Story, Volume I

by Dai Smith

  ‘But is it bad for you to break down?’ she asked with some energy.

  ‘Yes; I can’t stand it.’ Beyond the fixed calm of his small crystal eyes something flickered. ‘When I was discharged from the Army the MO advised me to attend a clinic. I’ve been to one. It made me feel worse. I don’t want to feel I’m a case.’

  ‘The clinic,’ she said sagely, ‘couldn’t be expected to provide you with a mother. You’ve got nineteen years of starvation to forget.’

  She had got into the habit of giving him a glass of milk and rum at nights. Nevertheless, she had her real angers with him, for she was of tempestuous disposition. She knew that he would not – it did not occur to her that he could not – unfold to her other than in these talks. He did not weep on her waiting bosom; he did not like his bright glossy hair to be stroked. And sometimes when he played the trumpet in his room she was roused to a transport of queer, intent fury and she would prowl about the staircase in helpless rage.

  He had been in the house a month when one afternoon, after he had been playing for an hour, she walked into his room. Her green hair was frizzed out, the heavily painted eyes sidled angrily, the violet lips twisted like a cord. There was something both pathetic and ridiculous in the frenzy of this worn and used woman gallantly trying to keep up an air of bygone theatrical grandeur and, indeed, of ladylike breeding. But she was so brittle. Carefully looking at her, he laid the trumpet on his knees.

  ‘Why must you keep on!’ she fumed. ‘That everlasting tune, it’s maddening. The neighbours will ring up the police and I shall have them calling. You are not in a slum.’

  ‘You said I could play my trumpet.’

  And still there was about him that curious and impervious tranquillity, not to be disturbed, and, to her, relentless. It drove her to a vindictive outburst, her gaze fixed in hatred on the trumpet.

  ‘Why don’t you go out and look for work? Your rent – you are taking advantage of my kindness; you are lazy and without principle. Aren’t you ashamed to sit there doing nothing but blowing noises on that damned thing?’ She heaved over him in the narrow room, a dramatic Maenad gone to copious seed and smelling of bath salts.

  He got up from the bed’s edge, carefully disconnected the trumpet’s pieces and put them in the elegant case and his shirts and socks into a brown paper carrier. She watched him, spellbound; his crisp, deliberate decision was curbing. At the door he raised his hat politely. All recognition of her was abolished from the small, unswerving eyes.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said in a precise way. ‘I will send you the rent when I earn some money. I am sure to find a position suited to me before long.’

  He stored the trumpet in a railway station. On no account would he pawn it, though there was only a shilling or two left of the pound the canon had last sent him, together with a copy of St Augustine’s Confessions. He knew it was useless to look for a job even as second trumpet in the cabarets; not even his fresh, shiny, boy appearance, that would look well in a Palm Beach jacket, could help him.

  That night he hung about the dark, chattering Circus, not unhappy, feeling vaguely liberated among this anonymous crowd milling about in an atmosphere of drink, flesh, and boredom. He listened carefully to the soldiers’ smudged catcalls, the female retaliations, the whispers, the ironical endearments, the dismissals. But as the night wore on and the crowd thinned, his senses became sharpened, alert, and at the same time desperate. Like a young hungry wolf sniffing the edge of the dark, he howled desolately inside himself. In the blackout the perfumed women, dots of fire between their fingertips, passed and repassed, as if weaving a dance figure in some hieratic ceremony; his mind became aware of a pattern, a design, a theme in which a restated lewd note grew ever more and more dominant. He wanted to play his trumpet. Startle the night with a barbaric blast.

  He began to accost the women. He had heard that some would give shelter to the temporarily destitute, exercising a legendary comradeship of the streets. But none had use for him. After a brief assessment of his conversation they passed on rapidly. Only one was disposed to chatter. She told him he could find a job, if his discharge papers were in order, as a stagehand in a certain theatre; she gave him a name to ask for.

  ‘Nothing doing, darling,’ she replied promptly to his subsequent suggestion. ‘No fresh pineapple for me tonight.’

  Waiting for morning, he sat on a bench in the ghostly Square garden and returned to an earlier meditation on the nature of God. In this mental fantasy he continually saw the embryo of a tadpole which split into two entities. The force that divided the embryo was God, a tremendous deciding power that lay beyond biology. It was eternal and creative, yet could one pray to it, worship it? Would it be conscious of a worshipping acknowledgement, and, if so, could it reward with peace, harmony, and contentment? He ached to submerge himself in belief and to enter into a mystic identification with a creative force; he wanted to cast himself at the knees of a gigantic parent of the universe. But on every side were frustrations, and the chaotic world, armed for destruction, was closing in on him triumphantly. Yet he knew it was that creative force that had driven him to attempt suicide as a solution and a release; he had believed that the power within him would not die but return to the central force and be discharged again. But he shivered at the memory of the hours before that act of suicide, those furtive, secret hours that had ruptured his mind. Outside himself he had never been able to kill even a spider.

  ‘You must think of your future!’ he suddenly whinnied aloud, causing a bemused sailor on an adjacent bench to lift his round cap off his face. He tried to envisage a concrete picture of that future, but saw only a ravaged place of waste with a few tufts of blackened vegetation against a burnt-out sky.

  He began working among acres of painted canvases depicting idealised scenes in a world devoted to song, hilarity, and dance. Rainbow processions of girls passed in and out, pearly smiles stitched into glossy faces, the accurate legs swinging like multi-coloured sausages. Watching these friezes in tranced gravity, he sometimes missed a cue, rousing the stage manager to threats of instant dismissal, despite the labour shortage. The hardworking young girl dancers, lustrously trim and absorbed in professional perfection, took no notice of the new stagehand fascinated in attempts to adapt their integrated patterns to his consciousness. But though hypnotised by this new revelation of idealised flesh and movements, he still could not identify himself with them. He was still cut off, he had not yet come through to acceptance that the world breathed, and that these pink and silver girls actually could be touched.

  He started and listened carefully when a distinguished young man, a hero of the sky, sent a message backstage that he ‘would like to collaborate’ with a certain starry beauty of the chorus. ‘She’ll collaborate all right,’ remarked another of the girls in the wings; ‘I never heard it called that before.’ That night he went home straight from the theatre and filled the house with the blasts of his trumpet.

  He had rented a small partitioned space in the basement, its window overlooking the back garden. It contained a camp bed and one or two bugs which he accepted as outcomes of the God-force. The street was not of good repute, but it was beyond the West End, and an amount of lace-curtained and fumed-oak respectability was maintained.

  ‘You can blow your trumpet as much as you like,’ Irish Lil said. ‘Blow it in the middle of the night if you like – it might drive some of the bastards out. Can you lend me five bob till tomorrow morning?’

  There had been a quarrel among the five prostitutes upstairs: four accused the fifth of bringing in clients during the daytime – they declared the house would get a bad name. They were entirely daughters of the night; in daylight there was a moon glisten on their waxen faces, their hair looked unreal, and their voices were huskily fretful. They called him the Boy with a Trumpet, and he was already something of a pet among them. He shared the roomy basement with four refugees off the Continent who came and went on obscure errands and everlastingly cooked cabbage s
oup.

  Irish Lil was the disgrace of the house. Though she always had real flowers stuck in the two milk bottles on her sideboard, she was a slut. Her slovenly make-up, her regular OMS lover in the Guards who got roaring drunk, and her inability to discriminate and to insist on prepayment angered the four younger women. Blonde Joyce carried on a year-old vendetta with her. Over a stolen egg. Irish Lil was creeping downstairs one evening with the egg, which she had taken from Joyce’s room, when a bomb fell in the Avenue. Kathleen rushed out of her room with a Free French client and found Lil struck daft on the stairs with the crushed egg dribbling through her fingers.

  ‘Don’t trust your trumpet to her,’ Joyce said. ‘She’ll pawn it.’ For, as his room had no lock, he asked where in the house he could hide his trumpet while he was at the theatre.

  ‘She weeps,’ he said gravely. ‘I’ve heard her weeping.’

  ‘If,’ Joyce said, hard, ‘she was on fire, I wouldn’t pee on her to put her out.’

  But they all, in their idle afternoons, liked him about their rooms. He fetched them newspapers and cigarettes; he was a nice boy and, yawning in their dressing gowns and irremediably nocturnal, they discarded their professionalism with him. Their calm acceptance of the world as a disintegration eased him; his instinct had been right in seeking a brothel to live in.

  Yet he saw the house, for all its matter-of-fact squalor, as existing in a world still spectral to him. Still he lived behind thick glass, unreleased and peering out in dumb waiting. Only his old Army nightmare was gone – the recurrent dream in which he lay sealed tight into a leaden pipe under a pavement where he could hear, ever passing and returning, the heeltaps of compassionate but unreachable women. But the tank-like underwater quiet of the observation ward in the asylum was still with him, always. And he could not break through, smash the glass. Not yet.

  It was Kathleen who took quite a fancy to him. They had disconnected conversations in her room; she accepted him amicably as a virginal presence that did not want to touch her. She was plump as a rose, and a sprinkle of natural colour was still strewn over her, the youngest girl in the house. She promised to try to find him a job as trumpeter in one of the clubs; he could earn a pound a night at this if he became proficient.

  ‘But I don’t want to earn a lot of money,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s time we learned how to do without money. We must learn to live and create like God.’

  ‘I’ve met all types of men,’ she said vaguely, tucking her weary legs under her on the bed. ‘And I hate them all. I tell you I’ve got to have six double gins before I can bring one home. That costs them a quid or two extra; I make the sods spend.’

  He said dreamily: ‘When I took poison I felt I was making a creative act, if it was only that I was going out to search.’ He could still rest in the shade of that release; the mysteriousness of that blue underworld fume was still there, giving him a promise of fulfilment. ‘I saw huge shapes… they were like huge flowers, dark and heavy blood-coloured flowers. They looked at me, they moved, they listened, their roots began to twine into me, I could feel them in my bowels… But I couldn’t rise, I was lying in the mud. I couldn’t breathe in the new way. I tried to struggle up… through. But I fell back, and everything disappeared—’

  ‘Don’t you go trying to commit suicide in this house,’ she said. ‘Mrs Walton would never forgive you. That Irish tyke’s doing enough to advertise us already… You’re not queer, are you?’ she asked, desultory. ‘I like queer men, they don’t turn me sick… Always at one,’ she ruminated of the others.

  She attracted him more than the other four, but, to content his instinct completely, he wished her more sordid, lewd, and foul-tongued, more disintegrated. The ghostly lineaments of a trembling young girl remained in her. They conversed to each other across a distance. But she was the only one of the women who still appeared to observe things beyond this private world of the brothel. He sometimes tried to talk to her about God.

  The taxicabs began to purr up to the front door any time after midnight. Sometimes he got out of his bed in the basement, mounted the staircase in trousers and socks, and stood poised in the dark as if waiting for a shattering revelation from behind the closed doors. There was the useless bomber pilot who broke down and shouted weepingly to Joyce that his nerve was gone – ‘Well,’ Joyce had said in her ruthless way, ‘you can stay if you like, but I’m keeping my present all the same, mind!’ That pleased him, as he carefully listened; it belonged to the chaos, the burnt-out world reduced to charcoal. He laughed softly to himself. What if he blew his trumpet on this phantasmagoric staircase? Blew it over the fallen night, waken these dead, surprise them with a new anarchial fanfare?

  One week when the elder tree and the peonies were in blossom in the once-cultivated back garden, Irish Lil declared she had a birthday. She opened her room on the Monday night – always an off night – to whoever wished to come in. Ranks of beer flagons stood on the sideboard, and Harry, her Guards sergeant regular, roared and strutted before them in his battledress like David before the Ark. Three refugees from the basement ventured in; Joyce forgot her vendetta, but refused to dress or make up; Pamela sat repairing a stocking. When he arrived from the theatre the beer was freely flowing. Irish Lil, in a magenta sateen gown, was wearing long, ornate earrings in a vain attempt to look seductive. Kathleen, on this off-night occasion, gazed at him with a kind of sisterly pensiveness.

  ‘Heard that one about Turnham Green—?’ bawled Harry, and took off his khaki blouse before telling it, owing to the heat.

  He was a great tree of flesh. His roots were tenacious in the earth. The juice in his full lips was the blood of a king bull; the seeds of war flourished in the field of his muscular belly. For him a battle was a dinner, a bomb a dog bark, a bayonet a cat-scratch, and in the palm of his great blue paw statesmen curled secure. He was the salt of the earth. The limericks flying off his lips became more obscene.

  But they fell flat. The prostitutes were bored with obscenity, the refugees did not understand English humour. Joyce yawned markedly.

  ‘Hell, what’s this?’ Harry panted a bit – ‘The funeral of the duchess…? Reminds me. Heard that one about Her Grace and the fishmonger?’

  ‘Fetch your trumpet, will you?’ asked Irish Lil, feeling a little music was necessary.

  ‘What!’ shouted Harry, delighted. ‘He’s got a trumpet? I been in the band in my time. A kick or two from a trumpet’s jest what’s needed.’

  He snatched the beautifully shining instrument and set it to his great curled lips. The bull neck swelled, the huge face glowed red. And without mistake, unfalteringly, from harmonious lungs, he played the ‘Londonderry Air’. A man blowing a trumpet successfully is a rousing spectacle. The blast is an announcement of the lifted sun. Harry stood on a mountain peak, monarch of all he surveyed.

  Kathleen came in, hesitating, and sat beside him on the campbed. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. He had flung away with the trumpet as soon as Harry had laid it down. He sat concentratedly polishing it with a bit of chiffon scarf she had once given him, especially the mouthpiece. ‘Has he spoilt it, then?’ she murmured.

  He did not answer. But his fingers were trembling. She said wearily: ‘He’s started reciting “Eskimo Nell” now.’

  ‘I wish I could play like him,’ he whispered.

  ‘You do make an awful noise,’ she said in a compassionate way. ‘You haven’t got the knack yet, with all your practising … I wonder,’ she brooded after a while, ‘if it’s worth going down West. But they’re so choosy on a Monday night.’

  ‘Don’t go.’ He laid down the trumpet as if abandoning it for ever. ‘Don’t go.’

  She seemed not to be listening, her preoccupied eyes gazing out of the window. The oblong of garden was filled with the smoky red after fume of sunset. Their low voices drifted into silences. Two pigeons gurgled in the elder tree; a cat rubbed against the windowpane and became intent on the pigeons. Kathleen’s mouth was pursed up thoughtfully. He was
conscious of the secret carnation glow of her thighs. Her thick hair smelled of obliterating night.

  ‘I won’t ever play my trumpet.’ His voice stumbled. ‘I have no faith, no belief, and I can’t accept the world… I can’t feel it.’

  ‘Christ, there’s enough to feel,’ she protested. ‘This bloody war, and the bombs—’

  ‘In the Army they taught us to get used to the smell of blood. It smells of hate… And to turn the bayonet deep in the guts… There were nice chaps in our battalion who had letters and parcels from home… from loving mothers and girls… and they didn’t mind the blood and the bayonets; they had had their fill of love and faith, I suppose. But I was hungry all the time, I wanted to be fed, and I wanted to create, and I wanted children… I am incomplete,’ he whispered – ‘I didn’t have the right to kill.’

  ‘But you tried to kill yourself,’ she pointed out, though vaguely, as if her attention was elsewhere.

  ‘My body,’ he said – ‘that they owned.’

  ‘Well, what can you do?’ she asked, after another silence. ‘You ought to take up some study, a boy with your brains…It’s a shame,’ she cried, with a sudden burst of the scandalised shrillness of her kind: ‘the Army takes ’em, breaks ’em, and chucks ’em out when they’ve got no further use for ’em. What can you do?’

  ‘There’s crime,’ he said.

  ‘It don’t pay,’ she said at once.

  ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘there’ll be big waves of crime after the war. You can’t have so much killing, so much teaching to destroy, and then stop it suddenly… The old kinds of crime, and new crimes against the holiness in the heart. There’ll be fear, and shame, and guilt, guilt. People will be mad. There’s no such thing as victory in war. There’s only misery, chaos and suffering for everybody, and then the payment…. There’s only one victory – over the evil in the heart. And that’s a rare miracle.’