to me. Whether he did it shrewdly or by accident I could not tell, but he had found exactly the way to make me work hard: I came to him with my determination to pass O-level Latin in nine months from knowing nothing, and his pessimism about my ability at twenty-one, when he said the automatic memory had failed, to do this made me all the more resolute. I think I had three lessons a week from him, two in the evenings at six and one on Saturday mornings, while I was working for the oil company during the day. I used to finish at five in Holborn, catch the central line to Holland Park, and have a drink and a cheese roll in a pub called the Castle before going to this large house become a crammers’. He would be waiting for me in his small classroom, or occasionally I would have to wait while his previous pupil finished his lesson. He was short, fat to overflowing inside his great tweed suit and snuff-coloured and besprinkled waistcoat, and the green glossy material of his tie was frayed at the knot where the stubble from his chins abraded it. I never knew his age, though from what he said about Oxford, where he took a double first, and Gilbert Murray, he must have been well over seventy. His desk was often untidy, but the two features which gave it continuity for me were the hierarchy of thick blacklead black and white marking pencils he aligned on his desk in order of the amount they had been used up, and his timetable of lessons given, which represented his piecework record of money earned, and which was kept from being blown away by the weight of two or three small brown and yellow ounce tins of Dr Rumney’s Pure Mentholyptus Tobacco Snuff. These latter would be dipped into in a pecking order as strictly observed as that which governed the use of the marking pencils, and, though at first I politely refused his offers, once when I had a cold he insisted that I take a pinch, this being what snuff was for, colds: and thereafter I generally had at least one pinch every lesson, enjoyed the smell of it, even bought a small tin of Dr. Rumney’s myself: though this I kept before me when doing Latin exercises at home as a reminder of what I was supposed to be doing rather than to take as a habit. Once he had seen how I worked, he paid me the great compliment of assuming my intelligence in everything, sometimes even crediting me with more than I had, so that I had to slow him down and ask him to explain something yet again. But all the time he was deeply pessimistic about my chances of passing the examination in the summer: and when, having entered for three different Boards in the hope of luck in one of them, I passed all three fairly easily, certainly with an ease which surprised me, he afterwards said he had been sure I would pass: and to my protestations that some of the things he had taught me were not even tested in the examinations, were not even on any syllabus, he merely smiled slightly, said it was basic policy to teach beyond the level required, in order to provide a margin, and that surely I was not complaining at knowing too much? · · · · · I tried to get to know him better after lessons. I was generally his last pupil on my evening lessons, and would ask him out a for a drink: I both respected him, and yet needed someone to respect in this way, at that time, I remember; that is, I suspect my admiration for him to a certain extent, it was impure. Usually he declined, not even politely, but once—perhaps it was just before the exams—he did allow me to go with him to a pub where they knew him well and where they made him a special welsh rarebit with beer in it, all sloppy with beer, in fact, which I had never seen made so before, though he told me it was quite a common thing. I think we had light ales to drink. I did not have a welsh rarebit. · · · · · Once I tried to get him to talk personally, or rather like a father figure to me, being involved with some woman or other at the time: but he just said he had never been even interested in women, had never wanted to be married, and that finished that conversation. He had read no modern literature, and when I asked him to translate for me the Greek epigraph to Four Quarters he told me he had never even read Eliot, who I at that time thought of as already a classic, even as being old-fashioned. He also said that nothing a young man wrote or had to say was worth reading or hearing, and added an exception in the case of a
genius just as the name of Keats was about to burst from me: this statement, which I now see to be very true, worried me far more at that time than the dismissal of every modern writer by this man I so much admired. · · Yet he was interested in the world outside, in an oldfashioned way: once when a quiet young Indian had finished his lesson and left, the first thing my tutor said to me was that I had just been—he implied honoured—to see the heir, if he lived, for his health was finely balanced, to all the riches of some vast maharajadom or something: I was surprised at his reverence before, and interest in, the aristocracy or wealth, whichever it was. I am sure the Indian did not pay more for his lessons than I did. · · The morning one of the exams was held, about nine o’clock, before going to the centre I went into the gents’ just beside Kensington Town Hall, and the attendant there said, Well, that’s done for her, then. I nodded, not wishing to make conversation in bogs, and only later realised it was the day that they hung Ruth Ellis. · · · · · His own funeral I attended, my tutor’s, out at the Streatham cemetery, that vast acreage of white stone where my father’s parents are buried. My tutor was to be cremated, however, and I arrived at the chapel just as they were finishing the previous service. A tall, grubby cleric removed a name written on a board, turned the card round, and put it back in its slots: it had my tutor’s name on it and I knew for the first time that his Xtian name was Lucius: his parents had directed him towards Latin from his christening. The cleric asked me if I was one of her party, indicating the name, and I realised that he thought the name was the form of which Lucy was a diminutive: I pointed out his error to him, sharply, I could not help it, wondering how a man whose calling, I believed, involved the study of Latin, could make such an error, and then reflected that there must be NCO’s and warrant officers in the church, too, that they were not all educated men, if any, the men of God. He conducted the service tiredly, mechanically, this man of God, too, hesitating and looking down when he came to the first gap where my tutor’s name had to be inserted, and pronouncing the c in the Xtian name soft, whereas I had said it to myself hard, in the pronunciation he had taught me, and this too seemed to me a slight by this cleric on the man I respected. There were other mourners there: a woman who might perhaps have been his sister, a niece perhaps, and a girl of about fourteen who looked long at me. There too was the director of the crammers’, who nodded to me afterwards, after the surprisingly small coffin had slowly slid on rollers through the curtained opening at the far end. · · I regretted that I had known my tutor less well during the previous few months than when I had worked so hard for O-level: he had helped me to Latin in Intermediate BA, as a private addition to my course at Birkbeck, and, when I had passed this and needed to go no further in Latin, had suggested I do Greek, which he had always told me was a finer language with a finer literature: so I did, for this short while, until he died, having given me only half a dozen lessons. · · · · · · · · There is a fault in my method, there must be, or so it seems. · · I create my own world in the image of that which was, in the past: from a defective memory, from recollections which must be partial: this is not necessarily truth, may even be completely misleading, at best is only a nearness, a representation. · · I see now there is a lot of sentiment in my memories of my tutor, what I have chosen to remember of him, that is, a short-tempered, self-centred old man who very probably saw me only as an entry on that timetable of money earned. · · · · · · · · This is merely to escape: this is not to confront. · · · · · · · · Is it
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