The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  Mat nodded his head in dazed agreement with all this, so amazed was he at the complete certainty out of which Dick spoke. In himself Mat knew that all the energy would go into shame, dissatisfaction and scrupulousness about his own work.

  Richards, however, was able to breast the torrent. ‘We can’t stay and listen to you all day. I’m dying for a cuppa.’ He spoke jocularly, but the torrent stopped, and Dick looked at him with anxious eyes, his face shining with sweat.

  As they went down the stairs together Richards was laughing quietly. ‘Christ!’ he said, ‘you should have seen your face. Your eyebrows were up into your hairline.’

  Mat couldn’t help comparing Dick’s outbursts with his own solemn and pedantic tirade and he was loth to judge him too harshly lest he judge himself as well. ‘Well, he’s quite a man. But we’ve all got our obsessions.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Richards. ‘You should have seen your face when he said that bit about him being dangerous.’ He laughed. ‘He doesn’t like it too much when the critics praise him.’

  Mat shrugged.

  Outside, the street was quieter, but in contrast to the mild light in the galleries the sun’s glare made them squint. After the stillness the remaining bustle of the street gave a slight feeling of dizziness. Richards indicated with a wave of his arm the direction they were to go and they crossed to the shady part of the street. In the shade it was cool, almost chilly now. For a while they walked in silence, then Richards asked Mat:

  ‘This place you work in interests me. Do you like working there?’

  ‘Of course,’ Mat said. He tried to explain what it was he felt about it but Richards kept interrupting him with questions.

  ‘How do they shoot them?’ Then he said, ‘Of course the cows know that they are going to be shot.’

  ‘Well, you know,’ said Mat, ‘they’re ten times our weight and with big horns. If they knew you’d never get near them.’

  ‘They’re paralysed with fear,’ Richards told him. ‘They smell the blood.’

  Mat had seen cows lick wisps of straw from the bloody floor of the slaughtering-rooms, even lick pieces of congealed fat from where it was stuck to the wall. Also he had skinned so many heads that he knew how narrow the skull was and how surprisingly little room there was in it for the brain box. ‘They’re too stupid,’ he said.

  Richards was indignant. ‘Stupid!’ He didn’t think that animals were stupid at all. They were in fact in tune to many things which human beings didn’t understand. ‘You struck me as an intelligent sort of bloke. But that’s a really crass remark. Stupid!’

  Mat laughed at this. ‘All you’re saying is that animals lead a rich sensuous life.’

  They walked towards the coffee shop with Richards haranguing Mat about the cruelty of his trade and with Mat unable to take Richards at all seriously.

  The restaurant was in the basement of a large bakery and cake shop. There were only a few people sitting round a large table in one corner, some of them sitting on a sofa against the wall, the rest in big comfortable armchairs. There was laughter and noise coming from them and their table was littered with coffee cups and trays. Richards took Mat over to the group and they sat down. Then Mat was introduced to them by Richards in the casual way he had. One of the group looked at his watch and said, ‘Another hour until the pubs open.’

  It turned out that there was a poet, a stage actor whom Mat remembered seeing in small parts, three painters and a B.B.C. Radio producer among the group. Mat was thrilled and curious in talking to them as it was the first time he had ever spoken with a group of artists or intellectuals in his life. They were indulging themselves in a good deal of small talk and banter. One of the painters told a terribly lame story of a man who farted inadvertently in polite company. Then the actor started talking of how, when he had been reading Hemingway and identifying himself with one of the characters, he had begun to feel the pain of the wounds. He was saying the titles of the various novels and writhing and holding himself in the appropriate places. He looked slyly at the waitresses and when they weren’t looking he said ‘Fiesta’ and clutched at himself, his face twisted in agony as if he had been hurt in the crotch. Then when he had finished he looked serious and said, ‘You should see my lady friend doing Faulkner’s Sanctuary.’ The producer ad libbed a review which he said he was doing of a biography of Rimbaud, ‘I was a teenage poet.’ Everybody laughed and a heated but not quite serious discussion took place as to the reasons for Rimbaud’s rejection of poetry. Mat felt too shy to take part but the poet who was sitting beside him on the right spoke to him. He was a tiny fragile looking man, large pale blue eyes and fine expressive features which were sadly marred by his teeth, which were badly impacted and which he hid with fastidiously pursed lips as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. He began to question Mat, giving the impression that he had a serious curiosity and concern about people and an acute personal sensitivity. He told Mat about his own poetry which he published under his own name – George R. Duncan – which Mat recognised, having read some of his astringent poems somewhere. The others were busy by this time discussing a get-together they would be having that same night in a pub.

  ‘You’ll come of course, Mat!’ said Richards swivelling his body round towards Mat. ‘We’d love to hear some of your ideas over a pint.’ Then he turned back to the rest of the company. ‘He’s a man with ideas. He should come, shouldn’t he?’

  There were cries from the rest. ‘Aha!’ ‘That’s a change.’ ‘I’d like to hear a few ideas.’ ‘Bring him along.’ George Duncan smiled sarcastically.

  Mat excused himself. It was time for him to go home for his tea. No, he couldn’t miss it, his wife was expecting him. He might manage to the pub later. Richards spoke to him for a minute, telling which pub they were to meet in and that he hoped he would manage to come. Mat left and the poet Duncan came with him. They walked together to Mat’s tram stop and Duncan asked if Mat could visit himat his home. Mat felt flattered at the invitation and said he would be pleased to accept.

  ‘Are you going to meet them tonight?’ Duncan asked him.

  ‘Them?’

  Duncan merely wrinkled his nose and pursed his lips tighter.

  ‘Och,’ said Mat, ‘they seem all right.’ He knew that Duncan for some reason would have liked to put him off going. Earlier he had noticed that Duncan had not appreciated the banter that had been going on in the restaurant. For that matter Mat had himself felt a little uneasy at the note of bantering levity in their talk. He had felt that there was something humourless in the forced pitch at which they’d create their whimsical and elaborate constructions. But he was curious.

  ‘Ah, well. Curiosity killed the cat. But I don’t think I’ll come to any harm.’

  Duncan by his expression was doubtful.

  ‘I’ll see you on Sunday night,’ Mat said, and waving back he boarded a tram.

  When Mat got to the top of the tram he looked back and saw the little figure, hunched, slightly splay footed, in his neat suit and looking nondescript in the distance, turn sadly and inwardly and walk away.

  * * *

  Mat had got drunk. Not very drunk, just a few beers and a couple of nips of whisky. But he was a bit drunker than everyone else and he was well able by this time to join in the conversation, if not dominate it. He was aware that he was talking too much and the others were laughing at him – Richards who remained almost sober, Dick who now exuded a sort of glistening benevolence, the actor Marquis whose fruity sarcasms were becoming richer, and the three painters whose laughter was now becoming thinner and higher pitched. Richards had egged Mat on and now Mat had started to talk about art again. He had begun by making his comparison between paintings and the gay plumage and exotic colouration of tropical birds, flowers, insects and fishes. There was the vividness of the colouration, and another element, stiff and formal, in fact abstract, in the stiff markings of some of those tropical fish. Picasso’s prolific productiveness (Mat’s exact and deliberate handling of this alli
teration caused much merriment) which, as he had said before, being too much of a good thing, was like the myriads of eggs laid by the turtle. All the little turtles hatching, crawling out of the sand and making for the sea only to be devoured by the sea birds, the crabs, the octopi, the fish, until only one out of the hundreds of eggs survives into full adult turtlehood.

  ‘Was this adult turtle one of Picasso’s great paintings?’ They kept egging him on, firing questions and giggling all the time. ‘Which one?’ ‘Guernica?’ ‘Les desmoiselles d’Avignon?’ ‘What?’ ‘Which?’

  ‘No! No!’ Mat was drunken and solemn. ‘It is the man’s essence I am trying to show. His real response to the world was not in fact cubism – his essence was in his fertility, in that he invented cubism. Not in what he did, but the way he did it. As if the ease and frenzy and speed of his inspiration were the whole quality and mark of his work. And in his work there is the same sadness and waste and mechanism that you find in the biological prodigality of the turtle.’

  But they wanted to know of other cases. ‘Cézanne?’

  ‘The oyster. All the formalism was characterised by the habit of shutting out experience.’

  ‘Hugh MacDiarmid?’

  ‘Nothing exotic there. A magpie. A collectomaniac in whom an inventorial passion was substituted for energy.’

  ‘Kandinsky?’

  ‘Of course, the striped fish.’

  ‘Moore.’

  ‘The dung beetle.’

  ‘Eliot?’

  ‘The hermit crab.’

  And then there were the innumerable peacocks, the humming birds, orchids, parrots, chameleons, vultures and that strange race of American poets, musicians and jazz singers who were like the lemmings.

  ‘Who’s the parrot?’

  ‘Nae names, nae pack drill,’ Mat said.

  But they went on teasing him and laughing at his garrulousness.

  Lautréamont was the butterfly with the horribly painted wings, though after all only a butterfly, but someone demurred at this. Mat suddenly felt resentful at their laughter, not because they were laughing but because they didn’t realise that his drunken solemnity wasn’t as serious as they thought. He laughed and wagged his finger at them. ‘And you’re the little monkeys who are frightened away.’ For some reason he thought of George Duncan and his reluctance that Mat should have come to the pub. He had a sense of impending disillusion, for he had not thought that these men lived in the same grey world as himself. Yet he sensed the boredom and disappointed expectancy which was latent in their frivolous banter. ‘Ah, well, Lautréamont? And Poe, Byron, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, De Sade, Nietzsche – they all frightened the little monkeys. Maybe they weren’t butterflies. When you think, though, what later poets were to actually see – like Céline, Owen.’

  Mat got up and went to the bar to order more drinks, buying half pints all round. When he had paid for them and bought another packet of cigarettes, the ten shilling note which he had got from Helen at teatime was gone, also most of the fifteen shillings which he had that morning was nearly spent. For a while he was almost sobered by a feeling of guilt. Twenty-five bob gone in one day. It was equal to a fortnight’s pocket money for him. The conversation had abated with Mat’s silence and he began to notice the pub round about him. Being a Tuesday night the pub wasn’t very busy and the few other people in the place seemed to be just sitting drinking glumly without talking. The waitresses behind the bar were idly busy, wiping the bar and polishing glasses. The glass topped table round which they were sitting had several rings of beer on it from the bottom of glasses. The mirrors on the walls reflected back the harsh aqueous light from the glaring electric lamps in their modern frosted bulbs. He began to feel the beer slapping in his stomach and it made him feel cold: there seemed to be a damp coldness exuding from the mirrors and the glass topped table. When Richards ordered another round of drinks Mat couldn’t face beer and asked for a half of whisky. When he swallowed it he felt himself grow warmer again, but also dizzier and his stomach heaved a little. He tried to remember what it was they had been talking about but could not. His head was full of ideas he wanted to express which seemed clear and at the same time incoherent. It was the feeling which he often had of thinking in images and then turning them into words, except that the images seemed unusually clear and forceful and the words unusually garbled and inadequate. Then he gradually got drunker until he became aware only of the extreme clarity and simplicity and profundity of his thoughts. He started to chatter again hardly knowing whether anyone was listening to him or not. Through the thick fog round his senses he could hear an occasional giggle and see an occasional face grinning at him. He had the feeling that his garrulous tongue was like a heavy steel ball rolling away before him down a long slope.

  It was very late when Mat got home that night. They had all gone up to Charlie Dick’s studio and drunk coffee and talked again. Or rather they had argued – a fierce, wild and stupid argument about solipsism which went round and round in logical circles. Everyone spoke with angry indignant voices as if they were forced into the argument by the stupidity of the others. Then as they had grown sober they had all become bored. Mat left at midnight and had to walk home. It took him a good hour and a half to walk through the lamp-lit streets. When he arrived home he was very sober and very tired.

  Helen was asleep when he got into the house. He didn’t bother to put on the light but undressed in the dark. He could see Helen’s form lying in the inshot bed and her hair spread all over the pillow. It had been chilly in the evening after the heat of the day and Helen had left a tiny fire in the grate. Mat poked the fire until it blew up and a flame grew, lighting up the room. Then he noticed something lying on the couch. He went over and looked. There was a little knitted woollen jacket, a pair of matching pantaloons and placed at the ends of the outstretched jacket’s sleeves a pair of tiny mittens. Helen must have finished them when he was out and placed them out for him to see.

  10

  WHEN MAT WOKE the next morning with an awful jerk he knew that he had slept in. He had been dreaming that he had got up, dressed and gone to work, then he had realised suddenly in his dream that he was dreaming and had woken with a start. It was now seven-thirty; too late for him to go to work; he remembered that it was Wednesday, market day, that it would be very busy, that beasts would be felled right up until four o’clock in the afternoon and that he would be missed. Right now he would be getting cursed right, left and centre. The shock of that thought made him feel the old coursing of adrenalin and he covered his face in self disgust. When he wondered why Helen hadn’t heard the alarm he remembered that he had woken himself, put it off, and had lain back in bed and started to dream that he had got up. It was as if his unconscious had played a dirty psychological trick on him. Now the recollection of the whole previous night came to him, that he hadn’t slept properly, that he had lain in that state on the verge of sleep when his dreams had part of the quality of real dreaming and partly had been shaped by some conscious theme. He could remember certain parts of the night, a kinaesthetic memory of the positions in which he had been lying and how he had come occasionally to wakefulness just enough to shift his cramped limbs. Mat still felt tired with his head thick from the drink and he lay back for a minute or two on the pillow and closed his eyes. The effect of this was to remind him of the theme which had so possessed his sleep.

  When he had been coming home the previous night his head had been full of a whirling frivolity, an inflamed exacerbated activity. He had begun to see strange connections and interrelations between things apparently opposite and to make unusual juxtapositions of ideas which usually didn’t seem to belong together; at the same time he was aware of a sense of disjointment, a kind of conflict of similarities as if the calm surface of life was being ruffled and broken. He felt at once attracted and repelled by his mood, at one moment delighting in the grotesque disintegrating ideas which he had, his mind like a flywheel running on and on of its own accord; and in the next
moment feeling the urge to stop this impetus, as if he felt a sudden eccentric motion of the wheel and his mind seemed to move in a series of bumps and rattles.

  The sight of the small knitted garments lying on the couch had the effect of a quick drench. During all the time that he had spent in silly chit-chat Helen had been finishing off the baby clothes. He had gone to bed shamed by this simple bit of actuality. Yet his mind had gone on working. All that chatter had been silly yet in spite of that Mat felt that the evening he had spent had been on the surface of something important. It was as if his interest in the people he had met, in their conventional irresponsible chit-chat, in talking of other people’s work, was a pale reflection of something else; a deeper, primal creative passion which was concerned solely with his response to the immediacy and directness of his own personal life. He supposed that the chatter was not entirely reprehensible, however wry and twisted and bitter it might be, in that it was wrung out of each person’s separate and unstated concern with his own creativity. Mat went on thinking and remembered that having fallen asleep he had started writing in his dreams. It appeared that he was writing yet the words had all leapt to the page as if by themselves and he had the experience of reading his own work as he wrote it. And it was writing of such ease, such fluency, such richness, such coherency, such significance that he was awed, exhilarated, amazed at his own prodigious talent. At one moment when he had come half to consciousness he thought that when he was awake he would be able to write it all down, like Coleridge and his Khubla Khan. There were times before when he had had this dream and had either been able to remember nothing when he was awake, or that his writing had been nothing but the monotonous repetition of meaningless phrases. But this time he could remember what it was he had been writing. Aside from the few scraps of nonsense he had written something which had as much significance and richness as he had dreamt.