The Picturegoers

by David Lodge

  Mark put his hands under her coat, and gently massaged her back with his broad, flat palms, smoothing away her cold, her stiffness and her reserve. His fingers manipulated her spine, making her squirm pleasantly, and push her body against his with involuntary force. She closed her eyes. Now his fingers were playing over every bone and muscle in her back as if they were the strings of an instrument, and in his sensitive hands her body suddenly became extraordinarily responsive. And all the time he was kissing her, nibbling kisses around her throat and under her chin, and she wanted to exhale everything from within her, to flatten herself against him, but all that came out was a kind of moan with his name mixed up in it. And his other hand crept slowly up her side, and she shuddered as his hand crept slowly up and closed over her breast and a window squeaked loudly overhead and she had said ‘No, Mark!’ and had broken from him and was fumbling with the latch, and was inside and upstairs before she began to blush.

  ‘No, Mark! ’ He was quite sure he had heard her say that. Locking the tail of his night-shirt between his ankles to prevent it riding up, Damien got carefully into bed. What had Underwood been up to? Some familiarity no doubt. Well, that would show her what sort of a fellow he was. She would see that he had been right after all: Underwood was no good. You could tell it as soon as you set eyes on him. That sly grin, all those immoral books in his room. That kind only wanted one thing from an innocent young girl. Well he wouldn’t be allowed to ruin a good Catholic girl like Clare—he himself would see to that. She had been foolish, and a little ungrateful, but he would not desert her. Soon she would be rudely disillusioned about Underwood, and when she was weeping with shame and anger he would come to her and comfort her. ‘No, no!’ she would say. ‘Please go away. I feel so ashamed. You are too good to me. I have not been kind to you in the past. Why should you be kind to me now?’

  ‘I am prepared to forget all that, my dear Clare,’ he would reply, ‘if you would consider favourably the idea of our marriage.’

  ‘You … marry me?’ she would exclaim, dry-eyed with surprise. ‘But why? How long …? I am not worthy.’ This last said with a pretty droop of the head.

  His imagination sped on to the wedding night, and to an idea which had been pleasantly preoccupying him of late. Clare, exquisitely beautiful, began shyly to divest herself. She smiled gratefully as he left the room in deference to her modesty. When he returned she was attired in a soft white night-dress, her long auburn locks resting lightly on her shoulders. Decked to please him, she came to him, gave herself passionately to his embrace. But he steadied her, calmed her.

  ‘Clare, most married people spend the night of their wedding indulging in the pleasures of the flesh, thoughtless of God. I suggest, my dear, that being two people specially dedicated to God, we spend this night instead in watching and prayer.’

  Surprise, admiration, and joy flooded across her face in quick succession.

  ‘Damien, you are so strong. And I am so weak.’

  He caught himself falling asleep. He rattled off a quick Act of Contrition, and thumbed hurriedly through his mental picture book of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. His soul tidied for the night, he composed himself for sleep.

  * * *

  In the privacy of her pink bedroom at the top of the house, Doreen gleefully unpacked the new panties. She had received them that morning from the Laurie Landsdowne Fan Club. That was a marvellous record of his, Love Is A Many-Splendoured Thing, they never got tired of it at the Palladium. The panties had Laurie’s own finger-prints on them. She giggled, wondering what the lodger would think of them when he saw them in the bathroom. He was a queer one and no mistake. Gave her the creeps. Ooh, she couldn’t stand him. No sense of humour. And so ugly. Seemed to be frightened of girls.

  Boldly undressing beneath the leers of her photographic gallery of film-stars, she slipped on the pants and opened the wardrobe. In the long mirror a perfectly normal image confronted her. She turned and peered over her shoulder. Like the finger-bones of some amorous skeleton Laurie Landsdowne’s printed hands gently clasped each swelling buttock. Stretching her own hands over the imprints, Doreen began absently to manipulate her bottom, as she hummed:

  Love is a many-splendoured thing,

  It’s the April rose

  That only grows

  In the early spring …

  Suddenly she felt the weariness attack her legs again. Slipping on her black see-through nightie and white bed-socks, she got between the warm bed-clothes and switched off the light above her bed. Stretching luxuriously, she placed the hot-water bottle under the joints of her knees, and felt the tiredness blissfully released from them. Soon she was dropping off to sleep, dreaming of pantie-raids in an American girls’ college—she had read about them in the newspaper. Grinning, muscular, alphabet-chested college boys invaded the shrieking delighted dormitory gathering handfuls of frillies. Then, oddly, Mr Berkley threw his leg over the sill, and advanced towards her with a roguish gleam in his eye. Tantalizing him with a wave of her bra, she challenged him to the chase …

  * * *

  Mark pushed open the door of his room, switched on the light, and stepped wearily inside. He threw himself down on the bed. So Clare was still a respectable girl. You could always tell a respectable girl. Their bodies could be mapped out like the butcher’s charts showing the different cuts of meat. You could only touch certain parts before marriage. Touch one of the forbidden areas—breast, rump or loin—and you encountered resistance. Still, he couldn’t grumble. He’d had quite a good feel around. She was yielding slowly. Take your time.

  It was the little speech on top of the hill that had got her defences down. To be fair, it hadn’t been at all a bad piece of rhetoric. It was worth noting down while he could still remember it.

  He swung his legs off the bed, and turned towards the desk. His note-book lay open. He read the last entry:

  ‘If you remove the “s” from nostalgia you get notalgia which means “back-ache”.’

  Now that was extremely interesting. But it was so lonely. His writing resembled rockets going off singly at long intervals. This note-book habit was terribly dangerous, unless one was quite prolific of fresh and startling ideas. Otherwise one came to regard the little stockpile of metaphors and apothegms as the essential foundation of one’s work, to be eked out with parsimonious care. He would probably write a completely worthless short-story just to enshrine that one flash of word-play, which itself seemed feebler the longer he looked at it. He decided not to enter the hill-speech in his note-book.

  He lit a cigarette and fell back on to the bed. Funny how reassuring was the action of lighting a cigarette. There was nothing to it, yet in the moment of static concentration, hunched over the flame, and the triumphant flick of the head as the first smoke came, one experienced a fleeting sense of identity: one was a man lighting a cigarette. Perhaps it was because a cigarette cost tuppence, and therefore to light up was an act of calculated extravagance. Anyway, it gave one a sense of being, for once, decisive and positive: it was a defiance of circumstances, a reckless devil-may-care defiance of circumstances.

  Were other people like this, he wondered—always observing themselves, trying to surprise themselves in a spontaneous emotion? It was the penalty of being (or trying to be) a writer. To create characters you took a rib of your own personality, and shaped a character round it with the dust of experience. But it was a painful, debilitating process. Usually the characters were still-born, and the old Adam got weaker and weaker, less and less sure of his own identity.

  Through the thin wall to his left the over-worked lavatory clanked and gurgled after someone—who was it?—sounded like Patrick’s heavy tread—had used it. Gradually the frenzied gurgling was hushed to a faint dripping. He waited to see how long it would take to be quite quiet. It was one of those times when there seemed to be nothing else to do but measure something quite meaningless, like the number of red motor cars on the road, or the time a cloud took to cross
the moon. Now all was still.

  But someone else was coming. The lavatory-seat was never cold in this house. Even so, it was late for all this activity. It must be Clare—yes, those were her floppy slippers. The seat squeaked, and he heard the rustle of her skirts. Carefully, as if it were a Boy Scout’s game, he visualized the movement accompanying each sound. In America you could buy a record of a girl undressing: a good sideline for the London Institute of Pornography.

  It was a good job girls like Clare had to relieve themselves: it made them face the facts of human nature. Otherwise they were prone to think themselves bloody little angels. But perhaps even the angels had to pass their nectar. The toilet roll rattled as two sheets were torn off. There was a silence, then a hiss, then a deep, resonant battering of water by water. It was strangely musical. But someone had said that before. Joyce in Ulysses, of course. But that was a chamber pot. Yes there was that marvellous bit as it filled up: ‘Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle hiss.’ The acoustics were different: this was a single deep note, like a bass. It would be fun to write an ode: On Hearing His Beloved’s Urination:

  O gushing stream

  You bring sweet music to my troubled ear;

  And as I lie upon my restless couch,

  I fit a picture to each sound I hear.

  Clare was sustaining the deep note very well. It was a kind of robustness attractive in a woman. Like Yeats’s great-bladdered Emer. Apparently there was a kind of competition among the Celtic goddesses to see who could make the deepest hole in the snow with her urine. You could imagine them squatting in a row, with the steam rising all round. They should make it an event in the Olympic games—Winter Sports.

  It was strange really, this attachment to the cloacal in writers and intellectuals. There was Yeats and Joyce and Smollett and Swift and Rabelais and himself. Well he was attached to the cloacal all right, but was he a writer or an intellectual? Why not simply admit that he liked smut—made respectable by the presence of literature, of course.

  The steady flow trickled into silence. Again the rustle of skirts, the jerk on the chain, again the ponderous deluge. Clare flopped out in her loose slippers.

  D. H. Lawrence had written somewhere that the writer who confused the excremental flow with the sexual flow was the real pornographer. But Lawrence was fundamentally effeminate. He couldn’t face the fact that the excremental flow led you to the channel of life. It was the irony of the thing that appealed to the healthy masculine mind:

  ‘Love has pitched his mansion in

  The place of excrement.’

  Take the little wedge of flesh itself, ‘those mysteriouse parts’ as Spenser called them. He was as bad as Lawrence. The latrine wall’s four-letter word was much more satisfactory. Clare’s—

  He sat up, suddenly and unexpectedly revolted. He was getting bored with his mind. It was like being trapped in a cinéma bleu, seeing the same film over and over again. He was nauseated, and felt a desperate need to cleanse himself in some way.

  Awkwardly he dropped to his knees. He didn’t want to pray to anyone, but just to humiliate himself in his own eyes, to make expiation. He said a Hail Mary, then started the Our Father, and got stuck at Thy will be done. Give us this day our daily bread. No, there was something in between. Never mind. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. He rummaged in the toy-cup-board of his childish memory for old scraps and fragments of prayers. Hail holy Queen, Mother of Mercy Hail our Life our Sweetness and our Hope. O clement O loving O sweet Virgin Mary. O Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us, O Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us.

  Help me to do the things I should,

  To be to others kind and good;

  In my work and in my play,

  To grow more loving every day.

  He realized that he had been reciting this infantile jingle over and over again. Wearily he got to his feet and undressed. Slipping on a dressing-gown he went out to the lavatory. It was occupied.

  * * *

  Patricia was wide awake as soon as the door squeaked and Clare tiptoed in. She took off her coat, put on her slippers and flip-flopped out to the george. By arrangement the curtains were drawn so that Clare could go to bed by the light of the street-lamps without disturbing Patricia. When she returned, Patricia yielded to the temptation of observing her unnoticed. The planned modesty of undressing, the careful folding, putting on hangers and stowing away of clothes, bespoke the convent, and carried a mute condemnation of her own explosive methods of undressing. The dressing-table mirror reflected the dim, blue rectangle of the window, and Clare was silhouetted against it. Really, she had the most marvellous figure. If only she wore a decent bra. Goodness knows where she found the things she wore. In fact, with a little application, Clare could be a real beauty. She could tell her what to do, but she was a little shy of her. She didn’t quite know how Clare would take it—it would be a bit cheeky. Still, it wasn’t surprising that Mark was keen on her. How keen she was on Mark you couldn’t tell. She was so innocent that you couldn’t apply the usual tests. You’d think that sharing the same room these last months Clare would have blurted it all out, but she was strangely reticent about things that were really important, such as Mark, or the reason she had left the convent. So were most of the family really, they had formed deep friendships outside, but they never really let themselves go in the family circle. Mummy, for instance, was full of love really, but she seemed to distrust it, and when anyone tried to make a fuss of her, even Daddy, she said they were being soft. Only Mark seemed to be able to compliment her, but he did it in a half-joking way. That last book he had loaned her was rather weird. Mother Superior would have kittens if she caught her reading it. But that was what she liked about Mark, he treated her like an adult. She knew what was right and what was wrong, what would do her harm, and what wouldn’t. After all, you had to gain experience somehow, and a Catholic couldn’t get practical experience. It had to be books. Sunday tomorrow. There, Clare was getting down on her knees, as if to underline her own lack of real piety. She usually said her prayers in bed. And Clare said such terribly long prayers. The whole rosary at least. Perhaps she’d better say some more. Hail Mary full of grace …

  Hail Mary full of grace … Clare stopped. It was no use repeating the words of the prayer faster and faster, like a skipping rhyme, when her mind was feverishly occupied with other things. Was it wrong of Mark to put his hand there? Was it wrong of her to like it? Had she liked it before she broke away? Had she broken away because it was wrong, or because of the noise of the window? Should she be angry with him? Or couldn’t he be expected to know better—was it really her fault that it had happened? These questions pulsed in her head and made it ache. Should she go to Communion tomorrow? Well, it couldn’t be a mortal sin, because there hadn’t been full knowledge or full consent.

  She hadn’t considered the possibility of being in a state of mortal sin since that Christmas when she was eight and Boxing Day was a Sunday and she had pretended to be ill because she didn’t want to go to church two days running. All that week she had gone about in fear and trembling in case she would die before she could go to confession on the Saturday. It was significant that now she felt no such guilty panic—just a tired academic curiosity. This was due partly to her spiritual lassitude, partly to Mark’s influence. He had the same effect on her as certain books he lent her. He said she should learn to accept the presence of immorality in life and literature without condoning it. But it was a trick she found difficult to learn. Often the casual disregard in such books of every moral principle she had been taught to observe and respect, threw her into a whirl of doubt and uncertainty, and she had been shocked lately to find herself wondering whether the Catholic moral code wasn’t just a tedious and complicated game with which theologians amused themselves at the expense of ordinary people’s happiness.

  Rule-of-thumb moral theology would indicate that she should give up Mark’s company. But Mark wasn’t just a disturbing infl
uence; he was an unhappy boy without a Faith. To give him up now would be cowardly—there was an element of risk in everything worth the attempt. Of course she would only be a medium for God’s grace, but unworthy as she was, she might represent Mark’s last chance of salvation. For he did seem to like her, to find some relief in talking to her. And already she had persuaded him to go to Mass again. Tomorrow he would be kneeling beside her at Mass. It was quite an achievement, considering how short a time he had been with them. But there was a long way to go yet. God must do something to help. Please God, You must do something to help. When the priest elevates the Host at Mass, You could appear to Mark. You’ve done it before. Sister Veronica had told them of many such miracles. And Mark was worth a miracle. At least, to her he was.

  * * *

  The clock in the Anglican church-tower at the top of the hill struck three. Only very remotely did Father Kipling’s ear record that, as always, the note was flat. He was deaf, and almost blind and dumb too. He lay prostrate before the altar of his church, as he had done on the day of his ordination.

  ‘Lord,’ he groaned, ‘I am a sinner.’

  It was a shattering admission to have to make. Oh, of course, he was a sinner in common with the rest of fallen humanity; but up till now this had been a mere formal admission, his confessions brief, dull accounts of a few trifling venial sins—a moment of irritation with a sleepy acolyte, an uncharitable thought about his housekeeper’s cooking. But now he found himself, at an unseemly age, steeped in real sin, yielding willingly to the temptations of impure thought—a sin almost certainly mortal, a sin he had always held in particular abhorrence, and treated with special severity in the confessional. It was horrifying. He felt physically sick as he pictured himself straining forward in his seat to stare at the lewd posturings and licentious antics of that infamous woman, like a spectator at some pagan orgy. Worse still, he was bound to admit that when she had walked into that man’s bedroom by mistake, he had actually wished, at heart, that they would consummate their unlawful desires. He had actually been disappointed when he had been reunited with his wife. He had connived at adultery. It amounted to that. He shuddered. And was this the man to care for the spiritual welfare of two thousand souls, to inspire them with zeal for the virtues of holy purity and marital chastity? A man who crumpled at the first brush of temptation?