by Paul Ableman
It was in this storeroom that, after my sudden discomfiture about Mrs Coates while waiting for Louise that evening, I brooded further about the matter. I tried to decide on a course of action. It was clear that I would have to move. There was no point in having exchanged the narrow provincialism of the village for its equivalent in Victoria. I remember that, as I sat there, smoking, waves of indignation at the enormity of the situation kept flooding over me. Here I was, an independent wage-earning adult, with the loftiest aspirations, who couldn’t even take his girl back to his room. All the generosity, wisdom, strength (which now, oh yes, through the rectifying lens of time, I can appreciate and evaluate) of that fine woman, who had selflessly befriended a scruffy, arrogant youth, seemed like unbearable patronage and prying. Well, I would simply have to explain to her, as I should have done months ago, that I had never intended to stay more than a few days in the first place, that our outlooks and temperaments were too different for my tenancy to continue any longer and that, in addition, there were private and personal reasons why it would be better for me to go.
In fact, of course, I did nothing of the sort. She’d have made—far stronger personality than mine she had, and probably more character than I can ever aspire to—short work of any such pronouncement, and a glum, if unadmitted, awareness of this doubtless prevented me from ever uttering it. What I actually did was to allow my increasing self-consciousness about the situation to emerge in little hints and provocative remarks, in strange, after our initial genial relationship, reticences and affectations. I remember one evening, having, as in former days, accepted a cup of tea in her living-room, aggressively, and not very relevantly (since she had been telling me her views on America—highly critical), proclaiming my belief in free love and going on to deride ‘stupid, narrow …’ (I almost said, while retaining enough decency to colour inwardly at the enormity of the potential slip, ‘stupid, slum…’) ‘morality’. Naturally, I had not the courage to inform her that my advocacy was not unrelated to aspiration but she doubtless knew exactly what I had in mind.
‘I certainly don’t believe in the “sanctity of marriage”,’ I recall having sneered.
‘It seems natural, doesn’t it?’
‘No! It doesn’t! Bears and seals don’t get married.’
‘You’ve got to think of the girl, haven’t you?’
‘Not at all—why?’
‘Well—take my sister Louise, for example——’
I remember that this coincidence in nomenclature somewhat overawed me and I listened, with grudging respect, to another of Mrs Coates’s plain (unmistakeably valid at its own honest, if not very subtle or Freudian, level) and well-told tales. She always had experience to support her and effortlessly humble my abstract and doctrinaire pronouncements. How could one protest, with slogans, against something that had been lived, slowly and painfully, in the world of men? Her sister Louise had run off with a sailor to, I think, Chatham and had been left with a baby. She wouldn’t have it adopted and, according to Mrs Coates, no one had wanted to take on the responsibility of the child and there was Louise, after all these years, a cook in a hostel for sailors, and the child had died when it was seven.
But I fancy it is only in retrospect that Mrs Coates looms so large at this period of my life. At the time, I was obsessed with my Louise. She was pretty, with light-brown hair, a firm, rounded chin and the silken complexion of healthy young girls, pretty, but not, I suppose, quite the Trojan wrecker she seemed to me then. And as for conversation—funny how often, when neither has anything to say, one requests access to the other’s thoughts. We seemed to be forever saying ‘what are you thinking about?’ as a desperate alternative to standing silently in the queue. Occasionally, indeed, I did venture some modestly ambitious remark, perhaps on a film or play, but the ominous mindlessness of her replies (which never, since, of course, the object of adolescent love is above criticism, led to the slightest doubt of her perfection) made me generally prefer fervent silence. And really, although clothed in romantic mythology, and consequently interpreted by the participants as reverence for the total being of the other, first love is virtually immune to any authentic attributes of personality. It expresses the first, purest, sweetest flush of physical desire. I didn’t really want to talk to Louise, even about films and plays, but to hug her and kiss her and explore her fresh young body. And this, what with Mrs Coates, was damned difficult to organize.
‘What are we going to do this evening?’
‘I don’t know. We could go to a film—if you really want to——’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. Or else——’
‘Or else what?’
Or else, I had intended to say, encouraged by a long session on the last occasion we had met, in the doorway of a dark, bicycle shop, during which Louise had abandoned herself to quite adventurous caresses, or else we could go to a hotel. There were such hotels, I was sure. They occurred in novels. Hotels where one could register with a false name for a few hours and then—giddy with desire at the prospect I had still been unable to make the daring suggestion. What if she were offended? What if she left me for good?
‘Or else—queue up for a gallery—if you want to.’
‘Life is ours, Helen. Why should we sacrifice our youth to their stupidity?’
‘The handkerchief, Iago!’
‘Nay, he hath but a little beard.’
‘Zounds!’
‘Everything’s gonna be orlright now, honey. Shucks if it aint.’
And we did ultimately consummate our relationship, in the bare, little room at Mike Rea’s, above the canal, that I was, over the years, to know so well. Mike, a lean, ill-shaven, urban Satan, turned up opposite me one lunchtime in Lyons with casual references to ‘Dizzy’ (Desmond Thorpe, the poet, whose work I genuinely despised but whose reputation I could not but respect) and ‘Foxey’ (Jack Fox, the ‘dynamist’ painter) with whom he was, I was clearly meant to infer, on drinking terms, and the passing information that he had a room to let.
So, with the help of Rea, posing as a cousin with an urgent message calling me home, I parted from Mrs Coates, promising to visit her, which I never did, and, as I marched off up the unlovely street, feeling a sudden, surprising pang of emotion, and moved into the cubicle above the street, market on the Southampton Road. At least, Rea’s rather larger cubicle overlooked the street market while my pigeonhole at the rear had a warehouse, a factory with its loading bay and a gleam of black canal for scenic diversion. And up the sounding, uncarpeted stairs, in nervous haste lest she be subjected to, as I then still fondly imagined it to be, Mike Rea’s imposing personality, I bustled Louise a week or two later.
She must have visited me there four or five times in all. On the very first, we went to bed together, but she retained all her clothes but her skirt. Nevertheless, it was very sweet (marred only by slight alarm lest Rea, as I had discovered he was prone to, might appear grinning at the keyless door) to lie locked in each other’s arms, warmed, in the ill-heated room, by the warmth of each other’s bodies and gazing, with helpless, unappeasable yearning, into each other’s eyes.
On the second occasion, I propped a chair under the door-handle which thwarted Rea, who, that time, did actually attempt an entry, and once more we lay together only this time it was necessary for Louise suddenly, in strange, shrill panic, to cry, ‘No! No, don’t!’. And it was on her third visit that, both of us from the moment we entered the room, tense and glum at what was to happen, and already nostalgic for the simple, innocent warmth of our previous two sessions, that, with gasps, struggles, tears and, moreover, as I discovered a quarter of an hour or so later when we arose, with physiology’s tribute of a dark stain of blood, Louise became my mistress.
Pale and pensive she was when I kissed her good-bye at the underground station that evening, and so profoundly did the mood of that joyless congress act upon me, breeding a sort of troubled tenderness, that, unable to wait a whole week before seeing her
again, I took a long bus ride out to Copse End, the suburb where she lived, and met her highly-strung, rather vampirish-looking mother and grey, quelled father. I had understood that they knew about me but it turned out subsequently, a moment of farcical humiliation, the recollection of which would instantly sober me if I had, by some random social convulsion, been elevated to greatness, that they had never even suspected my existence until I had turned up sheepishly at the door. As far as they knew, Louise was still going out on Saturday nights with Valerie, whose convenient dose of flu on the evening of our first meeting, and subsequent discretion, made the whole thing possible.
I wonder which it is, their depth or their superficiality, which makes them vanish so completely? It is far easier to remember the sensation of, say, seeing a film which moved one, than of actually reviving, re-living, recapturing the feeling of being in love. And yet, at the time, it seems so completely absorbing, so conclusive, so all-embracing that all other circumstances dwindle to triviality. And the same is true of losing the person one loves. Compared to this disaster (and young people do, occasionally, quite often—you read it in the papers—confirm the power of it with deliberately crashed cars, lethal doses of drugs or gas), compared to the numb anguish of being left by the one you love, few other misfortunes touch even a chord of feeling. So it was after I got that wretched little note from Louise ‘… perhaps as much my fault—mistake—better if we never meet again….’ I don’t know if I was authentically suicidal but there seemed to be nothing more in life. It was simple Hell for weeks. And why did she do it? I still don’t know. Parental pressure? That ludicrous business with her family—but she came back twice after that—twice more we lay together—anyway that note arrived—I tried to keep it from Rea but he found out quickly enough. I think I managed, grinning wanly, to ward off most of his coarse teasing.
But where do they go to, those terrific emotions of youth? One can’t really recapture either the bliss or the pain. And it must either be because they are so genuinely terrible that the punished mind builds up a good, stout block (I think deep Doctor Sigmund would wear that) or else because they are so superficial, mere flexing of emotional muscles for the long, hard pull ahead, that there is nothing for memory to grasp.
Anyway, when I think back, it is not to the miserable days that followed, lonely meals, Rea’s stupid (he dwindled rapidly, did Rea), grinning face, utter and unbreachable loneliness, nor yet to the ecstatic few Saturdays that preceded them. No, I see Louise and I permanently ensconced in a queue on a misty night, waiting to be transported to Marseilles, or Oslo or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, holding hands, while the neon glows and the traffic hisses over the muck-glistening road and the cultured young people around us murmur judiciously.
‘It’s well worth seeing.’
‘Awfully good in——’
‘No, I missed that one.’
‘Don’t blame you, Maggie——’
‘Good night, sweet prince——’
‘Farewell, my Louise.’
‘Zounds!’
As for the Cambridge—strange, as I write the word a soundless but distinct little jazz band blares suddenly in my brain and, although I have long since abandoned that harsh, insistent rhythm for the subtler cadences of Bach and Vivaldi, which, for some years now, have been my chief escape route from the twentieth century, a lingering thrill at clarinet and drum stirs me. The Cambridge Club, and if one sought a perfect antithesis to the cloistered calm of those quads and backs and elms and other serene things, which I have only read about, of the eponymous university, it is hard to imagine a better one than the smoky bedlam of that jive cellar, was a place I knew well. I had formerly jived a bit with Selma Rushington, but had found it disagreeably mechanical and had, moreover, never been able to rid myself of self-consciousness. Probably I would never have jived again if, that Saturday….
I heard the roar of mighty engines over Shaftesbury Avenue. I had been halted for a moment by an antisocial taxi driver nudging his vehicle towards the as yet unchanged traffic lights and was waiting to cross over to the ‘Starling’. As the reverberations of the winking sky cruiser (I had glanced up to see the wing-lights of the great aircraft sail past) subsided, I heard another sound, the beat of a jazz band, muffled by walls, intermittent in the steady drone of the traffic, but somewhere near. With sudden attention, although I had passed similar clubs dozens of times without the least positive response to the tortured strains issuing from them, I listened and then, instead of crossing the now-navigable street, I turned back and followed the sounds. They were emanating from some exhaust fans set low down in the wall and, peering through these, I saw, indistinctly, gyrating couples and smoky points of yellow light, candle flames.
Well, I found my way down, first along a narrow corridor beside a corset shop and then down steep, ramshackle wooden steps, into the Cambridge Club. Naturally the doorman, responsive to that weird jumble of regulations with which the spirit of Cromwell still ineffectually strives to dominate a carnal and Godless society, inspected me coldly but, before he had even had time to growl ‘members only’, a smoky figure emerged into the entrance with a glad exclamation.
‘Hello, Alan!’
‘Hello.’
Wondering a trifle uneasily where I had previously encountered the slight, even weedy, goatee-bearded youth who was now enthusiastically signing me in, I noted with pleasure that the stemmed glasses on the tables were apparently filled with wine and not with that limp, sweet transatlantic beverage that is, strangely, so often found adequate for fuelling the exertions of jiving.
Pete Corrigan (why did we call her ‘Pete’? Could her real name have been Petunia or Petula or something outlandish of that sort? Can’t remember). Caught my eye at once. Ronny, my new (but apparently only apparently so) friend jittered excitedly at my elbow. His risible beard, larynx, elbow seemed to perform little auxilliary vibrations to the dominant enthusiastic tremble of his whole body.
‘I didn’t expect to see you. I am glad to see you. I’ve been a member here for three weeks. That’s Pete Corrigan. The fact is, I’m not very good at jiving. Can I get you a glass of wine? Do you like this place? It’s very good, isn’t it?’
I make no attempt at the phonetics, at simulating the diphthong ‘ui’ Ronny substituted for our long vowel ‘oo’ in the basic adjective of approval, but the youth revealed, with his every word, at least a childhood spent North of the Tweed. As fleeting, tantalizing, less as regards the urgency of the quest than the necessity for command of the past, memories of the occasion when I had, as a dim conviction assured me that I had, met Ronny in the past, flared and died, I watched Pete Corrigan. She was very serious about her jiving and if her face hadn’t been so childishly pretty and her slim, full-breasted figure, generously displayed by her plain but effective costume of tight black trousers and green silk shirt, so stirring, she would have looked rather absurd, spinning and rocking with an air of austere concentration. Instead, more simply but becomingly dressed and a better dancer than most, and with her scholarly devotion to the beat, she was plainly the queen of the floor.
‘She’s very “guid”, isn’t she? Have you seen Stan lately?’
So that was it! Stan—ah yes, that clamorous evening in the Rainbow. The little beard, on the heels of his now identifiable enthusiastic and harebrained ejaculations, had kept popping out from behind Stan while I had been exploring a new continent, Leslie Weedon whom I had never really talked to before.
‘Here’s your wine. You’re a painter, aren’t you, Alan?’
Something in Ronny’s humble earnestness, his yearning for discipleship, made me strive for a witty, and perhaps even cutting, reply, but none came to me and I contented myself with murmuring, somewhat distantly, ‘No’.
‘Didn’t Stan say——? Oh no, perhaps that was——’
In spite of finding Ronny rather ridiculous, I felt a slight alarm lest his obvious hero worship of me should now prove to have been the result of a misapprehension, and, unc
omfortably sensing the ignobility of my motive, I quickly said:
‘I’m a poet.’
‘Oh aye? No, I was thinking of Paul—something—Williams, I think. Do you know him? He’s a very well-known painter. Where are you going?’
‘Dance.’
Impelled by mixed motives, irritation at what struck me as Ronny’s naïve tactlessness, bolstered by a knowledge that Williams, a modestly celebrated painter of blotchy canvases, did slightly resemble me, and also by a genuine desire, which had been steadily mounting, to have a spin on the floor, I threaded my way across to where Pete Corrigan, holding her wine-glass to her chin but, with an expression of brooding attention, not sipping it, was waiting for the music to start again.
‘Can I have the next one?’
Her eyes flickered over my face for a moment and then, looking back at the band with no change of expression, she nodded slightly.
‘Yes.’
During the remainder of that intensely-satisfying (so it seemed) evening, I recall indulging in all sorts of complacent little reflections. For instance, the way I handled Pete Corrigan. With amused tolerance, crediting him, doubtless to increase my own relative stature, with many worthy if prosaic qualities, I contrasted the suppositional way poor old Ronny would have floundered with this lovely and self-possessed young thing. Would he, as I had done, have sensed, after a single jocular attempt at conversation, some remark about the drummer’s evident enthusiasm for bottled guinness when, traditionally, he should have been smoking marijuana, received with an again expressionless nod and murmured ‘yes’, that Pete’s strength in the matter of self-expression was definitely not verbal? As I stood beside her, waiting for the last gulp of percussive Guinness to go down, easy and relaxed, I imagined poor Ronny rushing ingenuously on from breathless exclamation to exclamation until Pete edged silently away. If it wouldn’t have conflicted with the expression of worldly amusement I had adopted as appropriate, I would have grinned happily at the notion of Ronny, as I had done, adapting himself effortlessly to the situation.