“That’s different,” said Mark, “they come to ask for your help. I’m talking about people like my wife imposing herself on others.”
“And me,” said Mrs. Carmichael.
“All right then. What’s your answer?” And he smiled at her in order to take the sting out of the words.
“Mark, have you ever been lonely?” said Mrs. Carmichael. “I mean, really lonely.”
“Of course he hasn’t been,” said Lorna from the kitchen. “He’s never been alone in London as I have and, believe me, that’s loneliness. He hasn’t lived at all.”
Mark considered and said at last, “Yes, I have been lonely.”
“Absolutely alone?” said Mrs. Carmichael. “I don’t mean intellectually alone but really alone so that you don’t have anyone at all to talk to.”
“No, I can’t say that I have been that. But then your hermit chose to be alone. You at his moment of weakness have chosen to break into his loneliness. What will happen when you leave him? Won’t he be worse off than ever?”
“That, I suppose, is a valid point,” said the doctor looking at his wife.
“Oh, it’s a valid point right enough,” said Mrs. Carmichael. “But then the world is full of valid points.” Before she could continue, Lorna came in with tea and biscuits and said,
“A valid point. That’s the jargon of the New Statesman. What’s valid about it? He’s talking about valid points as if this was an argument which didn’t relate to anything. The man was filthy. He was in bed: he couldn’t move. There was no-one to feed him but us. He’s unshaven and dirty. He’s never seen TV in his life. He hasn’t got a radio. He lives all by himself. Utterly. It’s high time you got into the real world, Mark.”
“But what is the ‘real world’? The world of the hermit? Surely you aren’t going to say that that is the real world? That’s what you seem to be defending.”
Lorna distributed tea and biscuits and said, “Anyway I’m not going to argue with you. I get satisfaction from what I’m doing though at the beginning I hated his guts. He’s more comfortable than he has been for years. Mark,” she said to the other two, “doesn’t understand why I’m doing this. He doesn’t seem to realise the uselessness of my life. I never did anything for anybody before, not in my whole life. When I wanted to go somewhere I went and asked my father for my cheque and that was that. If I wanted a new hat or a new coat I did the same. I was completely futile.”
“And I always thought you an iconoclastic artist,” said Mark. “You married me under false pretences.”
“Don’t we all do that?” said Mrs. Carmichael. “Surely you aren’t blaming her for turning out to be better than you expected.”
“I don’t know,” said Mark, “I feel that this hermit is very important. He’s a symbol of some kind. There he is, escaped as he thinks from the world, but other people impose on him whether he wants to or not at the moment when he is incapable of resisting them. Is the world jealous that he has succeeded so long in doing without it?”
“Perhaps he’s had enough of his loneliness after all,” said Lorna. “Perhaps he really wants to be helped.”
“You’d be surprised how many of his type there are even in a beautiful town like this,” said Mrs. Carmichael. “You’d be surprised how many people suffer great griefs and need help. Most of them are grateful, some are not. I’m not setting myself up as a Florence Nightingale. But we do live in a community after all.”
“I agree,” said the doctor. “I was talking to a hotel keeper the other night. He had just had this hotel built and he was telling me about how he had it furnished and decorated. He told me that the local firm charged higher prices than a city firm would but he felt it was his duty to support his community, so he hired them anyway. I thought that rather admirable. It shows you that in a small town cut-throat business ethics don’t apply.”
“It doesn’t, of course, show anything of the sort,” said his wife gently. “It only shows that he sees a good bit further than some hotel keepers would do. He makes sure that you know about it, you’ll tell someone else, and so he’ll be patronised.”
“That’s true,” said the doctor, taking the pipe out of his mouth. “I must say I hadn’t thought of that. Mind you, I admit that this town like any other small town is a hive of gossip. People, I believe, are good on the whole, but, on the other hand, they can be nasty too. Still, surely it is a good thing that you should help the hermit. After all, it takes energy and there are other things you might have been doing. You could be going to the cinema for instance or playing bingo.”
“And spending Mark’s hard earned money,” said Lorna. So the discussion continued aimlessly as such discussions do, eventually coming to the confrontation which is: Who is the more admirable man, the one who, corrupted, fights in the arena or the one who, uncorrupted, looks on?
When the Carmichaels had gone, Lorna said to him, “I don’t know why you always have to argue with people. Why can’t you just talk? You never seem to be able to talk about anything without turning it into an argument.”
“Well, I used to tell you all about my girl students but you didn’t want to hear.”
“What bosh,” said Lorna. “I wouldn’t hear anything at all if I relied on you. After all, people are interesting.”
“Are they?”
“Yes they are, though you seem to have become an aristocrat.”
“I thought you were the aristocrat.”
“I don’t know about that but I like people better than you do. Did you know for instance that the local headmaster has had to leave because he was beating his wife? You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No, and what has that knowledge contributed to my understanding of the world?”
Later when they got into bed, he said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that Mrs. Carmichael makes me argue. She doesn’t mind.”
“How do you know she doesn’t?”
“Well she is really rather an intelligent person after all.”
“Intelligence? That’s what you always think about, isn’t it? If people aren’t intelligent then they are no use to you.”
“I wouldn’t say that. There are many ways of being intelligent. But I must say that I prefer it to your so-called niceness.”
“Well, I don’t know why you married me. I’m not intelligent.”
“Let’s not be proud of it then.”
Later still he said, “Look, I’ll apologise to Mrs. Carmichael if you like. It’s just that I don’t seem to be making much headway with my book and that makes me irritable.”
He paused and then said, “By the way, do you remember that night I was at your flat, you had a pile of Sunday Observers and Timeses. And a novel by Henry James. Did you read them?”
“Of course not. I bought them just to impress you. I thought that you might like Henry James. All the intelligentsia are always talking about him at parties.”
He was amazed that she should have done this.
“But why should you have bothered to do that?” he asked.
“Because I liked you. One mus be insincere sometimes, if one likes someone.”
The window of the bedroom was open and he could smell the perfume from the garden. Undressing, she appeared like a ghostly flower in the darkness, luminous and mushroomy.
“You’re changing,” he said. “You’re growing up.” He felt a terrible envy as if he himself were incapable of change and that some cataclysm would have to strike before he could move in any direction. She reminded him of a poem he had read by someone about Persephone emerging in the spring from the earth, diaphanous and ghostly, a root breaking, an unpredictable blossom, a purple crown.
The green watch on his naked arm was like a picture of earth and he gazed at it—time passing—with a distant love and fear. She was so young and he was old. She was capable of becoming someone else. He felt for the first time a strangeness deep in his heart, a foreshadowing of autumnal ice such as one sometimes senses in the air at the close of summer, a co
nstriction of the heart when one stands in front of the mirror in the bathroom with the used blade and the lukewarm water.
4
The city—about seven miles from the town in which Mark stayed—was changing all the time in the Wilson era. Where once there had been slums there were now housing estates: there was more space opening out as mouldy rotten warm houses were dragged to the earth. Great slabs of multi-storey flats rose against the low red industrial sky. Sometimes he imagined what it must have been like in the past, the warm closeness of people, the flare of the blue gas at the stairhead, the trams, the men shouting from their piles of oranges and apples in the open air, the music hall, the earthy jokes, the flat caps.
Now it was changing. It was becoming lighter, airier, colder. There was more glass in the shops. Roads were widening, bridges soared above the city. There was a sparkle where there once had been a density. He had images in his mind of people walking close together in the past, of doors opening and shutting to let neighbours in, of huge red women standing underneath clothes lines, pegs in their mouths, their large red arms stretching upwards towards the billowing blue and white. He had a certain nostalgia for this time though he had never experienced it. It seemed to be full of Irish people, and policemen with moustaches running after the intrepid Celts like long lines of glue on a bad TV screen. It was also a time of surprises, when trains turned into hosepipes, and doors into stars rotating.
Now it was changing. Density was being replaced by an open precariousness symbolised by the Belisha Beacons, by the winking of lights. Lounges replaced open pubs, leather seats of black and red replaced wooden ones, ashtrays replaced spitoons. And the face behind the knife was cold, not warm. It was expressionless without passion. It was a diagram, not a living being.
One day, after he had endured a lesson with a particularly dim girl, Mark went into the main railway station bar in the city for a drink. It was students’ charity day and he had been accosted by a number of students who were carrying a coffin with a girl in it, while written on the outside were the words, “Pay to open this box.” It was a cold day but the students reminded him of his own university days many years before when he had gone about the streets clinking his can and asking people for money and making the kind of joke that students do make on such occasions. It was on charities day—a particularly hot May day—that, weary and satisfied with his work in a good cause, he had gone into a bar for the first drink of beer that he had ever taken.
Now, the students came into the railway bar and the customers in good humour—for there was a Celtic–Rangers match that day—bantered with them and contributed generously. As he stood at the bar drinking his rum—a blue scarf practically trailing into his glass—he saw not far from him a person he recognised: it was in fact a writer he had once met at a symposium which he had attended and this writer had been giving a talk on the novel. He was a smallish abrasive man with a black moustache whom he remembered as a rather iconoclastic speaker. He had made a good impression with his nervous urgency and bluntness. For instance he had maintained that he wrote his novels not for the critics but for ordinary people: he said that he had no time for experimentalism and that the great Russian novelists—who were of course the supreme exponents of the art—were not experimentalists either but wrote about human beings in situations of crisis. He wanted in effect a spiritual content in his work. In the discussion afterwards a number of people had taken him up on this point of experimentalism, asking him what he thought of James Joyce, whom he did not agree was a great novelist, much to their surprise.
So when Mark saw him standing by himself with a glass of beer in his hand he went over to him. At first he didn’t recognise Mark but when the latter remanded him of the talk (to which Mark himself had contributed some passionate remarks) he greeted him warmly enough. He seemed to Mark to look even more peaked than when he had seen him before. It turned out however that he had been entirely consistent in his ideas of realism, for in the previous year or two he had been involved in a project for the dispossessed and the delinquent in the worst areas of the city. He was doing this not so much to get material for a new novel but to prevent himself from retiring into an ivory tower where he would become obsessed not by human problems but by language. He spoke as fiercely and nervously as ever:
“The trouble is that most novelists go and look for so-called experiences which they then turn into novels. Their books are just travelogues.” (Here he named one or two of those novelists.) They were interrupted at this point by a young man who was looking for a ticket for the big match and who was willing to give five pounds for it. Mark told him he didn’t have a ticket but the young man was rather obstreperous till Hunter (for that was the name of the novelist) gave him a long look and he disappeared muttering something about these bloody Prods.”
“As I was saying,” said Hunter calmly, “these books are just travelogues. I don’t know whether I’ll ever write a book about this project but that’s certainly not why I agreed to take part in it.”
“What is it like?” said Mark, buying him a whisky and thinking at the same time that Hunter didn’t look the sort of person who would be taking part in a project which involved such tough delinquents.
“What’s it like?” Hunter repeated, smiling and looking at Mark as if he was one of those people who wanted to write what he called travelogues, a tourist of the human distress. “It’s difficult to say. They have their own rules, you know. That’s the first thing to understand. It’s not an anarchic society. It’s like learning to grow antennae. If you make a mistake, if you say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing …” He made a gesture of cutting his throat. “You can’t imagine how hard you have to concentrate. In fact it’s like trying to learn a language while going through a minefield at the same time. The thing is of course that you and I and anyone else who had to live where they live would grow up exactly like them. That’s what the so-called TV commentators forget. We’ve had a bellyful of them, always poking their noses and cameras in looking for stories. It’s all survival technique.”
He paused for a moment. “It’s hard to explain. It’s like being on another world. All those waste lands, those huge estates, like being on the moon. They’re moon men.”
Mark thought grimly about Mrs. Carmichael and wondered what she would do, if she would march in there, the banners of principle and Barth held high.
“They’re doomed of course,” said Hunter. “That’s the terrible thing, they’re doomed. Which means that literally they have no future. None at all. There’s little you can do. You can’t save them. They’ve gone beyond anything anyone can do for them. They’re completely unpredictable, you see. They’ll attack you for no reason at all. Suddenly one of them will go for a hatchet and then go for you and then it’s you or him. There’s a hostility there all the time beneath the surface and they’re looking at you all the time, studying you. They don’t understand you of course but they try to understand you by external signs, the way you walk, the clothes you wear. When they attack you they’re not attacking you really. For that moment you happen to be in their way, that’s all. They live in the present, totally.” He brooded for a moment into his whisky. “They show no affection whatsoever you see. That’s the terrifying thing.” He stared past Mark as if on to the waste planet of which he had been talking. “No affection at all. They think of no-one but themselves, or rather they don’t think of themselves. What their minds must be like is inconceivable to our so-called liberals. They hate any show of affection and of course you must never help for “social” reasons. They’re very suspicious of that. They’re so prickly and sensitive it’s not true. They hate to touch each other or be touched. The only thing they’ll touch you with is a weapon.” He looked into Mark’s face as if he were trying to work something out, as if he saw even there that remoteness and coldness. “I’ll tell you, I’ve got a theory about them. I believe that knives are their form of communication. Do you believe that? Knives are for them a form of love.”
“Yes, they communicate with knives as normal people with their hands and lips. They are hollow inside, you see. Debris. The landscape around them has penetrated them. Their minds are as empty as slums and the lighting is bloody awful. Primitive. And yet as I say they have rules. You could probably walk in there and they wouldn’t attack you because they don’t recognise you as belonging to a gang. But if you did belong to a gang and they suspected it, God help you.”
“Did you earn their respect?” said Mark, sipping his third rum and trying to get away from a large man who was elbowing his way towards the bar.
“Respect? What does that mean? You might earn their tolerance for a while. But respect. They respect nothing. Everything that they have ever tried to hang on to has been taken away from them. It’s very exhausting being with them for you have to start from the beginning every time. To communicate with them at all is an achievement. That’s why I found that literary talk I gave so unreal. Playing with words.” He was silent for a moment and then he continued again. Mark looked down at his rum as if it were blood.
“The fact is I can’t write about them even if I wanted to. How could anyone write about them? All the normal procedures disintegrate when you’re confronted by that. Fiction assumes that the world is reasonable. These people aren’t. You would have to postulate a world on the analogy of magic; that is, anything can happen at any time. They don’t have continuous characters, you see.”
“And they show no affection at all?” said Mark. “That’s odd. I thought that they were very physical. I mean when I was in the army, all these people used to talk about women all the time. It was really quite obscene as you know. Their talk was absolutely and without qualification about women. I can never remember them talking about anything else.”
“Not this lot. I’m telling you they’re like robots. They’re killers. Sometimes you can’t even see any expression at all on their faces. No-one can save them. They don’t trust anybody. Nothing can get through to them. It’s like walking through No Man’s Land.”
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