‘Whoever could be listening?’ cried Clara loudly, knowing that Geoffrey A. Machin and Peter Hawtrey had cut Geography in order to do just that, and the other girls clucked and murmured and veiled themselves, thinking such deliberate flouting of the conspiracy of shame to be in doubtful taste.
But Clara had not cried out, originally, through vanity, nor for the benefit of her friends on the roof. She had been truly moved by herself, by her own watery image, by her grotesquely elongated legs, her tapering waist, and above all by the undersides of her breasts, never before seen. She stood there and stared at herself, seeing herself from that unexpected angle, as though she were another person, as though she were a dim white and blue statue on a tall pillar, a wet statue, a statue in water, a Venus rising from the sea, with veined white marble globes for breasts. She had never expected to be beautiful, and she was startled to see how nearly she approached a kind of beauty.
She had never expected to be beautiful because nobody had ever suggested that she might be so. Some mothers assume beauty in their daughters, and continue to believe it to be there, in defiance, often enough, of the facts, but Mrs Maugham was not one of these mothers. She assumed plainness, and she found it. She was so devoted to the principle that beauty is a frivolity and a sign of sin that she would have been ashamed to have it in the house. Nevertheless, her conviction of its absence was not wholly generous, nor wholly without malice. (On one occasion, with magnificent inconsequence, she had remarked after staring at one of Clara’s dazzling reports, ‘Well, handsome is as handsome does’; this was the only occasion on which she had ever said anything complimentary about Clara’s looks.) Clara as a child had fully supported her mother’s attitude, for she was in no way a pretty child; she was sullen, dirty, and her features were too big for her face. As she grew older, however, her face grew as well as her hips and bosom, but her way of looking as though she were about to burst out of her clothes became an asset rather than a disadvantage. She had not expected to be such a kind of girl; she had watched this kind of girl for years (the lips discreetly reddened, the loud laughter on the school bus, the tossing of long hair beneath rakish berets, the swinging of hips, the whispering in the garden) but she had never expected to become one. She had expected to be one of the others.
Although she was pleased with what she had become, and saw some future in it, there was one aspect of it that she did not like. She did not, could not like the boys. She persevered with them, in the hope that a taste for men, like a taste for the other desirable sophistications of life such as alcohol and nicotine, could be acquired through hard work. But it was hard work. She often shrewdly suspected that they found it hard work too, and that for all their signatures of fondest love they did not really like her; they wanted her, they thought that she would do, but they did not really like her. The difficulty was increased by the fact that she wanted good-looking boys only, and for some reason the really good-looking boys were quite impossible to cope with. For one thing, they could pick and choose, and they usually chose somebody else. And when one of them did choose her, she found herself quite unable to talk to him at all. There was one particularly disastrous episode with a boy of startling beauty; he was called Higginbotham, but even such a name could not dim his lustre nor silence his éclat. This Higginbotham, the admired of all beholders, honoured Clara with a note one day, delivered at the door of the swimming bath by a small minion; it said:
Dear Miss Maugham,
I have observed you several times coming and going. Perhaps you have observed me, I am often around, if you are not fixed up at the moment what about me waiting for you at the bus stop tonight? I can go your way.
Yours faithfully,
J. R. Higginbotham
The receipt of this letter threw Clara into ecstasy, for she had indeed observed his comings and goings, and had been suitably taken by his solid, rocky, regular features and by the dashing abandon of his hair style. She flashed the note around, proudly though covertly, and looked for him at the bus stop, but she could not look for him without some misgiving. She hated to admit it to herself, but there was something in the style and appearance of his note that would not do. The looseness of the syntax was a familiar symptom enough, but coupled with the handwriting it took on a more sinister light, for the writing was one of those faint, regular, carefully looped hands which indicate an underlying antipathy to the written word. She knew, from looking at it, that they would not get on. But she passionately wanted to get on with him; she made every effort to entertain and to captivate, for in proximity he was even more dazzling than from a distance. Her excitement, as she sat next to him on the narrow dirty furry seat of the bus, was almost too much for her. But it would not do. He did not find her amusing, and she found him quite disastrously dull. She could not have said that she found him dull, because she did not know it, and was conscious only of her own failure, and her misery at her own personal inadequacy quite drowned any sensation of boredom. When he asked if he could see her again the next day, she would not have dreamed of declining; they saw each other for about a fortnight, and her enthusiasm for him increased with each meeting, though he said not a word of any interest in the whole two weeks. They had no level of communication at all, and a bus ride with him was an ordeal rather than a pleasure, for she had to rack her brains to reply to his remarks about the weather, the town’s football teams, the cinema, his headmaster, and so forth, but nevertheless when he wrote her a note saying:
Dear Clara,
I think it would be better if we stop seeing each other, I find I have a lot of work to do with my Alternative Maths,
Yours ever,
James
she burst into floods of horrible tears, and cried for a whole day.
It was on the rebound from Higginbotham that she took up with the first boy that she came near to liking. He was not nearly as beautiful, but on the other hand his preliminary note promised other qualities. It read:
Dear Miss Maugham,
I have had my eye on you for some time. Now that Higginbotham has been given the brush off, may I venture to approach you? I hope that you won’t think I am rushing in, for I assure you that I am no fool, unlike certain other people. Nor am I an angel, exactly, you will find that out for yourself, that is if you give me a chance. There is a good film on at the Rex. This is a hint. I await your response.
Yours in hope,
Walter Ash
Clara knew quite well who Walter Ash was, and therefore did not flash this letter around the classroom, as she knew he was not a great prestige catch; on the contrary, he had a reputation for being rather a bore. Nevertheless, she thought his note had possibility. The syntax was not perfect, perhaps, but it was a great deal better than Higginbotham’s, and the use of such lengthy phrases as ‘venture to approach’ and ‘await your response’ showed some acquaintance with the useful clichés of the language. The handling of the ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ theme, though not wholly elegant, showed ambition, and the assumption that Clara was responsible for the dismissal of Higginbotham showed courtesy, though she would have preferred his name to be left out of it altogether. All in all, she thought she would give Walter Ash a try, despite the fact that people said he was very conceited, and despite his appearance, which was slightly against him, as far as his ears went. Only slightly, however. There were girls who were prepared to put up with far far worse than Walter Ash’s ears.
The evening at the cinema proved to be rather successful. The film was a Western, and without guidance Clara would have dismissed it as a childish frivolity, a glorified version of The Lone Ranger. However, Walter Ash said it was a classic, and talked knowledgeably about the genre, and so she permitted herself to enjoy it. She had not even known that Westerns were a genre of their own; it was exciting news to her. He talked, it was true, with a little too much self-confidence, and she could tell that his views were not entirely original, but she did not really care, because they were interesting, and it was somethin
g to be interested. She was tremendously impressed by a casual comparison which he drew between the victorious hero of the film and Corneille’s Le Cid, and all the more impressed because Le Cid was one of her set texts for A Level, whereas he was taking physics, chemistry and mathematics. ‘It’s all a question of the difference between the epic and the tragic,’ he said, when she expressed a preference for heroes that die. ‘In this kind of film they’re not supposed to die, they’re supposed to win.’ His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked several times during the course of the film that the heroine looked like she ought to be playing the horse. The comment had some truth in it, in that the heroine did indeed have an equine cast of feature, but he made it too often, and with too little variation; however, she was willing to forgive him, in view of his evident tolerance of her own social errors, such as an inability to say whether or not she wanted an ice cream.
This outing was a prelude to many more. She went out with him faithfully for several months, and as time went on she found that she liked him both less and more. He annoyed her in many ways – mostly by his incurable facetiousness, which went down very badly with her girl friends, and by his desire to undress her at every possible opportunity. Although only sixteen, she was not much shocked by his attempts, but she was alarmed by her own lack of response, for she did not fancy him nearly as much as she had fancied the infinitely tedious Higginbotham. What she liked in him most was the sense which he gave of being connected to and aware of other worlds; he promised connection. He was aware of things which she had known only by hearsay to exist, and he possessed sophistications which were most unusual in one of his age. For instance, he took her to a newly opened Greek restaurant, and introduced her to the delights of something called Baklava Syrien, which, having a sweet tooth, she very much enjoyed – although he managed simultaneously to annoy her by various highly irritating remarks about the way in which West Indians eat Kit-e-Kat, and by a joke about a man in a Chinese restaurant who found a finger in his Chinese soup. His taste in films, plays, books and music was far more decided than her own, though she would not admit that it was superior: she thought that, given time, she could outdo him, but as he had a good start on her in time, she was glad to listen to him. What impressed her most of all was his knowledge of the town itself, and of the way a town functions. She had no knowledge of the town; her impressions were confined to the bus ride to and from school, and to various coffee bars and shops in the centre. But Walter was well on the way to knowing his way around. He knew which cinemas occasionally showed good films, and which cinemas never; he knew about a painter who had been born in Northam, and whose work could be seen in a room at the Public Library. He knew the name of the Mayor, and he knew why Battersby was not the best Grammar School. He was sufficiently well-informed to be able to declare that it was a scandal that the town lacked any kind of orchestra, whereas Clara would have taken the lack of it as a simple act of God. He even ventured, once, a remark on the architecture of the Town Hall, but he would not elaborate upon it. (She found the remark, years later, in Betjeman.) The other girls laughed at this erudition, but Clara did not laugh, for she could imagine a scheme of events in which such knowledge might be an asset.
One of the moments which remained most strongly in her memory took place in the town’s most learned book shop, a charming building that dated, almost alone in the town, from a pre-industrial epoch: it was tall, and narrow, and its windows were so small that it could display only ten books at a time, and those ten were changed but once a month. Clara had visited this shop many times, and had stood for hours surreptitiously reading C. P. Snow, Tolkien, D. H. Lawrence and the poems of T. S. Eliot. She regarded it as an unofficial library, as remote and as municipal as the library itself. And then, one Saturday morning, she went into it with Walter Ash, to look at (not to buy) the text of Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon, which was being currently performed at the local rep. While they were there, an elderly man came down the stairs from the upper floor (with its second-hand books and books of local interest), and started to wander around, absent-mindedly. Clara could tell from a certain straining of attention on Walter’s part that he was trying to catch the old man’s eye, and eventually he succeeded in doing so; the old man nodded and smiled, with a bare minimum of recognition, and Walter said, ‘Good morning, Mr Warbley.’ When the old man had wandered upstairs again, with a book under his arm, Clara whispered, ‘Who was that?’ and even as she whispered she realized that it could be no other than the book shop’s owner, and added hastily, ‘That must be A. J. Warbley, I suppose?’
‘No, it’s his son,’ said Walter, shepherding her out into the street. ‘The old man founded the book shop, and that was his son. Don’t you know about the Warbleys?’
‘Well, not much,’ said Clara, wisely unwilling to betray her total ignorance. ‘How do you know them?’
‘I don’t, really,’ said Walter. ‘My parents know him, though. He used to come round to the house, a few years ago, before he took up so much with the Labour Party.’
And Clara, who could see no elegant way of enlarging this tantalizing scrap of information, had to make do with it – she dared not ask any further, for she knew nothing about the Labour Party, nor about the elder Ash’s political views, nor about A. J. Warbley himself, beyond the fact that his name was written up in black Gothic letters over his son’s shop door. But the hints and intimations which it conveyed to her, stretched far, far away, into the past and the future, and she had a sudden, piercing, painfully beautiful vision of a life where men with book shops called upon friends for the pleasure of society, and quarrelled with those friends upon topics as elevated, as unworldly and as magnificent as the Labour Party. Her desire for such a life was so passionate, and her gratitude to Walter for this glimpse of it was so great that she could have kissed him in the street, and later that day she did in fact allow him to undo her brassiere strap without a word of protest.
For her parents had no friends. Nobody ever visited their house except through obligations, and such family celebrations as still persisted had been transformed into grim duties. Christmas came, and the family groaned, and dourly baked its cakes and handed round presents; birthdays came, and useful gifts were unfailingly proffered. Nobody ever dropped in, and her parents never went out, save to large and joyless civil functions, or to the cinema. Clara could feel her friendly spirit choking her at times; she had affection in her, and nowhere to spend it. Sometimes she dared to wonder at the causes for this way of life, for she could see that it did not represent a normal attitude towards society, though it was so deeply bred in her that all aberrations from it were for the rest of her life to seem to her perverse: but when, occasionally, she glimpsed some faint light of causation, she recoiled from it and shut her eyes in horror, preferring the darkness to such bitter illumination. Once her mother, talking of Christmas, had said that as a child she had herself received no presents, as it had never occurred to anyone to buy such things – but that one year her elder brother, thinking to tease her, had hung at the end of her bed a stocking, and that when, excited, she had sprung to open it, she found it contained ashes from last night’s grate. This story was recounted as a warning to naughty children. Clara, having heard it, lay in bed and trembled, too frightened to cry, and counted herself lucky for her share of lip service.
The worst moments of Clara’s domestic life were not in fact those moments at which domestic indifference fronted her most blankly and sheerly, for they could be faced by an equally stony frontage – they were those which bore witness to hidden chinks and faults, deep within the structure. One of the events which shook her most of all was the occasion upon which her mother gave her permission to go on the school trip to Paris. This school trip was not an annual event, but a newly organized affair, to which the school’s attention had been drawn by the tireless Miss Haines; it was to take place in Clara’s last year, when she was seventeen, a year after
her father’s death. All those who were doing Advanced Level French were encouraged to go, and most of them were only too glad to do so, because the trip was both cheap and co-educational. Clara, when the idea was broached, declared instantly that it was not worth her while to ask her mother’s permission, whereupon the school embarrassingly said that if it were finance that were in question, then help might be forthcoming. Clara could not explain to the school that it was not so much a question of finance, as of her mother’s instinctive opposition to any pleasurable project – and anyone could see that a visit to Paris could not possibly fail to entail more pleasure than instruction. Finance was not, in fact, particularly in question, as Mr Maugham had provided for his family with a thoroughness that bordered upon the reckless – in so far as a man may squander upon insurance, he had done so.
The school’s offer of support put Clara in a difficult position, because she felt obliged to make the project known to her mother. She did not feel she could turn down such charity without proof of the necessary conditions of rejection. She had, at first, absolutely no hope of consent, and for a week or so she tossed in bed at night preparing to brace her spirit against the inevitable refusal. And then, under pressure from Walter Ash, she allowed to slip into her mind the faint, faint hope that by some quirk of reasoning her mother might be persuaded to agree. Once she had admitted the hope, she was inundated by whole floods of desire; the project took life in her mind, the trees grew leaves, the cathedrals grew towers and arches, the river flowed beneath its bridges. A whole week in Paris at Easter seemed to her something for which she would willingly have sold her soul. She tried, bitterly, to resist this fatal colouring; she tried to reduce the trip to words upon a notice board; but the mind had gone its own way, and she could not force it back into its grey and natal landscape. She turned on Walter Ash and reviled him for allowing her to hope, and indeed, despite the final outcome, it was his dangerous encouragement of this scheme that prefaced her final disillusion with him. She could not bear the sensations of loss with which she knew that she would be obliged to sit down and confront her mother. She hated the school for forcing her through the mockery of inquiry. She wished that the whole thing had never been.
Jerusalem the Golden Page 6