The Name on the Door is Not Mine

by C. K. Stead

  The ‘music’, however, when it came the following Wednesday was not a simple and catchy tune. At first, when he tried to tell her they must call it off, she reproached him—something she hadn’t done before. She wept, told him he was a bastard and a cunt; and then, worst of all, pleaded with him, telling him how much she loved him—adored him. He found it painful, and the pain focused especially on one fact. He had given her some kind of advance warning, a hint that he had ‘something very serious to tell you’. Possibly she’d guessed what it might be because she appeared to have dressed herself up for the encounter, and the clothes seemed to him in the worst possible taste.

  As Bertie explained it to me, he has no exact memory for women’s clothes, often doesn’t remember colours, or remembers them incorrectly, yet at the same time he always takes away a generalised, and in some ways quite precise, impression. Shelly, as he remembered her that day, was wearing a short yellow dress of some kind of stiff material, and around her head, over that rebellious but briefly tamed hair, a band of the same colour.

  ‘There seemed to be little bows and frills everywhere,’ he said. ‘I may be exaggerating, but it seemed to me she only needed a tray of sweets and ices and she could have gone to a fancy-dress ball as an old-fashioned cinema usherette.’

  He had never, he told me, felt so fond of her, nor so self-reproachful and so determined to protect her. He couldn’t give her what she wanted—he could not; and so the only thing for it was to remove himself. That’s what he tried to explain while she argued, wept, pleaded.

  At last, when he was on the point of exhaustion, she changed tack. She appeared to accept that he was going, and that he wouldn’t be back. Before he went, however, she would like, she said, to show him her old friend. ‘You didn’t know I ’ad a boyfriend before you, did you, Ber’ie?’ She went to the drawer beside her bed and took something out. He was expecting a photo of some dingy local lad. In fact it was what he called ‘a large phallic object’. She pressed a small switch and it began to buzz. ‘My vibra’or, Ber’ie. Say ’ullo to it.’

  Bertie’s account of what she did next was graphic. It was the cage again and he was being drawn back into it. His mouth was dry and he found it hard to speak, but he managed to tell her he was going. She put her head back, as if she was really enjoying what she was doing to herself, and said, ‘You’re not going nowhere, Ber’ie.’ She was right of course. He thought he was heading towards the door but he wasn’t. ‘She was a magnet. It was like being dragged bodily, against your will.’

  He’d been looking down into his drink as he told me all this, and I remember how he looked up now, appealing for a friend’s compassion. ‘You have to understand, I was hungry for it. I’d been all those weeks in New York, and there’d been nothing.’

  ‘So … What did you do?’

  It was a silly question. ‘We got on with it. I thought, Fuck it, life’s too difficult. Let’s just enjoy ourselves. And that’s what we did. Three o’clock came around, 3.30—I didn’t care. I was busy. I was happy. I was being myself for a change and I was enjoying it.’ So the afternoon passed; and it occurred to him afterwards that she must all along have counted on success, because she’d arranged for Jack and Jill to go to a friend’s place after school. They fucked and they talked, and finally they slept …

  Bertie was woken by her shaking him, staring down at him. ‘Wake up,’ she was saying. ‘Jesus Christ, Ber’ie, wake fucking up. It’s ’im! It’s Arfur!’

  Then she was out of bed and across the room to the hallway. He heard her snib the Yale lock. There was a conversation going on in the corridor—Arthur talking to a neighbour. In a moment he would try to open his own door with the key and find he couldn’t.

  Back in the bedroom Shelly was gathering up her things. She hissed at Bertie to get dressed. ‘’e’ll go downstairs to the caretaker to report there’s something wrong with the lock. Then you scarper. Go down the other stairs. I’ll pretend I snibbed it by mistake.’

  She vanished into the bathroom. And now from the front door came the scraping of Arthur’s key as he tried to turn it in the lock. Bertie dragged on his underpants and trousers, wrestled with and tore his shirt, which he found had lost a button in the earlier, equally violent, struggle to get it off.

  Arthur’s voice came through the door. ‘Mish? You in there?’ He rattled the door handle. ‘Mish?’ And then the key was withdrawn, the voice muttered to itself, footsteps receded down the corridor.

  Now, Bertie thought—his chance to escape. He would get out and would never come back. He thought of setting off, running, carrying his shoes. But no, some sort of dignity had to be preserved.

  He was sitting on the bed’s edge dragging on his socks when he heard a new sound, a scraping and scrambling. The balcony out there was shared with the flat next door. Arthur had gone through the flat of the neighbour he’d been talking to in the corridor. Now, from the balcony, he was scrambling up over a locked window to an open fanlight.

  From where Bertie sat he could see, across the hallway and through another door, a pair of long black-trousered legs pushing, sliding, hanging, dropping.

  There was a thump as two feet hit the sitting-room floor. Shelly’s voice quavered from the bathroom. ‘That you, Arfur?’

  Bertie put his head down and dragged at his shoes. He tugged at the laces. Footsteps approached. At that moment, he told me, he felt a desperate calm. The blow would come down on the back of his head, on his neck—he had no doubt of that. He wouldn’t defend himself; couldn’t. He would die; but it wasn’t fear he felt—it was embarrassment. It was shame.

  Two large black shiny guard’s shoes arrived and planted themselves opposite the two brown shoes which Bertie’s feet had just reoccupied. He pulled the laces tight and tied them.

  ‘One has to do something while waiting to die,’ Bertie said. ‘I remember wondering would the blow hurt, or would I pass instantly and painlessly into another world of floating shapes saying things like, “Hullo, dear. I’m your mother.”’

  But there was no blow. Nothing was said. There was only the heavy breathing of a wronged husband who had just climbed through a fanlight.

  ‘I raised my eyes slowly.’ (Bertie was acting it out for me now—bending forward, twisting his head around to look up at the occupant of those shiny shoes.) ‘There was the line of the trousers. When I got to the thighs I saw the hands, hanging at his sides. They were coffee-coloured, with paler palms. I raised my eyes further and there was a coffee face to match. My first thought was, Why the fuck had she never told me he was black?’

  The dark mask looking coldly down at him did not seem on the verge of violence. That ought to have been a relief; but violence would have been simpler. It would have given him something to do. He tried to read Arthur’s face. There was anxiety in the eyes; and around the mouth something like contempt.

  ‘This is a dreadful business,’ Bertie managed to say. ‘I’m really most frightfully sorry.’

  He stood, picking his jacket up from the floor. That uncovered the vibrator. They both, he and black Arthur, looked down at it lying there like a severed penis.

  Bertie said he’d better go.

  Shelly had been right—Arthur wasn’t a talker.

  Bertie moved out into the hall. His walk was unsteady. At the bathroom door he stopped and called to Shelly that he was going.

  The bolt slid back and she appeared in a dressing gown. Behind her he could see the yellow dress trampled on the wet tiled floor. She nodded to him, glanced at Arthur.

  Bertie moved to the front door—only a step or two in those cramped quarters. He unsnibbed the lock, opened the door and felt a moment of relief.

  But was it right to leave without another word? He turned. Shelly had come out of the bathroom, Arthur out of the bedroom, and they were standing side by side, ‘like two piano keys,’ Bertie said, ‘the ebony and the ivory. They made a handsome couple.’

  To Arthur, Bertie said, ‘You won’t hurt her.’ He meant it to be some
thing midway between a question and an instruction.

  Arthur said, ‘Out, cunt.’ That was the beginning and the end of his talk.

  Shelly looked at Bertie. Her expression was anxious but not frightened. She was safe, Arthur wouldn’t hurt her seemed to be the message. So he went, closing the door behind him.

  Out in the street he was assailed all over again by embarrassment. He turned west, away from his office, crossed Gray’s Inn Road, walked along to Southampton Row. In Kingsway there was a men’s clothes shop that had always, as long as he could remember, announced that it was having a Closing Down Sale. He went in and chose himself an unpleasant business shirt that had a faint shine and a green tinge to it. It would replace the one with the tear and the hanging button. He also thought of it as a penance.

  Handing over his credit card he asked the young woman did she have any with hair linings.

  ‘So-rree?’ she said, not understanding. He didn’t repeat it.

  It was raining now. He took a taxi back to the office. The secretaries had gone. He sat at his desk looking out at rain drifting past the ugly looming portals of the Barbican. He thought of Françoise and a few tears sprang into his eyes—a mixture of anger and regret. He thought of Arthur’s shiny black shoes and winced. He heard the partner in the next office getting ready to leave. He went to her door. Her name was Coral Strand. They’d worked together for years, knew one another well.

  ‘That’s a nasty shirt, Herbert,’ she said at once. ‘It’s not the one you had on this morning.’

  He had never got used to the fact that women noticed clothing so precisely. ‘The other one,’ he said, ‘got torn off my back by a woman desperate to have me.’

  Coral smiled wearily. ‘Of course.’ It was a tired old joke. How odd, Bertie thought, that it should be true.

  ‘Do I seem to you an absurd person?’ he asked.

  ‘Not especially.’ She snapped her case shut. It was a signal that she had no time for talk. Deluded by her name, which still suggested to him a tropical paradise, Bertie had long ago, and very briefly, imagined he and Coral Strand might become lovers. Inwardly he now thought of her as the Head Girl.

  ‘Not especially,’ he repeated. It was hardly reassuring.

  ‘About average,’ she said, easing him into the corridor and closing her door. ‘We’re all a bit absurd sometimes, aren’t we? See you tomorrow, Herbert.’

  He didn’t go back to Marlow that night but spent it at his club. He has taken me there sometimes for lunch or dinner and I can report that it seemed a dreadful place where faded lackeys served tasteless food to dead men in suits. Bertie, however, finds some kind of ancient comfort in brown leather and panelled walls, and comfort was what he needed.

  Next morning he went first not to his office but to the British Museum. After a lot of aimless wandering through the halls and galleries he found Arthur dozing on a chair in a corner among ancient clay burial urns. Bertie roused him with a sharp cough and said his piece: that he was very disturbed at what had happened. That it had not been as bad as it must have seemed (this in an attempt to allow for any story Shelly might have concocted) but that he wanted to apologise sincerely. That it had been his fault entirely, not Michele’s. That she should not be blamed—he took full responsibility. That it would never happen again.

  Arthur didn’t get up. He listened, staring with bloodshot eyes at a large broken urn. When the little speech was over he asked, ‘You got fifty quid?’

  Bertie was taken by surprise. For just a moment it seemed a wonderful relief, the possibility of doing something, paying something, by way of recompense, of absolution.

  Yes, he said, he had fifty, certainly. Possibly more … All the while scrabbling to get his wallet out, to get it open …

  He held out a fistful of notes. There was at least fifty …

  Arthur beckoned him closer. Bertie leaned down over him, holding the money.

  ‘Now stick it up your arse,’ Arthur said, ‘and fuck off outta here.’

  Out in the street he seemed to have lost control of his legs. He ambled uncertainly in the direction of the city, still holding the fistful of notes, looking for a passing taxi showing a light and then, when one came along, not hailing it. He saw a florist’s shop, went in and put the money down on the counter. What he wanted, he explained, was as many flowers as this would buy sent at once, this morning, to … And he gave her name and address.

  ‘And for the card, sir,’ the florist said.

  Ah yes, the card. He took it and after a moment wrote, ‘To Shelly from Keats. Love you for ever.’

  For the duration of the brief moment it took to write it, Bertie said, and for perhaps thirty seconds afterwards, he felt it was true.

  I didn’t quite believe—or was it just that I didn’t want to believe?—that that was the end of the story.

  ‘Just for thirty seconds?’ I said. ‘No more?’

  He met my eye for a moment, shrugged and looked down at the table between our comfortable chairs. ‘Let’s refill these glasses,’ he said.

  The name on the door is not mine

  One: Quinton: ‘the office of Ashtree’

  ON THE BUS THIS EVENING I thought, ‘Anything can look like a movie of itself—i.e. unreal.’ Can I recover the buoyancy of that thought? I was leaving the Quinton campus for my apartment across the river. There was snow on the fir trees and on the steps of the Faculty Club, the lawns and gardens were buried under it, it bulged on the house-roofs. It was banked thick on everything except the brown ragged-edged strip of roadway kept clear by snow-ploughs, the tracks dug from sidewalks to doors by householders, and the city sidewalks themselves over which I and the students skittered to the bus stop.

  I will call it ‘my apartment’ and ‘my office’—I have them on loan, one, the office looking over snow-bound fir trees down to a frozen river, the other, the apartment, looking from the city down to the river and up to the university. If I could occupy them both at once I could wave to myself, and would do it to relieve the loneliness. I am ‘Distinguished Visitor’ for just a couple of months, introduced to everyone, forgetting all their names, avoiding them all because avoidance is my habit, and hungry for company.

  A Distinguished Visitor is worth quite a lot of money—or a lot by his own modest standards. This morning an account opened in my name to receive my reward. ‘Age?’ the young lady asked, needing my details for future ID. Home address? Mother’s maiden name? Name of my first school? My first pet? There had to be a photo taken too, for which I was asked to remove the peaked cap I was wearing in the style of the German Chancellor of some years back, Helmut Schmidt.

  What was the movie I seemed to see myself cast in as I came out of the Hubert Harrison-Jones Memorial Building on to the Harriet Harrison-Jones Memorial Highway to catch my bus? It was of course a North American campus movie. A student—a young woman student, with pink fingers searching for her bus pass—ought to have accidentally spilled the contents of her bag on my lap. Apologies. She’s flustered. The bus starts. She falls back half into the seat beside me, half on my lap among the books. More apologies, while her things are gathered up and returned to the bag. We talk about the weather (what else?). She discovers that I am a visitor. Not the Distinguished Visitor, Helmut Schmidt? I admit it is so. She’s so pleased she tells me about her boyfriend. He was supposed to meet her this evening. Didn’t show up. Unreliable. She agrees to have dinner with me. Later in the week (to condense this tedious and trivial narrative) we go skiing together and finish up in a chalet, naked in a barrel of hot water soaping each other’s nipples …

  No student fell into my lap this evening, none spoke to me nor recognised me as the Distinguished Visitor, Helmut Schmidt. Not even as Dr Henry Bulov visiting the English Department from New Zealand. I don’t complain of this or believe it ought to have been otherwise. I note only that it is these little divergences that make the reality of a movie, or, as this evening, the reality of reality, unreal.

  Now it’s night and out
there the northern prairie weather means business. It’s minus 26°F, the scraped sidewalks hard with ice, and you fight your way along inside a big old German tweed overcoat which adds kilos to that figure of 75 so lightly offered by the bathroom scales this morning, and looking like a big old German. But it’s no longer the cute Helmut Schmidt cap in wapiti leather peaked over your northern blue eyes but a red, white and blue skiing toque tight down over brow and ears, your scarf over your chin, and the breath between faintly holding the chill at bay from that chiselled (or chisel) nose. Yet in empty Archibald Square you hear ‘Les bicyclettes de Belsize’ piped to the icy skies and a scrape-scraping to its rhythm. Surely not? But yes, two hardy teenagers in the half-light and togged to the eyebrows are skating on its flooded-and-frozen centre. The tweed is doing its winter work but the frightful chill is getting into the toque and through the shoes; your trousers at and below the knee feel as if they’ve gone over to the enemy; and you press desperately into the little Italian restaurant at the door of which you hesitated last evening and turned away because then as now there were no customers—not one. But the dish when it comes is tasty and cheap, with no frills, distinctly and edibly melanzane parmigiana.

  Warm and replete, you’re ready for the short battle homeward. There is, you reflect, something to be said for a climate that makes simply setting forth an adventure—never mind setting forth for what. Your apartment is on the twelfth floor and you will soon be drifting to sleep with the curtains open, looking at the lights of the city and the snow falling on your balcony. Contrarily, these past days, through all the invasions of melancholy, loneliness and disorientation, has come the old absurd ebullience, the unreasonable sense that life is its own reward.

  THIS WAR BETWEEN VANITY and convenience, the cap and the toque, has led me to inspect my ears in the mirror. I conceived of them, if at all, as small and neat. In fact they appear rather large and sprout a few untoward and random hairs, but they lie flat against my head. At 8.30 this morning on Channel 4 which gives constant print-outs of the weather I watched the temperature dropping and rising between minus 29 and minus 30. Two hours later it was ‘up’ to minus 22. In between I had walked, capped, two blocks to the Hudson Bay Company for supplies. The ears burned and froze and stung and ached. Two flaps of flesh one has hardly acknowledged as existing in their own right are bidding to become determinants of behaviour.