The Picturegoers

by David Lodge

  On that first evening, however, such considered judgements were out of the question, and he was content to sit back and observe the tide of humanity that seeped in and finally flooded the small room as the alarum clock on the mantelpiece ticked tinnily on into the evening. One after another the members of the family were greeted, introduced, put in their place, fed. Monica and Lucy, twin girls of twelve, with short spiky plaits, battered at the door, toiled wearily into the kitchen, and allowed their satchels to slump on to the lino.

  ‘Pick them up,’ ordered Mrs Mallory from the scullery, ‘and take them into the hall.’

  Subdued by Mark’s presence, they obeyed her. But shyness soon thawed, and they began to blurt out incomprehensible accounts of an insane French mistress. Mrs Mallory snorted incredulity.

  ‘But she did, Mummy!’

  ‘It was awful!’

  Patricia padded into the room, smiled wanly, reached for the aspirins on the mantelpiece, and squatted by the stove, which was not alight. Mrs Mallory expatiated on her absent children, James the priest, the eldest daughter Christine, a nurse, Robert the next eldest son, a National Serviceman in the artillery, who was due to go to a teacher’s training college when he was released. Gradually Mark was piecing the family together. Patrick blundered in, dumped his ravaged attaché case on the floor, ignored his mother’s rebuke, eyed Mark suspiciously, and applied himself to tea. Mr Mallory, moving, despite his evident exhaustion, with the grace that characterized all his actions, stole almost unnoticed into the room, and threaded his way across it towards a high-backed leather arm-chair in the far corner, with the air of a shipwrecked man who has gambled his last shred of energy on a desperate attempt to reach a raft. Having achieved his refuge, Mr Mallory sighed happily, and, taking a cup of tea from his wife, consented to give audience.

  ‘Tom. This is Mark Underwood. He came about the room.’

  ‘How d’you do, Mark,’ said Mr Mallory, nodding pleasantly over his tea-cup.

  ‘I’d like to take it, Mr Mallory, if that’s all right by you,’ said Mark.

  ‘Certainly. If my wife’s agreeable.’

  ‘Grand. Then that’s settled,’ pronounced Mrs Mallory.

  ‘And how are you two?’ inquired Mr Mallory, tugging the plaits of his twin daughters, who squatted beneath his knees.

  ‘Owwweeer!’ screamed Monica.

  ‘Eeeeeowwww!’ shrieked Lucy.

  ‘Stop that racket at once you little divils,’ said their mother.

  ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ said Patricia sardonically. ‘They read nothing but comics, and now they even talk like comics.’

  ‘Thinks: Patricia is a rat,’ said Lucy sotto voce.

  ‘All girls are soppy. One makes allowances,’ stated Patrick pontifically from the table. ‘But you two are the silliest, daftest pair of idiots …’ His eloquence dried up, and he bit disgustedly into a slice of bread and jam before continuing. ‘I was on their bus the other day, and the way they were fooling around I was ashamed to recognize them.’

  ‘Thinks: Patrick is a rotten sneak,’ said Monica.

  ‘What’s this about the bus?’ demanded Mr Mallory, pulling on Monica’s plait.

  ‘Ouch! Well … Gulp! Did you have a nice day at the office, Daddy?’

  There was a burst of laughter, in which Mark joined, at this transparent evasion.

  And then Clare had come in. She stood at the door for a moment, hesitating until a place was cleared for her, and slowly unbuttoning the navy-blue schoolgirl’s raincoat she wore. Her auburn hair, a vivid fragment of her mother’s, was scraped back cruelly into a pony’s tail; Mark almost felt the strain along her brow. She was dressed and she moved as if impatient of her own beauty. He perceived that hers was a more than ordinary shyness, that she was unused to society; and the way everyone’s face lit up at her entry suggested that she was a special favourite, or had recently returned to the family after a long absence.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve been helping Miss Skinner with the syllabus. You wouldn’t think infants would need a syllabus, would you?’

  She was introduced to him. The appearance of a personable girl of a suitable age naturally provoked a reflex of ordinary curiosity; but he soon perceived that this was something, new, rare and challenging.

  After tea, which he was willingly persuaded to share, Mrs Mallory explained that it was the family practice to recite the rosary together. Would he mind …? He begged them to proceed as if he were not there.

  They all got down upon their knees, and drew out their beads. Mr Mallory recited the first half of each prayer, and the others repeated it in unison. The experience was uncanny and disturbing. He felt quite alone. Among those kneeling figures his sitting posture seemed awkward and unnatural. Gradually the youngest children began to fidget, and he felt less of an intruder on a perfect act of worship. Indeed the Rosary had always been a monotonous devotion; it was not surprising the children were distracted. Ten Hail Mary’s to one Our Father and one Glory Be. In the cosmic league table of his infantile mind this had seemed to settle pretty conclusively the precedence of Our Lady over the Trinity, with God the Father runner-up as he had a whole prayer to himself, and a mention in the Glory Be. Perhaps it wasn’t so inaccurate an assessment of the Catholic Faith either.

  He took advantage of his position to study the girl Clare. She presented a very charming picture—and picture was the word. In contrast to the awkwardness of her entry, there was now a conscious grace in her posture, as if it were part of her prayer. Her body was quite erect, yet without strain, her eyes closed, her hands carefully joined, finger to finger, through which her beads were passed steadily, by some undetectable knack. Altogether she seemed a person used to praying. Her face was as smooth and clean as sand left by the receding tide, a face in which devout concentration had appeared without a trace of self-righteousness. Nevertheless, the warm, full lines of the body, suggested rather than revealed by her unflattering dress, the shapely bosom, full hips and long legs, seemed intended for something better than praying, traditionally the plain girl’s substitute for sex.

  As the clearing of the tea-things, and the washing-up were being organized by Mrs Mallory, with the reluctant help of the twins, and the other children became absorbed in homework, Mark had an opportunity for a word with Clare.

  ‘You pray a lot, don’t you?’ he asked.

  She blushed, and answered, ‘I did once.’ Then she blushed more deeply still, and added: ‘Well not so much really. Not compared to some people. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You do it very gracefully,’ he replied, smiling.

  ‘Do you think that’s very important?’

  ‘I suppose it isn’t—if you believe in prayer.’

  ‘Don’t you then?’

  ‘Unfortunately—no.’

  ‘How funny.’

  He regretted having turned the conversation on to religion, as it seemed to have come to a full stop. But after a short pause Clare volunteered:

  ‘I was a novice for two years. Perhaps that has something …’

  ‘A novice?’ he inquired blankly.

  ‘In a convent you know. Before becoming a nun.’

  ‘Oh. And you became one?’

  She laughed.

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I’m here.’

  ‘Oh I see. Yes, that explains about the praying, doesn’t it.’ They seemed to be getting on famously.

  ‘Didn’t you find it difficult to settle down to ordinary life again?’ he inquired.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she answered. He noted the tense. ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’

  ‘No, thanks.’ Checking the question that rose to his lips as to her motives for leaving the convent, he said:

  ‘I suppose you’ve gathered that I’m coming to live here?’

  ‘That will be nice.’ She blushed violently. ‘For you I mean. This is a very nice house.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall be very happy here,’ he replied.

  The only shadow cast acro
ss that first, pleasant evening was a rather grotesque and ominous one—the dog-like facial silhouette of Damien O’Brien, with the sloping lines of his forehead, nose and jaw almost parallel. One could forgive his ugliness—though it was difficult not to be disgusted by the small pale eyes, the rough, scurfy skin, the yellow crowded teeth—if he hadn’t been so insufferably oblivious of it himself. His arrival interrupted Mark’s tête-à-tête with Clare, and as Mark took his limp, clammy hand, he looked into eyes full of hostility and suspicion. At that moment he was, paradoxically, more certain of Damien’s rivalry than of his own attraction to Clare.

  ‘This is Mark …?’ Clare began.

  ‘Underwood,’ supplied Mark.

  ‘Mark Underwood. He’s a student at the London University, and he’s coming to live with us. This is Damien O’Brien, Mark, a cousin of ours over from Ireland.’

  ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance,’ said Damien stiffly. There was very little brogue in his voice, and he seemed to have carefully sifted his diction of Irish idiom. His speech was characterized by a queer old-fashioned formality. ‘I studied for three years at Maynooth,’ he volunteered.

  ‘Maynooth is the largest seminary in Ireland,’ explained Clare.

  ‘In the world, Clare,’ Damien corrected. Another disappointed religious? The coincidence was odd.

  ‘I called to thank you again for finding me such grand digs,’ said Damien to Clare.

  ‘You make too much of it, Damien, really you do,’ she demurred.

  ‘Indeed I don’t,’ replied Damien.

  ‘Indeed he doesn’t,’ agreed Mrs Mallory, who breezed into the room at that moment, having overheard the conversation from the scullery. ‘You see,’ she explained to Mark, ‘when Damien here got flung out of the seminary by the good fathers …’

  ‘Mummy!’ exclaimed Clare, laughing.

  ‘Ah go on with you, Damien knows it’s only my fun. Well, when he left the seminary so, he comes to London, like they all do, hoping to find the streets paved with gold …’

  ‘I did not hope for any such thing, Aunt Elizabeth. But Ireland has no work for her educated sons.’ (So we’re educated, are we? said Mark to himself.)

  ‘ … Hoping, as I said, to find the streets paved with gold,’ continued Mrs Mallory blithely, ‘he found himself something terrible in the way of a room, and th’ old woman who kept it swindled him entirely. And when Clare here saw the pitiable state he was in, she hooshed him out of it and put him in some clean, decent lodgings with Mrs Higgins next door here, who’s a decent sort of woman, for all her faults.’

  ‘And very grateful I am too,’ said Damien, staring at Clare. But she had not looked in his direction …

  Mark turned to look at her now. The film was entering a rather brutal phase, and she was pressed back against her seat, her lips slightly parted with revulsion. Yet the screen compelled her attention. Any dramatic or cinematic performance, however crudely executed, seemed to draw from her the same rapt, child-like attention. To her, as to a child, what she saw on the screen was real. However unpleasant or improbable the action, its visible enactment by recognizable human beings urged the truth of what was being presented, and she seemed oblivious of the artificiality of the whole affair, of the cameras and mikes and props just out of sight. Sometimes he envied the primitive intensity of her dramatic experience.

  * * *

  The little girl walked into a church and knelt with face upturned to the altar. A shaft of light slanted down upon her face.

  Praying for big tits, thought Harry. He stirred restlessly. Too much religion about this picture.

  Gradually however, crime asserted itself. A smile slowly appeared in Harry’s face, and spread like a crack running through dry earth. This was the gear. The gang running the racket had slugged the soft vicar bloke and tied him up, and now they had got the tart who was trying to go straight because of the vicar, and they were torturing her to tell them the combination. Serve her right, the poxy little traitor. A squat, hairy man, known as ‘Brute’, sucked deeply at his cigarette, and threatened her face with the glowing end. The economy and effectiveness of this torture appealed to Harry, Unfortunately the tart broke down without being touched, and began to whimper the numbers. The whine of police cars interrupted the scene, and Harry witnessed regretfully the capture of the crooks—not effected without some vicious exchanges of fire however. At least two of the police were killed, and the leader of the crooks, who swore he wouldn’t be taken alive. Not a bad film in the end. Not bad at all. Harry winced as the lights went up.

  The audience stirred uneasily in the sudden light, yawning, blinking, looking up and around for something to fix their gaze on. The abrupt abstraction of their entertainment left them for a moment baffled and resentful, though impotent. Then to their evident relief, a record boomed out. ‘Love is a many-splendoured thing,’ sang a vowel-murdering voice to the accompaniment of a quasi-heavenly choir.

  It’s the April Rose

  That only grows

  In the early spring.

  People whistled it, hummed it, tapped their feet to it. Shades of Francis Thompson, thought Mark:

  The angels keep their ancient places;—

  Turn but a stone and start a wing!

  ’Tis ye, ’tis your estranged faces,

  That miss the many-splendoured thing.

  Bridget’s heart swelled with the soaring and swooping notes of the melody. It was so beautiful. She closed her eyes and let herself float on its cadences, as if she was being rocked by the motion of the sea. She longed with love for Len. ‘Isn’t it lovely Len?’ she murmured.

  Len was a bit puzzled by the ‘many-splendoured thing’. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. But he liked the song on the whole. The tune had a sort of lilt to it, and the words were simple, apart from that first line.

  The golden crown

  That makes a man a king.

  He would have died before saying it, but he did feel like a king when he was out with Bridget, so pretty and smiling and adoring.

  They were playing Laurie Lansdowne’s record of Love Is A Many-Splendoured Thing again. Doreen listened through to the end, singing the words lightly under her breath. She never got tired of hearing it. There was that parcel from his Fan Club to be opened when she got home.

  ‘Let me out Len,’ whispered Bridget, as the record ended. ‘I must see a friend.’

  ‘Right,’ he replied gruffly, and stood up to let her pass. ‘Like an ice-cream?’

  ‘Mm. Lovely.’

  ‘What kind?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘What’s flavour of the month?’

  ‘Banana, I think.’

  ‘Banana, then.’

  On the screen the management appealed to patrons not to leave their seats. The sales attendants would visit all parts of the cinema. Nevertheless two queues were already forming in front of the two ice-cream girls down at the front. If he didn’t go now they might run out of banana. Though someone might pinch their seats if he left them. After some moments’ deliberation, Len laid his coat across the seats and, glancing warily over his shoulder from time to time, walked rapidly down the aisle to join the queue. As a precaution he carried Bridget’s handbag with him, though he felt rather a fool with it He held it by one corner, so that no one would think it belonged to him. Still, anyone might think he was paying for the ice-creams with Bridget’s money. Altogether he was glad to be back safely in his place, balancing a banana ice on each knee, waiting for Bridget to come back before he started. Meanwhile he gazed stolidly at the advertisements for local shops, cafés, hairdressing salons, that were whisked on and off the screen.

  In the passage Bridget collided with a black-suited youth, who swore rudely, and swung into the Gents without apologizing.

  ‘Well!’ muttered Bridget to herself, rubbing her arm. ‘The nerve. Lucky for him Len didn’t see.’

  Squatting gingerly on the cold seat she dwelt with pleasure on the protection Len’s hard muscles afforded,
the lovely helpless feeling when he took you in his arms.

  Harry pissed savagely into the wall behind her back. Seeing a block of camphor in the channel by his feet he directed his urine at it like a hose, but succeeded only in spattering his suède shoes. He buttoned his flies slowly, studying the pencilled drawings on the peeling distemper, and the words he didn’t have to spell out laboriously to understand. Yes, that was what he’d like to do to that curly-haired little tart. It was what she needed. It was what they all needed. Take the cockiness out of them. Tarts. Harry combed his long, oiled hair with care, and adjusted his mouth in the mirror to a thin-lipped, contemptuous smile.

  * * *

  ‘Coming next week!’ Into the passive audience a portentous voice pumped monotonous imperatives and superlatives:

  ‘You will thrill as never before … you will laugh as never before … you will cry as never before.’ Rapidly the trailer ran through the gamut of cinematic experience: ADVENTURE: horse-riders galloped pointlessly through a copse. PASSION: a girl sagged back in a man’s arms as he kissed her wetly. SUSPENSE: tense, unintelligible scraps of dialogue were exchanged. AGONY: a woman awaited the result of an operation on her lover. LAUGHTER: the comic relief fell backwards into a pool. Coming next week. Could it not be averted? No, it was coming, coming next week.

  Mark glanced at the people around him. Now and again, the brightness of the screen illuminated their torpid countenances: torpid, yet with a vague, undefined yearning in them. Like fish in a glass tank, their stupid, gaping faces were pressed to the window on a world they could never hope to achieve, where giant brown men stalked among big-breasted women, and where all events kindly conspired to throw the one into the arms of the other. The hysterical affirmations of the trailer’s commentary rolled easily off each person’s saturated consciousness; yet perhaps only the assurance of this window on the ideal world, on the superlife, made the waking nightmare of their daily lives tolerable. It was in a way a substitute for religion—and indeed a fabulously furnished pent-house, and the favours of awesomely shaped women, offered a more satisfactory conception of paradise than the sexless and colourless Christian promise—the questionable rapture of being one among billions of court-flatterers.