One skip and I’m high as you, one-eye cockhat Horatio, kissing the starlings like Hardy, any room on your platform, I bet not, reserved for admirals only . . . Why not take up the pavement, old artist squatting by your chalked racehorses and madonnas, take up the paving stones and hang ’em in the National Gallery, next to the Hogarths, genuine folk art, who else would buy it? . . . Spin in and out of the double-deckers climbing the Charing Cross Road, burbling and burping on bad petrol and old motors, one step off their roofs onto the second floors . . . Sway up Denmark Street where the brass nightingales swing and bebop from their celluloid nests . . . Stop by white palladian St. Giles-in-the-Fields, all overgrown with Bloomsbury now, stop by the old leper hospital ever mindful of charity, where the St. Giles’s Bowl was always full to give the condemned man a last nip of ale before the gallows at Tottenham Court Road or Tyburn, now turned to Marble Arch . . . Run out, you priestly potboy, run out with your silver bowl, put it to the lips of old Gog staggering up towards Hampstead, dry as a lime-pit and tied to the cart’s tail of instinct dragging him home to execution for treason to Maire, Maire and the past, Gog traitor to the old faith, lapsed Catholic and heretic of love . . . Over huckster alley Oxford Street, up Gower Street with its black terraces, past University College where Jeremy Bentham’s bones sit like calcium wicks in wax behind glass, no, all’s not the product of pleasure and pain, Jeremy, there’s the past too, driving us on unthinking to do what we would not do and cannot help . . . Float on, dragging feet like anchors, into North London, with the houses careening by, their brick sails battened down, tiled roofs tight as hatches, the pavement rising and falling like a coaly sea, smack into the arms of a looming bobby, Can I help you, sir? . . . Help me, help me, I know where I’m going, yes, I know where I’m going, I’ll float there, I’ll wash there, you needn’t help me, I’ll get there, look, there’s Maire’s paper in my pocket, telling me where I’m berthing, I’ll get there, copper, only I’m sinking, that’s why I’m sitting down, full fathom five my father lies, I’m diving, but I’ll get there . . .
And Gog falls in a faint across the glossy black boots of the policeman, who looks down at him from the height of heaven under his moon of a helmet, his belt buckle flashing as bright as Orion.
XXXIV
White.
A slab of white with two edges which meet in a corner where a lamp shines.
A white ceiling and three white walls and a white door and a window covered with black-out curtains.
Two carved horses’ heads at the foot of a bed with a ridge under lilac soft blankets that must be a body.
Hands on the black sheet with knuckles and blue veins standing out under black hairs and a blue tattoo on the left hand saying GOG and a blue tattoo on the right hand saying MAGOG.
Each finger can be set to work and move and bend at the joints.
A red silk Chinese robe embroidered with golden dragons over chest and shoulders and two more carved wooden horse’s heads at the top of the bed and a white wall at the back and a mahogany table at the side with a copy of Salome by Oscar Wilde and a glass of water.
Silence.
The man places himself in the room. His room. His bedroom. His bedroom at Hampstead. If the curtains are drawn, he will see clear over Hampstead Heath to the city lying beyond the trees. His home. His place. His pictures on the walls. The blue-and-orange poster of Rosa-Josepha, showing the Siamese twins joined at the hip, thin girls with pouting lips and four bare legs that make them look as if they were a beautiful stool supporting the immaculate curve of their arms. The Divan Japonais of Toulouse-Lautrec, with Jane Avril sitting pug-nosed and roundbreasted in profile and black skin-dress and orange henna hair, with Yvette Guilbert from the neck down clasping her bony hands together in the long gloves that have turned yellow with the yellow background of the poster, and the monsieur leaning over the indifferent neck of Jane Avril, tickling her nape with the edge of his pointed beard, propositioning her with offers of lusty sheets and gold. “Our poster,” Maire had said, and theirs it was, hanging in Gog’s bedroom by the large double-bed borne on the backs of four wooden horses.
The door opens and Maire enters. Her hair is piled high under a false bun of black tresses, piled high under the little bangs that fringe her forehead. She wears a kimono of black, on which jet swans fly above pitchy rushes. The kimono is closed at the neck with a gold brooch, but slit at the sides to the hip-bone, so that Maire’s long white legs show and vanish to the height of her round white thighs.
“You’re awake, Gog,” Maire says, going to the window and drawing the curtains until a dab of bright day slaps Gog in the eyes. “How do you feel after your journey? I’ll ring for coffee.” She presses the bell by the table and sits on the blankets beside Gog and brushes his forehead with lips cold as slices of melon and takes his hand and kneads it between her own.
“I feel . . . rested,” Gog says. “Yes, rested.”
“You know where you are now?”
“Oh, yes. In my room, at home.”
Maire smiles. “You are better. Back to your senses.”
Through the door, a maid comes, dressed in black dress and white apron and white cap, an Edwardian maid dating from the World War before the last. But her hair is cropped beneath her cap and her face is familiar, the face of Jules the chauffeur, now wearing lipstick and rouge. “Julia,” Maire says, “coffee and toast for the master.” Julia curtsies and leaves, mincing on high heels.
“Haven’t I seen her before?” Gog says. “Dressed in a man’s clothes as a chauffeur? Green cap, very dikey.”
Maire laughs. “Of course not, silly. Julia in drag? She’s so proper, she’d give in her notice if I suggested it. You must be dreaming.”
“But when you were following me in the big black car, she was your chauffeur. Or has she a twin sister, Jules?”
Maire looks at Gog in astonishment. Her eyes widen above her bland moon cheeks, the pout of her lips becomes a droop of wonder. “Follow you?” she says. “My poor Gog. You’re not as well as I thought you were. Follow you? I was with you all the way from Edinburgh. Sitting beside you, in the ambulance, all the way.”
Gog looks into the pale eyes of Maire, limpid and untroubled as twin glass eyes on an optician’s counter, reflecting exactly as much faith and truth as the beholder can see in them. “You mean to assert,” Gog says, “that I came from the hospital in Edinburgh to London, all the way in an ambulance, and you were with me all the way?”
“Exactly,” Maire says. “I’m so glad you remember now. I wondered if you would remember anything. You tossed and turned all the time, babbled in your sleep a lot of things I bet you wish I hadn’t heard. But I didn’t think you were really awake. It was very nice of me to keep such a long vigil by the wounded warrior, wasn’t it? Just like Florence Nightingale, except I’m married, of course.”
“It’s a lie,” Gog says. “It’s a damned lie. I walked all the way, except for that time you kidnapped me between York and Totnes so I had to walk in from the West. And you know it. You devil. Why do you have to lie? Why? You can’t tell the truth. It offends you. You’re the only person in the world who feels guilty if she says what’s actually happened.”
“Stop raving, Gog. I don’t mind you malingering when you’re perfectly well. But I won’t have you playing mad. Of course, you lay in the ambulance the whole way. Walked? On your back, if you insist. You just don’t want to admit how nice it was of me to sit up with you the whole way. It’s typical not admitting that I do anything for you. You always want to think of me as some sort of monster. Well, I’m not. I can be a perfectly loving wife, if I want to.”
In the righteousness of her reply, Maire speaks with such passion that Gog is almost convinced against the evidence of the past weeks in his memory. Then he feels under the bedclothes at the soles of his feet, which are blistered and calloused and horny.
“I walked,” Gog says, “and you’re lying. Feel my feet. The skin on the soles is like shoe-leather.”
“Feel your feet,” Maire says. “No thank you. I’m not one of those German tramps you’ve had lately kissing your boots for a fag-end. Of course, your feet are hard. You’ve spent five years tramping around in the silly old army. What do you think your feet should be like? Lavender bags?”
“They shouldn’t be as hard as they are,” Gog says. He looks round the room for his corduroys and his boots, but he can see nothing. “What have you done with my kit? My boots and everything?”
“I burned them on the bonfire,” Maire says, “last night while you were sleeping. What awful pyjamas you came in! They weren’t fit even to be given to the refugees. You were picked out of the sea naked. Boots? You’re dreaming.”
The maid Julia comes into the room, carrying a silver tray loaded with thin-buttered toast and marmalade and a silver coffee-pot and a milk jug and two large, blue, French peasant coffee-cups. She sets the tray down on the table and turns to go.
“Jules?” Gog says, “Where’s your green cap, Jules?” The maid walks away, apparently deaf.
“Julia,” Maire says, “the master’s talking to you. Humour him. He thinks you’re called Jules and you wear a green cap. It’ll pass. It’s a form of shell-shock.”
The maid turns and looks at Gog with cool green eyes. “I don’t have a cap, sir,” she says. “Is that all?”
When Gog nods, the maid turns again to leave. As she turns, the back of her hand brushes Maire’s cheek by accident or intention. Maire closes her eyes at this contact of flesh and she grimaces quickly from pleasure or anger at the chance familiarity. Then Julia walks out of the room.
“Really, Gog, I won’t have you upsetting the servants with your silly fantasies,” Maire says. “It’s simply impossible to replace them. So you can rave to me as much as you like, I’m quite used to it. But please be a bit discreet in front of poor Julia.”
“If you two are in a conspiracy to persuade me I’m out of my mind,” Gog says as Maire pours him his coffee, “you may well succeed. Provided I can’t find anything or anyone to check up with. But if there’s anyone I met on my walk who’ll say I did walk, you’ll catch it, lady.”
Maire hands Gog his cup of coffee and a plate of toast spread with marmalade. “Just who could tell you where you’ve been these last twenty-four hours on the ambulance?” Maire says. “Only a psychiatrist. They’re very good at telling us just why we took one particular journey through the mind, though there’s not a word of truth in what they say.”
“I suppose,” Gog says ironically, “you’ll be able to produce an ambulance driver and a doctor from the hospital in Edinburgh to swear I was put on a stretcher and driven all the way here?”
“Of course,” Maire says tranquilly, sipping her own coffee. “I’ve got your discharge certificate in my bag. And if you want a sworn affidavit, I can get that too, Mr. Prosecutor.”
Gog looks at the smooth kempt woman in front of him stocked with the assurance of the worldly-wise and the provocative tongue of the ready answerer. And although he knows that his defeat is certain, yet he plods on into the riposte.
“Cluckitt,” he says, “I mean, Miniver. And the Pardoner, I met him yesterday morning. And Merry and Granny Maria. And Evans the Latin. And everybody. I met them, just now.”
“You’ve met none of them since before the war. You’ve lost contact with all of them for six years. You’ve been having nightmares, Gog, in the ambulance. Tell me, in your journey, did you meet all these people in likely circumstances?”
“Well, no,” Gog admits. “Just like in a dream. They were suddenly there on the route, without explanation. Popped up again and again. But they were there. I could tell you everything about them.”
“You always did have a fantastic memory,” Maire says. “No one can doubt that. I should think even your nightmares are clogged up with telling details. I bet your dreams are full of the right facts, the verifiable facts, the academic facts. You don’t ever get a place or a name or a recollection wrong. I bet in your imagination you’re the Baedeker of the English byways. You remember every lane you ever strolled through in your old walking tours of the thirties, every bloody ramble you used to take. Why, you once walked the whole length of what you said was a lost sacred way, from Glastonbury nearly to Canterbury, day and night like a pilgrim fleeing from hell fire. I bet you took that route in your dreams.”
“Yes,” Gog admits, “I did. When did you say I walked that?”
“In ’thirty-eight.”
“Then why did I see a barrage-balloon on the way?”
“Because dreams don’t discriminate. You mixed up your memories of old walks with what you see roundabout you now. Dreams are a dreadful hodge-podge. They’re nothing to do with time. Confess, you thought you were jumping backwards and forwards through time every second.”
“Yes,” Gog confesses. “I did think so.”
“And weren’t you always having endless idiotic fights, just because you’ve been fighting idiotically the last six years? And just because you boxed even more idiotically when you were young?”
“Yes, again,” Gog says. He finishes eating and he lies back on his pillow, looking up at the white blank ceiling, trying to find there the clue that will prove he has walked his journey on his feet in nineteen forty-five, the year the war in Europe ended.
“Who’ll believe you, anyway,” Maire says, “if it’s your word against mine? Your doctor’s certificate says you’re a case of total amnesia with slight paranoia. Did you think I was persecuting you, too, my poor darling?”
Maire bends down and kisses Gog softly on the mouth. She picks up his hand and puts it against the swell of her breasts, rubbing it up and down on the soft silk yielding of the kimono. “You used to like that.” But Gog’s hand remains limp, so that she drops it back on the sheets.
“I wish I could believe you, Maire. I wish I could. But you know you’re a congenital liar.”
“You needn’t insult me, Gog,” Maire says, annoyed. “Just because the world’s so unspeakably dull that anyone with a grain of wit has to embroider things a little to stop themselves dying of boredom.” She rings the bell by the bedside again. “I’ll get Jules to clear away the things.”
“Jules?” Gog says.
“Of course, silly,” Maire says. “She was in here a moment ago. You saw her. I couldn’t have done without her. Who would have driven the car? You know I don’t drive.”
There is a knock at the door and Maire calls, “Come in,” and Jules enters, wearing her green chauffeur’s uniform, her hair slicked close to her skull, just as Gog remembers her from his journey. Without a word, she comes forward, stoops her narrow shoulders and picks up the breakfast-tray. “Will that be all, sir and madam?” she says without expression.
“Get the car ready,” Maire says. “I have to go out and cadge a few more extra ration-cards, now my husband’s back.” Jules turns to go, but Gog restrains her by tugging at the back of her green jacket.
“Were you in here a few minutes ago in a maid’s uniform?” Gog says. “Julia, weren’t you?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir,” Jules says, and she twitches her coat free with a swing of the hips and walks out of the room.
“You are trying to drive me mad,” Gog says. “You really are. It wasn’t a dream. You and your precious Jules. Do you deny she came in here just five minutes ago in a maid’s uniform?”
“Jules isn’t that kinky,” Maire says coolly. “Though I must admit, it’s an idea. Still, dress Jules up as a woman now, and she’ll give in her notice. She’s got so used to her chauffeur’s kit, I don’t think we’ll ever get her out of it. Except in the way of pleasure.” Here Maire laughs mockingly and puts a soothing hand immediately on Gog’s wrist. “I mustn’t tease you. I really mustn’t. I promise you, I didn’t do anything naughty with Jules all war long. It would have been too easy. I’d much rather torture her disappointed desire.”
“But the maid’s uniform . . . Julia . . . do you admit?”
/> “Admit that we’ve been playing a joke on you?” Maire says, her eyes wide with innocence. “I’d never admit that. You’ll have to prove it, dear, won’t you?” She looks up at the poster of Rosa-Josepha, and smiles. “Why not think of her as Julia-Jules, like you could be a Gog-Magog? Or a Maire-Jules, or anyone. Even a Maire-Gog. I’d like to be Siamese twins with you, as long as we were divided, of course! But seriously, I don’t know what clothes Jules wears. She keeps them locked up, though of course she borrows mine behind my back. As far as I’m concerned, I pay her and her sister to be Jules and Julia. If she’s the same person she’s getting a double wage for a double job, which is only fair. Poor dear Gog, you do suffer so. As if the truth mattered! Of course, it doesn’t. Especially now, when the Nazis taught us how to burn the truth, liquidate it, rewrite all the past, brainwash a whole nation. What was that remark I liked? The one you always used to quote and hate? By Aaron Burr, I think you said. Truth is what is plausibly stated and boldly maintained. Well, I tell the truth then, don’t I?”
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