When I did not get any work in the theatre I got that job as a sort of companion at the house in Ruskin Square: this was when you (and you?) first saw me. I used to take that dog for walks in the square.
The people I came across here were not trying to be elegant or witty: they were interested in money; but for the most part they were obsessed by gossip about people.
One group that I kept on hearing about which did seem likely to be at least witty was one that was involved in the actual business of providing gossip – the satire-and-scandal business – one which publicised and ridiculed the goings-on of the successful and notorious for the delectation of those who were neither but who seemed to need this gossip like some sort of food. These satire-and-scandal people were centred on a glossy magazine which was nicknamed Die Flamme: I am going to call it Die Flamme because (or although?) I am not sure about libel, though the people who ran the magazine seemed impervious to concern about libel. The original Die Flamme (as it were: do you not know this?) was the magazine run by the Nazis in the 1930s to abuse and ridicule people who differed from themselves; this nickname for the latter-day Die Flamme was I suppose unfair, but it was true that part of its style was to insult people in ways that made it difficult for them to answer back – and by this to gain popularity and prestige. It was not easy for those insulted to reply successfully because the Die Flamme people could switch from saying their stories were true to claiming they were obviously a joke: they prided themselves on performing a genuine public service in shedding light on murky corners, but there was also the suggestion that no one need believe what they said.
Before I arrived in London I had wanted to meet these satire-and-scandal people: their fame had spread to America. I was in this sense a child of my time, in that I was interested in the pecking orders of society. I am not ashamed about this; however you grow, you grow out of where you start from. And perhaps here I have always seen myself in relation to society in some way like Judith in relation to the Assyrians.
So this is not going to be one of those stories of a girl coming to London from the colonies or ex-colonies and being bitched and battered and bewildered: all this sort of thing has been done: it is not difficult, I suppose, to go on getting satisfaction from hearing the stories. But the point of Judith, wasn’t it, was that she gave some impression of control – I mean she called it God’s will, but she must have felt it as control. I had felt for some time that women opted out of what might be their special faculties for control – opted out, I mean, by taking refuge either in subservience to men or nowadays by making themselves become like men when what they know and complain about almost in the same breath is that men are like babies. The ways in which there might be (and indeed often is, but so secretly!) feminine control were almost never talked about: perhaps they are too frightening; perhaps they are too close, yes, to the story of Judith and Holofernes.
It was known that the Die Flamme people used to meet once or twice a week in a pub: they did this to discuss what they would put in their magazine; to toss bits of gossip and jokes about like bread or sausages across a table. I think they also did this just to be on show: they needed to exhibit themselves so that the public could be in the way of feeding them with the raw materials of gossip; then they could feed the public with processed gossip back in return. Their needs were not so different from those of show-business people; but show-business people usually want to be loved, and I think the Die Flamme people mostly wanted to be feared.
I went to this pub one evening with my friend from Ruskin Square (I wanted to get out of that job; it was not much of a job; it was not much, goodness knows, in the pecking order). We went to the pub to have a look: to become part of a crowd that gathers at feeding time at the zoo. All the Die Flamme people I had heard of were there – the one with short legs, the one with granny specs, the woman with hair like epaulets. They were in a part of the pub that seemed to have been specially cordoned off for them: it might once have been used for playing billiards. They were around a table, seven or eight, with glasses of beer in front of them; they were bobbing backwards and forwards, exclaiming, making faces, laughing. Every now and then one or another of them would pick up a piece of paper and read something out; look over the tops of his or her spectacles owl-like, performing. For a moment everyone would be still; then they would all be bobbing backwards and forwards again, laughing. They were like one of those clockwork tableaux in Disneyland in which animals mime the goings-on of humans; there is one called The Bear’s Jazz Band; the bears go through the motions of strumming banjos, beating drums, blowing saxophones; crowds come to watch – why? – because there is some ghastly reassurance in the odd things humans do being done by animals? then, does it matter so much if the things humans do are ridiculous? Anyway, there was quite a crowd in the pub watching the Die Flamme people: it was as if some sort of glamour might rub off, rub on, just by the fact of watching and being watched. We were most of us pretending not wholeheartedly to watch: this not-being-quite-there seemed necessary for sophistication.
One of the people at the Die Flamme table was Desmond. I did not know him at the time: I am going to call him Desmond. This is the beginning of the story that I have to tell you, really.
Desmond was not quite like the other members of the group; he got his timing slightly off-beat for rocking backwards and forwards. He had rather long blond hair and a narrow face; he smoked a pipe; he seemed to be caricaturing Englishness. He was the only one of the Die Flamme people who could be called attractive.
I thought I would pick up Desmond.
I suppose this is one of the things it should be difficult to write about, women in stories having got used to seeing themselves as victims – I mean, in stories written by women. Of course, there are those phantoms with snakes in their hair in stories written by men. Perhaps everyone gets a kick out of seeing themselves as a victim.
But the point of Judith was that she did not; was it not?
I had learned how to do this sort of thing from my father’s old friend Miss Julie from Hong Kong (there is something incongruous about my father here: for the most part he appeared to be a typical academic). What you do is – stand in profile, one foot in front of the other, front knee slightly bent, toe pointing to the ground; as if you were within the frame of a picture; something like a Degas dancer perhaps; or one of those outdoor girls (Courbet?) feeling the temperature of some water. You do not, of course, aim directly at being like one of the girls of Miss Julie of Hong Kong – one hip jutting, framed within a doorway – however much the effect of this sort of thing might be what you require. But one of the points about art is to make something like seduction aesthetic, is it not? Anyway, if you stand like this, and become yourself like a painting – well, what do you think a painting is or does? does it not attract? has it not some force, or field, like gravity?
Anyway, Desmond looked at me, did not look at me; looked at me, did not look at me. There was the counter-pull, of course, of the force of the Die Flamme people. Amongst animals this sort of thing is to do with smell. Humans have largely lost the faculties that go with smell. They pop up again, perhaps, with things like works of art; with paintings.
I did not think Desmond would be able to make any positive move on his own: the weight of the Die Flamme people would be like inertia. And Englishmen, it seemed to me then, had not only lost, as it were, their sense of smell but had got out of the way of picking up women even for the sake of prestige in the pecking order. They seemed to fear (also perhaps to desire?) the chance of getting chopped up like Holofernes.
Well, what might Judith do in this interesting situation?
My friend and I sometimes played darts in pubs. He would hold his dart in front of his mouth with his little finger crooked as if he were sipping tea. I liked playing darts because I could ruminate about how one day, if I practised painstakingly enough, I might be able to step up and almost without looking get all three darts one on top of another in the bull’s-eye – as Zen
Buddhists say can happen if one practises correctly for years and years for instance at archery.
There was a dart-board in another compartment of the pub. I remembered a scene in a novel I had once read in which a girl throws a dart right over the partition of a pub. I thought – I will be like Artemis with Orion: if I throw a dart carefully enough, I will get it over the partition and lodged in the woodwork somewhere near Desmond. Then I can go round and – how supplicatingly! (one knee in front of the other) – ask forgiveness for such lack of control. But, in fact, I could not quite remember what had happened between Artemis and Orion; she had killed him, had she not? But there have to be risks, don’t there, in any change of the status quo.
My friend and I went into the next compartment to play darts. After a time I threw a dart so that it landed in the woodwork not far from Desmond’s ear. Oh one does, yes, feel ashamed of these things; there are many things of this time that I shall be telling you of which I am ashamed. I felt, I think, as one is supposed to feel as I followed the dart into the other part of the pub – Dear God, I might have hit him! I promise I will never do this sort of thing again! I stood in front of Desmond and said ‘I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.’ The point is very nearly to mean it; perhaps not quite. Desmond was acting as if the dart had in fact pierced his ear; he was holding his head stiffly against the woodwork. He said ‘Will someone kindly tell me exactly what has occurred?’ The man with the granny specs said ‘The missile I think has pierced your left ear.’ The woman with hair like epaulets said ‘Is that the ear that you wanted to have pierced?’ People laughed; rocked backwards and forwards. I leaned across Desmond to get the dart out of the woodwork. I thought – There will be that smell of cloth, of dust, of energy – like that of a dancer. The man with short legs said ‘Please may I have my ear pierced?’ Everyone laughed again. I stood in front of Desmond with my hands clasped in front of me: I thought – I do not want to be too openly pornographic. I said ‘What can I do to make up; can I offer you dinner?’
Desmond said ‘I’ll give you dinner.’
I said ‘No, I’ve got to do something to make up.’
There was not much more to be done. I waited while Desmond went through the motions of finishing his business with the Die Flamme people. I did not have trouble with my darts-playing friend. Each of us I suppose by now wanted to be rid of the other: there are virtues, as well as boredom, in being distanced from the style of old passions. Also there was satisfaction for my friend I think in his handing me on to someone higher up, as it were, in the pecking order: some of the glamour of the Die Flamme people might even rub off on him.
It had not been like this where I had been brought up: there was always the chance, if you were a girl in a doorway, of a killer with a knife being round some corner.
Desmond said ‘Shall we go?’
I said ‘Yes.’ Then – ‘Where?’
He said ‘You have to choose!’
There was something here that I had noticed when I first came to London – the games-playing that went on in the business of choosing restaurants. It was men, of course, who were still nominally supposed to choose: but they seemed to have lost confidence in this, and women seemed often to be ensuring that this should be so – complaining of the table, of the music, picking at the food; ordering strange salads that could not be provided. But women, of course, still wanted it to be men who made the choice. Now I found myself in the position of the chooser. I thought – You close your eyes, do you: and after years and years, as with Zen archery, you get somewhere near the bull’s-eye?
Desmond was the first man I had met who seemed to admit this predicament. He said ‘How marvellous not to be expected to decide about restaurants!’
Desmond was this tall, good-looking Englishman. He wore a cap and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. I thought – He is like someone coming back from being with horses, or from the First World War.
But still – What on earth do you do about restaurants? No wonder men go off to things like race meetings and wars!
I thought I might say – I have been told of a good one just round this corner –
‘Here!’
‘Wow! Are you sure?’ ‘Yes.’
‘It looks a bit expensive!’
But then when we were inside, and had been sat down in armchairs, and menus had been placed in front of us like musical scores, and I had thought – Dear God, what should women do: of course it is easy to mock men’s pretensions – Desmond put his hand on my arm and said ‘Look here, I’m paying.’
I said ‘No you’re not.’
He said ‘Yes I am.’
I said ‘Well, we’ll go fifty-fifty.’
I thought – This is right? What I admire is people wanting to get the best of both worlds?
Of course, I wanted to admire Desmond.
During dinner Desmond talked: he talked about the state of the country, the state of the world. He talked sometimes looking at me and then, when I looked at him, looking away: he talked as if he were a circus tamer warding off a tiger with a stick. He talked about politics: he said politics were either sinister or a farce: power was exercised by mad freaks crouched over gambling tables: the conspiracy theory of history both was and was not true – there really were conspirators who ran the world, some conglomeration of capitalist millionaires and communist élites, and yet all this was still a game; things went their own way in fact by chance. I got the impression that he was saying all this because this was his particular game; he happened to like these words: he liked them perhaps because they were incongruous with his rather respectable appearance; the question about whether or not they were true did not mean much to him. I suppose he was a child of his time in this lack of regard for what might be true: what was necessary was to make an impact: he could not easily see the impact, in the society in which he found himself, of what was true.
All this, of course, might have been something to do with me. We were in this restaurant with mirrors and cut glass and flowers. Sometimes he stretched a hand across the table and laid it on my arm; then he would withdraw it, as if he had advanced too far into no man’s land. This was a style he had picked up from his ancestors I suppose: you do not over-commit yourself with women; you keep open your lines of retreat; you protect your flanks; is not that what you say? I do not know how to write about Desmond. Of course it is terrible when, in war, soldiers die.
I said ‘Do you live in London?’
He said ‘Not exactly.’
I said ‘Where do you live?’
He blew his cheeks out and frowned. I thought – These are his signals for a tactical retreat? One of the ideas I had picked up from Miss Julie from Hong Kong was although there is this theory that all men at all times are longing to go to bed with women (Miss Julie would say – There they are with their insides hanging out, poor dears!) in fact what they want to do is more to make a song and dance about it but in the end not go to bed; to pass out perhaps like Holofernes; to go home and if necessary have what Miss Julie called a quiet pull. (– They have to do something with those insides, poor dears!) Miss Julie’s idea was that men nowadays did not much want to go to bed with women because they felt themselves vulnerable to women’s criticism of their performances there (just as I suppose they felt themselves vulnerable in the matter of choice of restaurants); but it was useful to both sides to keep up the pretence about men’s insatiable desires, because thus men could retain some pride and women their liking for complaint.
The way out of this predicament, Miss Julie suggested, was what it always had been before the curse of romantic puritanism came along, which was that men and women should go to bed together for money: with money you knew where you were; there was no question of anyone expecting anything different from what was offered and what was paid for. Here men and women achieved some functioning equality.
Desmond said ‘You live in London?’
I said ‘Yes.’
‘Can we go somewhere?’
He said ‘But not tonight. I’m afraid I’ve got to get home.’
He explained that he had a wife and child somewhere on the outskirts of London. As he told me this he drew heavy lines on the tablecloth with his fork. I thought I might say – We could go to my place. But this was not strictly true, and I did not think there would be any point in challenging Desmond’s defenceworks.
He said ‘But we will one day, won’t we?’
I said ‘Of course.’
I had not worked out, then, much about the Die Flamme people; but it had seemed from their magazine that much of their cruelty, their arrogance, might be to do with some system of defenceworks. They were most of them, I learned later, somewhat religiously puritanical about sex: they exposed and lacerated others, not risking being exposed and lacerated themselves.
Miss Julie once said – But of course men want to be taken over! to be sent to bed and tucked up like naughty babies!
Looking across the table at Desmond I thought – You mean, it might be easier for you if I ordered you to come home and –
Miss Julie had said – Don’t get involved in that, my dear; they’ll be so pleased, they’ll never forgive you!
Desmond was like one of those heroic blond beasts: did they not in the end want to get themselves torn to pieces?
He said ‘In about a fortnight?’
I said ‘All right.’
I thought – But the world might have come to an end in a fortnight!
Do you think I might always have had some sort of wish to destroy Desmond? Do women have such a rage against men?
So Desmond and I took to having dinner two or three times a week, and afterwards he would catch the last train home to wherever it was in Buckinghamshire. Of course in some sense we became lovers: I would go with him to the station and we would say good-bye as if we were in one of those 1940s films; how can you have all that heaving about in taxis, on station platforms, unless you are being kept apart like people in a 1940s film? If there is no war, then at least you have to be trying to be faithful to a wife and a child in Buckinghamshire. But then – perhaps Desmond and I really were a bit in love. I liked being taken round by him: I liked being on show with the Die Flamme people. Perhaps Desmond liked showing me off as his girl. Is there not always something narcissistic about being in love?
Judith Page 2