And Miss Haines, who had been smiling too, as she heard this, abruptly stopped smiling, and assumed once more her brisk air of challenge, and said, ‘Good, good,’ and stalked most coldly off. But Clara was not perturbed by this change of manner: she knew now what it meant.
On the bus home that day, she wondered what her parents would have to say, if she were to ask them about it. She wondered if there was the faintest chance of impressing them with the significance of her position. It was a pleasant summer afternoon, and the rows and rows and rows of houses looked unusually bright and gay in the sun; the city, like Rome, was built on a series of hills, and there were several impressive long-distance views of hillsides covered with serried networks of roof tops and chimneys. This helped to alleviate the dreadful nature of the houses, which looked shocking from nearby, but which looked oddly bright and distinct and well-intentioned when glorified by mass and distance. Indeed, Clara knew from first-hand experience the moral truth of the story told in The Golden Windows about the house with the golden windows, for she had once admired from a friend’s house the whole dazzling, distant, smoky layout of her own hillside. It was hard, travelling home in that bus, and surrounded by the immense, evident, and varied liberties of people and land, to believe in the small impossibilities of her own home, and she felt, as she so frequently felt, the will to believe it to be different: the truth was too grotesque and too unnatural, and her hopes were so strong that she carelessly let them wander a little, giving them a little leeway, letting them sniff and pry and explore. When she got off the bus at her usual stop, even the moderate leafiness of the district contributed to her hopes, and she saw, fleetingly, the features that caused it to be described by others as a desirable residential area. She walked down Chestnut Drive, and as she picked a leaf off a privet hedge here, and ran her hand along a row of railings there, she thought that it was not so bad after all, and that she would tell them about it: they always said, when accused of indifference, that they were interested, so she would jolly well try to make them show a bit of their interest.
Even the sight of their own front garden could not quite depress her. It consisted of a small oblong patch of mown but weedy grass, in the centre of which stood a small green flowerless shrub with dirty leaves. The path to the door, like the path of the other half of their semi-detached building, was made of crazy paving. Mrs Maugham did not like crazy paving, because the stones worked loose, and she wanted it done in asphalt; Clara did not like crazy paving either, but felt obliged to defend it. The front door was painted blue, and had a coloured glass panel, which Mrs Maugham did not like. Over the porch was a wooden pointed hood with scalloped edges, to keep off the rain, presumably from the heads of visitors waiting for the door to be opened. Mrs Maugham did not like this either, on the principle that it was neither use nor ornament.
Clara, naturally, did not approach the front door; she went in by the back, and into the kitchen. Her mother was there, checking over a grocery order. She did not look up as Clara entered the room, but said, ‘I put down large, and they go and send me outsize.’ She always accompanied her unpackings by such comments, always with the same indignant implication that the grocers did their best to defraud and anger her with every item. Nevertheless, Clara could tell from her tone that she was pleased about something, and, as she took off her blazer and hung it in the cupboard, she waited to hear what it was. Information, however, was not proffered at once; Clara was sent upstairs to change out of her uniform. When she got down again her mother was setting the table for high tea; Clara, mutely, began to help, thinking that she might either find some opportune moment for introducing her own problems, or that she might be treated with news of her mother’s latest triumph. Usually she tried to evade such duties, by hanging around in the bathroom or in her bedroom; she loathed the tedious, repetitive business of the house.
‘Mrs Hanney came in today,’ said Mrs Maugham, as she passed the tea cosy through the hatch to Clara.
‘Oh yes?’ said Clara, in the grip of a horrible, bored fascination.
‘She wanted to use the telephone,’ said Mrs Maugham.
‘Yes,’ said Clara, beginning to understand the nature of her mother’s satisfaction; the lack of telephone of Mrs Hanney had been for some years a subject for discourse in a vein of amazed contempt.
‘Her television had gone wrong,’ continued Mrs Maugham. ‘She wanted to ring the service men.’
She paused, dramatically, allowing this statement to speak for itself, which it sufficiently did, for the fact that Mrs Hanney had a television and no telephone was the focal point of the Maugham household’s scorn. Such flouting of values, such wanton disregard for respectable priority, had often been remarked upon; Mrs Maugham was wont to enlarge upon the theme by describing situations in which a suddenly paralysed Mrs Hanney, unable to reach a phone to ring for a doctor, would expire before the inane cacklings of her own television set. It was true that Mrs Maugham’s moral fervour had had slightly more edge in the days before she herself acquired a television set, but even now she managed to retain sufficient cause for indignation, and the quality of her feeling for Mrs Hanney had changed not at all, though her attacks had been somewhat restricted in scope. Clara often thought that Mrs Maugham’s attitudes towards the television typified her whole moral outlook; before acquiring it, she had considered it infinitely vulgar and debased; after acquiring it she considered all those without it as highbrows, intellectual snobs, or paupers, while still managing to retain her scorn for all those who had had it before the precisely tasteful, worthy and perceptive moment at which she had herself succumbed to its charms.
‘She wanted,’ continued Mrs Maugham inexorably, ‘to have it put right before that dreadful serial thing, whatever it’s called, that thing about the family.’
And Clara saw that Mrs Hanney’s ignominy was complete, for this programme, the name of which her mother so evidently did not forget, was considered by her mother to be the very lowest form of entertainment available, designed for the exceptionally stupid and depraved.
‘I told her,’ said Mrs Maugham, handing her daughter a plastic butter dish, ‘that I’d never seen it.’
And with that, her recital appeared to be ended.
‘Did the service men come?’ asked Clara, feeling some word required of her, and yet not daring to comment upon the story’s true import.
‘I wouldn’t know. I told her she should have it serviced more regularly. She said they only got the men in when it went wrong.’
This remark she delivered with the immense complacency of the wise virgin; Clara could not help but feel that having men in only when things went wrong was not as wildly eccentric as her mother supposed, but as she knew no other way, no other world, she could not be sure. She was continually amazed and depressed by the way that the neighbourhood accepted and appeared to respect her mother’s self-erected authority; none of them did as her mother did, and yet they all deferred to the solidity of her principles. She had no friends, for she repelled intimacy as though it were an insult, but she had a position: her manner imposed itself relentlessly upon the indifferent and the unconcerned. Clara could never understand why others did not repay her contempt with contempt – why, for instance, the church-goers and novel-readers and fillers-in of football coupons and motorbike owners in the area did not possess the courage of their convictions and gang up on Mrs Maugham’s massive disapprobation. But they never did. They appeared to apologize for their pitiable weaknesses, instead of forming themselves into a counter-attack. Clara had actually heard one constant church attender, caught out donating a small charitable sum to the Vicar, defend herself to Mrs Maugham by saying that she hadn’t really meant to give it, and that she never would have given it if it hadn’t been that her little boy had just given up Sunday school. There was something in Mrs Maugham’s solid air of conscious rectitude that threw a faint shadow of guilt over everyone who approached her, though as often as not people did not know why they were guilty: her dis
approvals were so vast and public, her approvals so private and ill-chartered that all immediately cast themselves as goats in the discrimination of her gaze. Occasionally a cheeky shop girl in town, caring nothing, and with nothing to lose, would face her out, but Clara on these occasions felt such anxiety and associated shame that she dared not rejoice. The local shop girls never risked her wrath. They were afraid of her.
And Clara too was afraid. Although she fully intended to profit from the soothing exposure of Mrs Hanney by a judicious introduction of her own concerns, she found herself, when the moment came, quite unable to do so. She stood staring at the yellow-flowered table-cloth, as phrases formed and re-formed inside her head, but she said nothing. She did not know why she should feel such fear, because she felt for her mother not respect, but contempt: and why should she lack courage before someone whose attitudes were to her so transparently, pettily contemptible? She loathed her mother’s loathing of Mrs Hanney; it made her shiver with horror. Even the sight of the table, laid there before her, filled her with disgust, for it bore witness to so many foibles, so many fixed and rigid rules. There was not an object on that table that was without its history of contention; every implement lay there in the pride of hideous superiority. And everything was ugly. Clara could have forgiven the things their ugliness, if that very ugliness were not such a source of pride. The cloth was linen, for Mrs Maugham held that plastic tablecloths were the last resort of the working classes, and had said so often and at length; but it was adorned with place mats of plastic. There was no need for place mats as the meal was to be cold, but place mats were invariably laid. The rest of the objects were more in keeping with the plastic table mats than with the linen cloth, for Mrs Maugham was in practice a sworn friend to the synthetic; to her, utility was a prime virtue. And yet her views of utility were far from strict. The house was crowded with mock-useful objects, like pushbutton ashtrays (and in an unvisited house of non-smokers) and gadgets for watering plants and killing flies and dispelling odours and concealing rolls of lavatory paper and dicing potatoes and dispensing sugar. Mrs Maugham was a great shopper in large department stores, and she could not resist their sillier notions; if anyone had accused her of extravagance, she would have roundly rebuffed the accusation as fantastic and perverse, and yet she must have spent many useless pounds in her pursuit of useful acquisitions. Similarly, she always maintained that she hated clutter-clutter, implying, in her tone, the dense decorative drawing-room knick-knacks of Victorian England – and yet clutter reigned in all her rooms. But she could not see it as such, and indeed it could be said, on her behalf, that not a single object had been purchased or positioned for its decorative value. Clara calculated that at least a third of the objects laid on the table, by regulation, were not used during the course of any single meal, and yet their function was certainly not one of gracious adornment. There was a particular slop basin that Clara regarded with particular dislike. It was decorated with purple tulips, and it was hardly ever used, for Mrs Maugham was not unaware that it was something of an anachronism. And yet, every meal time, it stood there. To Clara, it was always painfully conspicuous, an indictment of a way of life; she knew nothing of the history of slop basins, or of the society that evolved them and their joyless name, but the sight of one affected her like some shameful family secret. In no other household had she ever seen a slop basin, and she hated to see an eccentricity erected into a symbol of the traditionally correct.
As so often happened, she deliberated too long about the introduction of her own affairs, and when she finally found the courage to speak, she chose a bad moment. She waited until tea time, and listened in silence while Mrs Maugham recounted her adventures with Mrs Hanney to the rest of the family: they were received in silence by Alan, Arthur and her father, who did not waste their speech. Then Clara, into the lull that accompanied the pouring of tea, said sullenly,
‘I saw the headmistress today. About what to do next year. I’m going to do French.’
Her mother poured the last cup of tea, stirred it vigorously, picked up her slice of bread and butter, took a mouthful, chewed it, and then, ‘Suit yourself,’ she said.
3
Long before she left school, Clara discovered that whatever negligent indifference might greet her in the bosom of her family, she was capable of arousing strife in breasts other than those of Miss Haines and Mrs Hill. The bosomy metaphor is appropriate, for Clara developed young, to the astonishment of her contemporaries, who had convinced themselves that sexual and intellectual precocity never coincided. Clara regarded her own development with unreserved satisfaction, for she knew that it promised well. By the time she was fifteen, her stock in the school rose enormously by virtue of the fact that she was a constant recipient of billets-doux from the boys of the neighbouring Grammar School. The girls in her class, who had hitherto regarded her as relatively plain, and as a non-starter in the fashion stakes, with no notion of how to twist a school beret or hitch a school skirt, quickly reconsidered their assessment of her, and she found herself elected to an honorary membership of the fastest, smartest, slickest coterie. She was naturally gratified by this change of front, and drew the appropriate moral – the possession of big breasts, like the possession of a tendency to acquire good examination results, implies power.
She never came to take her membership quite for granted: she had admired the in-people for too long ever to feel herself to be truly one of them. Most of them had been in from the start, born survivors, born leaders: amongst these lucky few were numbered Rosie Lane, an athletic, pretty, small-faced girl whose father owned a large grocer’s, and whose primal popularity had been cheaply purchased by the judicious distribution of dried apricots and jelly cubes, which the girls devoured whole. Another was Susan Berkley, a bossy, self-willed creature, whose natural vigour went, as adolescence progressed, the natural way. Then there were Heather and Katie, inseparable friends, who bolstered each other by their mutual devotion; never had they known a moment’s shame of friendlessness, never had they had to look for a partner in dancing or in gym, never had they walked alone from classroom to classroom, and their confidence overflowed and imposed itself upon all beholders. These four, in Clara’s year, were the hard core of self-satisfied splendour, and to them others had been added. Isabel Marshall had been added at the age of fourteen, when her gawky, bony clumsiness had suddenly transformed itself into dazzling beauty, and Clara, her especial friend, was added a year later when her breasts grew. And then there was the odd case of Janice Young, who was, if anyone ever was, the doomed and unalterable scapegoat – she was not pretty, she was not clever, she was not good at games, and yet, during her fifteenth year, she managed to make herself acceptable as one of the inner ring. The inner ring itself could never quite understand her arrival there, and concluded finally that she made it through sheer cheek. She was irrepressible, shameless, brazen; she ran after the boys, and the boys, to the amazement of the other girls, meekly succumbed, and took her out, and bought her presents. She talked about her boyfriends in a tone of most frightful, spine-chilling, whimsy determination, and they took it. She threatened them, she menaced them, and one day in this vein she would marry one of them. She was not to be resisted. And Rosie, Susan, Heather, Katie, Clara and Isabel could not resist her either; they let her join them, weakly, unable to refuse such primitive intention. They showed, from time to time, a faint suspicious desire to force her to provide her non-existent credentials, but every time, just as their forces gathered for the attack, she would produce out of her hat some new and dazzling boyfriend, all ready to pay tribute to her elusive powers.
Clara felt herself to be extremely fortunate in her membership of this group, and the insecurity of Janice’s position in it fortified her, for she knew herself to be more secure, less irritating, less tactless in every way than Janice. So she was especially kind to Janice. She was also rather surprised by the way in which she took her own newly acquired charms, for she was almost as determined as Janice to make th
e best of herself, and she had more to make the best of. Some of the girls – and even, oddly enough, the dashing, heavy-lipped, inviting Susan – were a little nervous about their developing selves, and a little alarmed by their own powers. Clara, on the other hand, was not at all alarmed. She did her best to stimulate a constant flow of love letters, and found the collecting of admirers a very satisfying pastime.
The chief scene for amorous exchange was the entrance to the boys’ swimming baths, for the girls had no baths of their own, and were obliged to use those of their brother school for their weekly afternoon’s lesson; here, on the steps, small red messenger boys would collect, proffering envelopes from their elders. The girls enjoyed their swimming lessons, titillated by the well-known fact that some of the more daring boys used to watch them changing through an easily accessible sky light. This well-known fact was somehow never discussed in public by the girls, for public admission of it would have destroyed and inhibited its oddly private thrill, and would have shamed the vain ones into cowering in their cubicles, as the timid and modest already did. As it was, such girls as fancied themselves would leave their cubicle doors open, in the hope that tantalizing glimpses of leg and breast and buttock might be seen through the high and smoky glass, and once Clara, taking advantage of the convention that they were unobserved, walked the whole length of the changing room draped only from the waist down by a small towel, on the pretext of borrowing a safety pin. The other girls, knowing quite well that she had done it for the benefit of one Geoffrey A. Machin, were shocked and admiring, but the convention restrained them from expressing either shock or admiration. On another famous occasion, Clara, stark naked, drying herself in her cubicle, caught sight of her own image in the wet tiled floor: ‘Good God,’ she cried out, ‘just look at me, how weird I look from underneath,’ and all the girls had cried out, ‘Ssh, ssh, Clara, somebody might be listening.’
Jerusalem the Golden Page 5