The Rachel Papers (11 page)

Very well: demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extraterrestrial wayfarers; Intense Consciousness of Being; pathetic fallacy plus omnipresent
déjà vu,
cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager's religion. The Rev. Northrop Frye fetchingly terms it 'queasy apocalyptic foreboding'. An Angus Wilson character terms it 'adolescent egotism', thereby driving me almost to suicide last Christmas. Is
that
all it fucking is, I thought. For the question that interested me about this feeling was not 'What is it?' so much as 'Does it matter? Is it worth anything?' Because if there isn't a grain of genuine humility there, it's the electrodes for me. Does it simply get weaker and weaker, like one's sense of uniqueness? Or do some of us hang on to it? Then, I suppose, I'd have to throw in my lot with all those twitchy twenty-five-year-olds I had noticed about the place, the characters who find egocentricity numinous in itself. Intermittently articulate, something held back, a third eye hovering above their heads, intrigued and forever gripped by the contrast between them and everything else. Look round: everything, except you, is (wait for it) quite unlike what you are, altogether dissimilar, a totally different kettle of fish. Yet this is what interests them most about the observable world. Well, I'll have to make up my mind at midnight, twenty and all, one way or the other. How about you ?

I telephoned Rachel the next evening. We chatted like friends.

When I brought up Blake she spoke of that engraver with enthusiasm and surprising familiarity. Obviously, if we did go, I would have to mug up on him.

'Yes, but there's at least as much blank fear in the Milton paintings as there is spiritual afflatus.' I paused, counted down from three. 'And the point is, will you be able to come?'

'Charles, I feel—'

'Hang on, you'll have to speak up. I've got some people here.' I slammed the door, so that the sounds of the radio-play on the kitchen wireless were reduced to an underground rumble. That's better. Yes?'

Her tone was no less firm. 'Charles, I feel rather uneasy about the whole thing. DeForest is coming on Sunday and I can't just ... you know.'

'You do want to come, don't you ? Well then, don't worry about that. I'll think up some amazing lie for you to tell him.'

That's just it. I won't... tell him a lie.'

Oh, for Christ's sake. 'Oh, I see. Couldn't you just sort of say you were going to the Blake and not with who ?'

'Well, we went together not long ago. And it would be unlikely that I'd get it into my head to go again.'

Surely there was no telling what could get into that battered hold-all. I went hang-dog.

'I suppose I could say I wanted to see the Gray Illustrations,' she said.

'Which are the grey illustrations?'

'The illustrations to Gray's poems.'

'Oh, of course. Say that, then. But he'd still want to come along, wouldn't he?'

'Not if I said I was going to see Nanny Rees afterwards.'

I waited. 'Would we really have to go and see Nanny Rees afterwards?'

'Do you mind?'

I thought fast. 'Not at all. But you said she lives in Famham, and, well, that's quite a-'

'No,
Ful
ham.'

'
Ful
ham? Oh, great, well let's do that then. She sounds marvellous, I'd love to meet her. Is she Welsh, or what?'

I went along to the Tate, I need hardly say, on the Saturday before, decked out like a walking stationery department, also with a pocket edition of the poet's work and the well-thumbed Thames and Hudson.

Half an hour of wandering round: I sneered at the militarist paintings on the ground floor and laughed at one or two of the Hogarths. Then it was down to work. I mapped out an approximate route and noted points of general interest. In the hope that he would acknowledge me on the day, I approached (practically on all fours) a winded attendant and talked to him about how much he hated Americans and children of all nationalities. I had a thorough look at the Blakes, marking them up in the Thames and Hudson, and generally got the feel of the place. I was a bit ashamed, actually, having not been along before then. Because I really quite liked Blake - and not just for the fucks he had got me, either.

Two hours later, over barley wines in a pub off the King's Road, I swotted up some quotes and drafted a few speeches. One on
God Creating Adam,
to be delivered as we were leaving, by the large windows at the southern end of the gallery; unless I missed my guess, albescent reflections of the sun playing on the river would flit eerily over my face as, voice hushed and brow creased, I spoke these words. I wrote:

There's so much sexual energy in the horizontal...
movement
of the painting. The faces of God and Adam [pause] - pained, yet distant. [Ask what she thinks and agree] Yes, it's almost as if Blake imagined the Creation as an inherently ... tragic act. [Laugh here, getting out of your depth] Quite sexy, though. Obviously quite an experience.

Then, in note form, I sketched out a short polemical piece on why I hadn't been to see (and apparently hadn't heard of) the Gray Illustrations.

suspicions justified - hopeless insipidity of the material -prim humour - no apocalypse

My face darkened, over-demure - reactionary platitudes - fuck all that

The pub started to fill up with blue-and-white-scarved soccer hooligans, who looked disconsolate, and uniformed senior citizens, who seemed giddy with precarious cheer. Finishing my barley, I read through what I had written. I looked round, coughed, and read it again.
Nobody talked like that.
Still, Rachel knew a fair amount about Blake, and it was a sort of last fling anyway. After this, I thought, I'll have to go Lawrence.

I patted my pockets for loose change. Enough for a taxi, or a double whisky plus the tube. Perhaps I should do neither, force down a pie or something. It was a funny thing. I had never been much of an eater, and was relieved now that Jenny had become too preoccupied or whatever she was to cook those marshy dinners for Norman and me (which I had always gobbled up in case Norm thought I was queer). But instead of being merely bland, food had begun to seem irrelevant, superfluous, wholly alien. Must be Rachel. I remembered a Dickens character, Guppy in
Bleak House,
telling Esther, for whom he had the hots, that 'the soul recoils from food at such a moment'. 'Such a moment': it bothered Guppy only when he was in a flap. It stayed in my body like a dull allergy. It occurred to me that I might be in love.

I chose the whisky, but that liquor pleasantly numbed my fear as I walked down on to the King's Road and along it to Sloane Square. Illuminated by bright shop windows, packs of Continental youths stood talking in loud voices, either among themselves or to heartbreakingly beautiful girls. They didn't mind me. Things got slightly sweatier when I changed trains at Notting Hill, a small riot being in progress on the eastbound Central Line platform. But I stuck close to a pair of fat old women, actually nipping into the seat between them on the train itself.

When I returned I got drunker with Norman. We talked for an hour and a half about girls. He didn't mention Jenny and I didn't mention Rachel.

Later, instead of going to sleep, I stared at the ceiling all night and got a lot of coughing done.

'If ever you think your prick smells bad,' mused Geoffrey, weighing a tube of glue in his hand, 'just get a load of this.' He held it up to my nose. 'And you needn't worry.'

I sniffed. A swimming-pool of cock-camembert. I wondered.

'When you say "bad" —'

'I mean bad,' he said, nodding.

Geoffrey was trying to stick a poster of a naked girl on to the south wall of his Belsize Park sitting-room. He continued:

'No, man, don't get too wanky with her. And cut out all this intellectual shit. Chicks don't want to be
over-awed ...
Thanks,' he said to his (new) witch-like girlfriend as she handed him a joint so ill-made that it resembled a baby's winkle. 'Just be yourself. If you make it, cool, if you don't, then no sweat because it wouldn't of worked anyway. Be yourself ... what's ... wrong with that?' He strained to adhere the top of the poster to the wall, and stood back, hands on hips.

'Crap,' I said (deducing that if he didn't care what he said in front of Sheila, I needn't). 'Who ever acts naturally with a girl? Do you think you do? How much of the time isn't it lovable vague Mandied Geoffrey, or big-cock groover Geoffrey, or just plain old honest-to-goodness
Geoffrey,
who doesn't put on any acts or play any games?"

He yawned. 'I don't know what you're talking about/ he said, and collapsed on to a pile of cushions, returning the joint to Sheila. As she puffed on it he kissed her neck and ears.

'Relax,' he murmured, to me rather than to Sheila. 'Flow with it, never try to change ... the course ... You can't alter...'

'Geoffrey,' 1 said. 'Have you been reading all that Chink crap again, that J-Shaing or—'

Geoffrey stuck out an amphetamine-verdured tongue and made covert gestures with his free hand. Sheila stood up, brushed herself down, and brought the joint over to me. I gently refused it.

'How're you feeling?' she asked. 'Bit better?'

'Yes, a bit better.'

'Like some more coffee?'

'Love some.'

Sunday, one o'clock. Two hours before I was to meet Rachel.

That morning, I awoke, bolt upright, at nine fifteen, with a bit of a hangover. I woke because Norman was 'doing the dustbins', a thing he did two mornings a week. This duty was, I imagined, also a pleasure; at the end of it Norman got to throw the two empty bins down the ten-foot drop outside my room. It made quite a lot of noise.

I waited for the second crash. It came, even louder than the first. Out of bed, across the room, I toppled into the armchair by the fire, which, naked, I lit, fourth match. With quivering fingertips I kneaded my forehead and scalp. When I had got them working again, I moved to the window and gingerly parted the curtains. Norman was standing above me, the two dustbin lids in outstretched arms. Cymbal-like, he clapped them together, and released them. I veered back into the room.

*

'... change the way you feel, but you can change the way you think.'

There was enough of a pause for me to say: 'Well, I'd better pull out.'

'Here,' Sheila said. She handed me a paperback.
The Well-Tempered Spiral: An Ascent,
by Professor Hamilton Macreadie. 'Read it,' she said. 'It's a very beautiful book.'

I flipped through. Four hundred pages of hippie sententious-ness. 'I will. Thank you.'

'Be sure you do.'

Geoffrey said that he would see me out. In the small vestibule, he took the book from my hand.

'Don't bother about that — I'll hide it.' He made a space between the telephone books on the floor. 'She's really into it seriously ... so—'

'Is that why you were trying to shut me up earlier?'

'Yeah, save hustles.'

'See ? You do it too. You go along with all that. What's the difference?'

Geoffrey opened the front door. 'I only do what I have to do, like everybody else. But I don't say anything I don't mean. With me, it's not all part of some great... scene.'

'Scene?'

'You know - strategy, angle. You go out of your way to do it. I never even really think about it. Never thought about it till today.'

'Yes, but you've
got
Sheila. I haven't got Rachel, so I've got to work on it.'

'Yeah. Anyway, fuck it.'

'Yeah, fuck it. She's nice, that Sheila, though, despite all the -'

'Yeah. Ring me. See you.'

'Yeah. Bye.'

'G'luck.'

To stabilize myself I had trekked slowly through the morning routine. Duffle-coat and gyms; up the stairs; gruff hellos, make some coffee, jokes and nudes in the morning papers.

Then I took the coffee to my bathroom (which a few not very arduous days had made usable) and sat on the lavatory seat, leaning over every now and then in order to hawk into the basin. The point of the coffee was to camouflage any darker substances I might chance to cough up; similarly, I used red-tinted toothpaste to abolish signs of what might or might not be bleeding gums. But I didn't dare look at all that morning, flushing the whole lot down with an imperious blast of the hot tap. I caught my eye in the mirror. My face looked, at once, dreary and vicious. My hair hung on my head as if it were a cut-price toupee. My mouth was crinkled like a frozen potato-chip. Moreover, my chin seemed curiously mis-shapen, or off-centre. Suddenly my hand flew to my face. A Big Boy.

For five minutes I savaged it with filthy fingernails.

Then I rang Geoffrey.

'Lovely. Then I suppose it was ewe decided to go to The University?'