Jerusalem the Golden

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Clelia is the only real saint,’ said Gabriel; ‘she truly is a saint. My mother always knew she would be the one. The rest of us, well, the rest of us get by, but Clelia has the real thing. Oh, we’re all marvellous, we’re all polite and delightful and witty and agreeable and all the rest of it, but Clelia is gifted, she’s the only one of us who’s really gifted, you know. She paints really well, one day she will paint really well. But the rest of us will never do anything. Look at Amelia, she went mad through the shock of waking up in the outside world, out of the golden nest, and she only married to get away from us, you know, to escape from our amorous family clutches, and when she got out, when she breathed the cold air of Essex, she went mad. And Magnus works – he’s the cleverest, but they never prized cleverness, they wanted us to be strange and wonderful, so in revenge Magnus works, he kills himself with work; he permits himself to wander so slightly, so discreetly, he lets it be known he’s a man of culture, but he works, to prove he can at least do that. And then he must, with all those children. And then there is me, and what can I do? I can do everything and nothing. No, don’t look at me like that, because it’s true, it’s quite true that I can do nothing really well, or rather I can do everything well and nothing well enough, I sometimes think I should have been an actor, because that was the only thing I ever wanted to do, but I didn’t do it, and now I couldn’t, I know the life too well to want to do it, and so there is nothing left that I want to do. But Clelia, she wants something, I don’t know how she can be so singled out, but so she was, and they always knew it, our parents, they recognized the marks. They don’t understand what she does, painting since 1865 means nothing to them at all, but people tell them it’s good, and since one of their children had to be good then it had to be Clelia.’

  ‘I don’t know about painting,’ said Clara, ‘but Clelia I love.’

  ‘Clelia’s nature is perfection,’ said Gabriel, ‘she is made up of every virtue, and moreover I have never heard her speak a dull word in her life. I could spend the rest of my life with Clelia; I miss her. I’ve never said this to anyone before, not even I think to myself, but it’s true, I miss her, when I married I began to miss her, and Phillipa can tell it, she hated Clelia, she must be the only person in the world who can feel hatred for Clelia. If she weren’t my sister, I would miss her, and since she is, why should I not?’

  ‘If she weren’t your sister, you would probably have married her,’ said Clara.

  ‘But she is my sister,’ said Gabriel; ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t we all go and live together, you and me and Clelia? Let’s go and live together in the country somewhere.’

  ‘Mon enfant, ma soeur, songe à la douceur, d’aller là-bas vivre ensemble,’ said Clara, and started to laugh, and said, ‘Oh God, if you could just see my brothers, you’d see what a refinement it is for you to spend time missing Clelia, Christ, why do you all have such marvellous relatives and wives and husbands to worry about? Why didn’t I have a few, just a few?’

  ‘You can worry about me, now,’ said Gabriel. ‘Me and Clelia, Clelia and me, your family by proxy.’

  ‘What do you think about the ties of blood?’ said Clara. ‘I believe in them; you know, I could tell my family, if I were an orphan I could go back to my own family, like a kitten, no, I don’t mean a kitten, but surely some animal; some insect maybe, that can tell its own blood? My parents were married for five years before they had any children, and it’s for that that they look so old, my father looked an old man when he died, and my mother looks twice the age of your mother, but she’s not, she’s not old at all, she’s got years and years and years to live, she isn’t even sixty, she might live another forty years, till I’m sixty too,’ and at this Clara began to cry, painfully, miserably, propped up against the green velvet roll, against the red wall, the tears rolling down her pale cheeks, cheeks unwontedly pale from sleeplessness and drink and strain and apprehension. And he, too, though he most gently, with soft lips, drank her tears, could have wept himself, for he too felt the weight of those empty, rolling, joyless years, years without hope and without pleasure, for they were his own wife’s years unrolling there in Clara’s eyes, and rolling down her face. And they sat there together, their backs against the wall, kissing gently, sighing, oppressed, united, related.

  The next day, which was their last day, he said that he would take her to work with him, and that she could see the television place, and have lunch there with him. He offered her this partly because he had been touched by her the night before and did not want to leave her, and partly because, it being the last day, he no longer thought it would be dangerous; the man that he was due to see was eminently suitable for introduction to Clara, being a bright young newly divorced fellow to whom all women promised bright new adventure, and Gabriel thought that he would judge Clara’s peripheral presence a complimentary asset rather than an embarrassment. Also, the work that he had come to do had been done; he had purchased a certain amount of film, which had turned out better than he had been given to expect, and also cheaper, and nothing remained of his mission but the final, mutually congratulatory stages, which he had no objection to her witnessing.

  She accepted his offer eagerly; she too felt warm towards him, as he to her, for his reception of her distress the night before had seemed to her peculiarly companionable. She was used to the look of boredom which crossed people’s faces when she talked of her mother, and had been grateful not to find it. And the thought of seeing the television place appealed to her as an excursion; she had always liked institution buildings, and hoped to find in the Maison de la Radio the smart paradigm of all such establishments. The idea of television seemed moreover to her to be instinct with glamour and drama: Gabriel, often profoundly depressed by the prospects of his career, found her enthusiasm and susceptibility an unexpected blessing. She was the perfect audience, the ideal visitor: impressionable, observant, uninformed, and yet at the same time no fool, for the things that she saw were the things that were there, though she saw them with the eyes of indulgence.

  They set off in the morning, on a bus, having time to kill, and got off at the Place du Trocadéro and looked at the golden statues and the Eiffel Tower and the inscription on the Palais de Chaillot which said that the artist’s well-loved pain strengthens him. Then, to kill more time, they sat on the terrasse of one of the cafés and had a drink, and Clara, yet once more, wondered at the way he without thinking sat at the most evident, the nearest, and inevitably the most expensive place, and wondered whether he even knew that by walking a little way off the Place and up a side street he could save himself a few shillings. And she wondered whether the saving of a few shillings would interest him, even if he knew how to do it. She had always been puzzled by the way in which people insisted upon sitting on expensive terrasses, and she had imagined them all to be, each time, overcome with shock and irritation when presented with the bill. She had thought the terrasse prices to be a vast hoax for the trapping of the innocent and had been perpetually surprised by the never-ending supply of victims, waiting to be duped. And now she saw that those who sat there drinking their expensive beers and coffees and green drinks and pale Pernod were not victims at all; they did not care about the bill, they preferred, they chose to sit upon a terrasse, it was worth it to them to sit there and watch the cars screech round the corners and the sun shining on the vast concrete Palais; and it was for such as Gabriel that these places had been built.

  They sat there, in the sun, and after a while she said, ‘It must be a year now, a whole year, since I first met Clelia. It was last May I met her, a whole year ago.’

  And he said, looking at her sitting there under the yellow canvas parasol,

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that whatever may happen to us, to you and me, you can never entirely escape me, you know, nor I you, for you will never give up Clelia, and I can never give up Clelia, so that makes us related for life, that makes you, as it were, one of the family –’

  ‘Why should I
wish to escape you?’ she said, staring at him, ‘on the contrary, there is nothing I want more than to keep – no, not to keep you, but to keep knowledge of you, to know what becomes of you, I should like to be forced to know what becomes of you.’

  He took her hand, and they kissed, under their umbrella, and when he let go of her he sat still with his arm around her, and it was as they were sitting there, thus linked, that Magnus walked past.

  He walked so close to them, across the front of the pavement where they were sitting, that they all three saw one another, clearly, with recognition, before they had time to turn away. Clara felt Gabriel stiffen by her side, and she too stiffened, in alarm, in pleasure at discovery, and in fear that she would witness in Gabriel some dreadful fall from grace. She thought he would release her, but she felt his arm decide to remain where it was, around her bare shoulders, and she knew that he had taken it, that it would be all right.

  ‘Magnus,’ said Gabriel, smiling up at him, with complicity, with charm, with apparent delight. ‘Magnus, as you see, we weren’t expecting you. But since you are here, sit down and have a drink.’

  Magnus, standing there, in his dark suit, and his heavy glasses, looked down at them, at their cosy installation under the parasol, and smiled too, gravely, and said,

  ‘Well, after all, why not?’

  ‘I must confess,’ said Gabriel, when Magnus had seated himself, and ordered himself a drink, ‘that you were probably the last person in the world that I expected to see. And since so much indiscretion has already taken place, perhaps I might be indiscreet enough to ask you what you’re doing here?’

  ‘You might ask,’ said Magnus, ‘but I wouldn’t answer. After all, what the eye doesn’t see, as they say.’

  ‘I trust you won’t spend too much time grieving over us,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘No, no,’ said Magnus, smiling at Clara, ‘I can’t see much cause for sorrow. I don’t waste my sorrow.’ Then he paused, for a long time, and they were all silent, and then he added, ‘I was rather glad to see you, in point of fact.’

  Then there was another long silence, and Gabriel finished his drink, and then got up to go, and said that perhaps he might leave Clara with Magnus and that she should come down to the television house and he would meet her in an hour’s time. Magnus said that nothing would give him greater pleasure, and that he would walk down with her himself, and so Gabriel left them, and Clara, finding herself alone with Magnus, felt herself to be touching some rare and devious emotion, some refinement of life too delicate to touch, and through sheer nervousness, when Magnus asked her, she ordered another Pastis, her head already beginning to turn from sun and lack of food. And she found herself, as she drank it, staring at Magnus, at silent Magnus, as she had never stared at anyone before, never so evidently stared, and he returned her gaze intermittently, unworried, and after a while he said,

  ‘It’s some years now since I’ve felt it necessary to envy Gabriel. It makes me feel at home, to envy him once more, after all this time.’

  ‘Why did you use to envy him?’ she asked, not wishing to pursue the other line of his thought, not knowing where it might lead her.

  ‘Ça ne se voit pas?’ he said, in modest French, and she agreed that it did, and added, generously, that in her view there could not be many people in the world without some cause to envy Gabriel.

  And then they were silent once more: she had never in her life felt so little compulsion to chat. As she sat there, a whole new self seemed to be unfurling broadly and confidently within her; nervousness dropped away, and the ease of slight giddiness set in. When he asked her if she wanted to have another drink, she said no, that she wasn’t bothered, and he laughed and said that that was the only Yorkshire phrase that he had ever heard her use, and that she must have another drink, so she said that she would, and he ordered her one, and then embarked on some lengthy conversation with the waiter in admirably fluent, pedantic French, and when the waiter went away she said to him that his French was marvellous, much better than Gabriel’s, and he said, ‘Ah yes, I have advantages that even Gabriel lacks.’ And they sat there together, staring out over the Place, with the comfort of conspirators, and as they watched a woman walked along the pavement before them, and Clara idly watched her; she was a large woman with a pink-brown face, and an old flowered print dress, in her forties perhaps, her red-brown hair straight and flat and short and uneven, slightly uneven; not fat, but tall and broad, her face gleaming slightly with what might have been health, a school mistress perhaps, for some reason clearly a spinster, and then Clara uneasily noticed that she was mumbling to herself as she walked, and then, before they had time to avert their eyes, she suddenly squatted down in the gutter, by a parked car, just in front of them, and pulled up her skirts, and Clara saw the bare gleam of her large red thigh, and then she stood up again and pulled down her skirt and wandered mumbling on.

  And Magnus said, ‘I have seen her before, she is always here, she sleeps much of the time on the Métro steps, come on, Clara, let’s go.’

  And they got up and went. They walked together, down the Rue Raynouard, and Clara stared at its perspectives, at the steep glimpses of courtyards with clipped bushes and fountains through expensive flats, at Balzac’s house, at a house with blue tiles on it, at a priest’s house with birds and terracotta angels on the chimney stacks, and she felt happy in Magnus’s company, she felt acceptable, she felt accepting, and when they reached the round block at the bottom of the street she said to him,

  ‘Why don’t you come in with me, why don’t you come and have lunch?’

  And he said no, that he had to go. But she insisted, against her nature and with her inclinations she insisted, she said, ‘Well, this evening then, let’s meet this evening,’ and he said, suddenly, that he would like to, that he would, and they arranged to meet at seven, at the terrasse where they had been. And then he said, but it must be your last evening, and she said yes, but that he must come, and he said that he would like to, and so they parted, and she turned her attention to the television house.

  She liked the look of the building. It was round, or round in principle if not in fact, as television houses always seem to be, and it had a post office in its basement; she liked places with facilities, and wanted to buy some stamps, but then reflected that French stamps would be of no use to her. So she went in. Gabriel had said he would meet her in the foyer, so she went up to the first floor, where the foyer seemed to be, but it was huge, it stretched right round the whole building, and she could not see him; all she could see were walls of glass sixty feet high, and pillars and vast mosaics and empty grey chairs and acres of fitted grey carpet. She noticed, thinking to herself, this ought to frighten me, this is the kind of situation I dislike, but she was not alarmed, she did not care, she was quite glad that he was not instantly there, and she wandered around, her giddiness increasing slightly from the vast grey extensions, but her calm increasing, too, with it. And then she saw him, finally, coming towards her from the other end of the expanse, with his friend, and she waited for them unruffled, unperturbed.

  The friend, who was called Patrice, suggested that they might go out for lunch, but Clara, when consulted, said with unusual firmness that she would rather eat in the canteen, that she particularly liked canteens, so they went up to the top floor and collected themselves a large self-service meal, and, as she happily noted, an adequate supply of wine. She liked the way that one could pick bottles of wine off the counter, as calmly as though they were milk or Coca-Cola or fizzy orange. When they sat down with their meal, Clara turned to Gabriel and said,

  ‘I arranged to meet Magnus this evening. I said we’d have a drink with Magnus.’

  ‘Did you really?’ said Gabriel. ‘Why ever did you do that?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Clara, starting on her bean salad. ‘Why not? I liked him, that’s why.’

  ‘I like him too,’ said Gabriel, ‘but I’m surprised that you do.’

  ‘I like most people,’ said C
lara, and before the meal had advanced much further she had invited Patrice, whose attitude was most complaisant, to join them too. He accepted with alacrity, and Clara, swallowing steady gulps of vin ordinaire, started to look round the restaurant saying, let’s ask him, oh look, I like the look of him, and what about asking that woman in that green dress over there. After a while they both succumbed to her mood, and when a colleague of Patrice’s stopped at the table to greet Patrice, he too was invited, and he too accepted. When they had finished their lunch they went on to the terrasse next door, and there, high up, they had a coffee and stared at the Sacré-Coeur, and Gabriel tried to buy himself a cognac and was told he could not buy spirits, so they went down to Patrice’s office, and on the way they passed a stocking coin machine, and Clara stopped and exclaimed at it, and explained that she had not been able to buy stamps, so Gabriel and Patrice put all their spare francs in the machine and bought her three pairs of stockings. Then they went down to Patrice’s office and he and Gabriel drank some cognac, and Clara had none, because she felt quite gay enough, for once, without it, and they sat around there talking for some time. And finally Patrice said he had to go down to the studio, and would Clara like to come, so they went, and she wandered around in the dark, tripping over cables, staring at cameras, reading notices on notice boards, while Patrice tried to persuade some men to move some chairs on to a set for a discussion programme. Then Patrice and Gabriel started to have a long and dull conversation with another man about a lens, and Clara, feeling de trop and needing the Ladies’, walked off to look for one. She had seen them on all other floors but the studio floor, and had to ascend several storeys to find one, and when she came out again she had forgotten how to get back. Curiously, she did not seem to mind; she knew that if the worst came to the worst she could always find Gabriel and Patrice again with Magnus in the Café Malekoff, and so instead of panicking or looking for an exit she decided to walk all the way round the fifth floor, and she set off, on the highly polished pale blue lino, walking very evenly, right in the middle of the corridor, and the names on the doors flowed past her. M. This, Mme That, Mlle This, red doors, blue corridor, round and round, until she noticed on one door a name that stopped her, the name of M. Harronson, and the name brought suddenly back to her so clear, so inspired, so brilliant a vision of the boy with daffodil hair from so many years before that she stopped there, stopped still in her circle, and stood. And then, although she could never in her life have pictured herself doing such a thing, she knocked on the door. She did not really think it could be him, but it was he himself that opened the door to her. He had a small blue office, of his own, and he looked young: her own age, she reflected that he was her own age.