Inner Circle

by Jerzy Peterkiewicz

  Then a big policeman with a squint and a Welsh accent accused him of soliciting outside the Classic cinema while they were showing Night and Day for the second time.

  Patrick pushed Miss Siam’s whiskers straight into that squint, so outraged he was, and the man became very polite afterwards, and even made an immoral proposal himself on the steps to the police station.

  Queers or homopathos, as Patrick nicknamed those with gloomy faces, accosted him in public lavatories, partly on account of his blue hair, partly because of his foul sublimations which, however, erupted at unpredictable times. There he stood dangling his thing and being watched by a gloomy homopatho from either side, when suddenly he felt peculiar all over, and a horrible taste filled his mouth, so he had to get those mucky words out as quickly as possible. They had a dynamic effect on the homogloomies gathered at this lavatorial reunion: they either rushed at Patrick, or rushed outside, pattering up the stairs.

  Now and again he allowed some nice elderly gentleman to adore his bum and take him out to the cinema, the Zoo or Battersea pleasure gardens, but, in fact, he didn’t much like that kind of sport. The phrase was not his, but dad’s. Augustus discussed such matters with him frankly, as it should be between real chums, and the army so-and-so days were usually recalled on these occasions.

  ‘One of my rifle-cleaning sergeants, you know, would always say: “Bad for piles, good for constipation.” So, if I were you, Patrick, I wouldn’t go on a holiday with that barrister chum of yours. The food in the South of France, my boy, is on the oily side. Ho-ho-ho!’

  And Augustus followed his laughter with a firm pat on Patrick’s head. Whenever this happened his father seemed to be surprised that the head was higher than he expected. ‘Are you still growing up or something?’ Patrick was almost twenty-one and his height remained stationary. He knew that, because he measured himself once a week against the door of his daddy’s bed-sitter, and marked the place with blue chalk.

  Being a friendly boy and proud of knowing practically everybody in two S.W.

  districts, he couldn’t help it if a few homopathos were after him for weeks. When they became too attached to his bum, he resorted to the same explanation.

  ‘Sorry about that. Had too much sex in childhood, you see. Would you like to meet a psycho-analyst friend of mine to discuss this particular attachment with him? It isn’t really expensive, you know, when you compare it with the price of cigarettes. Two guineas per session, reduced fee, but I’m afraid you have to go as far as the Finchley Road. Horrid street, isn’t it?’ And he gave the man his most charming, irrefutable smile.

  The psycho-analyst friend varied from situation to situation.

  And Patrick wouldn’t dream of inflicting a financially irresponsible chum on any of them. They worked so hard, listened for hours and hours to all sorts of cases, and foul sublimations, and to occasional snoring as well. He knew them all: Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, neo-Freudians, Jungo-Catholics and Sindrians, too.

  Sindra remained his best lady chum. She had made a big name for herself after treating Patrick for five years, 1,440 guineas in fees, discounting two fortnights each year for her holidays. Sindra was worth every quid out of his daddy’s wads, and daddy never bothered to count the total sum.

  She did, oddly enough, marry Doctor Patho, Vera’s friend with the thick American glasses, and went about calling herself Mrs. Whitestones which didn’t suit her beautiful Indian lips at all. She must have come to the same conclusion a couple of years later, because she divorced the bulging glasses and set up an amicable menage with a certain Scotsman who bred greyhounds for dog-races. Sindra discussed the whole thing with Patrick during a long walk in Regent’s Park; she couldn’t find a more understanding listener in the whole of London than her prize patient, the celebrated piss-boy and nocturnal Tubewalker. She titillated his heart with darlings, and Patrick, like an affectionate good boy that he was, reciprocated Sindra with darlings. Sometimes, in living memory of that five-year course, he would say ‘Sindra-mum’, but it sounded a bit like laying a wreath on the tombstone of Dolly-mum.

  Apparently things had been written about Patrick Boris; he had passed from pads to files, from script to print, and if he had known how to use modern reference books, he could have looked himself up. His reading habits, however, were desultory. Sometimes he picked up a Soho classic and refreshed his visual memory of the words he used to spell out in chalk and in public, but on the whole he found printed letters a frightful bore for the eyes to follow. Like his psycho-analytical mentors, he preferred the oral tradition and would, if asked by a drunken chum in a pub, recite, intone or shout the whole glossary of psychiatry, from Freud to Sindra and back, which for a backward boy was some feat of memory.

  The short list of Patrick’s mummies required nothing of this kind from memory.

  Dolly-mum upset his recollections in a different way altogether. He therefore played a conversational game with his father as though she were still living in her doll house, and Augustus were Boris and not daddy ho-ho.

  ‘And how is good old Dolly-mum these days!’ Patrick asked on Dolly’s sixtieth birthday, imitating his father’s tone to perfection. Augustus sat up, knocking his ancient headboard which now had only grease stains and no flowers. Each time this obsessional question reached out to him in his own voice, Augustus the father hit some object next to his head.

  ‘Ah, Dolly! good old Dolly. She’s fine, ho-ho-ho! she likes living in the country.’

  As soon as Augustus said ‘in the country’, he seemed to be puzzled why on earth he had said it. Patrick knew his father loathed cottages, cows, cow-dung; the very idea of spending a week-end in the country made him sick.

  ‘Is she still in Dorset, father!’

  ‘Ah, Dorset! Did you say Dorset, Patrick!’

  ‘I said the cottage covered with a square, thick turf and a marble chimney on top.’

  ‘Turf? Ah—’ And here Augustus dried up all of a sudden. He knocked the headboard again and looked horrified, as if he had touched a cold marble slab. ‘Ah—’ he stared at the telephone directories, under which the matches usually got stuck. ‘Where the hell. . . .’

  ‘You’re not lit, dad.’

  ‘I know. Fetch me the phone books like a good girl.’

  And Patrick fetched the volumes, one by one. Then he took a box of matches out of his pocket.

  ‘Well, dad,’ he said, ‘it’s time we paid a visit to Dolly-mum in the country, you and me, don’t you think so!’

  ‘The country?’ Augustus bulged his watery eyes. ‘Have I ever told you, Patrick, about my rifle when I was in the army’/’

  ‘You have, father.’

  ‘Ho-ho-ho, the good old rifle,’ Augustus inhaled deeply, rested his weary head and puffed out a few rings of smoke. ‘Would you like a quid or two!’

  Patrick shook his head violently. He didn’t want that, he wanted to be with Dolly-mum as in the good old days.

  2

  He didn’t kill her with the potato knife. He only peeled off a bit of her skin. A year later he tried to strangle her with a leather leash he had pinched from Nicky the poodle, but leather wasn’t much good for that kind of thing: it resisted the pull.

  Patrick felt very sorry about the attempt and the failure, kissed Dolly’s hands and the place on her throat where the leash had left a slight bruise. They both wept and said nice sweet things to each other. She was his only mum, much nicer really than Vera with her blue hair and her blue-eyed cat; nothing, nothing in the whole world would ever part them, because he was Dolly’s boy, Patrick. Oh, how warm her shaking hand felt on his cheek; how beautifully she sobbed over the tea-pot and one solitary cup with a lipstick smudge as crooked as her lips.

  The Indian lady-doctor was changed for a nasty yes-doctor who insisted on clear answers, no-sir, yes-doctor, this no, that yes. Patrick ran away from him, not far, only to Sindra’s place. And Sindra gave his dad a tinkle, and they talked for at least half an hour, while Patrick fiddled with the plast
ic telephone cord and thought of Dolly-mum.

  Every morning Dolly wept at breakfast. She couldn’t swallow a thing, she said, and Patrick like a good boy soaked brown bread for her in tea and in milk. Some she ate, some she threw up straight onto the white tablecloth which Patrick didn’t think polite. He forgave her that as she had forgiven other things.

  One day, Dolly-mum had a most unpleasant attack of weeping. She vomited all over the carpet and broke her blue tea-pot which she loved because it had been in the family for so long. This brought more weeping, louder and uglier. She seemed to be making faces at Patrick, now from the top of her nose down, now from her chin upwards.

  He became very nervous himself, and thought quickly of two solutions: either something suppler than the leash, one of her stockings for instance, or the risk of ringing up his father, though it was only a quarter to eleven.

  He chose the telephone, because it was there, glaring at him with its white dial, and Dolly was wearing both her stockings. Patrick would have disliked pulling them off her legs.

  Dolly-mum had a nervous breakdown and was taken to a quiet house in the country. After a few months she returned and there was much talk between his dad and the nasty yes-doctor about Patrick, whether he should see his second mummy or stay away from her. Only a week elapsed, and Dolly herself wanted to be with her sweet boy, she even promised to be very good and not to weep. She didn’t, good old Dolly, and the idyllic reunion lasted three long eventful days.

  On the second day Patrick took Dolly-mum to the Zoo by bus. It was his own idea. Augustus the father approved of it and gave him a couple of quid extra for entertainment.

  ‘Treat the old girl to a lunch somewhere off Baker Street, not too near the Zoo, though; the neighbourhood stinks of monkeys.’ Augustus patted him absentmindedly. ‘A boy of fifteen, you know, should occasionally entertain his lady chums, but don’t go to a pub called “Ye Olde Irelande”—’ he pronounced final e’s, ‘the place stinks of monkeys, too.’

  Alas, they couldn’t have lunch because of the parrots, yellow, green, violet, with hooked beaks and screeching hello-voices.

  They were perched on twigs and swings, they flapped their wings and stared at you sideways. Dolly-mum stood amidst the cages, getting redder and redder despite the powder she had on her face and the powder she tried to put on. Finally, she gasped, looked sideways at Patrick just like one of the parrots and after another gasp shrieked so loud that an attendant in uniform rushed in and gave her something to smell. Dolly-mum fainted, came to, fainted again at the sight of the parrots, and the whole treat ended for her in a taxi. The fare to South Kensington cost Patrick less than the lunch he was going to give her.

  At home he behaved like a real son, rang everybody he could think of to tell them what had happened, then he boiled some milk which she drank gratefully. His dad arrived, made a mess of things by trying to cook a meal; then it was the doctor’s turn to arrive and fuss about the house. Augustus said he would stay the night. He did and fell asleep as soon as he had drunk the last few drops of Dolly’s white port. Patrick took over: he wound the clock, shut the front door, went to the loo, washed and in the end entered Dolly-mum’s bedroom to kiss her good night.

  She was asleep, poor dear, and very pretty she looked in her pink nightie with a loose silk scarf round her neck. All day long she wore it, and in bed too, because she felt cold there, Dolly said, ever since they had taken her in the dark car to that dark house in the country. She couldn’t remember where the house was, in Dorset maybe, or in Cornwall.

  Patrick untied the scarf to find that place he had once bruised, and to prove that he meant no harm whatsoever, he lay a long, loving kiss there. Dolly-mum opened her eyes, shrieked horribly, jumped out of bed and then through the window, straight onto a small bit of lawn in her back garden. Even if she had wanted to break her neck, she couldn’t possibly have succeeded from that ground-floor window and on that bouncy lawn.

  And the poodle barked, and woke Augustus who said brightly: ‘Ah—where am I?

  Must have snoozed off in your lap, naughty girl.’ A dark car arrived in the morning, and two strong men carried Dolly-mum in a chair with straps. They took her to another home in the country.

  ‘Don’t imagine things, Patrick, my boy, she’s living in a lovely cottage with a thatched roof and a cock crowing from the top.’ His father said this a month later, when Patrick had already heard from the rheumatic lady about Dolly-mum’s funeral. She had attended it herself, and the poodle Nicky was with her. ‘I looked for you there, Patrick, but you know how poor my eyes are.’

  It was Sindra the beautiful who found out about the cemetery and drove Patrick there in her American car. She wanted him to see for himself that it was all over, the attachment, the compulsion and the guilt. No, he hadn’t caused Dolly’s death, how could he, since she was staying in a home at the time. As for nervous breakdowns, they were nowadays no more unusual than ‘flu, and Sindra sealed her pronouncement with an exotic Indian smile. ‘Oh, what a wonderful shade of green,’ she said to a man who was placing new turf on Dolly-mum’s grave. The old square, moulting at the edges, lay rolled up next to a marble slab which reminded Patrick of one of the chimneys in Queen’s Gate Terrace. No, he wouldn’t have a nervous breakdown, ever.

  And during the following six years he had none. He strolled gaily along the Fulham Road, the King’s Road, Queen’s Gate, through parks and squares, his debonair self on top of the world, and only sometimes a tiny-weeny bit below. Patrick was riding towards his twenty-first birthday on the crest of euphoria, and whenever he sank a little, for a day or an hour, it felt like dropping into a pit of depression. So euphoric he stayed on the sea of other people’s troubles. He could be most sympathetic though, when he heard of someone’s breakdown.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my dear John,’ he said to an elderly acquaintance who had an antique shop in Chelsea, a mistress at the cash-box, a tom-cat upstairs and a wife in a mental home. ‘I didn’t know she’d fallen ill again. Last time I saw you both, she looked so beautifully sunburnt and relaxed.’

  ‘That must have been Liz.’ He meant his mistress in charge of the cash-box. His wife was no beauty.

  ‘No, no! it was your charming wife, I am positive, John.’ And Patrick patted him on the back. John knew how useless it would be to tell Patrick that his wife hadn’t been out for seven years.

  ‘Well, what can one do? Life is hard, Boris, that’s all.’ He tried to get away from Patrick but Patrick wouldn’t let him. No chum of his, however pressed for time, should go uncomforted. Besides, they had cats in common.

  ‘Are you hard up by any chance? Would you like a quid or two? Please take three.’ And immediately Patrick began rummaging in his pockets.

  ‘No, thank you very much. Really, I have no financial worries, I assure you, Boris.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, John. But any time you. . . .’

  ‘I know, thank you again. Most kind of you.’

  ‘Look, John.’ Patrick put his arm round the man’s stiff neck and let Miss Siam drop on to the pavement, which the cat did with her usual grace. ‘Listen to me, John, you mustn’t think your beautiful wife is a mental case. Everybody one meets has had a nervous breakdown. It’s quite natural these days like—oh, I don’t know—like having a religious background. You must look at it that way, John. And how’s your cat?’

  ‘Very well, good-bye Boris.’ The man was off. ‘Give me a tinkle!’ he shouted after John, ‘whenever you feel a bit depressed.’ The next chum Patrick bumped into was euphoric like himself and smelt of beer and whisky.

  ‘How’s life, Patrick?’

  ‘Fine, splendid. Just fine.’

  ‘Your new job all right?’ This puzzled Patrick, for he had no job. But he was always ready to oblige a friend as interested in him as this nice tippler whose name he couldn’t remember. And Patrick mounted the crest of an optimistic wave which would make the conversation flow.

  ‘Ah—the job! I’ve been asked to take up a post in
Coimbra. Teaching English, you know.’

  ‘Splendid, Patrick—marvellous!’ The drunk chum sounded enthusiastic. Patrick loved it when people were enthusiastic while talking to him. Then he heard: ‘How’s your Portuguese? Excellent, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh—’ Patrick was taken by surprise but wouldn’t stoop to covering up. ‘Thought they spoke Spanish. Funny that. Well, I’ll know both Spanish and Portuguese in a couple of months, ho-ho-ho!’ His dad’s laugh came in useful on such ambiguous occasions. ‘As a matter of fact—’ he loved supplying facts—’I am taking my G.C.E. exams this June.

  Seven subjects at the Ordinary Level, three at the Advanced. Do you think’—he wished he knew the chap’s name—’do you think I should take English at the Advanced Level because of this job in Coimbra?’

  Patrick never sat for any examination and had nothing on paper to prove that he could read or write; his education had been entirely private and consisted of hours and hours spent in the consulting rooms of psycho-analysts. Yet he still had his two mummies rocking a little cradle of guilt, and he still startled people by saying he was backward.

  ‘It’s quite normal these days: Patrick explained. ‘You see both my mothers had a nervous breakdown. It’s natural too. What? Oh, yes, they’re all right now, thank you.’

  His first mummy, as a matter of fact, had hers in New York, while she was singing on the stage. Vera’s voice simply caved in, and the opera selected by fate for her breakdown happened to be Boris Godunov. When he heard of this, Boris Patrick bought himself a Siamese cat on a silk leash.

  3

  ‘You shouldn’t have told me about them drowning in the Tube. I shall have a nasty dream, as horrid as that about the turf being peeled off a grave. Have you ever smelt powder in your dreams? I have.’

  Patrick was talking to John who had an antique shop full of ricketty junk, with one live mistress at the cash-box. John, like Patrick’s father, had some reminiscences from his remote war days, but preferred to repeat the more horrific ones. This time he described at length how one underground shelter was flooded during the blitz, drowning several children.