It could have been so charming, this weekend, in this ideal setting, the place so beautifully furnished and the pictures everywhere, but almost from the moment we arrived there were undertones and atmospheres and one or other of them would vanish into another room and whisper away, or there would be looks at each other, and those tedious half-finished sentences, like the half of a letter you find in the street, that you can’t make head nor tail of, no matter how you try. It’s as if all this fascination with sex builds a big wall betwixt the devotees and the non-devotees. If you aren’t a participant there’s simply so much that’s incomprehensible. They pretend to be interested in art and politics and books, and they seem to chat quite intelligently for a time, but always, like a maggot eating its way across a particularly decayed and juicy fruit, there’s this sexual business, leaving a small trail of slime, and nothing else seems really to bring them to life. I do see, now that Lily has explained it to me, that it’s not entirely what it seems. Even I can see that their motives are somewhat different, but their impulses all seem to be working in unison, and they all pretend so much to emotions that must surely be real only once, that must be true only the first time, not over and over like a ball unable to stop bouncing.
When we came through the door of the shop yesterday, Claude put his arms round Lily and they clung there among all those breakable things set out on mahogany tables, mouths emitting sucking noises and Julia behind them, so courteous, so well bred. To look at her you would never dream she was a mistress, that she too was indulging so vividly and with such ladylike capability in this orgy of shared eroticism, night after night taking off her spectacles and brushing her hair, and rub-rub-rubbing at those lovely teeth, and after that God knows what madness. The way they all attend to their teeth, as if they were the gates to some sort of parkland. Reub has good teeth, though he speaks with his lips close together, spitting out his facts and figures and percentages, and once when he had the generosity to take me over the road for a cup of coffee, he yawned, and I had a glimpse of the lining of his mouth and his back molars were glittering with gold. I ought to have my teeth attended to, I really ought – but oh, the shame of exposing the private, altogether too intimate cavities of the jaw to some jumped-up little dentist boy, and I can’t quite see myself going round with a mouth full of dentures, artificial snapping like a mad dog, and they would have to be kept decent and cleaned day and night and it’s all too much trouble for poor me. It’s all too loose in there. It’s like a purse with the lining in threads. I’ve seen Lily spewing blood out after she’s cleaned her teeth at night, and mixing stuff in a glass and swilling it round her mouth and tears starting from her eyes.
She does look ill. It’s all this racketing about and not eating properly and rushing from place to place. It’s extraordinary how particular they are about their emotions and their teeth, and yet they simply never eat a decent meal or sleep regularly. Julia did provide a very nice meal for us last night, though it was ruined by conversation. When I think of how my poor mother prepared a meal – such care, such bravery in the face of adversity. Not that she would stoop to cook anything so simple as shepherd’s pie. And the wine Claude kept offering, running like water, and the indiscreet sentences tossed between them …
‘It’s a bloody wonderful life,’ said Norman. He’s right there – it is for him, with his weekly wage and his doting mother.
‘You mean that?’ Claude, the fool, stares entranced as if discovering great wisdom.
‘Yes. Yes, I do. I live, I make love to as many women as possible, I eat well, I climb mountains. I’ve good friends and we had a damn good time all together in Morpeth Street.’
‘I reckon,’ said Claude, for some reason agreeing with Norman, ‘that you’re right. I reckon love-making is about all a man should want. That and drink, eh?’
With a boozy surge of laughter they raised their glasses to be refilled, and listened to his oratory.
‘I reckon that in order for the blood to flow, we must have real stimulation. It’s all right for some people, with their diamond minds …’
‘Oh darling,’ I cried, for who else could Claude have meant but me, staring at me like that with his sweet, crazy eyes, ‘but the rest of us ordinary mortals need something in which to sublimate ourselves – some way in which we can release our inhibitions and return to the soil.’
The words evidently had an effect on Lily’s young man. He stood up calmly and commanded Lily to go to bed with him. There and then, without more ado. Wanted to celebrate his birthday, he said, in the most fitting way. And Lily sitting there with a little satisfied smile as if he were paying her a compliment instead of insulting her. And we were left sitting round the table in the kitchen, talking trivialities and they drinking their wine, and me feeling so weary and far too polite to mention it.
‘Come, come Shebah,’ Claude said, ‘the night is young.’ And I couldn’t disagree with him, being a guest in his house – and anyway I didn’t want to imply that I wasn’t young.
For I am young, far younger than them. I used to sit up all night during the war, in the shelters, and when even that poor refuge was denied me by the attitude of the scum who came there, I would huddle in a blanket on my little divan in my room high above the street, a sort of Jewish barrage balloon, my stomach all swollen with the tumour inside me. I did have my own little room – though I only moved there just for somewhere to put my things, never intending to stop twenty years – with all my books on the shelves, some with inscriptions written just inside the cover in his handwriting. ‘Did you ever have a love affair?’ asked Claude last night. Did I ever have a love affair! You’d think they had a monopoly on love. Maybe not what they would call an affair, though that did happen once, but it was a romantic affair, and it was more than enough for me. How they stand the repeated strain on the nerves, and the intrigue and the heartache I can’t imagine, let alone the echo they must evoke deep within their minds of similar words uttered in similar situations and for similar ends. My affair was so rich in texture, so varied in its detail.
There I sat at a play-reading and the hall was mostly in darkness because that was the way the director of the dramatic society wanted it done, and I was reciting some lines and he heard my voice, and he said to a friend, there and then in the pitch blackness, ‘My God, who’s she? I must know her.’ He had seen me about of course, everybody had, and I was so different and so chic, but we hadn’t actually spoken. After that night he bought me flowers and we sat for hours talking about poetry. He had such a sombre face, a dark face with studious eyes, and so tall and educated. When I think of those things Lily called men who used to court her, that little toad of an American – Joel or Moley or something – and that professor all fourteen stone of fat, or that Billie with his schoolboy face and blubbery eyes – in comparison with him, I smile. She doesn’t know what a man is. And I wouldn’t let him buy me as much as a cup of tea, because I was too proud. The night he introduced me to his wife I was so charming, and she said to him later, ‘I love Shebah. You should love Shebah too. She is so different, so alive.’ Of course all the other hags in the readers’ circle were jealous of me and wouldn’t speak to me. There was a positive gathering up of the folds of the skirts if I came too near, and all the men flocked round me and thought me something I most definitely was not. I wonder what stopped me. I could have been like Lily. God knows I flirted enough. I was so gay, so painfully exhilarated, with those great eyes of mine giving me such hell even then. I was too vain to wear glasses, though I was almost blind. The pain I endured. He thought I was weeping, and observed I was too tender for this world, which in a way I was, though it was mostly my eyes were so damn weak.
I shall never forget the day I came into the club, long after we had severed our association, and the men were sitting by the fire talking and Mr Cohen said, because he knew – they all knew – ‘Isn’t it terrible, Shebah?’ and I said, ‘What?’ and Mr Cohen said, ‘Why, he’s gassed himself, Shebah.’
A
nd then I did weep, and I don’t care what they thought. I never liked Jewish men. Never. Always the Christian boys. Besides, my poor father would never have been able to give me a dowry, and I hated the idea of being bought. And the Christian men were too stupid except him, though there was probably a touch of the Jew there, with those eyes, and I could never understand women wanting to have children. The responsibility it must entail. The strength it must require. And then there’s always the worry: that time Lily nearly died – though she never told me the full story. How she coped with the worry I’ll never know. And no sooner is she through with that than she meets the American with his stony face and I warned her, because I do have a deep regard for her even if I think her a damn fool. ‘Don’t give yourself to him, darling,’ I warned.
She laughed, with those innocent eyes shining like baubles and said, ‘Why, Shebah, I love him, I love him.’ At least that’s what she called it. There she is asking me round to Sunday dinner and asking me if I’ve brought the black bread and setting out the food on three cracked plates and music on the gramophone and not a mention of Billie and all that love.
Oh no, it’s schizophrenia and the mid-brain and diseases of the kidney from morning till night, and arguments about the medical service both here and on the continent, and such coyness. Though what that American made of it all I don’t know. Thought he was in a typically British household, God help him, and quite bewildered and glassy-eyed – what with Victorian Norman spouting Communism at him, and that dreadful man Rafferty arriving drunk and begging to see Our Kid and telling everyone he’s a navy man, and Claude coming in his frock coat to commit suicide and the Professor breaking his atomic heart on the front step. The American had the cheek to tell me I was completely sane. Poor little me with my tragic life and all the torment of visiting the out-patients’ department every week. ‘Have you ever had a day by the sea?’ he asked me. A day by the sea! The poor fool. Of course Lily made out he was a doctor, but what the hell did he know? Anyway, the atomic professor’s darling books on neutrons were parcelled up, and then we had volumes all over the place on Elation and new approaches to Manic Depressives (God knows, I’ve been one of those for years without having books on it) and case books on Psycho-analysis until no one hardly ever spoke, just came in and sat down and started reading and imagining all sorts of things. Everyone had had such terrible childhoods and no one had experiences any more, only traumas. Not that the American made us very welcome all the time he was around. Just standing, all four feet of him by the sink, with folded arms, the breathing example of an inferiority complex, saying ‘Yeah’ and ‘Nope’ to whatever one said, and no sense of humour at all. Then when he had gone and the light had gone out of Lily’s eyes, she seemed worried again, though of course she’s so deep and it might just have been tiredness.
There’s something wrong now, but I don’t suppose I’ll be permitted to know. If only she knew how trustworthy I am! I did think last night that Claude was going to confide in me, but he didn’t tell me very much. ‘Come, Shebah,’ he says, and I prepared myself for one of his ridiculous conversations which aren’t conversations at all but recitations about his wife leaving him (God knows, one can hardly blame her) and the great glory that is Lily, and a few flatteries thrown at me, just as if I can’t see through him, or any of them. And there was Victorian Norman with his arm round Julia while she washed the dishes.
‘Shall I help you, darling?’ I said, bloody fool that I am, hardly able to stand, and offering to clean their china for them.
‘No, thank you, Shebah,’ Julia says, mouth impeccably shaping her vowels, steam from the bowl blurring her glasses so that I couldn’t see her expression, though I can imagine it. She wanted me out of the way so as to be alone with Norman.
When I used to help at the Overseas Club during the war the rotten women were so jealous of me. All the young men wanted to talk with me, to be with Shebah. ‘Teach us to speak English, Shebah,’ they would say. ‘You speak English so beautifully.’ And those women with their wretched little brains said, ‘No thank you, Shebah, there’s nothing for you to do, we can manage.’ They’re all alike, God forgive them.
So Claude and I go upstairs, under that angel made of wood, into the long living-room, and he puts on the gramophone (how they all dote on noise) and I settle myself on the sofa. There was a little time taken up with those moist dogs and I had to pat them and he kept saying ‘Lie down’ all the time, inciting them to jump around with saliva dripping from their great purple jaws, and I went on laughing and making soothing noises, though really I wanted to scream. After a time he got tired of all that, and they put their noses into the carpet and went off to sleep. ‘Dear Shebah,’ he said, ‘how you observe us all … how wise you are.’ He really is a most interesting man, even if he did shoot me down in the grass. A puckish face, rather creased, and merry eyes and that beard in little curls so that he constantly licks out at tendrils with his tongue, and a small mouth, very pink. How young they all look in spite of their complications. So deeply healthy.
‘What, me?’ I said, because I detest insincere flattery, and he wagged his head, which is a whimsical habit of his, and repeated, ‘How wise you are’, and stares down at my feet. At the end of my legs (oh, my shapely legs that danced so much, that walked so far) I could see my sandals swing above the carpet and my little toes peeping out, and a dab of sealing-wax that was really red nail-varnish blobbing one toe and just visible through my stocking. My pathetic adornments. Reub said it was the harlot in me, the swine.
‘What about you,’ I trilled, ‘with all this beauty round you, and your wonderful knowledge – aren’t you wise?’
Which certainly wasn’t wise of me because it meant Claude could start on about his wife leaving him, etc., etc., but I had to say something. After a while he said, ‘You see, the wise ones are those who no longer fight against life, but accept and observe.’ And he licked at his beard again and pushed at one of the dogs with his foot, though mercifully it remained unconscious. They all say some very clever things and very important things, but their method of delivery is so bad. I keep trying to tell Lily this, but it’s something they can’t understand. Being an actress I say things with conviction. You do have to dramatise when making the profounder statements. Anyway, Claude looks so well fed and so cushioned with grandeur that it’s simply absurd to think of him fighting against anything. What on earth is there for him to object to? If only he had paused or sighed in the appropriate place I would have been more convinced. I know he’s had his troubles, his sufferings, though God knows he’s done it in comfort, in opulence, but the art of conversation is communication, and communication is a thing that must be felt. The spoken word seems to have lost its meaning. With all this television any little chit of a nothing walking the streets can mouth about life and suffering. Take that girl in the Kardomah some months ago, with her hair bleached and frizzed about her ears – quite attractive really, with her smooth little face devoid of expression. I had gone in for a cup of tea (I have to sit somewhere and the G.P.O. was about to close and I was too early for my next appointment and so weary) and there was this common man sitting by the wall, slouched in his chair, with a face stamped with brutality and weakness, such as they all bear marks of now, being kept and housed and fed by England and no need to work at all. I hadn’t been there for more than a few moments and had brought the edge of my cup to my mouth, about to drink, when I saw this lout put two spoons and a knife into the pocket of his jacket. He saw me looking at him and we stared at one another, a quite exquisite second of perception, me with my cup held up and he with his hand curled round the cutlery in his pocket, and all the little cafe sounds about us – hot water rushing out of the urn, the saucers being rattled – and a moment of recognition between this sot and myself. Then he got up, still with his eyes fixed on mine, and in a moment I was standing by the exit with my poor weak arms outstretched, weary as I was. Nobody moved, though people looked up from their crumbling buns. ‘No, you don’t,�
�� I shouted. ‘Thief, taker of property.’ The fools on the counter just stared at me, lifeless, immobile. ‘He’s put Kardomah cutlery into his pocket, two spoons and a knife – I saw him. Call the manager,’ I shouted. I knew there wasn’t much point in calling the manager, because he was most likely upstairs threshing about among the cardboard boxes and sacks of sugar, commingling with one of the women assistants. The man, the thief, just moved forward and took hold of my arm and thrust me roughly aside, and in a moment he was in the revolving doors and round and out with a damp rush of air into the darkling street. Just went, and nobody came to my assistance. Down went the insensitive heads to the currant scones and the mugs of tea, and this little fool with the dyed and curled hair, as transparent as a piece of glass, said softly in a voice distorted with catarrh, ‘Ah, give him a chance. Aren’t you human?’
Just that. ‘Aren’t you human?’ Had it been reversed, had it been I who had stolen so much as a crust of bread, they would have trampled on me, risen in a pyramid of loathing from the tables and ground me to the floor, called me a dirty Jew, cast me into prison. It was on account of the feeling and the emotion that I put into my accusation that they hated me. They sat with an embarrassment that turned them to stone. It is the generation of the unemphatic. Steal, kill, lie, fornicate, but beware of indulging with conviction. That’s their idea of being human.
A Weekend with Claude Page 10