Jerusalem the Golden

by Margaret Drabble

  And yet, when she finally, despairingly, screwed herself up and loosed the small words into the drawing-room air, her mother said yes. Sitting there, knitting, watching the television, knitting, her lips pursed over some unimaginable grievance, she listened, and nodded, and thought, and said yes. Clara, who had phrased the question so deviously, flinching in preparation from a brutal negative, thought that she must have misunderstood, and repeated the whole rigmarole, and her mother once more nodded her head and said yes. Or rather, she did not say ‘Yes’ – she said ‘We’ll have to see,’ but in her terminology this counted as a positive affirmative. Clara, perched nervously on the edge of her easy chair, was almost too overwrought to continue the conversation, but she managed to say, ‘You mean you really think I might be able to go?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Mrs Maugham, with a tight smile which seemed to indicate pleasure in her daughter’s confusion. ‘I can’t say that I see why not. You say all the other girls are going, and if it’s such a bargain as you say, then I don’t see why not. Do you?’

  Clara could hardly shriek at her, you know bloody well why not, you know bloody well why I can’t go, it’s because you’re such a bloody-minded sadistic old hypocrite, it’s because you think Paris is vice itself, and so do I, and so do I, and that’s why I want to go, and that’s why you won’t bloody well let me. She could say nothing. So she said nothing. But she was almost choking with emotion. And not with joy, either.

  ‘I don’t see,’ continued Mrs Maugham, ‘why you shouldn’t have a bit of fun too. And if you say it’ll be such a help to you, with your examinations, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go.’

  Clara did not know where to look.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and then, with a fine instinct for disaster, she tried to think of something to say to avert her mother’s next words, she tried to speak, but she could think of nothing, and her mother, shifting in her seat, said,

  ‘After all, Clara, you’ve had a hard year. With your father. You deserve a change.’

  And Clara sat there and endured it. Because the truth was that this evidence of care and tenderness was harder to bear than any neglect, for it threw into question the whole basis of their lives together. Perhaps there was hope, perhaps all was not harsh antipathy, perhaps a better daughter might have found a way to soften such a mother. And if all were not lost, what effort, what strain, what retraced miles, what recriminations, what intolerable forgivenesses were not to be undergone? And who, having heard impartially this interchange, would have believed in Clara’s cause? Clara’s one solace had been the cold, tight dignity of her case, and this had been stolen from her, robbed from her by an elderly woman’s few words of casual humanity. She had learned a fine way of sustaining the role of deprivation, but gratitude was an emotion beyond her range.

  She did not even thank her mother. She sat there in silence, and resentment made her cheeks hot; she resented the wasted hours of battle with her own desires, she resented her failed and needless attempts at empire, she was filled with hatred at the thought of lost anticipations. Now that she was to go, she knew that she might have had the pleasure of looking forward to going, instead of such long and cheerless debates and equivocations. Bitterly she thought, it is all spoiled, spoiled by consent, spoiled by refusal, it does not matter if I go or stay. By letting me go, she is merely increasing her power, for she is out-martyring my martyrdom. I die from loss, or I die from guilt, and either way I die.

  It came to her later, as she started to do her homework, that Racine and Corneille appealed to her so strongly because their ways were hers. For one event, five acts of deliberation. But she played alone, because the other people would not play. And she thought, as she sat there translating a piece of Polyeucte, that if ever she could find the personages for the rest of her tragedy, then her happiness would be complete. That would be what she would want from life; she would want no more than that.

  Before the departure for Paris, Mrs Maugham fortunately forfeited her position by various gratuitous and irrelevant remarks about the expense. Clara, grown careless and ruthless now that the struggle was over, did not fail to point out that the school would have helped upon request. Mrs Maugham countered this with contemptuous remarks about charity, and about the dignity of the family, and the lack of dignity of various families in the neighbourhood. Clara swore that she would pay for herself out of her Post Office Savings: her mother said that her dead father hadn’t put that money away for her to squander on trips abroad. Clara pointed out that it hadn’t been donated by her father in the first place, but by Aunt Doris, as birthday presents, over the past seventeen years. ‘Well then, your Aunt Doris didn’t give it to you to squander on trips abroad,’ said Mrs Maugham. And she was right there, too, but Clara was beyond the rights and wrongs of the case, blissfully carried away into the angry, amoral world of combat, wonderfully disconnected from truth and falsehood, freed from gratitude by meanness, released from effort by knowledge of fruitless impossibility.

  And after no matter what contortions, it was upon Northam Station that she found herself, and with a ticket for Paris in her purse. And she thought, as she stood there with Rosie, Susie, Katie, Isabel, Janice and Heather, that none of it mattered, none of it had any importance, in view of the fact that she was going. What could those apprehensions signify, in the light of departure? What could the nearness of victory mean to Bérénice, after five acts, and at the moment of parting? Or the possible loss of Chimène? Excitement had for days so filled her that she could not sleep, and now at last she had embarked upon it; thoughts of loss and martyrdom paled before the facts. What she had wanted, she was to have. And she thought, guiltily, I do not even feel guilty.

  Northam Station seemed to her a peculiarly lovely spot for such an embarkation. It was vaulted and filthy, black with the grime of decades, and its sooty defaced posters spoke to her of the petty romances of others, of Ramsgate and Margate, and she was going to Paris, albeit in a school raincoat, and with a beret on her head. The station had always been for her a place instinct with glory; its function beautified it immeasurably in her eyes. She felt herself to be of right there, to have a place upon its departure platforms, and the London train drew in for her with a particular significance. She had been to London once before only, and now she was going to Paris. As the train pulled out of the station, she watched the black and ridged and hard receding buttressed walls, travelling through their narrow channel into some brighter birth, and into some less obstinately alien world. And as they passed the rows upon rows of back yards, the grey washing on curious pulleys, the backs of hardboard dressing tables, the dustbins and the coal sheds, it occurred to her to wonder why she should so suddenly feel herself to be peculiarly blessed, and a dreadful grief for all those without blessings took hold of her, and a terror at the singular nature of her escape. Out of so many thousands, one. Narrow was the gate, and the hillsides were crowded with the serried dwellings of the cramped and groaning multitudes, the ranks of the Unelect, and she the one white soul flew dangerously forth into some glorious and exclusive shining heaven.

  4

  Victoria Station, when they arrived upon it, did not present a particularly exclusive aspect. It was crowded and swarming with school parties, hundreds of schools all gathered together, some in uniform, some not in uniform, some accompanied, some unaccompanied. Clara stared at them all hungrily, at the meek and the marshalled, at the loudly swearing, at the sophisticates, at the nervous and the panic-stricken ticket-mislayers. And she stared too at her own friends, who appeared to her suddenly in a new light, laughing and fiddling with their luggage labels, and casting their eyes around them as though unbalanced by the sudden variety of choice. The whole station was like some vast and awkward school dance, where need and constraint mingle in a heady, violent ferment of suppression. And Clara was glad that she was not accompanied by Walter Ash. She stood a better chance, she thought, upon her own: though a chance of what she would not have liked to have s
aid.

  The journey set in her a taste for such journeys that she was never to lose. The very sight of the sign at the head of the platform, shabby and tourist and third class though it was compared with that of the Golden Arrow at the other end of the station, was enough to raise her to a state she had never reached before, and as the train moved south, she sat in her seat and stared out of the window as though in a trance. The other girls in the compartment spent their time comparing their passport photographs, and commenting upon the rowdiness of some boys in the corridor, who seemed, to their disbelieving, priggish admiring indignation, to be drinking beer out of cans, but Clara, though she saw, was too rapt to speak. The boat too affected her profoundly; she had never been on a boat before, except for a rowing boat in the park, and she stood up on the top deck in the bitter grey April wind, and watched the foam and the emptiness and the receding bar of Folkestone, and she thought that she had never seen anything so wonderful in her life. Later she explored, and the boat’s possibilities seemed limitless; she did not think that she could ever tire of it. It was a rough crossing, and most people were rather quiet, and a few were vomiting over the railings and indeed all over the upper deck, but Clara had never felt better, and the rough lurching seemed to her an added attraction. She noticed that several of the school parties were starting, tentatively, to join up; those of her own friends who were not suffering in the Ladies’ saloon were talking, intermittently, to a group of boys from a school in Birmingham. But Clara did not join them: she kept herself to herself. The only person that she spoke to on the whole crossing was a young man who fell on top of her as she and he were going down the stairs: he was following her, two steps behind, when the boat gave a violent lurch and he missed his footing and crashed into her, and she too missed her footing, and they both sat down together upon the stairs. He helped her to her feet, anxiously dusting her coat, apologizing, undistressed, so courteous and unconfused that she felt that he had conferred upon her a favour, and to her amazement she heard her own voice answering, with equal, answering ease, assuring him that no, she was not hurt, no, of course it was not his fault, yes, it certainly was the roughest she had ever known it. Then he left her, and she watched him go: he had yellow hair, unmistakable yellow hair, and she said to herself, there goes a public school boy. She was not familiar with the type, but she recognized it when she saw it as she would have recognized the Eiffel Tower. Later, five minutes outside Calais, she saw him drinking brandy in the bar, and he smiled at her, and said, ‘Why don’t you have a drink?’ but she smiled back, and shook her head, and walked on.

  Paris, unlike the journey, had its disappointments, though she realized that what she principally disliked was the position from which she was viewing it. The school trip was an example of massive disorganized organization: every minute of every day was officially occupied, and Clara wasted some time before she realized that nobody in the whole world would care or even notice whether she attended each event or not. She was not used to laws so easily broken, authority so easily evaded. On the first morning, after a night in a Lycée bed, they all went to a preliminary reception at the Hôtel de Ville: Clara went, politely willing, but when she got there she found that it was a gigantic, milling, stifling insult. Thousands of school children, all of them well over sixteen, were crammed there into a large tall gilt room, and told not to insult the French, not to talk to Arabs, and not to go to Montmartre: then an English lady stood up and said that Paris had always been for her a source inépuisable de something, and everyone clapped, and then they were all turned out again, rather quickly, for the room was clearly needed for something else. Clara was not impressed, and amazed that she had the sense not to be impressed. But she still did not realize how unnecessary it was to attend such events, and she continued to go to all the scheduled treats. The Comédie Française did not impress her either, for it seemed to her a collection of posturing gabbling shadows, mocking at plays that she had studied in tranquillity and silence: the celebrated mirrors of Versailles were all spotty, Notre-Dame looked at her as though it had two spires missing from on top, and the famous intellectual cafés were full of old men and tourists. The lectures laid on at the Sorbonne were of an abysmal simplicity, and given by lecturers who grossly though understandably underestimated their audience: they bored her as she had not been bored by work for years.

  In the end she decided that she did not like being a sightseer: the role filled her with an obscure rage. She could not recognize, did not dare to recognize the grandiose ambitions whence her rage sprang; it did not amuse her to sit in the Deux Magots, remembering that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had once sat there, nor did she wish to glimpse the exteriors of the houses of the famous dead. She wanted interiors. She could not admit this, not even to herself, for such an admission would have pronounced her mad, but it lay there, subtly underlining her enjoyment. She was not content to be insulted in cafés by waiters more rude than any to be found in Northam; she could not accept the lowliness of her status, for it seemed to pain her more abroad than it had done at home, and she felt that she should somehow have escaped it, that she should have been changed, somehow, into something new. Once she saw, sitting on the pavement before a café, drinking pale green drinks, and embracing, leaning over from their plastic chairs towards each other and embracing, the most beautiful couple; the man with a face angular and ravaged and tragic, the girl dark and thin, with pale lips in a dark tan face: and she was so moved that she said, aloud to Rosie who was walking with her, ‘Look, oh God, look at those lovely people’; and Rosie looked and stared and laughed and said, ‘Good Lord, what odd ideas you have, I wouldn’t look like that if you gave me a hundred pounds.’

  They ate, three times a day, in the Lycée where they were staying, and the food was the subject of much exclamation. Clara was glad that Walter Ash with his quips was not there to add to it. Drinking coffee from bowls was universally thought to be charming, but other eccentricities did not go down so well. Garlic was much disliked; the amount of oil was heavily frowned upon, and Clara was enraptured by the spectacle of the profound and shocked indignation which greeted a certain sausage that appeared for lunch one day. The sausage was extremely coarse and highly seasoned, full of solid lumps of fat and gristle, infinitely far removed from the smooth uniform bread-crumb paste of sausages in England, and it was received with a horror too deep for words. Silently, the rows of sixth-formers tasted, and chewed, and rejected; silently they pushed the food to the side of their plates. Clara, like the others, found that the sausage inspired her with a sense of violent disgust, but she ate it just the same. She chopped it up, and chewed it, and ate it. Her friends turned to her and said, ‘You don’t like it, do you?’ and she turned to them with a smile of triumph, swallowing hard, and said, ‘Oh, it’s all right, really.’

  It was not until the next to last day of the visit that she finally formulated to herself her secret desire, which was to see Montmartre at night. The fact that they had been warned off made it the more attractive. She was not sure what it was, or what to expect should she go there, but she wanted to see it, because it had been forbidden. And on the penultimate day, emboldened by previous truancies, forays and excursions, she tried to persuade one of her friends to take the evening off from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and accompany her. But to her surprise, nobody would go. She had hoped that Rosie Lane at least, who was usually willing to try anything once, would have accepted the challenge, but she demurred, pleading a headache, and Janice told her, in mysterious tones, as though provided with obscene, private information, that she would be mad to go to such a place, that it was rough there, and wicked beyond all Clara’s pitiful conceptions of wickedness, and that if she went there anything might happen to her.

  ‘What?’ said Clara. ‘What might happen to me?’

  ‘Ah, anything,’ said Janice, shaking her head darkly, as though she could have told, but would not.

  So in the evening, after supper, Clara walked off by herself and caught the
Métro and got off it at the Place Pigalle, for that was the only name on the Métro map that she recognized.

  When she emerged, into the soft and dark and shining night, she caught her breath sharply, and tightened her grip upon her plastic shoulder bag. For here, in a sense, was what she had come to see. Here huge and naked cardboard women sprawled across the skyline, and red and green and yellow lights lit the blue air. The streets were full of people talking, walking and standing and talking, and the doors of the bars were open, and the pavements were like shops and the shops like pavements. The faint gay menace of music, issuing from juke boxes and radios, surrounded her, and it seemed that there was nobody, out of all those hundreds before her gaze, who was not there in the search of amusement – an amusement shallow, elusive, shapeless, all-embracing. She stood there, staring, immobile at first, before the riot of flesh and lights and people and advertisements, and she wondered what it was that she was supposed to fear, because she could not truly fear anything, in such well-lit company: and she wondered why she was not afraid, when they had all told her, all of them, the Party Organizer and Janice and her upbringing, that she ought to fear. She could see that nothing could harm her, that there was no danger, that danger in so far as it might exist was desirable, and she started to walk, slowly, up the street, looking at those who looked at her, exchanging glance for glance, shivering in the warm April air from a tremulous, hopeful, artificial apprehension. She shivered, and she walked as though she were naked.