Four Gated City (75 page)

But his real forte was television for which he tended to apologize. ‘Yes, I know, but one must take it for what it is …’ Yet it was here that he really touched the pulse of
now
, where he offered what no one else had ever done, or could, particularly in a programme which consisted of discussions with various of his friends, well-known and associated with the arts. It was here, in this programme and the many variations of it, that there was reached the culmination of that attitude towards the arts born in the first half of the nineteenth century which was essentially a need to identify with the life of the artist. Hard to see how much better this particular need can be fed than to be able to watch, week after week, artists of every kind, writers, painters, musicians, and so on (or when the supply of these failed, ‘personalities’ of one sort or another), sitting around in a make-believe drawing-room, playing a charade which consists of pretending the cameras don’t exist, but that they are a group of close friends living for free, passionate, liberal inquiry and that they have chosen just this moment to discuss their thoughts aloud. Here, people who had met half an hour before in the preliminary discussion about the programme, or under the make-up girl’s hands (How do you? How do you? -in the mirror), called each other by their first names and discussed the most private details of their lives as if alone with intimates. They were like privileged children at a party where poor children looked through a window to marvel and envy. But the watching children no longer envied, on the contrary, it was a form of contempt, for it
was they who paid for the party, and chose these performers who would act out for them their fantasies; and if the performers were prepared to use their own lives (a form of sacrifice) in the acting of the fantasies-so much the better, and what did it matter?

For it was on television that had been created a continuous commentary or mirror of ‘real’ life. To switch on the set when the day’s viewing started, with one’s mind slightly turned down, or in a bit of a fever, or very tired, and to watch, steadily, through the hours, as little figures, diminished people, dressed up like cowboys or like bus drivers or like Victorians, with this or that accent, in this or that setting, sometimes a hospital, sometimes an office or an aircraft, sometimes ‘real’ or sometimes imaginary (that is to say, the product of somebody’s, or some team’s imagination), it was exactly like what could be seen when one turned one’s vision outwards again towards life: it was as if an extreme of variety had created a sameness, a nothingness, as if humanity had said ‘yes’ to becoming a meaningless flicker of people dressed in varying kinds of clothes to kill each other (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) or play various kinds of sport, or discuss art, love, sex, ethics (in ‘play’ or in ‘life’). For after an hour or so, it was impossible to tell the difference between news, plays, reality, imagination, truth, falsehood. If someone—from a year’s exile in a place without television, let alone a visitor from Mars, had dropped in for an evening’s ‘viewing’ then he might well have believed that this steady stream of little pictures, all so consistent in tone or feel, were part of some continuous single programme written or at least ‘devised’ by some boss director who had arranged, to break monotony, slight variations in costume, or setting (office, park, ballet, school, aircraft, war), and with a limited team of actors-for the same people had to play dozens of different roles.

It was all as bland and meaningless as steamed white bread; yet composed of the extremes of nastiness in a frenzy of dislocation, disconnection, as if one stood on a street corner and watched pass half a dozen variations of the human animal in a dozen different styles of dress and face, as little Amanda Coldridge (who would soon be Francis’s legal stepdaughter) might experience a walk down the street to the shops, flick flick flick, the great lumbering many-dressed creatures walked or ran or talked their way past among a clatter and a roar of metal objects while á four-legged furry creature higher than she was that smelled strong and rank ran
between their legs and lifted one of its own to spurt out a yellowish smelly liquid on a corner of damp brick. A minute child with enormous dark eyes fringed by curling black lashes in a face of brown cream (she was all shades of delicious brown set off in a white dress and white shoes) hung tight on the hand of a fair-haired. blue-eyed roses-and-milk English girl who pushed a pram with her other hand; and people passing flicked their eyes down at her, then up at her mother, eyes suddenly narrowed or sharp or commenting, or bent to smile with all their lips and teeth offered to her, flick flick flick, they passed by; and it was the same inside at home, when Amanda sat in the great chair opposite that part of the wall where pictures flicked past all day. Her mother sat near nursing the new baby. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, ’ she cried, ‘look at me, take notice of me, smother or throw away that baby that I love so much, ’ and Jill said: ‘Look at that lovely horse on the telly, darling, ’ as she swung the new baby from one large sweet breast to the other. Then in came Francis who was not her daddy. ‘No, he’s not your daddy, Frankie’s your daddy, ’ and Francis came over, swung her up, and held her with a great spurt of tender love that enclosed them safe, safe, while they sat together watching the little pictures flick past. ‘Goodness, ’ said Jill, ‘he’s in form tonight, ’ as Arthur Coldridge, cut-and-thrusting, bending forward in the energy of argument, came and went among the pictures on the screen. ‘Who’s that? ’ ‘That’s my daddy.’ ‘My daddy? ’ ‘No, my daddy the bastard.’ Or, as a face appeared whose mouth twisted and moved and combated: ‘Phoebe Coldridge, one of the candidates for …’ ‘Goodness, look at
her, ‘
said Jill; and Francis-not-her-daddy who loved her said quickly: ‘I think she’s doing it rather well.’ ‘Oh she always does, the old cow, ’ and as the baby started crowing or laughing somewhere in the room behind the great chair, ‘Oh God, tum that damned machine oft, ’ and Amanda sets up a wail, ‘No, no, no, I want, I want to …’ ‘Oh leave it then, I’ve got to make her supper anyway. Are you staying for supper, Francis? ’ ‘No, I’ve got to be back at the theatre.’ ‘See you then, ’ ‘See you, love.’ Off goes Francis the man who comes and goes, he’s gone, flick, but in comes, flick, a tall lady who smells like sweets and jam, she’s-your-granny-Lynda, and she drops chocolates, bottles of fruit syrup, frozen chickens, flowers, just like the adverts on the telly, in a heap on a table and then off she goes, flick. ‘Where’s my granny, Mummy? ’ ‘She’s gone home, darling.’ Flick, flick, faces, people, animals.
dressed, undressed, carrying cauliflowers or drinking milk out of mugs with telly pictures on them or killing each other with guns or kissing, the same faces over and over again, as if at an enormous fancy dress party the hostess had asked all the guests to put on the same mask at the door, just very slightly different, so that one twisted in a grimace can be either LAUGHTER or TEARS or ι LOVE YOU or DIE, flick, flick, like the faces of the people who for that short period before Lynda cracked up again came to luncheons and dinners and teas at Radlett Street, ghosts tossed up like foam on the top of a wave, charming, urbane, friendly intelligent ghosts, so beautifully dressed, so marvellously equipped for a life of good talking and good living and good thinking.

Food, food, food-and clothes. Clothes and furniture. Make-up and clothes and food and the decoration of houses.

Fifteen, ten, seven, years before, Martha (and those like her) had patrolled a London which was full of damped-down, deprived, graceless people and watched for a gleam of colour, or flash of taste, or panache, or flair; had dreamed of just that one restaurant where real food was served, of clothes even half as good as one could imagine. Now she wondered to what extent this hunger had been responsible for ‘London’ in the ‘sixties, which thought, or so it seemed, of nothing, ever, but food and clothes.

Discussing food, clothes, art, and politics, the three hosts blended with their guests and were in no way astonishing to anyone but themselves. Lynda, particularly, was the success. She was accepted as normal by people who, who if they had heard of her at all, knew of her as a painful half-secret.

‘You see, Lynda, you’ve been such a dark horse, but I’ve told them, you’re just a little nutty sometimes, you shouldn’t mind, because everyone is, these days …’ That was Paul, smoothing her way.

But even if being nuts from time to time is a part of everyone’s life these days it was odd that these highly talented and insightful people were able to take Lynda entirely on the level she chose to present. She was a tall, rather silent, smiling woman, who wore extravagantly beautiful clothes and, invariably, long coloured gloves (very smart, that) and if she departed from her own party for half an hour, to make a telephone call, that was what she was doing; and her look of wide strain … well, she had drunk too
much, very likely. Yes, certainly Lynda must drink. But then, who didn’t?

On one or two occasions, she did not crack so much as fray slightly, and became rather scatty and pattering in speech; but, covering up, Mark and Martha discovered that there was no need to cover up. A discovery not without importance.

The fact was that Lynda ‘totally incapable of ordinary life’ was judged by her guests who were by definition the most sensitive and talented available, as like everyone else.

And mad? but certainly not!

‘You say that Lynda sometimes has breakdowns? ’

Extraordinary. But this thought does lead one on to the next … who, then, is mad? (Banal, of course, but all the same, not without its uses as well as its hazards.) Lynda, for a start and for a certainty. Martha? Well, there is evidence for supposing … Mark? Certainly not, he was an artist. Graham Patten? Good God no, or at least if he is, who isn’t? Francis, Paul? It was too early to say. Jill? But having illegitimate children, and practically on principle, is not certifiable. Margaret? Her husband John? No, no, this train of thought won’t do. Much better use the humility of the psychiatrists (which they display here and nowhere else) when they say that someone who can’t cope with ordinary life can be considered, as, perhaps, not as balanced as one might wish. Back we come to Lynda. Lynda, certainly, comes under this head. Martha? Jill…

How about Dr Lamb or Mrs. Johns?

No, it will be seen that this particular quest for definition doesn’t get one far. Particularly as … the fact is, for the six months when Lynda was a hostess, and a real one, with no more than reasonable help from Martha and her husband, with guests around her day and night, and putting all the energy one has to, into having one’s hair done, her shoes fitted, her stockings matched and her menus just perfect, Lynda, who was as mad as they come, and showing more strain with every day that passed, did not strike anyone as more than engagingly ‘different’.

Her gloves for instance: they charmed everyone. When asked why she wore them, she said it was because she bit her nails until they bled. ‘Lynda’s gloves’ became a kind of family joke-among dozens of people.

Lynda, asked why she didn’t have any affairs, replied that she
couldn’t have an affair because she never took her gloves off: the remark was found the very essence of
camp
.

Meanwhile, her two comrades, her husband and Martha, were sitting it out. Martha enjoyed it all-more or less. But it was destructive of that part of herself she cared most about. To eat and drink half the night, getting to bed at three or four: then, to get up late so as to attend to one’s clothes and help Lynda about food and charwomen; to talk and talk and talk; to meet a dozen new people every day, each one more delightful and intelligent than the next-it was utterly exhausting. Martha could not understand how it was anybody could live like this for long; but after all, many people did. She was more exhausted than Lynda, who seemed to be running on a battery of fine nervous energy unknown to Martha. She was more exhausted than Mark, who was simmering quickly but steadily on a low fuel of patience.

Sign of the time
: A London dealer, who bought on behalf of American universities, wrote to Mark among many others to ask if he had manuscripts of any of his books. Mark replied that he destroyed first or second drafts, and that in any case he typed. The dealer, having begged for an interview, came to say that ‘in the interests of literature’ Mark should not destroy early drafts, because ‘when students came to write theses about Mark, how would they know what to think about his work? ’ Further, Mark should not use a typewriter ‘if he could help it’, because good prices were only paid for handwritten work. Author X, having earned £341 for a highly praised novel, which he had written straight on to the typewriter, and, needing money badly to write another, took three months off to write out the novel again in long-hand, with all kinds of erasures, additions, notes, etc.-this work of art he sold for £900 to an American university. Paul was very angry with Mark for not allowing Paul to do the same with all Mark’s early books. ‘Everyone did it, ’ as he said. No, of
course
Paul did not want to get the benefit; he knew of a young painter who desperately needed the money: if Mark would let this young man make a fancy-free version of, let’s say.
The City
, then Mark could feel he was doing some good: after all, they never even checked about handwriting. Or how about an imaginary diary? It would be worth a fortune; he, Paul, would guarantee at least ten thousand for it. Well, if Mark was so rich he didn’t care about throwing away £10, 000, just like that, what about all the poor starving people in wherever you cared to name. Paul
knew just the man to write an imaginary diary-he had already done one for the novelist so-and-so.

Sign of the time
: The young man who was the narrator of Mark’s book,
The Way of a Tory Hostess
, had gone off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Now, no matter what Mark could say, he was taken to be a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. He was in America at that time, he said; he was not interested in politics then, he protested-but it was no use. His disclaimers were put down to modesty, and then (after all, he was such an old Tory!) to the fact that he had fought on the wrong side and was trying to cover it up. The ending of his book then, was hypocrisy.