by Paul Ableman
— I want to go with this lady.
Ram said:
— Yes. We’ll all go with this lady. To my place.
Down the hill, winding through danger, past the glowing façade of the cinema. Sue’s chosen looked very Jewish that evening, her hair or wig in tight curls, large, thick-lipped face, splayed nose. She had arrived after the war, with a roughneck husband, from central Europe, washed out on the tide of hate. They brought with them ineradicable accents, he various clumsy, sometimes dubious, methods of earning a little more than labourers do, she a fading elegance and coarse candour. A meagre, blonde little girl with a running nose snuffled around them.
Sue had chosen ill. We poured up the hill in the traffic stream and Jane, curious and flattered, started interrogating the retreating girl. Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do? What do you do, what?
— I thought of working in the cinema. Well, you see—it’s dark—
— Leave her alone.
— She must toughen up a bit.
The girl kept twisting and dodging.
— I thought—I could get another room. I had to leave my friend—you see—
A year, eighteen months, before, we had first grazed her. She had been in the taxi with us. Or had arrived in another taxi just behind us, A dark, lovely face; a thin girl escorted by a virile Cockney we had known for years. He read Spengler, earned fat pay envelopes at a composing machine, painted presumably sub-standard paintings. He asked:
— Have you met my latest?
— What do you think of his latest?
I asked you later. You would never admit good of another female, not while she was within tempting range. At that particular party, imperfectly isolated in memory from many others, we saw them through gaps in the revelry. You and I were together then. I touched this girl, a furtive hug round the waist, electrified by your sharp, pained glance. She sat on a chair and raised her skirt in a sudden, mischievous gesture. I saw to her stocking tops and knew the sickening pang of desire. You and I were close then but strained already.
We reached Ram’s flat and tumbled in with our bottles. He made it dark. Jane lost interest in her unsolicited protégé and the trying little Indian shouldered the attack. In a clipped, high voice he complimented her:
— You have quite a good profile.
He nodded, smiled, feeling for a method of annexing the girl. He liked a reserve stock.
— Listen, we will be having a party here soon—in two weeks. What is your telephone number so that I can invite you to it? Come along, you like parties, don’t you?
Sue smiled vacantly. She gazed vacantly about. A hunted thing leaped and swerved behind her eyes.
— Leave her alone, Ram!
I urged irritably again.
But it went on although becoming subdued. I lay back in a haze of wine, barely hearing the assaults, until from Ram and another man came the critical ones:
— Don’t bother with her.
— The girl’s stupid.
As she hurled her glass at the aloof Indian, Sue uttered a low scream. I sprang up and pushed her tormentor, tumbling him backwards on to the bed. I registered his indignation as I turned to comfort Sue. From the depths of her convulsive distress kept arising the query:
— I heard someone say I was stupid. Why am I stupid? Why?
She was still sobbing helplessly when I removed her. Ram assumed I was taking her home to caress her. I simply thought I was taking her home but it seemed we had to glide off down the highways, the bright strips winding out of town. I was a little touched by her faith and almost merged with the part I was playing: protector, spiritual comrade, he who understands. We shot out through the ghost of Hendon, a lonely, nocturnal bullet occupied by a hysterical girl and a self-indulgent man. We needed petrol.
I had sensed that she was schizophrenic, moving delicately between gulfs, capable of supporting the world in its more tranquil phases but never far from a tumble down the sharp shale and a slow struggle back. Now she was an out-patient.
We found petrol as the gauge threatened halt. It was shortly after Sue had extracted the last sniff from her despair. Then I encircled her shoulder with my arm as we wound through suburban lanes.
— Sometimes I think I’ll go into one of those places and stay for the rest of my life.
These are not my people. Who are my people? A few blue pills or an eighth of Scotch still get me to work. They hate the animals.
Ram’s hue had aggravated his offence. The country was filling up with aliens. Dark, strange beings. I waited for my own heredity to be censured but:
— I like the Jewish people.
— Do you suppose we turn right or left?
A thin, wandering girl in a shabby dress, she huddled against me as we nosed the eerie, empty highway. It lay bathed in imported radiance. She glanced listlessly both ways and snuggled closer to me. I kissed her cheek. A red car screamed out of London and vanished into mileage. I turned left after it. Somewhere hunched generators span. The clock ticked and the earth rolled. I couldn’t spend all night carting a mad girl round the suburbs.
— Sue—let’s go home.
But I sensed that this was wrong. She mustn’t be betrayed twice in one evening. Would they admit her? Would her ‘adviser’ be there? Where was the place?
Finally we curved in towards the low cubes. Grass and concrete stiff in the livid glare and an appropriate touch of nightmare to greet us.
I had glimpsed a squat porter who observed and disappeared as our beams swung round the drive. I nosed into a slot in the row of cars under the institution’s windows. Smudged light through a transom reached the room immediately before us. Sue, now calm, gazed straight ahead, anticipating rescue. I opened my door and circled the car to her side. In the room ahead someone fumbled amidst vague shapes. As I opened Sue’s door, a piercing torch beam shot from the window into our eyes. My own composure was not totally immune to the impression of a demented hag with an evil ray. Sue simply gasped and collapsed against me. She was still heaving in terror as a bulky, bespectacled sister bore reproachfully down on us.
The doctors had left hours ago. No, of course the girl couldn’t be admitted. There was an indispensable procedure for admission. The porter lurked in the background to reinforce the other’s outrage.
— Who’s your doctor? What’s his name?
The sister bent sceptical, bold eyes on the girl who, in a thin, uninflected voice, gave her psychiatrist’s name. During the brief, ensuing interrogation, Sue, glancing at the harsh woman as she answered, otherwise gazed steadily into blankness. She was restored and without hope. I begged the woman to receive the girl but she was adamant. For her, the unstable were merely the ordinary and this was no urgent case. The woman was competent. I sensed that behind the facade of blunt questioning she had probed the girl’s state and found it tolerable.
— Get some sleep. Have you any pills? See that she gets a night’s sleep.
I eased Sue back into the car. Folly. Why had we come? She was calm enough now. The sister leered faintly as I started the engine and backed out. An easy victory for her. These girls are viable. A little firmness. All this tearing about in the night.
And indeed Sue was verging on cheerfulness when we finally slid up to her door.
So that was a night out. Home from the champagne ball at dawn. The machines, at least, had danced. Our cities have become pavilions for jubilant machines through which two-legged mammals shuffle warily. Good-night—er—good-morning, Sue. Glad I could help a little. Thanks for that chaste peck. My wife? Actually we’re—kind of—separated.
But our cultured hill is too small to enforce durable separation. My sense of your presence, immanence, never wanted and, less reticent than deity, you repeatedly confirmed it by an Appearance. I spied you in the morning with John, on the ‘terrasse’ of the coffee bar. Odd to find John at this side of town. Excellent fellow. Best English breeding and yet entire family liquidated by German sanitation squads. Slightly swart
hy—like a young English aristocrat back from Bermuda.
— Naturally I think you’re a bastard.
Loves us both, this man. Pronunciation impeccable but inflection subtly mentions Poland. The hordes of the abused. Never heard of any of them again. Fire on my right and curiosity on my left. Exposed in a novel way.
— I’ve made myself comfortable—well—
Nothing bizarre. Three old friends having coffee on a bright morning. Doesn’t matter if anyone sees us. Comfortable? It’s a comfortable room, of course. Of course, I knew you’d be all right. Everything kept candid.
— Possibly we could have dinner together?
— Waiter, three more coffees, please.
— John, give us another fag. So you’ve stepped in smartly, eh?
— God, you are a bastard.
— Only superficially.
Jaunty as ever.
— Possibly we could have dinner together?
— All right.
Is it a good idea? New modes of calculation seem to be asserting themselves. Grin not quite effortless.
— Possibly we could have dinner together?
And after dinner? No, mustn’t weaken. Be snarling again in a week. Must see it through. A civilized trio in the most cultured part of Hampstead.
— Still jobbing or broking or whatever?
— God, you are—what is it, another cigarette?
Aware of her differently. Mine. Not mine. Close. Not close. Gay. Hardly gay. The discs of the broken columns at Sunium. The cold, wet heather. The trains drumming through that ghastly night in the lay-by. Yogurt and brandy with George. Too much to shed. But I’ve been cunning. Lose nothing. Just a kind of holiday, a vacation.
— Shall we have dinner together—one night?
— All right.
A fat, grey faun, George darting over the site. The great crag shouldering the broken temple. George, the gas-man, stooped muttering over inscriptions older than monotheism. Then the time for krasi. Very demanding, wine, in hours. We loved Athens and it seemed to reciprocate.
— Then—tomorrow night. Have to go now.
— A date?
Your eye shot sparkling challenge.
— Yup.
Our convention was candour. No shame. Damn it, I’d made that point often enough. You say you’re comfortable? What is behind your mad eyes? Your hair is on fire. There must be constituents of flesh and the world in your passion. No harm in having dinner together. May you never find me ludicrous.
I stood in the old living room where I now slept. The five fish—four carp, three of them golden, and a sliver of tench—registered my monstrous presence by flipping to their corner for food. I sprinkled some into the corrupt water. Must change it or they’d die. My son was in Spain.
— One of the best-selected small private libraries I’ve seen.
— Thank you, sir. I’ve forgotten how to read.
Those books are wrong. They are often contradictory. I think there are important aspects of our nature that do not receive due consideration in them. Socrates was a lethal swine. We are rushing through crazy rapids. London sprouts radiant towers. The world has laryngitis. Love is, of course, a word. When Esther was living with Jim, I found a plaster nude there. An oddly-bent girl.
— What is this statue? Who created it?
— Jim did.
— Jim is no sculptor.
Esther was embarrassed. The figure crouched oddly. Its anatomy was dubious. Jim would surely have examined it critically.
— The back’s not right.
Jim would surely have studied it intently, alight with interest. But she said he had modelled it! Jim clammy with moist plaster?
— Oh—you know—occupational therapy. Jim needed something!
He had tried various things. Codeine.
— One or two. Nothing impressive.
Nocturnal coffee.
— But, Jim, you can’t drink coffee all night and complain of insomnia.
— No, it doesn’t affect me.
He had come to depend on wine, a single glass, at dinner. Once or twice a week he might get drunk, his tall, corpse face animated above the crowd. Genial, patrician zombie extracting absurdity from the impact of instinct on convention, baring black stumps at some fetching girl. Codeine, coffee, alcohol, in moderation, the legitimate eccentricities and excesses of a balanced mind.
I had continued to stare uneasily at the figurine as Esther hastened to the kitchen to make coffee. What was it saying? I had to be tamped into warped existence to keep Jim sane? Jim? The mind that effortlessly humbled mine, that I had never seen intimidated by another intelligence? Of course, Jim, we whispered that you were sterile, that your acute understanding would never be the matrix of achievement. I asked you once:
— But ultimately—what do you ultimately want to do?
Your face puffed like a frog’s, your chest expanded in parody of all pompous ambition:
— Write a great, big book!
Good, you were sound, impregnable. In ecstatic flight, I raged at your logic and exact knowledge. And took comfort from just those things. Superior intelligence is a corrosive neighbour. Desmond, armoured by substantial achievement, in the acid murk of the Vesuvius Club, smarting from your benign contact:
— James Barraclough—with his intellect—I know all about his intellect!
With Silvia, I defended you and, since a champion assimilates some portion of his hero’s merit, gained a little self-esteem by doing so. I said that the modes of achievement that we have institutionalized are not necessarily the highest and are certainly not the only ones. That a person’s achievement may be expressed in terms of the change he effects in others. Jim had certainly changed you, Silvia. And me. I said that it was arguable that all forms of acknowledged success represented pathological hypertrophy of a particular function or attribute, that beyond this might lie a realm of subtle achievement whose measure was the total effect of the immersion of a personality in a culture.
We have talked so much, Jim, and deeply probed each other’s nature. No conventional barriers of shame, no restraint of class, race, origin have impeded our intimacy. But I never asked you about that plaster girl.
3
THE FLAT WAS not bad. We left it for a year, most of which we spent in Europe. We took the telescope with us and sold it in Venice. In Venice we walked through rosy autumn. There has been a hint of cameras turning throughout our love. We reached Greece.
Behind us in the flat, the daughter of the professor of English Literature of Western Reserve University dwelt without a telescope. We lived on the Acropolis, in a sleeping car. Greeks came and led us back to their hovels for cooked guts, weed and abundant krasi. Back to their teeming hovels.
You never liked the flat. One has an awareness of themes. The process seems banal and one rejects it. Still one is the dominant factor in one’s environment. I sensed that my work, whether good or bad, would not prosper. It never has. A blunt word and a relationship trembles for a decade. You said:
— I feel it’s unlucky.
Our three-roomed flat, self-contained, with a quaking floor. It surveyed London. Regional HQ of the occupying forces would have had the impression, at least, of dominating the Thames Valley conurbation from our living room. Through a good telescope one sometimes saw exciting things quite a long way away. I arose hurriedly from a stretch of dense prose construction and manned the instrument. Quite close a white body, bathed in weak sunlight, lay screened by provoking new foliage. The breeze stirred the trees, veiling and again revealing the white girl in the open window. My thirty-five magnifications conveyed my phantom eye to within stirring distance of the white mounds and the ruddy growth of the crotch. The experience moved me.
— I feel it’s unlucky.
Clearly I had to reject your superstitious allegation. Such neo-Gothic imprecations are alien to modern Hampstead. I observed that we were naked. The blast wave from unruly hydrogen fusing anywhere over London would have toppled us li
ke a flake. The hot pulse would have seared us to the clay. I watched the invulnerable sky modulating through glory above the great crystal of guilt. London is ruthless and still. You slept like a child next door. No harmonic waves invaded our flat. I shrieked soundlessly in creative impotence. I loathed that telescope.
We need our records. We can store very little reality. The powerful scanner, our brain, weaving through space-time, has only a fitful recall unit. Hence the necessity for ritual. The passion is processed into observance and the woman laying flowers on the grave of the one who was everything is probably brooding on the price of beef.
And yet—themes. They are magnified by duration. We scratch up the tip of a cone of significance and shrug it away. Yet it will fulfil its geometrical prerogative. Or, possibly a closer metaphor, the coded cell must evolve into the mature organism. No matter how stable and dense a biological system it is perpetually secreting its own ruin. The microscopic novelty of sperm and spore will soon invade the flourishing landscape and transform it.
— I feel it’s unlucky. For us.
No, really, you’ve got the period wrong. Ours is a modern novel. Not even a novel, a film—you sand I wander not through moral labyrinths but incontrovertible visual reality. The cuts are absolute, replacing Madrid with Athens, the rose-gem of Chartres with the limed cement of a Cretan inn. The dialogue is vernacular and inconclusive. Our motor rides come from Hollywood, our sex from the Latin neo-realists. How can a flat be unlucky? That would imply a schematic life, rooted in a durable locale, where the crack in the fireplace can evolve, over tedious years of inescapable contemplation, into a curse from the cabbala. We hum from flat to flat, city to city—how can ‘unfurnished accommodation’ be unlucky?