Yet he felt more driven than driving. He had no wish to exhaust himself day after day, but he went on doing so, drawn on, it seemed, by the landscape itself. It beckoned and bullied, demanded that he go farther and farther into its heart and heat, its dryness, dazzle, harsh blistering beauty. He would find himself suddenly taking dirt-roads into the mountains on sheer impulse, frightening himself with the possibility of a breakdown thirty or more miles from the main road, wondering at the impulse but not resisting it, aiming for small towns that the map marked in tiny lettering and which turned out, more often than not, to be ghost towns, and not even towns at all, merely huddles of miners’ huts now collapsed and ant-ridden, the paint peeled quite away, if there ever had been paint, the brief attempt at habitation mocked by the cacti and lizards, mocked above all by the sun, battering at the rotten shells put up against it, dismissing them back into the desert with contempt. He would get out of the car and watch the reclamation going on, the desert resuming the few square yards the miners had taken, the wood and the corrugated iron at one with the skeletons of cattle and horses which he saw from time to time like warning signs beside the road. There were skeletons of men there, too, somewhere, which would never be found. He would get back into the car and drive on. Sometimes he would pass a ranch or a single inhabited house, with a wooden lavatory in its yard and a man or a woman standing in the doorway. They would never wave, only watch as he drove slowly past, a white cloud of dust settling for miles behind him. There never seemed to be any children in these lonely houses.
Until these last few days he had regarded himself as reasonably well travelled. He had been to most of the major European cities, he had crossed over the Alps and tunnelled beneath them, he had seen the great rivers and the great cathedrals. He had thought of landscape as something to be enjoyed and actually taught himself to enjoy it, gaining considerable pleasure from looking out across the plain of the Po or up at the Alps and Pyrenees. But enjoyment was not the word for his response to the American west. In Europe, he decided, one always felt in charge, Europe was rolling, for the most part, cultivated, one had the sense that man had lived there and tilled the soil for generation after generation, that he deserved his sense of belonging. The age-long process of cultivation had created a bond between man and landscape that was harmonious and satisfying. In country towns, particularly, the sense of harmony was strong, where back-gardens faded imperceptibly into fields and streets into country lanes. And about the great industrial cities one felt a certain human triumph: by the time man came to build them the land was tamed and offering no resistance.
Here, there was no sense of harmony. Here the landscape was in charge, gave orders, was brusque, brushing aside man’s claims to partnership. Harold felt that he was only just beginning to travel, to understand the relation between man and landscape. If Europe was compliant, the West was a rapist, the small towns seeming to perch precariously on the edge of its wrath. Nothing grew that was of any use to man. It was harsh country, hostile, threatening. But not even that, quite. It did not bother to threaten, any more than it attempted to seduce. It preferred, rather, to ignore. It seemed to belong to an order of things that had nothing but contempt for human beings, suffering their violations as it suffered the violations of snakes and insects. It was mineral, multicoloured, austere. It could be described only in geological terms, explained only by wind and water and sun and aeons, but the description and the explanation left its mystery untouched. Its age, how it had been formed, these scarcely mattered compared to its challenge to every detail of human civilization. It did not oppose, it confronted. It did not fight, it simply waited. It never had to fight. It seemed to gaze over the heads of people at something on a horizon beyond human sight, ignoring the pop and sputter of activity as men tried to make it look down with roads and dams and dynamite, gouging at it for gold and silver and copper and iron, slashing at it with bulldozers, dropping atomic bombs on it. But it never lowered its gaze.
There was nothing man could do about it but tear it down, and to tear it down would take aeons more than it took to put itself up. Wind and sun and water would break its mineral composure, its hard hostility, before all the gougings and scratchings of men and machines. And it was this, its invincible composure, that fascinated him, that compelled him to turn off the safety of main roads to search in the hills for traces of human life, traces which vanished almost as soon as the men who created them packed up and went away. It was frightening and exhilarating, it challenged him by day and entered his dreams at night, forcing him to acknowledge its superiority and his fear. There were no trees, only cacti and mesquite, no streams, only great rivers hidden in colossal canyons. It was a triumphant desolation.
And today he would drive across the most triumphantly desolate waste so far, the Mojave Desert. Before dark, he hoped to see the Pacific Ocean at Los Angeles.
He threw off the sheet and got out of bed, his back aching slightly from the hours of driving, of being driven. In the mirror in the bathroom he looked at himself with astonishment, his face and neck so tanned, looking so healthy. He wondered how he came to look so well when he felt so—but he did feel well. That was one of the many revelations of the West. And the change of continent had forced him to revise many of his automatic morning assumptions. In Craxton Street it had been axiomatic that he felt terrible, if not physically, then mentally, at the prospect of yet another day. But in Del Rio, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Globe, Arizona, each morning promised excitement, he was glad to be awake, to be up, to be alive. He supposed vaguely that he must be enjoying himself, yet again enjoyment didn’t seem to be the right word.
But whatever the word, happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, he experienced it, or all of them, as the sun slanted into the bathroom at the Magnolia Motel, Mesquite, Nevada.
Forcing himself to leave the tanned face in the mirror, he went to take a shower, singing his new anthem: “God save old Dangerfield, Long live old Dangerfield, splendid old poop.” He beat his chest for the drum-roll. “What am I doing here? Where do I go from here? Looking for auburn hair! God save the mark!”
What had made him decide in the end was something so irrelevant, so absurd, that he still couldn’t quite believe it. Under a shower in the Magnolia Motel, Mesquite, Nevada, it seemed as far away in time and space as the momentous decisions of childhood, taken with a breathless lack of concern for the consequences—going up the arts side instead of the science side at school, for instance. His sole reason for choosing the arts had been a boy called Grierson on whom he had just developed an overwhelming crush. The crush was over within a week, but the decision, with all that followed, was irrevocable. Perhaps all the really vital decisions in one’s personal life were made on such whims.
It was certainly something of a whim which had finally made him decide to come to America, though calling Mrs Fanshaw a whim was putting it a little strong. She was more of an anti-whim. When she had returned from Poole to the debris of her flat she had, naturally, wished to know the full details about the fire, and Harold had given them to her. She was an untidy woman of about fifty, and she made her living by some doubtful form of spiritualism in the evenings. She was partial to a drop of stout now and then, she confessed, but her chief means of sustenance was very strong tea without sugar or milk, drunk near boiling-point. She scoffed at those who told fortunes from tea-leaves, but said tea gave her the uplift she needed for getting in touch with the astral plane. She wore dressing-gowns of various colours during the day, and only put on a dress to go out to her séances or to do her shopping. There were two dresses, both shapelessly old-fashioned and apparently run up by an apprentice welder out of the linings of old curtains: one was green and the other was mauve, and both were dirty. She liked to tell Harold what kind of aura she had, but he could never remember, except that it was pretty good. Her only other topic of conversation was her sister, whom she appeared to detest. Of Mr Fanshaw, supposing him to have ever existed, nothing was ever said at all. She would, h
owever, give gloating accounts of her sister’s illness, going into details which Harold felt could well have been left to the autopsy which must take place, it seemed, any day now. But the sister kept miraculously going, and Mrs Fanshaw maintained that she would never die, her aura was as strong as an ox, and anyway she was just keeping alive to thwart Mrs Fanshaw of her “rights”. Exactly what these “rights” were was never made clear, but they seemed to have been assumed by Mrs Fanshaw with the idea that when her sister did eventually die she would be the sole heiress. By not dying, therefore, the sister cheated Mrs Fanshaw.
After Harold had given her the details of the fire three times, he refused to give them again, much to her chagrin. However, one evening, as he was sitting in his flat glooming over the back gardens, there was a knock at the door and Mrs Fanshaw asked him if he would mind coming and telling the story just once more for the benefit of her friend Betty who had just dropped in. Harold obliged. Betty was a crumpled rag of a women who might have been anything between forty and seventy and who kept dabbing at her eyes with a filthy handkerchief which she kept tucked in the vee of her blouse. The vee came well down into the cleft between two outsize breasts, and Harold found himself fascinated by the amount of tucking and tidying which went on between dabs.
He was less fascinated, though, by the conversation that followed his recital of the fire. After a good deal of “Ooohing” and “Well-I-never” and “Did-you-ever-hear-the-like?”, there was some trenchant criticism of the landlord and some mystical reflection on Mrs Fanshaw’s good fortune in being away at the time of the fire.
“But if you’d been here,” said Harold, “you’d almost certainly have been woken sooner than I was, and there might well not have been a fire at all. Those wires had been smouldering for some time, the fireman said. You’d have noticed, all right.”
“I doubt it, Mr Barlow,” she said, and as she doubted her head swayed back and forth and her underlip peeled towards him. “I doubt it very much, don’t you, Betty? My aura is very bad to do with fire. Isn’t that right, dear?”
“Oh, yes,” said Betty, applying the handkerchief, “I’d say your aura is one of the worst for fires I’ve ever seen, to tell you the truth. One of the very worst. I don’t honestly remember a worse one, to tell you the truth.”
“There you are,” said Mrs Fanshaw triumphantly. “And she’s seen a good many auras in her time, haven’t you, Betty? You know a bad one for fire when you see it, don’t you?”
“To tell you the truth,” said Betty, “I do. And I don’t mind telling you, Mrs F., I’ve never seen one like yours. If I were you, I’d be very careful about fire.”
“Oh, but I am,” said Mrs Fanshaw. “Ever since I got back and saw the mess—it was terrible, Betty, the mess, really terrible—ever since I got back and saw it I’ve been telling myself, Ethel, I’ve been saying, you be careful about fire. You remember what the swami said.”
“I thought swamis were to do with something else,” said Harold. “I mean, not spiritualism.”
“I used to be a theosophist once,” said Betty. Harold wasn’t sure if this was meant as a clarifying remark, or simply as a piece of autobiographical data.
“Yes,” said Mrs Fanshaw, “the swami told me to beware of orange and red. And I always have.”
“That proves it, then,” said Betty. “To tell you the truth, Mrs F., if I was the man from the Pru I wouldn’t let you have one farthing of fire insurance. Not one farthing.”
“No more would I,” said Mrs Fanshaw. She looked thoroughly pleased. “But they couldn’t see an aura if you put it under their noses, those people. No sensitivity at all. Not a mite.”
“What kind of an aura do I have?” said Harold.
“To tell you the truth,” said Betty, “I’ve been watching you, and I’d say you weren’t a believer.”
“Does that mean I don’t have an aura?”
“Oh, no. You’ve got an aura all right. But to tell you the truth, Mr Barlow, it’s not considered right, not in the profession, to tell just anyone what their aura is. There’s no use telling people what they won’t put their hearts to understanding.”
“No,” said Mrs Fanshaw.
“I’m sorry I asked,” said Harold.
The two women looked at him suspiciously.
“Would you like me to give you a pamphlet?” said Mrs Fanshaw. Her lower lip was out again.
“Well, thank you very much, yes, I would.”
Mrs Fanshaw rose, wrapping her dressing-gown about her, and disappeared into the bedroom. When she came back she held about twenty small booklets, some no larger than a packet of cigarettes. “I want you to study these, mind, Mr Barlow,” she said. “There’s the secret of life in them, if you know how to find it.”
There was an uncomfortable seriousness in the room, which Betty broke by saying, “How’s the sister, then, Mrs F.?”
Harold rose to leave, but Mrs Fanshaw said, “Oh, don’t go, Mr Barlow, please. The tea will be ready in just a minute.”
He sat and listened as Mrs Fanshaw’s sister’s insides, stitched and stitched again by incompetent surgeons, amputated almost to extinction, saved when all hope was gone by plastic and tubes and rubber, weaker and weaker yet ever indomitable, adamantly refused Mrs Fanshaw her “rights”. There were a good many references to her “you know what, Betty”, and still more, with significant lowering of tone, to her “unmentionables” and her “what’s not for us to ask about”, but Harold guessed from the anatomical detail that he did understand that she had had three separate uteruses removed, something he did not altogether believe. There had, too, been simply appalling trouble with stones, and the gallbladder’s history would have made even a doctor feel queasy.
“You know,” said Mrs Fanshaw, “it’s a hard thing to say, and I don’t like saying it, but she’s got to die.”
Betty nodded religiously.
“It’s not as though she’s got much to live for, either, except to keep me out of my rights. What with her husband dead in the war—he had cancer, you know, went out to do his duty as an air-raid warden one night, and collapsed at his post on top of Woolworths. They took him straight to the hospital, but it was too far gone. All over everywhere, they said. And then there was only the one child before Iris had to have her you know what removed, and that child, Betty, believe me, she’s a terror. Been had up for shoplifting I don’t know how many times, and that’s not the worst of it, not by a long chalk. It’s a shame, too, them being respectable people, as you may imagine, not riff-raff. And then she had all this trouble with her insides. Of course, she doesn’t speak to Edith—that’s the daughter—not any more. That’s why I’m sure to inherit. It won’t be much, mind you, but every little helps. There’s the bungalow, for one thing. She owns that, I know, and it’s such a waste, her being in and out of hospital all the time. And then my mother left us both a little something, and I don’t think she’s spent it all. She did say once that she’d been having a bit of trouble raising the bail for Edith, but I knew she was lying. I could tell by her aura. And one time when she thought she was dying—and there’s been enough times like that, believe me—she did tell me she’d left everything to me, and would I try and look after Edith. I told her straight out, I said, Iris, you’re my sister, and that makes Edith my niece, and for the sake of the family I’ll do what I can, but you know as well as I do, I said, that there’s precious little anyone can do for that girl but marry her to a G.I. and hope she doesn’t come back.”
“You’re right there,” said Betty, with feeling. “The dirty little hussy.”
The kettle had boiled dry, but Harold was not allowed to leave until a new lot of water had been put on. “It won’t be a minute,” said Mrs Fanshaw, confidently.
Then it was Betty’s turn, and she made the most of it. Her trouble was her mother who was funny in the head, but they didn’t like to have her put away, which was what Mrs Fanshaw suggested, no, they didn’t like that idea, her being their own mother, when all was sa
id and done. Harold stopped listening when the tea appeared. Watching them stretch their necks over their cups, he had a sudden vision of how his life would almost certainly be spent. Not with Betty or Mrs Fanshaw, not even with Helen, but with one of the sisterhood, smeared, probably, with a little education and taste, and money, too, with luck, but with the same instinctive preference for death over life, the same determination to carry on or struggle through or bear up all their lives, and to be decent and British and basically rather admirable, but never to let go, never to let life touch them, keeping it always at arm’s length with lace curtains or privet hedges or brass knockers or “Trespassers will be prosecuted”. It was because Betty and Mrs Fanshaw were so unsuccessful, because their lives were so obviously sad and dismal, that they had any life at all. Deeply ordinary and possibly nice and certainly once respectable, they were now each other’s only prop of self-respect. Given a little more money, a little more luck, they would lack the little eccentricities that made them both intolerable and pitiable. Eaten with jealousy for the kind of life that they imagined should have been theirs, and perhaps once was, the eccentricities had been forced on them. It was because somewhere along the line luck and life had let them down, somewhere and somehow they had been deprived of the husbands with nice little jobs and small cars for the week-ends in summer, because they were deprived of what they thought of as their rights, that they were interesting, and worse, funny. And funny only in a pathetic way, without the selfconsciousness which could have made them genuinely funny, the lack of which made them, in fact, almost contemptible, so obvious their desires, so trivial their ambitions. They were so ordinary, so English, that Harold felt a wave of dismay, of horror. No, it wouldn’t be Betty or Mrs Fanshaw or Helen Gallagher, not for him, but someone basically the same. His whole life was leading towards marriage with a woman, of a different class, to be sure, but who would, in the last resort, feel the same trivial instincts, want the same security, the same respectability, which only these two middle-aged women’s failure to obtain revealed as nationally characteristic. He saw his mother suddenly sitting in Mrs Fanshaw’s place, Mrs Crawshaw in Betty’s. It was just a matter of luck and money who sat where, and it made no difference, for they were all the same woman, and they all wanted the same things.
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