But I wonder if the agony of unreturned love that becomes the sick, eating sweetness of jealousy isn’t by far the worst?
I remember how I said to you, Barbara, in the begin-ning between us, when everything was new, when each time you kissed me it was like fire and you said how you loved me for my brain: ‘You seem to lean down from heaven like a wind, and then are gone in a single gust, leaving nothing, a hallowed destruction. Only a memory might float down after, a particle of what had existed, remembered experience, a mood, a sound, music, some steps of a dance, my touch on your waist, or thighs—something that might last on in part of me and sicken all of me with longing and sorrow.’
Now the particles are floating down everywhere, a dark debris blotting everything out.
I wonder at times if my best course wouldn’t be to kill both of us. But I am not a murderer.
35
Number 44 Copernicus Court was in a dreadful reddish council block behind Eltham Road, not far from the New Tiger. The site dated back to the thirties and each of the three blocks was the same: there was an open cement staircase in the centre which took you up to the floors, and a black iron railing ran across the front of each floor. Number 44 was on the third storey. Local wit, punctuated by explanatory drawings of male and female pudenda, proliferated on the staircase walls: ‘Lead with your Head, Man, Your Arse will Follow.’ ‘There aint no such thing as clean Shit,’ and much other profound thinking. Anything around that could be broken had been, mostly two or three times over. The door of the boiler-room had been stove in to matchwood. A plank had been nailed across the opening marked grimly Out of Order, but an optimist had chalked in underneath this, ‘Okay for a fuck man.’ Wads of filthy cardboard, broken glass, flattened tins and other rubbish had been stuffed in there to a height of three feet or more. As I started upstairs five Rastafarians raced past me coming down. One carried a transistor with Capital Radio on full blast; it was talking about a bomb explosion in the West End.
There was no answer when I knocked at number 44. I leaned on the bell, but it didn’t work, so I went on knocking. Finally a big head, a man’s, stuck out of the kitchen window of 46 behind me along the open-air passage to the flats. Underneath the head was a demolition man’s coat.
‘What do you want?’
‘Mrs Kay Fenton.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m not in the answering business,’ I said. ‘Is she in?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ he said, ‘so why don’t you just go on knockin and spoil the rest of my bleedin sleep?’
‘Because it makes my knuckles hurt,’ I said.
‘Tough titty,’ said the man, and slammed his window shut.
I hadn’t a search warrant, and it began almost like a game, with me just feeling through the letterbox to see if there was a key hanging down on the inside by a string.
There was, so all I had to do was pull it out through the letterbox and put it in the lock. When the door opened I went in, shut it behind me, snapped the key off its string and dropped it on the floor.
I thought it was the neatest flat I had ever been in. There was a sofa and two armchairs, a telly with a doily on top of it, a table with a glass top, white plastic geese flying across the left-hand wall, and a set-in electric fire underneath that glittered with polish and loving care. It took me a few seconds to realize what was wrong as I went through the kitchen and along to the first bedroom. The windows were never opened, and the place smelled. It was more than a smell, really; it stank, but softly. There were several layers to the odour. First there was the sour smell of a flat that never gets any air; second, there was the garbage which, though packed away into the tidy under the sink, nevertheless gave off its distinctive perfume, mingled with that of plates washed up in Fairy Liquid.
There was more to it than that, though.
I stood in the passage and listened. I didn’t want to take long over this. Since Mrs Fenton wasn’t in, I had no wish to meet her. I had broken into her flat. I hadn’t any business whatever being in there, and I could get busted over it. All the same, there was no harm in seeing how Harvey and his mother lived. I might discover the things that Barbara had left out in her intimate talks with me. They were not all that intimate, really. Barbara was not an intimate person. There was some information I would never get out of her. Yet, thanks to Staniland, I had an idea that as far as Harvey was concerned, there was plenty of it.
I finished with Mrs Fenton’s austere bedroom and pushed open the only door I hadn’t yet tried. Immediately I was at the source of the smell.
There is nothing particularly logical about a feeling of disgust. Even when you have seen pretty well everything, there are plenty of disgusting sights that don’t excite a feeling of nausea at all. But this one did. There was a bed in the room, suitable for a child of ten, strictly made up with spotless sheets and a woolly blanket with blue bunnies on it. The eiderdown was turned down, and it was all ready to go into. There were fresh curtains at the window, light blue, with a motif of characters from nursery rhymes on them—Old Mother Goose, The Cat and The Fiddle, and so on. On the wall facing the bed was a big white card. On it, in black Letraset, were the words: ‘A Child Is Clean And Pure In Heart.’ Around the room were more cards. They bore, in the same neat lettering, the days of the week, and the space that each card represented was marked off from the next by clean, white tape.
The smell came from the floor. Each space contained a child’s chamberpot. Today was Tuesday, so Monday’s had excreta in it, and I wondered what the room would smell like when Saturday came, since Sunday’s task was evidently to empty the pots and scour everything clean. There was a table at the foot of the cot, placed on a spot precisely co-distant from it and the further wall. There was a hard wooden chair in front of the table. On the latter were various things. There was a list, made out in laborious block capitals; it was divided down the middle by a line. The left half of the list was headed What Mother Likes and began: Mother Likes a Boy to be Clean. Mother Likes a Boy to be Regular. It was a long list. There seemed to be no end to the number of things mother liked.
The other side of the list, headed What Mother does NOT Like, was equally long, however. Part of it ran: Mother does NOT Like DIRT. Mother does NOT Like Dirty Little GIRLS. The Only Girls Mother Will Permit are Girls that Punish Dirty Little Boys Who WON’T OPEN THEIR BOWELS.
There was more of it, but I had seen as much as I needed. As I looked at that spotless little table, the desire to vomit rising in me as I held my nose, I had an image of Harvey, the big extrovert bully down at the Agincourt, drinking with his mates—and then the other Harvey lying here in his cot, dutifully, insanely lying in the smell of his excrement while his mother listened through the thin wall of her room adjoining and stood over him twice a day while he did his business.
I imagined both women, actually, standing over him, ready to punish, one probably with a watch in case he passed the time limit for getting his wretched bowels open.
Two women, because on the table there was a portrait of Barbara in a big metal frame. She was dressed as a nurse, her hair tucked in neatly under her cap. Her expression was icy. But underneath the ice it was rotten, merciless, a sadist’s face.
On an impulse I picked up the whip I found lying on the table in front of the portrait, broke the stock in two and threw the pieces on the floor as I went out.
36
‘Barbara,’ I said, ‘Barbara, I am so bloody uptight—do you truly love me?’
‘That’s a silly question.’
We were in bed at her place.
‘No, it isn’t silly. Something strange has come over you.’
‘You mean you’re in doubt.’
‘You’d be in doubt too,’ I said, ‘if you knew everything I knew. Really everything.’
‘Would I? What is really everything?’
‘The things you can’t stomach in people,’ I said, ‘the shit, the pus, the septic places everyone has. The sicknesses you have to try and de
al with in the people you love. The shit you see that you have to try to purify by correction, the vagaries of child-hood, of failure, of old age—are you reading me?’
‘You mean like letting an old pouf smack you for money?’ She stifled a yawn. ‘I’ve done it. Then you smack him, he has his kick, poor old darling, then you have trouble collecting the money and everyone ends up with a hangover. Is that what you mean?’
‘Yes, that’s it, broadly,’ I said.
‘None of it reaches me,’ she said. ‘It’s no more than collecting fares on a bus, it’s just a service.’
‘Is that what you were doing for Charlie?’
‘More or less, but he couldn’t pay. Someone was slicing him up on the side already, before I came on the scene.’
‘Who was it? A relation?’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘the trouble with you is, you’re a bit like Charlie yourself in your own way. Once you get into a thing you never leave go, and I really am tired, but could we please fuck before I drop off?’ She turned to me with an honest look on her face: ‘I can’t tell you what it means to me to have a good, straight fuck for a change, with a man who’s a man. Will that do for saying I’m in love with you? It’s the nearest I can get.’
‘It’s near enough.’
‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘If you were in my place, you’d see there weren’t any good or bad people.’
‘I’ve been in your place,’ I said, ‘and I do see it.’
‘Love me,’ she said drowsily, ‘even if you’re not quite the man I thought I met in the 84.’
‘Perhaps I never was him.’
We had a row in the middle of the night. I was thinking about the whip on Harvey’s table and I said to her: ‘I think you’re very kinky.’ I thought I might as well have done with pretending, so I said: ‘Come on, sit up, you cow, what do you know about whips?’
She started screaming. ‘How do you know I know anything about whips?’
‘You know about them all right!’
‘Well, flog yourself with the fucking things!’ She went on screaming and started battering me in the face.
It was already morning, and not much later on she said: ‘You’ll have to go.’
‘For good?’
‘Yes, I think you’d better move out of here, this morning, and go back to Earlsfield. You’ve left me no choice. You probe too much.’
‘People in love always probe.’
‘Too bad for them. They shouldn’t. They should just accept. Anyway, you’re not in love with me, you just pretend you are. You’re bent.’
‘Well, it takes one to spot one.’
‘Come on. Get out of here. Get dressed. Get moving. I mean it.’
I was already out of bed; now I started getting dressed. ‘We might still meet at the 84.’
‘I won’t be working there.’
‘Well, we might run into each other, like casually. Where will you be working?’
‘That’s none of your business. You always want to know too much, you’re a drag.’
‘Come on.’
‘I don’t know, some African club, probably. There are times, I like a few Africans around me. They’re not into thinking, they talk about themselves all the time, and what it adds up to is, they never ask questions like you do.’
‘Aren’t we ever going to see each other again?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t we just have a drink when all this has died down, like in the pub, have a slice on the mat casually, as friends, nothing binding?’
She considered me with her head held aside. ‘I don’t know. I’ll see. But probably not, it wouldn’t be much fun. You’ve come to bits in my hands like they all do. I’ve lost my respect for you, but I’ll think it over. Meantime I’d like my key back, the key I gave you for this flat.’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve left it at my place.’
‘Well, I’d like it back.’
‘I’ll give it to you. Tell you what, better, Barbara, I’ll bring it round to you. I’ll ring up and we could fix a time.’
‘You can’t ring up. I’m having my number changed today.’
‘Oh, be reasonable,’ I said.
From the radio in the neighbour’s kitchen a woman’s voice sang out: ‘Just like timber, falls over and rolls ’way onto its side, I’m so heavy and so tired …’
‘I can’t believe this,’ I said. ‘Let’s take the whole thing again from the top.’
‘No, you’d better go now.’
‘I’m nearly dressed. It was that talk about whips that did it, wasn’t it?’
She picked up a coffee mug and hurled it at me. I ducked it easily. ‘I don’t know anything about whips!’
‘Did you know Harvey Fenton?’ I asked her. ‘Big man. Takes some subduing.’
‘You bastard.’
‘He owns a slice of the 84.’
She breathed down deep. ‘Just go,’ she said, ‘just go. I’m expecting someone here any minute.’
‘What? A new man?’
‘A man who wants to give me some work.’
‘What sort of work?’
‘Just work. Now go.’
‘Is it Harvey Fenton who’s coming?’
‘I don’t know. No. Are you a copper?’
‘I’m a man with a mission, certainly.’
‘Well, get your fucking mission out of here! And stop asking questions! Always your bloody questions, you wheedling bastard! Now just get out of here! Go away!’
‘Do you think there was ever anything between us, Barbara?’
‘No, I fucking don’t! Well, if there was anything, it’s over. Dead. Do you understand? Dead.’
‘Well, you make it sound very final, put like that.’
‘It is final. Now get lost. Don’t you understand the English language? I said out, get out. Out, out!’
37
When I got back to Acacia Circus late in the afternoon, I sat down and put on a Staniland cassette. I didn’t think while I listened to it; there was nothing to think about. Staniland said:
Barbara asked me last night: ‘What are you crying for now, you old fool?’ I told her: ‘I see existence as a vast tract of land that has to be worked.’ She said: ‘You are completely mad, Charlie, you know that?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘somehow the balance between logic and desire has to be maintained.’
Later in the evening I tried to explain all this in the Agincourt. The Laughing Cavalier was there as usual, listening with his back half turned to me. He had a sneer on his face. It’s curious; he foams at the mouth sometimes, like a badly opened bottle of champagne. While I was try-ing to argue my case about existence with whoever would listen, he was telling his friends about how four mates of his had gang-banged a girl on the London–Pulborough train: ‘Whole carriage except for her was empty, see? It was easy, a doddle! When all the blokes’d had her the gollies dropped in for the next course, train was full of em!’
I must wait until it gets dark I thought. I might as well play some of the Staniland tapes again. I looked through them and chose one which started:
Sunday at Duéjouls. Just to exist outdoors like this after the winter! I sit in the sheltered corner of the terrace with an old exercise book of Charlotte’s on my knee. It doesn’t matter if I write nothing in it today. One can write and think too much—be too solitary, until in the end you feel as if your brain had been bruised. Better to rest sometimes from the problems, just sit in the sun for a time, watch what this north wind does to the land and watch the sky, the clouds racing southward, elephants swinging into the shape of an adoring woman, into a madman with folded arms, into a god, into nothing. Grey rags, each one the shape of a teapot, hurry like detectives into a black shroud that means rain; contorted ghosts, the colour of boiled potatoes, collide with the mountain opposite me. Mean-time the little tributary of the Tarn rustling over the stones sixty feet below me changes from the colour of pure water into slate. Even so, with the storm coming, it is warm. I hold my cool wine and watch the trees become green, growing. What a joy!
For once you watch all that young effort, yet have no part in it! Today nothing matters; there is just gratitude. Presently I’ll go in and make a salad for lunch; then I’ll write in the afternoon, once the sun leaves me a patch of shade.
I shall wait until it gets completely dark and late, until after the pubs have shut. Midnight, or even later. Really late. I chose another tape. Staniland said:
Here at Duéjouls there is a climate and atmosphere that I understand. Every element advances through the year with its own austerity of heat or cold—the green with the black, the growth with the decline. As usual, man has tried to stifle all birth here, but thank God has been unsuccess-ful in the mountains—here there is still a blind but true balance, and in the end nothing is lost.
How easy it would be for me to close the case on Staniland, let it slide! But I’m going to smash it open. I shall reach through the alibis of those responsible down into their throats and tear their hearts out. Back to the next tape with Staniland saying:
It seems like the other day that my neighbour in Duéjouls was knocked down and killed by a tourist. I say killed—he actually died after lying in a coma at St Anne’s for three days. He was only forty-two. Everyone in the village was badly upset by the news. He was related to half of it; he had also just built a brand-new house next to the church and employed only local craftsmen. Although very successful in business he had been an extremely good neighbour and lent a lot of people in the village money when they were temporarily short. Yet the funeral was an awkward business, because he was of no religion. Therefore there couldn’t be a proper ceremony at St Catherine’s nor, of course, a priest, even though the family owned a vault in the graveyard, so in the end the mayor had to officiate: he wore the tricolour over his grey suit. My own countrymen generally freeze at a funeral, but here at Duéjouls everyone cried—widows, lorrydrivers, peasants, the owner of the bistro, the people from the castle, everyone: even the two officials from the Banque Populaire clung to each other. I myself felt pretty bad because only four days before his accident I had gone down to repay him the five hundred francs he had lent me and we had drunk an Old Crow together at the bar he had built in the hall and talked about shooting, because it was October. But now here I was, following the mayor with flowers to his graveside. There must have been three hundred people present, some of them from as far away as Rodez, and I’ve never seen so many sad faces. Yet, as soon as we all emerged from the cemetery again and were standing under the acacias facing the church, we just turned round in a body and went down for a glass of wine at the bistro, as the weather was still very hot. The owner had gone down first so as to be there to serve us, and did so, still, of course, in his best suit. We all sat down in our Sunday clothes and open-neck shirts and drank and talked about the funeral for a while, also about shooting. Only the widow, a very pretty woman, and her two sisters stayed behind in the churchyard, she with her face white as a wall.
He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) Page 19