by Paul Ableman
‘Then they sent me to Nigeria. That was just what I wanted. Naturally as soon as I got there I wrote and told them I quit. The things I found in Nigeria! I had intended to be in the East that summer. I thought that was where—anyone getting the next round? I thought that was where they were going to need us, but the things I found in Nigeria—incidentally, the dances! What life! But as for the political situation—what about that drink?—no one in Europe knew what was going on. I told you about this woman, Mary Chang, in Singapore? Marvellous person, full of life—well she ran an organization—we ran it together later—with contacts all over the East. Now one of the things we needed to know—Scotch again, please, with a little water—oh Hell, my poor wife!’
‘Your wife?’ I remember asking with a faint, speculative frown, as, stemming possibly from dim, residual memory of the fleeting glimpse I had obtained of this man, unbearded, that once in the past, but seeming to me to depend, as is perhaps just conceivable, upon the peculiar and complacent way he sighed ‘my wife’, I suddenly sensed the connection. A little later, someone addressed him by name and confirmed that I had in fact, been holding converse with Nicholas Baillet, agitator, whose wife had once collected my rent and, for a brief period, my desire.
I think the thing that prevented me, years before this meeting and when I was still at Rodney Street, from immediately adopting the move (‘stratagem’ is too suggestive of deliberation and complexity for such an obvious idea) I ultimately resolved upon was a certain doubt as to whether Otterley might not himself be on considerably closer terms with our landlady that I had any legitimate reason for supposing. Possibly, however, this is only a subsequent rationalization and it simply didn’t occur to me for several weeks that I might once more descend with my rent at a relatively late hour, that I might even take innocent steps to satisfy myself, say by listening at the door and noting the quality of light that emerged from under it, that approximately similar conditions prevailed.
‘I say do you know Clark Otterley?’
After three-quarters of an hour of running my eyes vacantly along pages of writing by William Blake, rolling off the divan and going to the big, wall-length window and gazing hungrily across Culverton Square to where the flaming night-signs of London diffused their surplus radiation into the moist air, of feeling my chest tightening with desire and almost allowing its force to thrust out my hand in a gesture of pleading, with the night, with the light, to the thousand bedrooms and ballrooms, to the joy and fulfilment of the world, saying, without words, ‘congratulations, urban man, on our victory over cold and emptiness’ and then returning in impatient incomprehension to Los and Enitharmon bellowing unscientifically down the centuries, I had finally permitted myself to decide that the time was ripe for the attempt. Lightly, stealthily, I had swung open the door of my room, progressed eight or nine paces across the damping carpet to the stair-head and been just about to begin the descent when the vivid lance of that metallic voice impaled me:
‘I say, do you know Clark Otterley?’
‘Yes,’ I answered softly even before turning round, and without, I pride myself, giving a sign of discomfiture while starting inwardly like a hailed thief.
She was standing just concealed in the well of the staircase leading to the next flight, at the top of which, amongst others, was Otterley’s room. She didn’t move, other than her hand which tugged restlessly at the bannister.
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No,’ I murmured, with sinking heart, discerning already, in the brittle determination of her voice, her defiantly level gaze, everything about her that one could sense in the first moment of a first encounter, that my projected exploit was being seriously threatened.
‘That’s very strange, you see——’ she began impetuously and then broke off, contemplating me. So we stood for a moment until she uttered my name, asking if I wasn’t Alan Peebles and, when I had admitted that I was, demanding unceremoniously.
‘Where’s your room?’
‘Just there.’
‘Were you going out? It’s getting awfully foggy. Have you got bronchitis?’
‘No.’
‘Then you probably like fog. I did, before I had bronchitis. Anyway, what do you suggest? Shall I sit here? On the stairs? Do you think anyone’ll mind? I must see Clark. I need some money.’
Inevitably, I had to invite her to wait in my room.
‘You’re not going out?’
‘No, I was just—um——’
‘Going for a pee?’
‘Well—um—yes——’
And so, furiously and with flaccid bladder, after having installed her on the single chair, quite a comfortable upholstered one, in my narrow home, I had to go and secrete myself in the w.c. and pretend to urinate, far from having derived, from the unexpectedly intimate encounter with this undeniably attractive person, compensation for the shattering of my designs on Mrs Baillet.
When I did finally get down to my landlady’s room, after Otterley had returned and collected Jane, and after still further delay occasioned by his redescending to borrow coffee, no fillet of light showed underneath the door and when, after a moment’s thwarted deliberation, I hardily knocked anyway and, in response to the murmur from within, stated my mission, my only reward was the final indignity of being requested, in a sweet, pillow-muffled voice, to ‘leave it until tomorrow’.
As for Jane….
Some nights later, in my room, in a state of high concentration, trying to secure something with the hands of my mind, through which, I was aware with increasing desperation, cascaded valuable images to dissolve irretrievably in the acid of the unconscious, I heard the doorbell ring three times, my personal summons. As I still hesitated for a last futile attempt, my maimed concentration groaned in silent despair. Then I raced down the stairs to find her on the doorstep.
‘You’ve rung the wrong bell!’ I snarled.
She gazed at me with prim determination.
‘I didn’t want Clark. I came to see you,’ she almost whispered, in a voice too girlish for her height, carriage and lean beauty.
‘Me? But I could never love you, Jane,’ I heard, with dismay, my own voice muttering.
‘Can I come in?’ she asked stiffly.
Having committed myself to burlesque, I bowed low and muttered something idiotic about the honour she was conferring on the house, but she vitiated this by tripping hastily up the stairs, prompting me to fly after her, only to find that she had already seated herself durably in the chair, crossed her legs and assumed an air of belonging.
‘Have you known Clark long?’
‘No.’
‘Did you know that he was a criminal?’
‘No.’
Upon this arresting foundation, she started breathlessly to erect a rambling, elaborate, patently improbable (in fact, fairly obviously, ad hoc and impromptu) tale of money and sex that appeared to convict, not implausibly if in this case unconvincingly, Otterley of malicious and damaging fraud. Part of the way through, I managed to suggest that we move to the local and she thoughtfully agreed. And later still, in the cheerless saloon of the ‘Brigand’, at what mercifully seemed the conclusion of her narrative, I succeeded in transferring the topic of conversation to other common acquaintances, watching (almost literally watching rather than hearing) the devious relays of her mind generating mischief. So and so was ‘amazingly dishonest’, Peter Oglethorpe, in whom I had never discerned any fault more grievous than a certain propensity for being, at quarter to eleven on any evening, both broke and in urgent, if bumbling, need of ‘just a last one, what? half pint, eh?’, turned out to be ‘a genuine sadist’ and so on through the apparently diabolically possessed ranks of mutual friends.
She seemed to be acquainted with only one fellow being whose character was not hideously deformed, and that was myself. At least, this conclusion was strongly suggested by the way in which, as new and riper examples of malice and failing were uncovered, the language of her manner grew more and
more inviting.
It was while she was concluding the tale of how Alice Marks ‘My best Jewish friend’, had done something horrible (I forget what) that her arm first edged full-length against mine. It was while Tony Regan denied her a simple act of friendship (a false declaration under oath) that I suddenly sensed that her proximity had passed the barrier of the possibly casual and my rarely sluggish sexual awareness gave a start of anticipation. My own arm, requiring no more than an imperceptible shift, covered hers and the experiment succeeding, in that she moved an inch closer rather than several away, soon swung round over her to rest lightly on her further hip. A red-faced, ugly man at the bar covertly watched us while his languid dog alternately dozed and nibbled its own back and loin.
‘Well?’
Her face, now transformed with a subtle glow of abandon, sparkled into a smile which seemed to urge that all the grievance, the pathetic secretion of inflamed nerves, had been superficial and the eagerness and gaiety now registered alone were real. Under the dripping trees, her body vibrant in the circle of my arm, I led her back to Rodney Street, finding, on being whirled, under an unconcealing sycamore, unexpectedly into an urgent embrace, my own impatience for once exceeded. And her impatience persisted, no increased, after we had reached my room, having the effect ultimately of thwarting its object, for embraces impeded the indispensable process of undressing and also my desire, robbed of the dominant role, became increasingly deliberate and laggard. And finally, in my narrow bed, after a storm of erotic activity which dispersed rather than satisfied my own ardour and converted hers, it seemed, into mere respiratory energy, we lay, trembling and clammy, far from that restorative, profound slumber which the guide-books solemnly discover at the top of Mount Orgasm, side by side on our backs watching a little restless puddle of light on the ceiling and wondering vaguely but insistently (at least I was) what could be generating it.
‘I’m glad you said that.’
As I tried to relate this remark to some recent utterance of my own, I sensed, from the renewed steel twang in her voice, that the earlier gulf of betrayal and evil yawned again.
‘What?’
‘When you opened the door you said that you could never love me. As a matter of fact no one ever has.’
‘I was only——’
‘That’s all right. I much prefer it that way. Good night.’
What a time poor Jane’s paranoid will must have had coping with all the proposals and declarations she received. Long before I knew her I had heard her spoken of, always appreciatively (for she was a lovely woman), sometimes ecstatically and yet busily, feverishly, through the years, every scrap of admiration must have been converted, by her working mind, into indispensable treachery.
She came back the next night, to my surprise, and it seemed to me, for a moment, that a small measure of tenderness was going to sweeten our relations but in the end it was much the same struggle as before. When she left on the following morning to resume, I subsequently learned, cohabitation with her second husband, though only for a few weeks, whom she had met casually in the street, she passed once more for me into the realm in which she had existed before her arrival, a realm of party references and pub gossip, though now amplified by occasional impersonal meetings, and in which she remained up to the melancholy end.
And for some reason, probably economic, I had to leave Rodney Street shortly afterwards and so Mrs Baillet was never more than a breathless but model landlady to me.
It was Charley Nelmes, the Baptist, who called Mary Spender a slut. Mary wanted to be an actress. At least, I heard her say so one day while I was drinking gin in the Rainbow Club and two girls were frisking lightly in time to the beat booming from the juke box. These two smiled at each other, an intimate, collusive smile, that exchanged an awareness of sexual power, in the knowledge perhaps that my eyes, apparently fixed broodingly on the dark corner by the cloak-room, were helplessly tugged in their direction whenever a sharp swirl, centrifugally lifting their bell dresses (fashionable then) exposed a flash of leg above the knee.
‘Flash!’ called a grinning street girl (this one a sturdy but still handsome woman at least in her mid-thirties) to her younger, harder and more brazen-looking friend when the obliging wind once suddenly, for an instant, displayed the wares of the latter’s naked buttocks to the street.
‘I want to be actress.’
Delicate, delicate—delicate apprehension, assessment, appraisal, delicate association….
My mind, wrestling with its own reluctant relays, trying to prise out a delicate phrase that earlier that day had seemed exactly to delimit some minutely specific human activity, collapsed at the impact of these words, not because of their minimal content, but because of the soft, bubbling, beckoning good-humour of the voice in which they were uttered. Abandoning the struggle (the correct phrase ‘delicate discrimination’ suddenly popped to the surface on the following afternoon when, while purchasing cigarettes, my glance rested on a roll of peppermints), I looked at the speaker. It was Mary Spender, whom I had seen before and she was with a hirsute, supercilious seeming man, whom I had never seen before nor ever did again. These two and the dancing girls (dancing on as the shining box, primed with coins, handed itself discs of frozen rhythm) and myself were the only ones, other than Maltese Henry, the lethargic barman, in the tiny subterranean bar of the ‘Rainbow’ that summer afternoon.
Mary was a large-bosomed, good-natured, scatterbrained blonde whose ineligibility for any conceivable stage career was clear at first glance. Application, elocution, empathy, memory and whatever other qualities are indispensable for holding an audience were obviously not available to the squirming, hebephrenic, giggling girl I saw cuddling herself against a complacent, bearded male. I watched her for a while, enchanted when one of her random movements cocked her head in such a way that our eyes met and she instantly and generously offered me a promissory wink.
After that, however, her companion began, less, I sensed, from genuine erotic hunger than from a narcissistic desire to show his effortless dominion over her, to caress and explore the girl’s body with such ostentatious impropriety that even Mary began to show signs of reluctance and finally Maltese Henry told him laconically to ‘give it up’, which, with a smile and a shrug of affected amusement, he did, shortly afterwards rising and beckoning Mary away with a jerk of his head. I sat on, getting rather warm and excited on the gin, waiting for—yes for Charley Nelmes who was supposed to be coming to take me to see someone who might give me a job, photographing people in squares and public places. Nelmes never came and I never got the job but lived for the next three months on two-hundred pounds unexpectedly inherited when an old, one-eyed aunt, who lived in South London and whom I had met only once, died of some sort of cancer. Instead, I wandered disconsolately out of the Rainbow at about half-past five, an hour and a half after Nelmes should have arrived, and saw some ivy growing round a steeple, all that was left of a church that an aeroplane had brought explosive from Germany to demolish.
While I was watching the ruined steeple, vaguely discontented with the breath of the old, non-kinetic, serious world that it introduced into the familiar glass and chromium and weaving throngs of Dynapolis, untoward movement on the pavement opposite attracted my attention and I saw Peter and Tommy Richards, drunker than I was, dancing unskilfully but conspicuously and a policeman urging them to cease before he was compelled to arrest them.
The two or three months on Aunt Ruth’s two-hundred pounds was very pleasant, sun-warmed, leaf-shaded, in the aura of young girls on heat and young men dead to industry and striving, most of us, ultimately, unsuccessfully, to hoist ourselves up to the sphere of the thought of the world, where the current of change sweeps on and on, blowing the future through the stuffy living-room of the present.
I left Mike Rea’s place again and took a large room with a kitchenette in Duck Street and this was the most agreeable dwelling place I ever had in those years. Something about Duck Street—it was near the park and
there were two good pubs not far off. It was a dead-end street with a nursery school at the far end which ensured a steady supply of tiny, absurd children trickling up and down—Duck Street hung for me between the past of stability and personal and family growth and the future of annihilation or colonization of the continuum. Duck Street was benign, and I was just old enough and sufficiently often, by now, not at fever pitch to have some sense of my surroundings other than in terms of drink and girls. The Greek alphabet and some of the grammar, for example, yielded to application in a comfortable chair near the window of my comfortable first-floor room in Duck Street from which, between assaults on that intricate syntax, or after the declensions and the moods, I would see Dave and Rosemary arriving to attempt once more to implicate me in their failure to thwart the time-ghost and love long.
More than that lovely alphabet, whole, real Greek sentences, epigrams, apophthegms, assembled by real Ancient Greeks, in their stable world, and longer passages, painstakingly construed with cribs and dictionaries from the spidery promise of the original, became gradually accessible. Probably I never acquired more Greek than Shakespeare but the acquisition of that little, the mysterious metabolism of mind through the ages, supplied a not inconsiderable part of the excitement and contentment of those months in Duck Street. True, there were parties as well, becoming something stronger after midnight sometimes, when the long, intoxicating talk would be suddenly deflected, perhaps by a girl yawning, quietly slipping off her dress and getting pseudo-sleepily into bed, back into the primary source. These were never the sort of orgies of erotic myth-literature with people plunging improbably into unadulterated voluptuousness but rather slow drifts into intimacy until finally, with the light out, three or four couples in the room would manifest, in sighs and more unorthodox respiratory sounds and those creaks and jingles of unco-operative material reality, the lineaments of both gratified and in the process of being gratified desire.