by Denton Welch
I sat with my back against the wall of Cocking Churchyard. The morning sun shone full on my face as I tried to make a picture of a gate, a field, a hillside and three posts. I had wanted to do it like this, with the sun behind, making everything rather flat and colourless and silvery.
I thought that what I was doing was good; it was really the best water-colour I had ever done. I was so pleased that I had the expensive paper with me. Now a little dry brush work for the hedge, I thought; and I prayed that only the right amount of colour would come off my brush.
When I could do no more, I lay back and looked at my picture in admiration. For once I felt almost delighted. ‘Is it only my mood, or is the picture much better?’ I wondered. It’s like the Paul Nash I saw when I was fourteen.
A FREE RIDE
… I stared up at the towers of the cathedral and thought of the Dutch boys in the hostel by the canal, who had sung in the courtyard and then had gone on singing nearly all night in the dormitory, rocking in the new steel-framed double-decker bunks until I felt that one must overturn. How glad I was that now I was in the top and the guttural fair-haired person down below me had to content himself by throwing his legs up in the air and gesticulating with his anus.
I remembered the man too who had given me a lift near the city. He was from the North and was on holiday with his wife. He had won a free ride in an aeroplane and was driving to the aerodrome. I went with them. When we were standing in front of the aeroplane, the man began to look nervous and he suddenly turned to me and said: ‘You’re a youngster; I think you should go up—you’d enjoy it most.’ But I protested, and saw with a certain amount of amusement the man going for his free ride with very mixed feelings.
When he came down at last, he was delighted with himself and the aeroplane, bursting with spirits. He wanted to pick up a lame man and then to know all about his history. He asked me if I was a P.S.B. and when I asked him what that meant, he said ‘Public School Boy’. I was rather taken aback, but I nodded my head and after he had asked me about my school, he told me about his, which had been a sort of orphanage for the sons of gentlemen, as he described it, but unfortunately it had had to close its doors in the middle of the last war. To get off this uncomfortable subject—he was protecting his school so painfully—I began to talk about my journey from Winchester to Canterbury on foot. He insisted on my having tea with them in a tea shop, and when I offered to pay the bill said indulgently, ‘But what would you do, then for your night’s lodging?’ I gave it up after that and let him do everything, he so obviously wanted to feel bountiful.
WHEN I WAS AN ART STUDENT
When I was an art student, I lived at Croom’s Hill, Greenwich. The house was early eighteenth century with later alterations; and opposite was the park with its ancient bulging Spanish chestnuts and the people lying together in the grass under the great branches.
My room was right at the top of the house and it was rather dark, because it only had one small sash window. The roof sloped and was low even where it didn’t slope. I could reach up and touch it with my hand.
In the evening, I would come back from the art school and throw myself down on the bed which I had arranged in the middle of one wall and covered with my grandmother’s moth-eaten and ruinous but still beautiful Kashmir shawl. I laid it on the bed wrong side up, so that the wonderful, vivid clashes of colour could still be seen. The right side was faded and it looked just the moonlight ghost of itself.
As I lay there looking at the mean ceiling, I would think about my day—the pain of it and the pleasure and the embarrassments or true contacts with other people. And I would wonder how much longer my life would continue alone, cut off, looking for my niche, lost, searching. I would think of the hours I wasted at the art school, sitting on the ‘donkey’ with the drawing-board in front of me and the pencil in my hand, not able to do anything, held up, frustrated, bored, tortured. I would think of the large shortbread biscuit, and cup of hot milky coffee I would drink at the end of the day. Somehow it was always a comfort to reach this point, and a sadness of more of life melting away before I had seized it. Terribly, I had this realisation that all my golden youth was running out and I was doing nothing to stop it. I was overcome with guilt at my own indolence. I felt that somewhere there was so much power in me if only I could make the right channel down which it could pour its exciting torrents. I longed for a life so full that each moment would be licked, tasted and savoured with delight.
And when I had been lashed and made restless by my longings, I would jump up and walk about the room, stopping to look again at the things I was sometimes able to buy cheaply in the nearby junk shops; at my chest of drawers which was really the bottom of an old Chippendale tallboy. It had lost all its brass mounts, except two key escutcheons, and Victorian wooden knobs had been put on instead. These I had yanked off fiercely, so now there were only holes in which one put one’s fingers and pulled. My dressing-table was an early Victorian work-table in rosewood which I had bought for eighteen shillings and carried across Blackheath on my back. My prize was the late fifteenth-century Italian nativity which I had found in the old clothes shop and bought for a few pounds. It was small and rustic and provincial, but genuine and unrestored. I still marvelled at my wonderful luck. I could hardly believe that it was true. I had paid for the picture by borrowing the money from my landlady.
But my things often had no power to solace me, and often contemplating them restlessly I would fly out of the house, and tramp over the windswept heath; first down Chesterfield Walk where the seats were always crammed with lovers, two or three couples sometimes at one. As I walked behind there I would stare at them, filling my eyes with any details I could make out in the darkness. I was always interested in the various shapes and poses of their joined bodies. I would walk by the pit where the earth had been dug from the ground, would come to the pond, where the ruffled water in the darkness seemed to be curling its lips at me.
Sometimes I grew happier and satisfied with the power of life inside myself, but at other times the sense of desolation grew in the emptiness of the dark heath and I would be ready to talk to anyone, to stay with them and enter their life for a moment and shut myself from the blankness of my own heart. I made strange contacts in this way, which sometimes suddenly frightened me, so that I would dash away, leaving the person I had been talking to in utter bewilderment.
Once I saw a drunk man lying on his back. He was unconscious and was breathing in an alarming way. In spite of fear, I bent down at once and undid the stud of his collarless shirt. He had been eating strawberries; their sweet smell clung round his face strongly, even penetrating the beer.
He opened his eyes and all I could think of to say was, ‘You’ve been eating strawberries.’ He gave me a blank look with one eye-lid drooping down; then he made a grab at me and I sprang back and ran hell for leather, laughing nervously to myself.
At last, after wandering in this way for an hour or more, I would turn back to my room, and I would hear the river sirens hooting, and see glimmering in the distance if it were moonlight, Wren’s hospital, or the square box of Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House.
After many long nights of solitude and fighting with myself, another youth at the Art School suddenly came to see me. This was most surprising. I just heard a knock at the front door after supper, and as Miss Langdon was nowhere about, I went myself and found Lynch there on the doorstep.
He smiled rather self-consciously and said ‘Hullo, I thought I’d just look you up, as I’ve been seeing someone who lives on the heath and I have to go home this way.’
Still rather bewildered, but trying to be as hospitable as possible, I took him into the downstairs sitting-room and then went to find Miss Langdon to ask her if she would make us some coffee.
I had really only spoken to Lynch once in my life, and that had been the day before, when he had found me in the Antique Room reading a very cheap copy of De Profundis which someone had left there. He was setting up a still-
life group for an evening class, for he was a senior student with a scholarship and sometimes helped to teach the night students. He looked across at me with rather bright snake-like eyes and asked me how I liked it, and in this way we had got talking. While he was talking I noticed that, for so young a person, he had curiously sunken cheeks.
I remembered now that in the course of conversation, he had asked me where I lived, and had then added, ‘So many of my friends seem to get depressed. I go round in the evenings cheering them up.’
I had not taken very much notice of this remark, but now I saw that he had come to cheer me up. Something in me did not want to be cheered up, but another part was glad.
We sat down on each side of the old white painted mantel and the hearth of scratched grey marble and when the coffee came, I poured out and Lynch began to talk.
He kept me amused, he told me gossip, he talked about painting, he told me a ghost story and when at last he got up to go, well after midnight, I thought that I had never met such a good talker, or anyone who I had not taken to very much on a first meeting, but had liked so much on a second.
As I lead him to the door, he asked if he might come another night, and I asked him to turn up whenever he liked enthusiastically.
As I lay in my bath that night, I thought that it would really make all the difference in the world to have someone to talk to.
A few nights after this, Lynch came again. Again we talked till after midnight. We hardly ever talked at the art school, only passed in the passages, going to our different classes, so all our conversation was reserved for these evenings.
Soon Lynch, or Mark as I now called him, was coming almost every evening. After my supper I got into the habit of waiting for his knock.
Then suddenly I realised that I had been robbed of almost all time to myself. If I wanted to be alone now, the only time was late at night when I was in bed. And I began to resent Mark’s almost as regular as clockwork appearance.
I grew colder and more truculent and uncommunicative, and one night I even openly quarrelled, but all to no purpose. Mark still came and still stayed for hours.
At last, in a black mood, I flung out of the house quickly after my supper one night. ‘Now if he comes’ I thought, ‘he’ll find an empty room and he’ll have to amuse himself.’
Instead of going up onto the heath, I took the road which led down between old houses to Hawkesmoor’s fine church. I skirted the church and passed along by the pawnbroker’s shop and the covered market.
This is the region that always reminded me of ‘smells of steaks in passageways.’ It always excited me with its dirt, its darkness and its secret and decayed atmosphere. It excited me too because beyond it was the mysterious promise of the river. On the squalid street, I would imagine it beyond, glimmering like old mercury.
I threaded my way down, until I came to the domed mouth of the tunnel which led under the river to the Isle of Dogs. This surely was rather a magic spot. The name, The Isle of Dogs—the extraordinary tunnel burrowing deep under the water-and then the procession of people going down the spiral stairs and coming up into the night air-all excited me.
I stood by the door of the tunnel at the top of the steps and watched the people; the sailors with kit-bags on their shoulders, the strangely Assyrian-looking tarts with black pom-poms on their eyeveils, old scavenging men and women with very thin wispy hair and prim toothless mouths; the surly lads of my own age who looked as if they’d like to knock me down. I looked at all the types and I felt so lonely, in spite of wanting to be lonely. I felt that they were all outside me and nothing I could do would make any difference, ever. And I turned away from the people passionately and yet longed to be taken to their bosoms. At the thought of being taken to so many and such strange bosoms, I burst out laughing, and to lighten myself, I dashed through the passage under the Inn, where the Parliamentary whitebait supper used to be held.
I was by the pier now. I passed the locked entrance and continued down the balustraded walk in front of the hospital. The black masses of the building and the pillared colonnades touched my imagination. I wanted a string of stately dancers lit by a torch to spiral out across the sooty lawns.
I thought of Mark. I saw him lying on my bed at home, waiting for me patiently. The thought was so enraging, that I found myself turning utterly against him. Would he never leave me alone? Could nothing break his persistence?
I stopped in my walk and leant forward on the fat stone balustrade. Below me was the muddy river beach, and two children were there, playing in the dark, close to that forbidding oily water.
They were so intent that they did not notice me, craning over the balustrade.
‘If I say “Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum” you must answer “Yes, your Majesty,”’ the older one admonished. She was delving into the mud with two sticks and scuffling out a sort of mystic circle and cross, with other magic signs.
The smaller child first nodded gravely, then some irrepressible impulse made it say ‘Yes, your Bumship,’ in a very impudent voice.
There was an ominous silence, then the echoing sound of a harsh slap.
The younger child set up a terrible wailing, and I heard the older one saying in the coldest, wisest voice, ‘If you won’t do it properly it’s no good. And if you don’t stop your row, I’ll take you home and we’ll have no communication with the spirit world after all.’
I knew then that they were playing a sort of spiritualist game.
I turned away and left them, leading their thrilling life, close to the horrible black water. And they filled me with such a feeling of time and sadness and death, that my heart seemed to give up hope inside me.
To ease my ache, I started to run. I ran until I sweated and panted for breath. I stared through the locked gates of the park and this struck me as the true symbol of my state. I was locked out and barred from every park in the whole world.
When I got close to the house, I looked up and saw the light on in my room. The sight infuriated me. I knew that Mark was still there.
I put my key in the front door, strumped up the stairs and burst into my room.
There he was, sprawling on the bed, idling reading one of my books. He raised his eyes but did not get up. He said gently, but rather accusingly ‘I’ve been waiting here for hours. Where have you been, it’s nearly midnight?’
‘Is it?’ I snapped flatly. I turned my back and started to slap my hair back viciously with the hair brushes. Then I picked up my flannel and towel and said ‘I’m going to turn on my bath.’
I left the room and a moment or two later Mark came and stood by the bathroom door diffidently. ‘Goodnight then,’ he said. ‘I’d better go.’ I heard him sadly walking down the stairs and then the click of the front door.
‘That’s that!’ I sighed, relieved; then the realisation of my own meanness surged over me and I felt so sorry for Mark. And yet I could not feel sorry that now I should have my evenings to myself again, although the fear of my own thoughts and the fear of emptiness and the fear of no contacts with other people all reared up their heads to stare at me.
A NOVEL FRAGMENT
I
Robert at last jerked open the door of the Life Room and stood on the threshold, not daring to look at the model. Out of the corner of his eye he could just see the edge of the dais where a piece of squalid green baize hung in folds. Clutching his drawing-board even tighter, he made straight for a vacant ‘donkey’ and straddled it. He busied himself with pencil and rubber and penknife. Then, angry, at last, with his cowardice, he stared straight in front, truculently.
The shock was as great as he had supposed it would be. The sight of all that mauvish flesh with the hank of dark hair sent a tingle of horror right through his body. Madame David, with her elaborate arrangement of pulleys, had slung herself from the ceiling in one of her poses from the old masters. One arm and one leg were supported in nooses while she reclined on the dais, cupping her chin in her other hand—it was contortionist—and throug
h his panic, Robert wondered if she was supposed to be Venus floating on a cloud. Madame David looked up and smiled broadly at him. She seemed to be cracking nuts between her teeth. He felt the furious wave of red spreading over his face. In desperation he bent over his board and began to try to draw the amazing figure. Those heavy tubes which were her arms and legs—how was he to relate them to that swelling stomach and torso? The breasts, curved and globular as the breakfast-cups on the L.M.S. Railway, seemed impossibly difficult, with their nightmarishly large purple-pink nipples. He felt dimly that there must be something wrong with the nipples, that they must be swollen; he was even afraid that before the end of the lesson they would have spread a little further up the smooth white globes of flesh.
Busily he fell to drawing the head, the only part at all familiar to him. He had just outlined the dark untidy mass of square-cut hair and was beginning on Madame David’s softening and ageing cheeks and lips when the half hour struck. Two jangling notes sounded from the school clock.
Madame David unhitched her arm and leg so that they fell against her with a soft thud.
‘I think a little rest, eh?’ she said, smiling to include the whole class, and still munching her nuts. Then she drew herself up slowly, stretching out her arms and tautening her whole body, so that a tremor went over her wide surfaces of flesh. She reminded him of a dog who suddenly becomes rigid and taut in the presence of another.
The students put down their pencils or brushes and relaxed. Some hunched their shoulders and lolled against the walls, others gathered round the stove where they carried on an animated conversation with Madame David. She was now dressed in a feathered peignoir, very much the worse for wear. Sections of mauve flesh could be seen through the rents in the dingy silk. She wore it impressively, allowing it to slip from her shoulders, and only gathering it together with one hand on her bosom. She held her head well back and laughed and smiled, making her mouth into that hard, very square shape which is used by trained singers. The plucked eyebrows danced up and down; there was much eye-work and she told the story of how she once looked after a little boy and taught him to box.