“We need volunteers. Oh yes, we need volunteers. But not the do-gooders, the charity-mongers, the beautiful souls who prop up the system so that suffering goes on. That’s the trouble with this country. Charity. Good causes. Lady Bountiful. Royal visitors, picking their dainty way through shattered lives. And the politicians, telling us we should get off our butts, take responsibility for our lives, play up and play the game. Do you know something?”
He turned towards me with a venomous look, and I tried to appear seriously fascinated by his diagnosis of our social ills.
“The really sick people in this country are up there on top, shouting for nuclear bombs, armies, police-forces, punishments, perks for their friends, while pissing on the poor sods who have to carry the can. And when people decide they can’t take any more of it, and try to live a half-way decent life, they are diagnosed as schizophrenics and locked away—or else handed over to us, for rehabilitation. ‘Rehabilitation’—I ask you! Teaching the buggers to keep their heads down, putting them out of our misery! It’s positively obscene. I’ll tell you something’—and he shot another angry look in my direction—‘it’s not our clients who need to be fitted into this society; it’s society that needs to be fitted round our clients. They’re the ones who have paid the price, the heroes, the martyrs. Are you queer?”
“Well, I—not really.”
“Pity. What our clients need is self-confidence. They think there must be something wrong with them, because they have the feeling they’re wading knee-deep in shit. But they are wading knee-deep in shit, and we should tell them so. What’s your name anyway?”
“Michael Sillitoe.”
“Look, Michael, you’re not the right person for this job, you realize that? You’re too young. You have been going up the ladder, rung by rung. When did you freak out?”
“I don’t think I ever did freak out.”
“There you are. You can’t hope to empathize with our clients when you are totally cut off from their experience. I’ve always said this to the Council. But they go on sending the wrong recruits. What the hell do they think they’re playing at? And they call themselves socialists.”
He threw the paper back on to the coffee table and looked at me more mildly.
“No offence. But we should be clear where we stand. Sit down for a moment, if you like.”
He gestured to a shabby armchair with bentwood arms and a brown flock cover, pitted with cigarette-burns. I hesitated and then decided to sit, if only to show my cool.
“I’m Jerry,” he said, and remained standing before me, looking down on me with a sudden curiosity, as though recognising a long-lost friend. “I have probably been in this job longer than is good for me. When did you say you freaked?”
“I didn’t.”
He laughed abruptly, and his pudgy face crumpled, as though pressed to a window.
“Of course you did. It’s written all over you. People don’t come here to offer help. They come to receive it. They want to spend time with the really ruined, the really broken and buggered and beaten down, so as to convince themselves they’re coping. Do you think you’re coping?”
“Not very well,” I admitted.
“No. It’s not surprising. You remind me of someone actually. He used to come here five years ago, when I was new to the job. He had been sacked from a solicitors’ office, described himself as a writer, spent whole days in the centre here, creeping about in a broken kind of way, conducting imaginary symphonies, humming to himself, and once in a while shouting ‘Beethoven’ at the top of his voice. Cambridge graduate. Pretended he had come to help. Would give long speeches, addressed to no one in particular, about the ruin of modern culture, and how we could all live again thanks to Beethoven. When I told him I prefer disco he said ‘what else do you expect from a schizophrenic?’ The culture illusion, I call it. Loads of people suffer from it. And they imagine they come here to help us!
“Yeah man,” he went on. “There’s no special distinction in being fucked up. The only difference is between those who admit it and those who don’t.”
He leered at me from his puffy eyes and gave a complicitous nod. I searched for words, but none would come. The armoury of culture proved as useless to me as it had been to Bill. Those antiquated words and old allusions stayed fixed to the wall of my mind like rusty weapons, trophies from some small-scale private triumph that would be laughable in a modern battle. Ulrike had a way of closing the trigger on an imaginary submachine gun whenever I tried to put my case. “Waffnen, nicht Worte,” she would say: weapons, not words, as though words were a thing of the past for her, like marriage, string quartets, and religion.
I noticed a little wooden Snoopy doll half hidden by the beer can on the table. It had a cheeky satirical expression, as though designed to reduce all encounters in this room to the level of farce. I reached out to pick it up and began to play with it in my hand. A grey light descended on the ugly furniture, a light of mourning. Everything in the room seemed discarded. It was a place at the end of life; like a transit camp where prisoners die among junk, cut off from all that they need and love. As I played with the little doll, I seemed to hear Bill’s voice again, his urgent imperatives, and behind them the barely hidden need for my acceptance. I imagined him fighting for his hard-won right to exist in this very room, with this very person, and everything sinking away inside, as it had sunk away in the face of my rejection.
“You see, I knew that man,” I said. “And yes, he is dead. Maybe you should feel a little guilty.”
I got up and faced him, passing the little doll from hand to hand, and debating whether I should throw it. He turned to the desk.
“Guilty!” he said, with a laugh.
He reached for the telephone and pressed a button on the keypad.
“Jim?” he said. “Difficult client here. Might need your help. Thanks.”
He replaced the receiver and came slowly towards me.
“One thing you learn in this job, Michael, is not to feel guilt. People come to us with guilt. It oozes from every pore. I mean, just look at you! We offer help, see. And that means staying out of the guilt game.”
The door opened, and two burly men in overalls entered. Jerry calmly moved aside, picked up the beer can and drank from it. One of the men pinned my arms to my side while the other prized my fingers free from the Snoopy doll, as though taking a toy from a child.
“I should think,” Jerry continued, wiping his mouth, “that you’ll be sitting on the pavement somewhere in a couple of minutes time in a real orgy of guilt. I expect you’ll be crying your eyes out over that freak we tried to help. And you’ll know that it’s not our fault at all, but yours. Because that’s the long and short of it. Whenever there’s a question of guilt, the guilt is yours. Bah!”
He tossed the can into a corner of the room and walked out. I followed him, lifted off my feet and carried like a sack of unwanted goods into the street. And yes, Jerry was right. I did sit on the pavement for a while. And I did weep a little, not for Bill only, but for all the hopes and dreams that he had awoken in me, and which had followed him into the grave. And as I sat there, leaning against a low brick wall, a queasy feeling came over me. I felt the annihilating flow of time, and the steady erasure of the past. Bill’s love for me was past, and therefore unreal, even impossible. It was a Now that had flickered and gone out. He sat enthroned in a fictional garage, not an actual garage but a sedan chair of possibilities, which had crumbled to nothing as the world moved on. The mystery of time and the mystery of Bill were one: and he was gone as time had gone and England had gone. There was nothing left of him save footfalls echoing in the memory, down the passage that we did not take.
Two days later I called on Bill’s parents. It was strange to be standing once again beneath that familiar street-lamp, to be lifting the latch on the wrought-iron gate, to be walking on the crazy-paving between neatly tonsured lawns, to be ringing the bell, hearing its two saccharine chimes, and peering at the blown-glass p
anel in the door, in which the vague shadows of human movement swam like half glimpsed fish. I had decided to confront them, to explain what I had lost in losing Bill, to force them somehow to make amends, by making amends myself. I imagined a trunk of manuscripts. I could be Bill’s editor, rescuing him from the sea of forgetting and polishing his corpse by the shore. And in entertaining these plans I felt a surge of distaste for Bill’s parents, so that, as the shadow of a man troubled the glass in front of me, I directed towards it all the anger that I should have directed at myself. I imagined Bill’s father as he opened the door, the complacent blankness of his face giving way to fear, then grief and finally remorse on seeing me. A hand turned the latch, and through the gap between door and jamb came the faint white sound of modern jazz.
“You’ve been a long time getting in touch,” said Bill, “assuming it’s really you.”
He was dressed in a dark suit, with the tie loose about his neck. A trim moustache softened the lines of his mouth, and lank hairs were smoothed over his yellowish cranium. He stared for a moment at my astonished face and then quickly looked away.
“But I thought...”
“Come in, have a chat.”
Bill stepped back and made a sweeping gesture with his left arm, of a kind that I had never seen in him before. He no longer stooped, and his thin face had an almost babyish shine to it, as though he had been rubbing it with cream. I followed Bill to the living room, where he promptly crossed to the record player and lifted the needle from the disk.
“Always calms me down,” he said, then added without looking up, “though I don’t suppose it has the same effect on you.”
“Bill...”
“Just a minute.”
He retreated into the kitchen, where he passed a moment of silence before returning. His breath, as he neared me, smelt of whisky.
“So, Michael,” he said slowly, “how’s Cambridge?”
Outside there was a squeal of brakes. Bill started and an anxious expression crossed his face. For a moment I glimpsed, behind the moustache, the frail, suffering creature I had known. And then he resumed his sarcastic smile and went to the window.
“Bill, I... I thought you were dead.”
“I’m not so easily disposed of.”
“They told me they had taken you to the hospital, and then I read that a patient had fallen from the roof of St Margaret’s. I was certain it was you...”
“St Margaret’s? You mean the loony bin? For heaven’s sake! OK, that’s where I should have been. But all I had was an ear infection. And you see, I survived.”
He stood in the window, and began to whistle beneath his breath what sounded like a long saxophone solo. I had sat down by now, trying to take in what had happened. It was as though my mistake had killed off the old Bill and brought into being a newer model, more fitted to suburban life, and more proof against disaster. I asked what he was doing. Speaking in a matter of fact tone and not looking in my direction, he described his work as a conveyancing clerk. The office where he spent his days was in the church close, next to Dr Jackson’s cottage. Sometimes he saw Dr. Jackson; in fact they had become friends, and would drink a pint together after office hours each Friday.
“Of course,” Bill said, “his Anglican prissiness gets on my nerves, as do Elgar, VW, blue remembered hills, et cetera.” He gave a snort, and turned in my direction. “But he helped me, Michael, just as you did. When you disappeared like that, not saying to anyone how to find you, and yet still connected to me by plans and promises and a thread of what you could almost call passion, if that wasn’t too antique a word, I had to face an existential question. Do I carry on with this pretence called culture, even though there is no one now to poison with it? Or do I return to an abnormal life? You see the problem.”
Suddenly he stood to attention and let out a gust of laughter. It lasted too long to be an expression of amusement and indeed had something contrived and theatrical about it. He stared from his hooded eyes, not at me, but at some object clinging to the wall behind me.
“You didn’t poison me, Bill. You gave me a life.”
I told him how I had been changed by his instruction, abandoning science to study first English and then music, all the while living from the idea of culture that he had first planted in my thoughts. He looked at me with appalled disgust, and then, for the first time, made one of his old familiar gestures, raising his hands to his ears and beating off the imaginary birds that had begun to assemble there.
“Look,” he said at last. “That’s not a life you’re describing. It’s a sickness. When I suffered from it, I couldn’t move from this place, not further than the end of the road. Now I can get to the office and back. I talk to my parents. I earn money. I have friends—maybe. And when the telly is on I sit and watch it, just like everybody else. Anyway, why did you come here if you thought I was dead?”
I had no answer to his question, save to look mournfully at the carpet. Bill really was dead: I had made no mistake. But his cause too had died with him. I rose to go, and he did not detain me. As I shut the front gate I looked briefly back at the window. Bill was clutching his hands in front of him, facing the street with a look of unspeakable anguish. And then he saw me and laughed.
Author photo by Pete Helme
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROGER SCRUTON is a freelance writer and philosopher, who rescued himself from the academy twenty years ago. He currently lives in rural Wiltshire, England. He has held posts in the American Enterprise Institute, and in the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is married with two children. He is the author of 40 books, including five works of fiction, and composed two operas. He is widely known on both sides of the Atlantic as a public intellectual with a broadly conservative vision. His acclaimed novel about communist Czechoslovakia, Notes from Underground, was published by Beaufort Books in 2014.
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