As Near as I Can Get (8 page)

‘What do you mean? What do you mean?’

And then she was face downwards, soaking a dark, spreading stain into the straw-coloured cushion.

As, appalled, I sat down stiffly on the sofa beside her, my hand reaching out to make comforting but not
compromising
physical contact, light-headed thoughts, generated, doubtless, by the feeling of irresponsibility that the
self-demonstration
of emotional incompetence had given me, floated through my mind. Bars and plays, sport and wit and elegance wove a world of hedonistic superficiality about the grim good taste of the Swedish living-room and the crying girl. ‘I am a silly person’, ran the refrain, ‘and you are a silly person and he and she and they are silly too’, while my mechanical mouth murmured grave pomposities, like:

‘—nothing really to offer you.’

and

‘—neither of us ready for marriage, do you think?—always remember—’

Finally, I could reconcile the two moods no longer and, abruptly rising, said in a faintly caustic and impatient tone:

‘It’s not
that
tragic. You can’t possibly love me because the fact is you don’t really like me. You’ve just got used to me physically.’

Then, uncomfortably, I watched her more subdued but still heaving back for a moment or two longer and then said clearly:

‘Good-bye, Vanessa.’

Feeling far more a fool than a rogue, I grasped my case and set off for the door. Before I reached it,
however
, a sob which contained components reminiscent of my name, caused me to turn and see the disturbing sight of her smudged face trembling in misery.

‘Are you going?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t want you to!’ paroxysmally, through swimming tubes, she gasped, and then she added something which probably expressed no more than the shock of unexpected abandon but which has often, in irrelevant moments, elbowed its way to the fore of my mind for the purpose, it has seemed, of cautioning me, but in allusive and almost inaudible whispers, against assuming
anything
of another’s feelings from the circumstances of their life. The last words of Vanessa’s I heard, as, longingly, and now at last thoroughly contemptuous of myself and all I had ever said or done on the third planet, I pulled open the front door, were:

‘I don’t want to be alone again.’

In the bus, gained only after striding, in tremulous need to separate myself as decisively as possible from No. 8
Capstan
Mews, past two request stops, I planted myself inconspicuously in the top-rear seat and, as the sights, the office furniture, the slatternly mother with two dribbling children in a narrow pram, the posters and shops and blocks of flats and traffic and monumental allusions to culture and history began to enfold me once more in seething anonymity, told myself that now I would work. Free once more, I would, I could, I must work, work and work. Now, when I came home from my distressing gainful
employment
, there would be nothing, no distractions, no sex, or possibly only casual (a slight premonitory thrill) and
undemanding
encounters, to keep me from getting down to it, from really….

As if previously notified by an aide of my imminent arrival, Mike Rea merely bowed silently and then, insisting on taking my bag, wordlessly conveyed me to my room. Even as he, still dumbly sustaining the jest,
displayed
the bleak cubicle with mock-ceremonious gesture and then gravely withdrew, I registered a little shock of dismay. Was this the freedom which a few hours before had beckoned so irresistibly?

In the yard and loading-bay of the warehouse beyond the window the motor transport jerked and roared as usual. Gleaming blackly, like the back of an eel which its polluted waters would have speedily choked, the still canal, and two boarded, tumble-down cottages and rusty bicycles and portions of cars on its further bank, showed between the warehouse and the back of Ransome’s Units and
Components
. What had I done? Given up a lovely, well-
connected
, tolerably affluent girl who was at least under the
impression
that she loved me, and also the chance to dwell, for another month anyway, in comfortable, spacious, even opulent, surroundings, for loneliness (emphasized rather than mitigated by the presence of my landlord) and squalor? Work? Here? and ‘work’? What work? What did I even think I meant when I murmured self-appreciatively ‘my work’. Tomorrow night I would be back on the late shift in the grimy station, with Fred and Tom and Lofty and once more nowhere to go when it finished but this room—at least until the pubs opened.

After a pair of bad weeks, aggravated by the scarcity of acquaintances, chums, pals or just familiar faces in the pubs and clubs, I got on a bus passing the magnetic mews. It was a warm, still Thursday afternoon and the city shimmered through its Diesel fumes. At the bus stop, a business type said to another:

‘Well I didn’t have one—there was a hell of an uproar!’

To which his companion, compromising between a
well-bred
desire to express sympathy and a quiet determination to display his own superior documentation and providence, murmured.

‘Actually, they’ve been very hot on that since the new act. I remember——’

And then my bus arrived and I scrambled aboard.

And perhaps I would have marched up the mews, so potently had self-pity operated over the past weeks to
convince
me, by contrast, that Vanessa and Vanessa’s way of life were the most desirable things imaginable, that,
beneath
the surly crust of criticism (which, by now, seemed the merest frivolous carping), I still worshipped the lovely American, if a poster on a passing bus, announcing that ‘Your most enterprising National Newspaper’ had secured the exclusive rights to the memoirs of a world champion boxer, had not set me brooding on an incident that had occurred a few days before at the station. Ostensibly originating in some alleged unfairness in the weekly shift rota, actually, one could dimly perceive, expressing a
long-standing
hostility containing elements of sex-rivalry, of regional enmity (for in a world ostensibly split into two mighty powers and their satellites the teasing banter
exchanged
between say, a Geordie and a Yorkshireman can still evoke potent manifestations of archaic hatred) and of other things, Lofty and Fred had, in the chill, deserted station at 3 a.m., disappeared grimly side by side down the shadowy length of No. 3 arrival platform. No one had intervened. There had been a few terse and callous jokes made to establish masculine equality with the combatants and we had gone on with our work, pausing to drag at our cigarettes and, during covert glances down the misty reach to where the black tunnel-mouths, in a welter of smoky shadows, opened on to the furthest extremity of the
platform,
sometimes fancying we could discern the gross gesticulations of combat, until, side by side again, the two had emerged once more from the gloom and passed us.

It was not until they were within a few yards, so poor was the feeble light, that one could discern that it was Lofty, surprisingly, since his arms were the longer and his body the heavier, who had taken the most punishment. Ostentatiously ignoring them, we went on lifting bags and carrying them to the truck as Fred, with a just-discernible discoloured swelling at the lips strode past to the
washrooms
accompanied by his wobbling but still vertical rival, Lofty, whose face was a red mask. How many cuts the agile knuckles of the smaller man had inflicted on that
ghastly countenance it was impossible to tell for the whole of it dripped blood. Side by side, they plodded past us and on up the station, honour assuaged, to bathe their
disproportionate
wounds.

The bus passed Turpin Street. In three more stops we would be at the Mews. My eyes noted the familiar approaches, the balcony flats near the wine shop, the ‘Gents’ and ‘Ladies’, decorously back to back in the triangular junction, the huge brewery, but although my hand went forward to grip the chromium support, I knew that I would remain on the bus. Something in the recollection of the fight, or in the way I had been able to surrender, at that moment, to a recollection of the fight, prevented me from going back to Vanessa. In a little while, the bus rolled past the entrance to the Mews which was so narrow that my eyes barely had time to select the grey and black façade behind which, possibly, an unfairly abandoned girl might still be weeping.

And I never saw Vanessa again. A few days later I met Kingsley Broderick, a beer-loving, book-loving Jamaican and Peter came back from Wales and the dying summer expired in the bar.

‘So and so’s dead,’ Mike Rea informed me, waving the morning paper in my direction.

And when I got to the station that morning, aware of death, violence, light and love, I gave in my notice.

Who else? Bricks? Other than the infrequent evenings of tortuous application? Edna dancing at the sea-side and Edna with a fellow at the terminus.

‘Watchoo seen? A bleeding ghost?’

Mrs Baillet,
sans
Mr or M. Baillet, sweetly, efficiently, wordlessly gliding through her carpeted house. With soft
excitement turning after one to mention ‘the rent? I mean—there’s no hurry, of course. Oh, it’s all right.’

Mrs Baillet, unapproachable but strangely encountered in apparent meditation by the blue-lacquer vase on the staircase window-sill, in the late dusk, a slim, catatonic shadow, suddenly becoming a bird-bat, flitting with
implausible
explanation of having been listening to an air from a distant speaker, and other strange items of conduct. No Mr Baillet but a female-child Baillet prancing for a day a fortnight through the orderly and yet not entirely conventional house in Rodney Street.

Edna at the sea-side, sand, cliff, crab and an earlier Edna juicily trampling the black, glistening marsh mud, already up to her knees in the cattle-watering end of the pond.

‘It’s ever so cooool….’

Reed, thinking reed, cliffs out of skeletons, land cupping sea, sea spawning, spawn groping, span growing,
impersonal
maternal caress of the saline bosom wooing back the escaped mammal. The general, the particular—and finally the unfathomed. A mile from here is a tree, a cow, a
powerhouse
. Tiny, furry, nipping mammal—a mole! A process, a realm and finally a domain. Who travels on that line, comrade Nature? Were you young, brother? I was young, comrade, and had a delicate toy which scattered seed. A dandelion puff, brother? A fine toy and ten fingers, wise comrade, is this the way up?

‘Can I give it you tomorrow?’

‘Oh, that’s all right—d-don’t worry.’

A dapper, sad, salaried man, name of Jennings,
scooping
up
The
Times
at eight-seven or eight-eight of a
morning
and vanishing up to the buses. Same Jennings escorting stately, black-draped, booming matron up the stairs to his room and down the stairs to the front door, looking pained and patient. Normally subdued voice of this Jennings suddenly strained hoarsely (as I pass his door) in two passionate assertions, the first relatively controlled, the second
exploding
,
it seemed, under the pressure of the indignation of years: ‘Rose
didn’t
look after mother! Damn it, she never looked after anyone—ever!’ And one could imagine Miss Patiently Inflexible, behind the door, a mere unit of Jennings’ restraint from a battered skull and a few columns in the national press, pursing her lips slightly and waiting for adult behaviour to reassert itself.

‘Charley—here Charley! Don’t tell her I said anything?’

‘Beyond the strategic considerations, however——’

‘It was packed—and the décor——’

‘Didn’t you see me beckon, sir?’

‘Not p.’

‘Not another bitter. Do you run to a whisky?’

‘What here? Here where the train whooshes through the cutting? By the bow of the falls? Creep, crag, slog, slush, spectacle——’

‘My husband!’

‘What?’

‘I said, what do you think of our landlady?’

I had, in fact, been thinking of another world, suggested by the crude mural (crinolines, carriages, etc.) on the pub wall. Yesterday, when Homer escorted Miss Austen home from the squire’s ball, tiptoeing so as not to disturb De Quincey, asleep on the first floor landing. Thinking that things were different now with cars and atoms and ripped skies—surely, quite different—and things change—where? Stoop for earth. The pinch is inert. Probe the skull for alchemy.

‘What, Mrs Baillet?’

Aware that disclosure, never far from Otterley’s tongue, was imminent, I allowed my refocussed thoughts to play around the strange, tremulous scene in the half-lit bedroom (bed-sitting-room, normally, but at that hour, with white sheets showing on the divan, the bed reading-light for sole illumination and Mrs Baillet, becomingly unprovocative in her red felt robe, emphatically a bedroom) when, at 10 p.m. a few nights previously I had descended with the rent.

‘If you’d rather I came back——’

‘No, no, that’s—that’s all right—er—er—erm——’

Eyes moving rapidly but unmethodically about the room, as if the search for her change-containing handbag, while not in itself specially demanding, had to contend for her attention with some momentous consideration, she stepped quickly back from the door.

‘Come in. I’ll—er—I’ll—erm—find my handbag.’ Then turning swiftly back to me but keeping her sensitive glance from rising above the level of my chest. ‘Come in. You—erm—if you could—the door——’

Watching her narrowly, my side resting lightly against the chest of drawers just within the room, as she glanced, moved, hesitated and rummaged about on ledges and under cushions, I was aware of feeling slightly breathless myself and somehow intensely aware of the ordinary room which, in spite of the conventional propped photo (this one of the fortnightly visitor), the few straggly novels and
sentimental
accounts of scientifically purposeless expeditions, worn but rather rich and fine amber carpet, and other orthodox appointments, began to seem strange—even mysterious.

‘Yes—I—erm—here it is——’

She returned towards me from the narrow desk, the drawer of which had yielded the bag, holding the article but making no move to open it. The light from the bed reading-lamp fell on one side of her decorously robed form and animated the tumbling, silky locks of brown hair that she nervously thrust back from the temple and also carried her constricting and then again dilating, as she traversed the lamp’s focus, shadow along the wall opposite, suddenly blotting out Degas’ frozen ‘rats de l’opéra’ and then exposing them again. I waited, aware that I had never been in the room before, having previously settled up in the entrance hall and once in the steamy kitchen where she had been boiling clothes.

‘Now you want——?’

Bending forward over the bag which she had settled on the chest of drawers, a few locks of now-disregarded hair falling to partially curtain her face, she disengaged the clasp, and then the fastener of the purse within, and sorted gravely amongst the miscellaneous contents in
manipulations
suggestive of a search for change.

‘Seven—you want—erm—seven and fourpence—now——’

‘Seven,’ I found myself murmuring, having contracted her inability to concentrate, ‘seven?—no, six—isn’t it? Six and fourpence——’

‘Six and—here’s a half-crown—and—erm—fourpence—fourpence——’

‘Isn’t it? I mean—yes, six——’

In sympathy with the frozen pirouette of the ‘rats’, the room ceased breathing. True, it harboured nothing animate, nothing which, of its own volition, could have expressed time but had curtains been cats and chairs butterflies, life would have deserted them.

‘Yes—six and—thank you——’

‘Six and——’

And finally, with dry throat, having conclusively lost a period of my life (for I could not, and never since have been exactly able to, decide whether a minute or an hour, although common sense, that blundering councillor,
suggests
it was probably nearer the former span, had passed since she had begun the financial settlement), I received the coins into my unsteady hand.

As she passed me the money, she tossed back her unsettled hair, straightened up and our eyes met. The doubled, limp collar of her felt dressing-gown righted itself and the gap which, as her financial quest had led her into ever more intricate crannies of the handbag, had casually widened to progressively reveal the hollow of a slim throat, the ridge of a collarbone, the flimsy and itself
unconcealing
neck of a sheer, lacy night-gown and so on until, before the last copper had been located, the external
garment had so far parted that nothing above the knee had remained concealed by other than almost perfectly diaphanous fabric, closed again and I confronted my modestly-attired landlady handing me the change for the rent.

‘That’s right—isn’t it?’

Our eyes still joined in a look devoid of content, I nodded.

‘Yes—I think so—yes——’

‘Yes—well—erm—yes——’

‘Yes——’

And then, muttering the tenant’s, or a husky version of it, conventional ‘Good night’ to his landlady, I turned and departed, pulling the door clumsily shut behind me. In my room, I sat on my bed, awed, wondering, already bitterly denouncing myself for a naïve fool and then wondering again. What? Had she? Should I? And then again shuddering in poignant desire at the recollection of the episode.

‘Yes,’ insisted Clark Otterley, ‘Mrs Baillet. What do you think of her?’

‘I think she’s—rather nice,’ I murmured cautiously, although observing Otterley with attention.

‘
Do
you?’ asked Otterley in his hollow, juicy voice and I waited breathlessly for confirmation of the more exciting of the two possible hypotheses that the incident had suggested (i.e. that Mrs Baillet had been aware of, had even engendered, the provocative behaviour of her dressing-gown). ‘
Do
you,’ asked Otterley with what I instantly
interpreted
, knowing the man, though not well at that time, as a suggestive smile. ‘Oh by the way, did you see that article in
The
Observer
?’

Grossly cheated, and yet somehow reluctant to show
conspicuous
interest, I was compelled, for a quarter of an hour, to consider a novel, or more exactly a critic’s view on a novel, which we had already exhaustively discussed. In this field, Otterley was my junior, my merest apprentice, and rather than strive for language with which to convey, to
his admittedly willing and receptive mind, what to me was obvious, I took the almost equally tedious course of allowing him to elaborate his own views and pretending agreement. But this had the virtue, at least, of permitting my mind to rove back once more to that somehow
indescribably
stirring moment (hour?) in the room of my landlady.

‘—even if the style isn’t very exciting? Do you agree? I mean, surely other things—characterization and—and so forth—are equally important? Don’t you think? I mean, I found it immensely——’

And then Willy Logan deposited the four pint pots of bitter that, having entered the saloon unobserved by us, accompanied by Mary Spender, he must, upon observing us, have bought.

‘Here we are. Well? What is it? Sodding books?’ grated Logan, manipulating the fleshy wing of his pitted nose. ‘You know Mary, of course?’

Like many rogues, Logan used the formalities with unexpected deference as if they provided indispensable criteria by which the effect of otherwise extravagant and obscene discourse could be measured. He now politely presented Mary Spender, a wobbly blonde we both already knew, and then greedily drained a third of his pint of beer. At first he feigned intelligent participation in the discussion and somehow, again like so many rascals who are never observed to do anything but drink, borrow money and pursue girls, he had acquired at least the denatured vocabulary of culture, including the names of the more prominent contemporary figures, whose works it would have challenged the imagination to picture him consulting.

‘Who? Keaton? You don’t read
him,
do you? I’ll tell you who you want to read——’ and so forth.

But as the beer enfeebled his never very sturdy
superego
and progressively released the excitement-predatory beast within, he succeeded, not without a preliminary brush with
Otterley, a man of some determination at times, in diverting the conversation to sex and relegating us to the status of audience when, with words, he performed an obscenely exhibitionistic dance for gaping Mary. And then others came.

It wasn’t until much later, gurgling with beer, as we strolled somewhat shakily homewards, that I raised again, caution dissolved in alcohol, the matter of our landlady.

‘What were you going to say earlier? About Mrs Baillet?’

‘That Logan’s a bastard.’

An opulent black sedan, with two incongruously youthful men in it, swam to the kerb ahead of us and
accompanied,
in a noiseless triumph of mechanical restraint, two swishing, exaggeratedly indignant girls who ultimately broke into a run up a side turning, the great car veering out into the traffic stream again and gliding off into the night. In Tony’s Pasta House, the idle, dainty young things span out of coffee and melody their ephemeral dream of romance.

‘Oh, Mrs Baillet?’ Otterley, having mentally disposed of the irritant Logan, reverted of his own accord. ‘What do you think of her?’

‘I think,’ I urged, with slight, wasted impatience, ‘she’s very nice.’

‘Her husband’s an agitator.’

‘A what?’

‘An agitator.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve met him two or three times. Stoney knows him. You know Stoney Cohen?’

We entered Culverton Square and the sound of a party, laughter, music, came from somewhere and we both glanced round to find the source, but could see only the stationary masses of the shrubs and dark façades, nothing festive.

‘What do you mean? Where does he agitate?’

‘The East, Africa, wherever there are subject peoples yearning to breathe free.’

‘Well——’

I couldn’t see what Otterley meant. He should have said, to be in character, and to remain within the orbit of my speculations, a lecher or a pimp or a queer. What had Mrs Baillet, with the subtle tremor of her voice and body, her radiant femininity, to do with
it,
with the world of power, the world of conviction, the world of fiends and saints, the world of squeezing capitalists and selfless planners or, alternatively, of freedom-worshipping humanists and
ruthless
machine-men, to the revived and terrifyingly-armed absolutism of our times.

‘An agitator?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well—what do you mean? A Communist? A sort of spy?’

‘Ah, here it is!’

And Otterley planted himself in front of the half-opened door from which a maximal flow of sound indicated that we had located the party. He suggested that we enter, alleging that he was ‘sure to know someone’, but I
declined
, having drunk as much as I wanted to that evening. Otterley, however, the most mobile of men, lightly detached himself from me and, with a throaty ‘Good night, then’, bounded up the steps towards the gramophone, leaving me to amble home with a phantom who, because I succeeded in shedding him for half an hour of sonorous Yeats before sleep, later reeled agitating, strangely armed with telescope and mace, and in the unlikely territory of a department store, into my dreams.