It was after two in the morning and he wanted to go to bed. He felt frantically in his pocket to make sure that he hadn’t lost his key. But it was there all right. He put it back and hurried on. But he kept his fingers round it, frightened that even yet he might lose it. He staggered onwards singing to himself to keep his courage up and now and again breaking off and swearing.
14
THE FOLLOWING DAY he stayed in bed late. He felt rotten. He didn’t want to go out and he didn’t want to eat. When he did get up he wandered restlessly from chair to window, now and again picking up a book and dropping it. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. A dull rage burned in him steadily and he felt as if he had been betrayed. He thought he’d do some work on his book but he couldn’t bring himself to touch it. Later on, perhaps. He knew now that he would have to find another Ann. This new Ann would not act as the one in real life had done. She would have to be much more composed and warm, less distant. To hell with her, he thought.
He sat in the chair and listened to someone pacing overhead. This was another man who lived alone and didn’t sleep much but sometimes brought friends to his flat who stayed up late and drank and sang. He didn’t even know what job the man did or whether he had a job. At nights he could hear him go downstairs, presumably to walk the streets endlessly, as his insomniac mind could no longer bear the closeness of his room.
There was nothing on TV worth watching. There was just the usual comic rubbish which made the mind blank after a while. Sometimes he thought of throwing the set away and going back to radio, but he didn’t. He was always hoping that one day or night an experience of true purity would emerge from the shadowy rubbish on the screen, that it would appear like a true great picture, calm and pure and glowing and immediate, such that for ever afterwards he would remember it. The only thing of that quality he had seen was Citizen Kane but that had only been one experience in years.
In the course of the soggy afternoon the doorbell rang and he ran to it, half hoping that it might be Ann, but it wasn’t. The stair was dark, and the day rainy and wet, and the window on the stair dim and dusty. Standing at the door were a man and a girl both encased in plastic raincoats. He wondered at first whether he ought to know them but it turned out that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The girl whose plastic coat streamed with rain, said:
“We are from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Are you interested in religion? Are you at all interested in religion?” Her dull zealous eyes examined him. The tall thin youth stared at him. There was a carbuncle on his face.
“I’m sorry, I …” He was about to shut the door. The woman said, “What do you think about peace? Do you think man will ever find a way to peace?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t really …” He still burned with rage but he couldn’t bring himself to shut the door in their faces. Dixon would never get involved in situations like this, ridiculous pseudo-religious dialogues on a dusty dark stair.
“Have you ever thought about the Meaning of Life?” she said. He almost burst out laughing. What a ludicrous question! Who did these people think they were? Did they have a monopoly on the Key to the Universe in Six Easy Lessons? What did they think he was, some silly moron who had never read a book, who never thought about anything beyond food and drink? In what closed world did they live? Imagine being so humourless as to ask such a question! He noticed that the light from the stair window was getting dimmer and switched the electric light on. In the harsh light he saw the rain dripping steadily from their yellow plastic coats. The two faces sprang suddenly into focus.
Suddenly for the first time the youth spoke. He had a stutter. He spoke quickly and nervously, “Don’t you think that the Lord’s disciples showed us how to live in peace?”
“I thought they quarrelled among themselves,” said Tom contemptuously. The girl looked at him in surprise as if some warning signal had been received by her dim mind.
But the tall youth continued, “But Christ was God. He was the Son of God.”
“Lots of people think they are God,” said Tom as cuttingly as he could. “People in asylums think they’re God. They also think they are made of glass.” He nearly said, “They may even think they are Jehovah’s Witnesses.” What an absurd situation. What would Dixon think of it? Would he have quoted Voltaire at them?
The youth smiled in a sickly manner and the girl smiled too but more warily. Tom suddenly thought, I wonder if I can use this in a novel, and was immediately interested. At that moment he didn’t see them as they were, but rather as characters, as types. He wondered. Do they have a car? Do they travel about? Are they trained?
“You seem an intelligent man,” said the girl. “Do you think man is capable of solving his problems alone?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Tom. “I don’t know and I couldn’t care less.”
“But what about the starving people of the world?” stuttered the youth. “What about pollution?”
“I don’t know anything about them,” said Tom. “More wars have been caused by religion than by anything else. That is one thing I know.”
The girl, who looked pale in the bleak light, said in a more companionable tone, “What do you do yourself then?” She seemed puzzled by him, by his bearing and behaviour.
At this point he didn’t know what to say. He had been about to say, “I am a writer,” but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. The claim suddenly sounded presumptuous. He wondered if Dixon would have said it, and thought that perhaps he would. Dixon would have the right hauteur. Dixon would have the correct contempt for this charade.
“I don’t do anything,” he said at last.
They looked at him almost in surprise.
Then the man said, “We call round at intervals. We could discuss this with you, if you like. Man cannot live on his own without anyone. We could talk to you and your wife.”
“I haven’t got a wife,” said Tom and again felt a certain emptiness. Why was he confessing his affairs to these people? It occurred to him that it was odd not to have a wife.
The youth, who had a prominent Adam’s apple, was saying, “Man cannot live except by each word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”
Tom thought, I don’t have a wife, and I live alone. Have these people been sent to judge me on this dull afternoon? Why were they interrogating him anyway? What right did they have to ring his bell and ask him these silly questions? Invading his privacy.
He heard himself shouting, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” For some reason he associated them with the Reader’s Digest.
“I see,” said the tall youth down whose coat the rain was streaming on to the landing, on to the scruffy rug.
The girl said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “Man cannot live by bread alone. That’s what it says in the Bible. The disciples died happily. We know that. That’s evidence, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s not. It’s not evidence of anything. We don’t know that they died happily. Buddhists have died happily in Vietnam. They burned themselves. That doesn’t prove anything.”
What was he doing talking to them anyway? What would Kafka have said to them? He despised their minds so much. He didn’t understand what they were doing there, what he was doing there.
And yet he felt guilty. They looked so wet, encased in their transparent plastic coats. Perhaps he ought to invite them in. The thought surprised him, because it had never occurred to him before, though in fact there had been gipsies and tinkers at the door in the past, especially one bedraggled woman with two children who was looking for shoes. He hadn’t given her anything.
He said, “Would you like to come in for a minute?”
“No, thank you. It’s all right. Thank you all the same,” said the girl. “We have a few houses to do yet.”
“Thank you,” said the stuttering youth. “We have here a magazine. You may have heard of it. It’s called the Watchtower.”
He stretched out his hand for it and
she said, “It costs five pence.” He gave her the money and took the magazine.
They seemed to be finished with him and he watched them walk downstairs into the rainy afternoon. He took the magazine into his room and glanced at it. It had articles with headings like “Christian Tinker tells about her Conversion”. He glanced briefly at the magazine and threw it into the waste paper basket.
He felt terribly restless and didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t settle down to write. The day had been wasted. He felt that he was struggling inside a big black cloud that was overwhelming him. Above him the man paced steadily. The bulb in his ceiling vibrated.
No, he must write. He must try to write, whatever happened. He must get this out of his system, whatever it was. He must continue, that was all there was to do. Anyway he couldn’t go out, it was too wet. It was dull and muggy, sapping his energy. He must try and create something. He must continue with what happened to Dixon when he met Sheila again. He began to write and as he did so the dim world changed again and became a concentrated small intense glow. He knew the writing was not very good but perhaps if he worked at it later, if he polished it, he might make something of it. The thing to do was to carry on anyway. That was all there was to do.
15
The fact is, thought Dixon, I’ve neglected the flat a bit, and as he thought this he also recalled Yeats’s dictum about the perfection of the art or of the life. Now and again he would go out and buy flowers and put them in vases on the piano or on the table. Yellow was his favourite colour. He liked nothing better than to open the window in the morning and let the air into the house. He felt like a schoolboy when he entered the flat first. He luxuriated in the idea of total freedom. There was no one he would have to talk to; his mind could blossom in secrecy without interruption. He wouldn’t be caught in minefields of silly quarrels which blew out of nowhere and illuminated him in an explosive silly light. But that was at the beginning. As time passed he felt a central emptiness and he even missed those same quarrels, those untidinesses, those ragged short-tempered bursts. For all around him was a perfect silence which was more than mortal could bear.
Still there was no denying that it was a comfortable flat and he could work all day if he wanted to. The people he met on the stair now and again belonged to a good class. They carried umbrellas and wore bowler hats. They looked sleek and prosperous. They nodded politely, but they looked as if they were in a hurry to get to somewhere where they had important work to do. As for himself, he was running into difficulties with his book. Some of the easy flow of his imagination seemed to have gone. He wasn’t satisfied with the inhabitants of his fictional Cultured City, they seemed to have become rather priggish, and he found it difficult to visualise them clearly or to take them seriously. Their concerns lacked urgency and realism. Was that because his own concerns lacked urgency? Was it simply because he had moved into a new place? Surely it couldn’t be as simple as that?
His life, until the time he had moved into the flat, had been in some ways enclosed, in others stormy. It was true that his wife had been silly and quarrelsome but at the same time she had contributed a necessary abrasiveness to his life. She had put the life into his chiselled sentences. Without her they would have been marmoreal. On the other hand, things had become more and more unendurable. She had expected him to take her out more and more and he couldn’t be bothered. She had taken to giving parties to which she had invited young sarcastic people who took nothing seriously, least of all art. They lived from hand to mouth, from moment to moment, they weren’t at all creative but they lived off creative people. She had cultivated a sadistic streak as if she had begun to hate and wished to destroy him.
At one time she herself had played the piano but had given it up. She never read anything but the books of fifth-rate writers who also happened to be best sellers. His life had been lived on a razor’s edge. He could feel her brooding like a thunderstorm at the edge of his life, he could feel her contempt. But now she wasn’t around him: there was space everywhere but the space had lost its mortal pathos, its flickers and storms of opposition. He had to fill the space with shapes and he found he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t sleeping very well. More and more he needed someone who could give him peace. But at the back of his mind there was a lonely unsleeping crystal which ticked out the message that everything must be perfect, that he was a member of an elite.
He had plenty of money; there was no problem there. The problem was how to keep writing and maintain that world, which was his alone and the reason for his being. Sometimes he wondered whether the growing untidiness of his house was symbolic of something but he shied away from the thought.
One day Sheila came to see him. She rang the doorbell and he opened the door. She was wearing a fur coat and red shoes. He thought of her suddenly as Little Red Riding Hood come through the forest of the city to his door. She had brought a box of biscuits.
She sat down shyly looking around her. The lounge, he realised, wasn’t too bad. There were glass cases full of books carefully arranged and there was a vase with daffodils on the table.
“I shall make you some coffee,” he said excitedly.
“If you like, I’ll make it,” she said and he allowed her to. He found pleasure in watching her as she moved about the kitchen. There were some unwashed dishes in the sink and she washed these while he sat in a chair. Her motions, he noticed, were calm and precise.
They took their coffee into the lounge and sat down and he talked. She seemed shy and self-conscious when she wasn’t doing anything.
“Did you have a busy week?” he asked.
She said there had been an inspector and that he had gone over everything she had done. He had been full of airy suggestions. Good God, he thought, what a terrible life. His own memories of school were of being taught Greek and Latin by a fanatical slim man with a moustache, who had no doubt whatsoever that the Greeks and Romans had represented the real values of civilisation and that everything since then had been a drastic decline into barbarism. He didn’t think she would know any Latin or Greek.
She seemed frail and precious as he looked at her, and yet also part of the real world which he knew so little about, especially in recent years. She was out in the dust and the conflict.
He offered her one of his books which was called The Changeless Crystal and she glanced at the first page or two. This was the one about the monk who had left the monastery and gone on a journey through the forests. He couldn’t make out what she thought of the blurb. He had an idea that she didn’t read many books. After a while he didn’t know what to say to her. Should they go out for a walk? He wondered what it meant to her to be an orphan, to have no one at all in her world. He had had someone whom he didn’t like. But to be totally alone must be a real bereavement.
There were long silences. He thought sometimes that she was rather awed by him and that she wasn’t sure whether she ought to talk about her own concerns in case he found the topic trivial. But in actual fact he did want her to talk about herself. He was starved for the minutiae of existence. He encouraged her to talk about some of the people she met. He felt as if he were becoming exhausted by the flat, its vases and flowers and pots and pans. As he sat there he suddenly thought that he missed the abrasiveness of life mediated through his wife. He felt inferior to her in a way.
He took out a chess set and began to show her how to play. That first afternoon he spent naming the pieces for her. He didn’t like playing chess against people. He much preferred to solve academic problems, especially two movers, at which he was quite adept. Chess he found restful but rather dry and therefore he didn’t play it much. They sat for an hour while he taught her. “Next time,” he said, “we’ll play a game.” He thought that he was a teacher too and wondered how she had assessed him in that capacity. He was patient with her though he wasn’t usually very patient. And as they played they talked.
She told him about her flatmate who had various boy friends and how she had been engaged three o
r four times but had broken off each engagement. She said that her flatmate insisted on giving parties on which she spent a lot of money. She was very beautiful and had many friends.
“I don’t suppose she’s any more beautiful than you are,” he said, trying to put conviction into his voice but failing, since he didn’t really believe that she was beautiful. She was pretty and calm and nice, but she wasn’t beautiful. Or rather her beauty was of a different order from that which he presumed her flatmate had.
At one point she arranged the flowers in the vase for him while he stood beside her in the breeze, which blew through the window and played with her hair. She looked suddenly transient and he was pierced by a strange pang such as he hadn’t felt for many years.
“Tell me about your parents,” he said.
“My father was a school teacher,” she said. “He taught history and he was a good teacher and a perfectionist. He would spend night after night correcting piles of exercise books. He believed implicitly in the value of what he was doing.”
Her mother wasn’t at all like that. She despised her mother, who thought that with his ability her father should have gone further and was inclined to ridicule him. She, that is her mother, was a philistine and never read a book. Her father had been a very handsome man, distinguished looking, with a high forehead and a pale face. He looked very scholarly and walked with a slight stoop. When he died her mother went to pieces, realising that she had depended on him more than she had thought. That was really very odd. During his lifetime she had appeared the stronger of the two, finding it easy to make decisions. But then she had utterly collapsed.
She stopped talking for a moment and then said: “What are you writing just now?”
He told her a little about the book as far as he had gone, though he didn’t like to do so. She listened attentively but didn’t ask any questions. When he had finished she went through and washed the coffee cups. She straightened one of the pictures.
Goodbye, Mr Dixon Page 9