by Paul Ableman
Still our luck decayed. Naive and superstitious it may have been to have located the cause in our new flat, you at least detected a disease. I don’t think I did then. It was in you, in me, in the morning headlines and the Saturday party.
— I don’t know. I just have a feeling.
Nevertheless, we successfully defied the curse for several years and when we motored off to the Pyrenees and the Alps, it was not to escape the mysterious sentence but simply to have a look at Europe.
During the year following our return, our life became intolerable. You left. What? All right, I drove you away.
4
DR. SELIGMAN WAS fat again. A few months earlier his clothes had drooped. He had lurked healthily in a collapsed, pin-striped tent. During his previous bulging phase, he had shown me huge, blue love-bites in the swell of his belly. A few years before he had been struck by a coronary. Excess flesh unfairly burdens an ailing heart. He had been relatively thin for only a few months and now his navy pin-stripe clung tautly round him again.
— Is it likely to harm a schizophrenic girl? To be made love to?
— Eh?
He glanced up vaguely but attentively, stubby cigar between extended fingers, medical text in his hand.
— Nooo. Be very good for her. Watch she doesn’t bite off your penis.
Sue’s teeth had in fact nipped, to the accompaniment of a little savage whimper, my left testicle. My gasped protest, as the sickening pain spread, had fortunately disciplined her.
I watched Dr. Seligman frowning gently, sucking the cigar, occasionally inserting a correction or emendation as he edited medicine into a text I had translated. I had asked him about Sue as much to brag about being in a position to seduce a girl, schizophrenic or otherwise, as to elicit information. He had probably sensed this. I felt humiliated. His erotic anecdotes had been one of the factors which had made marriage seem intolerably constraining. How ignoble! Had I been jealous of the fat, middle-aged doctor? He lived with mum, who always answered the phone:
— Dr. Seligman’s surgery.
In a voice rigid with the gutteral accent of the harried. Jim visualized her as ‘his greedy old mother’. How else account for his superb economic disasters? From Hungary and then a Russian prison camp where his captors, in deference to his technical enemy nationality, had flung a solitary Jew amongst Nazi officers, he had trekked through shattered Europe and liberated Paris to London and the ultimate catastrophe of hire purchase. This had nearly broken him as the earlier ordeals had failed to. He had snatched up, in an orgy of consumer lust, houses, cars and domestic equipment and so far had he waded into debt that it seemed he would flounder in it for the rest of his days. His evasive actions were picturesque and humiliating. He would sell and repurchase his car within an hour in order to modify the interest rate, alternately plead with the post office and threaten them that a disconnected telephone might, in addition to spoiling his chances of ever paying the bill, menace a patient’s life, borrow small sums and juggle large ones. Why was he so poor? He worked like a donkey. He had a research appointment, a private practice, devoted nights, not like other doctors and lesser men, to sleep but to an emergency service which, when he was not actually out on a call, provided what time he had for translating. Then why was he so poor?
— His greedy old mum.
Jim maintained.
— The hire purchase. I will explain.
But I tried to parry this. Each explanation was more complex and fabulous than the last. Naturally I didn’t want the fat, funny, clever pathologist to get another coronary but he showed a tendency to borrow money from us and then neglect our work.
— Watch she doesn’t bite off your penis.
I felt wary rather than alarmed. Was it a standard hazard of consorting with girls disturbed in this particular way? Actually Sue hadn’t seemed at all disturbed that glamorous evening—at least until the poignant farewell.
— Watch she doesn’t bite off your penis.
I couldn’t recall from random but fairly extensive reading in psychopathology that schizophrenic women were disposed towards oral castration. Perhaps it would be as well, if another intimate opportunity arose, to try and direct matters into more orthodox modes. That time she had had a period and we couldn’t do it properly.
Steak and wine. Her slight form, dark face, quick little smiles, as she daintily sipped and chewed, impressed me with her youth. I was still ageless.
In the car, as we hummed along the pastoral ridge to Highgate, she snuggled against me. Seated on a bench outside The Grapevine, in Highgate, she asked for:
— A whirlybird.
— What’s that?
— Haven’t you ever had a whirlybird?
— I don’t know. What is it?
A white-shield Worthington—so she was on pet-name terms with the powerful ales. We sat side by side outside The Grapevine. Each gust of wind generated a blizzard of pink petals. I told her about you and me in selected phrases. That was, I think, my first attempt to reconcile fidelity to our love with an urgent desire not to alienate a girl. A craven compromise? True, I should have said:
— I love my wife, and would love to sleep with you.
As a shiny vehicle pulled out of the tiny courtyard, accumulated petals slid from it as from a bridal car. Sue placed her hand on mine and squeezed it.
Her charm survived her views. She had it in for the blacks. I brought her another whirlybird. I tried not to slip from a bantering into a didactic mode. I refrained from advocating a liberal immigration policy. Sue turned and smiled clearly and sweetly. We slid away through the deep dusk to The Nag’s Head.
Several whirlybirds later I stood by a low wall. Sue sat on the wall. Around us, murmuring in the night, were the people of the suburbs. You were now inaudible. I had raised a wall of whisky between us. Ram too had been troublesome earlier. He had squeaked several times that my conduct was just as cynical as I had implied his had been. Wasn’t I getting her drunk? No, Ram, I am not so priggish as to claim purity of motive but I am not merely attempting seduction. I find the girl delightful. Probably I exaggerated the severity of her mental instability. You can see that this evening she is rational and gay.
— Another whirlybird? Sit here. Don’t move.
Soon I took Sue’s hand and led her to a stone nymph at the deserted end of the garden. I had only to swing her lightly towards me for her to sidle into my arms. I seasoned the kiss with a discreet but yearning caress of her leg and thigh. She pressed closer against me.
— Those things you can’t tell anyone. You know, secret desires—
Back in the flat, we stood by the fish tank and kissed. Blue lights marched across London. We stood by the table for an age. Her tubular dress had climbed to her waist, her dramatic knickers had fallen to her knees. Her head was slightly on one side, her eyes closed, her hands on my shoulders. You entered singing and laid the table for three. You dissolved in a mist of anguish. A white, knitted lamb peeped at us. We stood immobile, in erotic equilibrium. Seasons swarmed silently around us. I grew heavy with years which tilted the house, toppling us on to the divan. There the contest with tangled bedclothes restored me to green youth.
— I told you—I told you in the car that it was—the wrong night—
I became crafty and avuncular. It was often the best time, I explained, for many excellent reasons. There was definitely no harm in it. Just let me—
— No!
— Just—
— No!
I slumped. Strategic withdrawal. Must re-group. We were still again, listening to the slow diesel groaning through Gospel Oak. There may be iron spindles on that train. Are these your white legs? I have no talent for rape. Now you can hear the fish again. I don’t know why they click like that. It may be disapproval. Your long, white legs and your soft sealed lips. And your plugged-up body. Sue, you were fine this evening. I am menaced by this rigidity. I will stroke you into submission.
We lay in different postures, our bodies near
ly as intractable as our clothes had been. Speech jams the signals of groping hands. It stems from a different sector of evolution, a saloon car in a Jurassic swamp. That roar is peace carrying executives to Nairobi. Let me just—there! The classical position for Western man. Or its dry approximation. Grip tightly, Sue. I am disinherited without the slippery coils but you seem—
— Don’t go away! Please! Don’t go away!
Sue, I will never reach the crest but I am doubling for your sake. There is pleasure in inflicting pleasure.
— Please! Don’t go away!
Not in hours. And you won’t need hours. Minutes perhaps. The clock of your respiration is speeding up. Seconds—that little jerk of your chin registered the crisis? How mild. You did make it, didn’t you? Here, lie against me. Rest. There are no rats in this house. The ancient world is dust but so is the future one. We have recently invented dynamic dust that ripples. How did you get down there? You are tickling my feet. They have drained the virtue out of us and pumped it into our institutions. You are browsing on my leg. This afternoon, when I telephoned you I mentioned, without design, that I had just bathed. Would you have indulged these ‘secret desires’ without that assurance of hygiene?
The room was splotched with light. I lay like a specimen, probed by a diligent student. You are methodical, Sue, leaving no cleft or protrusion unexplored. I wish my undischarged vigour had not flagged. Why doesn’t this charming caress reanimate me? Is it too clinical? Now you have reached the variant parts and—
— Ha!
Sue, that was savage! And was it lust or rage that tore the muted snarl from your pretty lips as you nearly ruined me? The pain! Strange pain that dilates slowly. When the big boy clutched me that summer day in the Connecticut alfalfa I held in a gasp as the pain expanded until I thought my bowels would melt and tears oozed out. Will it increase this time until—no, it seems your little nip was not too fierce. It begins to abate already.
Now the lights are on. You are squatting beside me and laughing, shaking me like a carnival toy.
— You are beautiful, Sue.
Girlish, long white legs, still wearing a green blouse.
— I’m not very well-developed so—how can I be beautiful?
You cocked your head at this sly admission. Then you jumped off the bed and started to dress. Perhaps not. I hadn’t really noticed, even when I stirred your nipples, how ‘well-developed’ you were beneath the green blouse. Is it time for you to go?
Sue dressed rapidly. I lay naked and watched her. She glanced at me once or twice but didn’t smile. I prolonged the intimacy by remaining naked. How long would her period last? We had got on very well. I felt a stirring in my bowels. Sue moved towards the door.
— Sue?
She lurched out into the passage. I twisted off the bed and flew after her. She had opened the hall door, stood poised at the dark stairwell.
— Sue?
I smiled affection, smiled farewell, until next time. The exhausted thing turned. Hostile eyes met mine. The smile was that of someone who wanders alone through a blasted land, the voice was a whisper from beyond relevance.
— I never want—to see you—again—
5
BIRTH IS A technical event in the diffusion of life, death a staging post in the movement of thought. Most of the people I write about are not whole. Their lives are broken or desperate. I do not think it is chance that sickens my friends. There is a gravity of the damned. The motor-roads of this island are lined with the contented and the contented are dull.
Craig Miller is not whole.
The president of the United States issued an ultimatum. He said to the leader of the Russians.
— I am putting a blockade around the island of Cuba. If your ships attempt to reach that island, your ships laden with needles of annihilation, my ships will blow them out of the water.
This was the direct confrontation that we had all feared for years. The slow Russian tramps wallowed on towards the island of Cuba.
Many years ago Craig Miller won the gold medal at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He came from Liverpool. His father lived in a hut and pushed a hand-cart through the streets, brawling in answer to racial jeers. Golden light from the synagogue candles flowed over the black bowlers of the grave devout. Liverpool, in Craig’s mouth, lurched two thousand miles across Europe and merged with Odessa or some Polish, ghetto-bearing town.
On tour in Scotland, Craig attached to himself a Scottish girl and, in spite of his fidelity and devotion to the ideal of family life, planted, in addition to a child in her womb, an ulcer in her stomach as the years went by. He had received many fine notices but never parts worthy of his gifts. Years before we started to live thirty feet above his head we had been impressed by his representation of a decadent Arab boy in a mediocre play. But he was ‘difficult’ and so lesser performers were awarded better parts.
Craig charged squinting up Parson’s Avenue. Professional pride of physique sent him out to exercise but it was resentment that made his pace grim as he pounded in shorts across Hampstead Heath or thrashed down numerous lengths of the indoor pool. Probably a few centuries back a Tartar of the steppes had warmed Craig’s stock in the wrinkled pouch between his saddle-bowed legs. Caucasian Russians and Jews may have participated in the relay that later transmitted the seed but the nomadic East continued to smoulder in his features and, to his sardonic disgust, when he stormed off to the television studios it was often to play a sinister Oriental.
— I have to say: there are twenty-four points at which a touch will kill a man—and I know them all!
Returned from the ironic triumph of blunting his exquisite talent to the pitch of childish caricature, he practised Lear and Peer Gynt at home. But such sterile exercises only nourished his desperation.
— I am an actor, an artist. I must act. Otherwise I suffocate.
— I suppose I’m lucky. A writer—painter—can at least work—even in the face of permanent neglect. A virtuoso can’t.
— They won’t let me act!
Craig’s past seemed melancholy. It included such austere components as a hulk laden with the military mad, a room clammy with his own blood and a wife aghast, and a grotesque, pansy brother haunting his professional life with satiric reminders of its emotional superficiality and erotic ambiguity.
— Let them do it! Let them do it—like dogs in the street. They can do it in long lines—yes! But he mustn’t come running to me.
To have escaped all trace of paranoia would, given his just sense of his own prowess, have required greater stability than he possessed. In fact, he attributed his less able brother’s superior commercial success in the theatre to:
— A conspiracy of pooves! Do you know what he says? ‘You must understand, Craig, that we homosexuals are very promiscuous.’ Yes!
Above Craig, below us, raged the domestic life of a young journalist on the first floor. Its less obtrusive elements were sudden, piercing parties or endless nocturnal jazz. Its more brilliant coups were thuds and moans, voices high in recrimination or amatory abandon, house-shaking blows as the journalist, or his haggard blonde wife (accomplice?), having again locked themselves out, attempted to batter down their own front door with the stone base of an urn. He beat her. Craig intervened once, when the tumult became imperative, to stop him methodically pounding his kneeling and possibly expiring wife’s head with a small club. This vigorous neighbour also established the adventurous tradition of falling, or being pushed, from his window. Surviving relatively unscathed the first time, on the second his bloody, broken form provided the family at basement level with a dramatic moment when they finally responded to his feeble tapping and peeped through the curtains.
During the Cuba crisis I carried that tough, bone-handled dagger of yours. I thought if we were partially flayed by a remote thermonuclear explosion I might be able to despatch us quickly with it. That was the dagger the little crook warned me, with his diabolical grin, might wind up between my ribs. You brought
me a dagger, butter and cigars. He correctly noted the passion in your wild eyes but was insensitive to the tenderness of the love that fuelled it. I would have preferred, as the missilemen eyed their winking panels, and the Russian ships heaved towards the turbulent island, a pistol, but was unwilling to make melodramatic, and probably futile, attempts to acquire one. Still I carried the dagger and hated physical separation from you and the baby.
Poor Craig! How could he study? Suppose they had given him Lear or some long, glum part from Ibsen, how could he have learned his lines? He had only to sit down to master: ‘There are ninety-eight points at which slight pressure will kill—’ for naked children to tumble screaming into the garden below. Leaping to his sturdy feet, he charged to the sunny window and, extruding his leonine head five feet above the splashing throng, urged:
— Quiet! Do you hear? It’s in the lease. I shall write to the landlord.
In the momentary hush which was all such exhortations secured him, he would pick up the moronic script again just as grating bed springs, responsive to the exertions of the blonde wife and her latest lover, and punctuated by shrill, orgastic cries, rocked the ceiling over his head.
How could he live? His demands were few but apparently unattainable. He was an actor, a sensitive artist and he was already paying more rent than he could afford. Surely elementary amenities should be attainable? His wife, knotted round her ulcer, watched tensely as he stormed up and down the flat. In her memory were the fruits of earlier conflict, a ghastly red room containing a white, drained Craig. True that gore had been wrung from him by family jealousies but great distress might tilt him desperately again. Craig pounded up the stairs. The journalist and his wife, an intimate sneer on their double face, minced down. As they jostled past him they hissed at the incredulous actor: