‘There’s a gap over there. Let’s see if that’ll do.’ She led him on to an enclosure walled with thick-growing bushes with a single silver birch whose leaves trembled a little in the still air. ‘This is fine. Put the rug down there.’
‘You sure it isn’t damp?’
‘A bit I expect but with the bracken and the rug we should be alright.’
He stretched it over the bending stalks. ‘You’ll have to sit on it or we’ll never flatten them down. That’s it.’ He laid himself beside her and watched while she lit a cigarette and let the smoke curl straight up into the air. He was grateful for the rest. A lethargy had come over him; he wanted to lie there in the warm sun and doze the morning away. Under half closed lids he watched the silver birch and turned his head to peer into the insect world of giant stalks at eyelevel. A few midges began to dance above them, ‘Smoke up, the enemy are coming.’
She lay back and blew a smoke screen over their heads that eddied and thinned in the strong light. Watching it he fell asleep, the sun falling hot on his face. When he woke she was lying beside him, eyes closed. He felt warm and strong. Even the taste in his mouth was different with a tang of iodine that comes from sleeping in the open air. He picked a long furry grass blade and began to tickle her neck with it and she smiled but didn’t open her eyes.
‘You’re not asleep, you’re just shamming.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Do you think we ought to be moving?’
For answer she reached up a hand round his neck and drew him down on top of her. He felt the fire jump between them as their lips met and his hands began to move over her body. As they made love she seemed to be drawing him down into her and when the climax came he cried out like a sudden death pressing his body deeper into hers as she twisted under him. He seemed to feel strength go out of him and lay there, covering her, exhausted, for what was only a few moments but felt to them both as if ages passed. Eventually he lifted his head and kissed her. Then he sat up, thinking that if all the world had gathered to watch they wouldn’t have noticed. He bent over her and caressed her with his lips. ‘You’re a wicked woman, leading young lads astray in the woods.’
‘Love you.’
‘I could start all over again but I’m getting hungry and we ought to go if we’re going to find anywhere to eat. Come on now.’ The woods seemed even darker in their noon stillness as she led the way back and the heath, when they came out onto it again, was drained of colour under a milky sky. Looking round he felt a different person from the one who had followed her into the trees that morning, stronger, more sure of himself though why this should be he couldn’t decide and anyway they were soon on the road again, running along beside the heath, once glimpsing two gipsy caravans, a tribe of ragged children and two dusty-coated horses who didn’t lift their cropping muzzles as the car spun past. They had lunch at a pub, set back from the road, where the beer was still drawn from the wood and they could put away pasties and bread and cheese while a few locals talked horse sense in a corner under the dart-board. A notice in the window had said ‘No Gipsies’, and Matt would have liked to have gone on but time was running out if they wanted food. The couple behind the bar seemed cheerful obliging people and he wondered why they had put up such a notice. Perhaps it was the customers who didn’t like gipsies or perhaps there was something about them, fighting when they’d had a few too many or not washing over much. He felt his old indignation rising but knew there was nothing he could do in this context. ‘I don’t get it. There aren’t many of them and they’re fairly harmless apart from petty crimes. What do they represent for us that makes us so afraid of them? Is it their nonconformity, finding an echo in us so that we become frightened that we might chuck everything up and go native as they used to call it. I remember as a child they used to come round selling, the old women with baskets of flowers and clothes pegs, and I was terrified of them because they were so different. Witches I suppose.’
‘I’ve always rather liked them, and thought I’d quite like that way of life if I’d been born to it. In the same way I’d have liked a bargee’s life on the river, the freedom of it and being outdoors most of the time.’
‘Instead of which you sit in a little office drawing pots all day in smoky old London. But they’re dirty and irresponsible.’
‘Are they? I don’t know any so I couldn’t really say except that it’s the life that appeals to me. Why can’t people be allowed to be individuals any more?’
‘Is it because we’re outside society in a sense that we find it easier to think like this than the average man who’s got everything to lose or thinks he has if everyone doesn’t keep the rules. Funny how the word dirty always gets tacked on to the outsider whatever he is: Jew, Irish, queer, black. Perhaps it’s the old idea of the scapegoat loaded with the sins and filth of the whole community before he’s driven out into the desert?’
‘If so it’s a relic of the primitive people ought to be taught to recognise before we all do ourselves harm. But how do you ever teach that kind of thing?’
‘Just knowledge, knowing more and more about ourselves and making sure that knowledge gets down to the level where it can be used. You just have to keep on even when people say you’re mad, obsessed. Progress just isn’t made any other way. Come on, let’s go and see these two friends of yours, find out if they’ve got anything to add to the puzzle.’
She looked at him questioningly. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I can’t explain exactly. I feel as if I’m gradually piecing something together that’ll push me along some new way. Not a final answer or anything starry-eyed like that but a direction, something that answers the moment. Growing pains I expect. I’m about to become adolescent so watch it.’
Something I never quite understand.’
‘What’s that?’
‘How you seem to yourself.’
‘Maybe you only see what you want to see?’
‘I don’t think so because then I’d be proved wrong in the end and that doesn’t happen, at least not very often. I just wait and take things as they come as you know and usually it comes round to my way, in its own time and style of course as you have to know things in your way not in mine.’
‘Can people know something in different ways and yet it still be the same thing, still be true?’
‘I believe so.’
‘And what about Stag?’
‘She’s hidden any faculty she had for knowing in any way at all. It needn’t have been so but there you are, she made her choice. Look we’re coming to the kennels now through those gates. You’ll see the house at the end of the drive.’
He heard the dogs even before he drew up at the door and switched off the engine. ‘My God, I wouldn’t fancy any burglar’s chance of creeping in here unnoticed. What a racket! I hope they’re all well-fed. I’d hate to end up as a dog’s dinner even if it does have a pedigree as long as my arm.’
The door was flung open and a horde of small brown sausage dogs dashed itself at their feet and legs, recoiled yapping and snarling and bounced back to the attack. ‘Kiki down, Mim be quiet, damn dogs, down! Rae darling, it’s marvellous to see you. Franchie! Where’s my stick? I heard the car, or rather the dogs heard it first of course; they always do my dear. Kiki! Do come in, if you can get in that is. They’ll settle down when they get a bit more used to you. Have more than one dog my dear and they become a pack, believe me.’
‘This is Matt.’
‘And I’m Feathers darling, everyone calls me that. It’s stuck so long now I can hardly remember what my mother used to call me. Bill’s out in the garden somewhere. You know what she is Rae dear. She’ll be in later and we can have some tea. You will stay won’t you? We see so few people stuck out in the depths here but it’s the only thing you can do if you’re not going to be fighting law suits with the neighbours all the time, just don’t have any my dear, at least if you want to keep dogs. You see they’re settling now, provided you don’t move your feet or stand up or anything they’ll be alrigh
t now they’ve got used to you. Rae dear you look marvellous. What have you been doing with yourself? You must tell me all the news. You’ll excuse me being in these old slacks and my hair done up like a pudding in a cloth but, as I say to Bill, what’s the use of trying to look like Dietrich when you’re nothing but a damn kennel maid. You know me Rae, I like to look smart. It goes right against the grain when I think what I’ve been and done in my time but here I am. She’s got her way and buried me in the country. Not that I’m complaining. After all they’re my dogs. Stop it Kiki! You’re staying with Stag I suppose. How is she? We never see her you know even though she’s so near and such an old friend of Bill’s. Our worlds just don’t touch. In fact my dear, the only person we do see much of is Sally Wilmot. She’s doing a lot of showing you know. Done frightfully well too with some of her dogs. Got a small riding school too and shows for other people. Absolutely raking it in. Must be worth a fortune and hardly spends a penny except on the animals. Still what is there to spend it on down here. We go into Lexbourne sometimes but they’re not really my kind of people. You know me Rae, I like a bit of fun, a few high kicks. Well I’m used to it but that place is as dead as Manchester on a wet Sunday and I’ve seen that a few times I can tell you. By nine o’clock they’re all tucked up in their bathchairs in the lounge watching television. And the others, the crowd Stag runs with, all business and money, they’re not my kind either so there isn’t really much life if you know what I mean.
After all, by the time I was seventeen I was working non-stop in variety at Leicester Square and what I didn’t learn about life, abortions, queers, prostitutes in those four years my dear just wouldn’t fill a sixpenny programme. That’s where they first called me Feathers, after the act as you might say. I used to go straight home and tell my mother everything and she’d gasp with horror and say, “Keep away from theatrical parties.” You remember my mother don’t you Rae? She was very hard you know; a will like steel and used to throw hysterics just to get her own way. I never had her love, not up to the day she died. I fought her for it, begged her for it, even went and nursed her for months hoping there’d be something at last but there wasn’t a word. She knew what she was doing all the time too but that was how it was between us. When I was a kid, you know, I often used to think that maybe she wasn’t my mother at all, I mean what natural mother bundles a child off to a convent in Scotland at three? I wouldn’t do it to the dogs, even Bill wouldn’t and she’s not as soft about them as I am. She’s out there concreting you know. Mucking around with shovelfuls of sand and cement and buckets of water just the same as ever. Something about it must give her a feeling of security I suppose. Damn useful in this game I can tell you. Don’t know how I’d have managed if I’d had to employ men to come and do it all. Now she’s building a new shed for the next batch of pups and every bit has to be perfect, absolutely bloody perfect. You’ll have to excuse my language, I swear like a stableboy these days I’m afraid, cut off from civilisation out here. You know when I first saw her I said, “Don’t tell me anything about yourself. I know all about you. You ought to be in a garden growing cabbages and things.” I could see it even through the uniform. You were just a child in those days Rae, I don’t know if you remember. She’s made this house and everything beautiful, laid the paths built the conservatory and everything has to be bedded in concrete my dear as if it had to last for ever. No sentiment, no romance.
You remember how we met? Stag had all the army, at least that’s what it seemed like when I walked into that huge lounge her mother had at Oak Lodge. Lovely rooms they were you know and some gay old times we had there. So understanding her mother, didn’t give a hoot about convention. She was pretty good to me too when I was so ill that winter. Flu three times my dear and the last time I collapsed on the stairs and came to at three o’clock in the morning in an absolute bath of perspiration with my poodle licking my face. The doctor didn’t come for hours and when he did he told me I’d a temperature of a 103, probably had it for days. The poor old devil was rushed off his feet, it was a shocking winter, everyone went down with something. The war I suppose. Anyway he dropped dead of a heart attack a week or so after so I couldn’t really blame him for taking his time. Why am I telling you all this? Oh yes, so there I was weak and lonely, apart from the poodle, and along came Bill as the song goes or was it Jim? It was terribly romantic at first, the uniform and the war and all that. We used to go to the House quite a bit in those days. It was rather sophisticated with a piano and tea at little tables. Then the last time we went it was full of youngsters in teddy-boy suits and a jukebox in the corner going wah, wah, wah and I said to Bill, “Come on,” I said, “this is no place for us,” and we’ve never been back since. Well darling someone who’s auditioned for Maid of the Mountains as a mezzo soprano finds all this modern noise absolutely hideous. I might just as well go out to the sheds and listen to the dogs howling for all the sense it makes to me.
Course it was about that time that the penny dropped when I was working at the London Coliseum and auditioned for Maid of the Mountains. There were two girls in the front of the house who’d had a bet about me for fun and they took me to a night club. Well it opened my eyes I can tell you, in fact the first couple of times they were coming out on stalks my dear. Eventually I got asked to dance by various people and curiosity killed the cat. Then like the green kid I was I thought I’d made a marvellous discovery, something absolutely new and I ought to go home and write a book about it until some woman told me I was a snob and threatened to black my eye if I asked her any more questions. Fortunately one of the girls who’d had the bet saw I was fascinated and heading straight to make a damn fool of myself before I was very much older and she took me under her wing, mothered me you might say and I lapped it up like a kitten on cream. All those years at boarding school and no affection from mother made me an absolute sucker for anything like that. Not that I didn’t have a relationship at school but there was never anything physical in it if you see what I mean. It was all very spiritual and emotional.
I think I’ve told you the story before Rae. I suppose I was about five when it first happened. It was St. Patrick’s night. We little ones slept in a dormitory with a long corridor leading off. It must have been a laird’s castle at some time, a great big old house with panelled walls and dark recesses and ceilings that, as a child, seemed miles above your head. I hadn’t been in that dormitory long. Before then I slept with the other babies but a few weeks before this night I’d been put up into one of the girls’ rooms. Being a Catholic convent there were a lot of Irish girls there of course and in the middle of the night, or that’s what it seemed to me, pitch dark, the most terrible din woke me and I found the room full of hooded shapes, all screaming and clashing metal basins and spoons together like weird instruments. One of them bent towards me. I leaped out of bed and ran across the room out into the corridor with them all after me, and I saw one of the senior girls standing under a light at the end of the corridor, looking absolutely calm and beautiful. I ran towards her and she went down on one knee and stretched out her arms to me so that I went straight into them. And I felt safe, perfectly safe. Everything I did after that I did for her. I was in love with her. If I danced it was for her. We were very idealistic: Liszt, art, music and passionate relationships all around us. I wanted to take the Catholic religion too and become a nun but my father wouldn’t hear of it so I left the convent at sixteen and went on the stage.
My God when you think of it, it was a hell of a contrast and I damn soon forgot about becoming a nun and fell for the pianist who was only a boy not much older than I was. He was very frail and feminine and we never even kissed but I still keep his letters. He was a marvellous pianist. You know I met him again ten years later, three years running in the same show together. He was the bear and I was the fairy. Can you imagine? We looked so different it was frightful. Then I gave up the stage and took a restaurant with my friend and I was perfectly happy for thirteen years even though she was having
meetings with different women behind my back. Not that I knew my dear though I did suspect once and threatened to pack the whole thing in, including the business. In the end she met someone else and let me down completely. I thought, that’s that, never anymore. Well do you blame me? I’d been absolutely sold on her and I took a very nasty knock. I was left with the cottage and that was all. Of course I had to have a solicitor to sort everything out and one day he rang me up and said he knew I wanted to let part of it to recoup a bit and asked me if I had anything against coloured people because he had a friend, a married woman, who wanted somewhere to stay. Should he send her along? Well you know me Rae dear, being in show business and all that I’ve no prejudices of that sort and anyway we’re all supposed to be the same in the eyes of religion so I said let her come. And she came and she seemed a very nice woman, respectable, not terribly black anyway and rather attractive, Indian or Anglo-Indian so I couldn’t see where the fuss was and I told her she could bring her things along. The next thing I knew there was a knock at the door and when I opened it there she was in slacks and motor-cycling kit with a bloody great bike leaning against the kerb. “Oh God,” I said, “not another one. I swore I’d done with all that.” “I’m afraid so. I thought you’d guessed,” she said and that was that.
I thought I was so damn safe with a married woman, shows you I must have been pretty green even then, and the first thing I did was to fall flat, head over heels, and I’ve never enjoyed myself so much. She was my sort, quite mad of course, and I’ve never been so alive. She’d wake me up in the middle of the night and say, “Come on, we’re going to see the dawn.” And out we’d go. I saw things then I’ve never seen since. Once there was a tremendous storm and we got up and went out with macks over our pyjamas and sat on the common with the lightning flashing round us and the rain streaming down our faces. I wonder we weren’t killed. Oh lots of things like that I remember. Well my dear you have to fill your mind with something while you’re being nursemaid to a brood of pups that look just like little rats and you think to yourself, at least my life wasn’t always as dull as this. Not that I don’t love them of course. Look at them lying there just like four little pigs. These are the favourites; there are lots more out the back but only these allowed into the house or we should end up like the Irish living with their animals all in one room. She was always like that, so alive. But it was short and bitter not short and sweet I’m afraid. In the end it turned sour and all that life got twisted. She accused me of terrible things; went for me with a knife one night. She had the most terrible temper and she’d be quite beside herself while it lasted. At last I said it was enough and I kicked her out. “I’ve had enough,” and she went, and that was that, and I cried myself sick. She came round one night a few months later. You never knew that Rae did you? She asked me to go back. You know I’ve always been psychic, always been interested in spiritual things. I’d had a dream the night before and woken up hearing this motor-bike roaring away in the distance, and I knew then it was her in the dream. I was sitting there the next night quite late, and suddenly I heard this bike exactly like my dream, and I went to the top of the stairs and called down, “Come on up.” She came up into the light, we had our sitting room upstairs in the cottage, and said, “My God, how did you know it was me?” I didn’t answer that one. Then she asked me to come back but so many things she’d done had left a taste in my mouth, and besides she was bi-sexual and I’ve never been interested in that. I’m truly what I am dear as you know and all that’s never appealed to me. So messy, especially contraception. Imagine feeling all romantic and having to dance round the room looking for a contraceptive in the middle of it. The very thought of it’s enough to put me right off. Oh I was lonely after she’d gone of course that’s why I was so ill, and then as I said along came Bill and she’s been just like a rock to me so I’m not complaining. We live our own lives, hers out there and mine in here and we get on pretty well. But she doesn’t know me. I’m a very old soul, about two thousand years I should think, and to me she’s just an adolescent. Now, just as if there isn’t enough to do, she’s taken on the odd jobs at the nursing home you can see over there, just beyond that wall. Goes and digs for them. Between the two gardens we’re practically self-supporting. They’re mostly mental patients, voluntary you know, but I often wonder who’s sane and who should really be in there when I look round at the people I meet from time to time. I’m a dreamer that’s my trouble. I can listen to music and have the most beautiful love affair in my mind. The great thing is of course that it can’t fade whereas the other sort, what some people would call the real thing, will always fade. I’ve learnt that much anyway.
The Microcosm Page 30