Jerusalem the Golden (12 page)

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Clara, ‘do please come here, I should like you to come here.’

And she meant it, for she liked her college room, she was even mildly proud of it, and the thought of entertaining Clelia in it did not alarm her, though she had a deep aversion to the notion of entertainment, and had never in her whole three years at University embarked on the ritual tea parties or more ambitious sherry parties that mark the social life of such establishments. It was not so much meanness that restrained her, as a profound mistrust of her own organization: and also she felt, obscurely, that to invite people into her own room was to condemn them to boredom and unease. She recognized that this feeling was in part a hangover from her schooldays, when her occasional invitations to friends had invariably resulted in sessions of strained discomfort, presided over by the disapprobation, however concealed, of her mother; she had no precedent for successful hospitality. She had conquered this feeling sufficiently to allow her to accept visits from her friends, and had overcome the apologetic murmurs that used to assail her as she opened her bedroom door; she felt, in part, absolved by the wonderfully institutional shape of her room, which was on the third floor of a large block in the middle of Regent’s Park. The room was what
it was, one of many, it meant nothing, it spoke of nothing, it betrayed her in no way. She enjoyed its lack of significance, much as she had enjoyed the bleak and dirty corridors of Battersby Grammar School when she was eleven years old. She made no attempts to decorate it, to domesticate it, to possess it; she let it be, and her things lay in it. Some of her friends bought cushions and pictures and even, extravagantly, curtains, in an effort to make rooms look homely, and though she liked the results, she viewed the aim with contempt.

As she sat and waited for Clelia, she looked out across the park, at the spring trees, and tried to concentrate on her Spanish, and thought of what she should do next, without this view, without the solace of a yearly grant, without the irreproachable (or now, through custom, irreproachable) excuse of study. Her Finals were approaching, and she had no idea of what she should do next, and indeed did not dare to think about the future for she knew that it offered her little in the way of readily acceptable projects. Her friends, all equally indecisive, had no need to hurry their decisions, for nothing lay at their backs, pulling them, sucking them, dragging at their sleeves and at their hems. But Clara knew that her mother expected her to go home.

The thought of going home was for her the final impossibility, but she could not see any satisfactory way of avoiding it. She could not see why her mother wanted her, nor what she expected her to do in Northam, and whenever she mentioned the subject to others they exclaimed in horror, commiserating with her, telling her that she must be firm, never for half a moment assuming that she could or would really do it. She said to them, sometimes, but she’s a widow, she lives all alone, she has no one, she seems to expect it of me: and they sympathized all the more, and said that they could see how hard it must be for Clara to break away. But nobody ever so much as hinted at the possibility that she might return. They all assumed, blandly, blithely, that she must stay in London, or go abroad; that the guilt must be endured, and no question about it.

Most of the time Clara assumed it too. Her years in London had merely strengthened her desire to live there for the rest of her life, and while she was there her mother seemed, most of the time, to be
no more that a dreadful past sorrow, endured and survived. But then there were always the vacations. Clara dreaded the vacations, and tried to whittle them down as much as she could, by semi-obligatory study courses, and quasi-essential trips to the Continent to learn the languages she was studying, but despite these nibblings and thefts, she still found herself obliged to spend a great deal of time each year in Hartley Road. She had neither the money, nor, finally, the nerve to stay away. And these visits managed to reduce her to exactly the same stage of trembling, silent, frustrated anxiety that she had endured throughout her childhood; she felt, each time, that she had gone back, right back to the start, and that every step forward must be painfully retraced. It was not so, at the beginning of each new term she found it was not so, but it seemed to be so, and the same mixture of guilt and hate and sorrow would strike her anew, each time as forcefully, each time she got off the train at Northam Station. She found that she was not alone in her vacational penances, and that many of her friends endured similar harsh shocks and grating transitions, but she was alone in the way she took it. For she found herself incapable of struggling against it, as others did; while at home, she made no efforts to alleviate her lot. She sought no friends; she shut herself off, in the old familiar world of bedroom and drawing room, and her only amusement, for weeks on end, was the reading of her set texts. She lived in the house, as though there had never been another world, and when a boy she knew, who lived in Doncaster, asked if he could come over and take her out, she refused him, although she liked him, because she knew that she could not bear to allow herself to emerge. And so she continued, through three years, through a series of such violent changes; she inspected herself anxiously from time to time for signs of manic depression or schizophrenia, but she could find nothing but symptoms of increasingly quick recovery. In her first year, it took her a day or two to settle down to London, but in her last year she was there the moment she stepped on the train.

Nevertheless, she did not see that she could leave Northam for ever. She felt herself restrained from such freedom. And she sought, faintly, for compromise, for some way of life that would enable her
to see her mother as often as a sense of duty obliged. She never allowed herself to suspect that duty might oblige her to return entirely, but the idea lay in the back of her head, as of some final, exhausting, bleeding martyrdom. She shunned it, she avoided it, but she could occasionally feel herself blench as she caught a rash and unguarded glimpse of it. She did not believe that she would ever do it, for she told herself that she was free; she thought that she would probably end by prolonging, in some way, her present situation, by returning for vacations and for long dead summers. Such a summer now stared her in the face, for she had, through indecision, failed to fix herself up any foreign excursions; she looked towards it and towards her approaching examinations, and felt sadly weak.

Clelia’s visit, however, was all that she had hoped for. She arrived most promptly, sat down on the bed, and proceeded to tell Clara the story of her life. It was an impressive narrative, and impressively narrated; Clara found her craving for the bizarre and the involved richly satisfied. The picture that emerged was highly confusing, because she could not follow all its references, despite Clelia’s efforts to explain herself; she found it impossible to sort out the complications of Clelia’s family, which seemed to contain, as well as a poet father, an equally if not more famous mother, and a large number of strangely named children. The mother puzzled Clara particularly, for Clelia evidently assumed that she needed no description or definition, and spoke of her as one whose name is a household word. Clara, already familiar with children of famous parents, and with children who believed their parents to be famous, could not believe that Clelia’s assumption was ill-founded, yet she could not even locate the field of Mrs Denham’s distinction. She had more success with the identities of various names that had been puzzling her since their last encounter, and most satisfactorily of all, she placed the baby. The baby belonged to a man called Martin, who ran (or owned, or managed) the gallery where Clelia worked. Clara was not at all sure what a gallery was, but from the conversation she managed to deduce that it dealt in paintings, and unlike the Tate and the National Gallery, dealt commercially. Clelia worked there because she painted: also because her parents pulled strings: also because she had been to
art school: also because she had some highly inexplicit connection with Martin. All these explanations were proffered, haphazardly, one on top of the other, and from the excess of explanation Clara concluded that a job in a gallery such as Clelia’s must be something of a sinecure, and that Clelia’s attitude towards it was not wholly happy. The nature of her job there was, to Clara, wholly obscure, but then the nature of most jobs was obscure to her.

Martin had managed to inspire some kind of admiration in Clelia, and had enlisted her sympathy in the cause of his dissolving marriage. ‘It wasn’t that I was in
love
with him, you know,’ she said, from time to time, as chorus to her main argument, ‘it wasn’t as though I was in love with him, you know.’ However, love or no love, Martin had arrived at the gallery one morning, with his small baby in his arms, and the news that his wife had left him, and the clear expectation of help of some kind from Clelia. Clelia had provided help, instantly, by holding the baby, and looking after it, and changing, with increasing expertise, its nappy, and then at the end of the day she had invited Martin and his child home. She seemed somewhat defensive about this stage in her narrative, and said, ‘Well, after all, what on earth was I to do? He really is so peculiarly helpless, and I couldn’t have let him take it home all by himself, could I? I felt I had to do something, he seemed to expect me to do something.’

So Martin and his abandoned baby had moved into the Denham household, and they had moreover stayed there. They had arrived before Christmas, and it was now May.

‘We simply don’t know what to do about them,’ said Clelia. ‘It isn’t, after all, as though we had any reason for not having them, because now that Amelia and Magnus and Gabriel are all married there’s plenty of room, and my parents are anyway worried, politically speaking if you know what I mean, about having so much empty house (though he’s hardly the kind of tenant that
that
kind of consideration would provide), and he even pays some rent from time to time. But then, being so rich, he could easily go and live somewhere else. But he doesn’t, and my mother won’t tell him to go, because she’s never in her life told anyone to go, it isn’t in her, but he’s grinding her into the ground, she can’t work, she can’t concentrate, he
keeps talking to her all the time, and the baby cries, and it upsets her, for all that she keeps saying it doesn’t, and that it takes her back to the happiest years of her life, when we were all in plastic pants, I suppose she means, except I think we all had to wear wet woolly leggings, she had this thing about plastic pants being unhealthy.’

‘Why doesn’t your father tell him to go?’ asked Clara, for from what she could recollect of Mr Denham, she could not picture him suffering fools gladly.

‘Oh, he just doesn’t. He doesn’t like to interfere. I think, truly, he thinks I must be in love with him, and he doesn’t want to complicate things.’

‘But you’re not, are you?’ said Clara.

‘Well, it isn’t exactly as though I’m
not
,’ said Clelia. ‘I mean, it isn’t as though I wanted to get rid of him.’

‘I see,’ said Clara, feeling that maybe indeed she did. Her eyes were rapidly adjusting to such tones.

And then Clelia sighed heavily, and looked sadly at Clara’s Japanese wooden egg puzzle, which she had been trying all this while to do, and said, ‘How very dull for you, to hear all about my affairs, but I do so like to tell the story of my life, it makes me feel as though things have really happened to me, whereas otherwise they seem not to happen.’

‘It wasn’t dull,’ said Clara, ‘there is nothing, nothing that I wanted to hear more.’

‘Is that true?’ said Clelia, frowning intently at the egg, not risking the raising of her eyes, as though truly diffident, suddenly diffident. ‘I am glad if you mean it. I think I must be like my mother, she is always letting herself be interviewed, my father says it’s vulgar, but she likes it, she likes people coming to ask her questions about herself and how she makes coffee and who she has to dinner and what kind of paper she writes on, she says it makes her feel as though she really has got somewhere in her life. It consoles her, without it she says she feels she hasn’t moved. And she likes telling people things, she doesn’t mind who she talks to, total strangers, interviewers, so long as it’s professional, so long as it’s not personal. When it’s personal, she gets confused. So perhaps I felt I must tell you all this,
now, before I know you better, so that I can tell it you without too much confusion. And now I have told you, you must talk now, tell me about yourself.’

‘There doesn’t seem to be so much to tell,’ said Clara.

‘How can you say that, how can you say that,’ said Clelia, ‘by saying that you are condemning me, you’re criticizing me, you’re implying that I talk too much, God knows I do, but surely you could do better? Do tell me, believe me that in me you have the best audience of your life, you will never find as good an audience as me.’

And so Clara told Clelia, in return, some of her own history, and in telling it, she seemed to find, strangely and more securely than ever a tone that absolved her, a tone that redeemed her past from meanness and humiliations, so that she even found herself able to speak of her own mother without evasion. For Clelia was, as she had claimed, a good audience: she listened with an attention that picked up the faintest vibrations of meaning. And Clara, confident that she would meet with no misunderstanding, managed to relate episodes that she had never before related, and when, finally, she came to the subject of the future, she awaited Clelia’s views as though they might even be of use. She even asked her for them; she asked her what she thought she should do.

‘What a problem,’ said Clelia, contemplating it. ‘What about the rest of the family, what about your brothers, don’t they help?’

‘One of them went to Australia,’ said Clara, ‘and the other one is married, and lives right the other side of town. She has nobody, she really has nobody.’

‘And she thinks you should go home?’