by Angus Wilson
Alexandra glimpsed the cromlechs as she was jolted down from hospital to the communal beach in a car hired and paid for by Elinor’s mum, old Thelma. She registered it, in that glimpse, as a sort of Stonehengey thing, but her intense bliss both in herself, and, if she could ever separate them, more still in herself and Oliver together, did not allow any external objects to impinge on her for more than a second or two.
A few more miles, but to the south-east of the sand space she now occupied (with the fiercest pecking if her rights had ever been threatened, but given the flux and muddle of the Community as well as its deeply self-centred peace, they never were), lay the Garden of the Hesperides, orchard of the Golden Apples, according to that source of all ancient knowledge, Hesiod. Of this, Alexandra was more aware, for she passed it within view on her frequent, stifling, crowded, roller-coaster bus journeys to spend the night in Elinor’s unoccupied room in Thelma’s hotel at Larache. And these bus trips became increasingly frequent as the ever-colder nights threatened her and more still Oliver with the stenches and noise of the half-ruined ex-Spanish colonial shore fort and barracks where the Community sought refuge from the cold and wind and rain. She saw the Garden of the Hesperides and registered it as a kind of dreary marshland sort of place. If it remained with her at all it was as one of the few distresses of her wonderful existence, for she had seen there a tall chocolate-coloured camel seeking, with hobbled front legs, clumsily to reach her delicate cream-coloured calf that had stumbled and fallen. She certainly had no thought of its being the Garden of the Golden Age—all the golden ages were inside herself or in the movements and cries of little Oliver as she watched him sleep and yawn, feed and sleep, cry and play. Surrounded by those still seeking for nirvana and Utopia, ecstasy and bliss, she alone seemed to have arrived.
In fact, there was something else that possessed her, day and night, as she lay on her own special private piece of the beach that the Community had succeeded over the years against sporadic police raids in making its own. It followed her even to the various public beaches where, clothing her body, she (often with Rodrigo) sought refuge from Communal peace. It stayed with her in the assiduously scoured and swept, bare stone rooms of the barracks refuge which nonetheless stank, in their draught-ridden fug of pot and steaming clothes and orange-peel and sweat. It echoed above the sound of guitars and of mantras. It was there on the rickety brass-knobbed bed in the little Larache hotel room which still wore its “style jazz” wall-paper and fabrics of its nineteen-twenties beginnings. That other thing was the sea.
For hours—often as she later realized, when she had believed that she was intently feasting on the kicking, naked Oliver—she had gazed at the ocean. Its glossy swell was directly in her eye-line, a mirror flecked and stained with floating seaweed masses. Its smooth surface would swell at last to burst into white spume over the shingly ridge of shells that rimmed the edge of the sand. And, as it burst, it would fling the tangled slimy seaweed masses upon the dark wet sand; and, as often, gather them again to float and bob away out to sea. Hours of gazing at the ocean, hours more of hearing its perpetual slop, slop, slop and sudden surge, its slop, slop and sudden surge, its slop, slop . . . until the whole of her gentle, sweet daily round of life with her baby was taken up with the rhythm of the sea.
With Oliver well within range, safely sleeping or lying soothed or happily kicking in his carry-cot, she joined each day in Ned’s mime sessions on the sands. The steps and rhythms were for ever changing as he heroically sought to improvise new mimes to instil his shaped visions into the fluctuating, coupling, fusing muddle of carefully cultivated individual innernesses that called itself the Community. But, for Alexandra, Ned’s steps and rhythms, like everything else, became part of the rhythm of the sea. She knew that though she danced a giraffe, or a swinging girder, or a river, at Ned’s bidding, she did it deep down, no longer as a Trilby in search of an heroic Svengali, but merely as part of mothercraft; not as the act of human community that Ned sought to instil, but as an exercise demanded by sensible voices from outside the Community’s limits—Zoe’s, the Clinic’s, even Thelma’s whisky-sour rasp. The more that she saw Elinor seeking to turn Ned’s mimes into yoga and incidentally to dissolve Ned’s heroic ego, the more she herself participated in the rituals with a determined sense that she was any welfare mother doing the proper thing. And yet, in some part of her still, she could feel herself a spectator of the tournament she had long ago devised—the proving of her hero. In this remote emotional region, she still hoped that Ned’s strength of will, sense of form, sweet determinedness would rout both her and Elinor and mould them to the shape he wanted, so that in him she could recognize and crown her knight. But even the touch of self-mockery with which she voiced such thoughts evaporated in the general joy of her daily life. The hero-search was so far away that it needed no laughing self-correction. The mime was no more than one of the happy daily chores in her idyllic life, as they rocked back and forth (she and Oliver), for she was, they were the sea, and her life was its smooth unceasing rhythm.
A rhythm broken but never shattered by the heavy seaweeds that, clotted and tangled, were thrown out and sucked back. As, to begin with: 333—the secret name they had always given to their Birkin-Ursula-Gerald tripling.
The 333 trouble with Elinor had always loomed in the distance, but then finally broke one evening soon after she had returned from hospital in Tangier. She had fed Oliver. He was sleeping. The sand was still hot, almost too hot for her naked body in the evenings. She lay murmuring happily to Ned and Rodrigo about the hospital, what she could remember of it, that was, for just like people always said it was fading very quickly.
Ned said, “I believe you had an ecstasy!”
But Rodrigo told him “not to be obscene”. “You know perfectly well something nearly got torn. Don’t let him make you sing a hymn to disgusting Nature, Ally.”
But she told him, “Yes, it was very wonderful.”
“Christ!” from Rodrigo.
“Well, I mean I don’t know what word to use. And anyhow, how can you remember what ‘wonderful’ means? But I think that’s what it was. And horrible and painful too. Only I never felt miserable, I mean, angry. Except when I told the nuns my thighs were hurting and they said they couldn’t be, that wasn’t where the pains came from.”
“How could you know what they said? You don’t know any Spanish.”
“Thelma told me.”
“How does she know?”
“Lots of Americans learn Spanish, it seems. Especially in California where she comes from. And then she was in Mexico. To take evidence about Trotsky.”
“That can’t have pleased the nuns.”
“I don’t think they really understood. And then you see she was at a convent as a girl. Apparently no matter how much they lapse, Roman Catholics keep a thing about the sacraments. And so she agreed with the nuns about Oliver’s being baptized. And they forgave her about Trotsky. Anyway, she’d only let it out to them in one of her whisky bouts.”
Rodrigo said, “I can’t think it was good for you to have a Mrs. Gamp for your lying-in. Even a wealthy American Trotskyite one. What would your mother say?”
“It was Thelma who wrote to Mama to tell her about Oliver. I was pleased though I had forbidden it. And anyway even when she was a bit maundering, all that about Trotsky and Charlie Chaplin and McCarthy the devil incarnate made a sort of humming distraction when the pain was bad. Like when he nearly tore something because his head was so big. It is, isn’t it? And she held my hand. All the time. No one else did.”
“No one else was allowed.”
“No, Roddy. J couldn’t choose between you two, could I. And then to have both of you! After all my body was being torn in two as it was . . .”
“Elinor, like, would have been there, but she has this thing about blood. She knows it’s shameful. It’s the worst for her. I mean to achieve this peace she’s after and then to find shit and piss and blood and that won’t leave her mind.”
When Alexandra saw that there was no trace of smile as Ned said such things, she had to tense her muscles not to shout at him.
She said, “Elinor said ‘The pain rhythms work along with the fruition and in a proper birth they cancel each other out into non-being.’ That’s what she said. It was sent as a message of comfort for me. Thelma told me. And we both laughed so much the nuns stopped us as it might have split something.”
Rodrigo began kissing her hair, her eyes, the tip of her nose, all little brushes of his lips that changed to a delicious biting.
“Darling Ally, I do love you when you still hate people.”
She put out her hand and stroked Ned’s belly.
“Does it hurt being so red?”
“I like it,” he mumbled and ran his hand down her thighs. But when Rodrigo tried to move her head down towards his prick, “No, no. I’m sorry. Only just tenderness. I can’t think my way into anything completely. I’m sorry, Birkin and Gerald! I can see how shameful it is for you both. But you must accept it for now.”
And tenderness it remained. So much so that for the first time for months, since that happiness had first swept over her when she knew, for sure, that she would have the baby, Alexandra felt as though she could make some contact outside the swelling sea, with the seaweed . . . when she thought what that made Ned and Rodrigo, she began to laugh.
“Flotsam,” she said. And they began to tickle her to make her tell.
But a lengthy shadow had fallen upon them and as suddenly fell away again. There was Elinor, reclining on the sand in front of them, her elbow resting on the sand. She fell into such postures very quickly because of all the spiritual exercises she did. And she fell into them often. So often that, though there was so much of her, one usually did not notice her sudden crouches, her wild leaps, by now. Even when, as now, she was dressed in some diaphanous tulle kind of a long garment somewhere between something Arab and something Eastern and something in those Art Nouveau posters and postcards that had got so boring. Usually when she reclined like that, as though an odalisque or a caryatid were lying sideways, she quizzed you with deep gentleness in her large grey eyes. And, thought Alexandra, you knew that what she was aiming at was to look lovely, and intolerably she usually did look so. But this time she stared at their three naked bodies as though she were looking at a Cubist picture and trying to make out which were legs and which were arms and which were heads in the formal shape. Clearly the picture disappointed her. Stretching out her long plump arm, she traced with one long slender finger “333” in the smooth sand. Alexandra was filled with anger at Ned’s betrayal of their secret sign, such anger that she could not speak.
“So this is the famous tripling,” Elinor said, and leaning back her lovely head so that they could see the lines of her long lovely throat, she let out a coloratura of stage mocking laughter. “No, thank you, Ned. No thank you, so very much. We won’t make it a quartet. Birkin can have his Ursula and her Gerald; but not Gudrun. She doesn’t play. I just don’t reckon to being a babe in the wood. Not even to play such an innocent Wordsworthian game on Mr. Lawrence’s grave and have the pleasure of feeling him turn over under me. Poor boob! It was fine, fine of you to ask me,” as she could always do to order, she exaggerated mockingly her own usual earnest tone, “but I guess I’m too tall a girl.”
Alexandra determinedly continued to stroke Ned’s reddish matted belly, and buried her face for sheer misery in Rodrigo’s armpit.
It must have been some look of Elinor’s that whipped him, for the next that Alexandra knew was that his smooth, elegant body had slipped from under her. At Elinor’s cry, she looked up and there, as he crouched over the long body showing white beneath the transparent grey blue tulle (Elinor never lay in the sun), all the little notches of his backbone, that Alexandra had so often counted, showed in bumps through the smooth golden brown pastry skin of his tautened back. He had plunged his long powerful fingers into that Raphael Madonna’s calm softness and, with the long black strands of her hair as levers, he was beating that great gentle head backwards and forwards against the hard-baked sand, so that tears were flowing from those great grey eyes, wetting those long black lashes, falling down those beautifully structured high cheek-bones to moisten those firm full lips that were opened unusually wide to let out such screams. Alexandra knew that she did not care twopence for Elinor’s pain. Madonna turned to “cow in pain”, for that’s what those great Zen eyes spoke of—a cow’s vacuity. She knew that she was indifferent. She was not ashamed that she might even be glad. She only feared that the noise might awaken Oliver.
Sensing the anger that was filling Ned by the tautening of his stomach muscles, she tried to restrain him, saying, “No, Ned, no. Of course, Roddy hates her. He must do. We don’t blame you. She got you to tell. She’s indecent.”
But he pushed her arm away, and leaping on Rodrigo, he caught his throat in the crook of his arm and pulled him back from Elinor so abruptly that a bone snapped somewhere. Rodrigo screamed with the pain. At once they were rolling and struggling together in one of the worst of their fights.
Elinor rose to her feet. She was Hecuba by the waves, a Beardsley Cassandra, her hair streaming down her shoulders, her tulle torn, one smooth white breast caught in the golden sunset. Alexandra fed her disgust by thinking, she’s a vulgar tele-ad. But now this tall girl was kneeling down before her and crying to her.
“Stop them! Stop them! Oh, Ned, please, please, leave me alone. You’re making all my life ridiculous.” She turned on Alexandra. “You think I’m just some common fraud, don’t you? I’m not. It’s his weakness making me. He’s so vulnerable. He makes me will things. And I’ve worked so hard to be rid of all this will. Oh, let me be, all of you. You’ve made me act jealously, like a sour old maid. Don’t you understand how difficult it is for someone like me not to be absurd.”
That Elinor had such insight and such honesty about herself was unbearable to Alexandra. And to stoke her anger, Oliver had been woken by the noise and was crying that desperate cry that she had always feared from the memory of other babies. A cry of fright that he had never uttered before.
She pushed Elinor away from her so that the great graceful figure rolled clumsily across the sand.
“Get out, you silly cunt. And you two, go to hell. I won’t have my baby mixed up with all this stupid emotional rubbish.”
Rodrigo and Elinor stood side by side on the sand, shamefaced, their arms dangling, like two mental patients on a seaside outing, waiting to be snapped. But Ned had gone over to the carry-cot and within seconds, as always with Ned, the tiny fingers were playing among the hairs of his beard and Oliver was chuckling.
Elinor started to sob and then to hiccough, and then, in shame, ran off across the sands.
Rodrigo said bitterly, “I’d better not go near him or he’ll start to scream again.”
But Alexandra was determined that, with her baby’s fear gone, it should all come to an end, so she turned her face away from Rodrigo’s misery.
That 333 incident was only the first smack, smack of the seaweed, which broke the gentle rhythm of her life, but most of the time this rhythm itself was punctuated by another less violent yet teasing sound, just as the sea met regularly not only the sudden full stops of the seaweed, but also the commas of the shingle.
For many hours of the day, voices from the Community talked at Alexandra, though only from time to time did they break through the sea-spell that lay upon her, cradled with her baby in a soothing world of chorus. When they did, they meant little to her—hardly more, she supposed, than the rustling of the shingle meant to the sea. The voices were always young, mostly male; but the accents changed and changed again, so many American, and European in all Western varieties to season, but even then the phrases seemed to Alexandra a kind of American. The bodies that lay naked beside her were scorched all shades from pink to near black, mostly male, mostly bearded or whiskered, always skeleton thin.
Most of the sound was reminiscent an
d content—“I need not have bothered, within a month everything was happening everywhere” . . . “That was the good time. We were just making love—making love with God, making love with ourselves, making love with women. Yeah, 1964 through 1966 was the good time, look at it anyways!” . . . “Quite a lot of us about had got fed up with plastic. So we started to play it differently” . . . “We were kids. We dropped some L.S.D., sat around, giggled and watched the wall-paper do funny things” . . . “Y’know, like it wasn’t happening any other place the same” . . . “Often here I’m so full with something that’s happened between them and me that it’s like I’m on a trip, had a mind click that’s all good” . . . “So we lit up and watched the scenery go by through the elevated clarity of a good high” . . .
But sometimes the reminiscence moaned sadly—“He was the first guy I ever balled with. In a back seat. The whole bit. Stoned and drunk. Do you think it ought to start that way?” . . . “She knew just where I was, but I couldn’t tune her in at all” . . . “I was sixteen years old, right? A knight in shining armour, huh?” . . . “So what did they have to offer me but words. Words is the biggest hang-up of them all” . . . “So they told me, man, it’s in your head and it’s two billion years old and it’s got every control switch that I.B.M. ever thought of and a million more. But every time I tried to get my fingers on that switch, I just crashed.”
Once, Louise, a white-faced, ill-looking girl (who wasn’t a girl any more, but twenty-seven) with a sad, yellow, creased little body and shrivelled paps that her swollen-stomached baby turned away from, screaming, voiced a general lament. “Why can’t they love us? We aren’t up to putting anyone down about anything.” She was probably speaking of the Moroccan fishermen who the day before, as Alexandra, through her swell of bliss, vaguely learned, had thrown stones at four members of the Community straying inadvertently and naked outside their conquered stretch of sand. But it sounded like a general lament about humanity.