Jerusalem the Golden

by Margaret Drabble

  She could not make him out. She could not understand why he had to be so excessively pleasant, so amusing, so interested and concerned, so much a claimant of all the virtues; he worked hard to make himself agreeable, and yet there was clearly no need for him to do so, as he was quite agreeable enough by nature, by mere presence, so that any hard work on his part was superfluous. There was even something faintly ingratiating in his manner, which she found not at all offensive; on the contrary, it seemed an agreeably appealing weakness, a sign of vulnerability, which the too adequate Clelia lacked. Clara liked Clelia to be as she was, perfect, for she wanted nothing from Clelia: but in Gabriel she was glad to see marks of need. And she wondered whether his charm might not be in some way a recognition of the room’s defects; whether he might not, in fact, be struggling against the odds of his décor. The relationship of the Denhams with the two other couples was not at all clear, and Clara could not assess the degree of intimacy between any of the people present; one of the couples, an architect and his wife, seemed to have reached a considerable state of badinage with their hosts, but as they lived in the next street but one Clara could not but suppose that the friendship was one of convenience – and she more particularly supposed this as the wife, a solid cardiganed lady, had a kind of cheerful well-informed attitude towards life which assorted ill with Phillipa’s fringe attractions. The other couple were in appearance at least more congenial; the wife was an actress, and the husband a painter, and they were wearing the same excessively ephemeral style of clothes as Phillipa herself. The husband, a bony elegant-looking Scot called Alistair, was wearing a camel-coloured suit such as she had never seen on a real man; she had always supposed such garments to appear only in magazine advertisements for cars and liquors. She was rather glad that Gabriel did not wear such clothes; there was something about his check wool shirt and the way it fitted into the low waist of his trousers that suggested most marvellously the body underneath, whereas the Alistair man’s suit concealed him completely.

  They talked about art. Clara felt that if she had not been there, they might all have talked about their children, as even the actress had a child, but as it was they talked about art, with only the most casual and deprecating references to the exploits of their offspring. They talked, rather well, about the desire to imitate and to represent; Clara was impressed by the way they all managed to talk intelligently, yet without strain, without intensity, without affectation, and wondered if they could do it so easily merely because they were older than her and her friends, or whether they had been accustomed to talk so all their lives. The cardiganed lady put forward the theory that abstraction in art was a primitive whim, corresponding to the very earliest whims of childhood, and that any true artistic desire was a desire to represent the human form, in whatever medium; she illustrated this, subtly introducing her children, by describing the efforts of the American teacher at their nursery group to make the children paint with free expression. ‘And they hate it,’ she said, triumphantly, ‘they absolutely hate it. The little tiny ones don’t mind, they don’t mind slapping paint on with their fingers or making blodges all over the paper, but the big ones want to make real things. The older they get, the more they need to imitate the real; free expression bores them rigid. Miss Watson thinks my eldest has got something wrong with him, just because he paints real trees. She says he’s got no imagination.’

  The painter demurred, and seemed to imply that such a chronological interpretation of artistic development was not particularly valid, and Gabriel told a story about Clelia, who used as a child to have a passion for modelling things out of an obsolete substance known as Glitterwax. She was good at making things, he said, but not good enough; her critical faculty was always better than her creative, and when she was eight or nine she would sit for hours and hours in her room, savagely, persistently trying to create in the obdurate intractable wax the images of her imagination. She made trees, and flowers, and animals; but she was not content, she had to make people. And she could not make people. The human form escaped her. So she took to making sketches for her Glitterwax models, and worked for hours trying to reproduce her own designs. Then one day she did not come down to tea, having been out of sight all afternoon; after half an hour her mother went up to look for her, and found her sitting on the hearth rug in front of the fire, surrounded by the most delightful and talented drawings, weeping bitterly over a shapeless lump of Glitterwax, which she was kneading tearfully in her hands. Her mother inquired, tenderly, the cause for her distress, and Clelia, amidst many sobs, finally confessed that she was weeping because she feared she would never be an artist. Clara listened to this tale with a sense of extreme delight, for she liked to hear people talk of Clelia, as lovers like to bring in the name of their loved ones, and mothers the names of their children; moreover, she liked to hear Gabriel tell it, she liked to hear him speak, and to speak so kindly of his sister, to speak of her with such affection.

  It began to get late, and still nobody went home. Clara looked at her watch, and saw that it was after one. Eventually Phillipa told Gabriel to go and make some coffee, and he went through into the kitchen, and five minutes later put his head through the hatch and asked her to come and help him carry the cups. Phillipa did not move. ‘I can’t get up,’ she said. So Clara sprang helpfully to her feet, and went and got some cups from the hatch, and brought them through and put them on the floor at Phillipa’s feet. Then Gabriel called that he couldn’t find the coffee grinder. ‘Oh Christ,’ said Phillipa and did not move.

  ‘I’ll go and look,’ said Clara. And she went out of the room, and through the unspeakable hall, and into the kitchen, where Gabriel was standing looking bewildered, with some coffee beans in a jar, and a coffee pot. ‘There’s a grinder, somewhere,’ he said. He was not trying to look; his eyes were not looking at anything. Clara looked around for a coffee grinder, and noticed as she did so that the kitchen was both better and worse than the rest of the house; worse in its basic structure and materials, but better in its equipment, in that it was full of desirable and well-designed objects, most of which had probably once been donated as wedding presents. There was a new though worn gas cooker, a washing machine, and various fashionable coloured iron casseroles and earthenware pots, though the sink was cracked and ancient, and the linoleum, torn and frayed, showing all too plainly the irregularities of the stone floor beneath. Clara found the coffee grinder without much difficulty, and offered it to Gabriel, who put the beans in it and plugged it in. ‘I’ve never seen an electric one before,’ she said, to say something. ‘How does it work?’

  ‘You just press the button,’ he said. ‘Look, go on, press it.’ And she did, and the machine whirred and buzzed in her hand, and drowned the faint echoes of conversation from the other room.

  The room seemed very small. As she handed the grinder to Gabriel, their hands touched. ‘I couldn’t see it,’ he said, ‘I must have drunk too much.’

  And he tipped the coffee into a jug, and poured on the boiling water. As he poured it, Clara looked through the hatch; she could see only Alistair Beattie, sitting in the far corner of the room. She turned away, and looked at Gabriel, and he carefully put down the jug. Then he stepped towards her, and took her in his arms. Both of them started nervously at the contact, and glanced, with mutual alarm, towards the square window into the other room, the square opening in the wall, and he pushed her very slightly to one side, so that her head was against the wall, so that they were in the one small wedge of the kitchen that could never be seen from the other room. Then he kissed her. She returned his kiss with ardour, and held on to him tightly; he was hot, and his body under his shirt felt very hard. He continued to kiss her, and to press against her.

  When he let go of her, they both glanced once more nervously at the other room, and then he took her hand, and lifted it up, and kissed it, on the palm and on the fingers, and said, ‘I’ll carry the tray, if you take that packet of digestive biscuits.’

  And they went back
and joined the others. And she found herself able to converse, as she had not been before, with ease and some point, but for all that she said as soon as she had had her coffee that she must leave. She had hoped that Gabriel might drive her home, but the Beatties instantly and so sincerely offered to take her that their invitation could not be declined.

  And as she got into bed, she reflected that perhaps it was as well that Gabriel had not driven her, as he had certainly been drunk. She did not regret this; indeed, she was delighted by it, for without it she doubted whether he would have got round to kissing her so soon, if indeed ever. And she had wanted to be kissed, more by him than ever before by anyone. That secret kiss, in its dangerous angle, with its back to the wall, a few inches from discovery and surprise, was for her the lofty classic height of passion. The suddenness, the danger, the lack of discussion, and the brevity, had but added to her love.

  7

  Gabriel had known for some time before kissing Clara that he was about to kiss somebody. He was on the whole an honourable man, and had not kissed anyone except his wife since his marriage, save in the way of courtesy, so the act was for him a significant one. He was slightly uneasy about the lack of choice and the sense of desperation which had finally pushed him to it, but did not feel that they reflected ill upon Clara; he truly admired her, and the eagerness with which she had returned his onslaught had turned, through relief, his admiration into a kind of love. He had not expected to be so well received, for his vanity, once secure, had been steadily eroded by years of disastrous marriage, and having kissed her, having felt lips more hungry than cold, and a body that trembled with anticipation and not with apprehension, he felt himself to be made over again, to be a new man. He had forgotten the simplicity of such acts, and their lovely associations with the unfamiliar and the unexplored.

  Clara seemed to him, in his ignorance, to be everything that Phillipa was not: warm, enthusiastic, easily amused, amusing, and wonderfully, mercifully unexhausted. She listened to everything and everyone, as though she could not hear enough, and her face was mobile and expressive; she smiled and frowned and concentrated in rapid, vivid succession, and her features never set into a civil parade of attention. When she was bored, she inspected, frankly, the furniture. And she wanted him; she had wanted him to ask her round for a drink. In his gratitude, he could have kissed her for that alone. Other girls had seemed to want him, but he had never put them to the test, being unwilling to face the slightest, most minimal coolness, being too unsure of his reception.

  Phillipa’s receptions he knew, and his knowledge filled him with despair. He had tried, for years he had tried, and the slow living with his failure had exhausted him nearly as much as it had exhausted her. Half of his effort in life was spent in concealing the truth from the neighbours, a tedious bourgeois occupation which degraded him as much by its nature as by its lack of success. For the neighbours could not help but notice. Phillipa had reached such a point that she no longer knew what she was showing them; she had never much cared, and now she could not even see. She wept in the street; she sat on the front steps and wept. He had come home from work, and found her weeping on the steps, with a baby in a pram on the street by her, and the two others running loose down the pavement. She could not manage the children, a fact which aggravated her condition, but which had certainly not caused it, for it preceded both children, and, he devoutly hoped, their marriage. He offered her help with the children, and from time to time they had had girls living in, and women in to clean, but when they were there Phillipa wandered around the house in nervous, silent suffering, unable to sit down in their presence, unable to speak to them, unable to live in the house with others. She liked to be alone, or else she liked to be out; in company, in society, she weirdly flourished, and he had known her dry her eyes after a bout of frightful anguish, and put on her make-up and put on her newest dress, and go out to a party and laugh, and, to all appearances, enjoy herself. Then she would come back, and take off her clothes, and lie rigid upon the bed, staring at the ceiling, uncommunicative, silent, infinitely distressed.

  He did not think that he could ever understand her, nor the reasons for her malaise, but nevertheless he knew her, and at times he seemed to stare straight at the springs of her intolerable grief. When he wanted to revive within himself his tenderness for her, and to make his own heart bleed, there was a string of incidents which he would recall, which never failed to cause him an intolerable barb of painful emotion. The first of these dated from the second week of their marriage, when, after lying in bed waiting for her, he had got out, finally, and gone to look for her. He heard her before he saw her; she was in the living room of their small Paddington flat, and she was moaning softly and rhythmically to herself. The light was off, and he did not dare to put it on, but he found her, crouched in a corner behind the armchair, her arms around her knees, wearing her smart trousseau night shirt. Spread before her on the floor was a Durex Dutch cap, an instruction leaflet, and various other accoutrements of contraception. She was crying because she could not manage them. She was too narrow, she said, or rather she did not say, for she did not say such things, but this was what he gathered, from her meaningless sobs. He tried to console her, saying he would occupy himself with such things, as he had always done before their marriage, in their quite adequately exciting courtship, but the sight of her, so reduced, had struck him to his heart. And it was too late. Their first child was conceived that week.

  Other recollections he had, most of which, like this first, bore witness to a physical sensitivity most tragically pronounced. If she broke a nail, her eyes would fill with tears, and once she bought an unlined skirt which she could hardly bear to wear, for the friction of the cloth of the skirt against her legs would drive her into a frenzy. If there was a wrinkle in the bed, she could not sleep. And yet this neurotic fastidiousness in no way overflowed into her care for the house, which she left to its own squalor, with a fatality unparalleled even amongst their own middle-class acquaintances. It was as though, afflicted, she could not bear to lift a finger to help herself; instead she sat suffering, staring the image of her suffering in the face. She was passive, to a degree that was at times dangerous, for she would let the children play with the washing machine and run across the street. Some of her afflictions were at first sight bizarre and out of place; for instance, she cared dreadfully about the shocking conditions in which her neighbours lived, though the conditions were not, as some of her more malicious friends pointed out, so much worse than those in her own home. A social conscience was not something that even Gabriel would readily have credited her with, yet he had to admit that she had one, though it never carried her as far as any kind of action: nothing carried her towards action. She did nothing, and yet she would stand on her front steps and watch the more alarming sights of the neighbourhood, and cry. When questioned, she said that it was injustice that made her weep. And he thought that she suffered from these sights, as she suffered from a broken nail. Proportion had no place in her life: she was so deeply wounded that pain came to her simply, as itself. Once she said to him that she could not bear to have more of anything than anyone in the world and that misery seemed to her to be a duty, but he rejected this explanation, as one too metaphysical to be true.

  She did, from time to time, seem to be quite happy. (Sometimes she would laugh at his jokes.) In company she was occasionally even gay, though he never knew how much to trust her gaiety. She loved the children, and would pick them up and kiss them violently, but they did not like such treatment; the eldest of them said, crossly, that he did not like to be squeezed, and whenever he said this she would go into the next room and cry. Sometimes she even cried in front of them; the children were used to the sight of her tears. The only moments of joy that he remembered were the moments of the birth of each child; she had sat up in bed, pale and damply gleaming, a smile of triumph upon her face, her fair lank hair sticking to her cheeks and shoulders, transported by the narrow felicity of suffering survive
d. And the birth of the third was marred by the fact that the third was a girl. He dated the final phase of her impossibility from the birth of the girl. Having two sons, he had wanted a daughter, and whenever the subject had arisen, Phillipa had formally acquiesced, but when she was told, the throes of labour over, of what she had produced, she groaned softly, and said, more frivolously than sadly, that she would not know what to do with a girl. And he had, soon after the birth, caught her staring at the child, at her small girl’s body, at the swollen soft red sex of the baby upon the open nappy, so curiously dominant a feature of the newborn, as though sex were the first distinction of nature, and he had seemed to know, with a frightening intimacy, the quality and depth of her anxious, defensive, participating love. For the boys she had no fears, but in the girl, he thought she saw herself and her wounds reborn.

  Naturally, the degree of his own responsibility for her state exercised him considerably. At times it seemed to eat up his whole life. There were days when he took the memory of her to work with him, and rejoined it when he got home, without many hours of grace in between. But on most days he managed to forget her for most of the time that he was not with her. He was a sociable man, in a sociable profession (if profession it could be called, which he with his strict inheritance often doubted), and he found it quite easy to fill his time in with people. But he had few close friends: the secret of Phillipa cut him off from the world, he was too scrupulous, too closely wedded to her to abandon her, and she lived with him in some closed and white numb corner of his mind. The people that he saw most frequently were his brothers and sisters, and he was the only member of the family to find such attraction and devotion unnatural. He had learned this sense from his wife, who viewed his background with a profound suspicion, so that he was obliged to feel faintly guilty even about his visits to his own one-time home. His family, for its part, was too delicate ever to question Phillipa’s effect upon Gabriel, or his relationship with her, but he suffered enough from knowing that she could not enjoy their company, and that evenings spent with them were evenings of trial.