Vac (9 page)

And your counter-plea was:

And the silent struggle between my corrupt and your
matutinal
desire would generate beastly words. Sick with
self-revulsion
I would lash you with beastly words.

After we parted I often felt lonely at parties.

W
E CREATE EACH OTHER
.

We invent reality.

As our glance meets, stark alien, we construct each other’s face.

I define your potential. Independently of your will, you do the same for me.

One could describe the universe in a word.

Any word.

The anguish inherent in Western consciousness is an
awareness
of the perpetual destruction of the present. This is felt most keenly when consciousness is most intense, that is in
childhood.

A
CAR DRUMS
N
ORTH
with two old friends inside it. The humane, sophisticated millionaire speaks several languages. The face grins quickly. The voice is dented with the
inflections
of a Kansas farmer. He now belongs to the cosmopolitan rich.

Chris stares at the road ahead. Soon I give him the wheel and doze. They call this place England.

My dear. That was one of the hot summers. The amber of the beer infused the early evening. From where we sat in the yard of The Wakefield I could see a burst of poplars shattering the sunlight. My dear, there is a death of bricks.

The shop-keeper unfolded into a scholar, at least an amateur archaeologist. He knew a great deal about Michael Ventris and Linear B. Everyone came. A builder with a joke about a bed-bug. You came, my dear, with that young Turkish chap and a small boy.

We are mocked by asphalt. The trees leap up to intercept the sunlight which streaks to this pub across ninety-two million miles of space.

Trodden paths are now air networks and are twining
outwards
into space networks, built by Guinness-loving builders. Do you understand anything but love? That’s a nice little boy. He just called me ‘dad’.

The car drummed North. When we stopped for petrol my patron and ancient colleague of Paris bohemia paid for most of it. When we stopped for lunch my patron and affluent friend picked up the bill. When we reached Edinburgh,
another
American from a Tartar khanate attempted to drill
flesh into my words but the cast rebelled. Chris and I lived in the death of a residential suburb where hate and love are modalities of income.

I insisted. But the American embraced gesture and stifled my words. The critics came and blasted us both. At night in the bar a hundred girls breathed through their cunts and the despair which is the nucleus of desire wracked my
whisky-drenched
brain. I knew then that I would always be broke.

You know that girl. Her name is urn. She was expecting her family to tea but we got drunk at lunchtime. I drove her over the hump and we stopped where the red tubular trains hit daylight. Her room was bright and overlooked cabbages. Oh we were drunk. She asked me if I preferred that she retain her suspenders but I forget what I said. Then I poked her sideways and she refused to have orgasms because of her liking for you. You girls—your loyalties are subtle these days. The thin shrill of the doorbell aroused me and I exclaimed:

She exclaimed.

We had slept for hours. It was a moment rich in comedy of a type suitable for a bawdy film director. There were mum and dad, come to visit their chaste girl and there we were clammy in her bed. Everything had to be done—dressing and tidying up and shifting me down to the bog on the floor below so that she could rush finally to the door, call them back from where they had started away forlornly up the street, convey them upstairs past the lavatory where I mused and have a nice family tea. Then I slipped silently out of the house and roared off through the bright suburb in my ponce’s
convertible
. All these houses—we call it London.

You came back to me from Southampton.

My darling, it wasn’t anywhere. We walked on the rim of the land in Guernsey. A yellow bird flared up out of the gorse
of Dorset. We struggled through storm along the Cornish cliffs. And we had a cottage there, the sea clawing at our sleep and a red rogue next door to urge, whenever we set off:

But no durable home for our love.

Still you came back to me from Southampton.

My sad and vulnerable wife. You were his then. I had
half-feared
you would embark with him for the Levant. But you came back to me from Southampton.

You denied that you were keeping yourself for him but you refused me your body. How could I stay in the flat? But my departure this time was in a different key. You came to the dingy room in the Irish maisonette that I had found. You gave me plates and cutlery and hung fabric on the walls. Our relations were no longer brittle but in the solicitude with which you installed me in an alien room were the roots of harsher despair. Would we ever again lie curled as one being through long nights of drowsy love? Later, when I smoked hashish in that clammy room, the night sometimes congealed on my pillow and I nestled against it only to burst into helpless sobs when returning reason dispersed the hallucination and I found it wasn’t you at all.

The Irish landlady, a poor builder’s wife and a peasant soul, was kind with loans of groceries and when we became friendly asked me:

T
HIS SUBSTANCE HAS
been analysed into a great many constituents. Some are light and fragrant and drift away on the wind. Others drip to the ground like blood.

W
E SWERVED WITH
the iron river round the new canyons of London. We came to the railway station. It was too early. We went to the slick pub across the street. It was full of lunch-time cheer. I bought us two dry sherries. We edged as far away from three boisterous inspectors as possible. We chatted calmly.

So you did. You were splendidly groomed and wearing—

Aye, so ah have. Aye—well, will ye no tek a wee pint with me? It isna’ a case of havin’ a beau’ful wife. Noo—er—ye see, ma wee problem is I get this tug towards liftin’ the wee skairts of ony lass ah spy. Ye ken whut ah mean? Ah dinna care for this notion of—ye’ll have to pairdon ma indifferent Scootch—bein’ no pairmitted to plunge ma virile organ into mair thon ain braw lassy for the hale of ma life. Ah can see that ye’re a censorious mon of traditional morality. They say ye’re an engineer and ye resemble the haid of a thustle. Ye’re doin’ naethin’ to assauge ma copious guilt feelins’, mon, and ah regrait ma cordial spirit in addressin’ ye at all. So I’ll just abandon this pathetic attempt at your vernacular and tell you in good old standard English that I loved and do love my wife and I never from the first day intended to be faithful to her.

For twelve long years I all but made it in deference to her love and hurt. Just a few little lapses with girl friends she brought home from shop and office, I suspect subconsciously for just that purpose, and the odd paid girl from the streets. The first of these friends brought rude pictures with her, posted from Hong Kong by a sea-officer. We pushed the two
single beds together and I got in in the middle over the crack. And Lucy got in on my right-hand side and then it was
necessary
to coax the visitor in and Lucy told her it was quite all right. But when she did get in, just in her pink slip, and I rolled on to and into her, my wife whimpered a little and the friend, who was a pleasant woman, whispered:

And so I abandoned my first chunk of illicit sexual congress since marriage in order not too much to hurt my wife.

Then, years later, when we lived in a bower of lilac and dipping, dazzling blue-jays (but a bit shimmy in our two square rooms) Lucy brought a hearty, Cockney mum home. This one loved to leave her kids to her husband any evening she could and go off and do it anywhere. She had done it on heaths and in alleys, behind bushes, in the backs of taxis and once on a barrow with an importunate barrow boy.

Lucy became ill and retired to the bedroom and I kissed Clare on the cheek, removed my jacket and then heaved out of my trousers an enormous taut thing. This Clare
contemplated
for a moment, then murmured resolutely:

And draped it decorously in my discarded jacket. Later she explained that friendship with you precluded frolic with me. But her resolution proved frail and when I escorted her to the dark stairs, she murmured breathlessly:

And we stood, half-way down the carpeted flight, she with her bottom to the wall and I feverishly facing her. But it seemed I couldn’t. The narrow stairs, necessitating one foot up and one down, critically modified the vital geometry and
congress,
as they say, remained unachieved. So I gasped in furious frustration, aware that at any moment a button might be pressed and the dark stairwell become a dim theatre with a staid, astounded couple observing our indecorous antics, and tugged Clare down on to the stairs themselves. There curious,
convulsive heavings, reminiscent of what a salmon must
experience
returning to its nursery waters, finally nudged me
precariously
into the celestial lodge. It was fucking against the current but good fucking still and exultancy rode with me down the still-shrouded stairs when I finally led Clare out into the night. She squeezed my cheeks between her palms, kissed me gently and marched away buoyantly enough while, sudden sorrow and foreboding tightening my chest, I set off to clamber up the obliging stairs again to acquaint you with what had passed.

Do you, mother? But not what’s called infidelity. You accept that as inevitable. You think that admitting it is wrong. I disagree. We have confronted each other for so many
millennia,
swathed in convention, bridged only by the peremptory phallus, two alien races on the earth, isn’t it time we got to know each other a bit?

Suppose I did what you recommend. Suppose I had a steady mistress somewhere and kept it secret from Lucy. There would instantly be a wall between us, an area of silence, a necessity for guarded speech, in short a negation of everything we have, which is total candour, total knowledge and
acceptance
of each other. And it is that which crackles like a field of energy about us and enlivens everyone who comes within its range.

But when the wound heals, there we still are—together! Whereas if I hadn’t told her, we would walk on different sides of a crevasse which would widen, under the stress of lies, until we no longer knew each other. So—I choose cruelty.

There will come a time when human beings will couple in the streets and parks, if they are so inclined, and cause no more stir than people walking. There will come a time when there is no more private life.

If the bomb doesn’t get us first.

Mother, the image of our species for millennia has been that of bones hunching painfully across a stony land. It is changing. We can already see that it will soon be that of minds darting through the galaxy. The old sanctions are no longer appropriate.

We swerved with the iron river round the new canyons of London.

We had planned it that way. A last drink together. The cigarette sign glowed silver and blue. You were leaving me. Mammoth buses trundled through the station forecourt. Comical chaps capered above the theatre marquee. I steered you between snorting cars towards the pub.

You smiled sadly. I squeezed your arm. You were going an eighth of the way round the world. We had never been in different countries before and rarely in different cities. He had a claim on you. Indeed, I hoped you’d have a lovely holiday.

You shrugged off the question as idiotic. And yet—if he begged you to stay—if he said:

My sentimental eye glistened. Three boisterous inspectors
eyed us amidst talk of men who kicked balls. You leaned
towards
me and planted the sweetness of your kiss on my cheek. We had another dry sherry. I know I’m a shit. I couldn’t bear to lose you for ever. I said.

Your family would be on the platform, squat, saintly
plebeians.
They thought you were merely visiting friends abroad. The notion that you were hastening to a lover in the Levant would have been beyond their moral grasp. And yet, such their adoration of you, the fact that the deed was yours would ultimately have reconciled them to it. I couldn’t face them.

And then I saw, wondrously, that you were crying. It was still all right! I hugged you and praised you. You said:

And as I threaded my way out through anonymous
Londoners
I felt sure that you would come back—and I could go on being a shit for a while longer.