It's Beginning to Hurt

by James Lasdun

  Naturally we had chosen Lucille to represent us at this year’s party. In doing so we were aware of departing from a tradition of festive, perhaps essentially trivial demonstration, but it was obviously out of the question for us to put forward anyone else. Besides, our benefactress had heard about Lucille and wanted to see her perform.

  The revelation of any great gift always draws a wake of myth behind it as it settles into history. In Lucille’s case, the mythologizing was in my view concurrent with the performance she proceeded to give. Confronted with things this strange and extreme, the mind tends, without realizing it, to translate what it beholds into terms more familiar to its own experience than those on which the phenomena themselves exist. In this case, since our perceptions were in themselves implicated in Lucille’s performance, our sense of what actually happened must presumably be even further removed than usual from an “objective” memory. Furthermore, practically every one of us seems to have emerged with our own version of what happened, and while the gist of each version is the same, few of the details agree.

  I myself, for example, remained unaware of most of the physical occurrences reported by other witnesses. I didn’t see the flowers wilt or the lilac and forsythia blossoms wither and blacken on their boughs. I was unaware of the carpet of mold spreading over the half-consumed dishes of food in the dining room. The apparently overpowering smells of rotten meat and mildew that some people remembered so vividly didn’t register with me at all. Nor did I observe the moths others saw massing in thick clusters on people’s jackets and dresses. Although I would be the first to attribute these gaps in my testimony to the lack of a certain kind of receptiveness on my part, I remain convinced that what actually happened in that upstairs room was so far outside the experience of us all that each of us was obliged to re-create it simultaneously in a kind of emergency cascade of metaphors.

  What I do remember, aside from the immediate pandemonium that erupted when Lucille took the platform and the sound of Mrs. Van Kemp crying out for her to stop whatever it was she had started, was this: a feeling of bitter revulsion, directed both inward and outward; a sense of having partially disintegrated, putrefied even, and of being surrounded by a pack of horrifying, corpselike beings. I remember looking at Donald Kurwen, one of my oldest and dearest friends, with a feeling of sudden, overwhelming disgust, as if he had begun shamelessly decomposing before my eyes. Janice Hall, in whom earlier on I had noticed what seemed a resurgence of her youthful attractiveness, looked to me suddenly pallid, bloated, and insubstantial, like some kind of fungal organism that would collapse in a puff of spores if you so much as touched it. Even her jewels seemed to have rotted, giving out not so much a gleam as a kind of phosphorescent glow. I recall vividly how the Chenier twins seemed to me for a moment like a pair of old crones dressed up in little pink and white frocks as though in a cadaverous mimicry of childhood. I pushed and clawed my way to the door along with everyone else, glimpsing Ellen Crowcroft turn and lunge back toward the darkness of the stage with a panicky cry of “Lucille!” Outside, it was chilly and wet. The torches had gone out. A few people lingered near the entrance, but most of us went quickly off into the night, making our separate ways home.

  As it happened, that presentation turned out to be the final act of Lucille’s career, at least as far as her participation in our own circle was concerned. She never appeared at the Kurwens’ house again. None of us knew where she lived, and since it is not our policy to solicit meetings or initiate searches of any kind, we refrained from any attempt to find her. We all naturally have our own surmises as to what became of her. Some of these are more extravagant than others. Personally I tend to believe that her powers simply burned themselves out in that moment of frantic brilliance. And rather than linger among us, watching us grow steadily disenchanted with her, she had the good sense to remove herself altogether from our midst. To use an analogy from poetry, her gift appeared to be lyric rather than epic, and like most lyric gifts, it was short-lived. On the other hand, the critical exegesis has only just begun.

  CLEANNESS

  It was his father’s wedding day. Roland had flown into London the night before and slept at the hotel off Russell Square where he’d stayed during the last days of his mother’s illness. The ceremony, at the parish church near his father’s new house in Suffolk, was set for noon, reception at the house to follow. Roland woke late and found to his surprise that he had had an erotic dream. He tried to remember it, but the attempt itself scattered the last traces still lingering in his head.

  He cleaned off its physical residue in the shower, then dressed carefully in front of the mirror; his father had always been a stickler for tradition, and the words “formal attire” had been printed on the invitation.

  The rented outfit, which came complete with gray top hat, silk tie, starched shirt, and even a red carnation, fitted him well, and in spite of the absurd tails hanging halfway down his legs, Roland was pleased with what he saw in the mirror.

  He set off across London in a green Citroën—also rented—and was soon on the motorway. It was a bright day, cool, with a few hooked scratch marks of cloud crisscrossing the blue. Cirrus uncinus, he said to himself. His father, a naturalist, had made him learn the names of clouds when he was a boy, and he still remembered them.

  The old man was in his seventies now. His bride, Rosemary, wasn’t much over thirty. In another man Roland might have been surprised at the gulf, but not in his father. Wiry and agile, with thick silver hair swept back from his forehead, sharp eyes still fiercely scrutinizing the world from his buzzardlike face, he had conceded little more than a kind of flinty hardening to the passage of time.

  Roland had been introduced to Rosemary at a drinks party on his last visit. She was a biologist and had met his father on a scientific expedition to Tierra del Fuego. She was an intelligent-looking woman with an interesting face that made Roland think of a particular kind of craftsman’s tool—a planishing hammer, was it?—in its smoothly molded planes and concavities, its look of having been evolved to perform some highly specific, complex function.

  She had come toward him with an expression that had in it both shyness and something propitiatory. She seemed to want to convey to him her innocence of anything that might smack of an intent to interfere in his relations with his father, to assure him of her friendliness, and even in some way to ask his forgiveness for anything in the situation that he might find uncomfortable. They hadn’t talked for long, but he had left feeling well disposed toward her.

  He had seen her one more time on that visit. She’d come to London for the day and had rung him at his hotel to invite him for lunch. They ate at a Greek restaurant and afterward spent an hour wandering through the quiet streets around Hanover Square. Again the sensitivity, the propitiatory manner that soothed Roland and put him at his ease. He felt relaxed and, in response to her tactful but evidently sincere curiosity, talked to her quite volubly about his life: the well-paid banking job in Brussels that his father disapproved of (he disapproved of any profession that wasn’t explicitly dedicated to the betterment of the human race), his unraveling marriage, his childhood.

  His mother’s unhappy existence had ended in a hospital not far from where they were walking, and as they approached the shabbier streets that had become so familiar to him from his daily visits, he began to feel all the harsh emotions of that period resurrect themselves inside him. Whether by chance or by some peculiar power of intuition, it was just then that Rosemary began to question him about his mother. Caught off his guard, which had been firmly up since her death, Roland had found himself delivering a long, fervent speech full of all the sorrow and exasperation that had lain pent up inside him for the past three years. Without criticizing his father, he tried to convey his irrational but nevertheless profound belief in a secret symbiosis between his father’s vigor and his mother’s steady decline. However much the old man harangued her for not pursuing a career, for not seeing a psychiatrist when she became depresse
d, for drinking too much, for smoking after she was diagnosed with cancer, there was some part of him (and for this Roland admitted he had no evidence beyond his own highly subjective instincts) that required absolutely that she remain on the downward slide, just as a healthy plant requires the steady disintegration of the organisms in the soil around it in order to thrive. And by whatever convoluted action of the psyche, his irreproachable concern for her welfare had precisely the opposite effect of what was apparently intended. It kept her in thrall to her own failure.

  Within about twenty minutes of leaving the motorway, Roland realized he was lost. His father’s map, which plunged from A to Z without regard for any of the opportunities for deviation that country roads offer in between, no longer corresponded to anything Roland could see.

  He drove on, hoping to recognize a name on a signpost: without luck. Passing some houses, he considered stopping and asking for directions, but he felt awkward at the idea of going up a stranger’s garden path in his wedding regalia, and before he could make up his mind to do it, the houses were behind him.

  He realized that unless he found himself soon he would be late for the wedding, which would not go down well with the old man. By now, though, he was deep in the country. Fields of ripe barley lay on either side of him. There were a few barns here and there, but no houses. Small, unmarked roads appeared, each one necessitating a brief debate as to whether or not to explore it, so adding further to his consternation. Finally he came to the entrance of a driveway with the name of a farm on a sign.

  The driveway twisted sharply down through a wood, then came out into a bare brown field with rows of scaly cabbage stumps. The unmistakable offal-like smell of pigs blew in through the car window, though another quarter of a mile passed before he came to the gate of the farm itself. He parked to the side of the gate. The elegant Gallic contours of the Citroën looked almost as out of place here as he himself did in his tails and red carnation. Through the gate was a run-down courtyard of pigsties with dozens of pigs—gray and hairy with pink patches—rooting and snuffling inside them. As Roland walked past, they crowded forward to the iron bars, making loud, harsh squeals and grunts. Their sties were several inches deep in slop. Huge mounds of refuse were piled in the corners.

  Not just the pigs themselves but everything in the courtyard was covered in mud: buckets, bits of machinery, a small caravan occupied by chickens, even the chickens themselves. There was a forlorn oak tree with mud-covered leaves and a wheelbarrow so caked with mud it looked like a clay model of itself.

  He picked his way with care to the entrance of the farmhouse and knocked. A woman wearing a short-sleeved dress and house slippers came to the door. She looked him up and down. He explained that he was on his way to a wedding and had got lost.

  “Oh dear. I better get you a map. Come in.”

  She brought him into the kitchen, where she found a map and spread it on the table. She was about forty, large, with plump, pale arms. Her body in its thin cotton covering gave off a powdery odor—part perfume, part cigarette ash. Her eyes had a becalmed expression, almost dazed but every now and then settling on Roland with a soft attentiveness.

  “Who is it getting married then?”

  “My father.”

  “Ah. That’s nice.”

  They found a route on the map. Thanking her for her help, Roland turned to leave. As he did, he saw a man standing in the doorway, holding a live white rabbit by the ears. Both the man and the rabbit were staring at him with expressions of amazement.

  “He’s lost his way,” the woman explained. “He’s going to his father’s wedding.”

  The man said nothing. Roland edged out of the door past him, giving him a nod, which the man ignored. As Roland left, he heard a crunch and thud, and a moment later a white rabbit head, still wearing its look of amazement, sailed past him into one of the pigsties. The pigs converged on it in a cacophony of squeals. Roland noticed that a drop of blood from the severed head had splashed onto his polished black shoe. He turned back to the house, perturbed by the farmer’s aggressiveness, but the man had gone inside.

  The gate out to the drive where the Citroën was parked was now blocked by a gigantic red tractor. Roland stopped, jarred by the sight into what seemed to be a deep rift of memory. Where had he seen such a tractor before? He had the sense of having recently seen a tractor exactly like this one, though since this was the first time he had been outside a city in years, it was hard to imagine where it might have been. Even so, there was something familiar about it.

  As he moved on toward it, he realized he wouldn’t be able to squeeze past it without dirtying his suit. He looked for another way out. On either side of him was thick, wet-looking black mud. A little way forward on his left, however, some planks had been laid down in a line leading to a gap in a brick wall. He stepped onto the planks, and walked gingerly along to investigate.

  As he did, he thought again of the farmer’s behavior. It occurred to him that the man might have been a jealous husband wondering whether he had surprised his wife in the middle of a clandestine meeting with her lover. Dressed as he was, he perhaps had presented a certain archetypal, if also ludicrous, image that a jealous temperament might have found irresistibly suspicious. Then too, Roland surmised as he picked his way along the planks, perhaps he did have the face of an adulterer. A man’s more significant deeds might perhaps have a way of imprinting themselves on his anatomy, if in a manner visible only to the unconscious eye of other people. Had his marital infidelities left their signature on his flesh? Had the farmer dimly perceived it? Was he at some level even correct in his appraisal of the situation, that Roland did have designs on his wife? In a detached, clinical manner, Roland brought the woman back into his mind, imagined being in bed with her, was reassuringly unaroused, smiled to himself at the absurdity of it all, then suddenly remembered where he had seen the tractor before. It was what he had opened his eyes to on the nursery floor where he and the children’s Dutch nanny had first had sex. Unlike the one here at the farm, it was a toy, pedal powered, but for an instant it had seemed vast and strangely menacing, perhaps because his three-year-old son was riding it.

  By this point Roland had come to the gap in the wall at the end of the planks and seen that the wall itself enclosed a pool full of viscous greenish liquid that smelled like the contents of an open septic tank. There was no means of getting to the grass beyond it, and he turned to walk back. It was at this moment that the memory of the tractor had suddenly come to him, bringing with it a great wave of anxiety that seemed to contain in it the whole calamity of his marriage—the apparently inconsolable hurt he had inflicted on his wife, the silentness that had fallen on their young child, the bitter dismantling of the home—all of it surging through him with a force that for a moment overwhelmed him. He missed his footing on the plank. Groping at air to regain his balance, he fell backward into the stinking pool.

  A moment of absolute surrender followed. It was oddly luxurious, and he was aware of extending it for as long as he could. Although the day was cool, the liquid was warm, and in this state of surrender, what he felt seeping through his jacket and trousers wasn’t wholly unpleasant. He looked at the old farm buildings around him, the crops beyond, the sky overhead; for a while he felt almost blissful. It was only as he hoisted himself out of the pool, rising from it like a swamp animal dripping slime, that he began to feel the true foulness of his condition. There was no pain, not even any great physical discomfort. But the sensation of a vile uncleanness both soaking into him and emanating out from him was horrible. He trudged back through the mud (what need now for the planked walkway?) toward the gate blocked by the squatting tractor. There before him, he saw what he had managed to conceal from himself before: just to the side of the main gate was another little one, which he could have passed through without any risk to his attire.

  Tearing up clumps of dock (Rumex crispus), he did what he could to wipe himself clean. He lined the seat of the Citroën with a protect
ive layer of stalks and leaves before sitting down on it. In this manner, reeking, oozing greenish muck, he resumed his journey.

  He was more than an hour late by the time he reached his father’s village. Coming to the church, he saw that the wedding service was already over, and he drove on to the house.

  This was a large building of brick and cobblestones. A rounded glass conservatory, filled no doubt with his father’s specimens, protruded gracefully from the ample front. A brass band was playing in a marquee with fluttering pennants at the back of the wide lawn, where a couple of hundred guests were being served champagne. Under the shaggy arms of a cedar, long trestle tables had been set up, garlanded with flowers.

  Large family gatherings had always unnerved Roland. From an early age he had associated them with all the more troubling aspects of his mother’s personality: the outrageous remarks—cruel, snobbish, or simply bizarre—that any group above a certain critical mass seemed guaranteed to elicit from her and then later the drunken outbursts of weeping, cursing, even violence that his father’s response of dignified silence served only to fan to ever more destructive heights.

  He thought of the strange way his mother’s image had been transfigured in his own consciousness. Alive, she had been a perpetual source of pain and humiliation—hatred even. Dying, she had aroused a kind of morbid solicitousness in him, strong enough that he had taken two months off from his job to look after her as she moved from her flat to the assisted living facility, then to the hospital and from there to the crematorium. Dead, she had undergone a final change in his imagination, turning into something frail, blossomlike, but enduring, for which he bore unexpected tenderness and love. He heard her voice, sad and low, as if she were present again beside him. “It isn’t me,” she would say after each new attempt to make something of her life had been abandoned. The volunteer work, the college administration job, the gift shop … “It just isn’t me …” A familiar dim helplessness washed through him. At moments he could glimpse something almost intentional behind his own calamities, an obscure, insidious solidarity … Abruptly, the dream he had woken from that morning in his hotel came back to him; the woman in it had been his mother. A sharp pang of dismay went through him. A wet dream about my own mother, he thought, almost wearily. What next?