Absolute Beginners

by Colin MacInnes

  The answer came out before the thought, which is the only kind of true one. ‘Yes,’ I said, and she said nothing more.

  In came the herrings, and the poet.

  ‘The trouble about this country,’ he explained to us, picking up a train of thought he’d dropped somewhere earlier on and left to ripen up a bit wherever it was he’d dropped it, ‘is the total flight from reality in every sector.’

  Miriam and I munched, waiting.

  ‘For centuries,’ this Southwark Shakespeare said, ‘the English have been rich, and the price of riches is that you export reality to where it is you get your money from. And now that the marketplaces overseas are closing one by one, reality comes home again to roost, but no one notices it, although it’s settled in to stay beside them.’

  Short pause. Seemed that a question was demanded. And so,

  ‘And so?’ I said.

  ‘A rude awakening is due,’ Emmanuel said, smacking his lips around his herring, and gobbling it down like a performing seal.

  I took up the old, old cudgels.

  ‘A minute, Cockney boy,’ I said. ‘You talk of “the English” – aren’t you one of us?’

  ‘Me? Certainly. If you’re born in this town, you’re marked by it for life: specially by this area, you are.’

  ‘And so what happens to the English, happens to you too?’

  ‘Oh, positively. I’m booked on the same flight, whatever the direction.’

  ‘So long as I know,’ I said. ‘I want you to be around when the big bills come in for payment.’

  The chat had taken on suddenly an ever-so-slightly awkward edge, as chats will do, particularly when the tribal drums start beating in the distance – and I wanted Mannie to understand I did think him every bit a local, just as much as me and more, and needed him, and only feared he might get tired of us, and skip. But now he had grabbed prince Saul, and clutched him like that Epstein thing up by Oxford Circus, and said to me,

  ‘I write in the English language, boy. You take that away from me, and the whole world it and I come out of, and you cut off my strong right arm and other vital parts as well – let alone my livelihood and hopes of fame. Three of my own grandparents didn’t speak a word of it. But me, I do, your speech is mine.’

  ‘Grandmother Katz spoke English very well,’ said Miriam.

  ‘Never to me, she didn’t.’

  Here young Saul belched.

  ‘Listen,’ said Mannie solemnly. ‘I tell you a secret: England is dreadful, and the English – they’re barbarians. But three things of theirs I cherish most sincerely – the lovely tongue they thought up God knows how and I try hard to write in, and the nosey instinct of their engineers, and seamen, and explorers and scientists, to enquire, to find out why, and their own radicals that bounce up every century to flay and slay them, never mind the risk. So long as they have those things I’m glad to be with them, and will defend them … and everything else I can forget.’

  Mannie said this so seriously, like he was taking an oath that might land him in a gas chamber, but he’d keep it. Admitted, he was a bit conscious of saying it all, and of us his audience (particularly Saul) – but me, I believed him, and was impressed. ‘I could do with a cup of tea,’ I said, and this time Miriam went out to get it.

  M. Katz arose and stretched himself and said, ‘Heigh-ho – it’s the human element. It’s a wicked world.’

  I by this time was wandering around this ghastly front abode – ghastly, I mean, in its furnishings and whatnot, which hadn’t caught up with the contemporary kick, but nice and cosy-comfy and well used, as front room furnishings not always are. Over in one corner, almost hidden like a chamber pot behind a curtain, was a small selection of select volumes, including several of Mannie’s two productions, one copy of each of these being bound in the hide of some rare animal, and enclosed in an outer covering of velours.

  ‘They’re not a bookish lot, your elders and betters,’ I suggested.

  ‘Not on my side,’ said Mannie K., stepping over to finger his thin, beloved books. ‘But come round to Miriam’s father’s place, and you’ll see a whole public library, even stacked in the kitchen and the mod. cons., and most of them in German and in Russian.’

  ‘Your folk are traders, Mannie?’

  ‘Yes, but we have four rabbis in the family, if you include cousins,’ he said with a ferocious grin, half pride, half horror.

  ‘They didn’t like it when little Emmanuel got on the writing kick?’ I asked.

  ‘There was a struggle. In Jewish families, Gentile boy, there always must be, over all major decisions, particularly about sons, a struggle. But as I went on working down the market, and in fact still do most of the week, they soon ungraciously surrendered. Especially when they first saw me on the telly.’

  ‘And Miriam’s lot?’

  ‘They liked it even less. You see, I was supposed to be a bad match for the girl, and they thought, well, even if he’s a peasant, at least he’ll make the girl some money.’

  ‘And so now?’

  ‘Oh, they approve. Miriam’s poppa’s translated me into German and into Yiddish – but he’s only got me published in the latter.’

  ‘And they nice?’

  Mannie gazed at the ceiling, stroking his tomes.

  ‘I tell you one nice thing about them. The only three questions they asked Miriam when she dropped her bombshell were, “Is he healthy, is he a worker, do you love him?” – in that order. They didn’t mention money till they saw me.’

  Young Saul, feeling ignored, had joined us.

  ‘They’re pleased about this one, anyway,’ I said.

  ‘What? With twelve grandchildren already? Perhaps they’ll take a bit of notice when we have our twelfth.’

  ‘Not on your Nelly, we won’t,’ said Miriam, coming in bearing us the char.

  So there it was: my visit to Mannie and Miriam had set me up, and given me the fortitude to have another bash at Crêpe Suzette. After all, even if it’s undignified for a man to chase a girl, what had I got to lose in my position? So I asked the Katz pair if I could use their blower, and called up Suze’s W2 apartment where, quite surprisingly – or perhaps not, because boldness often is rewarded – she answered quite politely, and said to me, why didn’t I come round and catch her before she left for the Lament performance down in SW3?

  This time I took the metro, because I wanted to ruminate on what the best tactics would be to approach Suze – whether to try and force a showdown over Henley, or whether just to bank the fires, but keep them kindled till my turn came round one day. But this was a mistake, I mean the tube thing, because by the time I arrived outside her W2 address, I saw Henley’s vintage Rolls was parked there, and the lights blazing happily on Suze’s floor upstairs.

  Suze lives in a trio of Victorian bourgeois palaces that have been made over into flatlets for the new spiv intellectual lot, and on the old pillars underneath the porticos, instead of numbers 1, 2 and 3, or whatever it should be, they’ve written Serpentine House, this ‘House’ thing being the new way of describing any dump the landlords want to make a fast fiver out of. You press a bell, and a constipated voice answers down a loud-hailer thing (or sometimes doesn’t), and you state your business into a grille as if you were broadcasting to the nation, and then there are quite a lot of clicks, and buzzes, and in you go to a hall where your bollocks freeze, even in summer, and climb in an upended coffin called the ‘elevator’, and jerk up past blank walls like a pit shaft till you stop with a late lurch at the requested number. At the lift gates – which it needs a strong man to open, but which close themselves before you’re out – there, on the landing, rather to my surprise, stood Henley.

  You’ll dig Henley straight away if I describe him as a cold queer: i.e. he’s not the swing-my-hips camp chatterbox variety, or a side-eyed crafty groping number, or the battle-scarred parachutist nail-biting type, but the smooth, collected, let’s-talk-this-thing-over one.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said politely,
trying to help me out of the elevator contraption.

  ‘Well, and good evening to you,’ I said. ‘You’ve pinched my girl.’

  Henley smiled just so slightly, and shook his head ever so slightly too, and said to me seriously, ‘Naturally, when we’re together, you can still come and see her.’

  ‘Can I!’ I said. ‘You think I’d go near her in those circumstances?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said gently.

  ‘Well, mister, then you don’t know me!’ I cried.

  Hearing this frank exchange of greetings in the passage, Suzette herself emerged and stood there looking radiant: I mean, it is the only word to use that I can think of, she really shone, and wore a brittle Cinderella-in-the-ballroom-scene creation, one of those fragile things that girls, who really are so tough, as we all know, adore to climb into, to make us think they’re sweet seventeen in person (which, in her case, in fact she was). She saw we’d got off to a dodgy start in our conversation, so she came out and grabbed us both, one hand apiece, and pulled us into her apartment, and did all those things with drinks, and fags, and radiograms that are supposed to melt a polar situation.

  But I was not wearing that.

  ‘You don’t mind, Henley,’ I said, crunching some pretzels and refusing the glass of Coke I hadn’t asked for, ‘if I speak my mind.’

  The cat sat on an armchair, legs crossed, all laundry and hairdresser and dry-cleaner’s, looking like a superior footman on his day off, but still horribly polite. ‘Not a bit,’ he said. ‘That is, if Suzette doesn’t mind.’

  ‘We may as well have it,’ Suzette said, flopping onto some cushions, and opening up a 2,000-page Yank mag.

  ‘In the first place,’ I said, beginning with the least obvious weapon, ‘Suzette is working-class, like me,’

  ‘And me,’ said Henley.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘My father, who’s still living, was a butler,’ the cat said.

  ‘A butler,’ I told him, ‘is not working-class. No disrespect to your old Dad, but he’s a flunkey.’

  Suzette slammed down the mag, but Henley reached out what I think that he’d call a ‘restraining arm’, and said to me ‘Very well, I’m not working-class. And so?’

  ‘Those cross-class marriages don’t work,’ I told him.

  ‘Nonsense. What next?’

  ‘Suzette,’ I continued, warming up, ‘is young enough to be your great-great niece.’

  ‘Please don’t exaggerate. I know I’m much older, but I’m not yet forty-five.’

  ‘Forty-five! You’re ripe for Chelsea hospital!’ I cried.

  ‘Really,’ said Henley, ‘you do exaggerate. Take all the top film stars – Gable, and Grant, and Cooper. How old do you think they are?’

  ‘They’re not trying to marry Suze.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You think I’m senile. Anything else?’

  ‘Point number three,’ I said, ‘I leave to your imagination.’

  Henley uncrossed his legs, put neat, clean, effective fingers on either knee (I hope the creases of his pants didn’t slice him), and said to me, ‘Young man …’

  ‘None of that “young man”.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a pest,’ cried Suzette.

  ‘You bet I am!’

  Slightly raising his voice, Henley continued, ‘As I was about to say … do you know that a great many marriages between completely normal people are never consummated?’

  ‘Then why wed?’ I shouted.

  ‘It’s what the French call …’

  ‘I don’t care a fuck what the French call it,’ I yelled. ‘I call it just plain disgusting.’

  Suzette was up, flashing fire. ‘I do think you’d better go,’ she said to me.

  ‘Not yet. I haven’t finished.’

  ‘Let him go on,’ said Henley.

  ‘Let me my arse,’ I said. ‘What I want to ask you is, do you really suppose a set-up of that kind will make Suzette happy? I mean happy – do you understand that word?’

  Henley had also risen. ‘I only know,’ he said very slowly to me, ‘she’ll make me happy.’ And he went over and collected himself another drink.

  I grabbed hold of Crêpe Suzette. ‘Suzie,’ I said. ‘Do think!’

  ‘Let go.’

  I shook the girl. ‘Do think,’ I hissed at her.

  She stood quite still, and rigid as a hop pole. Henley, from across the little room, said, ‘Honestly, I do think Suzette’s mind is made up, and I do think it best if you accepted the situation, at any rate for the time being.’

  ‘You’ve bought her,’ I said, letting go Suzette.

  She aimed a swipe at me, but down I ducked. I moved over towards Henley.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you want to fight me.’

  ‘I suppose I ought,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if you really want to, I’m quite agreeable, though I should warn you I’m a dirty fighter.’

  ‘You’re dirty all right,’ I said.

  ‘Well, go on,’ he said to me, putting down his glass. ‘Do for heaven’s sake either begin, or, if you don’t want to, sit down and not spoil everybody’s evening.’

  I noticed he had one hand inside his pocket. ‘Key ring,’ I thought, ‘or maybe a lighter in the fist.’ But I was only making excuses, because I knew I really didn’t want to hit the man – it was Suzette I wanted to hit, or hit myself, bash my head against a concrete wall.

  ‘We’re not going to fight,’ I said.

  ‘Bravo,’ he answered.

  Suzette said very slowly to me, ‘This is absolutely the last scene of this kind I want to see. One more, and I just won’t see you ever at all, and please believe I mean it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘for making yourself so clear. Goodbye for now, if I recover my temper I may see you down at the Lament’s.’

  ‘Just as you think,’ Suze said.

  Henley held out his hand, but this was too much, so with a sort of a wave I stumbled out of the door and had to wait several minutes in the passage there, hearing them nattering behind me, because that bloody elevator kept going up and down with Serpentine House residents packed in it, and wouldn’t even stop when I managed to get the steel grille open while it was between floors, and stared down after it dropping into the abyss.

  When finally I got out of that front door, aching like in a nightmare, as I dived down the streets, I heard a kind of death-rattle breathing just behind my ear, and whipped round to look, but there was nobody – was me. ‘None of that!’ I cried, and broke all my regulations and went into a boozer and had a quick double something, and shot out again. I thought I’d go over the park, across the wide, open, lonely spaces, which also would be a short cut to Miss Lament.

  On this north front of the Hyde, the terraces are great white monsters, like the shots you see in films of hotels at the Côte de France. There’s the terraces for miles, like cliffs, then the Bayswater speedway with its glare lights and black pools, and the great dark green-purple park stretching on like a huge sea. The thing about the parks is, in day time they’re all innocence and merriment, with dogs and perambulators and old geezers and couples wrapped up like judo performers on the green. But soon as the night falls, the whole scene reverses – into its exact opposite, in fact. In come the prowlers and the gropers and the cops and narks and whores and kinky exhibition numbers, and the thick air is filled with hundreds of suspicious, peering pairs of eyes. Everyone is seeking someone, but everyone is scared to meet that him or her they’re looking for. If you’re out of it, you want to go inside to see, and once you’re in, you’re very anxious to get out again. So in I went.

  I tried not to think of Suze in there – and did. ‘Suze, Suze, Suzette,’ I said, and stopped, and I swear the thought of her was more me then than I was. I sat down on a bench, and my voice said, ‘Boy, do be reasonable.’

  One thing was right, I had to admit, in Suze’s smelly plans. Until you know about loot – I mean really know, know how to handle the big stuff, know what the difference i
s between, let’s say, five thousand pounds and ten (which are exactly the same to me), or what it’s like to look at anything and say, ‘I’ll buy it,’ or how the mugs will dance for you if you fling them down a shower of sixpences – then certainly you’re still a mug yourself. The hard little biting brain inside Suzette was decided to understand this money kick, and my lord, she was going to do so, come what may.

  I can’t say I really minded about Henley in particular, and that twin-bed marriage thing that he was offering. What I minded was that it should be anyone but me – anyone at all. When she played me up with her Spade Casanovas, it was just as bad … except for this very big except, that I knew those adventures had no permanence attached to them. I still had my way in.

  Mannie had said, ‘Wait,’ but how could I possibly be that wise? Would he have waited long for Miriam?

  Perhaps Suze isn’t me, I thought out suddenly. Perhaps I’m mistaken about this – she isn’t really Juliet for my Romeo. But what does it matter, even if she isn’t, if I feel she is?

  ‘Fuck!’ I cried out in a great bellow.

  Three or so special investigators, who’d been approaching my bench cautiously from out of the dark green, stopped in their tracks at this, and some melted. I got up. ‘Can I have a light?’ the boldest said, as I passed by.

  ‘Don’t take a liberty,’ I said, and hurried on.

  I got on a stretch of curving roadway that was so damn black I kept walking off it, and getting tangled in the whatsits that they put there to say please-keep-off-the-thing. A light shaft suddenly appeared from nowhere, and by me there flashed a pair of mad enthusiasts in track-suits, puffing and groaning and looking bloody uncomfortable and virtuous. Good luck to them! ‘God bless!’ I shouted after.

  Then unexpectedly, I came out on a delightful panorama of the Serpentine, lit up by green gas, and by headlamps from the cars whining across the bridge. I picked my way down by the water, and trod on a lot of ducks, they must have been, who scattered squawking sleepily. ‘Keep in your own manor, where you belong,’ I told them, chasing the little bastards down into the lake.