As Near as I Can Get (24 page)

‘Peebles.'

‘Mr Peebles.'

Something like that it must have been, with my extreme discomposure and Mrs Petheridge's charm, courtesy and, considered objectively, exquisite capacity for dissimulation, nursing me past the initial incongruities. And after that? It went beautifully, which is why the subsequent shock was so keen. Oh, it was easy later to reassess those bright nods and somewhat protracted periods of reflection, the quick, nervous smile, the faint mocking aura of her
hospitality
and conversation but, at the time, these merely seemed the expression of her quick and cultured intelligence.

Most marked, definite, memorable face she had, Mrs Petheridge, and that this is not simply an impression fostered by the clarity with which I have retained images from that afternoon is proved, or strongly intimated, by the exact opposite being true of her husband. Small and spreading, hunched over some vines in the garden, or later pottering about the house, Mr Petheridge was anonymous, grey, blurred. When I think of him, I can't be sure the image is not that of Mr Colquoun, a fellow with an evening paper in the Hart and Horn, or Lewka Poscwiesczi (I think), a Polish fellow employee in a firm I once worked for or any of many grey-plumpish men in the street. He seemed somehow, although probably, in fact, only about half way to his pension, quenched or quelled and perhaps all that nervous quickness, which so impressed me in his wife, had induced a sort of—resignation, a feeling of being out of the running. Whereas Mrs Petheridge….

She was thin, with narrow, fine, slightly-hunched shoulders, an oblong face, bright eyes, a wide mouth with a prominent tooth at each side. Vampire. There's a
painting
of a woman, doubtless by Picasso, like Mrs Petheridge, only green or blue. Thin, angular, nervous and curiously feminine. And very intelligent.

‘French—language and literature,' she replied briskly, when, after having learned that she had formerly been a full-time, and was still sporadically, a school-teacher, I asked
her her subject. And it was about French, literature more than language, that we recurrently talked that mellow afternoon.

Quick, cordial memories flash into my mind, with the background civilized and inviting, and the mobile, exact features of Mrs Petheridge visually emphasizing some
perceptive
comment or suggestion. For instance, we stood for a time by the French windows, sipping dry sherry, watching Mr Petheridge worrying a limp vine, and discussed
Rimbaud
. That was, I think, when I first began to feel really at ease. I said something bright about Rimbaud—I think I used the word ‘incantatory'—and she agreed with delight. About then, it occurred to me that I wasn't missing Louise as keenly as I should have been doing, and the impudent thought, giving me considerable satisfaction, that perhaps the mother was just as good (the implication being that she would have been, had I made the attempt, as compliant as Louise), passed through my mind. Then Mr Petheridge came in and laid some twine and his gardening gloves on the top one of three long, recessed rows of predominantly French, paper-backed books and his wife combined her (doubtless customary and perhaps not always so light and chiding) rebuke of this desecration with a flattering
reference
to
my
appreciation of books, which increased my gratification. Books, sherry, gardens, an atmosphere of
tasteful
comfort, all these constituted an environment that had been hitherto completely alien to me and I couldn't help congratulating myself on how effortlessly I was able both to appreciate and complement them. Mrs Petheridge
discreetly
encouraged me and I talked a good deal, about my struggles with the French and Italian languages, and my judgements on such of their classics as I had read. And I remember finding that the sympathetic atmosphere itself seemed to generate understanding so that I several times expressed as grave and long-held opinions, notions that had that very moment popped into my mind.

After a natural pause in our discussion, when, for a
moment, it began to seem as if the current had been switched off and I was searching through mental files for a new beginning, Mrs Petheridge remarked parenthetically that Louise was currently reading Balzac and had been so impressed by, I think, ‘La Cousine Bette' that she now planned to read the entire cycle.

‘Oh?' I exclaimed, surprised at this evidence of a literary bent far in excess of anything that I had credited her with. ‘She's never mentioned it to me. I didn't know she—I mean—I must ask her about that on Saturday.'

‘Yes,' nodded Mrs Petheridge, and then, after a pause during which her bright eyes remained fixed on my face but not quite in correct focus, ‘you do that.'

It was a recollection of that contemplative look,
suddenly
usurping the place of more congenial memories of the afternoon that, as I sat gazing at the weaving pipes through the window of the underground train, later
engendered
the first premonitory doubt. Why had she looked at me like that? So swiftly did I then assemble the
retrospective
evidence that, by the time the train shot into the glare of the next station, my satisfaction had surrendered to grim, rueful, anger. At one point she had asked me how long I had known Louise and then how often I saw her and I had answered, assuming that I was merely rendering precise rather vaguely held facts, with the truth. And my name—on the doorstep, when I had arrived, she hadn't recognized my name. It wasn't merely that she had formerly only heard Louise mention it and wasn't sure of it. She hadn't
known
it. After that, it had been easy to secure corroboratory and, it seemed to me, conclusive evidence from another source.

This was the method by which I had obtained Louise's address. I had often asked her for it but she had always, while assuring me that she wanted me to have it, evaded the matter until—yes—her handbag had fallen on the stairs of the Apollo Cinema one Saturday evening and, assembling the profuse and miscellaneous contents, I had
come upon an envelope, an official one from the university, and expressed the intention, immediately implementing it, of taking down her address there and then. Later that
evening
, she had said something like:

‘Em?—my address—you'd really better not just appear I mean, at the house—you see—you see, father's a chronic invalid——'

I had accepted this unhesitatingly at the time, and,
indeed
, when I had arrived at the house that afternoon it had been in my mind. Seeing Mr Petheridge through the window at his gardening, however, I had assumed mere exaggeration, at least in the way I had interpreted the
remark
, and that the disability must be some relatively trivial one, a touch of rheumatism—something like that.

But now in the underground train I scanned the relevant memory and knew that I had deceived myself. She had said distinctly, and meant me to understand, a genuine,
suffering
sick man, a chronic invalid. And the old gardener undoubtedly wasn't that. Louise had lied to me. She had never mentioned me to her parents at all and during that long afternoon, while I had been ingenuously and
enthusiastically
rattling on about literature, and feeling confident and at home, that woman, Mrs Petheridge, Louise's mother, had been dissembling. Ironic situation, at least for her! A strange young man knocks at the door and goes on for hours innocently revealing all sorts of secret and, probably, in her eyes, reprehensible things while she cleverly probes and encourages.

An unsettling, shifting flux of emotions played about me for the rest of the ride home, anger, at Louise, at her mother, grudging amusement at my own
naïveté,
shame, embarrassment, a sense of betrayal, defiant pride, and anger again. And whenever I have thought of the intrinsically trivial affair since, I have felt diminished. Actually, Louise, after, the following Saturday (to my surprise arriving for our customary date), confessing that I had been right, but parrying my reproaches by insisting that she had been
simply trying to safeguard our relationship from
incalculable
parental reactions, also alleged that her mother had, it seemed, rather taken to me, and been surprisingly mild in her admonitions. Nevertheless, Louise only came back one Saturday more—and then I never saw her again. Perhaps, she lied again. I don't know.

The railway embankment dipped and, at the edge of a little bridge, I saw a small boy in a bright yellow oilskin mounted on the lower rung of a fence and behind him an old lady smiling at the intent solemnity with which he watched our train swing past. Mother's dead. Simply gone. The watery rhythm of England. A long row of raw, new red-brick houses, the last still skeletal about the roof and the sky trembling at the effort of the broken pearl and purple cloudbank to restrain the radiance behind. I don't know—this—or that—how to live—appropriately….

I spent a lot of time, during the three days I spent at the cottage helping Mary, who did all the real work, to inter Mother and settle affairs, brooding about Lenin. I had previously read one short account of The Bolshevik's life and had retained the overriding impression of constancy. That was why, doubtless, I kept thinking about him, feeling myself to be inconstant, aerial, weightless, with no decision or understanding to show for thirty years in the world of men. I had drifted—but I had thought and tried to give durable form to what I had thought. Lenin, in spite of
perpetual
immigration, had been fast as granite. Had he been right? What does ‘right' mean in that context? Had he changed the world? Had he been a function of
manifestation
of a changing world? Had he hardened into ‘Lenin' when the Czar slew his brother and remained that, an avenging force, subsequently immune, having already touched reality at one of its furthest limits, to the world? Protean, my world in which truth is permanent
qualification
—not quite, never quite.

‘Friends, Russians, mob—having denied myself a human rôle these years of exile I come not to praise Russia, but to
bury it. There was a Russia, loud with bourgeois
merriment
at the droll Gogol's peasant tales. History, availing itself of Lenin's tongue, abolishes it. Henceforth, Leninism—ism—ism——'

And there was one surprise: the villain Slatterley. I had endowed him, purely, I should think, because his name was so redolent of music-hall villainy (and then his wealth and seducing Edna—probably the other way round, I thought, after having met him), with vague, pantomime props, swarthiness and a moustache, a veneer of charm and heavy-lidded eyes. Perhaps I hadn't really invented specific attributes but, never having met him, whenever I had thought glancingly of Edna's husband, Roger Slatterley, the thought had gravitated towards pantomime. And
that
was him! The plump, dandruff-flecked, whisky-nosed little worrier fussily extricating Edna's unnecessarily, ostentatiously, abundant cases and hat-boxes (for a week's stay!) from the big black Humber. He only stayed an hour: ‘How do you do? Could you perhaps—that's it—thank you. I'll manage the rest. Is the car all right, here? Do you think I should move it? So
this
is the ancestral home, Edna. Oops, I'm sorry, pet,' but it was quite long enough to strip Mr Slatterley of his theatrical accretions in my mind.

The cottage simply seemed dead to me. The reality was not, as the distant memories had been, at all nostalgic or evocative. The only thing that I found moving was the way Mary kept crying. She didn't sit down and weep or anything like that but, for example, we would be
rummaging
about in the attic and she would be energetically
working
an old tea-chest full of dusty fabric towards the light from the skylight and I would find, on going over to help her, that tears were again running down her cheeks. I was abashed at her simplicity and found myself, reluctantly, sometimes the ally of Edna, for whom I was working up a genuine loathing.

For instance, I didn't want to go and look at mother's corpse and Mary said, ‘But you must.' And,
although
knowing that, more because of her sense of its
uncompromising
necessity that anything I acknowledged, I ‘must', I found myself making use of Edna's
complementary
reluctance. So we had another little wrangle, I
continually
warding-off, and finding myself, in the process, more offensive than
she
gave any evidence of doing, an impulse to adore my elder sister.

We had to look at that body in the box, to me a thing glaring with the outrage of image worship, a husk from which all that mattered had—oops, I nearly said departed—and yet—to Mary, something quite different, obviously, mortal remains, all that was left and exacting the tribute of a last tender regard. And, through Mary's eyes, I did, in fact, suddenly see mother laying there—and had to turn abruptly and stalk out of the undertaker's for fear of—I think, kneeling at Mary's feet.

There were continual clashes. On the Saturday night, after we had finished eating and sat down in the parlour, I suddenly got the idea of walking into the village for a drink. I thought about it for a while and then asked Edna if she felt like a drink but on this occasion she deserted me, saying certainly not—she was going to bed early, and it wouldn't be right. I then thought about it some more and told Mary that I was ‘Off for a drink'. She said gently:

‘You can't do that.'

I insisted that I was quite capable of it, walking the two miles, ordering a pint of beer, consuming it, etc., and that she was in error in supposing I couldn't. And we wrangled back and forth for a while, until she looked at me for a long time, her eyes filling and said a few broken things:

‘Couldn't you—just for a few days—please!'

And rushed out of the room, leaving me unaware as to whether I was more tormented by having hurt her so or by the knowledge that I had known, when I had proposed the thing, that I had insufficient resolution to implement it.