by Paul Ableman
Well then—what was the point? Why did I work in the engraving works? And my real ambition? What about that? Why? There had been a past but there was clearly no future, nothing recognizable, nothing that could be related to either the past or the present, to any of the ways that human beings had learned to live on the earth. The modern world was a vast, mindless machine, the people in the buses, on the ships and in the aeroplanes were as mechanical, as devoid of human understanding, human aims or aspirations, as the great machines themselves. And so were the politicians, not human, but computers into which a given series of statistics were fed and which then formulated perilous abstractions without a single human thought intervening for the assumptions on which they spoke had nothing to do with the constants of human experience.
Perhaps most thinking people have these moments when the brain, like a powerful machine with a slipping clutch, seems to spin to the verge of disintegration. When I glanced around during that unnerving moment, rocking my pint mug slightly on the counter, I saw Peggy raise her glass of dark Guinness and sip it. I could almost see the lazy, domestic thoughts in her head, so different from my own. Once, something happened in Japan—Peggy sipped her Guinness.
And a little later, again calm, or in that state of taut equilibrium which is the calm of our age, I slouched away into the Bayswater Road, to meet Selma.
Who? Selma Rushington, dark girl, while they built the bunkers, and adjusted the instruments and set the timing mechanisms and the damned traffic churned on up Regent Street. The evacuation of the coral isle proceeded smoothly, half an ocean was appropriated, shipping was warned and I met Squadron Leader Rushington, a Whitehall officer who had a dark-haired, sly, laughing daughter called Selma who struck me as being ‘ravers’. The lorries clanked up to the rear of the engraving works and we carted great bulbs of acid, in straw-packed iron cradles, into the stores. Mickey Smith….
‘Mickey Smith, fellow I work with—likes maps.’
Mickey Smith was part of that November, imperturbable, young (not more than eighteen), laughing….
‘Wooden leg? Got a wooden head, I should think.’
Eating our sandwiches together, under the steam pipes, in the hot, dry timber store.
‘I’m gonna sign on—put in for an overseas posting.’
While the savants pored over their formulæ which expressed the behaviour, under specific and inducible conditions, of protons, neutrons, electrons and the engineers tested their new alloys and some people lived high with bags of lolly and Scotch. And the rainbow fish swirled under the doomed atoll and the hulks of obsolete battleships lay listing in the lagoon ready for instantaneous decomposition and their last voyage, as weightless particles, around the world in the stratosphere emitting hard radiation.
Another evening: rolling on the sofa with Selma in her rather elegant (to someone for whom accommodation meant furnished rooms) flat, while muffled sounds from without suggested that her father might be pacing up and down in the hall.
‘Whose that?’
‘Daddy.’
As I struggled to get my hand up her dress and Selma, without rebuking me, or saying anything at all, and never abandoning a more or less horizontal position on the bed, managed somehow, by means of athletic evasions, to prevent me, I wondered distantly if the door were locked and whether Squadron Leader Rushington might not have regarded it as even more compromising if it had been.
‘What if your father——’ I began, and at that very moment, the door clicked and, clad in tweedy mufti, his face rather pale except for the mottling of alcohol-burst capillaries, the dazed-looking officer appeared. Selma bounced off the bed in a flurry of white petticoats, a motor-cycle drummed past outside and I sat up, stroked back my hair and gazed glumly at the floor.
‘Good evening.’
I found that he was gazing at me with a sort of blank intensity behind which, I felt, played tentative and broken ideas but nothing that could be related to paternal outrage. I felt that he might have ordered me to attention, or tried to kiss me or tested me gruffly for sound opinions.
And Selma (whose arrival nineteen years before had destroyed her mother) had to live with him. No wonder she was a little off.
He suggested that we come and listen to the wireless ‘just a thought—don’t know if it interests you—rather a good series …’ and when Selma, untruthfully, told him that we were going to the pictures, he nodded judiciously but didn’t withdraw. In fact, he stood about, saying no more except once ‘Care for a drink?’ which Selma ignored and I, with some reluctance, politely refused while she made up her face and put on her coat and we finally left together, I muttering an awkward ‘Good night’. He stood about the room, looking forlorn, cruel and unbalanced as if, rather than pour himself another stiff Scotch and listen to a variety programme, deep inside he yearned to writhe in ritual desecration and disembowel goats.
At Ned Logan’s party, in the usual bare room with red wine, candles and a gramophone, we danced (which Selma did well enough to communicate a certain proficiency, not unaccompanied by exhilaration, to me) and then, as the candles sputtered out and the room got even darker and hotter, lay about on the lumpy divans kissing and listening to jazz.
I knew Selma for nearly a year, until she suddenly disappeared, Clark Otterley said to demonstrate tractors (she loved driving) in Africa and someone else to teach English in India. In spite of ‘necking’ (nuzzling, kissing, cuddling, caressing) at parties, I never f—— her, in spite of the fact that she visited my room in Rodney Street three or four times and on one occasion I managed to get off all her clothes but her knickers. Then, after dumbly wrestling with me for a few minutes, she calmly dressed again and, humming a popular song, made herself some coffee. Nothing shocked her, and she discussed, with a sort of feigned naïveté that mediated utter verbal abandon, all the procedures and variations of that vital gravitational force known as sex but I never, as they used to say, knew her.
‘Nor has anyone else,’ commented Otterley, ‘except the dashing squadron leader.’
‘Her father?’
‘Have you met that weirdy?’
Otterley smugly interpreted (it could only have been, since he was really an exceptionally intelligent man, in the interests of a reputation for sophistication) all human relationships in terms of perversion. Generally, his interpretations were neither convincing, which they were scarcely intended to be, nor amusing, which they were. On this occasion, however, I could not help wondering about Selma and her strange father although I finally decided that if there were anything unnatural (outside nature?) in their relationship, with no mother, and the magnum of whisky and the wireless in the gracious flat, it had no corporeal expression. I decided that Selma was only a sort of new model, old-fashioned virgin who wished to marry intacta. Pretty, lively, a head full of sea-shells and no power, ultimately, to give one, or at least me, anything.
But that autumn, I didn’t yet know that she was impregnable and dutifully took her out for the sake of later, I hoped, getting it in.
We went to the cinema (the atoll, the camera eye, the sudden puff of elemental energy, trivial by astronomical standards but under which, had they been there, London or Paris would have dissolved). And then the feature. We held hands and watched the real people on the screen, moving in the real world, like ours, with cities, and country and desert and ships and shops and all the familiar appearances and yet not the ‘real’ world at all. An isolated world, and yet compelling, detached, by the cunning director, from chaos and apparently tracing an elemental tale. We had the meeting, the poetry, the revelation, the pangs of being human until, when the lights went up, and we found ourselves merely sitting in a musty hall, I had almost forgotten Selma. And then back into chaos, the glowing, rushing, slippery street, confined by the monotonous traffic to the pavement under the suitcases and travel posters.
During that autumn, I say, as I went here and there, after working hours, with Selma, I often thought about my two sisters. Once I gazed down t
he short bar of the ‘Bell and Whistle’, while it rained on nocturnal London, at an owlish, dapper little man of about fifty and a pencil-shaped woman of about forty who were grumbling, in a persistent, accustomed way, about each other’s negligence and treachery. On the wall was a painting of the micro-structure of plasma, or of trampled lemons, and on the floor, rolling obscenely, was a heavy-papped bitch being tickled by the crouching barmaid, and on the secure bar was the companionable beer. First we were talking—talking? Talking to Selma? Something must have been said, must have passed between us, but I see only the slyly glancing brunette, Selma, holding her gin and synthetic orange juice, and a bony, underfed, scowling young man, in a cast-off mack, gazing in glazed reminiscence down the bar while smooth, anecdotal Otterly appropriated his girl.
‘Swiftly walk o’er the Western wave….’
I had read that one through from beginning to end and then started reading some interminable thing called The Revolt of Islam, lost the thread after a few lines, and glumly wandered off down the attic stairs in search of Edna, leaving the dusty, small-printed, disintegrating volume sprawled on top of the chest inside which, a quarter of an hour earlier, I had found it.
‘Swiftly walk….’
The remembered line, or rather the forgotten others, finally nagged me back to the attic and I desperately learned the thing by heart and, helplessly and self-hypnotically, repeated it to myself until it became a burden. One day I said it to Edna, or tried to, but she kept interrupting to urge that I wasn’t twirling her properly (a film having recently both stimulated and informed her pubescent readiness to succumb to jiving). In the following months more lyrics wormed their cataclysmic way out of the old, fading ‘Selections from Shelley’ into my dazed, infected, still rather ashamed and resentful, brain. Then came the village library and Byron, Keats, Browning and finally, a few years later, the sudden appalling shock of recognizing the looming reality not merely of mysteriously compelling lyrics with which to both stimulate and direct the imagination—but of a literature.
There I suddenly understood it to be, around me on the well-stocked, dust-free shelves of the library of Stockford, the market town, to which I had by then graduated, the literature of England, really another England, of a grandeur, richness and multi-dimensional structure that, in a trice, rendered the mere physical England of Clover Leaf Cottage (our home), Hardimans Hay (our village), Spitfire fighter planes, peace, Mr Billings the stationer, Mr Caute the grocer, Uncle Edward the infrequent visitor, the absurd school with its formerly exciting cricket and indescribably tedious lessons (which had included some nonsense called ‘English’ that I did not for many years even attempt to connect with the revelation in Stockford library), flat, transient, confining. And so I started seriously, alike, if in no other way, to so many whose names are ‘household words’ and who must also, in cottages, manors, slums and other dwellings, have begun the longest journey of their lives motionless except for tracking eyeballs, to read.
But the uncomfortable revelation of that evening, while I went on to the next pint that Otterley, fancying that he was getting on pretty well with Selma, having her hemmed into a niche formed by a pillar and the bar and pressing more and more insistently against her thigh, had discreetly set down next to my dwindling one, was suddenly seeing my relations with my sisters and mother in a different perspective, or rather, since revelation must be more general than that, of seeing that the perspective is all, that there is no intrinsic truth in human relationships. And even further, and most awful, prophetically seeing yet another perspective on myself and my family that I would not be capable of defining until I had, with years, accumulated more experience. Revelation? A sudden juxtaposition of adult order with juvenile dynamism and a fear of knowledge and experience and understanding. Yes, that was the point of awe in the saloon bar of the ‘Bell and Whistle’, a foreboding that understanding might be death and a sudden hunger for the intoxicating ignorance of childhood.
I don’t think that, until that moment, I had ever thought back on early years other than in terms of the emotions and attitudes that had filled them, so that I had scowled in memory of mother’s tolerant indifference to my precious books and ideas, smiled scornfully at Edna’s increasing abandon to such Hollywood glamour (a few red-necked farm boys in stiff suits, jiving in the village hall, make-up and films) as our still relatively primitive district offered, and my increasing estrangement from her, and finally fought retrospective actions in the permanent battle that had grown out of the earlier skirmishing between my frail, nervous, older sister and myself.
And now, with dismay, I suddenly saw a different order, that replaced the older one forever. I seemed to see objectively the way things had developed, how my growing contempt for Edna and mother had not been, or not only been, a vigorous, legitimate attitude explicable in terms of personality but also the inevitable evolution of that situation in which a thinking person arises in an uncongenial environment and that if there had been strength in my determination there had been weakness and cowardice in its intolerance. I saw that the continual hostility between Mary and I had been no clash of beliefs, attitudes or ideals but a mutual tribute to direction and purpose by the two members of the family that possessed it and that, as with all ostensible enemies, a strong bond of necessity linked each to the other.
These thoughts frightened me. I didn’t want to consign my youth and childhood to the realm of analysis which could only then be replaced by subtler or deeper subsequent analysis. Nostalgia gripped me for the cosy, living relationships and the right simply to sneer at Edna tarting herself up for a date with a cow boy, to feel simple exasperation at mother’s inability to form and adhere to any principle of conduct whatsoever but merely to scold or praise (always mildly) in an arbitrary way as the mood or the weather, or the delay in the arrival of funds from Uncle Edward, dictated. And I knew at the same time that the thing was hopeless, that the devouring intellect never gives up what it has seized and the journey into understanding, like that towards extinction, is irreversible.
What do I remember of Mary’s visit, the visit she had informed me of six weeks in advance in the short, sweet letter which, throughout that period, had repeatedly directed my thought back to childhood days? I remember winding, groaning and jerking south, through drear squalor, through endless suburb, on the top of a bus to the remote district where the remote aunt whom I had never met before, and with whom Mary was to spend a few weeks, lived. I remember Aunt Ruth saying:
‘Well, do you know, I was watching, as well as I can, I was watching them putting up the new houses along the by-pass and I thought ‘they do look nice’. That’s right. I hobbled down there three or four times during the summer——’
And then she must have said something about Fred, probably something like ‘one of those would have just suited Fred and I when we were starting off’, since this deceased uncle still enjoyed a very vigorous existence in every second or third of Aunt Ruth’s remarks and, doubtless, an even higher proportion of her thoughts. Dying inopportunely, and inappropriately from disease (embolism), in the last year of the war, Uncle Fred had left his widow a small pension (he had been a chief storeman in a huge, ‘enlightened’ firm) and the house. The house was a museum of Victoriana, harbouring sombre, humanoid grandfather clocks, glass bells sheltering everything from birds of paradise to miniature and palpably inauthentic Japanese landscapes, clumsy hairy sofas, rep curtaining and knicknacks. Through this dense repository, Aunt Ruth, cyclopian with frosted glass over one milky eye and her good one roving cheerfully, lumbered about preparing tea.
‘How old is she?’ I asked Mary in a hoarse whisper as the beehive bulk waddled out into the kitchen.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Mary nervously, as if I had asked something slightly improper.
Mary drew back into her corner of the sofa and gazed at a brocaded screen, her lips working faintly in, as I found out a moment later, chronological calculation.
‘Seventy-four,’ whispered
Mary.
On my second meeting with Mary, a few days later, in a small pub into which, at half-past five exactly, after a day, illicitly purloined from the Troubedor Engraving and Lettering Company, Ltd., on the strength of the customary fictitious cold, of languid sightseeing, I learned the real reason for her visit. It was to see:
‘Robert, Robert Smith.’
She had met him in the village where he had been on holiday.
‘What does he do?’ I asked slowly.
‘He’s an accountant.’
And there she was—a woman. So far from being the wan, neglected, maiden sister upon whom grudging duty had compelled me to bestow a little attention (when the saloon bars, and the laughing girls and the talking men called), she was a radiant girl come to meet her lover. And I, rather than her sole, and remote, prospect of pleasure from the visit, was simply the scruffy younger brother she condescended to see. An accountant!
‘Are you going to marry him?’
‘We’ll see,’ she parried rather than answered my question.
And she was, deliberate moments of inspection, as I helped her on with her coat, returned at an angle from the ‘Gents’ or glanced sideways while walking beside her, now revealed, radiant. Not voluptuous, but the meagre, bodyless stalk of girl I had last known, had so far filled-out, the blinking, childish face had so far matured and been discreetly enhanced with powder and lipstick, as to yield a slim, fresh, nubile woman.