As Near as I Can Get (17 page)

‘But—you’re famous!’ I exclaimed one evening, puzzled by a self-deprecatory remark he had made. I had noticed this tendency to turn the mild and yet telling irony of which he was master upon himself before, and been unable to reconcile it with what seemed to me to be a commanding position in society. After all, he knew some intimately, and had met most, of our eminent contemporaries and his name would have been familiar to any tolerably well-informed person from end to end of the country.

‘I’m not, you know.’

‘Well——’

‘I’m certainly not famous, although I’m probably more widely known than many who are. I’ve reached my correct level of celebrity—an ironic, civilized journalist who’s well-informed and writes clear, painless, easily-digested prose. And they read it—oh yes, on Sunday mornings, educated English eyes scan Collins’ latest article, marvelling at the effortless analysis of complex political and social matters and even more at the virtuosity with which disparate subjects are treated. This week we have an authority on architecture where last week stood a student of history. Very impressive. Collins ought to be running the show, some show, perhaps all the shows. But he couldn’t and wouldn’t, would be lost on the first morning at the Ministry, the first venture onto the building site. It’s a different thing fame, or rather what it expresses, achievement, real achievement. For that you have to not only be able, conceptually, logically, to do the thing, but to do it in the madhouse of the world and more to want to do it and more to be convinced both that it must be done and that you and only you are capable of doing it, building the splendid building, writing the
masterpiece, propping up the tottering nation, softening the hearts of millions. I can’t create or execute but only criticize and relate. I’m a technician not a scientist!’

Ned never actually made the above speech, but I think it roughly expresses the tenor of many remarks, the essence of his concept of himself. Once I remember, he self-mockingly used the phrase ‘permanent precocity’ when someone complimented him on the ‘freshness and brilliance’ of one of his articles.

He was homosexual, but in an unostentatious, almost inconspicuous, way. I think he was homosexual—I’m sure he was homosexual, and yet my evidence for it is mainly negative, the fact that, while apparently on amiable and normal terms with women, he never displayed, in manner or speech, any convincing sexual interest in them, nor, other than for professional or semi-professional reasons, was he much seen with them. According to pub murmurs and gossip (often interrogative ‘that bloke a queer?’ etc.) Ned was generally considered to be, at the very least, less than ‘100 per cent masculine’ and perhaps, in fact, I am at least partially succumbing to this vulgar conception to
misclassify
what was really only a reticent and not very demanding
libido.
But there was also the one strongly-suggestive, but not quite conclusive (still ambiguous), scene in his flat one evening.

After Leslie Weedon, an architect friend of Ned’s whom I had met once before, had left at about half past ten, we had continued to talk about the subject that Weedon had brought with him, architecture. And then, almost
prescriptively
, we had gone on to the Greeks, with their ceramics, and architecture, and politics and poetry and maths and all the rest of that sometimes faintly offensive, and then again prodigious, achievement.

‘Rather a satisfactory arrangement,’ commented Ned, when we had finally got round to ‘Greek homosexuality’, ‘don’t you think?’

Nothing more than a conversational link need have been
inferred from his tone of voice and, in fact, I don’t think my reply was governed by other than immediate response.

‘Yes—in principle.’

He was crossing the room towards his desk as I spoke and, just glancing at me, he murmured, ‘Only in principle, eh?’

And then—that was all—he bent over to examine some scrawled lines on the margin of the phone book and I shifted my position and mused some more about the Greeks. But that night, as I stood by the door of my room, listening for thin, prim Miss Riker to vacate the lavatory since I wanted to use it, I suddenly thought ‘of course!’, and realized that Ned had been subtly propositioning me. Or had he? He never did again. If I run my mind back over our relationship, I can retrieve nothing that, even by the most selective or slanted interpretation, could be given a suggestive meaning. And, at the apogee of our friendship, the evening we decided to go to Ireland, I was so infatuated with the man I would perhaps have consented to become his lover….

Infatuated, yes, but not in love with—I see it now. No, the things with Elly Brown and, later, with Louise and possibly even Vanessa, were quite different, almost complete ‘inversions’, now that I come to consider it, of what I felt for Ned. I succumbed to their looks far more than to their minds, whereas, although continually appreciative of Ned’s fine, lunar appearance, this would have been no more than a curiosity if unassociated with his intelligence. The social position of the girls, except insofar as it hindered or assisted propinquity, was a matter of indifference to me—it was a considerable part of Ned’s charm. Although impeded in the case of Elly and Louise and even, to some extent, of Vanessa, by hypertropied delicacy, by troubedor reverence, from dwelling mentally on physical love in their connection, nevertheless it undoubtedly represented the
consummation
of the feelings they inspired. I might have had sexual relations with Ned in gratitude for everything else
I had from him, but, if I had done so it would have been, although possibly without revulsion, certainly without desire.

I think I can isolate the exact moment of the breach, or rather, not of the breach, for nothing actually happened at that moment, nothing was said, but rather of the moment at which the equilibrium of our relationship was destroyed. Moments—nothing really happens in moments. Even in terms of physical events, the actual moment, at which the foot slips, the unleashed heat of the naked sun shrivels a city, lips meet, is only explicable as part of a continuum (indispensable, choice word). But I can assign a moment of time to the tilting of our relationship, at which criticism became explicit, latent resentment dominant, in Ireland. It was when Ned bent down to tie up his shoe.

Actually, he didn’t bend down, but sort of rolled over so that at one moment he was striding ahead of me up the brambly cliff path that led to a spray-plumed headland two or three miles ahead where we had decided to halt for lunch, and at the next he was seated on a little patch of grass bank.

‘What’s up?’

Ned, without moving, squinted his eyes, possibly against the fresh breeze and the considerable glare from the sun quivering on the moving sea, and possibly because he did sometimes wrinkle his eyes in a rather affected way. He didn’t answer me, at which I felt a slight stir of impatience. We had walked for the last few miles in silence, largely enforced by the steep trail which kept us in single file.

‘What’s up?’ I asked again.

‘There’s a—legend——’

‘Eh?’

‘—about this coast—about the mighty men of old—the Irish are very partial to the mighty men of old, doubtless as compensation for the rather less impressive contemporary reality——’

‘What legend?’

As I asked I suddenly felt a stab of anger, at being
manipulated, used, compelled suddenly to quell the exhilaration of muscles and lungs, and stand aimlessly in the path while he maundered on about a legend.

‘Why have you stopped?’

‘Shoelace,’ he explained, now bending to secure it.

I stood silently for a moment or two, to allow my irritation to subside, now aware of its impermissibility since an untied shoelace is a legitimate reason for a halt. But it didn’t subside and when, as I finally did, I asked him to elaborate, to tell me more about the legend, it was with an effort and a lack of authentic interest which I had never been aware of before in our relations.

And I think that was it. I lost sympathy with Ned Collins after that. Not abruptly, of course. We continued on down the coast and laughed a good deal, and had a couple more festive dinners, and I got first drunk and then atrociously sick on the return passage and Ned stuck staunchly by me, even after I had been objectionable to a steward in the matter of courtesy to suffering, even if drunken, passengers, and a little rumpus arose. But, after we had got back to London, it was weeks before I could bring myself to call at his flat again and when I did everything there displeased me, grated on me, goaded me to say bitter, stupid, jealous things, at which Ned largely smiled. And I never went back again. I saw him occasionally in pubs after that, but, as they say, there was always a barrier between us.

Some time later, Peter Oglethorpe and I were watching four obscene men toying with a pretty Cockney girl in the ‘Starling’. She was very young (probably under age for drinks) and slight, but with quite a pretty, thin little face and these four bookies, or whatever they were, one gross, cigar-smoking and red-faced, one taller, nattier and with a glistening, pale face and the other two young and tough, were making suggestive remarks, swapping swift, dirty cracks above her head, ostensibly in ordinary masculine good-fellowship but clearly actually for the girl’s benefit
and occasionally, assuming an avuncular earnestness, leaning forward, placing a hand rather high up on her leg and delivering a piece of hypocritical good advice ‘Now, here’s what you want to do—find another girl like yourself——’

‘And bring her round here,’ interpolated one of the others.

‘No, no, wait a minute—I’m telling her something that’ll help her. She doesn’t know where to go, right? Now listen, get hold of another girl like yourself and get a flat together—that way——’

I glanced at Peter’s mug, somewhat disconcertingly, since I had bought two pints a very few minutes before, again empty and, aware that, as was not uncommon in his case, he was broke, asked him if he wanted another.

‘That’s very good of you—Oh!’

Something had appropriated his glance and, following its direction, I saw a dark-haired man slip out from a position at the bar concealed from us by other drinkers and move towards the door.

‘Isn’t that——?’ asked Peter, blinking uncertainly.

‘Ned Collins,’ I supplied.

‘Oh? Do you know him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Lonely man, isn’t he? Don’t you think?’

‘Lonely?’

‘Don’t you think? I mean—perhaps you know him better than I do—I hardly know him at all—but I—it’s always seemed to me——’

Lonely—the notion took me by surprise. It had no immediate connection with anything I had ever thought about Ned and so I glanced at Peter with involuntary respect, feeling that he had said something profound. We drank our replenished pints and casually watched the girl and the four men (I noted that the girl, lounging back, smoking and blowing jets of smoke provocatively amongst them, now seemed more brazen than vulnerable), but I went on wondering if Ned could be lonely. And the more I
considered
it, against the resistance which operates to prevent the admission of a new and possibly crucial element into a situation we believe to be thoroughly assimilated, the more plausible it seemed. But if he were lonely, then I had conducted our relationship on false terms. Of course I had! When had I ever considered Ned, or what he might have needed from me? I had thought only of myself and what I could get out of it. And my repudiation of him, not because of any fault that could be considered such, not for any valid, objective reason at all, but simply, in the last analysis, because my jealous mind had seized on the first opportunity to terminate its discipleship and stigmatize the master, had been coldly selfish.

This gave me a shock, of a kind that I had had several times before and was to have again, the shock of discovering that one had not yet grasped the truth at all, but had been basing one’s conduct on—on what?—a selfish
rationalization
, a myth, a convenient aspect. And concomitant with this realization, as a corollary to it, was the sense of a hierarchy of perspectives. After all, was the fact that he was lonely (if he was) the truth about Ned? And even if it was, might not the influence of some other factor be even then expanding or contracting, so that if one accepted loneliness as the truth, by the time one came to act upon it, if one did, it would no longer be so.

But the worst of it was that I suspected that all these quasi-metaphysical considerations were simply going on in my mind in order to distract me from something
disreputable
which I didn’t want to admit. And, sensing this, I sought deliberately to uncover the guilty secret.
Fundamentally,
I discovered, I was gloating at the implication of superiority, or at least equality, contained in my very objective consideration of the matter. Ned was no longer the categorical success whom I had, if grudgingly, respected and towards whom I had inevitably stood in the relation of disciple to master, but merely a contemporary young man in a flat who might be lonely. I could offer him as
much as he could me. How amazingly things change! How pleasant to humble the great! How damnable the crafty mind with its servile shifts and petty satisfactions!

‘Damn!’ I murmured involuntarily.

‘Hmm?’ asked Peter anxiously.

‘Let’s have—look, why the Hell haven’t you ever got any money? Oh, never mind. Two pints of bitter, please!’

It was snowing. I had stopped off on my way home from work for supper, a pint of beer and a slab of veal and ham pie mantling a section of egg. And out there it was
snowing
, onto the file of buses slowly absorbing the long, huddled queue. I looked up from my book and saw a sudden arctic gust swirl a dense cluster of snowflakes around a street lamp.

Whenever the swing doors opened to admit stooped, glittering figures, usually swathed in heavy, black overcoats, I glanced out and saw the brightly-lit newspaper kiosk opposite and the trail of cars gleaming as they inched forward through the packed streets. Ingenious young men, on another continent, had perfected a new weapon, or rather a refinement of an existing one, and European trees were drooping under the snow. It was night over half the world, but even where it was night, the weapons men were active in bright laboratories. And the political men, accepting the substitution of the issue of the Earth’s life or death for the old ones involving mere relative carnage, continued to defend ‘our sacred way of life’, and, inevitably, their occupancy of positions of power. No, let’s read for a while.

I had with me an excellent book. Written perhaps seventy or eighty years ago, it described, insofar as it was concerned with externals, a way of life qualitatively far closer to
that found anywhere in Europe in the two or three hundred years that had preceded its production than to the way people lived in the nuclear dementia of our times. I read another half page, admiring, succumbing as always with this author, to the sheer intensity of his creative powers. Helplessly, one was picked up on the current of his imagination and carried on wild, magnificent journeys through—no, not the soul of man, for, of course, the most diligent anatomists have failed to locate the organ but—yes, the soul of man, using the venerable term to represent everything that neither anatomist nor psychologist can describe but which is implied in the wider prospect, the story of a nibbling, aboreal animal that has learned the secret of the sun.

I munched the delectable pie and tried to read the book. But my very eagerness impeded me. Sometimes, one enjoys a book so much that a sort of instinct to conserve it is generated, mingled with a reverence which continually questions the suitability of one’s mood, or the surroundings, or one’s background knowledge, for embarking on so rewarding and yet demanding a task.

The pub door opened again and the usual tongue of cold air licked towards me. I thought of distant floes under black skies, with turbulent seas rolling towards black bergs and a few huddled specks where the seals sniffed the storm. Naked on the planet. Naked as we once were, without pubs, and heated cars to bear us swiftly here and there. Now we have fast planes, but these sometimes fail and plunge into the restless sea and the seal cranes its supple neck for a moment towards the point of impact. We have cradled our planet in a net of power. Organized pulses of
electromagnetic
tension continually sweep its surface, unknown to the denizens of the sea and to the black, humanoid gorillas nibbling celery on African slopes.

I swallowed some beer, which tasted disagreeably bitter after the sweetish pie, and bent my eyes to my book again, but after a few paragraphs, again looked up. A very large, white and chillingly hairless dog had been introduced
into the saloon and several of the men at the bar, welcoming this standard diversion, were making unsuccessful attempts to entice it close enough to be fondled. The animal, notably deficient, it seemed, in canine intuition, chose instead to lay its slender muzzle on the knee of a large, bluff, rather sly-looking man who had been engrossed in his evening newspaper. This man, only I felt, by the exercise of considerable self-control managing to refrain from kicking the dolorous beast, started and said roughly.

‘Hop it! Go on—get away!’

Narrowed eyes and tightened lips greeted this display of blatantly un-British behaviour but the big man, quite unabashed, returned to the study of his newspaper. A few minutes later, glancing up again from an unsuccessful attempt to immerse myself in the narrative, I saw him
looking
quizzically over his spectacles and newspaper at a tall, middle-class (one would have said), man who, with a pipe in his mouth, was now romping in a gentlemanly way with the dog. The presumptive dog-hater glanced round and our eyes met.

‘Worse than blooming sacred cows,’ he grated, ‘can’t find a pub that isn’t a blasted kennel these days. I say if you want to keep a dog you should do it in your own home. For a whopper like that you need a perishing farm.’

I smiled, a trifle self-consciously, foolishly embarrassed and resentful at being implicated, since he had spoken in a loud, conversational tone perhaps intentionally audible to the dog-lovers at the bar, in his attitude, although I roughly shared it.

The well-groomed man engaged in fondling the dog, without making any overt acknowledgment of the other’s remark, murmured something and I sensed that breeding dictated that he must administer his discreet rebuke in the form of an assurance to the animal itself.

‘No, he’s a handsome fellow, isn’t he? We all love Simon, don’t we? Why we wouldn’t know the place without him,
would we? Eh, fellow? All the regulars love Simon, don’t they?’

‘Simon!’ snorted the dog-hater, and then, formalizing his challenge more narrowly, continued. ‘Anyway, I beg to differ. I’ve been using this house for three years—if that’s what you call a “regular”. I don’t think a saloon bar’s any place for a dog.’

‘Yes,’ continued the other, in the same impersonal tone, as he chafed Simon’s rump. ‘We all love Simon.’

‘Well, I for one,
don’t
love Simon.’

‘Oh, don’t you?’

Goaded by this blunt assertion beyond the restraints of gentility, the dog-lover addressed his antagonist directly for the first time.

‘I bloody well don’t! You can’t love a bloody dog!’

‘Oh, can’t you? Very interesting. I should say it was a matter of democratic procedure, wouldn’t you?’ and the dog-lover, before turning his attention back to the prancing animal, shot the other a glance of authentic dislike in which one could sense a world of class animosity of a kind that is supposed to have been neutralized by the ‘great social changes’ of our era.

‘Now talk bloody sense! What the hell’s democracy got to do with it? Some of you people think——’

But the rest of the remark was lost in a series of short, piercing barks from the contentious beast itself and the speaker, with a look of disgust, picked up his paper again and continued to read. But I sensed that this was more a flourish than a genuine resumption of interest for, after a very short period, he drained the last sixth of his pint, stood up, put on his (rather opulent, I noticed) overcoat with great deliberation and strode out, not failing to urge very forcefully as he passed the other.

‘A bar’s for men not for bloody animals.’

Which was answered, after the door, admitting a little gush of snow and icy air, had closed behind him, by a period of brooding outraged silence.

I remember that clash, without issue in violence, because of the later one on the same evening, which did find, rather terrible, physical expression. Now, however, knowing myself cut off, at least in that place, from my book, I finished my own pint, ate the last morsel of pie, got up, put on my ‘mac’ and left.

As soon as I got outside I felt happy. Cheerful thoughts had, in fact, while I had attempted to read and later listened to the squabble, been playing in the background of my mind. Actually, they must have been one of the factors thwarting concentration, for, several times, after starting to read, I had paused and allowed awareness of some pleasant background knowledge to try to struggle into consciousness. But it had eluded me.

Now, whipped by the freezing wind, seeing the pedestrians bent against it, the crusts of frozen snow on the car roofs, the lights glinting in the wet, icy streets, the great turmoil of clearing the metropolis once more for the night, I realized what it was. And, with the realization, came doubt and a residual feeling of shame. The pleasant thought was Nelly—Nelly Nelmes, whom I had known on and off for years, and had kissed casually in pubs and at parties, but never more. Indeed, prolonged intimacy had blunted desire, robbing the potential conquest of all but physical confirmation. However, a few nights ago we had suddenly, I think both with surprise, acquired a new and deeper sympathy, so much so, in fact, that Nelly had seemed almost like someone met for the first time. The conversation that had mediated, but I don’t think produced, this change had concerned animals, or rather, perhaps, the idea, which intrigued us both, of animals living amongst us and retaining their life rhythms in the midst, and in the teeth of our human constructs. It seemed we were both fascinated by the notion that to the saurian rock dove, known weakly to peanut distributors in public squares as the pigeon, London is only marginally better than, and qualitatively no different from, any rock-bound coast. I had even confessed
to her my particular esteem for sea-going mammals, that suckle amidst the waves, and generously infuse the primitive matrix of life with a little land-won intelligence.

Funny how even Nelly’s physical appearance, stocky, blonde and childishly pretty, had altered in my mind and her features and figure now seemed instinct with a charm I had never endowed them with in the past.

It had been appreciative, if unconscious, thoughts of Nelly Nelmes which had buoyed up my spirits
throughout
the day. But now, having admitted this to myself, I was compelled to revive the absurd debate which had already occupied a good deal of my mental energy. Was it right? Wasn’t there something—what?—disreputable, almost incestuous, about suddenly being attracted by someone one had known intimately for years? Silly! After all, she was like a new acquaintance. Yes, but, in objective fact, she wasn’t a new acquaintance, but someone you’d drunk many a silent, or predominantly silent, pint with, whose bottom you had cheerfully, and without any appreciable erotic feeling, slapped, who had been like a sister to you. But she’s not your sister! Nevertheless….

So it went. Although, I knew that I wanted to see Nelly, that, if we could recapture the intimacy of the other evening, seeing her and being with her would make me happier than anything else I could think of, I was hampered by the absurd equivocation I seemed unable to shed. Finally, as a compromise, knowing that I would, in fact, gravitate towards the centre of the town and the pubs where she might be found, and also as a response to the still-dense, rush-hour traffic which made the struggle for buses and underground trains, particularly if one were in a reflective mood, disagreeable, I decided to walk for a while, perhaps stopping for a pint and a few pages of Russian literature on the way.

I had to walk further than I had intended. There were queues at all the bus stops and I strode past them. When I reached the underground station at which I had vaguely
thought of getting a train it turned out to be closed. The iron gates were drawn and a policeman was warding off the irritated press. I passed on. By now I was cold and also exhilarated. It began to seem rather stirring to be battling a blizzard in the heart of London. The snow was thickening on the pavements beneath me, cushioning and transforming them. The wind drove great flights of snowflakes into my face. I could hardly see from street-lamp to street-lamp. I crossed the Bayswater Road and walked beside the park, which was turning, under the influence of the blizzard, into a sparkling and unfamiliar wilderness. Suddenly, it came to me again, a feeling that seemed to echo many in early childhood and, I fancied, a few similar moments in mature life, a feeling that, stimulated doubtless by the actual scene but seeming to embrace far, far more, could only have been expressed in some such appreciative exclamation as ‘how lovely! How lovely is the world!’ In a sustained rapture, forgetting or losing for a spell, all the qualifying factors, even the inhuman rhythms of the machine city, I strode on through the snowfall until regretfully finding myself at the next underground station.

On the final leg of the trip, I felt eager to arrive, picturing in my mind the huge, animated bar of the ‘Horseshoe’, which I knew Nelly favoured, and also feeling suddenly anxious for it now occurred to me that Nelly wasn’t patiently waiting for me to resolve my psychological conflicts but, a companionable girl who usually had men around her, might even now be cementing a liaison with someone else. What the devil had I been thinking of? Moping around over purely academic issues when life was uncertain and bombs were big and the whole show was merely an experiment conducted by gelatinous super-scientists on Neptune—where was Nelly?

I burst into the ‘Horseshoe’, prepared to battle my way through the noisy throng and verbally despatch whichever layabout was presumptuously making up to my newfound darling—and I had a queer shock! The place was
empty! But where—what…? Of course! It was too early—and the blizzard….

I gazed woefully around. The row of stalls stretched empty and bleak to the barren, curtained alcove at the rear. The great, horseshoe bar curved in untrammelled serenity round the room. At its furthest point, a short,
disgruntled
-looking sailor was munching potato crisps and
behind
the bar two barmen were polishing glasses—otherwise the room was as bare and forbidding as a barn. Damn! Where was Nelly? Where was anyone? Perhaps—but even as the thought of trying the ‘Starling’ stirred in my mind the realization that the two operative factors, hour and weather, would also be influential there, and indeed anywhere else, made me pause. Oh well then—bitter and nineteenth-century St Petersburg. I ordered my pint, carried it to an empty stall and prepared to read.

And then, at last, I did get into my book. The first pint lasted me for about half an hour, and at the end of that period I was so deeply immersed in the narrative that, although several times raising the empty tankard to my lips and irritably determining to get it filled, almost another half hour passed before I actually did so. Then I marched blinking across the room, vaguely noticing that I now shared it with a dozen or so others, but finding the whole pale scene, blizzard and bar and England and the twentieth century, merely a ghostly murmur behind the thunder of my book. It was, in fact, after I had finished reading an episode, a conversation in a slum room between a civil
servant
and a student that seemed to me to have been created at perhaps as incandescent a pitch of imaginative intensity as anything I had ever read, and while I was, although allowing my eyes to trail idly on across the page, in reality striving to assimilate the concentrated fare, that I became aware of someone beside me. As I glanced up, a familiar voice said: