As Far as You Can Go (9 page)

“But, good heavens,” said Harold, “you can’t honestly expect me to want to go to Australia, can you? I mean, would
you
go? From all I’ve heard it’s the world’s most boring country.”

“Ah,” said Dangerfield. “But I’m not complaining, am I?”

“Nor am I,” said Harold. But of course he was, and he knew it. He was complaining all the time. It was the pettiness of his present life, its tedious little margins, its narrowness, that got him down: in the old days people like him would have gone to Australia, certainly—to wide open spaces and all the rest of it. But how could you go there when you knew perfectly well that it was exactly like England for the most part, only worse? The pubs shut at
six,
dear Christ. It might be all right if you owned about ten thousand sheep and spent the time riding like Chips Rafferty over the outback, but how many immigrants ever managed to do that? If he, Harold, ever went to Australia, he would simply complain louder than ever.

What he needed, what he could not find, was something that would need intelligence, and endurance, something which would put a real strain on his abilities: something, when it came down to it, at which he could easily fail. That was what one could never get across to the Dangerfields of the world. You didn’t want pleasant escapism, you wanted
something to do which was worth the doing, was worthy of your intelligence and capabilities. And if Dangerfield seriously thought being a kind of high-class travelling buyer of old pictures was the sort of thing that could test him, then Dangerfield was out of his mind. Harold didn’t like Fenway’s, he didn’t like Craxton Street, he didn’t care for Peterham, he didn’t give a damn about England. But that was no reason to go on a paid holiday, traipsing across America after a lot of dreary family portraits. The moment he got back to Craxton Street, he would write to Dangerfield, apologize for having wasted his time, and say he was sorry but there had been a foolish misunderstanding, and he had never wanted the job, anyway. Which was true enough.

“Now tell me, Mr Barlow,” said Dangerfield, “are you happy with your present work?”

“No,” said Harold. “But I’m as happy at it as I’m ever likely to be happy at anything. I mean, it’s not the sort of job that gives one much opportunity for the use of
imagination
and intelligence and all the other things employers claim to be looking for. Most of them really just want robots.”

“I think you sound like the very chap I’m looking for,” said Dangerfield.

Perhaps it would be simpler, Harold thought, not to wait till he got back to Craxton Street before letting Dangerfield know how he felt. Besides, it would be no more than Dennis deserved to tell the truth.

“Look,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m here under false
pretences
, Mr Dangerfield. It would be absolutely absurd for me to abandon my career at the present time, just as it’s getting started. And I can hardly ask Fenway’s to let me take six months or so off, just to have a jaunt round America. Because that’s how it would sound to them. It sounds rather like that to me, actually. I don’t see how you can expect me to want to give up an almost certain partnership just to chase up your family portraits.”

“No risks, eh?” said Dangerfield.

“But you’re not offering me a risk. You’re offering a free holiday, with pay. And that’s very nice of you, and very kind, but what happens when the holiday’s over? I’ve had a good time, no doubt, but I’ve lost everything I’ve been boring myself blue for the last few years to obtain. That’s not taking a risk, it’s committing suicide. It would have to be a very large sum of money indeed that would make me even remotely tempted to commit suicide.”

Mr Dangerfield’s eyes glinted red with pleasure, and he mentioned a very large sum of money indeed.

But Harold couldn’t see the point, couldn’t see why he should do it—couldn’t see how he would be happier, how his faculties would be better employed, by working for Mr Dangerfield.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “And I never intended to take this job, anyway. It was Dennis’s idea to bring me, not mine to come. If I’m going to throw up everything now, it will have to be for some purpose. If you could offer me the chance to use my intelligence and imagination and
everything
else, really to put them to the test, then I’d leap at it. Because I’m bored. But I don’t see why I should be very much less bored looking for your pictures. I don’t want to go to America. I’ve never wanted to go there. Brazil, yes. The Congo, yes. But America is just England with a lot more money and bigger cars and a good deal fewer people per square yard, and though it would be interesting to see it, it wouldn’t be interesting
enough.
Do you see that?”

“I see what’s wrong with you,” said Dangerfield. “You make a great fuss and pretend to complain, but what’s really the matter with you is that you’re complacent. You like your boring cushy job, and you’re frightened to leave it. That’s your trouble.”

“No, it’s not,” said Harold. “You’ve got it all wrong. I
hate
my cushy job, as a matter of fact. But why should I give
up a long-term cushy job, for a very short-term, if slightly cushier, one? I can’t think of a single reason.”

“I’ll give you one,” said Dangerfield. “To start with, you’ve no idea whether it will be cushy or not. The element of uncertainty ought to be attractive. And then, there’s something else. Any man who hasn’t had the sensation of stretching himself hasn’t lived. I grant you that. But there’s another thing, too. You’re too young to have been in the war. But during the war many men did things which were
tantamount
to attempting suicide. And for no reason that anyone could understand. You see, Barlow, war gives a man a chance to push himself, to see just how far he can go. It’s himself he’s fighting, not the enemy. To feel that sensation, as I have, of committing suicide is to know what it is to be alive. To value the fact of being alive.”

“Well, all that may be true,” said Harold. “But what has that got to do with me?”

“I’m offering someone—maybe you—the chance to know what it’s like to commit suicide, and then to start again. I can’t guarantee the job will stretch you—I’ve no idea of how easy or difficult it may prove to be. But I want someone who is prepared to use the things you say you don’t have a chance to use—imagination, intelligence, all that. I don’t want a robot. I
do
want someone who is prepared to risk giving up the future to live vividly in the present. Possibly at full stretch, too. But vividly, anyway, if he has the vividness in him.”

“You can’t start again if you’ve committed suicide,” said Harold. “Your offer’s like everything else today—beautifully packaged, and fundamentally disappointing. It sounds great till you examine it.”

“Well,” said Dangerfield, “I’d have thought I’d made it plain enough.”

“Oh, yes,” said Harold. “It’s plain enough, all right, and you even make it sound glamorous. But really it’s not very glamorous, you know. And in spite of all that you say, I can’t
see any connection between your offer and a chance to
commit
suicide. Suicide’s irrevocable. This is a cushy job. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see it your way. I just don’t see it like that at all.”

When they were outside again in St James’s Street, Harold said, “I’m awfully sorry, Dennis. But he annoyed me, and I simply had to tell him the truth.”

“You couldn’t have done better,” said Dennis. “He was delighted with you, I could see.”

“But I practically insulted him.”

“No, no, not at all. You don’t understand Uncle Edward. He couldn’t have been more pleased. I quite expected him to slip us both a fiver to show how much he’d enjoyed treating us to lunch. I told you it would be like that. He’s convinced that all his nephews are still schoolboys. As a matter of fact, Harold, I could do with a fiver. You don’t have one on you, do you, by any chance?”

“No.”

“Never mind. The Macaroon can often be persuaded to give credit. Let’s go and celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“Your success. I bet you a fiver you go to
America.”

“All right. But you’re simply giving me the money.”

“Not at all. In fact, I’m so confident that I’m going to ask you to pay me now. It will be most inconvenient to have to change it back and forth, in and out of dollars.”

“Dennis, I wish you and your uncle would get one thing absolutely clear. I am not going to America.”

“If you insist on being mean, we
shall
have to get credit. Come on, let’s not waste any more time.”

“Dennis, I hope you’re not under any illusion about this. I am absolutely serious.”

“You always are, Harold. It’s part of your charm.”

“But, Dennis——”

“The car is this way.”

H
E WOKE EARLY
that morning, and in a panic. The dream of fire had grown more and more ominous as he had put Craxton Street farther and farther behind him, and this morning it seemed as though the bed itself was ablaze, and he inextricably tangled in the sheets, the flames shooting towards his face.

The room was dazzling as he opened his eyes, and for a moment the panic took control and he began to thresh about the bed, struggling to be free. But there was no fire, only the sun already fierce through the slats of the blinds, sneaking through even the smallest gap to lay thin slivers of piercingly white light on the pillows and sheets.

He rolled away from the window, his heart still beating furiously from the nightmare. He imagined it was all to do with guilt, a mixture of Helen and the fire in Craxton Street. He would tell himself firmly that his subconscious accused him of having been responsible in some arcane manner for the wiring of Mrs Fanshaw’s refrigerator, and that he purged this crime night after night by dreaming that he was burning to death in bed. He had, after all, been guilty enough in bed with Helen, so it all seemed to follow. But informing himself of his subconscious motives did nothing to make the
nightmare
go away, in fact it had grown more violent since he had been in the desert, the aridity and ferocious sunlight in the day being grotesquely reshaped at night. There must, then, be some other subconscious reason for the dream’s recurrence, and perhaps every reason one gave oneself for such
phenomena
was merely a cunning false trail laid by one’s wish to destroy oneself. By one’s wish to make oneself suffer, at least.

He stretched diagonally across the bed, telling himself that he would never sleep in a single bed again, that a double mattress like this was the first basic luxury of modern living. The rooms of the Magnolia Motel were painted pale green, with cream ceilings and light grey carpets. There were two double-beds, a large cupboard, a chest of drawers of cheap pine, and several bright reproductions in every room. All motels were the same, though the details altered, of course, and the prices varied. Harold liked them, he liked the way one was left alone. One simply drove up, paid one’s money, took one’s key, and that was that. In the morning one left the key in the door, and if one inadvertently took it away, all one had to do was drop it in a mail-box and its tag would see it safely home. No one bothered one. It was marvellous. America was marvellous.

Beside the bed lay a Mormon pamphlet, a Gideon Bible, and a paper-back copy of
The
Ambassadors
with an elegant cover by Edward Corey. Harold had bought it on the advice of Dennis Moreland. “It remains,” he had said at Waterloo, where he was seeing Harold off with great gusto and an inexhaustible supply of information about America, to which he had never been, “without question the greatest single work on European-American relations.” Harold had got no further than page fifty-seven. The style was rather
long-winded
, he found, and besides he didn’t find much time for reading. His clothes lay scattered across the other
double-bed
where he had flung them the night before, tearing them off in a passion for sleep. Yesterday he had driven—how many miles was it? Five hundred and sixty something—or was that the day before? From the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, anyway, east to the Painted Desert and then up and west again into Utah, through the Zion National Monument, and on and on, breaking suddenly out of the mountains and into the desert plain, the sun dropping fast, and then Nevada and a small town in the middle of nothing, Mesquite, a strip
of motels and diners and gas-stations and frame houses on Route 91, the sun setting violently in purple and red, the mountain-peaks behind him suddenly sharp against the vanishing blue-green sky. Then stars, and a quick drop in temperature. It took it out of a man, that kind of driving, and he’d been doing it for a week, for more than a week, for nine days, ever since he’d left Corpus Christi in Texas, a huge drop of sweat on the Mexican Gulf.

Yet he felt more driven than driving. He had no wish to exhaust himself day after day, but he went on doing so, drawn on, it seemed, by the landscape itself. It beckoned and bullied, demanded that he go farther and farther into its heart and heat, its dryness, dazzle, harsh blistering beauty. He would find himself suddenly taking dirt-roads into the mountains on sheer impulse, frightening himself with the possibility of a breakdown thirty or more miles from the main road, wondering at the impulse but not resisting it, aiming for small towns that the map marked in tiny lettering and which turned out, more often than not, to be ghost towns, and not even towns at all, merely huddles of miners’ huts now collapsed and ant-ridden, the paint peeled quite away, if there ever had been paint, the brief attempt at habitation mocked by the cacti and lizards, mocked above all by the sun, battering at the rotten shells put up against it, dismissing them back into the desert with contempt. He would get out of the car and watch the reclamation going on, the desert resuming the few square yards the miners had taken, the wood and the corrugated iron at one with the skeletons of cattle and horses which he saw from time to time like warning signs beside the road. There were skeletons of men there, too, somewhere, which would never be found. He would get back into the car and drive on. Sometimes he would pass a ranch or a single inhabited house, with a wooden lavatory in its yard and a man or a woman standing in the doorway. They would never wave, only watch as he drove slowly past, a
white cloud of dust settling for miles behind him. There never seemed to be any children in these lonely houses.

Until these last few days he had regarded himself as reasonably well travelled. He had been to most of the major European cities, he had crossed over the Alps and tunnelled beneath them, he had seen the great rivers and the great cathedrals. He had thought of landscape as something to be enjoyed and actually taught himself to enjoy it, gaining
considerable
pleasure from looking out across the plain of the Po or up at the Alps and Pyrenees. But enjoyment was not the word for his response to the American west. In Europe, he decided, one always felt in charge, Europe was rolling, for the most part, cultivated, one had the sense that man had lived there and tilled the soil for generation after generation, that he deserved his sense of belonging. The age-long process of cultivation had created a bond between man and
landscape
that was harmonious and satisfying. In country towns, particularly, the sense of harmony was strong, where
back-gardens
faded imperceptibly into fields and streets into
country
lanes. And about the great industrial cities one felt a certain human triumph: by the time man came to build them the land was tamed and offering no resistance.

Here, there was no sense of harmony. Here the landscape was in charge, gave orders, was brusque, brushing aside man’s claims to partnership. Harold felt that he was only just beginning to travel, to understand the relation between man and landscape. If Europe was compliant, the West was a rapist, the small towns seeming to perch precariously on the edge of its wrath. Nothing grew that was of any use to man. It was harsh country, hostile, threatening. But not even that, quite. It did not bother to threaten, any more than it
attempted
to seduce. It preferred, rather, to ignore. It seemed to belong to an order of things that had nothing but contempt for human beings, suffering their violations as it suffered the violations of snakes and insects. It was mineral,
multicoloured
,
austere. It could be described only in geological terms, explained only by wind and water and sun and aeons, but the description and the explanation left its mystery
untouched
. Its age, how it had been formed, these scarcely
mattered
compared to its challenge to every detail of human civilization. It did not oppose, it confronted. It did not fight, it simply waited. It never had to fight. It seemed to gaze over the heads of people at something on a horizon beyond human sight, ignoring the pop and sputter of activity as men tried to make it look down with roads and dams and
dynamite
, gouging at it for gold and silver and copper and iron, slashing at it with bulldozers, dropping atomic bombs on it. But it never lowered its gaze.

There was nothing man could do about it but tear it down, and to tear it down would take aeons more than it took to put itself up. Wind and sun and water would break its mineral composure, its hard hostility, before all the
gougings
and scratchings of men and machines. And it was this, its invincible composure, that fascinated him, that compelled him to turn off the safety of main roads to search in the hills for traces of human life, traces which vanished almost as soon as the men who created them packed up and went away. It was frightening and exhilarating, it challenged him by day and entered his dreams at night, forcing him to acknowledge its superiority and his fear. There were no trees, only cacti and mesquite, no streams, only great rivers hidden in colossal canyons. It was a triumphant desolation.

And today he would drive across the most triumphantly desolate waste so far, the Mojave Desert. Before dark, he hoped to see the Pacific Ocean at Los Angeles.

He threw off the sheet and got out of bed, his back aching slightly from the hours of driving, of being driven. In the mirror in the bathroom he looked at himself with
astonishment
, his face and neck so tanned, looking so healthy. He wondered how he came to look so well when he felt so—but
he did feel well. That was one of the many revelations of the West. And the change of continent had forced him to revise many of his automatic morning assumptions. In Craxton Street it had been axiomatic that he felt terrible, if not physically, then mentally, at the prospect of yet another day. But in Del Rio, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Globe, Arizona, each morning promised excitement, he was glad to be awake, to be up, to be alive. He supposed vaguely that he must be enjoying himself, yet again enjoyment didn’t seem to be the right word.

But whatever the word, happiness, pleasure, enjoyment, he experienced it, or all of them, as the sun slanted into the bathroom at the Magnolia Motel, Mesquite, Nevada.

Forcing himself to leave the tanned face in the mirror, he went to take a shower, singing his new anthem: “God save old Dangerfield, Long live old Dangerfield, splendid old poop.” He beat his chest for the drum-roll. “What am I doing here? Where do I go from here? Looking for auburn hair! God save the mark!”

What had made him decide in the end was something so irrelevant, so absurd, that he still couldn’t quite believe it. Under a shower in the Magnolia Motel, Mesquite, Nevada, it seemed as far away in time and space as the momentous decisions of childhood, taken with a breathless lack of concern for the consequences—going up the arts side instead of the science side at school, for instance. His sole reason for choosing the arts had been a boy called Grierson on whom he had just developed an overwhelming crush. The crush was over within a week, but the decision, with all that followed, was irrevocable. Perhaps all the really vital decisions in one’s personal life were made on such whims.

It was certainly something of a whim which had finally made him decide to come to America, though calling Mrs Fanshaw a whim was putting it a little strong. She was more of an anti-whim. When she had returned from Poole to the
debris of her flat she had, naturally, wished to know the full details about the fire, and Harold had given them to her. She was an untidy woman of about fifty, and she made her living by some doubtful form of spiritualism in the evenings. She was partial to a drop of stout now and then, she
confessed
, but her chief means of sustenance was very strong tea without sugar or milk, drunk near boiling-point. She scoffed at those who told fortunes from tea-leaves, but said tea gave her the uplift she needed for getting in touch with the astral plane. She wore dressing-gowns of various colours during the day, and only put on a dress to go out to her séances or to do her shopping. There were two dresses, both shapelessly
old-fashioned
and apparently run up by an apprentice welder out of the linings of old curtains: one was green and the other was mauve, and both were dirty. She liked to tell Harold what kind of aura she had, but he could never remember, except that it was pretty good. Her only other topic of
conversation
was her sister, whom she appeared to detest. Of Mr Fanshaw, supposing him to have ever existed, nothing was ever said at all. She would, however, give gloating accounts of her sister’s illness, going into details which Harold felt could well have been left to the autopsy which must take place, it seemed, any day now. But the sister kept
miraculously
going, and Mrs Fanshaw maintained that she would never die, her aura was as strong as an ox, and anyway she was just keeping alive to thwart Mrs Fanshaw of her “rights”. Exactly what these “rights” were was never made clear, but they seemed to have been assumed by Mrs Fanshaw with the idea that when her sister did eventually die she would be the sole heiress. By not dying, therefore, the sister cheated Mrs Fanshaw.

After Harold had given her the details of the fire three times, he refused to give them again, much to her chagrin. However, one evening, as he was sitting in his flat glooming over the back gardens, there was a knock at the door and
Mrs Fanshaw asked him if he would mind coming and telling the story just once more for the benefit of her friend Betty who had just dropped in. Harold obliged. Betty was a crumpled rag of a women who might have been anything between forty and seventy and who kept dabbing at her eyes with a filthy handkerchief which she kept tucked in the vee of her blouse. The vee came well down into the cleft between two outsize breasts, and Harold found himself fascinated by the amount of tucking and tidying which went on between dabs.