‘Get that down you, my dear.’
‘Oh darling, I couldn’t.’
‘No arguments. Eat up. Make a new woman of you.’
‘Oh darling.’
The new woman opened her mouth and ate all that was on her plate.
Lily has been almost silent since breakfast. She has held the hand of the placid Edward as if afraid he might yet make a break for it. He has thrown sticks for the dog and behaved like a gentleman, which perhaps he is. We will have to wait the few long weeks till Lily tells him the glad tidings of his approaching fatherhood. ‘Of course I cannot be sure,’ she will say, holding her breath to keep her belly flat, ‘but it’s almost definite.’ It is to be hoped that she does not ask Claude what it was he said to Edward when she and Julia were in the bedroom.
Lily and I arranged some time ago that we would meet in the Kardomah in extreme old age to discuss the outcome of our lives. Shebah, long since buried, will achieve resurrection through memories. From her island retreat off the coast of Scotland, Lily, if not grown bald, will shake her white head and lay a wrinkled hand upon my knee.
‘Tell me, Norman, do tell me, flower, what went wrong all those years ago, that weekend with Claude?’
Maybe I shall only remember the sunshine in the garden and the strip of bandage round the ankle of Shebah, her comic flag of truce, and the ham we had for lunch lying on a bed of lettuce leaves.
As Baudelaire tells us, There is nothing that is not misunderstanding. Claude is determined to take a photograph. The camera, like the gun, points at us all.
5
‘Why are they all friends?’ asked the woman. ‘They’re so different. All of them. Lily and Norman and the old woman.’ It was extraordinary how familiar they became when she named them like that.
‘Yes, they are different,’ agreed Julia, ‘though they all seem alike when they’re together. Claude seemed like them too, when they were together.’ She frowned. ‘I’m not like them at all.’
‘No,’ said Claude. ‘You’re not. You’re not like them, are you, girl?’ He looked thoughtfully at her. ‘You’re my own dear girl, that’s what you are.’
The man said loudly: ‘We really must be off. We’ve taken up a great deal of your time already.’
‘What takes up your time?’ asked Claude.
The man stared at him blankly.
‘What’s your line of business?’ persisted Claude. ‘Your job? Your racket? What puts the money in your pocket?’
‘I’m an insurance broker,’ the man said stiffly. He grew a little red in the face. ‘It’s an established firm. Originally, it was my father’s.’
‘All our problems,’ said Claude, ‘our mismanaged lives, point backward to influences in childhood.’
‘I dare say,’ the man said. He was beginning to perspire.
‘Take Lily, for instance,’ continued Claude. ‘When she complains that this one or that one doesn’t love her, what’s she really saying?’
The man fidgeted with his tie. Claude was looking straight at him, and he couldn’t think how to answer. He didn’t even know what the question was.
‘She’s saying,’ said Claude, ‘that they didn’t love her. She’s saying that her parents never loved her because they never could. She’s saying that if they didn’t love her then nobody else can, and she’s saying she doesn’t want anyone else to love her.’
The man stared at the floor. He felt he was in the middle of some sort of nightmare. He found the word ‘love’ acutely embarrassing.
‘Where’s the life we’ve lost in living, eh?’ shouted Claude. ‘Where are the Earls of Bushy, Bagot and Green?’
‘We really must go,’ the man said, speaking to his wife. ‘Come on,’ he ordered.
She ignored him. She was looking at the photograph. The old woman was sitting on a bench. There was a bandage round her leg …
6
SHEBAH
If there’s any sense in this, it eludes me. I find myself, almost, yes, almost – carried along by their general attitude of abandonment. They do it all with such an air, with such an absence of shame, with such complacency.
Was there even a feeling of reality in the way they picked me up off the ground this morning?
Do I, as Lily would have it, inhabit another sphere of existence altogether?
I’m sitting here in a garden, not alone for once (surrounded by scum), really very weary. I wish Lily wouldn’t keep throwing me those wan little smiles. I can’t bear her massive insincerity. Like this morning – not one of them daring to say a word to that swine Claude. Here, in all this luxury, to be shot at like an animal, hunted through the grass like some exalted form of game. It’s unbelievable and yet quite comprehensible.
Didn’t I run down Brownlow Hill – poor little me with my violin case under my arm, and all the gentile children calling after me ‘Persecutor of Christ … Killer of Jesus’?
And my poor father ruining his eyes, forever bent over the insides of cheap watches, giving his last crust of bread away to those damned relations of mine. Even cousin Reub wouldn’t believe the callousness that exists. Or am I being too generous on account of the blood link?
They are slaves who fear to speak
For the fallen or the weak,
They are slaves who do not choose
Hatred, suffering or abuse …
Oh my God, have I had my share of all three? The hatred from the women – those jealous, petty female impersonators with their tight calculating little minds and their dependence on men. During the war they hounded me from the Overseas Club – poor little me with my poor weak eyes – and still they were jealous of the way the men swarmed after me – me, with a tumour growing inside me the size of a football. How they begrudged me the solace of admiration. Teaching the men English, with my poor little education (now, which university did you attend?) and so witty and gay, giving them all leaflets for the concerts and shows, and crawling – yes, crawling – back to that concentration camp in Billing Street with Eichmann Hanna waiting for me with his bricks wrapped up in newspaper. And all of them avoiding me in the streets, all – even Reub passing me by without a look, his own blood, and not even a nod of the head, not even the courtesy of an enquiry. Once he was glad enough to acknowledge me, when he was a snotty little boy without an overcoat. ‘My lovely cousin Shebah,’ he would tell all his friends, and ‘Can we come to the Playhouse club and watch you act? May we, please, dear Shebah?’
What money does to people! What effect it has on their ideals, their loyalties! It couldn’t have happened in the old days, it just would not have happened. But now … now they’re all alike.
This lovely house full of marvellous things, rare as peacocks, and Claude throwing his money about on drink and saying he’s penniless, and Norman lying there in a suit that must have cost a fortune, though he said he couldn’t afford to travel here in the train. And Lily supported from first to last by men, however she may deny it, sprawling on the grass with the sole of her shoe worn through, and her skirt held together with a safety pin. We would have been too proud to let the world see our poverty. We would have made something out of nothing and put a bit of lace here and a bit of ribbon there, and still people would have turned their heads to look at us. The hats I made out of bits of curtains and scraps of velvet, and the dresses I made out of oddments, one for every day of the week, and there wasn’t an eye that didn’t hold regard or envy, as I trotted down the street on my dainty little heels. When I tell them, they all say, in that annoyingly insincere way, ‘Oh yes, I can believe it,’ and Victorian Norman turns his head away and I’m supposed not to notice that he’s laughing.
But it’s true. I was unique. I was beautiful. It’s the suffering, the hatred and the abuse that have brought me this low, the aloneness, the rottenness of my relations, the jealousy I’ve encountered everywhere. If I had received one-tenth of their education, their opportunities, what could I not have done with my life, with the brain I have. Lily’s clever. She has a
certain quality that I had, that makes people envious, but she uses her mind more cunningly. She wheedles and insinuates, she knows how to make herself indispensable and desirable. I never had her strength though, her sheer animal courage, which does exist, however I may disapprove. To take the risks she does, to go here, there and everywhere and have the house full of people, and to manage to appear so soft and gentle and in need of protection. I’ve told her all this – we even laugh about it. Her in need of protection! There’s not a soul that comes within yards of Lily who doesn’t need protecting from her. That poor man from the College, and that young man from America! Now he needed protecting, even if he was Jewish. She likes Jewish men. She likes all men. There she was inviting him to Sunday lunch served on a medley of cracked plates, and ‘How do I cook this, Shebah?’ and ‘How should I make gravy, Shebah?’ and all coy when he arrives, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Before that it had been science and atoms and explosions and, just like taking off a pair of gloves, it’s medicine and psychology, and books all over the place on schizophrenia, till we were all demented. Now it’s geology and rocks because of poor Edward. He’s completely blinded by her, besotted, quite unable to see her true nature. Not that he isn’t taking full advantage of the situation. Last night at the table he says it’s his birthday, and without a sign of embarrassment he remarks he wants to spend it in bed, and up he gets and off they go – like a pair of animals.
We went for walks along the front at New Brighton, in the wind, in the rain (so beneficial to the complexion) talking, talking about literature, about art, and me in my tight little dress and a piece of fur about my neck, always talking, always walking.
We didn’t go to bed all over the place, we hadn’t the knowledge – we were so gay, so full of life. What they would talk about now if they hadn’t the bed to retire to, God alone knows. Their pathetic bird-droppings of knowledge on books and politics and fashion. Norman with his socialistic outlook, and so concerned about the correct width of his trousers at the calf, and his uncharitable attitude towards me. Oh, I’ve seen him in the kitchen at Morpeth Street, with his face flushed red, watching the girls, and he and Lily looking at one another (God knows what goes on there) and then all of a sudden it’s ‘Good night, all’ and he winds up his clock and goes up to bed without a glance. Sometimes he did walk me home I suppose, though only because Lily told him to, and lately I can hardly bring myself to speak to him. The tickets I scrounged for him for the Film Institute, and the way he said he couldn’t afford them – and that anyway he was too busy.
His mother, poor thing, doesn’t understand him at all. Why should her Norman, with a good home, choose to live in one room in Morpeth Street? ‘His father and I have never interfered with him,’ she told me. ‘He always had strange ideas.’ I could have told her easily enough what sort of ideas he has, though it wouldn’t have done any good. I don’t want to offend him. I have to go somewhere to pass the time.
When I first met Lily I thought she was such a submissive little thing. When it gradually became apparent to me what sort of a life she was leading, and I even went so far as to call her a certain name, she merely disagreed with my choice of words. ‘Tarts get paid for it,’ she said. She didn’t seem put out. For a moment she looked at me and her eyes held a shadow of such suffering that if it had been real, which I doubt, I might have been forced to change my opinion of her. She can look very ugly and she did then; her face was a triangle of bones. Later she cheered up and we sang songs, though she always gets the words wrong – not like me with my tremendous memory – and she begged me to sing ‘The Army of Today’s All Right’.
If I hadn’t started to sing last night I might never have touched that glass case and Claude mightn’t have shot me through the ankle. There’s a moment – as I’ve told them so many times – when everything’s too late. Of course they constantly steal my words and refuse to give me credit for them – like the night Lily, pointing at a photograph of herself and some young man in the catering trade, had the nerve to say, ‘There was a moment, Shebah, when it became too late. It was to have been all happy endings, and Agonistes crowned with flowers’ (whatever that might mean – her quotations are always so wildly inaccurate) ‘but now I weep alone.’ Weep she may have done, but hardly alone. For all that she never took down the photograph from the wall, but left it in its frame alongside the large painting of two young girls wearing white dresses with bows in their hair. Nellie and Doris, Lily called them. She’d found the painting in the basement and she put it in a gilt frame and set a vase of flowers beneath it. All that in a kitchen with the floor riddled with dry rot, or wet rot, and a samovar on the draining board, though God knows the only tea she ever made was in a pan and that stewed over and over till in the end I simply couldn’t taste a normal cup of tea. It’s all so changed since Lily went, though Norman has been surprisingly kind. I used to sit in the basket chair under the picture of the cabin boy with his faded midshipman’s cap, and opposite the painting of Nellie and Doris. Of course I do still sit in the same chair when I visit Norman, but Lily took all the pictures away with her. If she wanted to create an impression, though God knows she could hardly fail to do that, Lily would tell her visitors that she liked to think of Nellie and Doris safely through their dual menopause and dead and buried. ‘It gives, don’t you think’ (a wide, candid smile) ‘such perspective to our lives?’ And they, the fools, just gaped at her and of course came again and again. Had they known, had they dreamt of the way she would dissect them once they’d left, they wouldn’t have thought her quite so innocent, so much the child. There was another photograph, quite small, of her dead father, hung between a Russian farming family and the entry of the Germans into Vienna. Her poor father was such a polite man, and intelligent enough to recognise me as a lady, and there again the general attitude was so bewildering, so eccentric.
I thought of Lily that entire fog-wreathed day of her father’s funeral, as I struggled through the streets hardly able to breathe, nearly knocked down by a No. 12 bus, mourning with her, saying a little prayer for the departed. And then to arrive later that night at Morpeth Street only to find the kitchen crowded and Lily with a fur hat on and a blanket and a pair of Wellington boots, behaving as if she was drunk, which she may have been. Not one expression of sorrow, not one tear, not one glance of respect or sympathy, merely an air of hilarity, of thanksgiving. Miss Evans – the hair-removing woman – and myself were the only ones who shed a tear for fathers lost and fathers gone (though hers by the sound of him was no loss to the bogs of Ireland), and I remembered, if indeed I had ever forgotten, how ill I was when my dear father died. They were all laughing, and Lizzie had been attacked coming through the streets, and Norman had given her a sip of brandy (the money they throw about), and Lily told a dreadful story about how her father sometimes hadn’t spoken for months and how the Vicar had said he was a jolly man. She sat there in that fur hat of hers, with lines of dirt about her mouth, drinking stewed tea and loving it all. Because of the fog no one could go home and they all paired off like animals as usual, and I was told to go and lie down on the sofa (Miss Evans for some reason having pressed to take the brass bed), and when I left Lily was lying on a lilo on the kitchen floor in her hat and boots singing, ‘Oh, it’s nice to have a home of your own.’ I don’t mean to be critical – she can be a kind child – but sometimes her callousness is appalling. I won’t say she’s been callous to me, not really, though I daresay she can be behind my back, and having heard her views on all her friends, so-called, I don’t see why I should be exempt, but she does tend to adopt a different attitude in front of different people. Claude for instance seemed to bring out the worst in her. He used to arrive without warning at Morpeth Street – just get into his yellow motor car and drive all those miles and arrive with bottles of this and bottles of that – and for days Lily would be laughing and shouting, altogether too elated. Of course elation is only the extreme end of deep depression, but how she kept going all through the day,
what with her job to go to and the telephone ringing, and rifling the gas meters for money to buy eggs and tea, and the nights spent in abandonment, I shall never understand. I came one afternoon, because I was passing the door and wanted to make sure of my appointment with Lily for the evening, and there was Claude in the kitchen, stretched out on my chair with a glass in front of him. He said, ‘Hallo, my dear, you look well’ – me, hardly able to lift my head for the pain and the tragedy of everything, the ignorant swine – and there was this old, old creature with bedroom slippers on its feet, and hands caked with dirt, rocking back and forth like a rag doll. Lily said, ‘Shebah, this is Miss Charters. She’s a friend of mine,’ as if in some way we had something in common. Oh, I felt pity for the poor old thing, so neglected and so idiotic, asking me if my daddy went to sea, but they simply don’t see the difference between my suffering with the brain I’ve got, and these other vermin who barely inhabit the earth. I wish to God I could wallow in my muck and accept all that England has to offer. I did try, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her at all, and afterwards Lily said I had been impolite to Miss Charters, and Claude gave a little high-pitched laugh and began to whistle between his teeth. I can’t afford to be too rude to Lily, but sometimes I would like to tell her dear devoted friends exactly what she thinks of them behind their backs. I know it was kind of Claude to invite me here, even if it was only for target practice, but I’ve done my share of entertaining. I’ve ceaselessly provided them with knowledge. And there was the train fare and peppermints for Julia, and I did sit and pat those damn dogs for half an hour.
A Weekend with Claude Page 9