The Picturegoers

by David Lodge

  He put his arm round her shoulder. Inevitably she blushed.

  ‘I don’t mind. While there are no lights,’ she whispered.

  He turned his head to look at her. How did she manage to make it sound as daring and exciting as a midnight swim in the nude? With Clare he was reliving all the breathless excitement and sense of discovery that accompanied adolescent love, without its pain and misunderstandings. He delighted in the frugality of her kisses, looked forward like a young kid to the one, chaste good-night embrace—chaste, but perhaps a little warmer each time, each time a little more reluctantly broken. It was fascinating to watch Clare, like another Chloe, fumbling innocently towards real passion. For the time being he was content to play the part of an only slightly more knowing Daphnis. It was typical of the whole family, he decided, this refreshing delight in ordinary experiences which most people were either too sophisticated or too bourgeois to appreciate. It had laid its spell upon him as soon as he had spent a day at 89 Maple Road, and had kept him there, a willing prisoner, ever since. He would not quickly forget the impact of that first afternoon.

  Back from a month’s hitch-hiking and youth-hostelling on the Continent that summer, he had gone up to London four weeks before the term started, ostensibly to lay the foundations of his final year’s study, but in fact to avoid a prolonged stay with his parents at Blatcham.

  He had never felt any affection for Blatcham, a dull, featureless town set in the no-man’s-land between London and ‘the country’, belonging to neither, but affecting a combination of both. In practice, the men of the town exhausted themselves in the diurnal pilgrimage to the City and back, leaving their womenfolk to wave vacantly after their receding figures each morning, before they returned to the dusting of clean furniture, the knitting of Fair Isle jumpers, and the bored manipulation of television knobs.

  Nevertheless, after the dubious comradeship of barrack-room life, even Blatcham and his parents’ solid, comfortable villa seemed to represent civilized living; and for most of his first year at college he had lived with his father and mother (who hadn’t seen much of him during his National Service), travelling up with his father each day. But the constraint of their carefully insulated lives gradually became intolerable. Their almost congenital blindness to the claims of any life different from their own, aroused in him alternating anger and pity, emotions to which they were equally impervious. In his note-book was his bitter and unfilial appraisal of the situation in his second term:

  My father suffers from chronic catarrh, though he cannot be persuaded to admit the fact, and generally abstains from the use of a handkerchief. Sometimes it seems to me that the very arteries of his brain are clogged with snot, so difficult is it to penetrate there with any new idea. He sniffs unceasingly, drawing up into his head quantities of mucous that must curdle and thicken into a morass which stifles the faintest stirrings of intellectual curiosity. I would like to admire and love my father, but the mere sight of his scanty hair combed painfully across the bald, bumpy scalp, the furrowed lumpish face, the sagging chicken-neck, the dark striped suit tight under the armpits, all buttons fastened, shiny over the haunches, swollen with too much sitting, as he carefully licks an envelope before sealing it with unnecessary pressure, affixing the stamp at exact right-angles to the corner—all this is enough to fill me with a desperate irritation which I have to struggle hard to suppress. It seems incredible that a person whose vision of life is a mere chink in the wall of his self-satisfaction should, by mere plodding, have secured such a comfortable salary; though it is fortunate, as it relieves me of the responsibility of planning a career with the possibility of having to support my parents in their old age.

  My mother is well-intentioned but stupid, her ambitions embarrassingly petty: security, a nice house, a car. Had she been thwarted of these, some sympathetic quality, some pathos, or hint of suburban tragedy, might have made her more endearing; but having achieved them all before she was thirty, she could conceive of nothing beyond their meaningless multiplication: another insurance policy, new loose covers, a bigger car.

  The war left us untouched: my father was exempted from military service because of some trivial medical defect, and took the opportunity to feather his nest in the Civil Service. The greatest hardship we endured was the sheltering of an evacuee family, whose lives we made so unhappy that they left us voluntarily after three weeks. We have no relatives or friends whose deaths caused us genuine pain. We have had no spectacular good fortune. There has been a paralysing absence of deep joy or sorrow from our bleak triangular existence, which, when I have left, will be but apathy’s shortest distance between two points. I have woken up to the fact that if I go on any longer endlessly discussing the rise in prices, the gardening programme for the next week-end, the traffic in Blatcham, the traffic in London, the punctuality of the morning and evening trains, and the temerity of our coalman in motoring to Italy for his holidays—imperceptibly the capacity for living, in any significant sense of the word, will slip away from me, and I shall be left mouthing the expected responses at the tea-table.

  I must go; but I do not wish to hurt. They are mildly puzzled that I should be willing to suffer the discomforts of living in a bed-sitter in London merely to avoid excessive travelling (my excuse), but they do not suspect anything. Our conversation is a game I deliberately lose again and again to disguise my real feelings. They are satisfied. It relieves me of guilt. I will leave them slumped before the TV, and quietly open the door and slip out into life.

  He had over-written the situation, but he had no regrets about his decision. In his second year at college he shared a flat with two fellow-students, and lived a free, unreflective, experimental and, on the whole, happy life, which he characterized as ‘the welfare Bohemia’. The drink was beer, the books were Penguins, the entertainment continental films, and the girls suburbanites disguising their respectability with tight trousers and unkempt hair. It was a game, but rather pathetic effort. One should live either like Oxford before the war, or like Paris after it, he decided—either have too much money or none at all. The compromise afforded by a benevolent State was feeble. That, at least was how he felt now. At the time he had thought the life gay and enviable enough.

  But for his final year at college he had felt the need of some change of existence and environment. For one thing, the amount of work to be done for Finals was oppressive, and the distractions of shared accommodation and the time-absorbing chores of keeping house, however haphazardly, were unthinkable. Digs were indicated. But the task of finding comfortable digs was formidable, as he learned to his cost in a week’s weary trekking across London.

  But when he alighted at Brickley station one afternoon, with a crumpled Accommodation Advertiser in his hand, he had a presentiment that this time he might be luckier. The place was so ugly that it could not possibly be either fashionable or fashionably unfashionable: the sort of place no one lives in from choice—only if one were cast up there by birth or chance. Nevertheless its ugliness held him with an obscure fascination that was to grow more and more insistent, until it entirely occupied the vacant space in his mind that should have held an affection for home. In future years, he felt sure, when he experienced a pang of homesickness, it would not be for the neat, clean villas and smug, dull shop-fronts of Blatcham, but for the grimy, arid streets of Brickley; for the tall, decaying Victorian houses, from each of whose windows sagged the washing of a different family; for the long, maddening rows of squat, identical nineteenth-century workers’ homes with big new cars parked outside in incongruous opulence; for the worn, soft pavements; and for the honourable scars of the blitz, of the suffering he knew only by repute, the patches of new bricks, slates, paving-stones, the pre-fabs sprouted like mushrooms from the dung of destruction, new raw blocks of flats, and even the occasional neglected bomb-site, its stark outlines softened by the work of weather and vegetation, a playground for children, and for him a kind of shrine too.

  But of course the main reason wh
y Brickley would always retain its hold on his emotions and imagination was the Mallory family, to whom he had been led by that terse advertisement in the Advertiser: ‘Board and lodging for business gentleman or student £2 5s. per week.’ 89 Maple Road was a tall, deep, narrow house with a basement. The Mallorys occupied only the ground and first floors, but he never became really acquainted with the other occupants of the house. They were the dull bread that sandwiched the rich and abundant humanity of the Mallorys; they crept apologetically in and out of the house, plainly overawed by the family’s vitality. Once Patricia and himself had surprised a thin, etiolated little man softly ascending the stairs from the basement—to judge from the towel in his hand en route for the bathroom.

  ‘Oh, here’s Mr Parsons,’ Pat had exclaimed, in a tone of such greedy enjoyment, that the poor little man had shot one startled glance at them both and scuttled down into his dim abode again, muttering that he had forgotten something.

  There had been the same zestful enjoyment of people in Mrs Mallory’s smile of inquiry as she opened the door to him that hot summer afternoon, her hair turbaned and her hands gauntleted with flour.

  ‘The room? Ah, of course, and me forgetting all about it. My, but you’re sharp. I only put it in the paper the day before yesterday. You must excuse the condition I’m in, but I’m baking this afternoon.’

  She pushed back with the back of her wrist a wisp of auburn hair which had escaped the turban, and led him into the kitchen. The architecture of the house was quite extraordinary, and to get to any room one had to pass through dark, perverse little passages with unaccountable ascents and descents of steps. As he stumbled over the first hurdle Mrs Mallory apologized:

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I should have warned you about that step. This is a terrible house till you get used to it. And then it’s worse. Are y’ all right now?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite all right,’ he replied, deciding that the slight accent in her speech was Irish.

  ‘You know, that step’ll be the death of me one of these days, the times I’ve tripped on it. Sometimes I feel like kicking it, I’m so vexed. But then I offer it up to Our Blessed Lord, who fell three times, and hurt himself a good deal more, I don’t doubt.’

  Irish and Catholic, he decided, with a certain uneasiness. He eschewed Catholics on the whole. They resurrected the odd, remote period of his Catholic early childhood, and he had no wish to roll back the stone from that tomb. His mother had been a Catholic, and had married his father in a Catholic church. He dimly remembered kneeling to say the Hail Mary with her, in his pyjamas. Then he had been sent to a convent school for his earliest schooling. Neither of his parents had gone to Mass however—a cause, he seemed to remember, of considerable pain to him, not so much spiritually as socially. When, after they had moved to Blatcham, he was sent to the County school, he had himself given up going to Mass without reproach. Doctrines of mortal sin and hell-fire had caused him some moments’ anxiety; but the threat of immediate punishment by human authority was more compulsive, and as the two were confused in his mind, the absence of the latter led him to forget the former. When he attained the age of philosophical curiosity he remembered these doctrines only to dismiss them, with a passing irritation that they had ever influenced him. In fact he deeply resented this tenuous claim Catholicism had upon him—the undeniable fact that he had been a Catholic, a fact from which his Catholic acquaintance derived an exasperating satisfaction. ‘Oh, you’ll come back in the end,’ they would say confidently at the end of every inconclusive argument. God, in their view, seemed to be a sort of supernatural Mountie who always got His man. The whole thing was a further source of unfilial resentment: it was the final indignity that his parents had imposed upon him—that they, utterly soulless as they were, should have taken it upon themselves to saddle him with a religion.

  The kitchen into which he was ushered confirmed his suspicions about Mrs Mallory’s religious background: the evidence of the plastic holy water stoup askew on the wall, the withered holy Palm, stuck behind a picture of the Sacred Heart which resembled an illustration in a medical text-book, and the statue of St Patrick enthroned upon the dresser, was conclusive. Not that these constituted the only decoration. 89 Maple Road was like the dwelling-place of some inadequately evangelized savage tribe, where the icons of Christianity jostled incongruously the symbols of obscure pagan cults. One day, to satisfy his curiosity, Mark counted fifty-five articles adorning the walls of the house. These included, besides a fair proportion of devotional objects: faded photographs of people whose names were forgotten, out-of-date calendars, pictures torn from magazines, fretwork cut-outs of atrocious design, plaster plaques, souvenirs of obscure seaside resorts, and in a dark corner of the hall—the item Mark treasured most of all—a small wooden panel, on which was painted a dog’s pathetic face, inscribed ‘Please don’t forget my walk’, and furnished with a hook from which depended an ancient, broken dog’s lead: the memorial of a mongrel run over by a lorry six years before. All the articles shared the neglected appearance of this last item: each enshrined a sentimental memory which no one bothered to recall, but which no one could make the effort to erase. The pagan gods were no longer invoked; but a proposal to remove them, Mark quickly discovered, carried with it a suggestion of sacrilege.

  As Mark received his first impression of the kitchen, Mrs Mallory chattered on about the vacant room.

  ‘We’ve never had anyone before—we never had the space for one thing, with a family of eight children. But now they’re growing up and leaving home. James—that’s my eldest—was ordained at Corpus Christi, and he’s gone abroad to the African missions. And Robert’s doing his National Service—he’s in Germany. So the boys’ room was being wasted, and with four children still at school we can do with a little extra, so we thought we’d have a lodger.’ She used the last word—anathema in Blatcham—without hesitation or self-consciousness. While she spoke she washed her hands, took off her apron, and freed her hair from its turban. The bulkiness of her body was a monument to the labour of frequent child-bearing, but the richness and abundance of her auburn hair surprised him as it came toppling down. It was a young girl’s hair.

  With what seemed miraculous speed she had produced a hot, tangy cup of tea, and he was being pressed to a slab of home-made fruit cake. It was all so different from the treatment offered to him that week by shrivelled, embittered landladies, in dressing-gowns and carpet-slippers, who suspiciously permitted him a brief glance at ‘the room’ before enumerating the rules of the household, and who affected to be insulted when he declined their accommodation—it was all so different that he listened in passive contentment to Mrs Mallory’s chatter about her son James, whose severe portrait held pride of place among the religious and secular bric-à-brac on the mantelpiece. Then he suddenly realized that she had casually asked him:

  ‘You are a Catholic, aren’t you, Mr Underwood?’

  ‘No, Mrs Mallory. What made you think I was?’

  She looked confused.

  ‘But I thought—the advertisement …’

  He glanced down at the newspaper where the Mallorys’ advertisement was ticked off, and immediately saw that printed beneath the address, so that he had thought it had belonged to the next advertisement, was the postscript: ‘Good Catholic family—co-religionist preferred.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see the co-religionist bit.’

  She giggled.

  ‘That was Patrick’s idea. I think he was afraid we’d all lose our faith if we allowed a heretic into the house. Seriously, though, Mr Underwood, it’s not that we have anything against non-Catholics, in fact I’ve far more against some Catholics I could name—no, it’s just that it could be uncomfortable and awkward for a non-Catholic living with us—no meat on Fridays, everybody rushing about like mad things on Sunday mornings, and so on … I remember my aunt Jemima, she was a Baptist or one of those queer religions—I don’t know why my uncle Michael ever married her, but marry her he did, and
brought her back to Ireland to stay with us, and I don’t know what she grumbled about most, the religion or the lack of plumbing.’

  He was glad of this turn in the conversation, for the religious content of her previous remarks now appeared in a less propagandist light. But, as he discovered later, none of the family flaunted their religion in the eyes of strangers. Until he became really intimate with them the Mallorys retained a pleasing modesty before him where their religion was concerned. Their communal prayers were conducted without fuss, and his own abstention was taken for granted, even by the young ones. Not that they didn’t care. One night he had overheard one of the twins at her prayers say: ‘ … and please let Mark be a Catholic like us.’ He had been moved. It was difficult to react in any other way to a kid saying her prayers.

  Almost with an effort he had guided the conversation back to the room, and Mrs Mallory led him to it. It was not bad, not at all bad, plain and bright. The inevitable religious and sentimental rubbish on the walls could soon be replaced by his Paul Klee prints. There was a writing-table and a good arm-chair.

  ‘I’ll take it, Mrs Mallory,’ he said.

  He wasn’t ushered to the street door after he had fixed up the details. Somehow he found himself back in the kitchen again, accepting a second cup of tea. He must have sat in that worn and battered kitchen for hours, but only towards the end of the evening did his buttocks begin to ache from the hard contours of the Windsor chair, so engrossed was he in his experience of a strangely novel way of life: novel to him, yet having an indefinably natural quality. It was the kind of life one could live for years, he thought, without becoming bored or dulled by routine. There were many things about the family which antagonized him at first. Occasionally amusement would turn into irritation at the fifty-five ugly ornaments that littered the walls, the clutter and confusion of the scullery, the essential utensils that were always missing, the incorrigible accumulation of useless junk in corners, cupboards, everywhere, the blind indifference to the latest books, plays, news (Mr Mallory was the only member of the family who read a newspaper from one year’s end to the other). But gradually their charm and good nature wore down his resistance. He recognized ruefully bourgeois upbringing or superficial sophistication behind his own criticism. He never got round to substituting his Klees for the photographs of Rugger teams and First Communicants in his room. He began by patronizing the Mallorys; he ended by admiring them.