As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  “I think we’ll just rumple the other beds. At least, I shall. I don’t feel at all like sleep. We’ll have to wake Ned before five. It seems that’s when Spanish peasants rise. Or, at any rate, Concepcion. And I don’t think she should know we’ve used Their bed. Oh! I am hungry. I’ll just rumple and then I’ll fry eggs and bacon.”

  “Do I look nicer naked or in my grey suede?”

  “Both. But I do wish you’d asked me that question first. Oh, I know there aren’t special questions for girls and for men. I didn’t really mean all that. I meant just a special question for me.”

  Rodrigo kissed her all over her breasts and her belly and down her arms. “I’ll dress,” he said.

  It was while she was breaking the eggs into cups and singing tunelessly “Green Apples” that Rodrigo put his painted face round the door and made a Japanese warrior’s grimace, all teeth bared Noh-play style. He had put on Zoe’s kimono and painted his eyelids and cheeks with her silver eyeshade. He advanced towards Alexandra with great bounds, hissing, with his arms held stiffly curved above his head. She retreated from him and, pressing her back to the sink, she began to scream. This time Rodrigo did not kiss her, he shook her.

  “Oh, shut up, for God’s sake! You’re not in the bloody mime now.” Then, taking her by the arms, gently, he asked contritely, “Was it the faces? I’m sorry.”

  “No, no. Not that. Just all these theatricals. It was phoney, suddenly. The kick I got, we got, out of doing it in Their bed.”

  “Proust gave his beloved mother’s chairs to a brothel.”

  “Proust was an asthmatic old homosexual with cork legs. And I’m not.”

  “Not legs. Walls.”

  “Cork balls! Poor thing! The blessing you don’t have those. But I should think Ned’ll end with them. Shall I do fried bread?”

  They were eating greedily, when Alexandra said, “It didn’t feel any different. Of course, it wouldn’t. But somehow it does seem extraordinary, when it’s said by everyone to be so important, that it shouldn’t. I shall tell Ned what absolute nonsense all his stuff about natural union is. At least for the woman.”

  Rodrigo dropped his knife onto the Delft tiled floor. When he climbed back onto his high stool, his hand was shaking.

  “Alexandra, you didn’t take all that nonsense we talked last week seriously?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I shan’t bother you with it, if it goes wrong. I meant it for Ned anyway, but of course . . . Chiefly it was, I thought we oughtn’t to talk so much and never do any of the things. I mean if play’s as serious as that, and if the pill is really a false chemical interference with the way things should be, as Ned said . . . And you agreed, you know. Or pretty well . . .”

  “Oh, Alexandra, you’re going to be such a terrible self-punisher. Hugging all this innocence. I’m sure of it, now I’ve seen your mother in full action,”

  “Mama! Then she’s put it over you. She’s indulgence itself. You realize I’m the only little unwanted one just because she found having me so hard and so she wouldn’t do it again. At least I might have had a little unwanted sister. Or even better, two, then we could have made a group like the Supremes.”

  Rodrigo licked the last of the egg off his knife. He got up. He was shivering slightly.

  “I’ll go and dress. It’ll be all right, of course. But you should have been honest with me.”

  Alexandra was on the point of weeping. “But you enjoyed it. We both did. And you were lucky. I have told you it was meant for Ned.”

  When he came back he was more than usual his svelte self. “I’ll take a taxi to Wilton Crescent and get the M.G. out of the garage. No one will be up yet. We can drive by way of the van. I know exactly where we left it—not half a mile from the café where we picked up the lorry. We can arrange to have it towed away later and pick up the essential props Ned wants now. It was so awful for him skidding. That’s why he came too soon. Poor Ned! We mustn’t be late for his rehearsal, whatever happens.”

  “Stop patronizing. He always comes too soon and goes to sleep like that. And you know it. Birkin indeed! He’s more like the dormouse. He ought to be between us, if that made sense. Then we could put him in a tea-pot. That would complete our happy, whimsical, little Mad Hatter’s breakfast in bed.”

  “Oh shut up, for God’s sake. I don’t know whether to quote adulterous Aunt Rosemary to you—‘Inquests are terribly bad form,’ or my mother, ‘It never does to be bitter.’ ”

  “And don’t you be so grand and worldly. You don’t have to be frightened. I’ve told you I shouldn’t dream of worrying you if anything went wrong.”

  “Oh that isn’t it. It won’t, I’m sure. And if it did, we could work out the answer. And I should do my part as well as I must, I suppose. No, it’s Sauron thoughts.”

  “Well then, you must tell. That’s part of the bargain. If we do this and we feel it’s a game of significance, then all Sauron’s dark thoughts must be declared. Otherwise we Hobbits are done for.”

  “All right. When you told me, I got a hard just thinking how defenceless you were. And I suppose also because it had been in my power. I am beginning to wonder whether the game-playing doesn’t lead to thinking too nastily. Nastiness is always second-rate.”

  She climbed off her stool, went up to him, and retied the lemon tulle. She kissed his nose.

  “Don’t talk so much. It’s bad. Just look pretty.”

  “I know. Like I said my aunt says, ‘Inquests are bad form.’ And she ought to know. She was the guilty party in four divorces.”

  But now came Ned, an honest, travel-stained, hobnailed old Hobbit dressed for the road. “Where’s my egg?”

  “You’ve got your own brown rice stuff. You must have some relation to your preaching.”

  “Yes,” said Rodrigo, “devouring pounded goose livers last night like Moloch! Now I think of it, I expect Moloch was covered in red coconut fibre round his lustful brass mouth. A randy orang-utan.”

  Ned pulled Rodrigo from the high stool and began to force him towards the floor, but Rodrigo was fully awake and reacted too quickly for Ned. He freed himself sharply and got back on the stool, smoothing his ruffled clothes, saying, “After your premature performance last night, you lack Birkin’s magic.”

  Immediately Alexandra sprang to the attack. “He’s only talking like that, Ned, because he thinks he used me like a machine. Well let me tell you, Gerald Crich, it was a fluke. The machine was intended for Ned. Let’s do the mime, Ned.” And they quickly excluded Rodrigo from their practice steps.

  He left petulantly to fetch the M.G. But his pleasure on his return was considerable.

  “I’ve borrowed Father’s Bentley which will get Chauffy into trouble. But he’s such a servile man. The M.G. would have done just as well. I do think that makes my action genuinely wilful.”

  “Baudelaire balls,” Ned said; and Alexandra, “Elekhamin, Sabaoth and all your brood, come to me.” And they continued their exclusive steps, keeping Rodrigo waiting.

  Yet, as they drove up the A.1 in search of the skidded van, it was Rodrigo and Ned who, in animated exchange about Nashe’s hero Jack Wilton, kept Alexandra out, for she hadn’t taken “the genesis of the novel”.

  Book Two

  The Journeys

  Alexandra in search of a hero;

  Hamo in search of a dream-youth

  ELINOR put her shapely arms out from the fringe of her kaftan across the table towards Ned, her bangles clashing on the deal table. “But Ned, I’m not suggesting that Lawrence wasn’t making the right search. You know that. Nobody, I should think, saw through the false values more completely. But this thing he put on top of it all, this so-called answer, this shared maleness that Birkin seeks of Gerald, this hardness of will beneath Birkin’s so-called love. It terrifies me. Not like he thought it would, when he gets a kick out of bullying poor neurotics like Hermione, but because of its insufficiency, its awful capitulation to a doing, making, power civilization. Oh, I know the power was to be his,
to use from ‘the true dark centre of life’ and all that, but to preserve this hardness of will and this being! How could he hope to get there? All this male blood-brothership and so on, like some Bedouin, like the other poor Lawrence, B.E. and C.G. or whatever. And yet this Lawrence had real sensitivity, real empathy; we know it. Look at his animal poems. And he clung to the will! It’s unbelievable. And he talked of founding a community! Can you imagine a vihare or an ashram with that lust for will let loose in it? It’s all this pride he pleads for. It destroys all his intuitive love. As if Dostoevsky hadn’t created Myshkin around half a century before.”

  “Birkin fails, y’know.” Ned was on the defensive.

  Alexandra felt as though she must spring at him and kill him, or, more likely, dissolve into the hopeless crying that was so near anyway nowadays. To boast of Birkin’s failure to make a real relationship with Gerald, to excuse Lawrence because of it, when the whole of their tripling, the whole of their secret 333—Rodrigo-herself-Ned—was to show that Birkin need not have failed, that Lawrence was wrong, that the old hard lines of man/woman could be dissolved into man/woman/man or into every combination of love you could think of. And Ned was denying it just for this awful pretentious, false, spiritual Elinor person!

  “Oh! if it’s failure that is the sign of sanctity,” the awful Elinor person said, raising her well-structured head on its long Pre-Raphaelite neck, “Dostoevsky’s divine idiot wins every time—a rare Chinese porcelain smashed to fragments, Aglaya married lovelessly to a Pole!—think of what that meant for Dostoevsky—a prostitute murdered in her own blood with a fly buzzing round her head, and Myshkin himself at the end, a babbling idiot. Oh yes, if failure was the answer, Myshkin has it over Birkin every time. Failure’s no good, Ned, it’s just as concrete and material and choking as success. Myshkin’s divine idiocy has something more than that, a surrender, a comic dissolution of the self that at least looks on towards non-being.”

  The awful sweetness of Elinor’s high-class American accent brought Alexandra near to screaming point. She looked desperately towards Ned for a refutation, she hoped a fierce, overwhelming refutation, but, at any rate a refutation. He looked quizzically at Elinor for a moment. “If she’s got a paper-weight, take it away from her, somebody,” he said. Burying his head in his arms, he appeared to go to sleep.

  “Oh, no!” Elinor cried. “Not British humour!”

  Alexandra kept her eye on Elinor’s plump arm, and, stubbing her half-smoked cigarette out in one of the many boot-polish tin lids on the seminar table, she felt it burn deep into that too smooth flesh.

  Rodrigo, sensing her anguish, said in his most drawling voice, “Elinor’s right. The divine idiot as hero is rather important. It’s an English invention, of course. Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller! Bertie Wooster and Jeeves! A class function where the servants do the thinking, and the aristocratic idiots offer the sainthood of elegance. Dostoevsky didn’t understand any of that, of course. But then, foreigners wouldn’t.”

  “And Don Quixote?” Elinor asked, trying not to be aware of the laughter Rodrigo’s English clown act had aroused among the seminar.

  “Oh, a sentimental primitivism that the English later put right! We English gave the knight’s sanctity a polished finish, and the clown’s knowingness a hardness of wit that make the ethical whole something uniquely our own.”

  But his last words were drowned by the voices and the clatter of feet outside, as seminars in rooms along the corridor came to their end. Their tutor, who had detected some note of private purpose in these last minutes of her students’ interchange, led the way out, for she disliked above all any involvement with her students’ private lives.

  As the dying sun cast for a few minutes a muddy pinkish light on the debris-strewn table, there was a gathering of coats and baskets and scarves. Alexandra lit a fresh cigarette, but otherwise she remained seated at the table, oblivious of all the movement around her. Ned lifted his head from his arms and, seeing her expression, buried it again. Rodrigo hovered behind her. Elinor stood by the open door.

  “I’ve had a letter from the Community, Ned,” she told him, “they say that they surely want the mime. We could meet up with them in Morocco around July. Or go straight to Goa in August.”

  Alexandra turned towards the door.

  “Will you let us know your agent’s fee,” she asked, “then we can consider the offer. We have a lot of other possible bookings.” Her tone made it impossible to take her remark as a joke.

  “Oh, God!” Elinor cried in protest.

  Ned raised his face from the table. “Please go, Elinor, will you?”

  Rodrigo added very politely, “I really think it would be better, if you please. After all you have your thesis. Crashaw, isn’t it? Or one of the metaphysicals. Anyway far too spiritual-brideish to be bothered with us.”

  But Elinor had something still to say before she left them.

  “If you would let me, I think I could help you,” she said to Alexandra, “but I can’t until you’ve relaxed that hard, self-torturing will of yours.” Then she was gone.

  Alexandra began to cry until she was hiccoughing with sobs. The absurd sound made her giggle. A laughing gleam came into her eyes. The men saw it through the large tear-drops that fell from her long lashes. It seemed to them like sunshine through rain; it gave them a conventional, sentimental sense that all was better, that she was happier, that the disagreeable black clouds of her misery and their own consequent sense of guilt were rolling away. They visibly relaxed. Ned sat up and began to clean his nails; Rodrigo lit a cigarette and sat down.

  “Ally’s right. She really is a most awful bitch, Ned.”

  “No she’s not. She has a thing of her own that’s quite, you know, something. And, too, she really knows all the stuff that she’s rejected. She’s not just a half-baked flower child.”

  “Well, my little dandy piece made her furious. And I’m very pleased. Anyway, fuck her!” Putting all else aside, he came and crouched on his haunches at Alexandra’s side, looking up at her with a half-pleading, half-sharing smile. “It’ll be quite all right, Ally, you’re not to worry. It’ll be easy enough to arrange. Although, of course, we know it all ought to be much easier. And it won’t be sordid like in books. Not nowadays. Anyway you don’t have to decide about it yet. I know at least three contacts . . .”

  But Ned, who was stroking Alexandra’s hand, said, “Shut up, Rodrigo. You know, either of us, we’ll be happy to be father, if that’s what you want. There won’t be any, like, awful tests or doctors interfering. It’s part of you. And the way we’ve been, you’re part of us. So you choose.”

  “You mustn’t listen to anybody but yourself,” Rodrigo followed up, and he touched Alexandra’s waist in a special sign they had of loving Ned but not telling him things.

  “Or if you don’t want a father, well . . . Think what an advantage, y’know, like it’ll grow up in the new world, in a community. It could be one of the first never to have been fussed with all the usual bourgeois crap.”

  Ned was growing lyrical, when Alexandra withdrew her hand.

  “Yes,” she said, “I shall do exactly what I decide. Stupid, weak girls who let themselves be used have that advantage. After all they’ve been done wrong. And you did, you know, take advantage of my weakness, of my being silly and randy and sentimental. You took advantage—you, Ned, with your big invasive ideas, and you, Rodrigo, with your big invasive prick.”

  The two young men looked away from her. In all their triplings, she had used the basic words only tenderly; and they had used them in this brutal way, on occasion, in a little side game they had of speaking of her body coarsely to one another as she lay naked between them. The game was spoiled. Rodrigo voiced it.

  “Then the Fellowship of the Ring is at an end,” he said, trying with mockery to lighten the atmosphere.

  “Oh, no,” Alexandra told them, “just because you’ve been weak and silly and let yourself be used, doesn’t mean that you cease to want your
users. At least I don’t think so. I don’t feel any different towards either of you. Why should I? I mean you aren’t different because Ned urged me not to take the pill and Rodrigo fucked me when I hadn’t. It’s just that we aren’t protected by magic. And, of course, I knew we weren’t, but our game seemed so important that it made me feel we were different. And I think I want to go on playing it. What else is there to do? But now I can’t tell, because now I’m different from what I was. So there’s only one thing that’s definite: I shall decide now. If I want your help I shall tell you. If I don’t have the baby that is. But I expect I shall. And then I may not want you at all. Which would be the better father? I don’t know. I must think about it. Ned the putative, Rodrigo the real. I don’t know.”

  Rodrigo said, “All right, Ally. But you never warned me, you know.”

  “No, you were used. I think we all were. But I’m the user now.”

  “If it’s not to be a bourgeois thing, if we could live in a community, I should, y’know, like it. Being a father, I mean.”

  “Yes, Ned, perhaps you would. But we shall see. I’ll decide and I’ll let you know.”

  She thought she saw that they were frightened and she had expected to be pleased, but their fright only seemed a further evidence that the game time was probably over. It made her sad. She had to grip the sides of her hard wooden slatted chair to prevent herself feeling for them both. Then she saw a sullen look forming in Ned’s eyes, and Rodrigo’s jaw setting in a hard line, and her softness went from her.

  “I could take you both to that Singhalese place in Market Street,” Rodrigo suggested. “You could have those hopper things with a fried egg that you like, Ally.”

  “Or,” Ned took over, “if you don’t want the fuss of people, we could cook a tin of spaghetti on my ring. I’ve got some rosé.”

  She said, “Treating me now won’t undo the way I’ve been treated. Anyway I won’t be with you much until I’ve decided. Loving people and admiring what they say, or liking their bodies, makes me too weak to find out if I’ve got a mind. So you’d better leave me alone until the term’s over.”