How did he get from the warmth of Margaret's body to this? The prospect of rolling about in the rain getting his head punched in? And Margaret was clicking along behind them. What was she going to do? Referee? Life was ridiculous.
‘This is ridiculous,' her father said.
He had stopped. Tam stopped. Margaret stopped.
‘Just leave my daughter alone. Okay? Come on, Margaret.’
The two of them walked away. Tam stood alone in the rain. He was both relieved and cheated. He knew this was just postponement of the inevitable. For he would have to find out some time what it would have been like in that darkened park - and it might have been better to find out from Mr Inglis than some of the Teddy-boys at the dancing.
‘Remember. Leave her alone,’ Mr Inglis shouted back.
But he hadn't. There were still those anarchic schooldays just before the summer holidays, when senior pupils lounged in the prefects' room and played shove-ha'penny and chess and briefly acted as if they owned the school. He talked to Margaret a lot and eventually she agreed to meet him outside Boots on Friday night. She agreed on the day he was leaving to look for a job. He didn't go back to school.
Meanwhile, came the plook - a record-breaking mound of white right on the tip of his nose.
‘That's not a plook you've got there, Tam,' Michael said. ‘Ah think it's a Siamese twin.’
Everything he did to hurry it on only made it last longer. It seemed to have the gestation period of an elephant, which was appropriate to its dimensions. Early Friday evening, he moped in front of Marion's mirror, feeling like a Quasimodo whose hump has transmigrated to his nose. He applied some of Marion's face powder but that only seemed to make it more conspicuous, seeming to him as vivid as the gentian violet that had shamed some of his classmates in primary school. Wiping the powder off, he saw his nose glow blindingly again, a light-bulb with the shade removed.
He stood Margaret up. He stood her up. It was the only time in his life he had done that. He thought if she saw him like that she might not want to see him again. He keeps hoping she will turn up at the dancing. But she never does.
He stares at his plookless face in the mirror and thinks that he looks not bad today. Margaret, where are you now?
‘Tom!’
His mother is calling him down for his dinner. If he had been born into a wealthy family, she would be calling him down for lunch. Or maybe a servant would be striking a gong. (His mother's voice sounds a bit like a gong - To-o-o-o-m.)
Either way, it would still be a pain in the bloody arse -the knight's quest for himself constantly interrupted by trivial irrelevancies.
AT LEAST HUNGER IS A CONSTANT, he would think. No matter what pretensions you had about yourself, your stomach was always waiting to bring them down to the ordinary. It was like the man who stood behind the triumphant Roman general on his chariot, while he took the plaudits of the crowd, and said, ‘Remember thou art but mortal.’ Is that what he said? Something like that. Anyway, what your stomach said was, ‘You better eat.’ In the tracklessness of thought, that was some kind of basic compass. In the confusion of selfhood, it was some kind of crude badge of identity. Even in the ecstasies of the mystics, there must have been a lot of bellies rumbling. Maybe that was what they mistook for the music of the spheres. You better eat.
Jesus, look at that fridge. It was like the laboratory of Sir Alexander Fleming. Get your home-made penicillin here. He would soon be frightened to open the door because, when he did, behold - a small abandoned universe of determined life. Cheese where lichen grows. Fruit that nurtures a dark, internal being. All around, small clumps of fungi continue their furious and meaningless existence and, when the god who carelessly created them absent-mindedly shuts the door, are plunged again into cold darkness.
He could forget about something to eat. Suicide by Roquefort. Stick to the liquid nutrition. He'd better clean it out in the morning. Before they all came out to get him like the invasion of the body-snatchers. The bastards.
He filled out another whisky, watered it and went back through to the living-room. Lit only by the light from the gas fire and the reading lamp that made a small bell of brightness on the table by the window, the darkened room seemed mysterious beyond the purpose to which he was putting it. He crossed it as if it was a walk-through painting of someone else's place.
Shit, he thought as he sat back down at the table, I'll have to stop thinking like this. It's just a room in a rented flat. Why see it in any other way? Was that tendency what had been wrong with his life all along? He hoped not. He distrusted romanticism.
But he wondered about that fixation with Margaret Inglis. Was it not partly about his sense of her as being not quite attainable? And Maddie Fitzpatrick. What chance could he ever have imagined he would have with her? And he remembered the girl on the bus, who had haunted him all that summer.
Something Jack Laidlaw had said some years ago came back to him. Four of them - Vic Vernon, Ray Harrison, Jack and himself - had been drinking in the Admiral in Glasgow. Ray had been teasing Jack about not having settled with a woman after his divorce. ‘Philanderer’ was mentioned.
‘I'm not a philanderer,’ Jack said. ‘Several hundred women will testify to that.’
They had all laughed. But the joke bothered him. He didn't believe it was true of Jack. And he knew it wasn't true of himself. He could only remember about a couple of one-night stands. Otherwise he had only made love within a relationship, even if it was a brief one.
But then why was he sitting here alone? It wasn't because he wanted the freedom to be promiscuous. If it had been, why was he living like a hermit? And he had always suspected sexual romanticism in relationships as being for some a means of justifying promiscuity. He had known people like that, both women and men, but mainly men.
They made such demands on the other that she must disappoint. The disappointment recreated a romantic vulnerability that made the man attractive to and attracted by a new woman. She thought she would be the one to give his restlessness a home. But in order to do so she would have to kill the very dynamic of his nature - his searching romanticism. His instinctive realisation of this danger made him dissatisfied with her and critical of her and the only mode of survival was by renewal of the quest. The cycle could begin again. Romanticism could only be in the search. To accept that you had found the object of the search was to commit a kind of suicide of the romantic self.
Also, he thought, sexual romanticism often had a very pragmatic method which it could contrive to conceal from itself in order to maintain its faith in its own romanticism - for example, by keeping many apparently innocent social contacts with women, like lines trawling in the sea. If nothing happened, nothing happened. But if the woman gave a hint of romantic interest the romantic was ready to take advantage of it - the bait had been taken. But the romantic could still convince himself that he had been surprised by coincidence, did not contrive his own ambush. Isn't romance wonderfully, undeniably spontaneous? The machinery of seduction had been kept concealed, was ostensibly separate from the seemingly spontaneous result.
Thus, those who profess the purity of their romanticism, their removal from baser motives of self-seeking and pleasure profiteering, are often street traders in emotion, barrow-boys of the affections - magpies pretending to be lovebirds.
He didn't believe he had done that. But then why was he sitting here alone? He couldn't exactly claim that he hadn't met any terrific women. Why wasn't he with one of them now? Or was it that good creates the appetite for best and baffles choice? At least in some people. To seek the impossible ideal was a perfect way of never connecting finally with anyone.
But that wasn't him, he thought. Surely not. Let us pray. Surely not.
But
TE AMO DEL UNO AL NUEVE
IN A CAFÉ IN BUENOS AIRES, near the Plaza de Mayo, he would sit with Cristina Esposito and she would be explaining to him the meaning of that sentence. I love you from one to nine. Without zero. Sin cero. Sinc
ero. She had a torn-off piece of grey napkin paper and a biro pen and she was breaking down the words for him as if they were an equation. She was speaking with the preoccupied pedantry of a schoolmistress. She looked as if she were trying to explicate some impractical science of the passions. In the space between her fussy manner and her luxuriance of chestnut hair, the black eyes where tapers of intensity came and went and the astonishingly mobile lips speaking a silent sub-text that sometimes made him forget to hear the real words, he sensed the impossible place where, though he could not remember the moment of choosing, he had perhaps chosen to live, where passionate compulsion could find no way to cohabit with necessary pragmatism.
Across the cafe, a middle-aged man looked up from his thoughts towards them. He smiled and winked, seeming to understand where he and Cristina were. In that generous Latin way of joining in other people's parades, he made an elaborate sidelong glance towards Cristina's intensity.
‘Esta noche,’ he said. He pointed at him threateningly. Tonight. You. He made a throat-cutting gesture.
‘No hay problema,’ he had replied. ‘Viva la muerte,’ grateful for having read Robert Lowell. Manifold were the uses of literacy.
He felt in that moment the strangeness of his being here, simultaneously the joy of Cristina's presence and the anguish of its fleetingness. It was as if the poignancy of this time lay in their inability to sustain it. Maybe if you make what is wild captive, you destroy its nature. He had that familiar, haunting sense that his emotions and his practical experience lived in separate but parallel universes and he wondered if he would ever manage to make them live permanently together. It was a feeling less of déjà vu than déjà senti, a sense of the impossibility of what is happening. Was it that very impossibility that attracted him, like a brief escape from the cage of time and circumstance?
Within the cafe, like a box within a box, occurred a car. He was driving with Gill in Ireland. It was the kind of day he associated with Ireland, bright and windy, the weather good enough to let you see the greenery but not good enough to let you luxuriate in it - a beautiful virago. He was rounding a corner when the image of a woman hit the windscreen like a hand grenade, blinding him. She was tall and her hair was threshing in the wind. She was barefoot and her shoes, the laces tied together, hung around her neck. She seemed to ride the wind like a witch, her simple dress blown along the contours of her rich body. The stunning face, in the second that she looked at him, was smiling - sardonically, it seemed to him, as if she knew that he was seeing the best place there was to be. And she was gone. Two children walked behind her. They were laughing. No wonder they were laughing.
‘D'you see that?’ he said involuntarily.
‘What?’ Gill said.
She was checking Megan, who would be two years old at that time and strapped into the child's seat in the back, and he felt the wantonness of the betrayal and compounded it with deceit.
‘Barefoot in this weather,’ he said, and stored in his head that image, innocent enough in itself but also like a talisman betokening the continuing possibility of an unforeseen and chance future which would not grow naturally out of his present.
And within the car within the cafe, like a box within a box within a box, he remembered sitting in a bus in Graithnock on a day of intense heat, and he would know again the feelings of that summer, that they were not dead but boarded in him somewhere still, lonely and gibbering and dissatisfied, like Mrs Rochester in her attic, denied by practical circumstance and the pretences of society but denying them in return, haunting them with longings they could not meet.
A GIRL COMES ON TO THE BUS who is a woman walking naked with clothes on. She wears a blue cotton dress. She has black hair, so carelessly abundant that he feels he could make his home there. Her face is broad and sensuous, with lips that seem poised for the next bite. The eyes, ah well, the eyes. He suspects they are the sort of eyes the passionless would describe as ‘come-to-bed’ eyes. They aren't come-to-bed eyes. Who needs a bed? All Tam knows is that when he looks in her eyes he thinks he can see all the way down to the dark place.
Her body isn't describable by him any more than he could inventory the happening of a thunderstorm. It drenches him in its presence, that is all. When the dusty bus, which on this hot day is like a decrepit sauna on wheels, rattles to a halt, she comes on, looks at him, takes him in and turns away, yanking his heart out of his body as if it were attached to a string.
It no longer matters where he is going. Where can he be going that is more important than where she is? He experiences instantaneously the awesome sensation that he could forget he has relatives, abandon friendships, live anywhere, wrap his past up in the one small parcel and put a match to it, just to be with her.
She has noticed him. She has three friends with her and they all sit down across the passageway, taking up two double seats. She is at the window of the further forward of the two seats and, as she sits with her back against the glass, turning towards her friends, he and she can see each other. She will take a smile that she is giving to one of her friends and pass it on to him. Her eyes keep coming back to his, resting on them thoughtfully, and he seems hardly capable of looking away from her at all. They are having a brief affair of the eyes, optical copulation in public. There is no self-conscious regality about her but you can see that her friends are her ladies-in-waiting. She's the one, dispensing a shower of light in which they bathe.
The longer she sits, the more intimately interlocked their eyes become. But she and her friends rise to go several stops before he is due to get off. She pauses briefly in passing and looks down at him. The proximity of her vivid face and body blots out the rest of the day. She smiles at him and then her lips form an infinitesimal ‘ooh’ sound and she is gone.
As he sits stunned in his seat while the bus pulls away, he looks out of the window. She has been walking off, chatting to her friends, when she suddenly, and obviously without warning to them, turns away from them and back towards the bus. She stands quite openly on the kerb and stares at him and smiles and waves. Her face seems to him to be expressing a kind of wistfulness that nothing more has happened between them.
He is breathless with longing. He feels a panic that makes him unable to sit still. He has never seen her before. Some phrases of conversation he has caught tell him that she isn't Scottish. Maybe she is visiting relatives and will leave for ever tomorrow, or today. The way she looks, maybe she is the Lady of Shalott just out on a day-trip to the twentieth century. This could be his only chance.
He gets off the bus at the next stop. He runs all the way back to where she had stood on the kerb. Obviously, she isn't there. He starts to wander the streets around the area. He looks in shops. He checks a couple of cafes. Nothing else matters. He has become a mad seeker for lost love. For more than two hours he scours the day, drenched in sweat that comes partly from the heat but partly from the imagined possibilities that hold him in a fever. As each compulsive, desperate step seems to bring him relentlessly nearer to the final and irrevocable admission that she is no longer there and may never be again, he curses himself as a weakling, a bloody robot so programmed into habit that when experience suddenly opens up before him and says. Turn here for El Dorado,' he is likely to reply, ‘Sorry, that would be great. But it's not on my itinerary for today. I've arranged to go to the shops.’
He cannot believe it. For several long, luxurious minutes, an amazing possibility has shimmered before him. Five minutes later, it is gone - for good, he fears. He stands breathing heavily on the corner of a street that is busy with everyone in the world, it seems, except her. He knows, he just knows, that if only he could meet her again, something wonderful and important and maybe life-changing would happen between them. And he goes on looking.
And he never sees her again.
IDEALS, he would sometimes fear, were like items you packed in your luggage and took with you everywhere and then never got to wear. For they never really fitted anyone. But you kept looking at them l
ovingly in private and trying them on secretly from time to time. They were the you you longed to appear as but couldn't quite find the occasion for.
Perhaps that was why he sometimes felt that everything he did was just a substitute for what he should really be doing, whatever that was. There was often the sense of being a surrogate of himself, an impostor in his own life, the servant of his circumstances and not their master. He supposed the feeling might be related to his attempts to write, that compulsion that precluded him from merely accepting who he was and sharing it with others. He must always be trying to use his own experience to project imaginatively into experience he had never had. The other self that was the writing could ghost through the most ordinary actions, haunting them with dissatisfaction, some vague demand for more.
Such talent to create as he had, he thought once, was like having an elephant on a leash. It complicated your entire life. It forbade the using of itself merely for enjoyment. It seemed to invite you to a banquet of life and then you found that you couldn't get through the door to where the revelry was without leaving it behind. And if you did leave it behind, you couldn't be sure it would be there when you came back.
These self-doubts left him vulnerable daily to a host of practical questions most other people dealt with automatically.
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