Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Well, no,’ said Walker.

  ‘Where’s England out there?’ asked Miss Marrow.

  ‘Oh, miles away in the darkness.’

  ‘You know, I don’t know whether you feel this sort of thing, but I must say I feel a bit mean, leaving it like that. I know fidelity and patriotism and loyalty are rather old-fashioned words these days, but I think when you’re doing something like this they suddenly mean something to you again. Don’t you?’

  ‘No, not really,’ said Walker. ‘In any case I’m only going for a year.’

  ‘If you can stick it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll stick it.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you’re tougher than I am. I seem to care more about that sort of thing than most people. How many in your cabin?’

  ‘There are four of us.’

  ‘Beat you,’ said Miss Marrow. ‘Only two in mine.’

  ‘Lucky girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Marrow, taking a cigarette out of her bag. ‘Have you a light?’

  Walker took out his box of matches, on the back of which he had written half a chapter of a novel, and tried to strike one. The wind kept blowing them out. ‘I think that’s got it,’ said Miss Marrow at last. ‘Does your cabin have a pink mirror?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘I thought they only had pink mirrors in brothels.’

  ‘Oh, do they?’

  ‘Haven’t you ever been in a brothel, Porker?’

  ‘No, I haven’t actually. Have you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Miss Marrow, with a change of tone.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean anything,’ said Walker, embarrassed, ‘I just wondered how you knew.’

  ‘I read about it.’

  ‘You don’t have to believe all you read.’

  ‘No, that’s very true. Damnation! My cig’s gone out. Come behind this ventilator, and light it properly this time.’

  They retired behind the ventilator; Walker cupped his hands and struck a match within it, and Miss Marrow penetrated the circle with her cigarette and put it to the match. Once again hair blew against Walker’s cheek, and once again Walker’s heart thumped a little, though this time not with the cosmopolitan flourish that Julie Snowflake had caused, but with a provincial backstreet beat.

  ‘Ta,’ said Miss Marrow. ‘Well, isn’t all this exciting. I suppose we’re miles out to sea now.’

  ‘Off Start Point,’ said Walker.

  ‘And just think, there are grey-green icebergs glistening in the mist . . . covered with sleeping birds. And sunken hulks on the sea bottom,’ said Miss Marrow, sighing, and went on: ‘Are you imaginative, Porker?’

  ‘A bit, I suppose.’

  ‘I thought you were. I was always the imaginative one at home. Ever write any poetry?’

  ‘Nothing to speak of.’

  ‘I did. Lots of it. I thought you were sensitive, though. You have a sensitive mouth.’

  Walker looked at Miss Marrow and realized that she wanted to be kissed. He looked down at his shoes.

  ‘Oh, my shoulders are getting so cold,’ said Miss Marrow.

  Her dress didn’t fit very well, Walker noticed, and the straps stood inelegantly away from the shoulders. She sat down on a life-raft. ‘Have my jacket,’ said Walker.

  ‘Oh no, you’ll freeze,’ said Miss Marrow.

  So Walker sat down, put his arm around her, and said, ‘Is that better?’

  ‘That’s rather nice,’ said Miss Marrow. ‘I say, do you think this bra I’ve got is too pointed? My mother thought so.’

  ‘Looks perfectly fine to me,’ said Walker.

  ‘That’s what I said. Don’t you think that old lady’s a terror? She’d have me running around for her all the time if she could.’

  ‘Matriarchal England, that’s what she is,’ said Walker. ‘Every man’s best reason for emigrating. And then she comes with you.’

  ‘Oh, I think that’s a bit hard on her. She’s very cultured, you know.’

  ‘Omar Khayyam,’ said Walker.

  Miss Marrow laughed. ‘You’re a fool,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ said Walker, leaning to kiss Miss Marrow lightly on the cheek. Miss Marrow saw the gesture and turned her face to meet the kiss with her lips. Collision ensued; the kiss went askew and landed in her hair; her nose struck his cheek; and the tip of her cigarette touched the lobe of Walker’s ear. ‘Bloody hell!’ said Walker, leaping up.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ cried Miss Marrow. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s just that I’ve burned my flaming ear.’

  ‘How?’ asked Miss Marrow.

  ‘Your cigarette.’

  ‘Sit down and let me look at it.’

  Walker sat and Miss Marrow twisted his head to face a deck-light. ‘You’ll live,’ she said. ‘It’s just gone a bit red. You’ll have a blister in the morning.’

  ‘On my ear,’ said Walker. ‘I shall look a fool with a blistered ear.’

  ‘Kissing’s dangerous,’ said Miss Marrow.

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker. ‘So I discover.’

  ‘Did you kiss her too?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That attractive American girl you were going round with.’

  ‘You shouldn’t ask things like that.’

  ‘I think it’s a bit awful, kissing two girls in one evening.’

  ‘Why?’ said Walker. ‘Anyway, I missed you.’

  ‘You know why,’ said Miss Marrow.

  ‘You mean I should have picked just one.’

  ‘Well, if that’s how you look at it,’ said Miss Marrow, ‘I’ll get off to bed. Still, it was nice, those dances, and talking to you. I hope your ear doesn’t blister, Porker. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Walker.

  Miss Marrow walked off down the deck, her long blue dress blowing in the wind. Walker sat for a moment and looked at the sea, his hand over his ear. The sea was dark and the birds were sleeping on the grey-green icebergs. He waited a moment, and then hurried downstairs to the bar. He found Jochum sitting at the table with some of the bagpipers, but Julie Snowflake had gone.

  ‘What happened to Julie?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Oh, she has gone to her cabin, I think,’ said Jochum.

  ‘I guess she thought you’d stood her up, you heel,’ said one of the bagpipers, ‘or else she thought she’d be a heel and stand you up. Either way you lost.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Walker.

  ‘Sticky wicket,’ said one of the girls.

  ‘Who shall we say called?’ asked another.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Walker, ‘I hope I’ll see her again.’

  ‘No, it’s all over,’ said the girl. ‘One of those beautiful fleeting things. She was having a great time with another guy, wasn’t she, Dr Jochum?’

  ‘Oh, two dances, that’s all,’ said Jochum.

  ‘Oh, well, goodnight,’ said Walker.

  ‘Stiff upper lip,’ said the bagpiper.

  The days at sea passed easily by; the ship pushed westward through calm warm weather. And gradually Walker began to feel further and further away from home, more and more en route, going somewhere. The life of the ship grew perfectly customary. Each morning, Walker woke late and in confusion, missing the warm pressure of Elaine’s buttocks against his own. But the swaying of the ship, the sound of the wash-basin filling and draining, the lanoline smell of shaving-cream, reminded him where he was, in his underwater troglodytic cabin. Looking out from his high perch he could see the quiffs of his three cabin-mates as they moved round getting dressed. Someone had placed the ship’s newspaper and the daily quiz (already doubtless completed hours ago by someone over the rank of assistant professor) on his stomach. He aimlessly glanced through the paper, skimming through the vague unreal news it offered of disasters, wars, fires, and riots in the distant world. Then at last he got out of bed and washed himself, humming the Trout quintet, an old bathroom speciality. He shaved with Richard’s razor, dipped his fingers in Julian’s hair-cream, brushed his
shoes quickly with Dr Millingham’s discarded undershorts, put on his suit and went to the dining room. His fellow-passengers had usually almost finished; they sat in holiday trim, beaming at him over the marmalade. Miss Marrow, in spotted blouse and blue linen shorts, usually hid his rolls or told him his breakfast had already been divided between the rest of them.

  ‘No talking between meals, Mr Bigears,’ the old lady would cry. ‘Is sloth the deadliest sin?’

  ‘It becomes desirable if it is called leisure,’ said Dr Jochum.

  ‘Oh, I hope it is the deadliest,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s the only one I haven’t got. My sins are better than yours, Mr Bigears.’

  And in this fashion the days went by. The sea lolloped against the side of the ship, his toothpaste went down in the tube, and meal-times came and went, with Lady Hunt-Francis and later, when a slight swell came up, without her. Walker found himself spending his time at the cinema with Miss Marrow, or walking the deck with Dr Jochum, and he became modestly fond of them both. Miss Marrow was shrill, played jokes, and appeared in clothes that drew attention to the droopiness of her behind, the paucity of her bust or the dyed auburn of her hair. Her unfailing lack of art was positively appealing. Dr Jochum maintained a vein of heavy gallantry that brought with it the smell of all the lindens in old Europe. It was like being entertained at some minor palace, and one expected that at any moment the minuet would break forth and life would begin in earnest. Occasionally, across the deck or at a meal, he would glimpse Julie Snowflake, cool, calm and uncollected, unsquired. Aspirations grew in Walker’s heart, but Miss Marrow always wanted to see a film or Dr Jochum wanted to swim, and Julie remained in the corner of his eye, an unadopted opportunity. Sometimes he sat on deck and watched her. He had hired a deckchair, a cushion and a rug; each day he went up on to the sports deck, where his chair had been conveniently set out for him, and joined the crowd of sybarites who, wrapped and huddled and smelling of suntan lotion, waited in the breeze for the sun to appear so that they could cast off their clothes and expose themselves. The clouds blew by, the sea glowed green. Sitting stretched out in his blue blankets, looking like a patient being carried into a hospital, he lay on his chair and thought about himself.

  It was an old subject with him. The wind whistled hard and strong across the ship; his hands turned blue and his body-fat, unused to all this, struggled to keep warm; but every day, in every way, he grew, so he felt, better and better. He started The Brothers Karamazov, which was a book he had started often before; he resolved this time to finish it. He accepted, in an absent way, his beef-tea, and often had to be reminded that it was time to go below for a meal. For suspended between the Mansfield Road flat, scented with dishcloths and Elaine’s Tweed perfume, and the imagined belfries and balconies of Benedict Arnold, he was looking at himself and wondering at what he found. What he seemed to find was nothing. His parents had always talked about people having good or bad characters; character, in that sense, he seemed to have none of at all. Nothing pushed him very hard. He believed himself to be a decent and rational man who, admittedly, always did indecent and irrational things. He had thought, however, that he was in charge of something. When he looked around, though, every corner of his mind seemed unfledged, and inadequate, and thoughtless, and he couldn’t find in himself any immediate machinery for improvement. He was too affable, too reasonable, too ordinary, too willing to drift, for anything like that to happen. His beliefs didn’t hold him to anything; they were rarely there when wanted. His body was as flabby as his mind. He was going to seed. His stomach was a great podge of flesh. He ought to get his weight down. He smoked too much. He had lost the power to be excited. Excitement, with him, was like the perfectly boiled egg that we feel we have had once, though when we can’t remember, and then spend the rest of our lives pursuing. What should he do? He lay on his back and thought of answers. He ought to look again at philosophy, religion, mysticism. He ought to read some energizing work. He ought to ask the world better questions. He ought to change his shirts more often. He ought to be spare. He was in the sere and yellow leaf; he needed insight and vision; he ought to possess elevation. But not, perhaps, yet.

  For the voyage didn’t, after all, push him very hard. Everything was so utterly pleasant. He looked at the long, thin shelf of the horizon, the slit in the system behind which the world lay, where sea and sky were held apart, and found he missed absolutely nothing at all. This was equipoise. A little mist was all that was needed for the gap to be elided, and he had no wish to stop its happening. So he accepted the sun, and the wind, and The Brothers Karamazov, and the various distractions, and time went imperceptibly by. He had discovered on the first morning that by turning on his side, making a little hole in the deckchair blankets, and peering with his bright round eye through the wooden slats he could see Julie Snowflake and the other American charmers three rows of people back, talking about Yerp in contralto voices. Charmers they surely were, clad in Bermuda shorts of dashing olive twill that threw up the high-toned brownness of their tanned healthy legs, and in handsome sweaters with circle pins on the collar.

  On the first morning, while engaged in this exercise, he had been caught and punished. His discoverer was Dr Jochum, now restored from his disorder of the previous night. He tapped Walker on the shoulder and said, ‘Oho!’ He was wearing white shorts and a sporty foulard shirt that blew away from him in the wind, exposing a round stomach and a deep black navel. He looked down on Walker, snug in his chair: ‘Come along, some exercise. Here we are, two fat men. Three times round the promenade deck and then a swim in the pool. That is my prescription.’

  ‘I was reading, actually,’ said Walker, holding up like a flag The Brothers Karamazov.

  ‘Vell,’ said Dr Jochum, ‘you are like all reformers. You like to reform the world because it is easier than trying to reform yourself. I have met such men.’ Walker’s expression showed some chagrin and Dr Jochum laughed heartily and at depth. ‘Oh,’ he said, wiping his eyes, ‘you are splendid as you are. But come on, we must take care of our boties. Let’s take a constitutional walk.’

  Walker turned down the corner of his book and silently followed the man down the metal staircase which brought them to the closed-in promenade deck. It stretched endlessly before them, stern to bow, and was empty save for a few young Americans playing a fast game of table tennis and a member of the crew carrying a small metal bucket. Dr Jochum struck out at a brisk pace toward the stern and soon had Walker puffing. ‘Not so fast,’ he cried, and Jochum allowed his speed to drop slightly but refused to take his eyes off the road. Presently, when his breath was back, Walker said, ‘Am I going to like Benedict Arnold?’

  ‘Ah!’ said Jochum, ‘that depends what you expect of it. No doubt you expect America to set you free?’

  ‘I think I do, yes,’ said Walker.

  ‘Well, it is the duty of the young to go out and seek their misfortune. Perhaps you will find it; perhaps you will be set free.’

  ‘Is it a misfortune? Surely it’s a good thing for a man to set out and, well, find who he is?’

  ‘So you want to know who you are?’ said Jochum, laughing, face forward. ‘Well, I am a gypsy. I will tell you the answer. You will go out into the American desert. The air will be pure. There will be no one around. There will be silence, you and the sky. You will open your chest to the air, say, “Okay, shoot, who am I? What am I?” And the sky will say, “Buddy, you’re nobody. Now go back to the beginning and start over.” ’

  Walker found this cynical, and protested. ‘Surely everything that happens to you changes you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t say America won’t change you; I said it won’t help very much. The convert takes with him more of his old location than he thinks. Every man thinks he has only to go out of his environment. But there always stays with him this.’ He tapped, with a gold-ringed forefinger, his dark, intense head. In the desert a Nottingham head, thought Walker. Jochum strode on, his shirt flying out behind him, so that his little drill Ber
muda shorts were all he could offer against total nudity. The sailor put down his bucket and watched them speed by in some alarm. ‘A nice day!’ said Jochum paternally.

  ‘That’s right, sir,’ said the sailor; ‘mind you don’t walk right off the end.’

  ‘How they look after you!’ cried Jochum. ‘Such peace, such contemplation, on a ship. You have leisure to do all you want. The mind works. It is like being in a monastery, without the basic disadvantage of those places.’

  They turned sharply where the promenade deck encountered the stern, and began the journey back to the bow on the other side. The sea looked just the same. Nothing was in sight. Walker tried secretly to shake his shoelaces undone. He said, ‘It’s just the way a university ought to be.’ This casual remark caused Jochum’s confident step to falter. He looked, for the first time, at Walker, and shook his head sadly. ‘Oh, my dear young friend,’ he said, ‘I am afraid you are in for a sad disappointment. A fine day!’ This last was to the sailor, who had come through, by internal means, from the port side to take another look at them, and who remarked, ‘You’ll do for yourself, going about like that.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jochum, ‘that it is necessary to tell you about Benedict Arnold.’ He took Walker by the elbow and led him to the rail, and they leaned there together, watching the garbage coming out of the ship’s side far below. ‘My friend,’ began Jochum, ‘universities are not better than life. They are just life. It is not you and I who make them what they are. It is the students, and the administration, and the computer, and the alumni, and the football team. Universities are places where people go to get acquainted with one another. Benedict Arnold is very good for that. They can find parking space for their cars. They can date. They can join fraternities and sororities. They can go skiing. And then, oh yes, there is one little thing – they would all like a piece of paper to say they have a degree. In pursuit of this they will come to classes and attack you for higher grades at the end of the semester. If we were just to abolish that piece of paper . . . but no, I am dreaming again.’ Jochum looked out at the wide expanse of sea and shook his head at it.