As Near as I Can Get (2 page)

What was the name? Celia, Celia Bridges, a fresh,
staring
girl with a sharp nose and a good figure whom I had once succeeded in getting back to my room and whose breath had proved to be so foul, and whose teeth, on
surreptitious
inspection, so decayed, that I had been unable to repeat an initial kiss. And, in spite of half-hearted attempts at prevarication, Celia had known, when we had parted without further intimacy, a little later, that I had found her repulsive.

As we approached Milly's flatlet from the underground station, down a winding, bus-loud road, and she began to squeeze my hand and give signs of strong, impulsive physical attraction, I remembered Celia, and how I might have hurt her, and hoped fervently that I wouldn't reveal to Milly,
when we were close, that I found her thin beyond the point of desirability.

‘Thin, aren't you?' I said, after she had sat down across my lap in the arm-chair and wriggled and hugged me until I had taken her up, as a father might his overtired daughter, and carried her to the bed. ‘Just skin and bone.'

Strangely uncircumspect, having discovered a tenderness that balanced my persisting revulsion at her thinness, I found for an hour I could be natural.

‘Lay off the drugs. You'll waste away completely. There's not much of you left now.'

‘Pneumonia,' she informed me, ‘pneumonia, and then I was in a home.'

No drugs, just germs, lethal colonies of microscopic parasites, and germs in the head, of fact more astonishing than fable, impermanence, warring germs of arbitrary value for which no antibiotic of unifying principle had yet turned up in the laboratory of twentieth-century thought. The sky raged with planes. Above ten thousand tubs of geraniums, and starview diners sipping cocktails, over the flaring beacons of commerce, and the quaint domes of an archaic architecture, screamed the havoc bringers.

Though plane and bomb are big, the pilot is a wee, technique-cramped fellow whose will is the will of the corporation, and whose pleasure and whose pain are but ripples on the surface of the world's hard-worn reservoir of feeling.

And anyway, whatever I had failed to conceal of my feelings, I don't think Milly would have noticed. The short, feverish caresses and gasped endearments were not for me but for any pleasure-promising male physique. But not pleasure-providing, it seemed, unless pleasure is only inspissated excitement. Someone rustled hurriedly down to the telephone a floor or two below and then talked urgently, a betrayed, angrily betrayed, girl from (the flat drawl
revealed
) the island-continent of Australia, insisting that ‘I did speak to Ethel. Don't tell me I couldn't have done! I
did! Well, I'm not going to stand much more. Where are you now?'

‘Darling,' said Milly, panted Milly, moaned Milly, struggling in folds of the chiffon with which, to no achieved purpose of modesty, she was still entwined, as she attempted to enlace me anew in her thin limbs, ‘Oh! This thing—off—take it off——'

She was too slight and oblivious for her importunity to be embarrassing. Smugly virile, I clasped my hands behind my neck, inspecting the terracing of her narrow, ridged back as she twisted herself out of her
négligé,
the flowing, fair hair, the angular face and hollow cheeks which, as she turned once more towards me, developed a coy, childish smile.

‘Hello,' she whispered, laying this same thin face on my chest, ‘what are you thinking of?'

‘Seals.' I answered untruthfully, or rather deceitfully, having only determined upon the reply, and evoked the appropriate marine connotations, after her idle question.

‘You know Cranston, don't you? Is it Cranston? Oh, sometimes I can't think properly.'

She pouted for a moment, rebuking her vagrant memory, but, behind the flirtatious expression, lay authentic distress at the proximity of chaos.

‘You don't think I'm too thin?' she gasped hurriedly. ‘I eat a lot, honestly. Well, I don't really. I can cook
anything
on that ring.'

‘Shall I tell you about seals?' I offered, allowing charged fragments of my thoughts to collect again, as they had done frequently over the past few weeks, around the terminal of a poignant phrase, ‘the wave-borne seals', to which I appended: grey sea-rovers, fish gulpers, sliding, muzzles raised, past blue, towering icebergs, flipping miles of green water behind them, coasting Canada. The lash of poetry, flailing the feeble and unaspiring imagination, the sluggish bearer, on to far horizons. Another cut and the stung brain struggles exhausted to the summit and lies
panting both from effort and from awe at the prospect revealed. ‘Here, here!' it gasps, ‘I will rest. True, there is a further range but may there not be others beyond that? I am content with this airy space to dwell upon.' Until the crisp lash speaks again.

‘Do you like that?' asked Milly.

This thing, this crucial moment in the affairs of
evolution,
when two units of intelligent life knit physically to generate another, is still magic, still unsecularized by the heroic attempts of some, and the less disinterested ones of many, mind-scientists of our century. We may not describe it lest we disperse it, and release the precious energy that builds the machines which change the world which changes us, conveying us in our car powered by erotic combustion—where? Into the future, into a million, million years of human evolution, into the heart of a star, somewhere.

‘Very much.'

‘Have you ever done it like this?'

‘No,' I answered studiously, ‘I don't think I have.'
Wishing
for total abandon, for the completely unselfconscious participation which alone would disperse my awareness of the growing absurdity of our acrobatics, and finding
instead
only greater and greater detachment.

Later Milly slept restlessly, turning from side to side and even sitting up occasionally with a muffled gasp as if freeing herself from some oppressive force. Feigning sleep, I saw her from the corner of my eye. I heard a car draw up further down the street and a burst of low, acquiescent laughter and a front door slam. I heard the swelling drone of the night flight to Paris or Rome or Karachi and I thought of India and its white cows and of the sprung shrimp beneath the careless, abandoned waters and of the familiar seals at play. And then I dozed.

‘Don't fall over the rocks,' urged my mother. ‘Take Edna's hand. Ah, here is Mr Billings. Mr Billings looks cross.'

And I had to strive with Mr Billings, the village stationer,
now inexplicably endowed with flashing eye and wrathful countenance, on some fearsome, eagle-haunted precipice, while Edna, horribly forgetting our attachment, dragged at my heavy limbs and mother watched critically as they toppled me over. And with despair at betrayal sharpening my terror of falling I had plunged down, down, down into a sort of drawing-room, which was also the middle ocean, to find Edna, partly a turtle, rolling invitingly in the depths.

The office was visually a place of sterile tedium and had a slippery floor. Piers of dove-grey filing cabinets jutted in labyrinthine profusion about the room partially isolating Mrs Longmore (spectacles and rude, frizzy, auburn hair), Mr Taper (cheerful and hunchbacked and irrevocably plebeian), Mr Copes (young and dull) and others, Mr Welsh, wearing nerves like a gaudy tie, raided us from his inner office (where several times a minute he smiled a brilliant smile) every hour or so and returned with a trophy of observed inattention or suspected inefficiency. Inside the filing cabinets were thousands of cards, each classifying a single wretched individual in terms of physical debility. Somewhere, creaking with arthritis, hobbled the venerable and affluent (implied by the ability to afford the essentially superfluous form of insurance we purveyed)
subject
of the stark slip of cardboard in Mrs Longmore's bony fingers. But, for Mrs Longmore, only the pathological index was real.

The great consultant strode through the office. Eyes that could infer, from a minutely deranged pattern of ribs, a buckled lung, surveyed clerks with lofty contempt, hands that could part and suture thread-like vessels, fingers that, probing amorphous, visceral slime, could detect a minute,
incipient tumour, clasped the raw, farmer's hands of the director who, a magpie of white, silken locks and decorous, dark suit, whirred from his inner office when notified of the surgeon-knight's arrival. Concrete. Through the bare, bleak windows flowed images of sterility, a concrete fawn in a shallow pool sprinkling superfluous rain. One day there was a child in the grass and concrete enclosure between the office blocks and we all watched its strange,
unself-conscious
behaviour with jolly water and cool grass
half-incredulously
for no one had ever before been seen in the inner court and it was tacitly accepted that no public door opened onto the forbidden space.

‘Has anyone got 147934?' trilled Mrs Longmore sweetly, no not sweetly, roughly. She was a rough, married woman who admitted once, to my astonishment and Mr Taper's cheerful unconcern, to being the mother of six. Six times the bloody matrix had swelled, six times the protean foetus had evolved in the generative cavity of this efficient woman and six times a slip of squirming life, propelled by
heart-rending
exertion and spurred on by yells of agony, had slid from between the parted thighs of this senior member of the office staff, whom I, in the delirium of youthful lust, could not think of as other than sexless.

Mrs Patty also wore glasses, plain ones too like those of Mrs Longmore, and tirelessly, sweetly, like a woman (in a Dutch interior) spinning, operated a complex, electronic machine. Egg-shaped, plump-faced, one might have said full-breasted if bosom and belly had not merged in a general upholstery of flesh beneath the limp pleats of her shapeless gown, Mrs Patty constituted no terminal on which the sparking current of desire could home. Nor did Olive, the dumpy, witless office girl, hardly even when she changed her shoes and, ponderously hoisting up an ankle, displayed pasty flesh high above the knee. Nor did the towering
angular
Mrs Richards.

‘But we
ought
to have a special correspondence clerk. I've been saying so for twelve years,' grated Mrs Longmore,
seeking chronically to fire Mrs Patty, who, effortlessly neutralizing her spleen, murmured, ‘Yes, yes indeed, things could be much better. Of course, they could be worse too. Perhaps there's a good reason, but of course you're
probably
right. Indeed you probably are.' Without ceasing to supervise and nervously, but infallibly, direct the complex activities of her dexterous machine.

Into the night of light, the glare of disseminated current, at half-past five went Mrs Patty and Mrs Longmore and Mr Taper, to small, electron-blue rooms, resonant of cars and planes, to bake, to bully and vicariously to pursue balls through howling stadia. Into the dove-grey, dustless,
loveless
office at half-past nine shambled an area of appalled space, clad in my body, as despairingly far from evening tap time as some peering, over-venturesome swimmer from the (he suddenly knows) never-more-to-be-trodden shore.

‘If you don't get a degree, you won't get a good job. You'll regret it later,' murmured the unemphatic maternal voice lodged, with all the rest of the spoken past,
ineradicably
in my brain.

Offices, where paper is handled, where files and records multiply like bacilli, where paper is marked with
communicative
symbols and we drink tea at half-past ten and three. Offices do not produce food or clothes or cunning machines but only black marks on white paper. ‘Ours is responsible work,' I murmured, in ironic self-encouragement. Paper must be marked while the sun, generating useful energy, shines. The sun once shone on the realm of the dinosaur, pouring energy into the luxuriant vegetation, which energy now propels Mr Welsh, seated, home in his new, sleek car. Stop, oh sun, your ceaseless benediction. It deprives Mr Welsh of exercise and pollutes the umber gloom of October.

In the fields, beyond the twinkling town, the shy fauna, mammal and reptile, repossess their ancient heritage. The last unpolluted brook gurgles down from the last
unprospected
mountain, quenching long-legged birds and
watchful
deer, mangling salmon. The last bear rears in Tibet and the seal dives to the warm, fish-rich current sweeping round the world. Plankton shimmers in the sea's green throat and five-miles up Miss Penny Fannington glances sideways in subtle acquiescence at Your Roving Reporter standing her drinks in the aircraft's Moon Room.

‘Yes?' asks Mr Welsh anxiously, and then smiles, the involuntary reflex drawing back lips and crinkling eyes in the semblance of fraternal benevolence. And then, abruptly, ceases to smile.

‘I'm leaving.'

‘Leaving?'

‘At the end of the week.'

‘Leaving?' smile. ‘Why?'

The fact is, I've been offered the throne of France. Er, no, while I was sitting out there just now, with Mrs Longmore grumbling and with Mr Taper (who is a dear—a gentle, ignorant, sweet-natured man whom I admire, but whom I cannot reduce speed sufficiently to accompany through life) humming a simple air about ‘your magic …' as he stamped forms and with Mrs Patty's slick sorter chattering on through its torrent of records and as I sought back through the Duckworth file for that sales manager's first intimation of asthma and my unfound
darling
wandered forlorn through some quarter of the
darkening
city and the fog thickened in the court and Olive sniffed, the image of a pint of beer came into my head and I thought of a Members' Club to which this little, sooty card will admit me where they dispense it at this hour and I rose as in a dream and came in here to quit.

Having given in my notice, I walked calmly back into the main office, aware that I was being watched, since an uninvited intrusion into the director's lair always signified drama, and calmly, or with calm exterior, donned my greasy mack and with a single crisp ‘Good night' for them all, walked out into industrial haze of the Thames valley.

Later that night, a mouse shuddered across the ceiling.
Mike Rea thumped up the wooden stairs, muttered,
complained
, stamped into his neighbouring cubicle, dumped a heavy object (a machine? books?) and was silent. Then I sensed his breathing at my door and almost groaned in sudden, inexplicable revulsion. Lean and pale as a Gothic saint in the half-moonlight, large eyes reflectively scanning the canal-side tenements, green in the half-green
moonlight,
tapping a pensive rhythm on the startling whiteness (in an unsanitary, unshaven man) of a tooth, Mike, slack as an unstrung bow, sat sadly on my bed.

‘Well?' (How is your life proceeding?)

‘Well?' (How is yours?)

‘I'm nobody.'

Pale, human faces in the sunless zone.

‘It's true, I'm nobody.'

I uttered a sort of nasal snort, intended to signify amused and confederate sympathy, and grew
uncomfortable
. The assertion coincided too narrowly with my own developing opinion. Mike, cheered by his admission, patted my thigh.

‘Seen Tessa?' he asked.

‘No.'

‘I saw her.'

His tame sardonic imp appropriated his features and
inspected
me coolly, but had nothing worthy to impart.

‘With her mother. Listen——'

The imp blew out and benign, candid Councillor Mike replaced him.

‘You haven't got a hope, not with her.'

Mike forgot me and Tessa and strove mentally with a host of enemies, tax officials, dealers, unfaithful, undevoted bloody women, respectable apes, somebodies. He stretched out his arms in an exhaustive yawn and the garlic and rot of his incompetent digestion reached my nostrils.

‘I can do anything,' he promised, rising lightly and
corruptly
as fumes. ‘Sleep beautifully.'

Out of a job, girlless, not drunk….

The next morning:

‘Where are you staying now?'

‘With Mike Rea.'

‘Uh huh.'

The fat face retained its expression of surface interest and background indifference. It was like Jock Kempton's face, round and pudgy, but with a glistening, ambitious eye. The name was Swishki or so pronounced and I had never seen it written. Heaving mutinously, beneath the thongs of an acquired, cultured British accent, were the glottal vocables of his original Slavic tongue.

‘With who? Who did you say?'

The greater part of his attention was devoted to
watching
the street-corners we passed in search of the one he sought, and, consequently, I had to address ear and tonsure rather than face.

‘Mike Rea.'

‘Yes, but—for God's sake—who's Mike Rea?'

‘Well——'

Somewhat nonplussed at the interest he was showing in the identity of my landlord (or rather host, the trifling rent having remained unpaid for nearly two months), I attempted to satisfy him with evasive murmurs but,
disconcertingly,
he persisted.

‘Rea? What's he look like?'

‘Like—like a torpedo——'

‘This is it! Driver!'

He directed the driver along the gentle avenue,
overloomed
by flats at its further end. A sudden, frail little girl leaped absurdly from a concrete pier and, the feat well beyond her physique, rolled forward to meet stone with her tiny head. She rubbed the bruise and gazed with bewildered pride at us, her audience. Mr Swishki pelted over to her, squatted down and, lifting her arms rather unhelpfully, admonished her.

‘Much too high. Where's your mother? You'll hurt
yourself.
Do you understand that? You'll hurt yourself.'

Struggling free, the dainty child crossed her arms over her face and began to cough dismally. Soon, abandoning the cause, Swishki returned to the cab.

‘You'd better come in,' he urged impatiently. ‘We won't be long—only ten minutes or so left. Wait!' he ordered the driver.

Inside were women in white and the pregnant hush of disease, that silence conditioned by the click of heels in corridors and (presumably) displaced occasionally by paroxysms of awful sound. In a dim room we found a bandaged skull and an emaciated but youthful face, ashen, intelligent and sympathetic.

‘Hello, Bob. This is Alan, Alan Peebles. Do you know you're looking better?'

Faint rolled the tides of life. Out there, where chimneys smoked into the charged atmosphere, sounded the roar of the productive world. No insinuating tendril of
broadcast
sound, scarcely a last reverberation of engine or drill penetrated the window, curtain and screen. The dying man smiled courteously, the flagging smile deliberately revived as the luminous, pain-ringed eyes travelled on to greet the stranger, myself.

‘How do you do?'

I withdrew from the bed to let the two friends talk, wondering slightly at the effortless intimacy revealed. From what was said, I gathered that they had fought together in a hot land. Gentle, well-bred and heroic, Bob talked calmly and, it seemed at first, rationally. Subtle indeed were the indications of the brain's destruction, a thoughtless
repetition,
an overlong pause, the loss of an obvious (to them) reference. Suddenly, from accumulated trifles, I realized that the invaded boy was picking his way along the commonplace, cheerful conversation with exquisite
deliberation.
Surely this was not a man at all but a mere rift of intelligence left in the merging dusk.

‘No,' said Swishki later, gazing at me severely.

‘He's not dying?'

‘Of course not. He'll be back at work in six weeks. Bob is a very brilliant set-designer.'

The trees were the sallow trees of March, the grass the trodden, sorry vegetable of urban greens. ‘Wines and Spirits' beckoned.

‘Do you feel like a drink?'

‘No,' said Swishki absently, consulting his appointment book.

When I asked him about the invalid's apparent mental lapses, Swishki dismissed them impatiently.

‘Have you ever seen dying men? Of course, he's a bit dazed. He's just had a major cerebral operation. It was completely successful. It wasn't a malignancy. Oh, don't be foolish! I was a doctor—at least nearly a doctor.'

‘Look,' said Swishki, ‘I can't help you. Shall I drop you somewhere?'

He dropped me under a cold, March sky which gained radiance just before dusk. A wadi of cloud sloped away like an escalator to Venus. Starlings wheeled silently home from the fields. Soviet production leaped, and a thousand motorists sat silhouetted amidst the flickering, weaving, flaunting lights of Oxford Street. The Minister entered his office. He had been wrong but his basic principles were unaffected. The Bishop gazed at his stunned cathedral. He had been wrong. Then the pathway to truth is paved with slabs of error?