As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  Still, in this one case, he felt a sudden alarm. He had a horrible vision of untouched Alexandra opening that third drawer of the desk, of her finding and reading, or, even if she did not understand, seeing . . . He unlocked the drawer, took out the magazines (they were so few, just some favourite ones he had kept over the years), but Alexandra, so distant, providing him incredibly with a responsibility he could not remotely meet, demanded the sacrifice of anything, however long cherished. Mrs. E., wise woman, sceptical of public services, had insisted on a supply of candles; two of which he now lit—a non-smoker, he had no other means of steady flame; and tearing the pages into small pieces he burnt them one by one, catching sight, even with his averted eyes, of a thigh here, a nipple there as they turned to ash. There remained only an inserted single sheet—an advertisement for some magazine he had never subscribed to—which had slipped to the floor. The difficulty of seeing the tiny photographs or of reading the minute prints so teased him that he went back to his study for the magnifying glass. The photographs revealed, even in enlargement, no more than three slender naked or near naked bodies crowned by cowboy hats; but the print he could read: “Mack and Rod were pretty surprised to find themselves at the dude ranch of the wealthy stranger, but it was not too long before those loose-limbed, well-built kids found plenty to occupy them. A day out duck shootin’ or learnin’ to break in young steers, was usually followed by a session in the showers. Here Mack seems reluctant to take that evenin’ shower, and Rod wrestles with him to get him under. But, hey, who’s this? Well, this ain’t fair. Two up against one. Pete—the blond stud who acts as hired boy around the place—is a hefty young giant too. They don’t seem to be having too much difficulty in forcin’ the rangy, curly-headed youngster under that stream of water. Uh huh, looks as though Mack’s gonna lose his trunks . . .” Hamo mopped his trunks as best he could with a handkerchief. There would be no time to change them until he reached the United States, land of dude ranches.

  *

  The two bearded young men from York were doing their thing with empty packing-cases. Alexandra had seen it many times before at rehearsals, even so she would have liked to wait for the great comic sequence when each made a funeral pyre and burned himself under the false impression that he was the last human left on earth.

  Unfortunately she had suddenly remembered, as she had been scratching and pecking her way out of “Batteries”, that she had forgotten to pack either her Yeats notes or Women in Love, both of which she absolutely had to revise during these days’ touring in Corby or Luton or Boston or whatever these places were—a whole list of names like those in the fifties novels that for some reason He was so proud not to have written—but Him she quickly put from her mind.

  Ned would have Yeats—if only, like Tolkien, because of its magic properties for him; and Rodrigo might have the Lawrence, because if Ned began Birkining too much, he liked to look up bits of Gerald and produce them unexpectedly to make Ned explode. But what she wanted was her own copies with her own notes; and that, if she told it to either of them, would make them gang up against her—it would be an “Ally for victim” time and she was so tired that she’d get frightened and cry, or worse.

  Thinking of this, of the faces, of how she couldn’t get away from Ned and Rodrigo yet must not let “that” happen again before she had thought of what it was leading them into, she saw Ned on the other side of the hall arguing with the anæmic troublesome girl from Warwick and he gave her the look. Immediately the blood drummed in her ears, excitement and longing, and, stronger, an engulfing panic desire to run; yes, even home to Them rather than enjoy it again before she could measure its hold upon her. And then she thought, this panic, this running away, isn’t it just to get Ned and Rodrigo to come after me? Isn’t all this hysteria just a squalid kind of flirtation? The whole thing was absurd. The magic was entirely a game, as Rodrigo knew, even if Ned sometimes let his thoughts out of control. She must go to him and quite simply say, “I’ve left some important things at home”—no need to particularize, it wasn’t his business—“please bring my suitcase in the van and pick me up at Number 8 in about an hour.”

  When she reached Ned, he was saying, or rather mumbling into his beard, as he did at his fiercest, “Look, y’know, those movements, they’ve got to go.”

  “But they’re the logical expression of the hens’ collective hostility to the system.”

  The Warwick girl felt it all so deeply that she was wiping the sweat from her hands on her tights.

  But Ned said, “This is a magical structure. Half-baked materialist ideologies only . . .”

  Very calmly Alexandra said, “I’m awfully sorry to interrupt, Ned, but it’s just that I have to fetch something at home. So could you pick me up there in about an hour. You know—Number 8.”

  He gave her the special controlling look that he reserved for her panics.

  “No,” he said. And, as she was about to speak again, more fiercely, “No. And that goes for those steps, y’know. They’re out,” he told Warwick, who began to argue.

  Alexandra saw that she must wait until he was alone. So to gain time she shrugged herself into her white lamb fur coat with the red fox fur collar and sleeves—the most wonderful second-hand buy—and then she had to search for her hat. It seemed nowhere. Other hats there were, some felt, some straw, two Russian fur hats, and military overcoats with froggings to equip a movie regiment, and even a bright cerise feather boa; but not her hat. She began on hands and knees to look for it beneath the forms, and, at once, of course, at contact with the wood floor, her bloody knee began to bleed again, where she had cut it slightly in the sequence when the rest of the hens pecked her. At last, there the beige felt hat was—for a moment in her dizziness, she had thought it a horrible crouching sandy cat—now crushed into quite a bad shape, despite all those wettings and thumpings and stretchings it had received over the weeks to get it into a good one. It lay behind an old coke stove, under the silver-painted chimney duct, its beige felt looking not beautiful now but nothing, and as for the long mauve chiffon streamer which hung from it, that was all covered in sooty cobweb, and, when she went to pick the hat up, this streamer caught on some bolt and tore.

  And there, of course, behind her, in his large-lapelled grey suede suit and his beautiful lemon chiffon cravat, was Rodrigo, offering his dandy elegance to be ravished by her sluttish disorder. His hands came from behind her, stroking her breasts. She would have responded, but feeling his body tremble, she knew suddenly a desire to take advantage of her power. Turning her head, she kissed his ear.

  “Look, Rodrigo, do something. I can’t talk to Ned now. But I must go home to fetch some books. Will you please ask him to come for me in the van?”

  Let them fight over her, it would diminish their dangerous energies.

  “But I’ll take you home in the M.G., Ally, and then on to blissful Luton where you should have a super audience of wealthy motor workers on permanent strike.”

  She hadn’t time for all that.

  “No, my luggage is in Ned’s van.”

  He came to her side and put his arm round her waist, and said in a “seducer’s voice”, “No need for luggage. Anyway, why not travel in comfort to perform in squalor?”

  She longed to respond to the feel of his hand, but . . .

  “No.”

  A sense that she was lost if she did not prove her will stronger than theirs constricted her throat. She broke from him. Tears of anger came into her eyes; and he, seeing them, was suddenly, as he could be, marvellously wily-understanding and, kissing her lips, told her to go off home and she would be fetched in an hour.

  When she opened the door of the hall to leave, there, in the still and freezing foggy air that caught her breath, stood a dark-haired young man. “Excuse me, but you were in that last piece, I think, weren’t you?”

  He pushed back his black locks as though he were standing, not in the still fog, but on the clearest-aired, breeziest cliff of Albion’s shores, so that Al
exandra, used to regional television news from childhood, looked in turn for a microphone and cameras, but none was there.

  “You were in the last thing, weren’t you?”

  He was shouting now, for fear, presumably, that the non-existent gales might carry his voice away.

  “Oh, I know roughly what was meant. Well the name tells you really—‘Batteries’. And, of course, there’s a lot in it. You ought to see life round here. Eat, sleep, make love, die. Or variations. But what I didn’t quite get . . . Your knee’s bleeding.”

  She said, “Oh, yes, yes,” impatiently, and then, “thank you,” as though he’d done something to stop the bleeding.

  “Well, what I didn’t know was when you went off on your own—that bit—and the others fell on you. What was that? Was that sex? Or was that the flock or clutch thing pecking the loner? It’s for the local rag. Not that they’ll give much space as I expect you realize.”

  As this very point had been under discussion with no final solution at every rehearsal, Alexandra felt at bay. She opened the door—and, although you never called people’s names out, it seemed an occasion for pardonable exception, so she shouted: “Ned, Ned. I think you’d better see Ned Phillips, our producer.”

  Ned, in an agony of horror at his name proclaimed aloud, shook his head to show that he was too busy. She said, mumbling for lack of certainty:

  “It could be either really. Or given the way the system works, probably both, I expect.”

  He looked alarmed rather than puzzled, so she felt compelled to add:

  “We’re not Marxists, you know. Or Women’s Lib. I mean if I seemed to imply anything like that. It’s a question of structures.”

  Rodrigo appeared again. He removed her hand from the door knob and closed the door.

  “Just because you were the only one with any real idea of how a hen moves, you’re not entitled to kill all the rest with pneumonia,” and to emphasize the point he fastened the silver clip that held together the high neck of his bottle-green felt cape.

  “He’s a reporter,” she explained. “Ned ought to see him.”

  But Rodrigo ignored the young man. He kissed Alexandra again but more passionately this time.

  “Killing people with your draughts of honesty. Old Ma Failing.”

  As this was a joke from the Forster seminar, where they’d first met by quarrelling publicly, she felt all her tiredness flow out of her in his embrace. Assured, he said, in rebuke, “You’d better get home since the show must go on.”

  He dismissed her and turned to the reporter.

  “In bringing together arts conventionally impoverished by the isolation of self-styled professionalism, this group, drawn from a number of the universities, and produced by Ned Phillips, is seeking, despite lack of money and inadequate equipment, to suggest a restructuring . . .”

  If Ned were to hear, there’d . . . And now there was Ned, come out to fetch her in. Rodrigo had reached a splendid climax.

  “We do not ask to be judged professionally, still less intellectually, we make our appeal to the initiated . . .”

  He was clearly finding it difficult not to laugh, when Ned lunged out and hit him hard on the face. In seconds they were locked, struggling on the pavement, in one of their fiercest wrestles. Alexandra felt triumphant, but she knew that her victory could lie only in flight, so, gathering her coat in her left hand, she began to run towards the lights of the main road. They were not so absorbed in their intimate fight that they did not sense her movements.

  Rodrigo called out, “All right, you bloody little bitch, you’re to blame for this.”

  Ned shouted, in his special menacing voice, “We shall come after you and we shall get you.”

  The young reporter ran after her.

  “Silly fools. And speaking to you like that. Structures! They ought to think more of manners like ordinary people.”

  Alexandra turned on him, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Please, please, go. It isn’t fine to be ordinary, you know; it’s stupid and beastly.”

  *

  Perry, driving his E-type home through the fog, was exultant to find that despite all his determination to have no thoughts but for the road, Seasmell Terrace had taken over. It worked, this dual life; and, with the long week-end in the country, he would bring his man Jack through his comic-sentimental return to the Terrace in his Cambridge vacations. There’d be the girls to pick up with again from the County Grammar, but first, to get into the mood, a visit to his first (pre-pubertal) window into the Wonder of Woman’s Body—the good old pennyworth on the pier: What the Butler Saw. Turning off Maida Vale, the kerbs giving a white frost warning of their presence through the mist, he strove to go back to those flickering hazily seen girls (to recapture the vision and then find the words—that was the method). Surely they had been shingled or even Eton cropped. They must have been twenty-year-old flash cards even then: sort of Berlin twenties whores, and they’d worn something incredible, probably called cami-knicks, what the Little Mam might have worn if she’d been a tart instead of an honest barmaid; but he’d got a tremendous kick from it. He tried to hold the flickering picture firmly in his vision. He saw—Susan Nebble slipping out of her tights.

  Punishing the neat little body pleasurably for having got in the way of his creative activity, he drove very slowly towards Primrose Hill. Remembering that Blake had here repelled the devil in archangel guise, he sought to drive Susan’s desirable form from his vision. He tried to reach his hero Jack another way. How would he feel now, who, too young to vote for Utopia in ’45, had yet kept faith and put his party in power again, and now was watching them turn Blake’s Jerusalem brown and sour-tasting? Poor Jack! His pity somehow followed Jack away from Labour’s failure, to the failure of his marriage. Poor Jack, sterilely married in his gilded, gelded cage, seeking (who will cast a pebble?) his little bit of fun away from her high-mindedness, and clinics, and uplift, and money guilt. One of the oldest jokes in the pack, but none the less pathetic for that. But he must play it for laughs and let the pathos come of its own accord. And the wife’s name—something stuck-up—Celia, Viola—no, crude and easy—Honey, the bitch with the money. The name came to him as a triumph as he entered Number 8.

  In the hall, he heard voices from the first-floor sitting-room—hers and, Oh Lord! Hamo’s. He’d forgotten that farewell call. Hamo, moustached and elegant, like some prize Sandhurst prodigy, seated primly upon the edge of one of her Louis Seize chairs, his primness parodied above him by the stiff Zoffany family, by the geometrical lines and vanishing-points of the Pannini pillared church interior. Death to Seasmell Terrace lay there. Not, anyway, that old Hamo would resent his creeping upstairs, as he began to do. For all his narrow specialism, perhaps because of it, Hamo had always been appreciative of his writing, had even read and remembered for quoting Above His Station, probably the only novel he’d ever read in his life and with a social setting that must have been unintelligible to him. But then they were both craftsmen and could speak to one another in respect. He could clout Leslie for not marrying Hamo. That was how life treated one. Broad-minded as hell about having a queer brother. Trying to get him settled. And Zoe, to do her justice, being wonderfully helpful about it. And then Leslie ups and offs with this ghastly rag-trade queen. Sold himself for money, for that was what the little bastard had done, and into just that sort of impossible screaming world that was too much to stomach. Leaving poor old presentable repressed Hamo probably too frightened to have even the odd wank.

  Nevertheless it was curious that Hamo had continued to see them for all these years, nine or ten; sitting there, saying nothing. Zoe seemed to like it, encouraged it. Maternal feelings, no doubt, or . . . Feeling at last that he was getting somewhere, he threw his overcoat over the chair-back, poured out a whisky and sat relaxed in the quiet of his study to let a new shape compose itself. “Sitting in her drawing-room, surrounded by her taste, Jack felt stifled. Bugger them, why couldn’t they keep their flabby camp fo
r their country cottages and garden paths? . . . By the very smell of the house, he was sunk in a dismal torpor from which Honey’s high, smart voice awakened him, ‘Darling, do you have to sit about like a manic-depressive? I mean it’s not exactly what one wants to find at home after a fascinating evening.’ ” Yes, that was the right tone for Honey—hard, moneyed, and a bit socially uncertain. And Jack always a trier—“ ‘Sorry, darling. Where was the wonderful evening spent?’ ‘Oh, with Freddy Roe and his new boy-friend. He’s rather enchanting . . .’ It was the tone; Jack knew it so well—the over-emphasis on the boy-friend. Suddenly everything snapped into place; watch the birdie, it’s cuckoo; and, hey presto, Ladies and Gentlemen, you have your picture. And a very dirty picture too—what the modern butler saw.”

  Perry glowed with creative self-satisfaction, you could call it nothing else, for here it was—Seasmell Terrace, but it now took in the sort of view of the sea that the reader of today was looking for. A nasty dead fish pong it gave off, too. Their Fellini unisex decadent world. Sterility. Yes. That could be the dénouement of the scene, when Jack cleared out, telling Honey where she could stuff it, all her worldly goods, including her poove lover. A very unjokey Jack would face her with it, one that she would hardly recognize as the poor old fireside Tom she’d castrated with her cash. “ ‘It doesn’t shock me. It just depresses me. It’s so anti-life and so boring. You take a thing that’s about as good as anything that exists—the pleasure that a man and a woman can give each other with their bodies.’ ” Steady on here—no Lawrence crap; avoid bodies. “ ‘A man and woman making love, and you play nursery games with it. Pansy petting, for that’s all it’ll be. A lot of titillating, tit-touching is as far as it can go. You dressed up as mummy or nursie . . .’ ” And then, surely reasonably, or so the reader must be made to see, all Jack’s bitterness would well up, thinking of where he had come to in his long climb up the hill above his station. He would break out, “ ‘Well, one thing, good old Freddy’ll never plough deep enough to find he’s bought sterile land.’ ” And Jack’d leave Honey’s flat, glad at last to have shed all the fake gentlemanliness he’d acquired in these years since Seasmell Terrace, glad he could kick a woman in the cunt again when she deserved it, throwing their childless marriage right back at her barren belly where it belonged.