by Paul Ableman
And I remember, after she had gone off to meet him, sitting on in the narrow bar feeling chastened, examining instead of the flattering situation I thought had existed (myself, bold and emancipated, leading a free, urban life untrammelled by conventions and poor Mary wasting away with mother in that forlorn cottage) another and doubtless equally imaginary one: Mary, integral, vital, advancing into life and myself a dingy poseur rotting in a squalid little circle of affected bohemians. I crawled back through the slimy streets to my furnished room and, prohibited (even when, as here, no connection but a retrospective and psychic one could have existed) by the celebrated dread of incest from even the sedative comfort of masturbation, alternately read impenetrable (to my run-down brain on that dismal evening) paragraphs of Kafka, and brooded self-disgustedly, until finally rescued by unstable sleep.
Summer.
A man of 74 died. This (someone dying) is a regular occurrence. It happens (the exact figures please, Mr Gumm. Eh? Well, get the statistics—the D.H. wants them) every .79 of a second. Fizzles out. Who? Raymondo Lopez, Peruvian miner, of strangulated hernia, in great agony, after concealing the fact of a minor rupture from the Southern Mining and Refining Consortium and continuing to load ore and also Myra Beauregard, of French, English, African and Singhalese extraction (milk dusted with coco), 87 year old widow of a Mauritian cane farmer from spreading necrosis after injuring leg in minor fall, stops ‘dead’, the brain goes blank, the long sunny film is over and the grandchildren eye the dilapidated holding across her gnarled corpse and (let’s see) Henri Bardetti, mayor of Provencal village of La Chaulme, instantaneously in forty-third year, of burst aorta, the mighty, main artery, with a splash and a dark, internal flood of blood—and Comrade Akevsky, eight, imperfectly aware, as yet, of privileges and duties of member of ascendant proletarian society, run over by a drunken lorry driver in a Crimean town.
Which gives us about three minutes of threaded extinction during which, in Mike Rea’s large cupboard, where I was then residing, to absorb the fact of another death. This one, unlike the others, was the world’s concern, concerning an English writer, a man who had written—words on paper. He had written—anyway. His thought had—caressed the world. Many, many others that summer evening will have murmured ‘there’s a great spirit gone’. When can we hope for such another?
‘So and so’s dead,’ Mike Rea had announced with a sardonic smile a moment before and now lounged in the doorway, holding the disclosing sheet of newsprint languidly towards me. ‘Time to rise, exploited man.’
‘Dead?’
Shocked, I tore the paper from the flaccid hand and gazed at the appropriately-black, banner head-line. In soiled underpants and working shirt I swung round out of the unsoft divan and, blinking back the mists of unconsciousness, glanced down the column: ‘peacefully in his sleep from heart failure—best-known works—recently visited Russia to attend a….’
‘He only wrote one thing that was any good,’ confided Rea, slouching over to the window to gaze, between hulks of buildings, at the oil-dark canal. ‘Do you know what that was?’
Ignoring Rea’s smart disparagement I finished the article, and then, while considering it, in order to justify a continuing disinclination to converse, allowed my eyes to slide idly down adjacent columns of print. Mike Rea lounged at the window frame, making clicking sounds with his tongue against the roof of his mouth, affecting amused patience and I, trapped as inevitably happens, by messages of whatever kind, windows, footholds on the wild ranges of all experience, drove, or felt receding, the crucial fact of the writer’s death back into coronary realms of consciousness, while my mind surrendered to the text actually entering it: undesired, unemployable data on the market prices of aluminium domestic products.
Light.
Light and fatigue. And brutality. And death. Light and the horror of detail, of the ‘all-revealed’, each apple on the barrow from the window of Mike Rea’s smelly room, the probably excremental stains on the vest-end escaped from the drooping pants of the small boy clinging to the pitching back of his hardly-larger, equally-grubby sister humping him down the milling street between the barrows. Obliterating light of today in which all yesterdays are dissolved. Where in the flood of summer light does the conscious past survive? Light is mere achievement while the dark is potential.
In retrospect, this scene of light becomes assimilated to other lightscapes, all of them manifesting the same primary aspect of rigidity, of finality, of holding their human components in a highly-articulated but unevolving framework in which, forever, the strewn sun-bathers on the beach, the promenaders on the front and the decrepit valetudinarians on the porches and terraces of the hotels would exist in contempt of history and cosmic dynamics, in which, beyond the shadowy cubicle in which the two introspective astronomers (Rea and I) brooded, the teeming street-market would timelessly hawk fruit and shoes and the detritus of industry, in which the cornfields and the copse and the arrowing birds above the brook could permanently ignore geological erosion and human intrusion and carry a pastoral image unscathed through all escapades of energy, in which—but no, not the sea, where there is always secret darkness, soft organisms fleeing the light, a sealed mystery and the supple, mammalian rovers congealed from the contra-sliding waves.
‘I could use that van,’ remarked Rea. ‘Well?’
The round, brown eyes in the faun-like face dilated as they swung mischievously round to accost me.
‘Toiling brother, exploited brother, tell me something. Tell me something, friend worker. Tell me something true, you bastard!’
Rocked back and forth in Rea’s gipsy grasp, delicate gastric equilibrium tilted by his foul breath and sight offended by his swarthy, leering countenance, I protested.
‘No. Stop—hey——’
‘Well then? Stop me. Defend yourself. Arr——’
Rea hurled me back on the bed and then, humiliated by my refusal to romp with him, paused.
‘Me? I’m only a poor, crooked dealer. You read books. Here, how about paying your rent?’
He eyed me cautiously for a moment or two longer.
‘You going to be sick?’
Normally my stomach was fairly strong but sometimes, after much drinking and irregular eating, it protested in bouts of violent vomiting. That summer I had been drinking a good deal, in pubs and at parties. Earlier in the summer I had met Vanessa Coutts, a pretty American girl with a rather fetching (if, as it ultimately appeared, deceptive) air of candour and an open mind. That had happened, inevitably, in a pub.
The pub doors had been open onto the soft summer evening. The crowd in the popular, ‘bourgeois-bohemian’ establishment, both expelled by internal pressure and seduced by the mild dusk and soothing, if exhaust-impregnated, although the subtle excitement of vegetable reflorescence also flavoured the Chelsea air, breezes, straggled along the narrow pavement. The usual talk, the talk that I had got used to in my years in the metropolis, stemming more, it seemed, from a desire to produce a cheery, background hum, than any impulse to exchange ideas or fathom character, was going on. My own group, shabbier and fairly obviously belonging to a less affluent and influential stratum of society than the average, consisted of Charley Nelmes, Peter Oglethorpe and a girl (a scowling, tiresome girl), Stan Mackay and a few others.
Conversation amongst us had flagged. Peter’s head was nodding. He had been drinking all afternoon in some club and his normally slack frame was now so limp that he seemed more like a thing of rags than a highly-evolved vertebrate. Nelmes was passing a few desultory after-reflections on the topic of ‘conspiracy’ which, in a discursive and not at all illuminating way, had been the theme of earlier discussion. I was gazing glumly over little Stan’s head, occasionally, as if haphazardly, allowing my glance to wander towards one end of the bar where a robust, red-faced girl was planted on a bar-stool with her legs, propped brazenly on another bar-stool, widely-enough separated to afford an unimpeded (but, to me, indirect) view of her thighs. While Nelmes produced, from
his littered mind, what sounded like an authentic legal definition of conspiracy, I wondered if I might ‘casually’ edge round a few paces until I could gaze ‘naturally’ up between the farm girl’s legs, but the wretched woman suddenly swung herself round and stood up. Flushing inwardly with shame and rage at provocative womanhood (with clothes, like bodies, open in permanent invitation) and suddenly giddy with desire, I studied the pattern on the cut-glass screen above the bar and then caught a flash of white, the petticoat beneath a billowing skirt, as a young and lithe girl leaped daintily down from a window ledge and then found my eye caught by a casual hand first opening to uncatch and then sliding closed a zip fastener which, at its widest expanse, revealed a narrow section of naked thigh bounded by white knickers. For a moment suffocated by the great ‘conspiracy’ of provocation, compounded between girls, police and registry offices, by means of which ithyphallic, spastic man is always ultimately either harnessed to woman’s vastly more comprehensive sexuality or gaoled, I lifted my glass, quaffed deep and managed to intellectualize my fury with caustic thoughts of ‘Lawrence’s wholewheat sex’ and Dionysus in the park.
The clock hands approached the conclusive hour. The manager poised himself to progressively request, urge and command recalcitrant drinkers to vacate his premises and cease endangering his licence. Peter suddenly lifted his head, in woolly recognition of the thirsty hours fast approaching, and bayed thickly for ‘a last round, eh, don’t you think? Better have one more—same again, eh?’
I heard these familiar intimations, and was also aware of the gnat-knitted dusk and the purring and growling of the sleek, new cars as the jeunesse dorée slid in pairs away into the electric night but had managed to immerse myself in a train of thought. Inspired initially by the earlier wave of lust, borne on by sudden, and rather distressing to a self-supposed admirer, repudiation of Lawrence’s sex mystique (‘not sex at all, or rather, what he condemned, sex in the head—and anyway, how keep it out of the head, how keep anything out of the head, and what’s the literature he himself practised and needed but everything in the head?’), I had passed beyond the original limitations of the subject to a challenging, exciting territory, style and experience, and the relation between them, how the observable fact, the actual conformation of thought, yes and of the concrete of the material world or that portion of it, at any given evolutionary moment, susceptible to human modification, stems originally from stylistic definition and this implies—and then looming ahead I saw, as so often on this sort of mental voyage, some huge dictum formulated back, far back, when none of the considerations now motivating my own quest had existed even in larval form and consequently representing what mighty span of prophetic reach! Ahead, taking shape, I saw the portentous, not yet-to-be-fathomed words, but words readily dissociable from the superstitious connotation still generally assigned to them: ‘In the beginning was the word’. My mind was poising itself for the exultant, predatory leap of understanding when suddenly, borne in upon it by a low voice behind saying nothing of any special or even general interest, came an avalanche of unsought reflections and considerations which, in an instant, dammed up completely the adventurous stream of thought.
What was the remark, Vanessa, with which, on that kinetic, lilac night before we had ever exchanged a word, you mysteriously unleashed a spate of romantic fragments? Was it ‘Not artichokes …’ or ‘they kept watching me, you know?’ or ‘I’ve never swum in the sea’, none of these things, all of them, for I realized immediately afterwards that I had actually been listening to the low murmur of your transatlantic voice for some time. Perhaps, therefore, it was a cumulative rather than a solitary stimulus which suddenly shattered my scholarly reverie and forced me to glance round and see the small, twinkling, wide-eyed face of my future Kansan mistress as, released by some cerebral relay, the refrain ‘summer, summer, summer’, bearing with it images of human love and pain, ached in my reeling brain.
‘Songe à la douceur….’
Vanessa, you smiled at me! Past the three hulking, self-confident bulls flirting and joking with you, you widened your tiny mouth in a tiny, radiant, spontaneous smile. At me? Why? You didn’t need my height as, I had found, some girls did. There was more than competitive height in the beefy triangle around you, but out from that Euclidian prison of Olympic champions, you projected a ray of welcome at my sullen, surprised, peering face.
‘Take some back? Eh? Shall we? Back to my place? A few quarts?’
While I irritably rejected Peter’s plaintive appeal, fortified by docile paws laid beseechingly on my shoulders, our potential life together, Vanessa, began to crystallize in my mind. It required isolation, a cottage—no, perhaps not a cottage, a narrow, porched, sandstone house in a smallish, non-industrial town. Isolation, however, remained emphatically the primary requirement, a dwelling where we could be uncompromisingly together. The conventional appurtenances of married life, friends, place of employment, a dozen dismal links with official and commercial establishments (ministries and dairies) were completely absent from my vision. Somewhere where we could love and be alone was all that was needed, where I could look at you and see that wistful, exquisite smile forever, and hold you, know that lithe, concealed body in its unveiled sweetness and know it with my own body, held to my own body, timelessly. Somehow, the world was missing too. Russia had been absorbed by the roseate but apparently corrosive mists which hovered in the circumference of my vision, and America had dissolved there too, and so had the dreadful laboratories with their chilling discoveries. Much of England had gone too—in fact there was nothing left but us, Vanessa, not even Kansas.
‘You want to, don’t you, Charley? Eh? Shall we take a few quarts——’
So urgent, by now, was Peter’s supplication that his cold pipe, which had been nestling in its accustomed place between his teeth, deprived of adequate support by its master’s vigorous oral exertions, fell to the trampled floor and Peter sank after it.
‘Eh? What do you think——?’
The wistful, muffled plea still floated up from our feet across which, through the tough leather, we could feel Peter’s erratic fingers groping for his pipe.
‘That’s it, gentlemen! No—I’m sorry—there’s no more time now. Your glasses, please, gentlemen!’
That was the first time I saw Vanessa. The second time, two or three days later, in the same bar, I not only saw her but addressed her (she was alone), not only addressed her, but chatted with her, later walked with her, held her hand, under laburnum and wistaria, and finally, in the mouth of the narrow footpath or defile between buildings, a little way from the Redfern Hostel in which she was living, held her lightly-clad body against mine, stroked her shoulder, arm and back and felt her lipsticked lips against my own thin, dry ones.
The three tight-trousered, bare-armed athletes who had seemed, on the first evening, such a formidable obstacle to any prospect of an intimate acquaintance with the girl, were vanquished as much by the benign, patronizing tone as by her words when, in response to my cautious query, she replied:
‘Oh them? Oh, they’re just—just good Joes. American boys are terribly immature.’
In a district rich in pretty girls Vanessa still exacted attention. Giddy with pride, I stumbled after her into cheerful, buzzing bar-rooms, covertly noticing the way the blazered swains of the local play-set followed her with their glance even while ostensibly maintaining jocular interchanges amongst themselves. And the girls paid her the tribute of that long look of critical appraisal, which inevitably signifies admiration.
She let me take her living hand. She permitted me, under the green nets of the lamp-lit trees, to encircle her supple waist with a trembling arm. We walked, she no longer noticing things and I aware of one thing only, the miracle of her yielding presence at my side.
Soon we were meeting daily, first gazing, in pitiable vulnerability, into each other’s faces and then, with a gasp of secured reassurance, falling into each other’s arms. When we were apart, I chucking mail-bag
s into reeking goods cars and Vanessa visiting the Dunots, whisky exporters associated with her father’s business (‘He’s just an American business man, a small one….’) in Topeka, or performing some other social obligation, we thought about each other. At first, I could not get over being incredulous, could not convince myself, without endlessly recurring to the fact in the attempt to assimilate its extraordinary truth, that it had happened, that I was allowed to be in love with her and that she loved me, that the sweetness of her youth and health belonged in my arms. I thought of the end of our first evening together. Near the hostel in which she was staying was a narrow passage or right of way between buildings. In the mouth of this defile, under the summer moon, we had stopped to stay good night and, as I had gazed down at her white face, she had suddenly smiled happily. I placed my two palms on her waist and drew the girl towards me and when we kissed the feel of her warm, slightly-clad body against mine, the smell of her faintly-perfumed body, the warmth of the summer night had blended in my mind into such a powerful impression that when I had tried to speak her name, the word had emerged as a sob.
At work, during our fairly regular, if unofficial, breaks for a smoke, I would retire, with my newly-lit fag, as far as possible from my grunting and faintly-hostile fellow-workers, to sit on a barrow in the hissing station and think about Vanessa and wonder if I could somehow cease to be a porter in a railway station and live with her. Instead of my customary sense of superiority in the purposeful lowliness of my position and affected scorn for the glamorous voyagers departing for leisurely holidays in unspoiled parts, I began cravenly in my mind to cadge a place amongst them for a dark, ‘hauntingly-lovely’ girl and a tall, ‘romantic looking’ youth who were plainly ‘so much in love’.
The Dunots went away to Cannes and left us, or rather left Vanessa, the key to their small, chic mews flat. She had been supposed to accompany them but had written and obtained, on the improbable, but apparently compelling, grounds of a fictitious opportunity to take a summer course in ‘gliding’, parental authority for remaining in England. I moved, temporarily as it turned out, out of Mike Rea’s quarters above the street market in the Southampton Road and Vanessa and I lived in the Dunot’s maisonnette together for six weeks.