by John Bowen
“I feel awful. I think I ought to go, if you don’t mind.”
“Would you like Tony to go with you?”
“Where?”
Tony said, “Well—take you home or something.”
“No. No, thanks. I’ll manage, thanks. I think I’ll go now.”
Everybody stood up as Julian left. He wanted to say, “I’m not bloody royalty, you know,” but then he felt himself begin to shake, so he got out as quickly as he could. He went out into the corridor, found a lavatory, and washed his face in cold water. He had no towel, and there were none in the dispenser. He tried to dry his face with toilet paper, and while he was still doing this, a boy from Production came in, so he left with bits of tissue still sticking to him. He went down the stairs and into the street. He had no idea where to go, but he knew that he ought to keep moving. Only in that way could he kill the hours.
*
At Julian’s semi-progressive prep school, the authorities had believed in reason; before any child could be punished, he had to be convinced that he should be punished. “What did you hope to solve, Baker, by running away?” they had said to him, and Julian, twelve and a half years old then, flushed and feverish after a night huddled among old pads and batting gloves in the pavilion, had answered, “Nothing, sir”.
“Quite right, Baker. Perfectly right,” the headmaster had said, “nothing is solved by running away.”
Nothing is solved, because there is nowhere to go. There is no compartment, no watertight bulkhead, that will close as you pass through it, shutting off the past and beginning the future from scratch—a new man on a new road, responsibility and memory all left behind. Nothing had been solved for Julian then, because there was nowhere to go. And now that he found himself in the street outside the agency, why there was still nowhere to go. He could not go home. He could not stay where he was. He walked about the West End until he was tired. He sat in Hyde Park, paid the attendant for his deckchair, then threw the ticket on the grass and began to walk again. People left their offices. The public houses opened. He could get drunk, but he was afraid to get drunk, and only had a couple of drinks to pass the time. He bought an evening paper, and read it. He went to a cinema. If only he could spend the rest of his life in the anonymity of parks and pubs and cinemas, and never meet anyone he knew! He saw the programme through one and a half times, and then the cinema closed, and it was only eleven o’clock. The cinemas were closed, and the pubs were closed, and still he could not go home. He had a cup of tea at the Coventry Street Corner House. He must find somewhere to spend the night. He had heard that a Turkish Bath is cheaper than a hotel. Julian went to a Turkish Bath.
It cost fifteen shillings to get in; Julian was left with a pound and about six shillings in change. He gave his watch and his wallet to one attendant, his shoes to another, and proceeded on stockinged feet into a curtained gloom, in which beds were grouped by couples. Here and there, people had already gone to bed, lying in the warm air under a single sheet. Some of them watched Julian, and some kept their eyes closed. But it was still early, and most of the bathers were in the hot rooms.
Julian picked out a bed for himself, undressed, and hung up his clothes in the locker at the bedside. The second attendant had given him a towel, which was just a little larger than a drying-up cloth (why not a Turkish towel in a Turkish Bath?), and he wrapped it round his loins. The air was dry, and seemed to smell slightly of sweat and sulphur. At the other end of the long room, brightly lit behind a glass partition, he could see naked men in canvas chairs. “I might as well go through the drill now I’m here,” he thought, and went to join them.
This was the first of the hot rooms, and it was not unpleasantly hot. Three of the men were fat, and pink, and elderly. Their towels lay on their laps like tiny aprons; their bottoms filled the canvas of the chairs, and seemed about to spill over the edge; each of them was reading the Daily Telegraph. The fourth man was younger—perhaps forty-five years old—and in much better physical shape. Unlike the fat old men, he was not at all relaxed, but sat up very straight in his chair, looking covertly and quickly from one to another of them. There was a heart tattooed on the inside of his lower right arm, and in a panel under the heart, the word, “AMY”.
Julian found a chair. Its seat, he discovered as he sat down, was much hotter than the room. He took an evening paper from the marble-topped table at his side, but decided that he did not feel like reading. As he looked around him, the tattooed man caught his eye, and came over to sit by him.
“Come here often?” the tattooed man said.
“No. I’ve never been before.”
“Oh.” A pause. The tattooed man smoothed the towel on his lap. It came unfastened at the side, but he did not bother to fasten it again. “I come here whenever I’m in London. I used to be in the Navy, you know. Lower deck.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I know them all, you know. I’ve met them all in my time. I’ve had a lot of friends.” He named an admiral, a well-known industrialist, and a Labour M.P. “I often used to go round to his place in the old days.”
“That must have been interesting.”
“Of course, I’m married and settled down now.” He indicated the tattoo on his arm. “My wife. But I still look in here whenever I come to London. You’d be surprised how often I come. You meet a lot of people.”
“Yes, I expect you do,” Julian said. He had thought it would be better to have someone to talk to, but it was too much effort. At the cinema, he had not been expected to reply to the actors. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s about time for me to move on. I expect I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah,” the tattooed man said, “yeah. See you later. I’ll look out for you.”
Julian walked into the next hot room, and the heat came out and hit him. He tested the seat of a chair, decided that it was much too hot, and went on upstairs to the steam room. Sitting anonymously in a corner on the highest of the tiered benches, breathing steam and feeling the sweat burst out liberally all over him, he tried to think seriously about his situation.
How had it happened? There are people to whom promiscuity is an itch. You itch and itch, and have to scratch. Over-sexed?—no, it was nothing to do with being over-sexed. Quite the contrary; that was one of the troubles in his relationship with Penny. Not that she wanted it particularly. She knew she ought to enjoy coition, because all the books said so, but Penny didn’t really enjoy it. She needed it only to prove to herself that he still desired her, and when they had gone one week, then two, without it, she began to be suspicious, and this made him all the more unwilling and unable, and so the comedy continued.
I am promiscuous and under-sexed, Julian said to himself. What a mess! He was married. He didn’t want a divorce. He even liked being married (Penny would have said he only liked the idea of it), with all its illusions of security, and a home, and being the sort of person he wasn’t but would like to be. Should he, instead of alley-catting about the place, have taken out his promiscuity respectably in an affair? But Penny would have known at once. And an affair would have trapped him emotionally, tied him almost as securely, as his marriage did already. All his life he had run away from being tied.
He had never wanted to be tied, never wanted people to make on him the sort of emotional claims his mother made. When he had wanted sex, he had avoided the women of his own class—Good God! they had thought him shy! The Army had taught him how to make the casual pick-up, had taught him the easy gallantry of the pub or Palais, the suggestion of class which attracted, the hint of commonness which reassured. He knew all the ways—the back seat in the cinema, the bench or the bushes on the heath, the bodies pressed together against a wall in an unlighted alley. “Sordid!” Penny would say, “squalid!”, but it was not sordid to him; it was a game, an adventure, a way of proving to himself that he could get all that whenever he wanted it. It was all those things, and now it was more—it had caught him; it had become a compulsion.
When he had m
arried, he had intended to give all that up. Yes, he had. Really. Not in any moral sort of way— he didn’t see that there was anything immoral in it—but because you have to make some sacrifices. He might miss it, but you couldn’t go on doing that sort of thing when you were married; it wouldn’t be fair. Only, it wasn’t easy. Even during their honeymoon, he had been unable to keep from responding to the habitual coquetries of the maid, of the girl in the tobacco kiosk, of women who passed them in the streets, expecting to be admired. But after all that was only automatic. He never intended to do anything about it. It meant nothing. At least, it meant nothing to him. It meant a lot to Penny.
At first she mocked him gently. “Eyes front!” she would say, and they would both laugh, and he would say “Well, I’m only human”. Then she said nothing about it at all, but sometimes she would be watching him, and he wouldn’t know how long she had been watching him. Then she began to nag him. Nag, nag, nag! She was always going off at him. She never forgot anything. She would remember some perfectly harmless pleasantry to some perfectly harmless creature, and she would remind him of it, and ask him what he meant by it, and they would quarrel. Sulks and tears. Neglecting the home, and taking offence if he suggested that the floor might be swept, the furniture polished. The amount of housework I do, he thought—and an echo of Betty Monney came into his mind, “It’s not right. That’s not a man’s job.” What on earth was he going to do?
Not that Betty had been the beginning of things. That had started long ago—the trip to Leicester on a test campaign, the girl at the milk bar, who came off duty at six, and never, she said, knew what to do with her evenings. He had forgotten it was so easy. After that there had been a string of pick-ups from the teen-age market, bleached blondes in amusement arcades, urchin cuts in coffee bars, counter girls at cheap stores, usherettes in suburban cinemas, deadened intelligences in dead-end occupations, looking for a cheap thrill and a bit of life.
Not that in many cases they had often been able—no, it was most a matter of fumbling and feeling-up. But because, in most cases, he never got further than the preliminaries, than the casual touch of a hand, the pressure of a knee, the preliminaries had become habitual; if it had not been for the occasional trips to the provinces or afternoons snatched from the office, they might, indeed, have taken the place of sex altogether. And so since Betty was available, and had seemed responsive, and after all, he had told himself, she knew what she was doing, and anyway the poor kid didn’t get much fun, and now——
“Why, Julian, what a surprise! I noticed someone hiding up here in the gloom, and I felt I must see who it was. So I was very bold, and came straight across. But, my dear, I never thought it would be you.”
“Simon,” Julian said, “what are you doing here?”
“My dear, what are you?”
It was Simon Purvis, a fellow copywriter from the agency. Standing there in the steam, the bald crown of his head a mottled pink surrounded by tufts of spiky black hair, he looked like something from the Hall of the Mountain King. Once upon a time during the war years, Simon had been a poet; he was a contemporary of Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes, and had published two books of poems, both well considered in those serious times. Then the war, as he would himself have written “became over”, and Simon went to New York City. He lived in Greenwich Village, wrote some violent and stylized short stories, and was taken up by New Directions. He did graduate work at Columbia, and, in the evenings, haunted the bars of Twelfth Avenue. He had an unhappy experience with an alcoholic boy from Iowa who had read the stories, and so he came back to London, where he found work first with one advertising agency, then with another, then with another. He wrote no more poetry and no more short stories. He believed that advertising should be fun. “I mean, if it isn’t fun, what’s the point?” he would say. “You might as well go straight out and cut your throat.” He was not often sober during the afternoons. Once Julian had found him alone in his office, reading aloud to himself from one of his own books, and blurring the page with drunken tears.
“Do you come here often?” Simon said.
“Why does everyone keep asking me that? I’ve never been before. I’d heard it was a cheap place to sleep.”
Simon giggled. “I’d never thought of that, but I suppose it is,” he said. “I’m in here quite often.”
“It’s company, I suppose.”
“Very dreary company most of the time, but one of the masseurs is rather sweet.” Simon climbed up to the top tier, and sat next to Julian. “Still, it keeps you from getting lonely, and sweats some of the alcohol out of your blood. Out of mine anyway.”
“Simon,” Julian said, “I’ve sometimes wondered. This world you live in … this life you lead…. How do you manage!”
Simon said, “I’ll give you a short answer. I don’t manage very well. Not many do.” He stared ahead of him, round-shouldered, bony, the sweat dripping from the point of his chin on to his knee. “I suppose it would be easier if one grew less discriminating as one grows older. But one doesn’t. If anything, one gets more choosy, more easily bored, more greedy for youth.”
“And what happens in the end?”
“Loneliness and self-pity. You thank God you’re normal, my dear. A queen’s life can be very glamorous and exciting when you’re young—not that I was ever pretty myself—but the winter sets in early.”
“Poor Simon!”
“You couldn’t be sorrier for me than I am for myself.”
“Not all normal people are happy, you know.”
Simon turned his little poked-out head, sharply sideways like a bird. “Trouble at home, is there?” he said. “I thought as much. Well, don’t you worry——” He patted Julian’s knee. “—You go to bed, and sleep it off. Things will seem quite different by tomorrow.”
*
Julian and Penny lived in the top half of one of a row of grey brick houses in Putney. It was not what Penny had been used to, but of course they had the river and the common, and it was so convenient and so cheap. With Penny’s salary from the Public Relations department of a film company and Julian’s as a copywriter, they could have afforded a much higher rent, but after all it was better to wait until they had found something they really liked, and then buy. They were on a furnished tenancy, and could move at any time. They had been living in Putney for three years.
Most of the furniture in the flat was their own—the studio couch, the two armchairs from Heal’s and the five wooden chairs from the Portobello Road, the bookshelves that hung on brackets from the wall, the Bernard Buffet lithograph over the gas fire in the living-room, the twin beds with Dunlopillo mattresses. Most of their landlord’s own furniture had been moved downstairs to make room for theirs as they bought it. Consequently his half of the house was rather over-furnished. Not, as Penny said, that he minded at all; he was such an old sweetie, really no trouble to them. “I think he likes having us,” she would say. “He’s going to be terribly hurt, poor lamb, when we up with our traps and leave him.”
The landlord was Albert Monney, Alfred and Betty’s father. He was a widower. His wife had died of pneumonia, following an attack of flu. Since it was only flu, there had been no reason for her to go to hospital, so she had died in their big double bed, while Mr. Monney camped out on the sofa. After the funeral, Mr. Monney had thought of selling the bed, but he was used to it, and anyway it seemed wrong to sell to strangers the bed in which his wife had died. He had continued to sleep on the sofa during his period of mourning, and moved back into the bed when he left off his black. There were many times during the years that followed when Mr. Monney would wake, and feel an emptiness at his side, and he would lie in bed for a while on his back with his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling and missing his wife, until, if it were a cold night, his mind would be diverted to the need to empty his bladder, and he would get up, and pad off to the lavatory in his stockinged feet, and, returning, fall once more asleep with his arm round the pillow.
Alfred had been eleven
years old, and Betty twelve when Mrs. Monney died. At first, since there were no close kin to take them in, they had been sent to a Home, and Mr. Monney had lived alone. Then, after four years, Betty had been considered old enough to look after things, and so the family had been reunited. Mr. Monney gave up his domestic responsibilities to his daughter gladly; he had not enjoyed doing for himself. But he and Alfred didn’t get on. The Home had seemed to both children a betrayal, and although Betty grew to love her father again simply as one loves a pet—by taking care of it—Alfred had no such way of approach. He had wept when his father took him to the Home, and he had wept again when he was taken away. The Home which had taught his sister to be domestic, had taught him independence. There was no doing anything with him.
Penny didn’t really care for Mr. Monney, old sweetie or not. She didn’t care for his teeth. Mr. Monney had given up smoking so as not to get lung cancer. He had heard that not smoking was easier if one sucked sweets instead. Then he had discovered that he had a sweet tooth. Ordinarily he might have controlled his sweet-eating, but now he had an excuse for it. He sucked sweets for much of the day, and always had a tube of mints or gums or fruit candies in his waistcoat pocket. His teeth were rotten. Mr. Monney did not know why this was happening to him. “I’ve always brushed them night and morning,” he told Julian. “I used to have such good teeth. Never needed a plate. And now look. Old age catching up with me, eh? What do you think?”
He would stand there, half up the stairs, half inside some door, half going in, half coming out, always on his way to somewhere else, but always ready to stop for a chat to pass the time of day. He was proud to have the Bakers for tenants. He liked to think that Penny and Julian were professional people, who gave tone to the house, tone to the street. He was not an educated man himself, but he knew the value of it. He liked a good play on the radio, but had taken against the idea of television. He read the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Reader’s Digest (the Bakers took the Daily Express), and he found the Digest particularly valuable, because it was not only a good read in itself, but gave you something to talk about. He would never have thought of subscribing to the Digest for himself, he said, but they had found out about him somehow, and had written to him specially suggesting it. He had always been struck with the thoughtfulness of this, although of course it was in their own interest as well.
