Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 2

by Alan Bennett

  Eric Japan doesn’t have any special animals though, does it?

  Bron Doesn’t it? I don’t know.

  Eric I wish I could see them.

  Bron Who?

  Eric Your visitors. I wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t show you up.

  Bron Eric.

  Eric I’d keep out of sight.

  Bron Peep through the bannisters.

  Eric They’ve no need to see her.

  Bron You’re all she’s got.

  Eric What’re they like?

  Bron Not sure now. What are we like now? The same. Or even more the same. That’s the difference.

  Eric Maybe they could put a word in for me?

  Bron I wrote. You know I wrote.

  Eric But maybe if I met them. She might like me. Feel sorry for me. You like me. I’m good at making people like me.

  Bron I’ll see.

  Eric So can I stay?

  Bron Eric. You shouldn’t ask. It’s family. It’s not fair on them.

  Eric Why? Because I’m just a draughtsman from Portsmouth Dockyard. The sort of people you’re reduced to.

  Bron Eric. They’re coming all this way to see us.

  Eric Skip it. It will be boiling in the car because she won’t have opened the windows. She won’t even have noticed. It’s not important. She sweats. There’s no excuse for that, is there. Nowadays. I’ve told her. That’s not important either. Because she once had it much worse nothing else counts. You’d think it might make her jump at all the little things. Perms, lipstick. Frocks. No. It’s not important.

  Hilary begins to play the piano offstage. It is the same hymn, ‘Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven’.

  Anyway, I’d better go for this picnic.

  Bron Stay a bit longer. Go on.

  Eric I wish she was dead. I wish I could go out to the car now and find her dead. That would be a real picnic.

  Bron Eric.

  Eric goes as Hilary begins to sing the words of the hymn.

  Hilary (off)

  ‘Praise him for his grace and favour,

  To our fathers in distress.’

  Bron Hilary.

  Hilary (off)

  ‘Praise Him still the same as ever,

  Slow to chide and …’

  Bron Hilary.

  Hilary stops and comes on.

  What gives you the right to be so bloody condescending?

  Hilary Did you know they’ve scrapped the Holy Communion? They’re experimenting with something called Series 1, Series 2 and Series 3. That doesn’t sound like the Eucharist to me. That sounds like baseball.

  Bron Who are we?

  Hilary I am a snob. We know that.

  Bron He likes you.

  Hilary I imagine when it comes to the next prayer book they won’t write He, meaning Him with a capital H. God will be written in the lower case to banish any lurking sense of inferiority his worshippers might feel.

  Pause.

  The C. of E. was my first love. Until the age of sixteen I had every intention of going into the ministry.

  Bron Saved everybody a lot of trouble if you had.

  Hilary Had I chosen orders I would have been a bishop by now.

  Bron She’s a lonely woman. What pass do you flip to allow you to behave like that?

  Hilary One of the few lessons I have learned in life is that there is invariably something odd about women who wear ankle socks. Olga. Four letters. Anagrams Gaol and Goal. Eric. Rice. A pale flavourless substance consisting of millions of seemingly identical grains.

  Bron He’s just a lost boy.

  Hilary This isn’t Never Never Land.

  Bron You could pretend. For half an hour.

  Hilary I appreciate Olga has seen things she cannot forget. What is tiresome is that she will not let anyone else forget that she can’t forget them. I get it every day at the office. They’re a dismal couple and I see no reason why I should have them in my house.

  Bron Your house. This shack.

  Hilary My house. My country home. A doting frump with her silly little copper’s nark of a husband. Who is he? A common criminal. What is she? A woman to whom the past is simply misery and horror. Not surprising she can’t wait to get to the future. We have nothing in common at all.

  Bron (without emotion) Except the one thing. You’re all traitors.

  Hilary goes and puts a record on the turntable and comes back. The next speech is over the slow introduction to a very grand Strauss waltz.

  Hilary Considering this taunt was quite deserved and in substance true, he thought he kept his temper very well. The easiest accusations to bear are, after all, the ones of which one is innocent. To be accused of something of which one is guilty, that is the intolerable thing. Though I use guilt to mean responsibility. Not guilt. However.

  Bron Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.

  Hilary If the past is anything to go by, we would normally sulk for the rest of the day. Then towards evening we’d make it up, get drunk and dance. But we haven’t all day and we can’t get drunk until the company comes so … come on, old lady.

  Hilary and Bron dance immaculately, in best ballroom fashion. Occasionally he shouts instructions or the time. ‘Two, three and turn. Two, three and reverse.’

  He is also very easily puffed and almost has to stop and fight for breath, but goes on.

  Bron stops suddenly. Listens. Goes to the gramophone and stops it. Listens again.

  There is the sound of a car door. Voices off.

  Bron I am terrified.

  They wait.

  Veronica, a slim, very chic lady comes on slowly, picking her way with a fixed smile, not sure whether she’s come to the right place. Duff, her somewhat stouter husband, bringing up the rear.

  Veronica Bron! Oh Bronnie, darling! Hugs, darling. Hugs, hugs, hugs. Such hugs.

  Bron You found us, then?

  Veronica And Hilary. Hilary. You look well. Doesn’t he look well?

  Bron Dear Duff!

  Duff kisses Bron.

  Veronica So trim. And so young.

  Hilary holds out his hand.

  Duff Put that careful hand away. We too shall kiss. And kiss properly. See, Veronica, the great man blushes. My dear, it is accepted now. Men can kiss. And remain men.

  Hilary No, they kiss here too. No … I … we are very happy to see you.

  Bron Oh yes. Yes.

  Hilary Welcome to the Forest of Arden.

  A slightly awkward pause.

  Veronica This is heaven, Bron. Do admit. A Wendy House. And here you both are. Looking so young. Children.

  Hilary You found it all right?

  Duff We came in an embassy car. They seemed to know exactly where it was.

  Hilary That’s not surprising.

  Veronica Darling. Is there somewhere I could wash my hands?

  Bron You want to ‘freshen up’. Then let me show you ‘the geography of the house.’

  They laugh.

  Oh the heaven of jokes. That’s our little garden.

  Veronica Sweet. Duff. Look. The garden.

  Duff The English garden.

  Bron We’ll go through.

  Veronica (off) So cool here. Moscow was boiling.

  Duff You live here in the summer? Charming.

  Hilary It’s hardly Hookham.

  Duff Your books. A garden. Some distant prospect. Dieser kleine Pavillon. Paradise. How very clever of you. (He mouths.) Are we overheard?

  Hilary Sorry?

  Duff mimes someone listening.

  Here? No. Why, what do you want to say?

  Duff Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Anyway, Hookham is now a diocesan conference centre. It’s wild with bishops.

  Hilary So I’m told.

  Duff They’ve put in a sauna bath. What do bishops want with a sauna bath? You look so well.

  Hilary Flourishing. Flourishing.

  Duff Thoreau. A second Walden. The great, good place. How enviable. Listen to that
silence! Delicious.

  Hilary What are you lecturing about?

  Duff Lecturing, lecturing? Lecturing?

  Hilary I thought you were in Moscow to give a lecture?

  Duff Oh lecturing! Forster. Forster. For my sins. And for my supper. For my sins and for my supper.

  Hilary He died, I gather. Forster.

  Duff I rather think so, yes. Yes, he’s gone at last. That mild but steady glow put out. I was at the funeral. But not Passage. To India. My lecture. Not the evils, say rather the indignities of colonialism. That is what they are expecting but no. Howards End. I shall run up the flag of personal relations for ever and ever. That should set the cat among the pigeons. Beard the Wilcox in his den, be it Stock Exchange or Palace of Culture.

  Hilary That’s bold. I’ve got a first edition of it somewhere. (Begins to look.) I’m not sure it’s not inscribed.

  Duff Only connect, comrades. Only connect.

  Hilary I never quite understood what that meant.

  Duff Neither did I. But it is not important. It’s all the things it might mean, the penumbra of half meanings, the nimbus of uncertainty. That’s its power.

  Hilary I don’t know what it means at all.

  Duff What do all such en joinders mean? ‘Grace under pressure.’ ‘Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize.’ ‘Only connect.’ Forster. Hemingway. Henry James. All add up to the same thing. Be nice. Behave, or people won’t like you. Neo-platonism diluted. The farewell at the mouth of the cave. Remember, be nice!

  Hilary finds a copy and hands it to Duff who looks at it.

  Hilary Cambridge.

  Duff Cambridge. Love. Life.

  Hilary I was waiting for you to admire our trees.

  Duff Yes. Yes. I do.

  Hilary Spruce, apparently.

  Duff Indeed? And what happens beyond the trees?

  Hilary ‘Beyond the wild wood comes the wide world.’

  Duff The freedom of the fields, the shelter of the woods. Un vrai paysage moralisé.

  Hilary I must apologise for the birds. They do not do their stint so far as singing is concerned. When you consider most of them are only here for the summer, that winter finds them in Bournemouth, or even Amersham, it really is rather unfair. I’d sing.

  Duff You’re not happy?

  Hilary Did I say that?

  Duff Are you happy?

  Hilary Well, Duff, shall I put it like this. I’m not sorry it’s not Surrey.

  Duff Yes. I see. The real tragedy with us lately has been the loss of the elm. Practically every single elm has gone.

  Hilary Does that make a difference?

  Duff A vast difference. We are only now starting to count the cost. Wiltshire is a wilderness. A spokesman in the Department was telling me that upwards of nine million trees have perished. One of the most characteristic elements of the English landscape cancelled out. A gap in nature. Constable. Cotman, Crome now documents. Invaluable evidence of the countryside as it was ten, even five years ago. The loss of an inheritance.

  ‘Felled, felled, all felled.

  After comers cannot guess the beauty been.’

  Hilary I’m sorry.

  Duff ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois. Les lauriers sont coupés.’

  Hilary I wonder what those girls can be up to?

  Duff It is sad to find oneself so often striking the elegiac note when one is by temperament and inclination a modernist. One’s whole nature yearns towards the new yet time and time again one finds oneself averting one’s eyes from evidences of modernity. Pain. Pain. Too much pain. One thinks of Bath. Northampton. Leeds. Worcester. I too am an exile, and in my own country. From my own time. You should see Glasgow, that Grecian place. Edinburgh. And dear, dear Brighton. How much better off you are, Hilary. Amputated. Cut clean. Not to see the slow death of friends. And as the monuments, so I fear the institutions.

  Hilary Yes. I was reading the other day that Lyons were closing down the teashops. That does seem to me to be scandalous. Where will people go?

  Duff I don’t know. I do not know. You must be rubbing your hands.

  Hilary At the death of the teashop? No.

  Duff All part of the prescribed withering away. Only what you’ve been tell us to expect.

  Hilary Me, Duff?

  Duff History delivering the goods.

  Hilary Not me.

  Duff Your team.

  Hilary On the contrary the nice things about my people … how quaint to call them a team … is that they’re very old-fashioned. Not at all forward looking. And whatever their shortcomings in point of the liberty of the subject very litter-conscious. Do I want the old place to change? I don’t think so. I have left it. It must stay the same or there is no point in having come away. I certainly don’t want things to improve. Though I remain, of course, firmly in two minds. Whereas ideologically I must count every sign of decay an improvement, so my personal inclination is to think of every improvement as decay. Certainly where the end of Lyons is concerned. Was that presented as an improvement? I imagine so.

  Duff I forget. But it is paradoxical that it is the socialist regimes which are so bent on demolishing the institutions of the past that are the most scrupulous guardians of its monuments. One thinks of Dresden, doesn’t one (every stone restored). Die Altstaddte: Prague, Warsaw. A hint of aspic. But does that matter? They remain. They survive.

  Hilary Moscow, you can take tea on every street corner.

  Duff The fact is, at this moment in our history I fear we flounder. And if one were asked, as indeed all too often one is asked (conferences, think-tanks, round-ups at the year’s end) the inevitable question: ‘Diagnose our predicament’ ‘Sort out some symptoms’ ‘Pin-point the problem’ ‘Name the culprit’ (Ah ha!) In a word ‘What’s Up?’ Then lamely I say that in the people I come into contact with … last week in Wiltshire, man laying us new cobbles, a genuine craftsman, stalwart figure (minded of Hardy) thirty-five, two children, set up on his own, £90 a week, doing very nicely thank you … and no bad barometer … in such people again and again one comes on this settled conviction that things will turn out all right in the end. And this conviction, this common sense not so different from the official philosophy here that, leave history to itself and one way or another all the eggs are going to end up in your basket.

  While Duff has been talking he has been going round the room, looking at books, picking up objects and replacing them.

  Hilary (pause) What I think I would say, Duff, is this: people are the same the world over.

  Duff (sagely) Absolutely.

  Hilary rights the books and objects Duff has disturbed.

  Hilary Of course the service is bad here. But then it always has been. Apparently one waited an age in a restaurant even under the Tsars. Nothing has changed.

  Duff Quite. And do we differ? Not fundamentally. Because slow lane, fast lane, we all of us seem to be headed in the same direction. Where? Well, in the general direction of the millennium. But remember, no goals or grand arrivals. No end in sight. No fullness of time. Just dribbling along. Stop, go. Carriages in a siding. Shunted along, middle of the night. Where are we? Never mind. We’re en route for the millennium. Not that we’ll see it. The millennium’s a place to go to not arrive at. Millenniums mean murder. Trials in football stadiums. Babies on bayonets and poets in prison, indignities offered ambassadors’ wives. No. Amelioration. Improvement. As here. Not the best. Too soon for the best. Slow but sure. Slow but share. World wide amelioration. (He winces.) I’m being bitten.

  Hilary Really? It’s funny, they don’t bite me.

  Enter Veronica and Bron, giggling.

  Veronica I’m just saying to Bronnie one of the delights of Moscow is that young men keep sidling up to Duff and saying ‘Have you any jeans?’ I mean Duff! Jeans! I shriek.

  Duff In point of fact, Veronica, I have a pair of jeans.

  Veronica Never. Oh yes, you do. They’re a sort of tinned salmon colour. He bought them at Simpsons for when he does Saturda
y shopping down St John’s Wood High Street.

  Duff I’m not a complete fool, you know.

  Veronica Listen, I haven’t given you your stocking. (She gets a bag.)

  Hilary How’s Father?

  Veronica Pa? Marvellous. Tip-top. What’s this? Oh, the garlic crusher. (Is that the sort you wanted?) Gentlemen’s Relish.

  Bron Heaven. Two pots.

  Veronica Your hymns record. King’s College Chapel.

  Bron Oh God.

  Veronica Crossword puzzles.

  Bron Bath Olivers.

  Veronica The last Anthony Powell.

  Duff I’m told it’s very good. I think he’s probably brought it off.

  Veronica A Times.

  Hilary I see that at work.

  Veronica No. Pa is marvellous. Never better. Can’t see him pegging out for years yet. He thrives.

  Hilary He always does in the bin. Ordering everybody about. It’s like old times.

  Veronica Like, duck? It is. He’s so confused. He thinks Ma is still alive, Duncan and Frank. Gussie with her bugle. Dozens from the trenches. All there. It’s just like a wonderful cocktail party. No distinction of age, creed or class. Everybody.

  Hilary The resurrection.

  Bron The open society.

  Duff It’s actually a form of arteriosclerosis.

  Hilary Now, how about a drop of the old nail varnish?

  Veronica Whisky for me. I won’t venture to say Scotch.

  Hilary Duff?

  Duff Not for me.

  Hilary Oh.

  Duff With the meal perhaps. Now, no.

  Hilary Duff tells me Lyons have closed all their tea shops.

  Duff I didn’t tell you. You told me.

  Hilary Where on earth do you go for a cup of tea now?

  Veronica One seems to manage.

  Hilary The nice thing about Lyons was that they cropped up at such regular intervals. Rather like lavatories in that respect. I suppose one could have spent the day hopping from Lyons to lav and lav to Lyons all the way across London. If one was so minded. But not any more. However. They still have lavs?

  Duff Yes.

  Hilary That’s a relief.