by Paul Ableman
‘Seen the f—— rota?’
‘Cor!’
‘Eva Constance—that’s her! Over by the bookstall—the blonde tart!’
‘You on late shift this week?’
‘’Oo? Never ’eard of ’er.’
‘The singer—the—don’t you know nothing?’
‘I know that Lofty’s gonna get a thick ear if ’e don’t do something about that rota. My missus’ll give it ’im.’
The tanks were massing again at some disputed frontier. The distinguished Swedes and Indians were off again to arbitrate, to pump a little verbal lubricant into the jagged spaces, inhabited by Earth’s population, between the iron ideologies.
‘Although the President remained in Washington today, cancelling an official visit, it was denied that this was in any way connected….’
‘While there can be no question of condoning aggression….’
‘A surprise move from the Far East today aroused speculation….’
‘The distinguished diplomat descending from his plane at….’
‘Undoubtedly serious but also, by a strange paradox, perhaps the most hopeful opportunity since the war of strengthening the foundations of mutual trust by compelling world leaders to re-examine….’
‘… winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics said today at his home in….’
‘Pravda….’
‘Nah, it ain’t the Russians. Do you want to know who it is? It’s them Indians.’
‘Lofty did the rota? I might have f—— known it!’
‘I wish,’ I muttered wistfully to Vanessa, on our first evening in the Dunot’s house, ‘I wish….’
‘Do you like flounder? Plaice you call it?’ she asked briskly.
The room gradually went dark. It was a lozenge-shaped room of which I remember a thin, tall, white vase that lived, like a private Zeitgeist, amongst us. Everything else was low or had its vertical lines cunningly blended with vertical planes: bookcases, stuffed with modern art and novels, a grand piano, plastic and wire cradles for sitting in, polished horizontal surfaces for putting things on (journals open at glamorous diagrams of transparent homes; an ascending white vase like the ghost of the twentieth century), rugs, lamps and a small, jocular coffin full of cigarettes.
‘It’s gone dark!’ cried Vanessa, now a second ghost at the kitchen door, a dusk away from me behind the piano. ‘Now it’s gone purple. What is it?’
The hue, in fact, was lilac, but a deep, eerie lilac through which, at any moment, one felt tremendous daggers of lightning might lance in some ultimate experiment involving the total atmosphere.
‘It’s a cloud,’ I murmured, wondering myself at the unearthly effect.
Still clutching a half-pound of margarine, she wound her way across the room to the window and stood gaping out, so bemused by the pseudo-eclipse (really the accumulated discharge of hundreds of factories held down by a layer of warm air) that, for a few moments, she gave no response to my close presence behind her, to my hands sliding furtively up from her waist, to my urgent thighs tightening against her firm buttocks.
A few windows lighted up across the mews, at the open end of which a gaudy bus plyed slowly past. The leaves of a colour-drained sycamore lay limply on the faded day.
‘A dog …’ murmured Vanessa, in absent surprise at the unconcerned mongrel nosing its way briskly up the mews. ‘No!’
With a sudden, deft plunge my eager hands slipped inside the loose neck of her summer blouse and found, each one, its objective. Her own hands were instantly at my wrists, but only for a moment was their pressure a serious attempt to dislodge my grasp, after which it manifested, by convulsive squeezing, acquiescence and finally encouragement. Between my delicate fingers, the tiny buds of her nipples grew. Her breathing deepened and accelerated to match my own and, with an exultation that remains even now one of the most vivid impressions of my adult life, I withdrew my hands, stooped low, lifted her and carried her up the stairs to the first bedroom I came to. Ignoring her tightly-shut eyes, her parted lips, her beckoning outstretched arms, as she lay nestled on the soft eiderdown, until I had pulled and worried myself out of my clothes (except for time-consuming and relatively unimpeding shoes), I lay down with an involuntary groan of desire beside her and enfolded her fully-dressed (faintly-dressed) body in my arms. And fully-dressed she remained when, in the glowing bedroom, into which the sun had crept back, and after, with a little (only a very little) gauche assistance from her, my excitement had been copiously quelled and hers too, so little hindrance had her filmy knickers supplied, had been brought by my gentle hand beyond its peak, and after too, the sweet, helpless, period of intertwined slumber that had followed, we awoke.
That bright evening, for the dispersal of the inspissated smoke left a sky of limpid blue and mellow, slanting sunbeams, was the kindest of our whole relationship (dispassionate term adopted by a sinless age). Liquid with tenderness, Vanessa grilled the ‘flounder’, her surprisingly accomplished preparation of the meal repeatedly interrupted by caresses, glances, murmurs and for an hour, for a night, the ‘I love yous’ were simple, hopeless expressions of a helpless truth. And it was bliss. I always remember it and the basic memory has become so firmly set, from repeated handling, that it requires exquisite retrospective surgery to detach from the main fibre the little icy sinews of continued thought, of restlessness and of already-incipient contempt for my newly-won mistress.
But she was a snob and a racialist (shrinking at the change-returning black hand of a ‘nigger’ bus-conductor) and provincial, provincial—with no notion of life on terms other than those of ‘nice things’ and conventional ideas. Strange how the balance of my awareness of her shifted over the weeks that followed from almost exclusive sensitivity to her slim, lovely body and fetching countenance to what it was when I could contemplate her nudity (climbing out of the bath; voluptuously curved over the task of applying crimson varnish to her toenails) without even a ripple of desire interrupting the stream of my contemptuous analysis of her latest pretty or whimsical remark.
The next day she had a headache and by the time I knocked (we had not yet obtained a second key) in the evening, the externally active phase of her menstrual cycle had begun and a plug of gauze, absorbing the sanguinary debris of her untried, shedding womb, kept me impatiently at bay. And at the end of the week:
‘Just for a moment. It’ll be all right. I won’t——’
‘No! You must use one. I don’t want to get caught!’
And so we never ‘knew’ each other at all, for a barrier, if a thin one, of ‘medicinable gum’ from some damned Arabian or, more probably, Malayan tree, subtly but effectively kept us apart, until finally, that is a few weeks after our first meeting, I was conscious of the inert, lightly-gasping form beneath me, in the greenish dusk, as no more than a sort of erotic liability and my desire flamed once more along the dancing street.
Amongst the girls. The floating girls, the gliding girls, the tripping, mincing, flaunting girls, surging in seductive battalions through the rumbling conduits of the metropolis at morning and evening rush hours, swaying down Regent Street, clustering in giggling flocks beyond the plate-glass keeping them from the gauze and flounces of ephemeral garments, whispering confessions to each other in tea-shops and snack-bars, the great reservoir of temptation in which it seems that the most insatiate lust could be effortlessly quenched but which always resolves itself into the prospective wife of Sid, a garagehand in Ealing, or the purveyor of ‘a nice time, dearie? Two pounds.’
As I packed my things, on that chill, August evening, I felt silly and once or twice almost giggled to myself like a schoolgirl. I kept trying to think of a medieval French poet, whose very words, scrawled, the legend at least runs, in the brothels and wine-cellars of that plague-ridden, priest-haunted, violent and superstitious huddle of hewn stone that was then Paris, were neatly imprisoned in my jacket pocket, and I once paused, with socks in my hand, in surprise at not knowing whether words moved through time o
r the world span on an axis of words, or whether history was genuinely explanatory or just a wobbling beam of light picking out perhaps a thistle and a cairn in a vast landscape, but almost immediately giggled again and shivered. Moving lightly, the incipient dread that I had thus far, by deliberately automatic decision and action, warded off, mounting rapidly, I trod down the sounding stairs and advanced towards Vanessa, who was listening to the wireless.
‘I’m off.’
As I watched the transparent sequence of her reactions, eyes in a fading smile turned upon my case, jerked up head conveying the first shaft of bewildered reproach and then almost immediately, terribly (and, that was it, predictably) the tremble of the chin and the dark eyes blurring and blinking as they filled, I knew what it was that I had secretly decided to ignore. The whole process, the whole development of our affair, from trembling adoration and desire, to boredom and physical indifference, had been subjective, had taken place in my mind while I had always, by progressively emphasizing my native taciturnity, by discreet murmurs, by facile agreements, permitted Vanessa to assume that nothing had changed. God! In the pubs, when she and they, the beaming, gleaming Aussies and Yanks and bowler-hatted budding executives had twitted and trilled the long evenings away and I had drunk and read, or drunk and gloomed, or, once, drunk and argued my way into a daunting, but soon forcibly terminated, physical encounter with a—what was he? that glib nihilist with a stoker’s arms—I had permitted my own keen awareness of her companions’ contempt for me to overflow into an accusation of treachery and duplicity on her part. But, of course, she hadn’t been disloyal, had, in fact, been true, and mysteriously, in spite of our utter incompatibility was still attached to me by the original bond of sexual submission, that tie which is so often steel cable to the girl and rotten twine to the man.
‘What do you mean? What do you mean?’
And then she was face downwards, soaking a dark, spreading stain into the straw-coloured cushion.
As, appalled, I sat down stiffly on the sofa beside her, my hand reaching out to make comforting but not compromising physical contact, light-headed thoughts, generated, doubtless, by the feeling of irresponsibility that the self-demonstration of emotional incompetence had given me, floated through my mind. Bars and plays, sport and wit and elegance wove a world of hedonistic superficiality about the grim good taste of the Swedish living-room and the crying girl. ‘I am a silly person’, ran the refrain, ‘and you are a silly person and he and she and they are silly too’, while my mechanical mouth murmured grave pomposities, like:
‘—nothing really to offer you.’
and
‘—neither of us ready for marriage, do you think?—always remember—’
Finally, I could reconcile the two moods no longer and, abruptly rising, said in a faintly caustic and impatient tone:
‘It’s not that tragic. You can’t possibly love me because the fact is you don’t really like me. You’ve just got used to me physically.’
Then, uncomfortably, I watched her more subdued but still heaving back for a moment or two longer and then said clearly:
‘Good-bye, Vanessa.’
Feeling far more a fool than a rogue, I grasped my case and set off for the door. Before I reached it, however, a sob which contained components reminiscent of my name, caused me to turn and see the disturbing sight of her smudged face trembling in misery.
‘Are you going?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t want you to!’ paroxysmally, through swimming tubes, she gasped, and then she added something which probably expressed no more than the shock of unexpected abandon but which has often, in irrelevant moments, elbowed its way to the fore of my mind for the purpose, it has seemed, of cautioning me, but in allusive and almost inaudible whispers, against assuming anything of another’s feelings from the circumstances of their life. The last words of Vanessa’s I heard, as, longingly, and now at last thoroughly contemptuous of myself and all I had ever said or done on the third planet, I pulled open the front door, were:
‘I don’t want to be alone again.’
In the bus, gained only after striding, in tremulous need to separate myself as decisively as possible from No. 8 Capstan Mews, past two request stops, I planted myself inconspicuously in the top-rear seat and, as the sights, the office furniture, the slatternly mother with two dribbling children in a narrow pram, the posters and shops and blocks of flats and traffic and monumental allusions to culture and history began to enfold me once more in seething anonymity, told myself that now I would work. Free once more, I would, I could, I must work, work and work. Now, when I came home from my distressing gainful employment, there would be nothing, no distractions, no sex, or possibly only casual (a slight premonitory thrill) and undemanding encounters, to keep me from getting down to it, from really….
As if previously notified by an aide of my imminent arrival, Mike Rea merely bowed silently and then, insisting on taking my bag, wordlessly conveyed me to my room. Even as he, still dumbly sustaining the jest, displayed the bleak cubicle with mock-ceremonious gesture and then gravely withdrew, I registered a little shock of dismay. Was this the freedom which a few hours before had beckoned so irresistibly?
In the yard and loading-bay of the warehouse beyond the window the motor transport jerked and roared as usual. Gleaming blackly, like the back of an eel which its polluted waters would have speedily choked, the still canal, and two boarded, tumble-down cottages and rusty bicycles and portions of cars on its further bank, showed between the warehouse and the back of Ransome’s Units and Components. What had I done? Given up a lovely, well-connected, tolerably affluent girl who was at least under the impression that she loved me, and also the chance to dwell, for another month anyway, in comfortable, spacious, even opulent, surroundings, for loneliness (emphasized rather than mitigated by the presence of my landlord) and squalor? Work? Here? and ‘work’? What work? What did I even think I meant when I murmured self-appreciatively ‘my work’. Tomorrow night I would be back on the late shift in the grimy station, with Fred and Tom and Lofty and once more nowhere to go when it finished but this room—at least until the pubs opened.
After a pair of bad weeks, aggravated by the scarcity of acquaintances, chums, pals or just familiar faces in the pubs and clubs, I got on a bus passing the magnetic mews. It was a warm, still Thursday afternoon and the city shimmered through its Diesel fumes. At the bus stop, a business type said to another:
‘Well I didn’t have one—there was a hell of an uproar!’
To which his companion, compromising between a well-bred desire to express sympathy and a quiet determination to display his own superior documentation and providence, murmured.
‘Actually, they’ve been very hot on that since the new act. I remember——’
And then my bus arrived and I scrambled aboard.
And perhaps I would have marched up the mews, so potently had self-pity operated over the past weeks to convince me, by contrast, that Vanessa and Vanessa’s way of life were the most desirable things imaginable, that, beneath the surly crust of criticism (which, by now, seemed the merest frivolous carping), I still worshipped the lovely American, if a poster on a passing bus, announcing that ‘Your most enterprising National Newspaper’ had secured the exclusive rights to the memoirs of a world champion boxer, had not set me brooding on an incident that had occurred a few days before at the station. Ostensibly originating in some alleged unfairness in the weekly shift rota, actually, one could dimly perceive, expressing a long-standing hostility containing elements of sex-rivalry, of regional enmity (for in a world ostensibly split into two mighty powers and their satellites the teasing banter exchanged between say, a Geordie and a Yorkshireman can still evoke potent manifestations of archaic hatred) and of other things, Lofty and Fred had, in the chill, deserted station at 3 a.m., disappeared grimly side by side down the shadowy length of No. 3 arrival platform. No one had intervened. There had been a few terse and callous jokes made
to establish masculine equality with the combatants and we had gone on with our work, pausing to drag at our cigarettes and, during covert glances down the misty reach to where the black tunnel-mouths, in a welter of smoky shadows, opened on to the furthest extremity of the platform, sometimes fancying we could discern the gross gesticulations of combat, until, side by side again, the two had emerged once more from the gloom and passed us.
It was not until they were within a few yards, so poor was the feeble light, that one could discern that it was Lofty, surprisingly, since his arms were the longer and his body the heavier, who had taken the most punishment. Ostentatiously ignoring them, we went on lifting bags and carrying them to the truck as Fred, with a just-discernible discoloured swelling at the lips strode past to the washrooms accompanied by his wobbling but still vertical rival, Lofty, whose face was a red mask. How many cuts the agile knuckles of the smaller man had inflicted on that ghastly countenance it was impossible to tell for the whole of it dripped blood. Side by side, they plodded past us and on up the station, honour assuaged, to bathe their disproportionate wounds.
The bus passed Turpin Street. In three more stops we would be at the Mews. My eyes noted the familiar approaches, the balcony flats near the wine shop, the ‘Gents’ and ‘Ladies’, decorously back to back in the triangular junction, the huge brewery, but although my hand went forward to grip the chromium support, I knew that I would remain on the bus. Something in the recollection of the fight, or in the way I had been able to surrender, at that moment, to a recollection of the fight, prevented me from going back to Vanessa. In a little while, the bus rolled past the entrance to the Mews which was so narrow that my eyes barely had time to select the grey and black façade behind which, possibly, an unfairly abandoned girl might still be weeping.