by Jim Powell
‘Are you planning to write?’
‘Not especially. But I am planning to be independent. Any job I’m likely to want after university won’t pay much more than five hundred a year. So I’m considering other options.’
‘Like being a kept woman.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for it. For prostitution too.’
‘Anna!’
She expands on her theme. I don’t know whether she is being serious. I think she enjoys developing an intellectual argument for its own sake, the more shocking the better. Distasteful though it is, I can nearly imagine her as a prostitute, or a courtesan perhaps. Maybe it’s the detachment again. I’ve heard it said that men can naturally separate sex from love, that women can’t. In our case, the generalization doesn’t seem to apply. I think that Anna can probably separate the two quite easily. I haven’t yet discovered that I can.
‘You’ll need a pimp,’ I say.
‘Are you volunteering?’
‘For a percentage I might.’
‘Of my earnings? Or of me?’
‘Of you, of course.’
‘It’s nice to meet a real romantic. I’m surrounded by mercenaries.’
‘What are you really going to do?’
‘Oh, publishing, I expect. I’m already a slave to the written word. Might as well go on being one.’
‘I like writing,’ I say. ‘I write poems.’
‘What about?’
All sorts of things. Life. I might write a poem about you.’
‘Don’t,’ says Anna. ‘Wait a bit.’
‘Why?’
‘Wait a bit.’
We don’t say anything for a while. A money spider is inching down my arm. We both watch it crawl.
‘Anna, where do you think you’ll be in fifty years’ time?’
She pauses to think, is then quite definite. ‘I will be living in a small rented cottage in Dorset, drawing my pension, digging my vegetable patch, keeping chickens, and writing to the newspapers about the decline of the modern novel. What will you be doing?’
‘Coming to visit you,’ I say. ‘And suggesting it’s about time we had an affair, before we’re both too senile.’
‘I might say yes.’
‘You mean I’ve got to wait that long?’
‘At least. Of course, you could always come with me to France next week.’
‘What’s on offer?’
‘Scintillating company.’
‘What else?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I’d love to, but I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘No money.’
‘That’s a poor excuse. Don’t be so unimaginative. Come to France. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’
I wonder if I will regret it and decide I won’t. It’s not as if I’ll never see Anna again. Whatever is meant to happen between us will happen in its own time. It’s true that I don’t have any money. It’s also true that I don’t want to be sharing Anna with anyone, even a girl friend. I calculate my chances of persuading Anna to ditch Sally and conclude that they are zero.
‘I’m really sorry. I just can’t do it.’
‘If anything is ever going to happen between us,’ says Anna, ‘it will need to be spontaneous. It won’t happen any other way.’
‘I’ll work on my spontaneity,’ I say. ‘When do you get back?’
‘End of August.’
‘Shall I call you then?’
‘I’ll expect nothing less.’ She gives me her number, and her address for good measure.
We get to our feet, pause for a moment, hug for a long time, serenaded by Procul Harum and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’. Another snapshot in the album of memory. When I drive back to London that evening, I am in tears.
I telephone Anna, as arranged, after she has returned from her holiday, and I speak to her mother. She goes to fetch Anna, returns to say that Anna must have gone out. I say I will call back later. I call a few days later, and again speak to Anna’s mother. Anna is not very well at the moment. I leave my number for Anna to call me, if she feels like it, and hear nothing.
In early October, I speak to her. She answers the telephone herself, so there is no avoiding me. She can’t talk for long, she says, because she is off to Exeter the next day. Yes, she is better now, thank you. She sounds like a stranger. My suggestion that we might meet up in the Christmas holidays is met with indifference. The unmistakeable message, whatever lies behind it, is that Anna Purdue has no interest in seeing me again.
That autumn, I write a poem that I like and I send it to her. It isn’t anything as obvious as a love poem. I hope I’ve learned something.
I hear nothing back.
8
I looked again at Anna’s note, and decided not to go into her cottage, at least for the moment. I knew I might not be able to resist, but the thought troubled me. Instead, I beat the bounds of her small estate.
What must have been a modest garden originally had been extended into the corner of a neighbouring field. Apart from a small bed near the house, and roses growing up the walls, there were no flowers. This was a vegetable kingdom. Beds hemmed by ware boards marched in precise formation over the ground, rows of vegetables drilled with precision into the soil. Behind a tall hedge, the hens were scratching away in an enclosure reminiscent of Stalag Luft III. There were seventeen of them the first time I counted. After that, it varied.
What brings us to where we are? What had taken me from a semi-detached in Lewisham, to the students’ bar at Southampton University, to living in a posh house in Barnet, to being a sharp suit in the City? What had taken me from being a sharp suit in the City to standing outside an empty cottage in the fields of Somerset, an exhausted wreck? And what had brought Anna here? What had taken her from the comfort of the Home Counties, from her books and a university degree, from sociability and love, to this degree of isolation? Where would life now take either of us? This seemed so solid, as solid as my job had once seemed. But it was as provisional as everything else, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, a smear of permanence across a window pane that looked out on nothing.
In the cottage might lie some clues as to Anna’s journey. Yet I felt that I would be searching for them under false pretences. I had spent hours, and not only recently, wondering what had become of her, where life had taken her, whether she was married and had children, whether she was happy, as happy as she would have been with me. Trustingly, she had left her door open to strangers, and to this stranger. But I was not a stranger, and the life I would be exploring within would not be the life of another stranger. Would Anna have left the door unlocked if she had known that? Would she have invited me in? Would she have asked me here at all? The speculation was pointless. Nothing would prevent me from entering the cottage now. I had been issued with an invitation and I would accept.
I had expected her home to reflect its agrarian surroundings. It looked tiny from the outside, perhaps with no more than a single bedroom. I thought it would be rough and primitive, with smoke-stained recesses and dark walls, a womb of a dwelling. I was wrong about that. Outside was Somerset. Inside was Camden Town, a small pied-à-terre in Camden Town circa 1980. The parlour and kitchen had been knocked through, so that one large space consumed the ground floor. The walls were white; the floorboards sanded and bleached, with pale rugs lying across them. A small wood-burning stove stood where a larger fireplace had once been. The walls were covered with bookshelves, each bookshelf filled with paperbacks. Old paperbacks, mostly. Old novels with orange Penguin spines. On a separate shelf, as if not to contaminate the rest, was a selection of more recent novels. Enough to support a letter to the Guardian on the decline of the modern novel.
Upstairs, there were two bedrooms, one with a single bed, barely more than a box room. The bathroom was tiny too, with signs of damp and cheap toiletries crammed everywhere. A lived-in bathroom, one could say. Anna’s bedroom revealed nothing. It was neat and sparse
and uninformative. There were no photographs, and none elsewhere in the cottage. This was disappointing, also surprising. Surely everyone has at least one photograph on display. I suppose I couldn’t quite say that this was the house of someone who wished to erase her past. Not quite. Books do tell a story. There were a few paintings. This was the home of someone educated, someone frugal and with good taste, but not someone keen to be reminded of her past, or to delve too deeply into it.
I looked at her note once more. ‘If you’re still around tomorrow.’ That seemed an encouraging remark. It sounded as though Anna might actually want to see me. It also made her excuse for today more credible. She thought I had come down for a meeting in Dorset on Friday. As she had suggested when we met in London, Somerset is next door to Dorset, but where she lived was almost in Devon, miles from where I would have been, had I been there at all. The fact that I had come to see her nevertheless was proof of serious intent. If I hung around another day, would it look like desperation?
After the shock of losing Anna in 1967, I had set up a royal commission in my head. It soberly assessed the circumstances of that event. It took evidence from assorted parts of my body, my heart and my memory, my gut and my cock, and produced, many months later, a twelve-volume report for me to ignore. One of the conclusions was that I had been too keen, too unsubtle. Was I now about to make the same mistake? Should I play a waiting game?
Waiting for what? That was the question. I might be playing a waiting game until I died, without ever knowing if what I was waiting for was even a possibility. Sometimes it is better to act, to strike out for what one wants, to achieve it or to move on. No one has yet resolved the argument between the soldier and the philosopher. Yet at every turn in life a choice has to be made between them. A British Prime Minister, Balfour I think, wrote an essay called ‘In Defence of Philosophic Doubt’. I tried to imagine Thatcher reading it. No one thought Balfour was a great Prime Minister. No one hated him either.
I felt unable to make a decision, so I decided not to make one. I decided not to write a reply to Anna’s note. I decided to sleep on it and hope that things would seem clearer in the morning.
At the back of my mind was the thought that if Anna could play hard to get, in fact bloody impossible to get, all those years ago, so could I. If I pinned the note back on her door, exactly as it had been, using the same hole for the drawing pin, Anna would have no idea whether I had been to the cottage, no idea whether I had read her note, no idea whether I would be coming back the next day. If she did want to see me, that pang of uncertainty would surely strengthen the feeling. If she didn’t, my pursuit of her was a waste of time whatever I did.
So that was my decision. And I would have the evening ahead, and the night and whatever subconscious inspiration it might bring, to decide whether to return the next day, or to go home and hope to make her want me all the more. And if I still couldn’t decide, I would take a coin from my pocket and toss for it.
It was about six in the evening when I left the cottage. I needed to find somewhere to stay. I could have returned to the previous night’s establishment, but I didn’t want to. It felt too poncey, not earthy enough for where I was now. I meandered round the lanes and villages, came to a place called Churchinford and booked into the York Inn. I showered and changed and went down to the bar.
When the new puritanism has extinguished almost all our pubs, when the last landlord has pulled his last allegedly unhygienic pint, the York Inn in Churchinford will surely be one of the few left standing. Alcohol will have been proscribed as injurious to the public health and the place will be serving betel or coca leaves or ganja, tolerated because they belong to cultures not our own. It will still serve cider, from under the counter, the landlord swearing to the magistrates that it had arrived as apple juice and fermented by accident. It will serve a ploughman’s lunch, and visitors from London and other foreign countries will ask what a ploughman was.
It irritates me when I start thinking like this, and for the most part I don’t. Or haven’t. Perhaps I do now. I have no desire to become one of those ageing men who grumble about the world and claim that everything used to be better. For the most part, everything was not better; lots of things were worse. From the position of things being worse, we wanted to make them better in a particular way. I’m not sure that I should complain if some of them have now got better in a different way. I’m not sure what I do think any more. I’m not sure if my thoughts even make sense any more.
I looked around the pub and saw a species of Englishman I had forgotten still existed: rough, natural, uncomplicated. I didn’t see people like that in Barnet, let alone in the City. Judy and I didn’t go to places like this at weekends, or at any other time. When we went abroad, we went to France. I would sit in bars in small French villages having much the same thoughts as I was having now, forgetful of the fact that I could also have them in my own country. Manufacturing has been outsourced to China, culture to Italy, efficiency to Germany, optimism to America. Now nostalgia has been outsourced to France. There must be something we’ve kept for ourselves. In the EU’s brave new world of the day after tomorrow, I expect everyone will be born in Greece, grow up in France, have sex in Italy, work in Germany, holiday in Spain and retire to England. We will die in Belgium, as before.
At the next table, five young men were playing a game with coins. It wasn’t a game I knew: one traditional in the West Country, perhaps. Their forebears had probably played the same game with groats. I watched them and tried to work out the rules.
After several rounds, I reckoned I’d cracked it. Each player concealed a number of coins in his right hand, anything from zero to three, and then put his closed fist over the table. When all five fists were extended, each player in turn guessed the total number of coins concealed, something between zero and fifteen. Then the hands were opened, and if any player had guessed the correct total, he was the winner.
I considered the available strategies. The maximum number of coins was fifteen, so the safe bet was to call eight, the median. But each player knew the number of coins in his own hand and, unless he had three, he would know that the maximum was less, and therefore the median also. If the first player to call had one coin, he would know that the maximum was thirteen, the median seven. But if he called seven, the other four players might surmise he had only one coin and adjust their own guesses accordingly, and more accurately. So the first player could call eight or nine, to bluff the others into thinking he had more than one coin, to encourage the others into bidding higher still. Or he could call seven, or lower, and leave the others to guess whether he was bluffing or not. It was a deliciously subtle game.
I assumed that the last player to call would have an advantage, but he didn’t. It seemed to be against the rules to call a number that had already been called. The last player needed to choose a number as yet uncalled, which usually meant going one higher or one lower than the range in play, unless there was a gap in the range. Even if he made the correct choice between the two, it was often still too high or too low, because the correct number had already been called. So the last player did not have an advantage. Neither did any of the others. It was a game of pure skill, or of pure chance, depending on how you looked at it.
I made notes of what calls each player made and what was later revealed to have been in their hands. One of the five men won significantly more rounds than the others and he was the only one with a consistent strategy. If he had three coins in his hand, he always called the next available total that was higher than what the last player had called. If he had one coin, he called the next available total that was lower. If he had two, he varied the call. If he had started the bidding, he always called eight, whatever coins he had himself.
This was a strategy reduced to two known facts: what the last player had called, and what he had in his own hand. It disregarded any calculation of bluff or double bluff. It sometimes disregarded what seemed to be the probabilities. It had nothing to do with guessw
ork, other than accepting the previous player’s guesswork as a starting point.
It dawned on me that this was what I’d been doing for forty years. Insights and instincts, my arse. I had played the percentages in exactly the same way. The only difference was that I had been allowed to call a number that had already been called. Oh yes, and I’d earned several million pounds for doing it.
The rounds didn’t take long. When a player had chalked up five victories, the others bought him a pint. The master strategist had already downed several, and two more were lined up for him. Progressive inebriation didn’t seem to inhibit his success. He could stick to a simple strategy through any number of pints. That appealed to me too.
Do people like this have any idea of their options in life? He must have been in his mid-twenties, rough-handed, perhaps a farm labourer, I don’t know. Did he have any idea that he was perfectly equipped for a career in the City, in some parts of the City, and could be earning millions of pounds from it? Because he could. He could do my job for a start. Yes, all right, Rupert Loxley, fuck you. What used to be my job. Of course, it could have been luck. On another night, he might have won fewer rounds than the others. I doubted it, but this didn’t affect the point. The City rewarded success. It was indifferent as to whether luck or skill produced it.
It had rewarded me for one or the other and, after all this time, it must have been skill, mustn’t it? And that was why I had gone on doing it, wasn’t it? Because I was good at it. And perhaps I’d started in the first place because I’d thought I might be good at it, wanted to give it a try, much as Ten-Pint Charlie on the next table might do if I told him that the option was open to him. I might have made that bet in the bar, but it wasn’t the reason, was it? That was my excuse. What I’d chosen to remember were those parts of the evidence that supported the case I now made for myself.
Nothing goes in straight lines. If you’re a good farm labourer, it doesn’t mean you’ll be a good farm manager. If you’re a bad farm labourer, you can still be a successful City bastard, just as you can if you’re a dedicated anti-capitalist. To make the transitions, you need imagination. And perhaps flexible principles, but let’s not talk about that. Once upon a time, I must have had imagination.