As Near as I Can Get (18 page)

‘Yes now, there he is, our little friend——’ followed by a throaty chuckle.

‘Hello Kingsley?’

‘Can I get you a pint?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you reading, eh?’

A bit cramped and never particularly addicted to
sedentary
drinking, I stood up and accompanied Kingsley over to the bar.

This man was the first negro I had ever known well and, in the early days, struggle as I might in self-contempt against it, I had not been able to escape feeling slightly self-conscious about being with him. He often teased me about my height, in fact, only just over six feet, but
emphasized
by my thinness, and this was probably a form of self-mockery. He was himself very short, perhaps five feet three or four, and very broad, with a large rump and a large rounded chin, giving him the broadest grin conceivable, bespectacled, with somewhat protuberant eyes and dense fuzz of little curls on his head—very odd-looking. I had been conscious of the contrast we had made, walking or talking together and had striven to ignore it. And then one day, I had said to myself, ‘Why try and pretend that these things don’t exist? He
is
a negro, and something of an oddity to boot, and civilization for the last few centuries anyway has generated this exaggerated awareness of racial differences. The falsity is in maintaining that you can be friends with Kingsley in exactly the same way as with Clark or Peter or someone you were in the army with. Stop this doctrinaire pretence that you have “no racial feeling” and simply get on with knowing the man’.

And this seemed to work, in that we became, quite rapidly, sufficiently good friends for superficial things to dwindle out of sight. Strange how a common response to, say, a poem by Baudelaire instantly creates a bridge of understanding no matter what extremes of social or national background seem to separate two people.

I recall one perilous incident before we had become close friends, perhaps, by a blessing of chance (since
it might, I suppose, have turned out quite differently—and miserably), it was this incident that confirmed our friendship. Actually, I think it was. We had been talking and drinking and drinking and talking and now we were talking about a certain book by an English novelist which I maintained was the only authentic comic novel in English. But Kingsley wouldn’t have it. I am sure to this day that I was right, at least in the sense that my arguments were relevant to the proposition, for I sensed, without being able to put my finger on it, that some psychological block was coming between Kingsley and a perceptive understanding of the book. He wasn’t considering it with anything like the depth of critical penetration that I knew he was capable of. Instead, however, of being able to locate the key inhibition in Kingsley’s mind and to demonstrate it to him, I merely kept multiplying positive examples and arguing in the, for the purpose in hand, futile mode of ‘yes, but what about this passage or that passage’ and so on. It was, I think, as much from progressive dissatisfaction with my own ineptness as from impatience with Kingsley’s apparent obtuseness that, after a particularly glaring example by him of a missed point, I cried out:

‘No, but listen, you stupid nigger——’

And then stopped, appalled, as suddenly crowding in upon me came applauding legions of phantom Klansmen and old-style imperialists, and genteel racists and fascist theoreticians, the whole rabble army of those with a vested interest, if only of self-esteem, in ignoring the overwhelming evidence for the essential similarity of human beings everywhere. I stared at Kingsley, in terror of the veil of doubt and hurt that I feared would come over his face. But it didn’t happen. As deeply committed to the argument as I had been, he simply glared back at me and roared:

‘Stupid nigger yourself! Can’t you see——’

And then, suddenly grasping the message of my frightened gaze, his own eyes contracted and, for an instant, he stared silently back at me. But, of course, it was too late.
The acid of outer hate had already been dissolved by his absurd, reciprocal insult and, almost at the same instant, we grinned, our grins broadened and a moment later we both laughed aloud.

‘Anyway,’ I resumed, ‘whichever of us is or isn’t a stupid nigger, it’s quite clear that only one of us understands Smollet! Illiterate pig!’

That had been nearly a year or more ago. Now I
accompanied
Kingsley to the bar, and, while he ordered the drink, gazed idly around, still in the grip of the mighty allegory I had just been reading.

When was it—then or later? I recall, much of it vividly, everything that happened that evening, but the detailed order of things, at least from this point on, defies my
recollection.
Had they already, while I glanced around, noticing bushy-bearded Tony roaring (he always roared) at Nadia Grunwald, various strangers, two dim little girls I had seen before and other familiar faces, arrived, the three bearers of violence? Were they already clustered near us, down the bar, still adequately diverted by the magazine they were snatching out of each other’s hands, and their periodic raucous bursts of laughter at things it contained, to keep them from glancing around in search of further destructive entertainment? Or did they arrive later? I can’t remember, while recalling that, at some period, as Kingsley and I chatted, my eyes were increasing doubtfully attracted from time to time to this ominous little gang. No, of course—it was before they arrived that I saw Nelly.

I must have forgotten her before that, what with the pleasant talk with Kingsley and a feeling that, whatever else happened, there would always be ale. But suddenly I saw her. Probably I had shifted my position a little and there, tucked behind the curtain of the little proscenium that separated a small chamber from the main part of the saloon, was Nelly. Puzzled at first, my eyes moved from her to the pale, haughty-faced youth whom I had been glancing idly at from time to time without realizing that
the concealed companion with whom he had been conversing was my Nelly. She was gazing across the proscenium and so at right angles to my own line of vision. With mounting dismay, recalling the intimacy implied by the casual demeanour of the young man, I watched the pair. Kingsley must have asked me something to which I failed to reply for now there was a slight edge of impatience in his ‘Well?’

‘Mm?’

‘Well—don’t they?’

He meant, I suppose, don’t films convey certain things more readily than words do, for this was the subject we had been discussing. But, although understanding his question, I was too shocked by what I had seen to make an adequate reply. I merely mumbled ‘I suppose so’ or some such listless agreement.

‘You what? What is it? Are you listening?’

In fact, I was suddenly weary of the conversation. I had a sense of things piling up—negative things, hopelessness, despair, beginning to reveal their true, terrible mass which only the blind energy of youth is capable of fatuously ignoring. That damned Russian book—brilliant but, in its ultimate statement, desperate—for there was no room in that universe for evolution and only the struggle itself was stable—a preordained struggle that could never seek further victory than its own perpetuation. Is that what it’s for—the parks glittering under the snow, and the
glittering
buds in May and the stars glittering in the depths of space? A mighty intellect says so—Damn Nelly! I felt that she was lost to me, and, in fact, although my feeling was based on a total misinterpretation of the situation, an absurd, classical misinterpretation, this proved ultimately to be the case. We never did recapture our moment of intimacy. It was, in fact, months before I saw her again, for the young man she was with took her two hundred miles away, and when I next did see her she had found herself a new boy-friend. True, we were technically intimate once
subsequently but that was casual (although it had a protracted, surgical sequal), a mere extension of our long familiarity, almost accidental since I don’t think she really knew, when she crawled under the blanket at that party, that the randy young man there ahead of her was me.

Soon Nelly and her brother (as, months later, after Charley Nelmes had again followed his sister down from, I think, Huddersfield to London, I discovered that my rival had been) left the ‘Horseshoe’. I was watching them in the bar mirror and for a moment I thought of turning and confronting them, but I felt too depleted and gave the cause up as lost. Nelly and Charley—strange pair, Nelly completely indifferent to Christian morality and Charley a staunch, dull friend in later years, indifferent to everything else.

‘There she goes,’ I murmured sadly.

‘Who?’

‘Nelly—do you know her?’

‘Nelly? I
do
know a Nelly.’

‘Nelly Nelmes? No? She’s just left. I feel low, Kingsley, distinctly low. How do you feel?’

‘I feel well, and I wish to continue to feel well. I haven’t had a love affair for three years. Are you proposing to be maudlin?’

By now, the place was beginning to fill up. But, of course, I had been deprived, by having seen, and seen depart, Nelly, of any real interest in new arrivals. I remember wondering if belligerent Tony, a sturdy and reassuring, if not always comfortably predictable, presence was still with us, and then glancing around to find he wasn’t. Most of the stalls were full and the amount of vacant floor space was decreasing. The snow seemed to have stopped falling but, as could be seen when the doors opened, a substantial layer of it had been durably deposited on the pavement. Gradually, what with the ale and Kingsley’s attractive company, my spirits began to rise again, but our talk was now desultory and soon something happened which sent them plummeting down again.

I had seen them by this time and not liked the look of them, three young, sturdy, flashily-dressed urban rebels—bright too, one could tell, as the most turbulent ones always are. They were noisy, assertive, convinced of the supreme interest and importance of their moods and actions. For some time, they had been occupying themselves with a magazine and expressing their appreciation of its contents chiefly in whoops of jeering laughter.

Kingsley and I were, I think, standing somewhat reflectively, without talking, and I was not, at that moment, looking at our boisterous neighbours, a few feet away down the bar, when suddenly I heard something that made my heart jump. In a rather more muted voice than they had been using, one of them murmured something, only a few words of which reached me, ‘—the darky—there.’

I glanced down in time to meet the eyes of a rather cheerfully handsome face, but one fixed in a tight malicious grin, with long rakish sideburns and curly, glistening black hair, eyes which met mine indifferently for an instant. The body that went with the eyes was slumped lazily forward over the bar in front of one of the other two youths, a more potato-faced but equally stylish type, to whom the first had just confided both the few words I had caught and also whatever else, inevitably sinister it seemed to me, had gone with them. Had Kingsley heard? There was nothing in his expression to indicate one way or the other.

We stood on silently, but, in my case at least, no longer languidly. I was wondering feverishly what, if anything, should be done. The ominous muttering, punctuated by bursts of raucous laughter, continued from down the bar.

‘Time for another round,’ remarked Kingsley soon.

‘Here?’ I asked quickly and then as quickly (seeing us followed out into the icy and doubtless relatively deserted streets, by three obscene figures) regretted it. ‘All right, let’s have one more here.’

Kingsley ordered two more pints and we stood again in silence, he apparently studying with mild interest the
two couples now occupying the alcove where Nelly had sat and I straining to hear any further intimations from what I had now definitely come to regard as the threat down the bar. And finally I did hear something distinguishable. Apparently concluding, in a manner so satisfactory that I felt a distinct surge of relief, their mischievous conference, the third one, standing furthest away from us, and with a thinner, weaker, more sly, face than the other two, urged in a strident voice:

‘Nah, let it go! Arthur, here Arthur, come on, we’ll go down to the Dragon!’

Hoping fervently that the lure of the pub or coffee house so designated would prevail with Arthur, I waited again. There was a faint stirring above the general clamour and, finally glancing round, I saw the three of them, in the customary single-file swagger, shuffling out of the door. A little later I said to Kingsley:

‘Come on. Let’s go somewhere else?’

‘Did they bother you?’

‘Did you hear them?’

‘Oh yes. If you belong to what is technically known as a minority group, you develop sharp ears for that sort of thing. You heard what they were saying?’

‘No—at least—no, not much——’

‘They were saying—they wanted to come over here and order me to leave.’

I stared at Kingsley. Had he really heard that? From what I had gathered, the sense seemed plausible, but how had he managed, standing a foot or two further away from them than me, to hear it when I, concentrate as I might, had only detected sinister murmurs? Order him to leave? Them? Those three—useless, ignorant—order Kingsley, a man of wit and intelligence and kindness…. For a moment a wave of such incandescent anger overwhelmed me that, not normally conspicuously bold, I regretted that they had gone, that they hadn’t implemented their little bit of fun, as they doubtless regarded
it. I would have liked to have hit one of them, all of them, to have stood by Kingsley with my fists and struck a blow for….

‘Kingsley,’ I inquired, ‘do you think we ought to go? They might come back.’

Kingsley merely moved his head in an impatient little gesture and grinned.

I remember gazing at him thoughtfully, a little confused. An impulse to say something encouraging, to give him an assurance of loyalty and support, stirred in my mind and then died in some absurd, racial embarrassment at the possibility of being emotional. But this impulse was also thwarted by having to compete with a sudden wave of understanding which came to me, I think, as much from the imponderables of his manner, his little gesture and the deliberateness of his grin, as from what he had actually said, and which seemed to express a whole dimension of
experience
that I had never really considered at all, the dimension of being hunted. And the hunters I perceived were not, or not predominantly (for in any community the actual agents of violence are relatively few) three razor boys in a pub, but, for example, the dapper fellow at the bar who, after Kingsley’s arrival, might direct a single sharp glance at him and then fold up his paper and meaningfully carry his pint to a table across the room, or the lady who, jostled against Kingsley in a crowd, would give a loud ‘Tsk!’ of dismay and draw in her shoulders.