Judith (2 page)

She reclined on one elbow again, watching him. I thought – You mean, like this, the story of Judith and Holofernes might not after all have to end in a conventional blood-bath?

Holofernes appeared to be immobilised – like an old horse dangled from a crane above a ship. There were one or two screams as well as laughter from the audience. From the back, bits of Holofernes's flesh bulged out. I wondered – Has something appalling happened to his front?

There was a time during which nothing much happened: Holofernes seemed to dangle with one foot half off the ground: Judith continued to size him up like meat. I wondered if, eventually, the curtain would have to come down. But it did still seem as if some electrifying performance was continuing. After a time noise from the audience stopped. I thought – But the point of this non-acting is still, yes, that one is somehow involved in choice?

I left the back of the stage and went to Holofernes's front: I saw that yes, indeed, one of his balls had come half out of his codpiece and was squashed against his thigh. It was like one of those globules that you can make from burst balloons; he was doing nothing to free it; he was I suppose getting some satisfaction, as an actor might indeed, from the enthralment of his audience. It might have been agony also, of course; do you not have to pay for such powerful effects? His face, anyway, seemed to be in pain. I knelt down in front of him and pulled at the bottom of his codpiece; his ball, like a sea-anemone, popped back inside. He said in a deep voice ‘Thank you, my dear.' The audience remained hushed. I went back to where I had been standing.

Now there was something extraordinary that continued
here: Holofernes went on with his non-acting: I mean he said his lines, but it was as if at the same time he was showing that he knew this wasn't the point: as if he expected you – you on the stage (myself) and you in the audience (you?) – to know that something quite different was going on: as if he expected you to be sharing his interest even in whatever it was that was really happening as it were off-stage. And this was working. I mean it seemed to be working for the audience: it was even working, now, for Judith too. She stopped her histrionics: she became caught up in some style that was quiet, ironic, self-reflective. It was as if she were saying her lines and at the same time saying – Well, you see, we have got through one absurd drama, haven't we; and now we can calm down; so what about Judith and Holofernes? And the effect that this produced was curiously like some powerful moments in life: for do not humans for the most part, of course, talk the most fearful rubbish? But then, if they know this, are not the moments when this knowingness breaks through not to do with rubbish? The audience anyway seemed to catch the feel of this: Judith and Holofernes were, after all, giving uniquely extraordinary performances. They did their whole love scene, seduction scene, passion-and-death scene, in this style – as if this were indeed, yes, the sort of fix that poor humans found themselves in: but what an odd joke it was! and might there not still be something dignified in the fact that humans could see this? The two of them, after all, were perhaps for once being honest and even gentle with one another. And so at the end of this second act, when Judith and Holofernes went off to the alcove to go to bed or to the beheading or whatever it was, they had their arms round one another and it was as if they might really be in love, as they were supposed to be in the script and as I suppose they were in life; but they were not going to die; perhaps they would not even have to pretend to die; perhaps they would have a nice time even; this was, was it not, the unique theatrical experience.

There was a long interval in which no one quite knew what was happening, neither behind the stage nor I suppose in front;
no one talked about it much; what was there to say? what had happened did not seem to be much within the area of what could be talked about. Judith and Holofernes had barricaded themselves in her dressing-room; perhaps in fact they were making love; they did not come out; there was the sound, after a time, of someone crying. Eventually the stage manager got into the dressing-room, and when he came out he said the performance was over. He went in front of the curtain – the audience had remained largely seated during the interval – and announced that the leading lady was indisposed. It was interesting that he said it was the leading lady who was indisposed: I thought – You mean, she takes the responsibility? I sat on a fallen pillar at the side of the stage and wondered if I might have my chance now of taking over from Judith; but I did not think I would be asked to; and I found that I did not mind if I was not. In a sense I had taken over something (but what?) when I had stepped out of context and had helped Holofernes. But this had not helped, of course, the continuation of the play.

The play ran for a few more nights, or a week even, and then it folded. I mean the audience on the night had been enthralled, but they probably could not remember except as a joke what they had been enthralled by; and the actors anyway could not or did not reproduce it. Judith and Holofernes went through the motions – half in the old style, half in the new – but they could not gather again the effects of that night, which perhaps after all had depended on chance and unique circumstances. So audiences, finding nothing now that they could enjoy, let alone put into words, became hostile to the actor and actress; and people stopped coming to the play.

For myself – I was not sure if I wanted to go on being an actress: but then no one, for a time, asked me to. No one talked to me about the scene when I had stepped forwards and freed Holofernes's ball: no one talked about the scene afterwards when Judith and Holofernes had acted as if they were not acting. I suppose I don't quite know how to talk about this either. But this is the point, isn't it? – you can't talk much in
real life about how things might be all right. When the play folded, Judith and Holofernes just sent me, from the two of them together, an enormous bunch of red roses.

My dream in coming to London (I had spent time on the way at a university on the West Coast of America) had been that here I would find people who were sophisticated and witty – who were not in the business of owning a percentage of everyone else. To some extent I found this with theatre people; but they still seemed to have their eyes on bits and pieces of others; not so much it is true for the sake of money, as out of some need or even demand to be appreciated.

When I did not get any work in the theatre I got that job as a sort of companion at the house in Ruskin Square: this was when you (and you?) first saw me. I used to take that dog for walks in the square.

The people I came across here were not trying to be elegant or witty: they were interested in money; but for the most part they were obsessed by gossip about people.

One group that I kept on hearing about which did seem likely to be at least witty was one that was involved in the actual business of providing gossip – the satire-and-scandal business – one which publicised and ridiculed the goings-on of the successful and notorious for the delectation of those who were neither but who seemed to need this gossip like some sort of food. These satire-and-scandal people were centred on a glossy magazine which was nicknamed
Die Flamme:
I am going to call it
Die Flamme
because (or although?) I am not sure about libel, though the people who ran the magazine seemed impervious to concern about libel. The original
Die Flamme
(as it were: do you not know this?) was the magazine run by the Nazis in the 1930s to abuse and ridicule people who differed from themselves; this nickname for the latter-day
Die Flamme
was I suppose unfair, but it was true that part of its style was to insult people in ways that made it difficult for them to answer back – and by this to gain popularity and prestige. It was not easy for those insulted to reply successfully because the
Die Flamme
people could switch from saying their stories were true to claiming they were obviously a joke: they prided themselves on performing a genuine public service in shedding light on murky corners, but there was also the suggestion that no one need believe what they said.

Before I arrived in London I had wanted to meet these satire-and-scandal people: their fame had spread to America. I was in this sense a child of my time, in that I was interested in the pecking orders of society. I am not ashamed about this; however you grow, you grow out of where you start from. And perhaps here I have always seen myself in relation to society in some way like Judith in relation to the Assyrians.

So this is not going to be one of those stories of a girl coming to London from the colonies or ex-colonies and being bitched and battered and bewildered: all this sort of thing has been done: it is not difficult, I suppose, to go on getting satisfaction from hearing the stories. But the point of Judith, wasn't it, was that she gave some impression of control – I mean she called it God's will, but she must have felt it as control. I had felt for some time that women opted out of what might be their special faculties for control – opted out, I mean, by taking refuge either in subservience to men or nowadays by making themselves become like men when what they know and complain about almost in the same breath is that men are like babies. The ways in which there might be (and indeed often is, but so secretly!) feminine control were almost never talked about: perhaps they are too frightening; perhaps they are too close, yes, to the story of Judith and Holofernes.

It was known that the
Die Flamme
people used to meet once or twice a week in a pub: they did this to discuss what they would put in their magazine; to toss bits of gossip and jokes about like bread or sausages across a table. I think they also did this just to be on show: they needed to exhibit themselves so that the public could be in the way of feeding them with the raw materials of gossip; then they could feed the public with processed gossip back in return. Their needs were not so different from those of show-business people; but
show-business people usually want to be loved, and I think the
Die Flamme
people mostly wanted to be feared.

I went to this pub one evening with my friend from Ruskin Square (I wanted to get out of that job; it was not much of a job; it was not much, goodness knows, in the pecking order). We went to the pub to have a look: to become part of a crowd that gathers at feeding time at the zoo. All the
Die Flamme
people I had heard of were there – the one with short legs, the one with granny specs, the woman with hair like epaulets. They were in a part of the pub that seemed to have been specially cordoned off for them: it might once have been used for playing billiards. They were around a table, seven or eight, with glasses of beer in front of them; they were bobbing backwards and forwards, exclaiming, making faces, laughing. Every now and then one or another of them would pick up a piece of paper and read something out; look over the tops of his or her spectacles owl-like, performing. For a moment everyone would be still; then they would all be bobbing backwards and forwards again, laughing. They were like one of those clockwork tableaux in Disneyland in which animals mime the goings-on of humans; there is one called The Bear's Jazz Band; the bears go through the motions of strumming banjos, beating drums, blowing saxophones; crowds come to watch – why? – because there is some ghastly reassurance in the odd things humans do being done by animals? then, does it matter so much if the things humans do are ridiculous? Anyway, there was quite a crowd in the pub watching the
Die Flamme
people: it was as if some sort of glamour might rub off, rub on, just by the fact of watching and being watched. We were most of us pretending not wholeheartedly to watch: this not-being-quite-there seemed necessary for sophistication.

One of the people at the
Die Flamme
table was Desmond. I did not know him at the time: I am going to call him Desmond. This is the beginning of the story that I have to tell you, really.

Desmond was not quite like the other members of the
group; he got his timing slightly off-beat for rocking backwards and forwards. He had rather long blond hair and a narrow face; he smoked a pipe; he seemed to be caricaturing Englishness. He was the only one of the
Die Flamme
people who could be called attractive.

I thought I would pick up Desmond.

I suppose this is one of the things it should be difficult to write about, women in stories having got used to seeing themselves as victims – I mean, in stories written by women. Of course, there are those phantoms with snakes in their hair in stories written by men. Perhaps everyone gets a kick out of seeing themselves as a victim.

But the point of Judith was that she did not; was it not?

I had learned how to do this sort of thing from my father's old friend Miss Julie from Hong Kong (there is something incongruous about my father here: for the most part he appeared to be a typical academic). What you do is – stand in profile, one foot in front of the other, front knee slightly bent, toe pointing to the ground; as if you were within the frame of a picture; something like a Degas dancer perhaps; or one of those outdoor girls (Courbet?) feeling the temperature of some water. You do not, of course, aim directly at being like one of the girls of Miss Julie of Hong Kong – one hip jutting, framed within a doorway – however much the effect of this sort of thing might be what you require. But one of the points about art is to make something like seduction aesthetic, is it not? Anyway, if you stand like this, and become yourself like a painting – well, what do you think a painting is or does? does it not attract? has it not some force, or field, like gravity?

Anyway, Desmond looked at me, did not look at me; looked at me, did not look at me. There was the counter-pull, of course, of the force of the
Die Flamme
people. Amongst animals this sort of thing is to do with smell. Humans have largely lost the faculties that go with smell. They pop up again, perhaps, with things like works of art; with paintings.