“I’ll find it,” she said. And he knew she would. He had great confidence in her practical ability.
“I think I’d better pay for this,” she said decisively. He wasn’t at all angry and allowed her to pay, though it wasn’t really very expensive. She took out a small red purse and counted out the money with a serious expression on her face. She seemed very prudent and careful. He was sure that she looked after her money like a good housewife.
At the same time he was worried that she was taking pity on him as if he were someone whom Oxfam might help, on whose behalf Christmas cards might be printed. He felt vaguely related to Barnado’s Homes. And that did make him feel slightly angry. He determined that he wouldn’t wear his khaki coat next time.
When she went out he looked after her through the window. He saw her trim figure walking purposefully among the people on the pavement, people he didn’t know, and he watched her as a sailor might watch a ship on which he had once served with a certain sentimental wish that nothing terrible would happen to her, that in spite of everything she would outlast the storms and the treacheries of rocks. She looked quite capable of looking after herself, however, there was no question about that.
He tried to imagine a conversation between herself and Dixon and couldn’t. Dixon would never have attended such a lecture anyway. He didn’t quite know what Dixon would say to her but he felt that he must invent something. He felt responsible for Dixon and also responsible for her. He felt for the first time a twinge of irritation with Dixon. He ordered another coffee and stirred his spoon in it vaguely. It looked frothy and cheap and almost vulgar. She could certainly look after Dixon’s flat for him. For the first time he began to think that perhaps she was too good for Dixon but he pushed the thought to the back of his mind. Perhaps on the other hand Dixon might have grown discontented with beauty and elegance. He associated her with her wristwatch, working neatly and elegantly and dependably.
He stirred his coffee insipidly. At least he would see her at Shane and then he would understand her better. Technically she was an orphan; the two of them at least had that in common, for though his mother might still be alive somewhere, he thought of himself as an orphan. He thought of Crawford. Poor bugger. All that guff about The Novel and all those ridiculous questions. Perhaps he should try and find him. But he didn’t move from his seat. Crawford, he knew, was sure that he had done well, that his lecture had been a good one. He was incorrigible, sunny, deluded.
He rose from the table and left some money on it. He was already looking forward to the film—a combination of the old and the new—and smiling as he left the café.
9
THE GIRL’S NAME was Ann and, as she said, she lived with a flatmate called Mary. On the death of her mother—which occurred later than her father’s—she had concentrated exclusively on her teaching which she liked because she got on well with children. In any case there was nothing else that she could do. Whenever she read anything she did so with a view to using it in a project: she hardly ever read for pleasure. She didn’t think that Tom Spence could be a very good writer; she had in fact never met an author before, or anyone who even said that he was an author. She rather pitied Tom; for one thing he looked as if he neglected himself and didn’t have very much money. That khaki coat he wore was really dreadful. There was about him, however, a resentful, rebellious, throttled energy which she found rather exciting. The headmaster of her school was certainly very different. He wore conventional clothes and was always neatly dressed. He spoke very precisely and walked about with a sunny smile. The women in the school were also very conventional though there were one or two interesting young ones. She sometimes wondered whether in fact some of the older ones bored her, they were always going on about education and “what was best for the children” except for one waspish older one who smoked like a furnace and said that they should be “kept in their place”. Really, however, she preferred the children, their spontaneity, their habit of coming and telling her their secrets openly and nakedly, their strange animal naturalness. But otherwise she didn’t meet many people, certainly not men.
She didn’t know quite what to make of Tom Spence. For some reason he made her uneasy. He looked at her sometimes as if he wasn’t seeing her but someone else. She had noticed this particularly and it made her feel rather eerie. She had never been looked at in that way before, with that kind of remoteness. On the other hand she thought that he was safe enough. In fact he seemed in many ways naive. She was quite sure that he hadn’t seen much of the world: she herself had been to training college though not to a university. She had decided not to go to university, though she could have gone, because she wanted to earn money as soon as possible.
She was used to looking after herself. She was good at sewing and cooking. She saved a certain amount of money every month from her salary and put it in the bank. Her expenditure wasn’t high though she did spend some money of her own on books and magazines for the children—there was never enough material in the school and one needed so much nowadays. It wasn’t like the old days when they sat behind desks without moving and all they needed might be one or two books in a whole year. Now enormous numbers of books and magazines were necessary, massive amounts of information. The books had to be left lying about to attract them. She also bought newspapers, anything that would provide facts and data. Some nights she would spend hours looking out bits and pieces for a particular project. She ransacked libraries, made notes, listened to radio programmes. She had a small tape recorder as well as a record player.
While she made her way back to her flat she wondered why she had consented to seeing Tom Spence. Was it that she was growing bored with the people in the school? Was it that she was lonely? She didn’t really have enough time to feel lonely except sometimes at the weekends. Was it that she felt the danger of becoming a typical schoolmistress, such as one might see in caricatures, with a self-satisfied childish mind? Was it that she felt a spirit of adventure stirring in her? She didn’t really know much about Tom. For all she knew he might live in a slum, or he might have no place to live in at all. But the latter, she remembered, was not true; he had mentioned a flat. She couldn’t imagine what the flat was like, probably very untidy. Still she didn’t really believe in him as an author, though on the other hand, to be fair, that could have been said about many artists who had later become famous. And nowadays you couldn’t tell from their appearance what people were like: they all looked unwashed and untidy. Her own mind was very conventional and she liked to see people dressing properly.
But she found just the same that she was looking forward to going to the cinema. It was ages since she had been: she did watch a certain amount of TV, but again that was mainly so that she could extract information for projects. She liked to watch programmes about geography and animals, and Tomorrow’s World. But the cinema was different from TV. And the fact that he had invited her to the cinema made him safe enough. A dance hall would have been different: she might have had to think twice about that. Not that she didn’t care for dancing, but nowadays there was such a lot of fighting at dances. She didn’t even know where the dance halls were: her parents hadn’t approved of her going to dances alone, though she was allowed to go to the school dances. But she had no romantic memories of these, for while the other girls talked of their conquests she had sat or stood about very quietly. There was no doubt, however, that she envied them, all those pink fleshy attractive girls with their mirrors and their natural hunting kit. She couldn’t herself be like that and therefore there was no point in trying to be.
But if she was to go out with him she would really have to insist that he get rid of that khaki coat. He would look quite handsome in something more tidy and bright. Perhaps a red tie, a creamy shirt. He had very nice hair, curly and blonde; he could make something of that if he tried. She imagined herself refashioning him as if he were some property that belonged to her, a kind of doll whose clothing she could arrange and rearrange indefinitely. And really
he must shave. She stopped at that point, half amused at herself for inventing these ridiculous plans. After all, she might choose not to go out with him after the visit to the cinema. In fact she could quite easily not turn up even for that. He would have no means of finding her again: it was purely by chance that they had met twice. Or was it? How could one tell? Perhaps it was fated. She had stopped and was looking at a jeweller’s window which was packed with rings and bracelets. They all looked very expensive and elegant and there was a very fine gold wristwatch. She had never in her whole life been given a present of jewellery by a man or boy and at that moment she felt starved as if the thought had swum into her mind for the first time. After all she was twenty-seven and not ugly. She could see her trim figure reflected in the window of the shop among the rings and she knew that she was not ugly. It was just that her personality was not spacious or confident enough: it was just that she preferred the shade, and protection.
On the other hand he himself was a bit awkward and, she was sure, quite impractical and liable to spill things and fall over things. She wasn’t doing anything on that particular night anyway; she might as well go.
10
TOM SPENCE HAD a record player and two classical records. One was the 1812 Overture and the other was the Finlandia of Sibelius. He had bought them because he thought that with their help he might bluff his way through that aspect of Dixon’s personality. He thought of Dixon as a lover of classical music but he himself didn’t know very much of Mozart or Beethoven or Bach, and to be truthful didn’t particularly wish to explore them. His own favourite music was jazz followed closely by folk songs. He loved jazz and the more definite the beat the better he liked it. He considered it to be the greatest achievement of the twentieth century and liked the images which the music evoked in him, of cities lit by blue light, rainy streets, pianists and trumpeters in stuffy rooms. But at the same time he felt respect for Bach and Beethoven though he couldn’t appreciate their music. He had a special respect for Beethoven, some of whose biographical details he had read. Something formidable and massive there, he thought, though his own feeling was for wanderers, troubadours, people who lived on their wits. He suspected that Dixon didn’t like jazz: it would be altogether too smoky and primitive for him. Dixon would live among Mozartian music boxes, the elegances of the drawing room. Perhaps, however, Dixon didn’t like Beethoven either, perhaps Beethoven was too stormy for him, perhaps he preferred Mozart.
Tom would play the 1812 Overture a lot though he couldn’t make up his mind whether Dixon would like it. Still it was the only record that he had thought would be suitable at the time he bought it. He himself quite liked it though not so much as jazz or folk music. There was colour and narrative in it and he liked the skating, whirring, slightly metallic surge of the cavalry charges, etcetera. And also the sound of the anthems fighting each other to the death. Finlandia was different: that was slower and sadder and more leisurely. It gave an impression of empty space and dying light.
But when he had finished playing them out of a sense of duty he would play his jazz records and feel again the attraction of the spontaneous and the impromptu. The thing about jazz was that it sent your whole body dancing classical music had very little direct impact on him. The trumpets of jazz were different from those of Tchaikovsky, there was more courage in them, individual courage, a dancing, precarious, gay courage. They emerged out of the city and loneliness and desperate traffic. They had assimilated the city and were basically joyful. Perhaps that was why he liked them so much, because he himself hadn’t assimilated the city so that he could say, “My imagination is like plasticine. I can make and remake the city in any way I please.”
But he also liked folk music. He liked the strange harmonies that one got, the irreverence in some of them. He liked for instance ones like MacPherson’s Lament and, some months before, he had met in a pub—a haunt of folk singers—a man who had sung a song he had composed about the boxer Benny Lynch. But classical music he found dead, not to say boring. He couldn’t see the point of it, or ballet or opera. But the trouble was that he respected it and did not blame it, but rather blamed himself, as if he had an organ missing. There must have been something to all these people, Mozart and Beethoven, all these gigantic people, there must have been something to Michelangelo, da Vinci and Rubens and so on. But to him they seemed somehow statuesque, distant, composing or drawing or painting or sculpting for a different race, a larger, more solid race. They were like large boulders on a hill.
When he was young he used to read the comics and still did so now and again, though he wondered what Dixon would think of that. It occurred to him for the first time that though he himself often speculated about Dixon he had never asked himself what Dixon would think of him. Surely Dixon would disapprove of his reading the comics.
Tom liked the comics for the same reason as he liked jazz, their spontaneity, their unpredictable nature and also their bright colours, their vulgar yellows and crimsons. But he would never have told anyone that he loved reading them, that Desperate Dan was one of his heroes. When he was young, lying in bed with bronchitis, he used to read them by the hour. Sometimes, when he remembered that barrow episode, he thought that it was exactly the kind of thing that would happen to Desperate Dan, in that world where hats flew off, there were shouts of aargh and oops, and everything came right in the end. But he was often ashamed of all that and also the fact that he sometimes read picture books about the war. He felt that he ought to be reading better books, that he should be listening to classical music and that he shouldn’t be dwelling too often in that irresponsible world of crazy hosepipes and flung pies and dishelmeted policemen, all falling about in a crimson sky.
For this reason he kept all his comics locked away in a drawer and his books by Hesse and other authors carefully visible. Not that anyone visited much. But in case anyone did. Though at the same time he wasn’t so careful about hiding his jazz records. Jazz was respectable. There were columns about jazz in dignified newspapers, though none about comics. He thought of the jazz musicians as orphans trying to create music from the fragments of the city. He thought of them as vulnerable wanderers. Sometimes in the city where he lived he could see tricks of the light which reminded him of the precariousness and lovableness of jazz, vistas at the end of streets, unfinished glimpses.
But these visitations were not frequent. Most of the time the city was grey and dull and he only stayed in it because he could find bits of work to do there more easily than he could anywhere else. A lot of the time the city was dispiriting and desolating and ugly. Certainly not like the world of Dixon, not like the world of Mozart. The city was uncivilised.
After he had written the bit about Dixon meeting the girl he put on his record of Finlandia and tried to concentrate on it and decide whether Dixon would like it. He thought on the whole that perhaps it was too melancholy for Dixon, too pastoral, too northern. And yet he wasn’t sure. On the other hand the 1812 Overture almost certainly wouldn’t do. He would really have to borrow some Mozart. Perhaps Ann liked Mozart and had some records or knew where he could get hold of them. Perhaps she could tell him things that he didn’t know about, introduce him to a new area of experience, one which he could make use of in his writing. Though really he didn’t feel that she was at all cultural. She was probably not musical at all. On the other hand, he couldn’t imagine her liking pop songs, for example. And almost certainly not jazz.
For the tenth time he played the Finlandia while, in the house below, the untamed dog barked at his master, endlessly snapping its teeth. It was very odd that, really, he found himself thinking again. Perhaps that was how marriage was, his own mother and father, for instance, the latter trying to sit quietly and his own mother barking at him. Perhaps the man and the dog formed a strange marriage. “Bugger you,” he shouted down, at the same time taking off the record. “Why don’t you get rid of that dog? Do you need him so much? He ought to be taken somewhere and shot.” But every day the old man would pl
od along with the dog rearing up and snapping at him continually. How he could stand it was beyond Tom’s understanding, for the dog really looked ferocious. “Ah, to hell with you,” he said again and went over to the cupboard. He took out a packet of soup and began to make some. He had done one hour’s writing that day, which wasn’t really bad. He might get some more done before the night was over. He usually worked better at night, his mind felt clearer, and the dog didn’t disturb him. There was an eeriness about the night which he loved, and he would listen to the clicking of heels on the road, eventually fading into silence. Sometimes he would go to the window and look out at the blazing moon with its stunning clarity hidden now and again by a cloud, a big infertile stone which at the same time looked romantic and free.
11
WHEN TOM ARRIVED at the cinema Ann was there before him waiting. He saw her before she saw him, framed in the neon light, in the blue coat and hat which she had put on for the occasion. He stood watching her for a moment, reminded of a story which he had read in a newspaper about a husband and wife in their sixties who had met for the first time in a cinema and who re-enacted every year that meeting, he going to the row where he had met her and she waiting there for him. Dixon would have found this sentimental but Tom found the tale curiously moving. Dixon might have met someone outside the door of an opera house perhaps, but he couldn’t imagine him rehearsing that story in real life. He couldn’t imagine himself doing it either. He couldn’t imagine Dixon running, filled with joy as a sail with a breeze.
As he watched her she seemed to take on solidity, to grow more definite. She wasn’t particularly looking anywhere that he could see. She wasn’t even glancing at her watch. She was simply waiting patiently, serenely. As people milled about her, some studying the trailer and some going straight into the cinema, he thought of her as solid and vulnerable at the same time. She wasn’t aware that he was looking at her, and this made her endearing and fragile. But what filled him with a rare joy was that she was waiting for him. The world, the universe, steadied around her, took on shape and meaning. The very fact of her existence, of her waiting, was enough for that to happen. She was like a magnet which attracted filings. Abruptly, as if aware of the possibility of voyeurism in the situation, he moved forward. What a terrible thing to be looked at like that! For after all she wasn’t a rose or a stone, she was a human being. It was indecent to be trapped by his gaze in that ring of neon.
Goodbye, Mr Dixon Page 6