The Furnished Room (11 page)

He stood up, putting on his raincoat for a dressing gown and thrusting his bare feet into his sandals. He emptied one of the mugs of cold coffee into the slop basin, and took the mug with him.

The house was in darkness. He groped his way down the stairs. The unbuckled sandals were loose and made a noise. He curled his toes, trying to keep the sandals on and make them less noisy. His warm skin contracted where the wet raincoat touched him. Thus he clopped slowly down the unlit flight.

The bathroom was on the ground floor. A strip of worn lino ended at the iron claw-feet of the bath. The bath was marked by horseshoes of rust under the taps. There was a large, old-fashioned gas geyser. On the medicine cupboard was a cup from which someone had drunk cocoa, a stub of shaving soap, and a litter of spent matches.

He ran water into the mug, wiping it clean with his fingers. Then he filled it again and drank thirstily. The coldness went straight down to his stomach. He wanted to urinate but could not be bothered to shuffle laboriously to the lavatory, so he used the bath.

The window had been made opaque by covering it with adhesive paper. The paper was varnish brown, with a pattern of fleurs-de-lis. He pushed the window up, letting the cool night air blow in on his forehead. Somebody's socks, which had dried stiffly on the string from geyser to window-frame, swayed in the breeze.

He had contained a wolf, which had become steadily more ravenous the longer he had led his monkish life. The wolf panted towards the moment of orgasm, the moment when he knew that there was nothing except this. Then the wolf disappeared, leaving only a man who felt anticlimax and disillusion, who grasped air instead of a prize, and who resented Ilsa's presence in his room.

He conscientiously went back over all the things he had said to Ilsa, and tried to discover whether he had meant them. He did not know, but suspected that he had not.

He thought: No prizes in life. Only mirages that disappear when you arrive at them. Freedom from sexual desire results from gratifying it. But there must be another sort of freedom. Not just a passive lack, an emptiness, but an active, positive freedom.

He looked out of the window. The row of solid buildings opposite were a negation of his love-making with Ilsa. His thoughts wandered to building construction; to men in overalls, to planks and scaffolding, to the bulldozers whose jaws scooped up mouthfuls of rubble.

Somewhere in the house a clock struck twice. He switched off the bathroom light, and groped his way back to his room, Ilsa lay with the spun silk of her hair on the greyish pillow, and the warm smell of sleep around her.

The sunlight made metal patches on the office window. A fly buzzed dustily against the letter T of TONS & PAC.

Beckett looked at the clock. It was only three minutes later than the last time he had looked at it, a desert of boredom ago.

On his desk was a pile of invoices to be entered in the ledger. The first stage in the task was to pick up his Biro. But he could not do it. Even the thought of doing it drained away his energy.

The cover of the ledger had a marble pattern. He stared at the ledger until it seemed alive, swelling like yeast. He did not think. Thought had been replaced by consciousness of the ledger.

The door of Presgate's glass tank was ajar. His cracked, clerical voice could be heard dictating to a typist: ‘... we would advise that Credit Note Number — look it up on the carbon — was despatched to your good selves on the 28th ultimo comma against our invoice.…'

Beckett looked at the clock again. It seemed stationary. He realized that it was no good hoping for five-thirty. Five-thirty was in the future and did not exist. Only the present existed. He was fixed in the present like a man in a photograph. And tomorrow he would have to endure it all again. Not only tomorrow, but for all his life until he retired at sixty-five. He was resentful. He had only one life; why should he be forced to waste it in this manner? It would be different if he believed in immortality.

His thoughts started down this new track. Hard work and active patriotism declined with the decline of belief in immortality. When people knew they had only one life, they were not inclined to waste it by working or end it by dying for their country.

He daydreamed of a small private income. He did not want much and he was enough of a moralist to admire austerity. He wanted only sufficient to live modestly, to purchase food, cigarettes, and books, without having to waste time at a job. Syd asked him: ‘What's the matter? Have you got the total wrong again?'

‘Yes. I loathe sums. I never could do them. At school I enjoyed algebra and geometry, and loathed arithmetic.'

‘Why not try brains, the new wonder head-filler?'

‘Oh, drop dead.'

Beckett got up and wandered out of the office. In the corridor he felt dizzy with boredom, as if he were going to faint.

He went into the cloakroom, which, to his relief, was empty. Waves of faintness broke out like sweat. A notice on the wall forbade staff to throw cigarette ends down the washbasins. All the hot taps were fixed with wire so that they would not turn. He leant against the wall, and pressed his forehead against the white, lavatory-smelling tiles. The coldness made him feel better. Then he sat on the edge of one of the washbasins and smoked a cigarette.

After a while he supposed he should return to the office. He yawned. A tap was dripping and he turned it off. Then he turned it on again and washed his hands, tipping liquid soap from the container. The roller towel was damp as usual.

On his way back to the office, he knocked on the managing director's door and was told to enter. Mr Glegg was fat, like a pig, with his neck seeming thicker than his head. He had a small moustache. He was sitting weightily behind the two telephones and the fan arrangement of
Packaging Worlds
.

Mr Glegg said: ‘Won't keep you a minute.' He shuffled through some papers. His stertorous breathing gave the effect of stupidity. He ironed the topmost paper, picked up his fountain-pen, and signed the document.

Beckett thought with sudden surprise: How can he sign anything? His name means nothing. He isn't real. There was something absurd about the flourishing signature, the mark of a man who certainly thought himself real.

Mr Glegg set the papers aside, breathing. Then he asked: ‘What can I do for you?'

‘I'm resigning. I want to leave on Friday.'

‘Oh.' Mr Glegg waited for an explanation. When none came, he said: ‘Pastures new? You've found another job?'

‘No.'

Mr Glegg clasped his hands over his stomach. ‘This firm is like a boat in which we must all pull our weight. We are all cogs in a vast... all cogs. Everyone of us, from myself... I take work home with me every night, Beckett, did you realize that? And often I come in on Sundays too. I could tell you young fellows something about hard work. And/or all staff who pull their weight, and show keenness and ability, there are good channels of advancement and ... keenness has prospects. And the conditions and hours are excellent, very excellent.'

‘Oh yes, I suppose it's no worse here than anywhere else.'

Mr Glegg talked on about the excellence of the firm and the crass folly of leaving it. Beckett did not listen. It was nothing to do with him. He watched Mr Glegg's lips, which writhed like pink worms under the moustache. He knew that Mr Glegg kept a bottle of anti-halitosis gargle among the gin-and-tonic bottles in the cabinet. He gargled before appointments with customers.

‘… your progress here has not altogether given satisfaction —'

Beckett cut in: ‘All right. We both know that I'm inefficient, habitually late, and completely uninterested in the work that poverty forces me to do. Having agreed this, let's end the matter without a long and boring discussion.'

Mr Glegg stared at him, his mouth dead-fish open. Then he banged his fist on the desk. ‘Get out!'

Beckett went.

Later, walking with the rush-hour crowds towards the Tube, he saw the broken glass. It lay like a crystal fortune in the gutter. The wonder of it took him aback. He wanted to shout aloud the miracle of a broken milkbottle.

It was a small incident, but it made him happy, as if he had been touched by grace. The happiness lasted, so that when he walked through the square where he always spent his lunch hours, he was pleased by it. The open-air café was pleasant, and there was a nostalgia about the iron tables, the pigeons, and the fallen leaves. He would miss his lunch hours spent reading in the square.

The experience of seeing the glass, and others like it, were a compensation. They were the occasional visions into super-reality given to the victims of unreality.

In the days that followed his departure from Union Cartons, Beckett did not bother to look for another job. He decided to lay off work until he ran out of money.

He spent most of his time in his room, reading. Between books, he lay on the bed and looked at his view of washstand, armchair, and wallpaper. Occasionally, he had a beer at a pub that had tables on the pavement.

Sometimes he visited Ilsa at Earls Court. It was her fortnight's holiday from her office, but she did not go away because she could not bear to leave her habitat of cafés, pubs, and clubs. Her latest craze was to get brown. The back steps of her basement flat led up to the garden. The earth was barren except for old slop buckets and a few clumps of dusty grass, but she spread a blanket and lolled around listening to pop-song programmes on her red-and-cream plastic portable radio. Her favourite programmes were the Hit Parades, and it was of vital importance to her to know which tunes were in the Top Twenty. Under the dish-rag of London sky she chatted gossip, or was bored, or painted her toe-nails silver.

Indoors, in her flat, she nibbled incessantly at her diet of biscuits and tea made with condensed milk. She never seemed to eat a proper meal unless she was taken out to a café or Katey cooked for her. Even in the daytime she always had the gas fire and electric light on; and the curtains with their Martini, Cinzano, and Dubonnet design were closed, making a permanent artificial night.

In the grey wastes of SW5 she seemed like the one bright flame. Her radiance touched the whole district, so that Beckett, on his way to visit her, thought the 31 bus-stop at Earls Court a most glorious place. Passing the row of flyblown little shops where she got her groceries and cigarettes, he endowed them also with the magic reflection of her radiance.

When he was with her he generally felt bored but he would rather be bored by her than interested by intelligent conversation. She had a passion for things which were trivial and fifth-rate and chatted about the latest scandals in her circle of friends, the plot of a film she had seen, or the clothes she wanted. Beckett listened, bored by her talk but enraptured by her presence.

The second week of her holiday she had to go home to her parents' farm in Sussex. She whined and complained at the prospect. ‘The only decent thing is when they've gone to bed I stay up and swig the drinks they keep in the bottom of the larder. Luckily they never seem to notice how the level goes down.'

‘Your parents seemed pleasant people to me.'

‘Oh God. They're absolutely impossible. Dad never thinks of anything but the farm, and Mum never thinks of anything except making scones and bottling fruit and the socials at the Women's Institute. They're both terribly limited, really.'

‘Poor love.'

‘I don't know how I'll endure it. Oh, honestly.'

The night before she left for Sussex she spent with him in his room. Her smart tweed suitcase was in the middle of his floor, her best dress for tomorrow hung in his wardrobe. She had her period and could not make love. Instead they lay, with limbs entwined, talking softly into the night.

She moved as if she were uncomfortable.

He said: ‘Huh?'

‘Sorry, I want to scratch my thigh.'

‘Where?'

‘Here. Oh, thanks.'

‘I can feel your bones. Sharp as a chicken's. You are thin.'

‘Cheek. I'm slim, not thin. Sort of boyish.'

‘You're thin. Skinny Liz. Oh, darling, I adore your thin body.'

‘M'm. I love being scratched.'

‘I'll have to get you a Chinese back scratcher.'

‘What are those?'

‘Oh, you know, one of those things like wooden toasting forks.'

‘Marvellous.' Then she said: ‘Aren't I vulgar, darling, to like being scratched?'

‘I like vulgarity.'

‘Oh, so do I. I'm terrifically vulgar.'

They were automatically caressing each other, occasionally giving little sighs of pleasure. He said: ‘What do you do that's vulgar?'

Giggle. ‘Well, for instance I pick my nose.'

‘So do I.'

She giggled again. They were both suddenly wide awake, a conspiratorial midnight-feast awakeness.

He continued: ‘And also, I smell my socks to find out whether they are still wearable.'

One of her caresses made him sharply intake breath; he exclaimed: ‘Oh, darling...'

‘Darling. Am I good in bed?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘Good. I'd hate to be no good in bed. And I have got sex appeal, haven't I?'

‘You know you have. All your men friends are trying to make you.'

She wriggled with flattered delight. ‘Are you glad?'

‘It makes me feel proud and victorious to have my property admired. But on the other hand I'm always worried that somebody will steal you. It's like being the winner of a valuable prize that everybody wants to steal.'

‘Yes?' Then she whined: ‘Can I have a cigarette?'

‘Does that mean I have to get out of bed and get them?'

‘Oh, honey, be nice.'