Here Be Dragons

by Stella Gibbons

  Yet he did not truly, within himself, believe that they were; and while he was almost ready to accept, with poets of the past both minor and great, his share of the age-old misunderstanding of the poet’s nature, something within him rebelled at being classified away into a psychoanalyst’s case-book.

  When the accusation had been made: when the verdict of ‘morbid humours’, or ‘the vapours and the spleen’, of ‘unmanly weakness’, or ‘neurosis’, had been passed, did not something remain, and escape? The contact of the flesh of his fingers with the petals of a quilted dahlia—was not that left behind, with all that it implied, after the poet had been classified and filed?

  His temperament and talent were not nostalgic, and he felt no dislike for the broad contours of the age in which he lived, for some of its typicalities had already provided him with inspiration. He had written true poems that sprang from a reading of the works of Jung, and from the atomic explosions in the Nevada desert. But sometimes he felt that it was a great age expressing itself in an unbelievably silly, pompous and cautious jargon, and he felt it at this moment.

  His irritation took the form of wishing that she would be a little sweeter to him.

  “We go on like a pair of snapping turtles,” he said suddenly, and got up to pay the bill. “Don’t you ever wish that we could go on like a pair of turtle-doves? It’s a prettier sound, anyway.”

  She had forgotten that her lover was a young man who worked in words, and the sharpness in his voice surprised her. She liked to be scolded, and for the rest of the evening she was almost kind to him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “BOHEMIA. A DESERT COUNTRY NEAR THE SEA”

  “WHY WON’T YOU come? Ricardo is going to be there.”

  “Is that any reason why I should? I’ve been on my feet all day and I want to sit down, not tramp for miles,” Nell said.

  “You won’t have to tramp for miles. Oscar lives on Church Hill; it’s only round the corner. And you ought to meet Ricardo. As a matter of fact you could have met him yesterday. He was crawling down our stairs at half-past three this morning.”

  “I did hear someone creeping about, but how could I know it was Ricardo? If I had I would have got up to meet him, of course.”

  “You can sound bloody crushing, Nello,” John said approvingly. He had come to meet her from The Primula, as he sometimes did, charming the busy females, while they flitted about, with his air and his manners. “You ought to give up this ridiculous job and go and be trained at RADA. You could play acid-spinster parts.”

  Miss Berringer, who was swiftly putting away left-overs, threw him a protesting exclamation; Nell uttered an unoffended laugh. When one is not quite twenty—and beginning to be cautiously content with one’s life—such a remark can seem amusing.

  “Oh, Ricardo’s terrific,” John went on—“he’s what Boswell would have called retenue. He always wears an officer’s coat, perfectly pressed, in winter and summer, and underneath it he’s almost naked. He’s terribly attractive to women. And he’s been in prison.”

  “Might be a good idea if he went back there,” Miss Berringer said detachedly. “Nell, just smell this. Will it go another day?”

  “So you’ll come, won’t you, Nello?” John said, when the inspection of a jug of custard was over.

  “I suppose so. But I can’t stay late. Who’s going to be there?”

  “Most of The Coffee Dish people. Eleanora, Francesca, Davina, Dominic (his real name’s David but who wants to be called that?) and Adam. Adam’s just back from singing in a concert party somewhere. It was terribly well-paid. But he had to give it up. The bloody man who ran it insisted on his turning up every day no matter how he felt, and he was feeling awful because Claudia (that’s his woman, she’s ballet) had a modelling job in London and he couldn’t see her. She had to stick it, you see, because she’s just come out of a mental home and they said she needed regular occupation.”

  “Or a regular swishing.” This was Miss Berringer, from the depths of a cupboard. John gave her slim back view an indulgent look. Nell had noticed that he seemed to like her, as he did anyone who treated life, and himself, with firmness: it was only his parents to whom this attitude did not apply.

  As she sat propped against the wall of a cellar some two hours later, she was wondering resignedly why she had not realized that any party attended by patrons of The Coffee Dish would be like this. She was by now prepared not to expect ‘sandwiches or that sort of suburban bull’, but even her experiences with them, and at their favourite café, during the past six weeks, had not prepared her for a floor running with pools of cider from a leaking barrel, on which people were dancing with naked feet, a fused light which gave an excuse for burning one candle in—of course—a Chianti bottle, and nothing at all to eat. Oscar lived in two cellars; one held his bed and the other the table at which he wrote short stories. He was not at the party, having early on gone out on to the Heath with his boy-friend.

  Nell had accepted the boy-friend, and his delicately painted face, as she had accepted everything else encountered in London. She supposed, when she heard older people discussing such subjects, that she would one day have to make up her mind how she felt and thought about them; meanwhile, she was so busy that she had no time to think about them at all. She found herself, rather amiably, accepting everything and everybody. She supposed that she ought to be troubled about this. She supposed also that it was because of John that she was not. It was John who had detachedly and clinically explained to her about Oscar and his boy.

  At this point in her reflections, while her sober eyes rested absently upon the indistinct, fantastically dressed shapes jiving all about her in the candlelight to the music of a radiogram, a voice crossly addressed her:

  “Doctor Livingstone, I presume. Will you dance?”

  He was a young man of medium height, distinguished from everybody else there by a lounge suit and short hair. Nell’s eyes strayed to his feet: he wore shoes and socks.

  “Well …” she said, smiling to show that she knew the Stanley joke, and standing up, “I have been but it was so uncomfortable … aren’t your feet wet?”

  “It doesn’t come over my soles. They are wet; my shoes need mending; but I’m absolutely damned if I’ll take them off … I say, do you like this sort of thing?”

  He stared at her gloomily. He had a fair, snub face with what used to be called an ‘open’ look; he seemed about twenty-three or twenty-four years old.

  “Not very much. Hardly at all, in fact.”

  “Why come, then? (Shall we sit down? This seems to be a place without a hole … do have it.)”

  “I came with my cousin,” Nell said, when they were rearranged on poor Oscar’s decaying bergère. (Where was that cousin now? She had lost sight of him in the confusion and dimness for the last half-hour; had, indeed, been trying to find him amidst the whirling skirts, flapping ponytails, and prancing jeans and corduroys when ‘Stanley’ addressed her.) “But he seems to have gone off. …”

  “Oh … I wonder if I know him.”

  “John Gaunt.”

  He shook his head. “And what’s your name—may I know it?” he added quickly.

  “Nell Sely.”

  “Sely. That isn’t a usual name … mine’s Robert Lyddington.”

  “Do you live in Hampstead?” asked Nell, who was getting along nicely with this conversation, “because my mother used to know some Lyddingtons when she was a girl. They lived in Frognal.”

  “My grandparents. They had a house on Vernon Hill. It’s pulled down now, and my parents have never lived here. (We’ve always lived in Richmond.) But I like Hampstead. I’ve always wanted to come back, and now I’ve got a room in Rosslyn Hill.”

  “We live in Arkwood Road.”

  “I know it. Looks over the Heath at one end. With your parents?” The tone was neither disapproving nor sympathetic.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do? Are you ballet? (You look rather ballet. Your hair’s ball
et, anyway.)”

  “No. I’m a waitress.”

  Nell said it calmly. But she had to tell herself that she did not care what he thought.

  “A waitress?” He looked quickly away from her, but she had seen his astonishment. “Oh … jolly good. Why not, I mean. But isn’t it terribly hard work?”

  “Frightfully. But it’s awfully amusing and I make a lot of money.”

  Seeing that he was not frightened off, she began to tell him about daily life at The Primula, rather soberly, in the thin pure voice that matched the texture of her skin and the tint of her eyes, as they sat side by side against the wall (from which Robert occasionally jerked himself away with an impatient exclamation, brushing plaster off his shoulders), and surrounded by the patrons of The Coffee Dish, some of whom had spread newspaper upon the wet floor and, having collapsed upon it, were passionately arguing.

  Glancing at them occasionally when a louder yelp than usual attracted her attention, Nell thought how unmistakable they were. She had first met the group of people whom John called ‘we’ some six weeks previously, and now felt that she would recognize a specimen anywhere.

  Their long, thick, dark clothes, which they wore unchangeably in spite of weather now fairly consistently warm, and their hair sprouting copiously unbound and unshaven upon head and chin, appeared most at home in the quiet, leisurely, smoky setting of The Coffee Dish itself.

  This restaurant in a little street between Berwick Market and Golden Square had been planned by its first proprietors to secure the custom of the workers in a large block of new offices facing it, and they had decorated their long room in a style which seemed original, until it was compared with that of the Espresso bars. But frescoes of space-ships and flying saucers could not account for The Coffee Dish almost at once attracting a type of customer who not only occupied all the tables for hours, so that those pressed for time could never find a seat, but also possessed faces and wore clothes which scared ordinary customers away.

  There they sat: the large, calm, dirty girls in flowing skirts and lead jewellery, and the dreamers in drain-pipes and duffel coats, the spinners of fantastic plans for making fortunes brooding silently over a newspaper, with unwashed hair falling across (in the case of the girls, who believed in living naturally) unpowdered faces. The workers in the office block, running downstairs to snatch their lunch in a crowded Lyons serve-yourself-bar, looked at them rather wistfully. Who were they all? Whence this apparently endless leisure, passed in brooding or arguing, which could have been spent delightfully in tennis or music or car-tinkering? And what made them all come to The Coffee Dish; day in, day out, wet or fine, early and late, to The Coffee Dish?

  “It’s their bloody parents who are responsible in most cases for their leaving home,” John had explained. “Stifling them with too much safety and comfort and not giving them enough love. (You see, Nello, one’s got to be free.) One simply cannot have parents, for example, interfering with one’s work. Never shall I forget the bores my papa and mamma were when I first showed that I’m a writer. They were at me like two well-meaning vultures. Nagging me about working regularly; trying to show my stuff to literary giants who were as bored at the idea of seeing it as I was furious with the idea of letting them … frankly, I gave up trying to take it all. Most of the people in this room don’t have a real home any more. We’ve discovered, you see, that it’s possible to live without food or money if only you’ve somewhere to sit down indoors in the winter. In the summer, of course, it’s much better. You can eat even less. (Most of us starve all the time, you know. That’s why everybody’s so white.) Sleep? Oh … in each other’s rooms. Or at places that stay open all night. (You can sleep quite well with your head on your arms on a table.) Adrian, over there—” nodding towards a long black-bearded figure in dirty jeans and an American shirt, “hasn’t slept in a bed for two years. It’s his thing. He sleeps on chairs and on the floor in people’s rooms. (Of course some of us do go back to our parents occasionally. Then we get what you’d call proper food and sleep. But we always run away again.) You see those two girls, Lavinia and Jane, yes, the one with the fair hair down to her waist, they get all their meals from men. No, they aren’t tarts. The men are sorry for them. They’re artists: Jane does linocuts and Lavinia is a very fine portrait painter indeed.”

  Nell had grown accustomed to hearing how gifted, delicately-minded, and high-principled everyone at The Coffee Dish was. Lofty ideals of courtesy prevailed. Certain virtues, but only certain ones, were much praised: romantic faithfulness in love, devotion to one’s art, freedom from all control, the Spartan casting aside of any comfort and order. Tolerance was of course the master-virtue, except (Nell discovered) when it became necessary to extend it to anyone who drew a regular salary in exchange for set hours of work. Then no words were scornful enough for the poor wage-slave.

  “They’re about the narrowest crowd I’ve ever met,” Benedict said to her once, when Coffee House shibboleths were under discussion one evening in the Gaunt’s flat, “… very good, John; all right; but they are. If you aren’t jobless and homeless and hungry, you’re outside. That’s narrowness. Call it what you please; it means the same thing.”

  The girls under eighteen who lived on their friends and stray meals from men; the boys who slept at home perhaps two nights out of the seven and carried always a portfolio containing photographs or poems or drawings; the youthful dancers and singers and lyric-writers who were always about to land a job at fifteen pounds a week—Nell, using her eyes as she walked on her day off about London with John, had seen them wandering as far north as Hampstead, and on the extreme limits of Soho to the south.

  They were seldom seen beyond Marble Arch on the west, and their eastern boundary came down somewhat firmly at the beginning of New Oxford Street. But along Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street and in the narrow lanes of ramshackle eighteenth-century houses running between these thoroughfares, their long hair and white faces and thick, dark, shabby clothes were to be seen at almost any hour of the twenty-four, not excluding three and four in the morning. And John had told her that on the fringes of the set there were elements that were criminal.

  She was interested in them because they were his friends; fearfully interested, because their influence upon him seemed to her baleful and strong, but their polite contempt for herself, her clothes (“You’re the first girl who has ever worn a fitted coat at The Coffee Dish, Nello!”) and her background, soon convinced her that they would never become friends of hers.

  They tolerated her, because she was John’s cousin, and because her job now admitted her to the ranks of those earning a living unconventionally, but they only tolerated her. Davina and Grenouille (a young woman wearing black leggings laced with bands of straw whose style was much admired) and Francesca and the rest had never forgotten that Nell had once implied criticism of the hours and hours and hours spent at The Coffee Dish in doing nothing, by taking her knitting there. They had called her—their tone did not hold the friendliness of a nickname—‘Mademoiselle Defarge’.

  She now found them all bores, and was glad that they could not often afford the fare out to Hampstead. As John seldom took her to The Coffee Dish nowadays, she seldom saw them. But she feared and disliked their influence over him more than ever.

  She did not know—how could she?—that in one way, he was safe.

  John, in fact and in truth, is the only one of them all, poets and painters, gifted or pretentious, idle or dedicated, who is safe. When—years on from this evening in early summer, while Nell and Robert Lyddington are sitting in Oscar’s cellar looking at the arguers and the dancers—the door of an unspeakable room is opened; and people go in, and later on someone reluctantly, hesitatingly, opens the worn, filthy suitcase that for years, now, has been almost John’s sole possession, the manuscript will be found.

  It will be seamed and crossed and criss-crossed with long delicate lines of writing like flights of birds, and corrections in coloured inks; starred, blotted
, patiently re-done; then re-done; and done yet again. It will look almost more like a map than a thing written; and in one sense it will be: a map of London, carved in pouring molten crystal words, that have set in massive splendour for ever. John is safe: he is with the immortals.

  “If this is Bohemia, you can have it,” young Lyddington said suddenly, after an interruption in their talk caused by someone bumping a large dusty behind into him and sending lukewarm cider all over his trousers, “Who was that? Do you know her? She seemed to know you,” rather accusingly.

  “It was Eleanora, I think—or Polly.” Nell tried to disentangle the memories associated with a fat, sweet, spotty face. “I think she’s going to do ballet in South Africa.”

  “Oh. Well, would you like to come out somewhere and have some coffee? I don’t think we want any more of this, do we.” It was not a question, but Nell, though welcoming the suggestion and agreeing with the verdict, hesitated.

  “My partner’s walked out on me, too,” he added, very crossly.

  “Oh. Then let’s. It’s a very good idea,” Nell said.

  While they were walking up the hill she was telling herself not to be idiotic about ‘offending’ John—who had behaved disgustingly rudely anyway—and listening at the same time to Robert.

  He worked in a costing accountant’s office in Holborn during the day, and on most evenings studied, with a correspondence college, for the examinations which he must pass in order to qualify for his costing accountancy degrees. Nell asked him casually what this was; she had never heard of it; and he seemed pleased to tell her. It appeared that he had done his National Service in the Royal Navy (“I’ve got an uncle in the Navy who’s done rather well”) and had had a wizard time; Australia, Ceylon, Straits Settlements. But friends who came home on leave couldn’t be got to see that one must stick to one’s ruddy work four evenings out of the five, or else one would fail one’s exams. and then one’s whole scheme would go overboard. Did Nell play tennis?