As Far as You Can Go (7 page)

“Hit her well on the port side,” said Harold as they neared the end of the game. Belsen grimaced, and missed the shot.
“I think we might consider an appeal against the light soon, don’t you?” he said.

“But we’re losing,” said Harold.

“All the more sporting.”

Mr Barlow hit Harold neatly into a clump of irises. “Want to give in?” he said, putting himself through the hoop and aiming towards Belsen.

“Certainly not,” said Harold.

Belsen’s ball disappeared towards the rose-garden.

“If you’d done what I told you,” said Harold, amiably, “we should now be well ahead. As it is, it’s going to be rather tough. You’d better try and find your ball before it gets too dark to see.”

Belsen stalked off, and tripped over a hoop.

“All right?” said Mr Barlow.

“Yes, thank you.” Belsen vanished into the gathering night.

“Where’s Mrs Crawshaw?” said Harold.

“I’m here,” said a voice from the rose-garden. “Is it my turn yet?”

“Not yet,” called Mr Barlow.

“Well, we got those two together, anyway,” said Harold to his father. He hit his ball as hard as he could at the
silhouette
of Belsen at the other end of the lawn.

“Ouch!” said Mrs Crawshaw.

“Sorry! Just coming over to join my partner.”

“I say, are you all right, Dolly?”

“I think so, Jack. Is it my turn?”

“Yes, your turn.”

The game dwindled into total darkness, and Mr Barlow reluctantly suggested they should all go in. When they came into the light, it was noticeable that Mrs Crawshaw was limping.

“I’m most awfully sorry,” said Harold. “I do hope you aren’t badly hurt. I was trying to hit the Captain.”

A few minutes later the brother and sister went home in their Hillman Minx.

“What’s that man’s name?” said Harold, after they’d gone.

“Belling. I say, you shouldn’t have made all those remarks about port and starboard, he was Fleet Air Arm, not Navy proper.”

“But he kept talking about the Navy.”

“I know. Not your fault. I don’t think much of him, do you? Not surprised they didn’t make him an admiral.”

“Do you think that’s really his sister?”

“My dear boy, what can you mean?”

“I think he’s right,” said Mrs Barlow. “I think they’re a very fishy pair. I don’t think we need ask them again, do you, Roger?”

“I say, in Peterham, too.”

“They obviously don’t like the place,” said Mrs Barlow. “I can’t think why people come to the country if they don’t like it. I suppose being at sea you get a romantic idea of what it’s like.”

“He wasn’t in the proper Navy. I was telling Harold. He was in the Fleet Air Arm.”

“Oh dear, I did get it wrong, then.”

“I suppose the Fleet Air Arm is one better than the R.A.F., but only just. I wonder if that really is his sister.”

“I think she is,” said Harold, “and that they’re living in sin, as Mummy calls it.”

“Really, Harold.”

“Harold, you shouldn’t go round saying things like that, you could get yourself into trouble. Why do you think it, anyway?”

“It would be more interesting that way, wouldn’t it?”

“If I thought you were right, I’d never have them in the house again.”

“Suits me,” said Harold.

His father gave him a wary look. “Well, we’ll have to
think about all that. I must say, the thought had never entered my head.”

“Nor mine,” said Mrs Barlow. “Nor will it again, unless they ask us back. I don’t care for them at all, do you? I think there’s something rather common about her, in
particular
. And he’s rather rude, I thought. I can’t see why people come to the country if they don’t like country life.”

“Oh, well, if he was in the Fleet Air Arm,” said Mr Barlow.

“Snob,” said Harold. “I’m going to bed. Good night.”

“Good night, my boy.”

“Good night, dear. There’s an extra blanket in the airing cupboard if you think you’ll be cold.”

“I shan’t need it, I don’t expect. But thanks all the same. Good night.”

“Good night.” Harold could hear her returning to her theme as she went upstairs. “Why
do
people like that want to come and live in a quiet little place like Peterham?”

“Well,” said his father, “if you and Harold are right about them, I dare say they want a little privacy.”

Harold had a bath and went to bed. He read a few pages of a book Dennis Moreland had lent him. It was about
literature
and politics, and didn’t seem to be in favour of either. He threw it at a chair and missed, turned out the light and went to sleep.

In the morning he avoided his father till after he had set off for church. Harold never went to church, but his father tried to make him accompany him every Sunday. It wasn’t, Harold decided, that he hoped to convert him, simply that he wanted someone to sit beside him. Mr Barlow went purely out of a sense of duty, since the vicar had been a friend of his father’s.

Harold got through the two serious papers in a quarter of an hour, then settled down to the
News
of
the
World.
There was a father of two who had strangled a little girl after
committing
a serious offence against her. The judge said it was
the most revolting case he had ever heard of. He couldn’t have been reading the papers, then, Harold thought. Mr Barlow came back from church while Harold was in the middle of an article about provincial girls being lured to London under false pretences.

“Good sermon?”

“What? Oh, all right. Mackenzie’s getting on a bit, you know. He keeps it short, thank heaven.” Mr Barlow blew his nose. Then he said, “Your mother says you’re not enjoying your job. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, really. It bores me, that’s all.”

“Well, you can’t expect to start at the top, you know.”

“No.”

“Everyone has to go through it. I know it seems a long time before you get really established, but it’s the same with everything.”

“That’s exactly what Mummy says.”

“You’re not thinking of giving it up, are you?”

“Only idly.”

“Have you anything else in mind?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“Well, soldier on. You’ll be a partner in a few years. It can be frustrating when you’re young, I know, but it’s worth it in the long run.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Good heavens, yes. What can you be thinking?”

“Just that it might
not
be worth it in the long run. That I might suddenly decide, when I was your age, that the whole thing had been a colossal bore, and I would much rather have done something else.”

“But you say you haven’t got anything else in mind.”

“I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t be a colossal bore, that’s all.”

“My dear boy, you’re talking nonsense.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Well, it’s the truth. What’s the matter? Things not going too well with the girls?”

“Perfectly, thank you.”

“Liver all right?”

“Fine.”

“Then stop talking nonsense and have a glass of sherry.”

“I’d rather have a gin and French.”

“Well, go and get it, then. And bring me a glass of sherry. And ask your mother what she’ll have.”

Harold went out to the kitchen, where the drink was kept. His mother was cooking the lunch.

“Would you like a drink, Mummy?”

“A glass of sherry would be lovely, darling.”

“Why did you tell Daddy I was fed up with my job?”

“Well, you told me, and I don’t hide things from him. You know that. What has he said?”

“Exactly what you said.”

“Well, that makes two of us, then.”

“Yes, but there’s still me.”

“Harold,
is
there something wrong?”

He thought about all the things that were wrong, but said, “Not really, no. I’d like to do something more interesting, that’s all. It’s exceedingly dreary at Fenway’s, you know.”

“I expect you need a holiday. You start next week, don’t you?”

“Yes. Perhaps I do. But August’s such a hopeless month. There’s nowhere one can go at all without being trampled to death.”

“You have to take your holidays when you’re given them, dear. You can’t expect to pick and choose at your age.”

“That’s precisely the trouble. By the time I’m old enough to pick and choose I shall have lost all interest in being alive at all.”

“Nonsense. Where’s my glass of sherry?”

“Every time I say anything I’m accused of talking nonsense.
If I said Macmillan was Prime Minister, you’d say I was talking nonsense. I’m bored and fed up and sick of being told what I have to wait for.”

“I’m bored with waiting for my sherry.”

“Here you are. Don’t you see that it’s about as tedious as can be to be told all the time that in a few years everything will be different and I’ll be able to do what I like, when I want to do it now, while I’m still young and reasonably interested in things?”

“Yes, Harold, everyone knows it’s very frustrating to be young.”

“But I’m not young, I’m twenty-eight.”

“That
is
young, darling.”

“I shall be thirty soon.”

“It’s worth it in the long run.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Harold, and left the kitchen.

T
HE FOLLOWING FRIDAY
he was again at the Macaroon a few minutes before the official time to leave Fenway, Crocker and Broke. Dennis Moreland was sitting at a table with a man Harold didn’t know. He wasn’t sure whether Dennis would want him to join them or not, so he smiled quickly at him as he went to the bar, hoping for some definite indication. But Dennis, who was looking faintly harassed, simply nodded. Harold decided to risk it. Besides, there was no other vacant table, and he refused to sit at the bar and be overwhelmed by the overripe woman behind it.

“Hallo,” he said, taking a seat.

Dennis looked relieved to see him. “Harold, how good to see you. Eddie, I’d like you to meet a typical young Britisher, as you would say, Harold Barlow. Harold, meet Eddie Jackson.”

“How do you do,” said Harold. “But I’m not typical of anything.”

At times Dennis’s genius for finding categories and sticking people in them without their permission could get very
annoying
. In a way, he reflected without rancour, Dennis had made himself a name, if not a living, from thinking up new categories and then turning them into clichés.

The man called Eddie Jackson looked hard at Harold, said, “I hate everything typical”, and turned back to Dennis to continue a conversation about a girl called Annabel. There was a slight twang in his voice which Harold could not quite place. He sounded basically American, but there were overtones of other places—Australia, perhaps, or South
Africa. It was as though, too, he had learnt his accent from a teacher: it did not sound wholly natural. Perhaps he had picked it up from gramophone language lessons, or from the B.B.C. Perhaps he had travelled a good deal, never staying anywhere long enough to get a definite accent.

He looked like a traveller, with that travellers’ sallow
complexion
which Harold had noticed in others, as though different climates united to produce not an exciting mixture of colours but a grey colourlessness. He was wearing dark glasses, too, the sort of unnecessary piece of showing-off by which travellers often give themselves away. The Macaroon was lit by several heavily-shaded old carriage-lamps and it was quite difficult to recognize anyone at the other end of the room, so there was no excuse for smoked glass.

He was wearing a black leather jacket, with the zip open to show a white sweat-shirt. His black trousers were so tight that when he shifted his feet Harold could see the muscles moving in his calves and thighs. He had flame-coloured socks and black suède shoes. In the dimness of the club it would have been impossible to see the colour of his eyes, even if he hadn’t been wearing the glasses, but his hair was fair and cut short. It looked as though it had been a crew-cut a couple of months before, and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it now. He had small ears and eyebrows darker than his hair. When he suddenly took off his glasses, Harold realized that he was more than conventionally good-looking, in an entirely American way. The face was smooth, the nose straight, the eyes widely spaced beneath a broad forehead. When he smiled everything moved in correct proportion. It was the straightest smile Harold had ever seen.

When Dennis and Eddie Jackson had finished talking about Annabel, whoever she was, there was a pause. Eddie put his dark glasses on again.

“Eddie here is on his sixth trip round the world,” said Dennis. “And he’s only twenty-eight.”

“Really?” said Harold. “Where do you start and finish? Or don’t you?”

“I don’t,” said Eddie. “A home town is simply an
emotional
indulgence. An excuse to get out of the real world into a nice cosy vacuum.” He lit a cigarette, then said, “Like this goddam country.”

“The real world?” said Harold.

Dennis raised his eyebrows at Harold, whether in
admonition
or sympathy Harold could not tell.

“Yes,” said Eddie. “The real world. Are you interested?”

“I’m not sure,” said Harold. “Is it some kind of new political movement? Or are you being metaphysical?”

“Crap,” said Eddie. “This is what I’m talking about. There’s a game called social life, right? The basic rule of the game is you play as a team, and the basic team is the family. The family is
good,
right? So is the country. ‘My country right or wrong’, they say, and they feel proud. You have feelings that don’t fit in the family, don’t belong with the national flag, and they take a saw and a hammer and a chisel to you, they
make
you fit. O.K.? We don’t need
individuals
on the team, right? They might break open the vacuum, let in some air.”

“Well,” said Harold, “I’m not sure——”

“Now wait a minute, do you mind? Let me finish.”

“All right.”

“Now you tell me, Harold, you tell me what family life is really like, will you? Is it good? Is it real good?”

“Sheer unmitigated hell,” said Harold promptly.

“Right. And the wise guys of our time, the psycho-pseudo boys, they know it. They’ve got it all worked out, they batten on to that hell and take fifty thousand dollars a year out of people who want to be told to adjust. People want to adjust because they believe all the crap about the family being good, right? They’re masochists, maybe, too. Or stupid. But they go on believing it, all that propaganda, in spite of the
blatant loathing of children for parents, husbands for wives, brothers for sisters. Most of them, it’s the only thing they do believe, and it’s false. Like God, it’s false. But they go right ahead pretending it’s true. They have elaborate ceremonies to make everyone feel O.K. They announce their
engagements
in public journals, they exchange rings, they give presents. They call in the priests and wine merchants to make everything nice and holy and drunk and O.K.” He frowned heavily. “But the real world’s not like that at all.”

“But that is exactly what the real world
is
like,” said Harold. “Anything else is an illusion.”

“The real world,” said Eddie, ignoring him, “has no time for the family. Take me. I’m in the real world, I have no family. I had parents, like everyone else. They used to live in Bellingham, Washington, when I last saw them. I used to have a brother and a sister too. They’re all still alive as far as I know. But I recognize no such thing as the family.”

“It’s all simply a verbal confusion,” said Dennis, who seemed to have listened to the conversation before, and found the same logical mistake. “You choose not to use the word ‘family’ in its accepted meaning, that’s all.”

“I have at least two children,” said Eddie Jackson. “I have slept with men, women, children, trees—you name it, I’ve fucked it. But I have no family. I’m a free agent. I do what I like. I live in the real world. And I crap on your verbal confusions.”

He took off his glasses again and sat back as though he had proved something.

“Eddie,” said Dennis, “is a man who is
against.
There are always a few around. I wonder if we could make a movement out of it.”

“Isn’t it called the Beat Generation?” said Harold.

“Movements,” said Eddie scornfully. “Generations. That’s all shit. Something frightens you, so you give it a name. Then a lot of phonies join in and
Life
magazine poses a few
photographs
and everyone thinks an important statement has been made about modern youth. You make me sick, Dennis. Why don’t you live a little, instead of making up names for other people?”

“Yes, you’re a Beat, obviously,” said Dennis, clearly
annoyed
.

“A Beat? You mean the guys with beards who play bongo drums? Not me. I don’t like teams, for Christ sake. I’ve been telling you.”

“All right,” said Dennis, “then you can be a great individualist. The man who is against.”

“Abstractions, abstractions,” said Eddie, irritably. “You probably believe in good and bad.
People
don’t
understand.
They think that when they say one man is better than another they are saying something important. That’s crap. They’re just applying a set of rules—social shorthand and convenience. They think the rules are absolute, they believe in them, there’s something called ‘goodness’ which you can find somewhere around if only you look hard enough. But ‘goodness’ is an arbitrary idea, and from it follow arbitrary rules. It’s like a game. You should know that, in a
games-playing
country like England. What about Rugby? Some boys were playing some kind of football one afternoon, and one of them picked up the ball and ran with it, which was against the rules, right? So Rugby was born, God help it. But no one has ever grasped the significance of that boy picking up the ball. You can’t change the
rules,
the old football remains the old football. But you can change the
game,
you can start a
new
game of your own.”

“That’s rather a good idea,” said Dennis. “You mean when you’re fed up with something, you ignore it and start something else?”

“I’ve told you what I mean. If you don’t understand it’s because you don’t want to understand, you’d rather live in a vacuum, calling things names and thinking you’re living.”

“You’ve got to have critics,” said Dennis. “Otherwise there’d be no one to appreciate how revolutionary you were.”

“I don’t want a revolution,” said Eddie. “I get on fine the way things are now. I just have my own game and my own rules and ignore the others.”

“But doesn’t that get you into trouble with the police sometimes?” said Harold, who rather liked Eddie’s ideas.

“Yes.”

“And what about other people, people who don’t know your game?”

“I teach them. When I’m fed up with them, I change the game. Like with this Annabel we were talking about. She comes crying and weeping about how much she loves me, while I’m in the middle of shaving this morning. There is no such thing as love in my game, ever. I tell her so, but she goes on crying and weeping, so I clear out. She was nice while it lasted, but when they start crying and weeping, you know it’s lasted too long.”

“Callous,” said Dennis.

It was about time, thought Harold, that he tried the Eddie Jackson technique on Helen. She didn’t cry and weep, it was true, but she did hint, which was almost worse. That was the trouble with decent English girls. If only they lost their heads and made a mess of themselves crying and weeping, one might be able to feel so disgusted that one could leave them with a clear conscience. But they didn’t, it wasn’t part of the game. Eddie was really rather clever about games. One did stick to the rules, even when one didn’t want to. It was because one hadn’t thought of picking up the ball and
running
with it.

Eddie was shifting his feet about under the table and
tearing
matches in his long thin fingers. He was glancing now and then at a girl with blonde hair who sat at the bar. She was well known at the Macaroon. Her name was Heather Armstrong, and she was notoriously mean with her affections.

But now there was a frank interest in the way she was looking at Eddie. Her right leg swung selfconsciously at ease, the tip of her tongue kept her lips invitingly moist, she smiled whenever she caught his eye. Finally she came over to their table and said, “May I?”

“Hallo,” said Dennis, unenthusiastically. She had once thrown a glass at him for having made an ill-timed pass.

“Hi,” said Eddie. “What’s your name?”

“Heather.”

“Eddie.”

“Hallo, Eddie.”

He seemed to think further formality unnecessary, taking her hand and saying, “Say, I’m kind of a stranger here in London. How about you showing me around?”

“I’ll show you anything you want,” she said, smiling.

Dennis looked at Harold and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Harold was amused. Those who had got to bed with Heather said it was worth waiting for, and he had never seen her offer her services to a total stranger before.

Eddie did not bother to ask her if she wanted a drink. He simply looked at her as a buyer might have done at a slave-girl in the market and said, “Well, shall we go while there’s still some light left to see by?”

“Suits me,” said Heather.

They got up.

“Nice to have seen you,” said Eddie, nodding at Dennis. “And Harold.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr Jackson.”

Eddie Jackson looked offended.

“Eddie,” he said.

He left with Heather.

“That’s one of the quickest pick-ups I’ve ever seen,” said Harold admiringly, watching them go.

“It’s always happening,” said Dennis gloomily. “Annabel was mine originally. They take one look at him and ring for
a bed. He’s the sort of man before whom women drop
instinctively
to their knees.”

“To their
knees
?”

“You know what I mean. Their backs, if you prefer it.”

“Lucky man.”

“But a bad friend.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose it’s a matter of chromosomes.”

They sat in silence for a while, pondering the mysterious power some men had over all women.

Then Dennis said, “I’ve got my bloody Uncle Edward coming to London tomorrow. And I still haven’t found
anyone
to go to America for him. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?”

“No.”

“I can’t see why not. You’re just the man for the job, you know. At least, you’d do.”

“Thank you. I have prior commitments, as they say.”

“Who hasn’t?” said Dennis gloomily. “Freedom depends on a private income, I suppose.”

“Why not your friend Eddie Jackson?”

“Good God, no. Eddie is very doubtfully honest, and
certainly
not reliable. Besides, you heard what he said about the family as a social institution. You can hardly ask a man with his views to find family portraits for you.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“There would be no communication between him and Uncle Edward at all.”

“He’s rather interesting, isn’t he, though?”

“Yes, he’s certainly interesting. But he’s also stark raving mad, you know. And basically, he’s a gun-runner.”

“Really?”

“No, of course not really. I mean he’s the gun-running type. Adventure without responsibility.”