by Paul Ableman
‘No—well—er——’
Although she was sufficiently flustered to stammer and refrain from meeting my gaze, I could sense her resolution.
‘We can’t—this evening——’
‘Why not?’
‘Well—we can’t—really——’
And then I saw, over her shoulder, scowling faintly, someone called Mike, a bit of a hard man and a showy dancer, glancing possessively at Pete and defiantly at me.
‘Him?’
‘Anyway—I’ll see you—next time——’
A bit dazed, temporarily managing to convince myself that I was more amused than distressed, I rejoined Weedon, explained to him that I’d been jilted, and accepted his suggestion that we go for a cup of coffee.
We walked along the crowded pavement beside the clogged traffic, towards Piccadilly Circus. Weedon said:
‘I think you missed my point—about mathematical originality.’
‘Oh?’ I replied, sufficiently gruffly to express my mounting dismay at Pete’s perfidy and also the unsuitability of my mood for intellectual things.
‘It isn’t, in fact, a matter of intuition or anything like that?’
‘Oh.’ I growled.
I looked distastefully, almost vengefully, at the vulgar glare of the twitching neon signs, at the newsagents and snack-bars, theatres and kiosks, at a shapeless, scarf-wound and drink-blotched old woman trying to vend fluffy monkeys on elastic cords, at the endless crawl of the motor traffic round the ugly little fountain.
‘Maths are abstract,’ resumed Weedon, ‘in the sense that they belong to no class but their own.’
I grimaced and sensed, with slight, malicious satisfaction, that Weedon had noticed the tacit reproof, for he became silent. Good—at least, better than his silly prattle about mathematics. It had seemed to me that, by continuing our (previously absorbing) discussion on the relation of mathematical to literary originality, Weedon was implying that my emotional affairs were too trivial to require any acknowledgement. And my sense of resentment at this interpretation was heightened by a feeling of shame that I was weak enough to make it. After all—what did I want, sympathy, consolation? Obviously the man was paying me the compliment of assuming that I was sufficiently mature and stable to prefer to have the matter discreetly ignored. And of course, he was right, wasn’t he? I didn’t want to weep on Weedon’s shoulder, nor on anyone else’s. And certainly not because of that crazy Pete—after all, I hadn’t been going to marry her, had never even thought seriously of living with her. Then what was it?
But in spite of these compelling, indeed irrefutable, considerations, stronger and stronger waves of self-pity surged up within me. I had nothing, no home or only a furnished room, no family or only an estranged one (not true for I corresponded intermittently with mother and saw Mary occasionally), no wife and now again no girl, an evil job (in fact, helping to print a satirical and, initially, quite successful, broadsheet for a tolerant and generous drinking acquaintance, I was better off in this respect than I had ever been before) and no real friends. Suddenly, I felt my heart thump as a little thrill of authentic panic ran through me. I was getting old! In three more years I would be thirty. For seven years—God!—yes actually, for seven long years, I had been in London! But—how—where had they gone? The offices, the factories, the railway station and the other places where I had earned my living wage passed through my mind, and the pubs and the furnished rooms and the girls and boys I had known tumbled after them. Seven years? Had these glancing impressions devoured seven long years? Of course, I wasn’t old—I knew that, but I was no longer, in the absolute sense, young, right at the beginning, with unlimited possibilities. And what had I done? Three little lyrics, unnoticed by all but a few friends (Peter had liked them immensely), in an amateurish little periodical that had folded on its fourth number—that was the total, the entire real achievement of those—seven? Really seven long years?
It was probably a sudden fervent appreciation of Weedon’s friendship, intensified by these dismal reflections, that, after we had been issued with our two cups of foaming coffee, made me ask, more to resume contact than from any keen interest in the matter:
‘Who’s that Ricky?’
Weedon had been gazing, with his dispassionately intent, faintly wondering, expression, at two American sailors, stretched hypotenuse-wise in their seats and at the two pretty, tarty girls with them, but turned with a quick, mischievous smile, indicating that he considered the question potentially productive of fun.
‘Ricky? At the Cambridge, do you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ricky is Richard Pringle, the fourth son of Lord Pringle, the only male suffragette.’
At this level of gossip and technique, Weedon’s world was full of absurdities, paradoxes, irrationalisms which continually challenged one’s more trivial assumptions. He knew the scandalous and ludicrous truth behind this fashionable wedding or that solemn undertaking and was, indeed, so adept at overturning the conventional view of things as to give the impression, sometimes, of inhabiting a world in which the psychological dynamics were either arbitrary or deranged. If everyone else knew from the Press that, say, the foreign ministers of two unfriendly powers had met to reconcile outstanding national differences, Weedon, with a good deal of probability, as the uneasy facts that later trickled out would confirm, was able to assure you that they had both been ‘interested’ in one of the page boys of the Geneva hotel at which they were both staying and that, in fact, the loftier grounds for their encounter had only been hastily discerned by their respective governments after less statesmanlike motives had brought them frantically together. So little did conventional motivations figure in Weedon’s everyday outlook that it was surprising to find that he was orthodox, and even conservative, in more intellectual matters. Philosophically, he was, I suppose, a liberal-atheist, softened by a certain sybaritism, of a nineteenth century kind, accepting conventional intellectual categories and classic historical and social causality. I often wondered at the contrast between his keen eye for the irrational, for the false, but time-hallowed, assumption, in mundane affairs and yet his rather unimaginative weltanschauung.
Now I looked at his eyes glowing with enthusiasm for the ridiculous, his rather heavy underlip almost perceptibly trembling on the brink of anecdote, and his charred teeth bared by a broad grin. Half-resentfully I surrendered to the invitation and to the necessity, which he seemed effortlessly able to enforce, of asking absurd and undignified questions.
‘What do you mean—a male suffragette?’
‘He was, in actual fact, a male suffragette.’
And Weedon related a grotesque and, if neglected by most historians of the period, possibly authentic episode concluding with an account of how one of a number of women, arrested for militant demonstrations somewhere in London, had proved, at the police station, to be none other than Lord Pringle, clad in a skirt and shawl.
‘What—do you mean he was a transvestite?’
‘No. He just wanted to identify himself with the cause.’
‘And he managed to get a peerage?’
‘He got that earlier, for devaluing the rupee.’
Partly dutifully and partly because Weedon’s ingenuous enthusiasm was infectious, I laughed, but he was, I sensed, aware of my underlying reserve. Often his accounts reduced me to helpless laughter but, at that moment, I found his method essentially offensive. If I wanted to know anything about Ricky, I wanted to know it at a more—a more adult level. I wanted to know something that could be significantly related to the cheerful, non-dancing, patrician mascot of the Cambridge whose underlying sadness had to be inferred from his apparently having nothing better to occupy his evenings than watching alien (surely we must have been to him) juveniles jiving.
We fell silent again, I mentally tracing, with growing dismay, the course Pete and Mike were at that moment presumably taking across London to the snug attic overlooking Regents Park.
‘Jane used to come here,’ said W
eedon meditatively.
Although the remark was sufficiently introspective to require no response, and although I was deriving a sort of compulsive, masochistic satisfaction from ever more vivid imaginary evocations of the relations between Pete and her brainless new consort, Weedon’s words set up a small, reluctant eddy in my mental flow which ultimately forced me to ask, ‘What?’.
‘I said, Jane used to come here.’
He smiled at me, a shade sadly now, the high spirits abated.
‘Jane who?’
‘Jane Paget—I don’t think you knew her.’
I looked at him, wondering whether to confess that I had known Jane, and thus risk being diverted from my glum, but somehow satisfying, brooding, or simply to murmur something deflective.
‘Yes, I did,’ inevitably, after another pause, I admitted. ‘Jane—how is she?’
‘Jane?’ asked Weedon, more briskly and apparently with some surprise.
‘Do you see her?’
‘I did.’
It had happened, according to Weedon, more than a year ago. At some party, Jane had been diverting those around her with her customary allegations of the treachery and faithlessness of everyone she had ever known, concluding with the resolution to ‘end it all’ on that very evening. The more susceptible in her circle of hearers had been dissuaded, when she had stalked resolutely from the room, from following and reasoning with her by the more experienced ones who had been able to assure them that it would have been any other behaviour on Jane’s part which would have been uncharacteristic to the point of inviting alarm. And the party had gone on until, lurching into an upstairs bedroom in search of privacy some hours later, a couple had found Jane motionless on the bed, an empty phial that had contained her hostess’s months supply of barbiturates beside her.
‘She killed herself?’
‘Yes,’ Weedon uttered the monosyllable with a heavy, slightly reproachful intonation. He looked at me hard, with a faintly-challenging smile as if inviting me to ask, as I did:
‘Why?’
But then the expression deceitfully changed and, with a sigh, he uttered his characteristic ‘Well….’
A moment later, he offered tentatively, ‘She was always threatening to.’
‘I thought they were the ones who didn’t.’
‘I know.’
It may have been self-defensively but it was months later before I suddenly remembered a possibly relevant episode in my own brief association with Jane Paget. Then I remember thinking, with a queer little stab almost of pride, ‘I wonder if I had anything to do with it’ as I recalled the way I had greeted Jane on the first of the two nights we had spent together. I had said something facetious, stupidly facetious, like ‘I could never love you, Jane’. Could that have been one of the few authentic pricks from which she had fashioned a cactus world that it was better to get out of? However, although I could make this seem logically plausible I was unable to feel it, and this was mainly, I suppose, because it would have required a good deal more confidence in my personality and influence than my always depleted self-confidence could supply. But it was also because, in spite of the fact that when I left Weedon that evening, to wait in a sudden shower for a number 89 bus and then to swish home to Crawley Green past the shops and offices and glistening pavements, I deliberately assembled from the melancholy elements of the evening a sombre, romanticized cautionary tale, the apex of which (the first of us to go, symbolizing the end of an epoch) was Jane’s suicide, but which also embraced Ricky and his eccentric father, the couples spinning in the Cambridge, Weedon’s corrupt, benign intelligence, and, still keenest of all, the wordless Pete’s oblivious raptures in the arms of the scowling Mike, in spite of this—in a sense I didn’t believe in Jane’s death at all.
Gone? She would turn up again, in some pub, at some party—they always did. People ‘died’ for a month or a year and then you met them again and found that they had been in existence all along, as you had. You couldn’t contract out, not of the nuclear age, not of the mid-twentieth century, not of the great jive session round the crater, for it was not taking place in time at all. At a certain moment in the early summer of 1945 the world had stopped and we who had been living since then really inhabited a hiatus in history. At some crucial moment to come, the thing might start up again, and then men and women could die once more and self-slaughter have some meaning. Until then….
You are here, Jane, here in the bar of the ‘Starling’, waiting for Otterley to come in so that you can complain about what Nadia Grunwald just said—here as we are all here. After all, to escape, there must be something to escape from. And what could that be but—the future?
I recall the slender shoot of annoyance that, before sternly trampling it under, I fleetingly detected thrusting its head above the surface of my genuine distress when I learned of mother’s death.
‘Telegram for you, Mr Peebles. I’m putting it under the door’, enunciated Mrs Wick, my landlady. Mrs Wick, who was kindly but remote and somewhat forbiddingly valetudinarian (from arthritis), articulated her sentences with deliberation, as if consistently doubtful of her hearer’s ability to understand anything. I recall the grave, measured fall of her words, never conveying other than the most banal or trivial thought: ‘I’m—putting it—under—the door’, ‘Could I—have—a—moment—of your—time?’, ‘I fear—the bathroom—light—was again—left—burning’. But now I also remember that, while originally (because of benign smiles, talk of charities, loans of small sums, etc.) crediting her with, and seemingly having since accepted as an authentic endowment, a kindly disposition, strong, almost violent, opposition testimony was at the time supplied by someone who should have been in a position to know.
This was Carol, the Irish girl who came in daily to keep the house, make beds and so forth, and with whom I had a verbally uninhibited, but physically immaculate, relationship.
‘What did’je do, last night?’ Carol, always carefully knocking before being invited in, would unceremoniously demand. Then, carrying the vacuum cleaner to the centre of the room, and without giving me time to recall that she must have been thinking of a date I had mentioned but which had been subsequently cancelled, she would face me with an intent, quizzical look and ask, ‘Did’je do her?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? I thought you was going to? Wouldn’t she have it—or what?’
Then, after another searching, but not obviously immodest or provocative look, she would busy herself furiously with the cleaner, perhaps muttering a moment later:
‘Sure, I don’t think you’re any good at all.’
I had assumed that Carol had a congenial relationship with her employer. She always seemed to have time for a chat, with me or the milkman or one of the other lodgers, was neither censoriously addressed, nor, as far as I could judge, overworked and certainly never evinced any real sign of discontent. It was with considerable surprise, therefore, that I heard her refer, quite casually, one day, to ‘the old devil’.
‘What old devil?’
‘What old devil! Herself—Mrs Wick.’
‘She’s not an old devil.’
Carol, taking refuge in eloquent silence, dusted madly for a few moments until her simmering indignation could no longer be denied speech. Then she hurried over to me, admonitory finger raised: ‘Do you know what she is, then?’
From the torrential indictment that filled the next ten or fifteen minutes and which incorporated such relatively venial items as Mrs Wick’s failure, on the alleged grounds of economy to replace a damaged broom for a period of several weeks, only one allegation seemed to me to be immediately telling: Carol’s wage. This did seem low. I earned less than the national average and she got less than half of that. How could she live? But, in fact, I did a bit of checking up with acquaintances and found that, while absurdly low for the hours and amount of sheer physical energy expended, Carol was apparently getting about the average for her work. Still, her venom depressed me. It seemed dishearte
ning to find all this complexity and malevolence beneath what had seemed a simple and candid relationship. And actually I don’t believe Mrs Wick was, mean or tyrannical—a bit neglectful, perhaps, from age and physical debility, but, essentially, a kindly old woman. Nor was Carol really malicious but more—histrionic perhaps—anyway….
‘I’m putting it under the door,’ came Mrs Wick’s startling (I had been standing at the window gazing down at the green board over the paint shop and meditating) announcement, causing me to whirl, almost guiltily, to see the door still reassuringly shut and the little yellow envelope projecting into the room.
Hyperglycaemic coma—anyone but mother—what with the strict medical instructions and….
Instead of going next door to Mrs Flindle’s cottage and phoning the doctor, mother, when she had felt the first, premonitory symptoms, which, God knows, as Dr Regan subsequently declared, she had been emphatically enough instructed to recognize, had apparently simply gone to bed with a hot water bottle (another thing she had been warned against). She did not appear, somewhat strangely, since it is apparently a normal manifestation of the condition, to have vomited but simply to have lapsed into an ultimately fatal coma, her blood saturated with sugar, and Mrs Flindle, calling for some reason the following morning, had found her dead.
When Mary had first told me, some years before, that mother had developed diabetes, we had exchanged guarded forebodings, but Mary, having already tentatively sounded mother, rejected any suggestion of moving her, even as much closer to qualified attention as the mile into the village. Well, she had apparently not contracted the worst sort of diabetes and should, with just a little care and self-responsibility, have been able to treat herself with insulin injections and so forth, as thousands of other diabetics successfully do.
Mother? Had I believed that? So characteristic was her final folly that my vengeful conscience has never since allowed me to maintain it. And yet—I suppose I substituted (after all Mary did too) hope for conviction. Mother—in a dream all her life—perhaps, truer, a daze. In fact, she wasn’t very bright and when I think of Mary, Edna and I, all of us at least normally alert citizens and compare us with mother, I feel that we must either have received our relative mental vigour from father, bombed to death at the beginning of the war when he was just beginning to get on as a commercial traveller, or that mother must have been a sort of missing link in her own family. She listened to the wireless; she mildly revered the royal family. She accepted whatever came along.