by Dylan Thomas
‘Three whiskies. What’s yours, Sam? Nice drop of Kiwi?’
‘He’ll have whisky, too,’ Mrs. Dacey said. ‘See, he’s got his colour back.’
‘Kiwi’s boot-polish,’ one of the young women whispered, and she bent, giggling, over the grate. Her big toe came out of a hole in her stocking, suddenly, like a cold inquisitive nose, and she giggled again.
This was a bar in London. Dear Peggy, Samuel wrote with his finger on the counter, I am drinking in a bar called the Antelope in Edgware Road with a furniture dealer, the proprietress of a tea-shop, three young women and George Ring. I have put these facts down clearly because the scent I drank in the bath is still troublesome and people will not keep still. I am quite well but I do not know for how long.
‘What’re you doing, Sam? Looks like you’re drawing. I’ve got a proper graveyard in my chest, haven’t I? Cough, cough,’ Mr. Allingham said, angrily between each cough.
‘It wasn’t the cough that carried him off,’ the young woman said. Her whole plump body was giggling.
Everything is very trivial, Samuel wrote. Mr. Allingham is drunk on one whisky. All his face goes pale except his mark.
‘Here we are,’ Mr. Allingham said, ‘four lost souls. What a place to put a man in.’
‘The Antelope’s charming,’ said George Ring. ‘There’s some real hunting prints in the private bar.’ He smiled at Sam and moved his long, blunt fingers rapidly along the counter as though he were playing a piano. ‘I’m all rhythm. It’s like a kind of current in me.’
‘I mean the world. This is only a little tiny bit in it. This is all right, it’s got regular hours; you can draw the curtains, you know what to expect here. But look at the world. You and your currents,’ Mr. Allingham said.
‘No, really it’s rippling out of me.’ George Ring tap-danced with one foot and made a rhythmical, kissing noise with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
‘What a place to drop a man in. In the middle of streets and houses and traffic and people.’
The young woman wagged her finger at her toe. ‘You be still.’ Her friends were giggling now, covering their faces and peeping out at Mr. Allingham between their fingers, telling each other to go on, saying ‘hotcha’ and ‘hi de ho’ and ‘Minnie the Moocher’s Wedding Day’ as George Ring tapped one narrow, yellow buckskin shoe and strummed on the counter. They rolled their eyes and said, ‘Swing it, sister,’ then hissed again into a giggle.
‘I’ve been nibbling away for fifty years now,’ Mr. Allingham said, ‘and look at me. Look at me.’ He took off his hat.
‘There’s hair,’ whispered the young woman with the hole in her stocking.
His hair was the colour of ferrets and thin on the crown; it stopped growing at the temples but came out again from the ears. His hat made him a deep, white wrinkle on his forehead.
‘Here we are nibbling away all day and night, Mrs. Dacey. Nibble nibble.’ His brown teeth came over his lip. ‘No sense, no order, no nothing; we’re all mad and nasty. Look at Sam there. There’s a nice harmless boy, curly hair and big eyes and all. What’s he do? Look at his bloody bottle.’
‘No language,’ said the woman behind the bar. She looked like a duchess, riding, rising and sinking slowly as she spoke, as though to the movements of a horse.
‘Tantivy,’ Samuel said, and blushed as Mr. Allingham pointed a stained finger.
‘That’s right. Always the right word in the right place. Tantivy! I told you, people are all mad in the world. They don’t know where they’re going, they don’t know why they’re where they are; all they want is love and beer and sleep.’
‘I wouldn’t say no to the first,’ said Mrs. Dacey. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ she said to the woman behind the counter, ‘he’s a philosopher.’
‘Calling everybody nasty,’ said the woman, rising. ‘There’s people live in glass houses.’ Over the hurdle she goes, thought Samuel idly, and she sank again on to the hidden saddle. She must do miles in a night, he said to his empty glass.
‘People think about all kinds of other things.’ George Ring looked at the ceiling for a vision. ‘Music,’ he said, ‘and dancing.’ He ran his fingers along the air and danced on his toes.
‘Sex,’ said Mr. Allingham.
‘Sex, sex, sex, it’s always sex with you, Donald. You must be repressed or something.’
‘Sex,’ whispered the young woman by the fire.
‘Sex is all right,’ Mrs. Dacey said. ‘You leave sex alone.’
‘Of course I’m repressed. I’ve been repressed for fifty years.’
‘You leave sex out of it.’ The woman behind the counter rose in a gallop. ‘And religion,’ she said.
Over she goes, clean as a whistle, over the hedge and the water-jump.
Samuel took a pound out of his wallet and pointed to the whisky on the shelf. He could not trust himself yet to speak to the riding woman with the stuffed, enormous bosom and two long milk-white loaves for arms. His throat was still on fire; the heat of the room blazed up his nostrils into his head, and all the words at the tip of his tongue caught like petrol and gorse; he saw three young women flickering by the metal logs, and his three new friends thundered and gestured before him with the terrible exaggeration of people of flesh and blood moving like dramatic prisoners on a screen, doomed forever to enact their pettiness in a magnified exhibition.
He said to himself: Mrs. Antelope, pouring the whisky as though it were four insults, believes that sex is a bed. The act of love is an act of the bed itself; the springs cry ‘Tumble’ and over she goes, horse and all. I can see her lying like a log on a bed, listening with hate and disgust to the masterly voice of the dented sheets.
He felt old and all-knowing and unsteady. His immediate wisdom weighed so heavily that he clutched at the edge of the counter and raised one arm, like a man trapped in the sea, to signal his sinking.
‘You may,’ Mrs. Dacey said, and the room giggled like a girl.
Now I know, thought Samuel beneath his load, as he struggled to the surface, what is meant by a pillar of the church. Long, cold Mrs. Dacey could prop Bethesda on the remote top of her carved head and freeze with her eyes the beetle-black sinners where they scraped below her. Her joke boomed in the roof.
‘You’ve dropped a fiver, Sam.’ Mr. Allingham picked up a piece of paper and held it out on the sun-stained palm of his hand.
‘It’s Lucille Harris’s address,’ Samuel said.
‘Why don’t you give her a ring? The phone’s on the stairs, up there.’ George Ring pointed. ‘Outside the Ladies.’
Samuel parted a curtain and mounted.
‘Outside the Ladies,’ a voice said from the sinking room.
He read the instructions above the telephone, put in two pennies, dialled, and said, ‘Miss Harris? I’m a friend of Austin’s.
‘I am a friend of nobody’s. I am detached,’ he whispered into the buzzing receiver. ‘I am Lopo the outlaw, loping through the night, companion of owls and murderers. Tu wit to woo,’ he said aloud into the mouthpiece.
She did not answer, and he shuffled down the stairs, swung open the curtain, and entered the bright bar with a loping stride.
The three young women had gone. He looked at the grate to see if their shoes were still there, but they had gone too. People leave nothing.
‘She must have been out,’ he said.
‘We heard,’ said Mr. Allingham. ‘We heard you talking to her owl.’ He raised his glass and stared at it, standing sadly and savagely in the middle of the room, like a man with oblivion in his hand. Then he made his choice, and drank.
‘We’re going places,’ he said. ‘We’re taking a taxi and Sam is going to pay for it. We’re going to the West End to look for Lucille.’
‘I knew she was a kind of Holy Grail,’ George Ring said when they were all in the darkness of the taxi rattling through the rain.
Samuel felt Mrs. Dacey’s hand on his knee.
‘Four knights at arms, it’s te
rribly exciting. We’ll call at the Gayspot first, then the Cheerioh, then the Neptune.’
‘Four lost souls.’
The hand ached on along the thigh, five dry fishes dying on a cloth.
‘Marble Arch,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘This is where the fairies come out in the moon.’
And the hurrying crowd in the rain might have had no flesh or blood.
‘Park Lane.’
The crowd slid past the bonnet and the windows, mixed their faces with no features and their liquid bodies under a sudden blaze, or vanished into the streaming light of a tall door that led into the bowels of rich night London where all the women wore pearls and pricked their arms with needles.
A car backfired.
‘Hear the champagne corks?’
Mr. Allingham is listening to my head, Samuel thought as he drew away from the fingers in the corner.
‘Piccadilly. Come on Allingham’s tour. That’s the Ritz. Stop for a kipper, Sam?’
The Ritz is closed forever. All the waiters would be bellowing behind their hands. Gustave, Gustave, cried a man in an opera hat, he is using the wrong fork. He is wearing a tie with elastic at the back. And a woman in evening dress cut so low he could see her navel with a diamond in it leaned over his table and pulled his bow tie out and let it fly back again to his throat.
‘The filthy rich,’ he said. My place is among the beggars and the outlaws. With power and violence Samuel Bennet destroys the whole artifice of society in his latest novel, In the Bowels.
‘Piccadilly Circus. Centre of the world. See the man picking his nose under the lamp post? That’s the Prime Minister.’
3
The Gayspot was like a coal cellar with a bar at one end, and several coalmen were dancing with their sacks. Samuel, at the door, swaying between Mrs. Dacey and George Ring, felt his thigh, still frightened. He did not dare look down at it in case even the outside of the trouser-leg bore the inexcusable imprint of his terror in the taxi.
‘It’s cosmopolitan,’ George Ring whispered. ‘Look at the nigger.’
Samuel rubbed the night out of his eyes and saw the black men dancing with their women, twirling them among the green cane chairs, between the fruit machine and the Russian billiard table. Some of the women were white, and smoked as they danced. They pussed and spied around the room, unaware of their dancing, feeling the arms around them as though around the bodies of different women: their eyes were for the strangers entering, they went through the hot movements of the dance like women in the act of love, looking over men’s shoulders at their own remote and unconniving faces in a looking-glass. The men were all teeth and bottom, flashers and shakers, with little waists and wide shoulders, in double-breasted pin-stripe and sleek, licked shoes, all ageless and unwrinkled, waiting for the flesh-pot, proud and silent and friendly and hungry—jerking round the smoking cellar under the centre of the world to the music of a drum and a piano played by two pale white cross boys whose lips were always moving.
As George Ring weaved Samuel through the dancers to the bar they passed a machine and Samuel put in a penny for a lemon. Out came one and sixpence.
‘Who’s going to win the Derby, Sam?’ said Mr. Allingham, behind them.
‘Isn’t he a lucky poet?’ George Ring said.
Mrs. Dacey, in half a minute, had found a partner as tall as herself and was dancing through the smoke like a chapel. He had powdered his face to hide a scar from the corner of his eye to his chin.
‘Mrs. Dacey’s dancing with a razor-man,’ Samuel said.
This was a breath and a scar of the London he had come to catch. Look at the knickerless women enamouring from the cane tables, waiting in the fumes for the country cousins to stagger in, all savings and haywisps, or the rosy-cheeked old men with buttonholes whose wives at home were as lively as bags of sprouts. And the dancing cannibal-mouthed black razor kings shaking their women’s breasts and blood to the stutter of the drums, snakily tailored in the shabby sweat-smelling jungle under the wet pavement. And a crimped boy danced like a girl, and the two girls serving were as harsh as men.
Mr. Allingham bought four white wines. ‘Go on. He did it on a pin-table. You could bring your Auntie here, couldn’t you, Monica?’ he said to the girl with the bow tie pouring their drinks.
‘Not my Auntie,’ Samuel said. Auntie Morgan Pont-Neath-Vaughan in her elastic-sided boots. ‘She doesn’t drink,’ he said.
‘Show Monica your bottle. He’s got a bottle on his finger.’
Samuel dug his hand deep in his jacket pocket. ‘She doesn’t want to see an old bottle.’ His chest began to tickle as he spoke, and he slipped two fingers of his right hand between the buttons of his shirt on to his bare flesh. ‘No vest,’ he said in surprise, but the girl had turned away.
‘It’s a Sunday School,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘Tasted your wine yet, Sam? This horse’s unfit to work. A regular little bun dance. You could bring the vicar’s wife in here.’
Mrs. Cotmore-Richards, four foot one and a squeak in her stockinged trotters.
‘A regular little vestry,’ Mr. Allingham said. ‘See that woman dancing? The one who fell in the flour-bin. She’s a bank manager’s niece.’
The woman with the dead white face smiled as she passed them in the arms of a padded boy.
‘Hullo, Ikey.’
‘Hullo, Lola. She’s pretendin’, see. Thinks she’s Starr Faithfull.’
‘Is she a prostitute, Mr. Allingham?’
‘She’s a manicurist, Sammy. How’s your cuticles? Don’t you believe everything you see, especially after it’s dark. This is all pretending. Look at Casanova there with the old girls. The last time he touched a woman he had a dummy in his mouth.’
Samuel turned around. George Ring whinnied in a corner with several women. Their voices shrilled and rasped through the cross noise of the drums.
‘Lucy got a beating the last time I see her,’ said a woman with false teeth and a bald fur. ‘He said he was a chemist.’
‘Lucille,’ George Ring said, impatiently shaking his curls. ‘Lucille Harris.’
‘With a clothes-brush. He had it in a little bag.’
‘There’s a chemist,’ said a woman wearing a picture hat.
‘He doesn’t mean Lucy Wakefield,’ another woman said.
‘Lucy Wakefield’s in the Feathers with a man from Crouch End,’ said the bank manager’s niece, dancing past. The boy who danced with her was smiling with his eyes closed.
‘Perhaps he got a leather belt in his little bag,’ said the woman with the fur.
‘It’s all the same in a hundred years,’ said the woman in the picture hat. She went down to her white wine, widening her legs like an old mule at a pool, and came up gasping. ‘They put hair oil in it.’
This was all wrong. They spoke like the women who wore men’s caps and carried fishfrails full of empties in the Jug and Bottle of the Compasses at home.
‘Keeps away the dandruff.’
He did not expect that the nightclub women under the pavement should sing and twang like sirens or lure off his buttons with their dangerous, fringed violet eyes. London is not under the bedclothes where all the company is grand and vile by a flick of the cinema eye, and the warm linen doors are always open. But these women with the shabby faces and the comedians’ tongues, squatting and squabbling over their mother’s ruin, might have lurched in from Llanelly on a football night, on the arms of short men with leeks. The women at the tables, whom he had seen as enamouring shapes when he first came in dazed from the night, were dull as sisters, red-eyed and thick in the head with colds; they would sneeze when you kissed them or hiccup and say Manners in the dark traps of the hotel bedrooms.
‘Good as gold,’ he said to Mr. Allingham. ‘I thought you said this was a low place, like a speakeasy.’
‘Speak easy yourself. They don’t like being called low down here.’ Mr. Allingham leant close, speaking from the side of his mouth ‘They’re too low for that. It’s a regular little hell-hole,’ h
e whispered. ‘It’s just warming up. They take their clothes off soon and do the hula hula; you’ll like that.’
‘Nobody knows Lucille,’ George Ring said. ‘Are you sure she isn’t Lucy? There’s a lovely Lucy.’
‘No, Lucille.’
‘“She dwells beside the springs of Dove.” I think I like Wordsworth better than Walter de la Mare sometimes. Do you know “Tintern Abbey”?’
Mrs. Dacey appeared at Samuel’s shoulder. ‘Doesn’t baby dance?’ He shuddered at the cold touch of her hand on his neck. Not here. Not now. That terrible impersonal Bethesda rape of the fingers. He remembered that she had carried her umbrella even while she danced.
‘I got a sister in Tintern,’ said a man behind them.
‘Tintern Abbey.’ George Ring pouted and did not turn round.
‘Not in the Abbey, she’s a waitress.’
‘We were talking about a poem.’
‘She’s not a bloody nun,’ the man said.
The music stopped, but the two boys on the little platform still moved their hands and lips, beating out the dance in silence.
Mr. Allingham raised his fist. ‘Say that again and I’ll knock you down.’
‘I’ll blow you down,’ the man said. He puffed up his cheeks, and blew. His breath smelt of cloves.
‘Now, now.’ Mrs. Dacey levelled her umbrella.
‘People shouldn’t go around insulting nuns then,’ Mr. Allingham said as the ferrule tapped his waistcoat.
‘I’ll blow you down,’ the man said. ‘I never insulted any nun. I’ve never spoken to a nun.’
‘Now, now.’ The umbrella drove for his eyes, and he ducked.
‘You blow again,’ said Mrs. Dacey politely, ‘I’ll push it up your snout and open it.’
‘Don’t you loathe violence,’ George Ring said. ‘I’ve always been a terrible pacifist. One drop of blood and I feel slimy all over. Shall we dance?’
He put his arm round Samuel’s waist and danced him away from the bar. The band began again though none of the couples had stopped dancing.
‘But we’re two men,’ Samuel said. ‘Is this a waltz?’
‘They never play waltzes here, it’s just self-expression. Look, there’s two other men dancing.’