Jill

by Philip Larkin

  “Come in,” cried a voice. John rattled stupidly at the door-handle and at last it was opened from inside by a young man with fair, greased-back hair and horn-rimmed spectacles.

  “Yes?” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I——” John experienced some difficulty in getting his tongue to work. “I’m trying to find a party—a party, it’s given by—by——” He could not remember Eddy’s surname. “You know, Eddy what’s-his-name. Here, have a drink.” He pulled the bottle from his pocket. “Oh, sorry. Haven’t opened it.” He fumbled at the neck. “It’s corked.”

  “I’ve got a corkscrew—come inside.” The young man took the bottle and stepped back. John came in, frowning at the light, seeing a desk under a lamp littered with sheets of paper covered with half-finished poems.

  “One gets so worked up,” said the young man. “As regards your party, there are dozens all over the place. There’s certainly an unholy row in the next quad.”

  He produced a corkscrew from a drawer full of knives and set two glasses on the table. John sank into an armchair, and when the young man gave him a glassful, gulped it.

  “I say, this is remarkably good sherry. Where is it from? I must say I should like a dozen or so of these for myself. Where does it come from?”

  John told him and a period of utter forgetfulness intervened. The next thing he noticed was that the young man was reading him a poem, in a slow voice that rose and fell, all in one sentence that seemed to go on for ever. John did not understand it, and had more sherry.

  “I say, is there a lavatory about here?” he inquired, when the young man paused for breath.

  “Yes, on the next staircase. Turn right when you get outside. Do hurry back or we shall lose the mood.”

  John left him lighting a long clay churchwarden pipe with a glowing cinder held in a pair of tongs. It was not hard to find the lavatory, which was lit by a ghastly blue light and smelt of a peculiarly choking kind of disinfectant. He turned the wrong way on leaving it, and the room he entered was empty, with a glum fire smouldering in the grate. He switched on the light and lay on the hearthrug in an effort to get warm; he put lumps of coal on the fire with his bare fingers, but it still would not burn up. How cold it was. To help the flames he took a book from the table and stuffed it among the dim coals. Then he lay perfectly still, like an open-eyed figure on a tomb, staring at a photograph lodged on the desk. It showed a girl: Jill in fact. Slowly he dragged himself across on his knees to look at it, and when he took it in his hands the expression on the photographed face changed slowly until it was not her. He began trembling. He shielded his eyes from the light and the book in the fire burst into flames with a loud flap; simultaneously something seemed to run across the floor close by him. Holding the photograph, he waddled frantically on his knees for the door, pulling himself upright by the doorpost, and got away out. His dirty hands had left marks on the photograph: since it was dirty, he tore it up and threw it away.

  But this would never do: straightening his tie, wiping his fingers on his coat, he knocked peremptorily on the door and opened it. The room was lit by three candles arranged symmetrically on the table; a man was standing on the hearthrug staring at himself in the mirror, and did not look round as John entered.

  “Do you know where the party is?” said John.

  There was no answer and John slowly realized that the man was laughing very softly with hardly more noise than a driving-belt makes on a machine that is not running very fast. Wind from the door caused the candles to stream out in elongated shapes. John went out on to the steps and was quietly sick. Then he pushed on, listening to what now was quite plain—singing and shouting and cursing. It came from all sides at once, echoing and re-echoing from the many dark walls, mingled with croaking noises from some musical instrument, a trumpet or hunting horn. It seemed to rebound from the sky as if the sky were a low damp vault. A lighted aeroplane crawled across, leaving a soft trail of sound: looking steadily at its lights, John ran into a wall.

  All at once the darkness was full of people running this way and that, gasping, bumping into each other, calling out: “This way! No, this way! Watch the garden gate!” John leant flat against the wall to avoid being knocked over, and after a few minutes became aware that someone else was leaning by his side. He turned to examine them more closely and as he did so they bent slowly forward like a drawn bow and vomited at length. John waited patiently for them to stop, and then asked:

  “I say, where’s the party here?”

  A burst of cheering from the middle distance announced that someone had been captured and thrown into the fountain. John blew his nose and reeled off once more, singing tunelessly. He could hear the swift beating of dance music woven in among the tramping feet and shouting, and he directed his steps towards the source of the music. Strung out behind him, unseen, was a clamour of cries converging: he was leading the way back to the party. He saw at the bottom of a staircase in the light an unbroken bottle and a lump of coal: the music was louder and louder. He stumbled up the steps and sat on the bottom stair, his head in his hands, his brain feeling like a horse that was rearing up and trying to fall backwards to crush him. Very soon he thought he would be ill again. But he was disturbed as the drunks came clattering up the steps, half a dozen of them, panting, noise steaming off them. One carried a trombone. Sitting alone in the pool of light John lifted his head and looked at them with mumbling lips, fumbling for his bottle. It was not there. He was terror-stricken at the sight of their dishevelled hair, loosened neckties and mouths shining with saliva, knowing that they were going to trample him down, but suddenly their noise was stilled as if by a spell; a door opened above and a river of sound came flooding down the stairs. They were clustering together with their pale faces tilted back, looking upwards over his head.

  John pulled himself upright and looked round. Jill, Elizabeth and Christopher had begun to descend the staircase, the girls with their coats on, going, and Christopher in his shirt-sleeves, with his cuffs rolled back. The knees of his trousers were wet, as if he had been kneeling somewhere damp. John stood back. In the weak light his face was quite expressionless. Everything seemed at that moment clear and restful. As Jill came level, he took her quietly in his arms and kissed her.

  Elizabeth gasped something.

  Christopher ran lightly down a few steps, pulled John forcibly round, and hit him hard in the face.

  John twisted away, falling crookedly among the drunks, whose cries met over his head. Fighting to get a grip on him, they carried him into the darkness. The trombone crowed triumphantly. Christopher had followed them, and for the moment the two girls were alone on the stairs.

  “The nerve,” said Elizabeth hotly.

  Jill did not reply: she had gone very red and her eyes had filled with tears, and when she stooped to pick up the umbrella she had dropped she began crying in real earnest, so that her hand beat fruitlessly around the steps without finding it.

  Another muffled explosion of cheering indicated that John had been thrown into the fountain.

  Four days later John lay in bed with a fairly high temperature due to bronchial pneumonia, and as the fever grew, his mind lost the chronology of things, so that the days of his illness faded away to something no more vivid than a memory of childhood, and the events of the evening swelled to a monstrous size. In remembering them, his mind felt like a fly crawling over the great stone face of a statue able to comprehend only one feature at a time.

  For instance, although he was safe in bed, he could not rid himself of the idea that he was still lying face downwards, wet through, on the wet grass. The stalks tickled his face: he could feel his hands, outstretched before him to the level of his ears, cold upon the grass, the nails digging lazily into the earth. Then he would gradually realize that he was in fact lying on his back with his arms by his side, and there would be a sickening struggle as each impression pulled this way and that. At length reality would submerge once more, and he would be lying
face-downwards, the grass making a cold pattern on his cheek.

  The kiss, too, grew realler every hour. He could feel the quiet pressure of her lips perpetually, and in response she would fill his arms again. The memory was keen. At intervals he would become aware that it was his bruised lips and jarred teeth that remained with him, and another struggle would ensue, filling him somehow with nausea. The sensations tugged this way and that.

  Nor had he freed himself from the tempest of sickness that had ruled him that night. He had crawled along the back lawn on his hands and knees like a dog, every now and then stopping and hanging down his head to vomit. At the end of the lawn he had collapsed again, which was the last thing he remembered: his mind then ran back to the beginning to start all over again.

  As his temperature rose, untruths took their place quite naturally among these recollections. One of the earliest was that they were lying together on the floor of some room in each other’s arms. He could feel her lips pressed against his, but he could not feel the rest of her. He could not feel her with his body at all. He hugged her harder, rolling desperately against her, but it was all nothing, he could not feel her at all. Everything was confined to the mouth and he would wake up with burning lips.

  This became a root dream, into which numbers of others would change. Time and again different climaxes of different dreams would end in this. One of the most vivid was in a sort of cottage where they had been for some time: it was near the sea and had a long overgrown garden full of weeds and raspberry canes. They sprawled together on the couch and John was filled with a lassitude so great that it alarmed him, it seemed a kind of treachery. They had lived there so long together that their love had worn thin like a coat; it was shabby with wearing. He looked at the young girl he held, at her perfect, composed face so near to his, and was frightened at his own indifference. His mood was easily definable: it was simply the boredom of no longer loving. Yet he covered it up, frantically, with layer after layer of dishonest thoughts, and kissed her neck, just below the ear. She wrinkled her nose slightly, but made no comment. He got up and crossed to the window with his hands in his pockets, staring moodily up the garden that was hung with trees. And there he saw Christopher, moving about half-way up the garden, poking about the bushes for something. An unreasoning terror seized him: he knew that Christopher must not see Jill or he would come in and take her away, and though he did not care much for her now, he was determined to stop this at all costs. He began talking to her very fast and insincerely, trying to occupy her attention, but to his horror she got up, wanting to go to the window. He gripped her, to hold her back, and as a last resort turned his grip into an embrace, hoping to cloud her mind with sensuality, pressing his face against hers, though knowing all the time that she looked over his shoulder out through the window, that Christopher had seen her and was coming towards the house. On this vertiginous note of expectancy the dream began curdling and slurring into the first one, and they were lying on the floor again together.

  He was not conscious of outside circumstances to any degree. Things whirled about him as the grey clouds whirled about the white sky. He noticed that his bed was under a window and that the room was a strange one, with a tiny electric radiator plugged into the wall. Through the window he could see treetops moving uneasily. The room looked like the College sickroom, which he knew existed, but had never been inside. The College nurse attended him, bringing him food and sponging his hands. All such things he noticed at different intervals, fitting them together with a distrust of the picture they formed. It had not really occurred to him that he was ill.

  Instead, he fell to pondering within the framework of the dream how the love they had shared was dead. For the fact that in life he had been cheated of her was not the whole truth. Somewhere, in dreams, perhaps, on some other level, they had interlocked and he had had his own way as completely as in life he had been denied it. And this dream showed that love died, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled. He grew confused whether she had accepted him or not, since the result was the same: and as this confusion increased, it spread to fulfilment or unfulfilment, which merged and became inseparable. The difference between them vanished.

  He was watching the trees, the tops of which he could just see through the window. They tossed and tossed, recklessly. He saw them fling their way and that, throwing up their heads like impatient horses, like sea waves, bending and recovering in the wind. They had no leaves. Endlessly, this way and that, they were buffeted and still bore up again to their full height. They seemed tireless. Sometimes they were bent so low that they passed out of sight, leaving the square of white sky free for a second, but then they would be back again, clashing their proud branches together like the antlers of furious stags.

  Then if there was no difference between love fulfilled and love unfulfilled, how could there be any difference between any other pair of opposites? Was he not freed, for the rest of his life, from choice?

  For what could it matter? Let him take this course, or this course, but still behind the mind, on some other level, the way he had rejected was being simultaneously worked out and the same conclusion was being reached. What did it matter which road he took if they both led to the same place? He looked at the tree-tops in the wind. What control could he hope to have over the maddened surface of things?

  The College nurse closed the door quietly behind her, leaving him sleeping. In the distance the clock was chiming eleven o’clock: this was the end of her period of morning duty, and she walked along the carpeted corridor towards her dispensary. As she turned the corner she met Rivers, the Senior Tutor. He was smoking a pipe and held a letter in his hand.

  “Oh, Mrs. Crawford, I was just looking for you.…” His voice trailed off and he examined the letter he held closely. “It appears that Kemp’s parents are coming.… They’re coming today, in fact they’re on their way and will arrive, according to this, early this afternoon.” He looked up vaguely. “I’m afraid it looks as if you will have to be here to see them.…”

  “But why are they doing that?” said Mrs. Crawford, energetically surprised. Rivers turned and they moved slowly in the direction of the dispensary. “Why are they coming? There’s no need.…”

  “I don’t know why they’re coming,” said Rivers, taking his pipe from his mouth. “I wrote to them, you know, saying that Kemp would not be home for perhaps a week, saying he was ill.… I think I said he had slight bronchial pneumonia, but I can’t really remember.…”

  “It rather looks as if they’ve taken fright,” said Mrs. Crawford. “There’s nothing like the word pneumonia for frightening people.” She was washing her hands at a washbowl in the corner.

  “Well, heaven knows, I didn’t mean to.” Rivers inspected the letter again, then replaced it in the envelope. “Do you think they’re alarmed because he’s had this sort of thing before? … Is——?”

  “Well, naturally, I can’t be sure, but Kemp doesn’t look like a bronchial subject to me,” said the nurse, drying her hands. “They sound to me like fussy people, and that will be a nuisance. They’ve absolutely no need to come bothering about here.”

  “No, that’s what I said, or what I tried to say,” said Rivers eagerly. “Though it doesn’t look as if I succeeded.… I said there was no danger. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, perfectly. The boy’s in no danger now; in fact, he’s a bit better today. I’ve just left him asleep and his temperature was down this morning nearly a whole point. He’s in no danger. Really, he’s never been in the slightest danger at all.”

  “Well, that’s what I said.” Rivers put the letter back into his pocket and took out a box of matches. “You’ll have to tell these people so when they arrive this afternoon, and try and pack them off as quickly as you can.”

  The Kemps arrived at the station just after half-past two that afternoon. As the nurse had suggested, they had been alarmed at the news that John was ill in bed with bronchial pneumonia, but it had been Joe’s idea that they vi
sited him. He had been very touched by John’s immediate post-haste visit to Huddlesford after the air-raid, and secretly he was ashamed that he had not been there to meet him. Of course, he did not say anything of this to Mrs. Kemp. But when the Senior Tutor’s letter came, Joe announced that he was going straight to Oxford, full of a muddled concern which he concealed by obstinately refusing to explain himself. He felt deeply and illogically that by doing so he would be somehow repaying the love his son had shown. At first he demanded that Mrs. Kemp should stay at home. But she would not be left, still nervous as she was from the shock of the raid; and she concealed this by saying over and over again that she did not trust those nurses. So in the end they had both set out together, without any thought of how long they would be away or where they would sleep that night.

  Their arrival was a sad mockery of the sight-seeing visit they had planned, when John would show them round, and something of this entered into their silence as they walked slowly down the dull streets, not thinking it would be far from the station. Joe Kemp clutched his cap in his hand, then suddenly put it on, staring about him at the traffic lights and cinemas, as if surprised to find that Oxford was a city like any other. He took his wife’s arm when they crossed the streets.

  “Is this where he said turn right?” said Mrs. Kemp doubtfully. They asked again.

  They could not help looking curiously at the venerable buildings and the shops with strange names, and the different-coloured omnibuses, though the anxiety that lay hidden in their silence prevented them commenting on what they saw. The only remark Joe made was when he paused in front of a large bookshop, seeing displayed a large volume with the University crest and motto stamped intricately in gold on the cover. His forehead wrinkled as he spelt it out. “Domimina,” he said haltingly. “Domimina … nustio … illumea.” He turned slowly away. “That’s Latin,” he said.