The Picturegoers

by David Lodge

  ‘But they’ve got finger-prints all over them!’

  ‘Yes, they’re Laurie Landsdowne’s. I was crazy about him once. They were all I had clean.’

  She peeled off the pants, and tossed them on to the chair. Then she got into the bed and waited for him. A few crumbs from the biscuits they had eaten the night before, pricked her skin. Her eyes fell upon the finger-printed pants again They were an oddly disturbing relic of her youth and innocence. It was only a few months ago, but it seemed like years, since the young girl, who kept herself to herself, and thought she knew what she wanted from life, unpacked them with secret glee. God, but she had grown up a lot since then.

  ‘Come on, Maurice,’ she said. ‘I want it tonight.’

  Her coarseness almost shocked him. Not I want you, but I want it. Love had already become an impersonal sport, an itch to be satisfied. It wasn’t long before the butterfly dust of innocence and romance brushed off a girl nowadays. Then he caught sight of Doreen’s pale, tired face, the tiny, delicate Cockney features set in a characteristic expression of grave determination, and he regretted the unkind thought. By her coarseness she sought to make things easier for him—she committed herself to the relationship, to this way of life, which, God knew, wasn’t much fun for her.

  Doreen fidgeted between the sheets. The vision of the vain, silly girl she had been seemed to accuse her in some obscure way. But she hadn’t known anything about life in those days. This was life: going to bed with a man twice as old as yourself who was married to someone who wouldn’t divorce him. The sort of thing you read about for a cheap thrill in the advice column of a woman’s magazine—it really happens, it happens to you. And when it does, you’re proud of it, because it’s life.

  ‘Damn!’

  ‘What’s the matter, Maurice?’

  He was staring into the drawer where he kept the doings.

  * * *

  Harry shut the front door, and leaned back on it, closing his eyes. His mouth ached, and his heart thudded painfully from exertion and fear. He lurched forward and groped his way up the staircase, gasping and retching in the stale air. In his room he fell on his bed, and buried his head in the pillow. But her screams still echoed in his ears, ringing out into the night, summoning all his enemies, the whole world, who only wanted this opportunity to hound him, to tear him. Again and again the nightmare rose into his mind like bile into the mouth; he threshed about in a desperate attempt to shut it out, but again and again he suffered the humiliation, the panic, the pain. Again he tore his bleeding fingers from her mouth, and gaped in horror as she screamed, and went on screaming. He heard again the noise of doors opening, voices, saw a light streaming across the street, and he was scrambling frantically over the bomb-site, tripping over a pile of rubble, tearing his coat on a fence, and running down the shockingly open street, running for his life.

  Gradually rage began to absorb fear. Jesus Christ! Had he allowed her to make a fool of him again? He sucked at his hand. The bitch had teeth like knives. Right to the bone. And all for nothing. Her virginity still taunted him. If he’d had his hands on her for one minute, he could have given her something to remember him by; if only he’d spat a single obscenity into her ear before running off, it would have been something. But he had been utterly routed.

  He put a hand down to his groin, and began to mouth into the pillow all the obscenities he knew, repeating them in a kind of chant. In his imagination he subjected her body to every abomination he could think of, until the blankets twisted round his legs were damp and sticky. But it gave him no comfort. Finally he lay prone, still, exhausted; and bitter tears oozed out between his eyelids. He buckled under the final, inescapable realization that he had failed, and would always fail; that the jeering kids, the mocking men, the scornful tarts, were right; that he was nothing but a turd in the gutter.

  * * *

  Frowning, Mark went into the kitchen for his customary cup of cocoa. It was late, but Mrs Mallory was still ironing, the line of her mouth grim and purposeful in a face that was unusually tired and unhappy. Mr Mallory was smoking behind a newspaper, sunk in the depths of his arm-chair. Patricia was at the table in her dressing-gown, eating corn-flakes—her favourite food. The creaking of the ironing board, the crackle of corn-flakes and the occasional rustle of the newspaper were the only sounds. Mark sensed a tension that was like static electricity in the air.

  ‘Hallo, Pat,’ he said. ‘Been working late?’

  Patricia pulled a face behind her mother’s back.

  ‘No she hasn’t, the more’s the pity,’ rapped out Mrs Mallory. ‘She’s been roaming the streets, worrying the life out of her father and mother.’

  ‘I told you I went to the pictures,’ said Patricia into her corn-flakes.

  ‘I suppose you think that your father and I have scrimped and saved to give you children a good education so that you can waste your time and money at the pictures,’ said Mrs Mallory, pressing down fiercely on a handkerchief.

  Patricia’s spoon dropped into her bowl with a clang, and she left the room.

  Mr Mallory flipped down the top half of his newspaper:

  ‘You shouldn’t have said that.’

  His wife put down her iron with a thump.

  ‘Now don’t you start. I’ve had quite enough.’ She stopped abruptly, remembering Mark’s presence. He shuffled awkwardly towards the door.

  ‘Well it’s getting late. I’ll be pushing off to bed I think,’ he said, glancing at the clock and his watch. ‘Clare’s gone already. She was feeling tired I think. Good night, Mrs Mallory. Good night, Mr Mallory.’

  ‘Wait till I get you a cup of cocoa, Mark,’ said Mrs Mallory.

  ‘No thank you, really.’

  ‘But you always have a cup of cocoa.’

  ‘Thanks, but I don’t really feel like one tonight. Thanks very much.’ And he managed to make good his escape.

  He climbed the dark, tortuous stairs heavily. A roar of falling water as a door opened and closed indicated that someone had just emerged from the lavatory. He hung back in case it was Clare. But it was one of the twins, in fluffy pyjamas, who flitted across the landing like a moth, eyes half-shut under the electric light.

  He had scarcely closed the door of his room when there was a tap on it.

  ‘Come in,’ he called in a low voice, expecting Clare, and steeling himself for a long and exhausting reconciliation. But to his surprise Patricia slipped into the room.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me coming in like this, Mark. It’s an awful cheek I know.’

  ‘S’alright, Pat. Er, sit down, won’t you?’

  He gestured to the divan bed, and turned his chair to face her.

  ‘I want some advice, Mark,’ said Patricia, fiddling with her dressing-gown cord.

  ‘Well, anything I can do to help … By the way, I’m sorry if I dropped you in the soup just now.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right. Mummy only wanted an excuse to get at me anyway.’

  He did not take up the point.

  ‘Well—shoot!’

  It was a sweet sensation to give sympathetic audience to Patricia. There was no offering more gratifying to him than the trust of adolescents. For one thing it was not as easily won as the trust of adults, or children or animals. For another—well, there was something peculiarly touching about adolescent suffering; and their sins and neuroses, like babies’ excrement, gave no offence. As decisions became for oneself increasingly final and far-reaching in their implications, it was refreshing to deal with problems that would be solved by the mere passage of time. It was with a certain self-indulgence that he adopted a pose of relaxed attentiveness, and put Patricia at her ease by casually offering her a cigarette. She accepted, and the picture of precocious, and faintly absurd depravity she presented, in her old, handed-down dressing-gown, with her feet tucked up under her, her lank auburn hair about her face, and the cigarette cocked flamboyantly between the fingers of her left hand, gave him the keenest pleasure. However, he was somew
hat startled by the sober determination with which she spoke of leaving home.

  ‘You see, I want to do something worth while. I mean, there wouldn’t be much point in my leaving home unless I did. You’ve travelled, Mark, and done lots of odd jobs and things. But it’s so much easier for a boy. So what can I do?’

  ‘Why exactly do you want to leave home so badly?’

  ‘Don’t you see? Didn’t you see tonight? Mummy and I—we love each other of course, but we just can’t go on living like this any longer. I’m making everybody miserable. I heard Daddy and Mummy after I left the room just now. I don’t mind being miserable, but I’m not going to let Daddy and Mummy quarrel because of me.’

  Mark leaned forward and took her hand. To his surprise she was trembling.

  ‘You’re a good girl Pat,’ he said.

  ‘Better for everyone if I went ’way,’ she mumbled, hanging her head.

  ‘The first thing you must get out of your head is that you’re the predestined black sheep of the family, that you and they are necessarily opposed.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘It’s not a bit true.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘Yes I do. Look, you trust me, don’t you, Pat?’

  She looked at him with tears brimming in her eyes. The whole thing had suddenly become disconcertingly serious.

  ‘Well, listen then. I’ve travelled a bit, done things as you put it, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Believe me it doesn’t. There are too many people nowadays who think they are achieving something by changing the scenery as often as possible: hitch-hiking through Europe, peddling across Asia, rowing across the Atlantic and so forth. But so what? When you’ve done it you’re still left with the same vacuum inside you waiting to be filled. Your memory is a confusion of too many faces and places encountered too rapidly. Much better to dig your roots in somewhere—anywhere—and dig deep. Mark out some small area and cultivate it really well. I’ve knocked about a bit in the last few years I suppose, but I was always restless until I came to a very ordinary house in a rather dingy London suburb, where there was a large and interesting family who had been in the same place for a long time. It was good to feel I belonged somewhere—if only by adoption. It’s difficult for you to appreciate that feeling. But don’t throw it away lightly.’

  Patricia wasn’t going to cry after all. She stood up, pulling the lapels of her dressing-gown together across her neck. Beneath the faded material was a figure full of promise.

  ‘Thank you, Mark, you’ve been very kind.’

  ‘But no help?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. But I don’t think you could ever quite understand.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘About a large family I mean. How it sort of suffocates and devours you. Sometimes I think I was intended to be an only child, and got born into a large family by a mistake. Perhaps with you it was the other way round. I don’t know. But I like being lonely.’

  She paused, as the noises of going to bed reached them from downstairs—the snick of the light switch, the clang of the damper on the boiler, the sharp reports of bolts being shot home.

  ‘I must go. It was lovely of you to listen.’

  The door closed silently behind her.

  Mark sat on the edge of his bed, one palm in the warm depression left by Patricia, troubled by a sense of failure, almost of humiliation. Was it true, what he had said to her about the value of this family life? Or did his advice derive from the crooked workings of a twisted kind of covetousness—perhaps the kind prohibited by the Ninth Commandment, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, which had always seemed superfluous after the Sixth. True, Patricia was no one’s wife—yet. But she would make some man happy some day. Did he subconsciously wish to deprive that man? Had Patricia, with her flattering attention, touching gratitude, and diverting problems, become a necessary part of the furniture in his mind? It was true. It was terrible. He really wished to prevent her from discovering life. He was trying, insanely, to preserve everyone in this family in just the state in which he had first encountered them, when they had given him that delightful sense of secure, harmonious, integrated living. As if he could arrest their development at that stage, and set them working like articulated models in a shop window, mechanically repeating the same gestures—Mrs Mallory always pouring out a cup of tea with a warm, motherly smile; Mr Mallory always easing himself blissfully into his chair; Patricia always reaching for the aspirins with womanly resignation, Clare always shyly yielding to the one good-night embrace …

  Shy wasn’t exactly the mot juste now. It wasn’t many months ago that she had been offended by his exploring fingers, but tonight she had given her breast to his hand as if to a baby. It had been an unsettling evening. People were not behaving as he had ordained they should behave. First Clare, then Mr and Mrs Mallory, then Patricia …

  Restlessly he moved to his desk and focused the reading lamp on a book, some potted critical work on Marlowe. He only had time to read potted critical works now, with Finals a few weeks off.

  Marlowe was a puzzling character. A notorious atheist, yet capable of dramatizing the interpenetration of the natural and the supernatural more effectively than any other playwright. Why this is hell nor am I out of it. It is the man who will not submit to God who is most compulsively aware of his reality. The more violently you abuse God, the more completely you affirm his existence. You can’t win in the end, whichever way you play it.

  That the angel Gabriel was bawd to the Holy Ghost, became he brought the salutation to Mary.

  The sort of thing that would have delighted him a few months ago—he would have chuckled over its witty irreverence, and imagined with pleasure Clare’s shock and embarrassment had she come across it. It was difficult not to be ashamed of his behaviour at that time. Shocking and embarrassing Clare had been a kind of sexual indulgence. To lend her, under the pretence of ‘educating’ her, a book which contained frank or scurrilous passages, was a kind of vicarious rape. And perhaps, indeed, he had succeeded in corrupting her. Perhaps this explained her behaviour tonight, and the gradual change that had come over her lately. There was a change, though it was difficult to define it, except by reference to a few trivial details of behaviour. She was longer in the bath and quicker out of church than when he had first known her. She didn’t blush any more at jokes about somebody’s bust—but this was his fault for teasing her about being narrow-minded. Now she wasn’t narrow-minded any more, he didn’t feel inclined to make the jokes. She had learned all about dress and make-up. She looked desirable all right. But did he desire the well-groomed young woman in high-heels and with figure held firmly in place by a good foundation garment, as much as the callow, untidy girl, so soft to touch and hold, he had first known?

  Tonight, as she spoke of the convent, that frightened, insecure schoolgirl-woman had broken through the shell of sophistication and touched him again, moved him to be tender. But not tenderness she wanted now. Passion now.

  If dishonoured her, must then make an honest woman of her? Marriage with Clare. Nothing said, but it was expected. Suppose could do worse. Logical really, after what he had said to Pat. Merge with the Mallorys; marry a Mallory. Name the day, bride in white, radiant, nuptial Mass. Our Lady of Perpetual Sucker, till death do us, special graces, Mendelsohn, the happy couple, pause for photo, confetti, into the car, what to say, what the hell does one say—roll on bed? The reception, a buffet, so glad you could come, yes didn’t she, yes I am, O ha ha Uncle Tom’s sozzled ha ha good old Uncle Tom, accustomed as I am to public speaking, a glass of champagne cider each, I give you the Bride’s parents! My own parents looking a bit sick of all the tipsy Irish. Thank God we’re going, kippers in the car, confetti, small hotel, double bed, a baby started, could do worse …

  Mark sagged forward on to his desk, straightened up, and dragged himself from the brink of sleep. No good; must get some work done tonight.

  He lit a cigarette and gazed at the page of his book unti
l the printed words ceased to dance about. Where was he? Oh yes.

  That the angel Gabriel was bawd to the Holy Ghost, because he brought the salutation to Mary.

  Strictly speaking, it was quite true. The irreverence was verbal, not conceptual. Annunciation—assignation: only the associations differed. Marlowe had been tricked into vividly illuminating the miracle of the Incarnation.

  That if there be any God or any true religion, then it is in the Papists, because the service of God is performed with more ceremonies, as elevation of the Mass, organs, singing men, shaven crowns, etc. That all Protestants are hypocritical asses.

  The common mistake of outsiders, that Catholicism was a beautiful, solemn, dignified, aesthetic religion. But when you got inside you found it was ugly, crude, bourgeois. Typical Catholicism wasn’t to be found in St Peter’s, or Chartres, but in some mean, low-roofed parish church, where hideous plaster saints simpered along the wall, and the bored congregation, pressed perspiration tight into the pews, rested their fat arses on the seats, rattled their beads, fumbled for their smallest change, and scolded their children. Yet in their presence God was made and eaten all day long, and for that reason those people could never be quite like other people, and that was Catholicism.

  Again his mind had wandered from the text before him. It was hopeless. For effective study one required emotional calm, self-satisfaction, routine, the minimum of distractions and discomforts, mental or physical. The troubled conscience, the tortured mind, compelling one to come to terms with life, made one impatient of the mere accummulation of facts.

  But after all, he had come far in the last few months. Should he not have acquired a deep mental calm and certainty? But there was the rub. One could never say ‘I have reached the limit of my religious development; it is time to return to the secular plane and develop there correspondingly.’ One was never finished. Just when one had decided to go no farther, one caught a glimpse of something ahead, challenging, enigmatic, and one wearily set off again.

  The Christian life, as exemplified by Christ and the saints, offered countless possibilities for self-perfection; but you couldn’t do everything. Or could you? It occurred to you that you might say the Rosary every day. There seemed to be no reason why you shouldn’t, and to decide not to, after having had the thought, seemed to indicate a lack of real caritas. So you did, and used up a little more time. What about one Mass on a weekday? Well all right. Well then, why not every day? Well that’s a bit much, it means getting up every morning at— But what about the Passion, the sufferings of the saints? O.K. So you flogged yourself a little more. But there seemed to be no valid reason for not devoting one’s whole life to religion. Excuses, but no reasons. Yet there must be a reason somewhere, if life was to go on: life, that is, work and play, eating and drinking, copulation and birth. The whole structure seemed to be based on the indifference of the majority. It was Original Sin and not love that made the world go round. Perhaps nothing would embarrass God more than if every one of His creatures took His Word literally and to heart. But for those who tried to do so, there seemed to be only a progressive involvement in guilt. Take Student Cross for example. If he had never seen that leaflet pinned up on the Catholic Society notice-board at college, he would never have dreamt of participating in the pilgrimage. But God had made bloody sure he did see it—and He had safely left the rest to the inevitable reflex of challenge-acceptance. For why, having seen the leaflet, had he been unable to dismiss the idea? It was preposterous enough, a medieval demonstration grotesquely out of place in modern England. Its purpose Augean—no less than to perform an act of reparation for the sins of students everywhere. It had immediately struck him, of course, that the latter, had they been aware of it, would have strongly resented the interference of spiritual sanitary workers. Yes, you could mock at the idea, but that wasn’t enough to rid yourself of its insidious appeal, politely, persistently tugging at your soul. No doubt his motives for going on the pilgrimage were varied. No decision of his was unmixed with egotism, and an agreeable consciousness of impressing Clare and the rest of the family had made his decision easier. Again, he always savoured the bizarre, eccentric experience—it would be useful material. But these motives would not have been sufficient in themselves. After all, he detested physical pain and discomfort—and this excursion had promised both. So what was it that had made him go, but a furtive, half-acknowledged sense that not to have done so would have been like turning one’s back on the Crucifixion, that here perhaps at last was the litmus which might determine the validity of his readopted faith?