Through the swing doors and into the vast reception hall. It was like a burnt-out world; in the stale atmosphere the hanging smells of cigarette smoke, ash, the lingering scents of women and men, all pale and in its dimmed brightness empty, a Romanesque cathedral with a fitted carpet, lined near the street with model display windows of dressmakers, perfumeries and haberdashers, all dimly and discreetly lit at that hour which was the very witching hour of night. A few night porters stood about, a liftman, the night clerk behind his desk talking to a full-bodied young woman in a black dress, heavily made up in the manner of managerial assistants in large, commercial hotels. Everyone seemed to be talking in whispers as though a funeral cortège were about to descend the main stairway. I crossed the hall to the lounge where drinks were served after hours to residents only. That is one of the privileges of being a registered guest in a London hotel. A number of provincial businessmen were still scattered about the lounge, talking with intense gesticulations over late drinks. The apple-green basket chairs were shabby at that hour and the lounge smells were similar to those in the hall. A vague pantry smell emanated from the green-baize-covered swing door through which the waitresses came and went. One of them, a tired powdered woman of about sixty with a blue wen31 on her cheek and wearing a faded black dress, served me. Afterwards, she stood at a short distance with her empty tray, her old face twisted in concentration as with the fixed and hypocritically innocent smirk of the eavesdropper she overheard the conversation between three commercial travellers from the north. It occurred to me that they, unlike me, were in London for a reason, and I began to think of the voyage.
I had travelled so often and in so many directions that I was bored at the mere thought of it. Moreover, this particular voyage had a more than usually sinister aspect; not only was I unable to produce for myself a convincing reason for going to the United States, I was tolerably certain there wasn’t one; no reason, that is, other than the fact that neither could I find one for remaining in Paris, nor for going anywhere else. On previous voyages I had at least gone through the motions of satisfying myself that I should go here or there, even if the journey were for its own sake like a trip to Spain for the bullfights; but in this instance I had no means of knowing what my experience would be. And as a man was not a piece of litmus paper to register this or that property of the objective world – even as litmus paper was finally expended with too much immersion – I was sceptical of the value of going to another new place and facing an entirely new set of objective conditions. I would notice them effectively or I wouldn’t. If I did, I might widen my experience without deepening it. In travel, as in all things, there is a law of diminishing returns. And if I didn’t, my experience might be drastically short.
During the last year in Paris I had drifted away from my former acquaintances. I could no longer share a common purpose with them. I had spent most of that year in a small room in Montparnasse, going from it to play pinball or to distract myself with a woman. This room had three sides and one large studio window which looked out over the projecting roof of basement studios onto a high grey wall which cut off all view of the sky and of the summer sun. It was like living in the box in the kitchen in Glasgow when I was a child. I spent more and more time in the room. I can remember lying on my back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of Beckett, and saying aloud for my own edification: “Why go out when you have a bed and a floor and a sink and a window and a table and a chair and many other things here in this very room? After all, you’re not a collector...”
It was in that room I had begun to write Cain’s Book, the notes for which took up a disproportionate amount of space in my only suitcase, and which I was carrying to America with me.
“Another drink, sir?” The waitress was speaking to me. The commercial travellers were getting up from their table.
“Yes please.”
“That was Scotch and water, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.”
At a certain age, looking back over the past, I began to wonder how much, except in a purely negative way when they presented themselves as limits, objective conditions really affected me. Certainly, for as long as I could remember, I had been selective of what was external to me, and not merely, I think, in the sense that all perception is selective; sometimes, and unconsciously, I had excluded “facts” with which every one of my immediate acquaintance was familiar, facts which I should consciously have judged to be vital to my own well-being if I had been aware of them. For example, in the two instances in which I had lived with women in a full-hearted way, it was a friend who drew my attention to the fact that my wife had deserted me six months ago. I remembered saying: “No, you’re wrong, man. She’s coming back,” and then suddenly realizing that she wasn’t, couldn’t come back, because in a dimly conscious way I had been organizing my life to exclude her, from the moment she had left me. And yet I was not quite wrong, because what was left out of the present situation as described by my friend was my own will, which, it startled me to see, he left quite out of account. And then I realized that in presenting myself as up till that time unconscious of my wife’s desertion of me I had all the time demanded of him that he should ignore my will, which he saw very well, as something external to him, and fairly predictable. My momentary annoyance that he should think of me as predictable he perhaps excused in me as my friend, at the same time excusing himself, no doubt, for excusing me who he knew stood in no dire need of excuse, since nothing is predictable which is not externalized.
Sitting there in the deserted lounge reminded me of the smoke room in downtown Glasgow where my father used to sit and while away the long hours of the afternoon. I thought that my father would be alone now, that he would have turned on the light in his room... it was nearly midnight... and would be alone. The last time I had seen him was at the funeral of my uncle who, running after a tramcar, was suddenly on his knees, arms akimbo as his heart burst.
The coffin had brass fittings and smelt of varnish. It was supported by scrubbed deal wood trestles in the middle of the parlour, and it dominated the room as an altar dominates a small church, the wine curtains pillars, and over it all was the smell of flowers and death and varnish – like the smell of pine cones – which set the mourners at a distance from the dead man far more utterly than his mere dying had. The smell pervaded the whole house, met one at the door, and as the mourners arrived in their white collars and black ties, shaking their hands, talking in hushed tones, nodding to others distantly known, it had descended on them, crystallizing their emotion, and drawn them inexorably towards the room given over to death.
I watched from a distance as the coffin was lowered into the grave, tilting, from silk cords, and then, following the example of the others, I threw some sod on the lid of the coffin, a flat hollow sound from distended fingers, rain on canvas, a chuckle of despair. Afterwards, the mourners moved back into groups and the clergyman led a prayer; a small man with a bald head who had donned his trappings at the graveside, and when, without music, he broke nervously with his small voice into the 121st Psalm and the mourners took it up, their voices ineffectually suspended like a wind-thinned pennant between earth and sky, I glanced directly at my father and for a moment we seemed to understand one another. My father dropped his eyes first, involuntarily, and I looked beyond the mourners across the green slope where the grey and white gravestones, sunk in the sod at all angles, jutted upwards like broken teeth.
After the prayers and the singing the two workmen moved forward self-consciously and threw the earth back into the grave, and the long block of raised earth was covered with wreaths. “That’s ours,” my father said out of the side of his mouth at me quietly, “the one with the tulips...” and, feeling himself overheard by a sterner gentleman at the other side of the family, coughed his little cough, and said: “Yeeeeees. I believe that’s it,” and he was suddenly looking at it with an almost pained expression on his face, offensive thing, that at the beginning had delighted him... until am
ongst the others suddenly he had seen it small and less prepossessing than he had remembered. The clergyman shook hands with the family, with Tina, whose goitre was bad and whose eyes had had a fixed, unaligned look for some weeks, with Angus who was blinking at the first day he had seen during seven years on the nightshift, with Hector more solemn than I had known him – Tina must have been later, for of course, being a woman, she wouldn’t be at the graveside – the clergyman, muttering comforts that sounded like apologies, went with his little leather case alone down the path without looking back.
The sobriety of Hector’s air caught my attention. Since he had become a commercial traveller he had adopted a permanently spoofing air, a professional light-heartedness which deserted him now. But then his father was interred and he seemed to take hold of himself and to notice me for the first time. How was I? Were things going well? Lucky devil to live abroad these days! Why, the taxes in this country were past belief! Overhearty, evasive... this the boy I had carried on my back over a dangerous ledge near Ben Nevis. Was it not funny how everything had turned out differently, not as one expected? I had a vague idea he was referring to my clothes, informal, beginning to be threadbare – poor old Joe, gone the way of his father! My general air of anonymity.
“Come and see us before you go,” Hector said, but he was already looking over my shoulder where one of his associates was buttonholing his boss. “Don’t forget now, old man. Vivian and I would love to hear all about your travels, always talking about you. Marco Polo, eh? What wouldn’t I give to be in your shoes!”
“Next time,” my father said when we were alone at last, “it will be for me.”
“Nonsense. And I shan’t stay away so long this time, Dad.”
I thought then it was hardly a lie; there was no way of knowing.
We lingered long after the other mourners were gone, walking along the gravel footpaths between the graves, and the grave of my uncle with its covering of bright wreaths was nearly out of sight.
“Your mother was buried here,” my father said. “Would you like to see the grave?”
“Not particularly.”
“You’ve never visited it.”
“No, I never have. Would you like a drink?”
“It’s just as you wish,” he said, not looking at me, “but I thought as we were here anyway.”
“I don’t want to see it, Dad. I have explained it to you before.”
Springtime, I remember thinking. To be in England. Casually I stooped to pick up a broken flower which had fallen on the path. It was quite fresh.
“From a wreath,” my father said.
We walked slowly, in silence, and the sky was low and white-grey like milk which has stood for a long time in a cat’s saucer, collecting dust, and as I looked up I felt a raindrop on my face. “Looks as though it’s going to rain,” I said.
“I come here every month,” my father was saying. “Sometimes I miss a month, but not often. It’s the least I can do.”
I repressed the impulse to say something harsh. I glanced at him but he avoided my eye and there was a faint flush on his cheeks. It was as though my father had said: “I’m old now, Joe, you must understand,” said that and not the other thing, which was not important and which was not really what he had meant to say. I wanted to put my arm round him and say: “We’re like one another, Dad,” but I couldn’t make the gesture.
He was looking at me uncertainly.
“I’ve sometimes wondered, Joe, why you haven’t done something serious, you know, like Hector or your brother-in-law.”
“Have you?”
“You could be independent today.”
“I am independent.”
“Of course, I know,” he said. “But you know what I mean, Joe.”
“Money?”
Coughing. “And position, you know. Take Hector; he’s in a fine position now. He’s worked hard that boy.”
“You envy him?”
“Who? Me?”
His laugh was forced. I looked away at an urn on a pillar of white marble; the inscription was in Latin... in vitam aeternam...
“You know that’s not true, son.”
“I don’t want to talk about Hector, Dad. Poor guy with his infinite quotas.”
“It’s just as you wish, Joe. I didn’t mean to upset you. Only you were close when you were kids. Follow the leader it was when you were boys. He followed you everywhere.”
“Yes, I remember.”
I wanted simply to change the subject which bored me but my father had crumpled and his mouth had fallen. I had an impulse to explain myself to him... that I would not have had it otherwise, at no point would I have gone back on the past... didn’t he see? But he would not have understood. “We’re alike, son, you and I.” He might have said that. His son, after all. The second generation.
“I realize of course,” he said at last, “that I haven’t been much help to you.”
The irrelevance shocked me. He would always believe that; my son, my world; at least he could claim guilt.
I found myself saying, somewhat drily: “You needn’t blame yourself, Dad,” and I was going to add: “You didn’t decide me one way or the other,” but the defensive smile of disbelief was already there, like a vizor over the eyes.
We walked on.
And then I noticed that my father’s hat seemed too big for him. It was. It didn’t fit him. I took his arm:
“Your hat’s too big for you, Dad!”
He laughed. “Can’t afford another, Joe! D’you know, when I bought my first hat they cost 12/6d... the best mind you. The same hat costs 62/6d today. Money’s not worth what it was as Hector was saying only a few days ago. The cheap hats are no good, no good at all. This is a Borsalino.”
A Borsalino. He had halted, removed his hat, and pointed with his finger at the discoloured silk lining. “Borsalino. Made in Italy. You see?”
“Must be a good one.”
“The best,” my father said.
We were walking towards the main gate of the cemetery. The cortège had already broken up and the last of the cars was gone. The porter at the gate nodded to us as we walked out onto the street.
“I suppose those shops do good business,” I said to my father, referring to the row of shops which sold graveside ornaments and flowers.
“Capital,” he replied. “I bought a vase there once for your grandmother’s grave but one day when I went back somebody had broken it. That’s a long time ago now, of course. Must be twenty years.”
“And shells,” I said.
“Yes, you can buy shells with inscriptions.”
“Eternity in shells,” I said. But my father was looking straight ahead and walking quickly as he always did on the street, and he seemed to have forgotten what we were talking about.
“Will you go abroad again immediately?”
“I suppose so. There’s nothing for me here at the moment. I may spend a day or two in London.”
“And then where? France?”
“North Africa perhaps.”
“Was there during the first war,” he said mechanically, “Alexandria.”
“Yes.”
“I know! It was the day before your Aunt Eleanor died.”
“What was?”
“The day I found the vase broken. Sheer vandalism.”
“Yes, it was a pity.”
“I paid 17/6d for it. It wasn’t cheap. Come on, we’ll get a drink across the road there.” And we crossed the street to a green-painted public house.
It was easy there with a glass of whisky in front of us to recreate the surface intimacy which, years before, I had assented to during a game of billiards – never pot your opponent’s ball – our having even then little to talk about and our inexpertness at the game causing us to smile, to laugh, to be together, until, in the sun again, we took leave of each other, I to go to some class or other at the university, my father to drink coffee in his favourite smoke room and to read and reread the local paper.
/> My father, like my uncle, used to talk about his memories of Cairo, Jaffa – the oranges were tremendous, like small melons – and Suez, to speak of a head wound he had received, shrapnel – fingering the scalp tenderly – which had resulted in his being “sent down the line” to the base hospital and thence home to Blighty, and, as he uttered the word lovingly I used to wonder how he could have failed to relate the homecoming to those things to which he came home – or did he come home? – for it seemed to me that those years and those vague memories were the only positive thing in his entire life – he invariably returned to them after a few drinks – and that from the day he had set foot again in England he had known nothing but humiliation. I was brought up in a world in which we could refer to my father’s unemployment only in a discreet whisper and never in the presence of guests. Those were the days, Joe! You were too young of course! Good Scotch, what was it? 7/6d a bottle, yes! Jaffa oranges, pick them off the trees, get a nigger to do it for you for an acker,32 the price of second-hand furniture, too bad you’re not setting up house, I know where you could get some cheap, know a dealer, Silverstein, good business in the East End, trust the Jews, see a man was convicted at the Old Bailey, fifteen thousand gold watches, that’s smuggling! No wonder, income tax, bloody robbers... conversations which in the end always came to his noting that someone had died, to his search in the deaths column, as though the printed notices informed him, quietly bringing desolation to his eyes, that time was running out.
Cain’s Book Page 16