As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  “Good Lord, man. You haven’t let that worry you? I’ve never given it a thought again. Passmore wrote it, you know, and he wanted to dig at me, not you. You’re too thin-skinned. This dive into the way the world’s run will do you a power of good. I know I’ll be called an enemy of research freedom, but concentration on the pressing problems is the best way to solve them and the best way to use public money.”

  He came to an abrupt stop, and seemed surprised at the nature of his audience.

  “Well, I’m keeping you.”

  Both Hart and Langmuir said together: “A little, yes.” But Hamo said it with cold courtesy, Nelson with a warm rudeness. The telephone rang. Hamo answered it: “Oh God! Mm. At once. That,” he told his colleagues, “was Watton to tell me I’m already late.”

  “You’ve helped that young chap on greatly,” Sir Alec said. “It was a sad pity the regulations didn’t allow the institute to give even a wee farthing to the cost of his travel.”

  “Yes,” said Hamo, “it was.” And he was gone.

  “A brilliant man. A perfectionist in everything. That’s why he resents the smallest mistake,” Sir Alec commented, sighing deeply. “He’s tired though. It’s a long body to carry around with you.”

  “Ah, so you think the Lodger is at last about to lodge.”

  But Sir Alec preferred not to acknowledge this long-treasured technical joke against Hamo Langmuir’s height. He merely said, “You’ll be glad of a free hand, I dare say.”

  And this time Nelson Hart preferred not to comment. They appeared unable to go their proper ways. Which would have budged first remained unknown, for once more the telephone rang and a very loud bantering Cockney voice said: “Look, you’re gonna miss the moon, Chief, if you don’t get crackin’.”

  “This is the Director.”

  “Oh, sorry, Sir. I thought it was Mr. Langmuir. I don’t want him to be late for count-down.”

  “Quite right, Watton. Well, happy landing, and don’t forget to bring us back some rock samples.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll know the Institute, Sir, this time next year—it’ll be so thick with genu-ine moon dust.”

  “Right you are. Good-bye.” Sir Alec was chuckling when he put down the receiver. “Not much danger of Langmuir getting lost with that chap to look after him. And he’ll be a cheery companion for a world voyage as well. Always the comic side of things. These Cockneys have a way with them. And he’s a good worker, too.”

  “Yes. He should be after ten years at lab work. Still Hamo would be lost without him. He must make a tidy sum from his photographs for Nature. I believe he has ambitions to become a film director. Makes home movies and so on.”

  Nelson laughed with some scorn, but Sir Alec had heard a word he approved.

  “Ah, ambition. That’s always good. He reminds me of a batman I had at Mersa Matruh.”

  “He reminds Langmuir of that, too, I think.”

  “Langmuir is far too young for the war.”

  “I meant if he hadn’t been. If I had been in the war, you see, I shouldn’t have had a batman.”

  Sir Alec’s dentures came together loudly as he removed his smile.

  “Well, the lassies here will miss him. I thought there was something between him and little Heather White.”

  “So did she. But Watton saw more opening in a world tour.” Nelson Hart laughed coarsely. “Why not? He knows which side his bread is buttered.”

  Sir Alec looked into the distance.

  “What extraordinary expressions we do use. It’s hard to imagine that any man can have failed to know which side a piece of bread is buttered. I respect the chap for keeping his Cockney. I’ve always found my plain Scotch speech a great help to me in the world.”

  Nelson Hart liked to think the same of his Midland accent, so he merely said, “Ah.”

  *

  Hamo Langmuir, with the longest of Scots ancestry, would have been surprised to learn that anyone should seek purposely to maintain a Scots accent like Sir Alec; it was something one expected of the villagers and tenants he had known as a boy on his grandfather’s estate at Loughaugh. Had he thought about it, he would have explained Erroll’s Cockney as, given all the circumstances, very fitting. But his mind, as he edged his way towards London against the outcoming commuting traffic bowling up out of sudden banks of yellow fog, was on visual objects, of what he hoped to see abroad. Slender, shapely figures, brown, amber, olive, almost black, danced round and round and round in the swirling mists like some vapours in a centrifuge. But for one moment, it is true, they seemed the more delectable because he realized suddenly that, for the most part, he would understand but few words they said, have little or no insight into their minds; not as here, for example, where a Northern voice too fully conveyed all the clogging, deadening contents of an empty Northern mind. Even so, as he neared London, Northern or not, he felt a pressure against his flies that seemed to promise an end to these wretched barren months.

  *

  Alexandra, in line, let her left leg shoot forward, knee bent, foot inclined towards the floor, every muscle loose as she had practised during the whole of the preceding fortnight. Now they were all conditioned in reflex—peck, peck, scratch, scratch. To feed, to lay, to feed, to lay, to feed, to lay. Not even necessary to mate.

  No, that was the wrong way to think of it. Meaning was secondary, must come to the audience by conviction of sensation. Ned had convinced them. Further down the line, three away from her, he was there, as she knew, and he would not be thinking—feed, lay—he would be feeling, feeling the sharpness of his claws scratch, scratch, feeling the dust fly up from this bare earth yard that would not for him be wooden boards; he would sense the scaliness of his feet and legs, would itch in his feathers, shake and spruce them, flick his comb, and, later (as he had made them ache with funny sadness at each rehearsal), stretch his neck to give that once-virile crow that was no longer there. She could feel Ned’s warm loving body against hers and for a moment the attendant pressure of Rodrigo’s lips upon hers, his tongue slithering into her mouth. But she forced her thoughts away from that—that, later it must be. But now, in thought, pressing her body to Ned’s body she merged into it, until she felt herself to be Ned.

  And so feeling, she began to sense her own feathers, her own wings, her own long scaly yellow legs, her own sharp outstretched claws. And peck, peck, scratch, scratch; here there was a small corn seed, there a minute grain of wheat. Conscious, however, of Rodrigo somewhere in the audience, mocking. What right had he to mock? He could move so elegantly out there in the world of getting and spending. Out there, if he said, come, she would gladly follow; as, out there, if she called to owlish, whiskered Ned, he would come ambling up at her command. But here in the world of release play, where Ned was her leader, she would compel Rodrigo with all the others out there in the hall to need what her play had to tell them. The old, scary, longed-for, triple knot pressed upon her again; she was that knot, taking the strain of their tug of war. She sagged as she felt the wrench. Night after night, as Rodrigo had quoted “talking and fucking we lay waste our powers”. To counter the exhaustion she made an urgent act of self-dissolution. She was a hen.

  And now to enforce this feathery, scaly, beaky feeling came “hens to the centre”. Six of them, feeling nothing but this; and she feeling just herself and yet part of the battery, clucking and fussing and brooding, and straining to lay her egg, until she feared that the grey cotton crotch of her grey cotton tights might split. And around them circled Ned and five other capons. She could sense them stretching, and stretching their necks in a chanteclair that would never sound. Six here, six there, useful to man . . .

  *

  Later, Hamo lay back on the bed, legs neatly together, hands cupped under his neck—in no sense sprawling. The ruffled pillow next to him fussed him, a dark pubic hair on the slightly crumpled sheet at his side irked him. He would be glad for the youth to be dressed and gone so that the bed could be stripped to the neat bare skeleton it
would remain during his own months of absence.

  Meanwhile it appeared less wasteful to watch Brian splashing about in the bath, through the half-open door. After all, with last week’s failure added, ten pounds would have been spent in fruitless play. He tried to express the thought brutally, sadistically. But money, as he knew from experience, was as dangerous a road where sex was involved as social class or accent or any other diversion that took one’s thoughts away from the body. And, of course, that he should try to equate the boy with money was only an expression of bitterness, unfair to Brian, and as pointless as it was detestable in himself. He concentrated on what he saw.

  It seemed, taking every feature into account, impossible that the stimulus should have failed for a fifth or sixth time. Straight black hair, small ears, high cheek-bones rose-coloured at the pommets, for the rest a whey-white skin, wide mouth, small teeth, slender neck, chest 30 inches, waist 24 inches, hips 35 inches, length of leg 28 inches (he had taken the most exact measurements), plump but firm buttocks, a curly pubic bush not too thick, slender smooth thighs; above all, well within the age-span, eighteen years and ten months next week, it seemed. A perfection among the few optimum varieties.

  Indeed the arrangement had worked with regularity every Thursday for some months, but ever less well as familiarity had led to talk, to human exchange—Langmuir’s inexcusable law of diminishing returns.

  But at its peak it had been ideal. At the memory, stimulation returned. Brian looked round, smiling.

  “So the old magic can still work. Do you want to see the picture through a second time then? You don’t want to go round the world on a plane, when you can go round it now with your tongue. For old time’s sake with your laughing lad.”

  Instantly stimulus had gone.

  Embarrassed, the boy who had found his confidence, so disastrously for Hamo over the months, turned to nervous chatter, said, his accent thickening, “So it’s New York. And after that, San Francisco. They say that’s really good. Will you be growing a beard then like the hippies? And Hollywood it’ll be in the end. An M.G.M. star. Fabulous! Anyway, you’ll find plenty of chicken over there. What about taking a poor orphan boy with you then?”

  Hamo closed his eyes; wearily he could only blame himself, and the boy’s bantering tone didn’t lack a certain desperation at seeing Hamo go out of his life. Not only had he put the youth’s whining between himself and sexual satisfaction, but he had mined a whole seam of self-pity and misery in Brian himself, which had been happily buried beneath the hardness of his everyday life. More than two months ago, over-greedy for information for his coming travels, for news of the Promised Paradise he—who knew too well that the satisfaction count was always of random origin—had asked Brian for contacts. He had got in return one dubiously attractive Tyneside youth, now a Sydney barman, address almost certainly garbled. But he had also let loose all Brian’s self-justifying reminiscences over the following weeks. His voice, once just a stimulating accent, as much just a part as a nipple or bum, now sang at each meeting for Hamo’s praise of his orphan-boy courage.

  As it was singing now to Hamo who was desperately seeking not to hear it. Sensing this desperation he applied the curative sedation method. Indeed, miraculously (or rather, as with all discovery, by some suppressed step of logic), going over the figures for lysine content in recent sorghum returns from Karachi laboratories, he suddenly saw an important connection between these mutations and certain others, occurring it seemed naturally, in Uganda. Getting off the bed and putting on first his white towelling robe, and then his cork sandals, he went from the room to his study, noted the figures and added a reminder to inquire as to the Uganda soil analysis.

  Then, relaxed, he took out Brian’s envelope from a pigeon-hole in the desk, and reflected that, on his return, the boy would be too old, or, if not, irrevocably lacking in anonymity; perhaps mercifully returned to the mysterious North. With decency, not sentimentality, remembering the relief the youth had given him during their first months in which he had still been doing some of his best research work, he unlocked the desk’s central drawer, in which as a routine precaution he had put his wallet, extracted from it a ten-pound note, and, opening the envelope with a paper-knife, added it to the five-pound note already there.

  Then he sensed that Brian was standing, dressed, behind him. He handed the envelope over his shoulder, not turning. In thanks the boy said, “Travel’ll get the old banger working again before you’re air-bound. Just think of all those Indian boys. The Fathers never taught us any of those positions at Sunday School.”

  Hamo guided the boy, his overcoat not yet fully pulled on to his left shoulder, to the front door. Then to modify this appearance of haste, he held out his hand in a good-bye gesture. So little was this part of any usual order that Brian stared at the hand for a moment, then ignoring it, leaned forward and kissed Hamo chastely but firmly on the lips.

  “You’ll do all right,” he said, soothingly.

  Hamo was startled into speech.

  “That’s a question I’ve never allowed myself to consider since my twenty-fourth birthday.” And he gave little pats with his index finger in turn to each side of his small moustache. Opening the front door, gently and firmly he pushed the youth out on to the landing; then, closing the door again, shut Brian and all the satisfaction he had once provided out of his life.

  *

  Zoe, pounding the ducks’ livers, the garlic cloves, and the bay leaf, tried to make no conscious effort to bring Concepcion into the conversation. She had long ago decided that to find special speech for these household conversations—other, that was, than the interlarding of her normal English with Spanish words and phrases—would be condescension. Besides, considering the limitations of her peasant upbringing and the debilitating poverty of those monstrous childbearing early married years, Concepcion, as Zoe had soon found out, had an extraordinarily sensitive hold on life, a real feeling for people.

  As now, when holding up into the air a leg of the pheasant she was jointing, this stout, merry black-eyed woman made with her lips and teeth comic grimaces of greedy devouring (she had a splendidly natural lack of concern for appearing a clown and so never lost her native dignity).

  “Mister eat,” she said, “Mister write.”

  And she imitated with her other hand typewriting movements. The two gestures taken together were so reminiscent of Perry, when, his absurd schoolboy appetite for food satisfied, he sat down blissfully to write, that Zoe burst into delighted laughter.

  “Carlos, too, eat big and working all day singing,” Concepcion added, miming her husband’s busy life of hammering and planing.

  Zoe, thinking of all the many jobs in the house that Perry frequently said he would have to carry out himself because Carlos had neglected or performed them in a slovenly fashion, returned to the pâté, measuring the half glass of armagnac required. Carlos who had forced all the children on his wife, Carlos—his lean, vain, handsome looks turning to pampered fat—stood for so much which held up decency’s progress that she preferred to return to her own husband.

  “You won’t tell Mr. Grant that you are sad you do not go down to the cottage these winter months, mes do invernado, will you, Concepcion? I know little Miguel’s disappointed. But I’m honestly not sure that it’s good for him to be in the country in these wet months anyway. You have kept him in today, haven’t you?”

  At Concepcion’s looking down, Zoe assumed great sternness, for the terrible thing about peasant simplicity, with all its compensating insights, was the sheer failure to grasp the smallest basic principles of reasoned hygiene.

  “That’s very bad. Muy malo. You remember what Dr. Powlett told you about any suspicion of fog. You must do what he says. Otherwise you’ll lose Miguel, you know, like you did the other two.”

  But, as so often, Concepcion rebuked became Concepcion tearful, so that Zoe decided to return to happier things.

  “You see, I just want these next week-ends to be a sort of relaxed
honeymoon for Mr. Grant. That’s why I’m taking down all this rather grand picnic food with us. And for me, of course, Marriage needs these renewals. Renova buena por matrimonio. Not that we’ve ever lost each other. But we’ve changed and we’ve got to find those changed selves. Mister grow older. I grow older. Must find what he is, what I am. I’m sure that’s the way Perry will start writing seriously again. Mr. Grant writing new book. Very funny. Mucho comico. And sad, of course,” she added.

  Concepcion said, “New book good.”

  “Very. And that’s why I don’t want Mister upset at all. Not tell him you are sad not to be at cottage. Mister is very kind, you know. He will be sad; think little Miguel want to come to cottage, little Miguel must come. Then he will not write book. Anyway, Concepcion, you’re going to have the cottage just for yourselves for the whole of May. That’s the best month in the garden. Heaven knows we wouldn’t go abroad then if that awful controller hadn’t practically made Perry take his holidays in the spring. Of course, he’ll be able to write in Sicily, but we’re going to miss the lilacs terribly. You’ll have to write and tell me how the garden’s getting on.”

  “Miss Alexandra make garden when you no here.”

  “Alexandra! I hope not; she’d pull up all my best plants. She’s not interested in gardens. And I shouldn’t want her to be. The young don’t need that sort of sense of continuity. We didn’t either. On the other hand, we didn’t make such a conscious revolt against it. But I didn’t really care for anything but the present when I was at Cambridge. There was so much to do all the time. And so there is for Alexandra. It’s the most marvellous time of her life. And thank goodness for it! Just at the moment when Perry most needs to have me on his own.”

  “Miss Alexandra no sleep enough. So beautiful, but very thin. No sleep enough. No . . .” and in want of words, Concepcion sketched out the shape of Zoe’s ample breasts in the air.