As Near as I Can Get (14 page)

I didn't question Mary. I haven't learned much about it and how they manage these things in South Coast resorts. I imagine it as in the films: the sophisticated décor
(glossy oils of naked, but defective, girls) in the expensive restaurant overlooking the bay. The view is picturesque at this remove with the souvenir and fish-and-chip shops and the shooting arcades and other feeble diversions of the people dwindled by distance and only the intelligible swerve of shore and bend of bay to languidly divert the pampered glance of the Very Rich who dine there. And Slatterley,
unable
to achieve total dedication to his collection of carved ivory, long-wearied of the featureless little wife who was loyal to him when, down in the town, with a snack-bar and ambition, he started up, meets Edna, at a dance in a sea-side hotel, which he illicitly visits sometimes in the hope of meeting someone like Edna. He and the young laboratory assistant drive around in his big, gleaming car and get to necking amidst the gorse at the end of bumpy lanes petering out on the cliffs. Ultimately they slip up and there's Edna pregnant, having just been formally told so by the clinic, standing brooding and waiting for her train back to Cliffbourne (fictitious name) when her almost-forgotten, not particularly welcome, elder brother, dressed as a porter, breezes up beside her.

I don't know—I don't know whether that moment conditioned, or was merely symbolic of, our subsequent relations. I loathe the thought, I reject the proposition, that a single chance moment, played upon by a hundred random and irrelevant influences, can rigidly determine the future. Suppose her handbag had slipped off the table in the buffet and, both stooping to retrieve it, our heads had bumped, with the almost inevitable consequence that we would have had to laugh at the absurd situation. Would it all have been different? Not that there has been much ‘all' to be very different but would I have been able to refrain from progressively disliking Edna with each fresh piece of information about her life? Or was it fixed, the resultant not of one meeting, but of a thousand-thousand moments, already inescapable when, filling much of each other's mental world, we played lewd games together behind the golden-rod?
Anyway, she got him in the end. Within three years, the first Mrs Slatterley was receiving alimony and Edna was mistress of Chez Belly, or whatever the place was called, and rich, rich enough, and sensitive now, as I found out on one of our few subsequent meetings, to the ‘class of people' one encountered at—I don't know—continental resorts, Glyndbourne, Chez Belly—little bitch!

Is this characteristic of our times? No, are these three things characteristic of our times:

Us? Nothing happened to any of us. Yes it did—didn’t.

‘Hello—how are you?’

‘Oh hello.’

‘Hello.’

‘No, I’ve just come down from—Gadsley. Gadsley—Yorkshire, is it? Lancashire—I don’t know. Pamela’s up there. Pamela Franks—teaching at a local school. Yeah, she got a working permit—mother’s English, I think. What are you drinking?’

Eddy Spicer, frowning, his thin, bearded, neutral little face wrinkled into the perplexity of being a machine-man, turns towards the bottles and barmen, away from Joe and Sybella. Sybella is very frothy and giving, wanting to give herself, her youth, energy, bright-thinking, to some more glamorous recipient than Joe ‘let’s go to the pictures—not there. What do you want to go to that place for?’

On another occasion, Eddy shouting about the truck drivers in Italy.

On Sunday mornings, a bland sky lures forth the families to drink beer and read the papers in the local. Well-nourished, lightly and brightly clad children of urban motorists roll and scramble on the little lawns of pubs in garden districts. The bland sky, half blocked by the featureless brick wall of the cinema, dominates the season of flowers. ‘Buy, use, get, own, have—more things. Easy, queasy terms——’

‘Observe the badger, snuffling and wuffling along the hedgerows. Observe the speed limit or poor badger’s flat. Observe what can’t be seen, the skeleton of Galactic Man being assembled in public houses.’

‘You must have a cutting, dear. The colour
is
rather fine.’

While the husbands, dry-mouthed, discuss the latest models:

‘Frankly I’m not very interested in maximum speed—I’m all for
comfortable
motoring. Anyway, she’ll do ninety.’

‘Still don’t think you can beat the old——’

Drumming through Kent at eighty miles an hour on two singing wheels, hurled by half a litre of perpetual
detonation
towards….

Canterbury, wither the pilgrims.

‘This Canterbury?’

‘Yah.’

‘Wanna stop here? Ralph? You wanna stop here?’

‘Aren’t we gonna see the cathedral?’

‘Ralph? You wanna see the cathedral? I wanna get this carburettor checked. She was spitting back there.’

England dynamic: Planes, man, I test planes. Tell you one thing, the prop’s finished.

Re-emergent:—modern rôle—unique contribution both as a stabilizing force and, if I may, without any
suggestion
of patronage, put it so, in a tutorial capacity….

I stood with Tom and Roderick in the Bayswater Road on a misty night. I liked that night and I was happy just to be there with Tom and Roderick in that fantastic road. Ah, the squirrels, the little squirrels—I couldn’t see any squirrels and nor could Tom. I don’t think Roderick could see any squirrels at all. The squirrels were all over there in November in the park, perched, busily munching, above the good-time gals and their customers having a bash down by the roots. I can see those yellow lights in my mind, now that I’m far from that Bayswater Road—I’m going out into space, man. Man—you ever stop to think?

Signals of London, after the Second World War, ultimate or penultimate struggle of a series that will not easily escape at least the virtue of brevity. Gaps, where the explosive teeth of war bit into the city, harbouring some slates, a pile of bricks, rusty tins, tyres, and swiftly-encroaching vegetation as shrubs sprout already amidst the jagged foundations of shops. And the new buildings—we play the games of mad but mighty children—knock ’em down and pile ’em up. How many centuries was Athens in the building? Now, flat in a night and a decade to slap it together again. I will build you a capital as big as a continent and fill it with the scrambling shoppers at the sales, and the long, morose queues for the censored dreams. And the cars going—kinetic urban man going—grumbling, muttering—home to his garden suburb.

And then Kinapolis, Dynapolis, Motropolis, city of glass and wheels, decomposes, breaks sweetly down again into the human scale.

‘We feel it has something of a village character.’

And so it has, hasn’t it, because there’s Sunny Joe, the milkman, marvellously, it is true, wielding a ton of milk
at the end of a stick, but slow and genial, unchanging as he deposits the salubrious bottle (there are no isotopes in
villages
) on the doorstep. And there’s the Bingley girl walking her hound. I’ll clean the mower this evening.

A short but ferocious little man, in his attempt to approach the newspaper vendor, jabs Eddy out of the way. We have, after the casual meeting, settled ourselves for a brief, uneasy talk in a somewhat inconvenient spot—behind the railed mouth of a secondary entrance to the underground station, near a green metal box full of control gear for the traffic lights, athwart a newsagent and in the main path of pedestrians, who are first massing and then, when the traffic stream, halted by switching lights, permits, streaming across the junction.

Five roads meet. Eddy starts, as if his body were the housing of a single, taut string, and, giving the impression of self-protection from too great a flow of stimuli, moves slightly in towards the railings without glancing at his assailant. A bus grinds round the corner, its huge rubber wheel for a moment appropriating my glance and then passing to offer a perspective of neon signs, heralding restaurants, leading to a tiny, tree-locked church and everywhere the vibration of milling people. Across the road, a maroon, oblong coach that, from the legend it bears, has just wound down through England from Carlisle with its padded cargo of (at least so they seem, ranked high along the spaced windows) solitary and apathetic
working-class
aunts and uncles, slides up behind a van advertising ‘Injection and Vacuum Moulding’ and eclipses the huge cut-outs in front of the cinema which must be showing yet another film about Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece since these represent brawny, Nordic-looking gladiators and diaphanously (but decently) robed maidens who, with their round, made-up faces and fresh, shining limbs, seem as
reassuringly
sanitary as the girl next door.

A few days previously Eddy had told me that he was looking for a room and, when we had met, obeying the
convention
which prescribes casual interrogation about elementary personal facts as the form of human intercourse most appropriate to a machine culture (the reverse of
Dostoyevsky’s
young Russians who eagerly plunged, even over the handclasp, into the depths of historico-philosophical speculation), I had asked him about it. He had found one—use of kitchen and bathroom, two pounds, near the tube, not bad. Gazing past Eddy’s perpetual wry frown at a shop window full of gleaming, chromium accessories, I strove to link the little American with some other possible topic of conversation. We didn’t know each other well. We had never ventured, in our social exchanges, beyond crisp
greeting
and terse fact.

As I attempted to locate common acquaintances, as a sequence of images of those occasions in the past on which I had been in the same room or vicinity as Eddy, slid through my brain, I absently observed a fat, harassed mother, intolerably goaded at last, violently shake her young son who had crouched down at the kerb to examine something and so been unprepared, when the lights had changed, to cross the street. The headline of a paper that a tall man had just purchased from the newsvendor beside me caught my eye as he folded it to tuck under his arm. While still wondering what next to say to Eddy, aware that the period of silence was becoming sufficiently protracted to generate embarrassment, a focus of alarm at the message of the newspaper began to emanate ripples of secondary speculation through my mind. The headline was not directly concerned with the central crisis of our times, with the height of the burner flame beneath the test-tube of international events which, as I know because I am
writing
these words and you will know if you are reading them, has never yet flared high enough to heat that volatile fluid beyond its flashpoint. Nevertheless, as simply representing the most conspicuous recent international happening, the headline entailed a process of assimilating it to the general context.

While my thoughts cursorily surveyed recent events, or such of them as my relatively random newspaper reading had acquainted me with, in the Middle East, where the assassination proclaimed by the headline had occurred, and sought channels by which this superficially local incident might flow into and contaminate the more general
situation
, I suddenly remembered that Eddy had lived in—the Lebanon, was it?—Israel?—somewhere in that area for several years. Before, however, I opened my mouth to draw his attention to the news, or refer to it, since he might already have acquired knowledge of the situation from some other source, a sudden doubt as to whether it was Eddy or another American, Bill Carozzi (Italo-American), who knew the Middle East.

‘You staying—I mean, you’re living here now—in England?’ I asked lamely, on the heels of this doubt.

Eddy with, or so it struck me, a somewhat quizzical glance, nodded. What then? Had I asked something foolish? Perhaps he lived in England, always had, was English, but what about the informal drawl, the nasal twang, the phonetics from ‘across the pond’. (New York: with its skyscrapers. Texas: with its oil and expanses—a nation geared to the values of adolescence. Easy to run, a machine culture. Any kid can push buttons. ‘The
Adolescent
Empire—A critique of America’s Rôle in the Modern World—eh, tovarich?)

‘Well,’ Eddy glanced at me, readying himself to terminate the unstable interview. Two silly, pretty girls, giggling conspiratorially at their awareness of themselves, their
immaculate
, print frocks, scrupulous grooming, momentary perfection, swished past us, and, inevitably, we both followed them for a moment with our eyes.

‘So long.’

‘See you.’

Eddy left in the opposite direction to the one taken by the two girls, who turned right into the main
thoroughfare
, past a shop window full of cameras, new eyes, machine
eyes, and one full of toes, pointed toes, ladies shoes, towards the park and the sunset, at that moment still creeping across Russia towards the meridian of Greenwich.

I followed the two girls. I might have gone south towards the victor of Trafalgar as Eddy had forged north towards Aberdeen and Iceland and the Empire of the Seal, the white wastes and floes and the stinging sea, beyond the playwaters of the porpoise, where, except for algae, seals and sleek bears, the only living things were American and Russian sailors gliding beneath the ice-cap. Ned went north towards Glen Coe and his furnished room in Camden Town, past Flannagan who now had a chain of seventeen shops in the metropolitan area and perilously high blood pressure—‘no salt, Mr Flannagan, and, preferably, no whisky’.

While I moved west after the two laughing girls I would never know, who were even now being secured from my carnal longing by jostling crowds. I could still see them ahead while Eddy (education?) roamed north to get a bus or train, thinking ‘that one. Who’s he then? Do I know him? Nothing to say. Kind of thin. Some kind of accent—don’t get these accents over here. Hell, can’t talk to everybody. I’ve seen that guy somewhere. I’m not gonna shave off this beard. Wonder what the guy thought of me?’

Mr Thatcher, a gas company inspector from Derby, passing through on his way to holiday in Eastbourne; wee, plump Jane and plump Wilbur, invoice typist and
storeman
of mighty Aluminium Developments Ltd., easy in each other’s company but finding their natural tendency to
saunter
baffled by the standard nervous weave of pavement crowds; Ibo Oginda, grave, bearded, pitch-black negro nationalist from Kenya whose life is essentially a demonstration of the compatibility of pigmented skin with the decorum of an English scholar and others, a hundred others, weave between me and Louise and Roana, the two fresh, flaunting girls, dazzled by the inflated value of their lithe bodies. In a tobacconist’s window, Louise, sophisticated,
daring in her filmy, black chiffon nightgown, puffs, through a tiny, silver trumpet, a particular brand of cigarettes. Roana, in sporty and brief white shorts, lounges on the roof of a cabin cruiser which, if you sit on a board of directors, brew beer, job stocks, invest shrewdly enough, govern the country, etc., you too can afford to explore the sunny coves of Cornwall with. Buy these lovely cigarettes and smoke them in this lovely boat. There was a time….

Men and beasts, under the sun, along the rutted lanes, moved in an explicable world. Mathematics, a racing language, has produced the present one, a world under siege by novelty. What do you think, Roana? Or you, Louise? Even if you were master of that assurance of
significant
individuality we seem to have outgrown, you would lack the maths to tell me.

‘Hello,’

‘Hello, Eddy.’

He dreamed a dream of brotherhood. Beneath the pylons, peering through the singing cables at the beckoning blue, in the yards and car-parks of the great plants (converting, combining, assembling the elements of a plastic environment, adaptable to man and his desires, into consumer goods) he dreamed a romantic, old-world dream of brotherhood between beings that the organizations he frequented were banishing from our world. He talked to men while corporations conquered the earth.