by Paul Ableman
I looked at the bottles, not the huge array, found in West End pubs, of multi-coloured intoxicants from many lands, but the staple, upturned whisky and gin and rum. Two uncouth lads, slouched at a table, were flipping a coin back and forth and guffawing hoarsely when one failed to catch it. A shabby old man, with a compressed, toothless head, was sucking a pipe and occasionally glancing critically at the two. The barman was feeding a dog.
Of course they were in control! In all lands, the men in the chauffeur-driven cars, the influential men, the highly-paid men, the self-confident men. My vision of a moment before of the twentieth century as a single city street along which we were all careering madly and blindly, members of governing councils and verminous beggars alike, now seemed like wishful thinking and I saw the nameless millions of the earth, including myself, without money, reputation or influence, as the mere ground-swell across which the winds and tides and gravitational pulls of power created the living climate. Ciphers, anonymous scuttling masses——
‘Actually, you were right,’ remarked Charley Nelmes coldly.
Characteristically he refrained from looking at me but leaned languidly on the counter and signalled the barman. He had materialized without my noticing it. My mind instantly connected him with the district. I felt sure he didn’t live there. It was a crumbly half-negro and half-white district and I felt that snow-white Nelmes had come to get a paid girl. Probably he would have withdrawn on seeing me except for then possibly incurring the great ignominy of my half-turning and noticing a furtive retreat.
‘You remember?’ he now favoured me with an icy smile. ‘You insisted——’
And he reminded me of some trivial, flushed drinking argument about the name of a film, and belatedly admitted my accuracy.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.
In reply to which, and in apparent refutation of my theory, he calmly handed me a tract.
‘What? What do you mean?’ I asked, rejecting the notion that Nelmes might actually have been distributing naïve Christian literature on the streets.
‘You’ve been pottering about, haven’t you?’ asked Nelmes, throwing back his head to emphasize his glacial profile. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘What’s this thing?’ I asked, getting angry.
‘Is that what you’ve been doing?’
He glanced briefly at me and gave a little superior snort of laughter.
‘What are these—tracts?’ I asked.
‘I’m a lonely person—a solitary. You said so, didn’t you? Wasn’t it you? Or one of those louts——’
‘Look——’
‘No!’ to the barman. ‘I meant, two halves of bitter.’ And to me, ‘Sorry, I don’t run to pints. I don’t get paid for half of what I do.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘How are all our dear friends from the——’ and he named a pub in which, some months before, Nelmes, myself, Peter Oglethorpe and a few others had sometimes had a few pints together.
‘All right,’ I murmured, ‘at least——’
But I didn’t go on because I had suddenly realized, with a shock, that Nelmes was in love with me. No, not ‘in love’, but that (while I had, until this moment, considered him to be an intermittently witty, ordinarily masculine sort of chap), he was really intensely feminine emotionally and that I had somehow become the focus of his emotions. Did he know it, I wondered. Oh God, bad enough, bad enough, surely, to be a raging, mincing, made-up queer in a society tied to a savage and superstitious code that still deprecated, to the extent of inflicting long terms of imprisonment, some forms of touching, but not to know it! To think one was walking one way and to be continually slithering in another, to grope in a welter of ambiguities and inadmissible impulses….
‘Read it—if you have an otherwise intolerably dull moment. Look here, what did happen to you?’
‘Mmm?’
In queasy apprehension, I sought a reply. A few minutes before, although I had completely forgotten the petty incident, I would have replied quite negligently to this reminder of a missed appointment. Nelmes had been given two tickets to the first night of some silly play that a cousin of his had been acting in and, drunk and matey one evening, I had casually agreed to accompany him. Sober, on the next evening, the prospect of two hours of puerile rubbish without a drink, and with no other company than that of Nelmes, had proved too daunting and I had simply not turned up. I hadn’t seen Nelmes since.
‘I mean, couldn’t you come? You weren’t ill, were you? I mean, you had my number? I suppose for some reason, you were simply unable to telephone, was that it?’
My alerted senses now detected the faint tremble of his hand as he held his glass a little above the counter. My mind, poised stupidly between possible attitudes, seemed unable to generate speech.
‘You did promise.’
This murmur, escaping involuntarily I felt sure, seemed unbearably poignant. And still, wretchedly, I couldn’t think of a viable excuse. Nelmes, however, mastering himself, averted an emotional crisis. He changed the subject or rather carried it beyond the inflamed area by going on to tell me about the play and I tried to compensate for my failure by taking an intelligent interest. ‘Oh yes?’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, she can be very good—in the right part,’ and so on, while, beneath my superficial attention, I assembled an alibi.
I saved this for later in the evening, after Nelmes had explained why, because he was a convinced believer, he felt obliged periodically to take an active part in the propagation of his faith and how, on such occasions, he put himself unreservedly in the hands of ‘the Committee’, consenting to everything from public speaking to, as on this evening, distributing what seemed, even to him, patronizingly oversimplified leaflets in which God, Christ, and the entire Christian religion were reduced to the ethical dimensions of, as his current batch was entitled, ‘Fair Play in the Fourth’.
‘Incidentally,’ I began, ‘the reason I didn’t turn up——’
And then went on to develop what I hoped would seem a plausibly improbable reason for my delinquency, but it didn’t work. He pretended to accept it and I pretended to be relieved that he now understood, and we both gazed, with studiously vacant faces, across the bar at a horrid little gadget made of light and bubbles.
At some point later in the evening, Nelmes mentioned that he had seen ‘that slut, Mary Spender’.
Earlier, before he had stealthily appeared, I had felt very low, very low and lonely, not having had a girl for months, not even having known any girls to talk to, and seeing the blithe couples everywhere, in the buses and streets, even two in the ramshackle house I was living in.
The old man with the pipe, a vacant, probably smelly old man, had looked to me as if he lived alone, on a niggardly old age pension, in a linoleum-floored room. This bleak, if imaginary, and quite possibly incorrect picture, had suddenly made me shudder. I had seen the stale, cheerless progression of his days, with no pleasure beyond a carefully self-allocated ounce of tobacco and perhaps eight pints of beer per week, and an occasional opportunity to squint censoriously at the lawless young. Age was probably the connecting link which next directed my thoughts to Aunt Ruth, for old people, I suddenly realized, had been uncommon in my direct experience. Aunt Ruth—and suddenly this vast, grinning, half-blind old aunt had ceased to be either the distant benefactor (when her will had brought me money) or the folksy old horror she had seemed on the one occasion, when my sister had been briefly staying with her, on which I had visited her. She had had a husband whom I had never met—Fred, my uncle Fred in fact, and although Fred had been dead for more than a decade, Aunt Ruth clearly thought of him all the time. Was that so bad, really, so naïve, so commonplace? So despicable, really, compared to our sex and superficiality? They had shared a whole life.
And from Aunt Ruth, my thoughts had swung, on the trapeze of my inheritance, to my life in Duck Street with Mary Spender, and I had instantly felt a wave of nostalgia and of longing for her warm generous body.
‘I saw
that slut, Mary Spender,’ remarked Nelmes.
Yes, I thought, with a wry, involuntary grin at what seemed to me the flattering contrast between Nelmes’ world and my own, yes, a slut, undoubtedly a slut, I suppose so—yes, friend, there’s no escaping it—a slut—of course—you’re right…
Below the family cottage, the narrow lane, often conveying no more than half a dozen cars and carts throughout an entire day, ran through a wooded cutting. Rounded, mossy banks rose some twelve or fifteen feet to belts of woodland a couple of hundred yards in depth and separated from the banks by three-strand barbed wire fences. As a child, I had sometimes climbed the banks and peered into the dismal thickets of dry, slanting sticks and young trees which, in the spring, suddenly developed innumerable rows of green buds. The ground was a tangle of coarse grass, fallen branches and thistles. Little gulleys, crossing each other at random angles, created improbable pockets and hummocks. I hadn’t liked the area and had never ventured in. Possibly I had been teased by mother or some villager with tales of ghosts. Possibly it was simply because the wasteland had no human use and so seemed inhuman whereas the much denser woodland on the other side of the hill often harboured woodsmen, walkers, hunters and so forth and never seemed in the least forbidding.
‘Watchoo seen? A bleeding ghost?’
Perhaps it was this reference to the supernatural which, combined with the unexpected meeting, later caused me to think of this place. I had glanced up from sorting mailbags and seen, not fifteen feet away, Edna gazing absently along the platform. So complete had been my astonishment that I had, with a mailbag dangling limply, simply stared, ultimately provoking Lofty, my working partner on that shift, to make the above remark.
‘My sister——’
When I came up beside her and as, suddenly aware of my presence, she glanced round and recognized me, Edna simply said ‘Oh.’
‘Hello.’
‘Hello.’
I had instantly felt hostile and angry, and also angry with myself for feeling angry. After all, I hadn’t seen her for years, hadn’t written to her, and had made no attempt even to ascertain her well-being, had, in fact, jealously guarded my life from any family taint. Perhaps, though, I had always assured myself that I must be an object of romantic admiration to them and that, deprived of any authentic news, speculation as to my activities must occupy them hugely. Perhaps a possessiveness for my younger sister (and first girl-friend) remained in my mind and I had always obscurely assumed that she was somehow my property. But the young woman with rather an absent expression who was now contemplating me, was immune to any such assumption.
‘Do you work here?’ she asked, without much interest, further inflaming me since I sustained myself, in the tedious and menial jobs I usually performed, with the delusion that they would seem romantic and heroic to anyone who knew the circumstances. But now, my occupation became, under the influence of Edna’s indifference, merely tedious and menial.
It seemed she had twenty minutes to wait before the departure of her train to the south coast and I explained matters to Lofty and took her to the station buffet. Without a word she sat down at one of the tables and left me to join the short queue for tea. While queuing, I glanced over at her. She was gazing out at the bookstall, the huge arrivals board, the travellers and porters moving backwards and forwards, with the same abstracted air she had worn when I had caught sight of her. And that was when I suddenly thought of the cutting and the ‘haunted’ wood.
During our glum cup of tea, I was bursting to tell her about things, about the beautiful American girl I was living with and who was in love with me, about my fabulous friends, journalists and artists, and mad, gay young things, to brag and boast, to overwhelm her with the fullness of the life I was living concealed beneath the somewhat prosaic exterior and teach her that I was not just the negligible, drab relative she apparently took me for but quite a force in certain circles. But she gave me no opening; the few routine questions she asked were delivered in such manifestly indifferent tones that I merely grunted and deflected them until finally we both sipped and gazed silently out of the window. Gradually, a sense of shame descended on me, bitter, retrospective shame which increased my anger because it seemed to stem from attitudes that I thought I had completely repudiated. I suddenly realized that I had hardly asked her anything and that increased the shame. I was just girding myself to question her about her life when she glanced at the clock and stood up.
‘Damn her!’ I thought savagely, as the train drew out and we both waved dutifully a few times before, she into the compartment and I back to my mailbags, withdrawing.
It was Clark Otterley who said at a party one evening, in his occasionally-successful, epigrammatic manner that the greatest single achievement of the modern world was to have ‘divested sex of biology’.
Not long after that, however, biology, at least in my own experience, reasserted itself for Nelly Nelmes, Charley’s winsome little blonde sister, told me that she was pregnant.
‘Who by?’ I asked cautiously.
‘You, I suppose.’
I began to protest although aware that, as a result of a long and mellow party, in a great, cavernous studio in upper Bloomsbury some months before, during the later part of which I had found myself sharing a couple of blankets and a corner with Nelly, it might have been true, but she impatiently silenced me.
‘Anyway, do you know anyone—you know——’
When I mentioned this to Otterley, it turned out he did know someone. Autumn, unreality, the wet streets, the trickling lights in the street, the old, unrenovated saloon bar with its original tiles in bunch-of-grapes and shepherdess designs and full of young people, some doubtless students for the university was not far away. I remember feeling absurdly happy as I stood at the bar with Nelly waiting for Otterley to come and take us to the abortionist. Why? A conspiracy of youth, perhaps, to tell them to go to Hell, to tell the mature and wise and influential to go to the Hell they were so efficient at planning and leave night and trees to us. Rare those moments, or at least they seem so now when I follow the news, when I have grown into the world and feel myself a fibre of the total weave, a part of it all—hard to recall the exhilarating impatience of youth. And yet they couldn’t really have been rare, for those two to three thousand days were spent largely in the company of boys and girls, young men and women, and there were many parties and gay, noisy evenings in pubs, and long walks, after the staid and meticulous transport system of London had gone to bed, through winking streets, by several laughing couples with arms circling waists to someone’s room or shared flat for the night.
Otterley arrived. Nelly, who didn’t know him very well, and who was standing facing the door, asked cautiously.
‘Isn’t that him?’
And I turned to see Otterley, standing by a table near the door, mysteriously engaged in conversation with a tubby little man seated there alone. Otterley glanced round and his swarthy, delicately-handsome face shot us a momentary, embarrassed grin and then he went on conversing with the bowler-hatted, waist-coated little man who looked as though he might be some sort of scout for a dubious firm.
‘Who was that?’ I asked, when he ultimately joined us.
To which Otterley, with an air of faint surprise, answered, ‘I’ve no idea.’
It seemed that the moment he had entered the little man had asked him if he knew ‘Oscar Popski, the pianist’, whom none of us had ever heard of and whom I soon began to suspect was imaginary, and had held Clark talking, insisting that he did know him and was, in fact, a great friend of Popski’s. This struck us as inordinately funny, and we laughed, the idea of the abortion and Popski and sex and being young, fusing to create a mood of the utmost festivity.
‘No, for God’s sake——’ protested Otterley, but it was too late.
Nelly had smiled at the little man, who had been ostentatiously heaving himself round in his chair from time to time to gaze at us, and he, readily construing this as an invitation, had risen
cumbrously and was now ambling towards us.
‘Told me he didn’t know Popski. They’re the boys, aren’t they, fiddlers?’ and he sawed an imaginary violin. ‘’course you know Popski,’ he rounded on Clark again. ‘I’ve seen you with ’im.’
He claimed to be a song-writer but later something he inadvertently said, vengefully taken-up by Otterley, forced him to admit that he was also a clerk in an insurance office, that in fact none of his songs had ever been published or performed. Anyway, he bought us two rounds of drinks and did not diminish, if his later over-protracted fun with the, by now, admittedly mythical Popski did little to augment, our gaiety and we left him feeling that there should be a niche amongst us for such a sporty little man.
After a twenty-minute taxi ride we reached, not as I had vaguely anticipated, a sooty terrace of proletarian houses to encounter a mumbling crone with a syringe, but a tiled, Greek-revival porch in a smart row in Knightsbridge and a young man opened the door.
He was about my height but broader, with yellowish eyes that had dark rims and rotten teeth. He looked thoroughly liverish, even corpse-like, but this unhealthy impression battled continually with the blaze of a bright intelligence that one instantly felt.
‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’ asked Otterley, sensing some reserve.
The large, thoughtful eyes in the broad, haggard, faintly-smiling face surveyed us.
‘Yes, I didn’t expect so many of you, that’s all,’ and then, in response to Otterley’s continued questioning look, the deep, stable voice continued aimiably. ‘I thought probably the—ah—young lady would come alone. Well—come in.’
He offered us red wine in a room with an unmade bed, large, brilliant reproductions of modern paintings and one sombre, probably, nineteenth century original oil of a wharf, abused books sprawled on the floor, a telephone and a desk. He and Otterley immediately began to talk about a certain Harry Fisher who was apparently a don at Oxford, and, listening to them and particularly to Weedon (as I subsequently found the other young man to be called) I forgot the earlier high spirits and the purpose of our visit.