The Centre of the Green

by John Bowen

  So much for Sunday.

  *

  So much for Sunday. Penny Baker, who was spending the Bank Holiday week-end with friends in Sussex, went to bed in a room with bamboo wallpaper. Wearing pyjamas from Harvey Nichols, she sat before the dressing-table, and took off her make-up with cold cream and cotton-wool. She patted astringent lotion carefully into her skin, taking plenty of time on this routine occupation, since there was nobody to be irritated by her slowness in coming to bed. A lumpish country moth flew through the open window, bumping and butting its head against the parchment globe from Heal’s which hung from the centre of the ceiling. Penny began to brush her hair.

  Penny was not lonely; she did not believe in that. The empty flat in Putney did not oppress her. “My dear, I’m never in it,” she would say. She did not lack company. When one works in Public Relations, one knows—one has to know—so many people. There were so many parties for the Press, so many acquaintances to drink with in the evenings, so many influential people whom she could help to entertain. The Soho pubs, the expense-account restaurants—how pleasant to take them up again, and find them still the same! how foolish of her to have left so much of this part of her job to others during her days as a wife, a tied woman. Now it was gin and tonic again, and pink gin, gin and Dubonnet, Bloody Mary, Scotch on the rocks. Now it was, “The Scampi Provençale are very good here”. “I think I’ll have a steak.” “No potatoes, thanks. Just a green salad.” All the old bits of conversation came out, and could be used again. That wonderful man who slimmed you by metabolism—“And then, you see, when you’re down to your basic weight, you start putting things back in the diet again until you see what causes the trouble. Of course, I started with alcohol. I must say it was a relief to find it wasn’t that.” You could talk about him, or about the latest American musical, or you could gossip endlessly about the shifting politics of the Public Relations world, in which it is rare to hold one job for more than eighteen months. And if you ran out of talk about that, there was always the wider political scene—” I mean, I’m not political, Penny. You know that. But the way everything keeps going up all the time. I mean, they can’t keep asking for more money. They’re bleeding the country white.”

  Of course, living in Putney was madly inconvenient. What with the buses stopping so early, and the tube from Earl’s Court running so seldom, and taxis really being out of the question for a working girl, it made things very difficult. Generally her escort—not often the same man, but usually the same kind of man, which was middle-aged, red-faced and yellow-fingered, thin of hair and wearing good humour like a mask—would bring her home by car, and she would have to ask him in for a night-cap, and then, unless he were someone she knew really well, there would be all the fuss of coping with a pass. Not that she minded—Good Heavens! you couldn’t work in Public Relations and remain a prude—but she simply wasn’t interested in that sort of thing at present. She was enjoying her freedom far too much to compromise it.

  Besides, there was Mr. Monney to be considered. If she were to invite men to her flat late at night, and if they were to stay too long, it would upset him—you know how these people’s minds work. She could move, she supposed; she didn’t have to go on living in Putney; she could look for a flat somewhere more centrally situated. But it would be so much bother. She didn’t want to move. Mr. Monney had a sort of—well, a sort of faith in her, and she found that touching, in spite of his bad teeth. He would feel betrayed if she were to move away, especially since that other business was still uncompleted.

  For the matter of Betty’s abortion was proving rather difficult to arrange. Penny had been to see the man recommended to her, and it was all rather squalid and impossible. She had said so to the girl at the office, and so had foolishly offended a contact. She didn’t quite know what to do next. In any case, matters had gone too far for a back-street abortionist to do any good. An abdominal operation of some sort would be needed now. How on earth did one arrange that? Perhaps Betty’s own doctor—doctors were supposed to be understanding, and, although naturally he couldn’t do it himself, he might know of a way. After all, Betty was very young. But Penny had met the local doctor during Julian’s bout of Asiatic flu the winter before. He was a forthright Irishman, who prescribed penicillin like a patent medicine for all ills, and had suggested swimming as a cure for Julian’s post-influenzal cough. In Ireland, Penny supposed, as in so many primitive countries, girls much younger than Betty had babies at the drop of a hat.

  Well, she must get into bed. She put down the hair brush. How tired she looked! People didn’t realize that simply being with friends was tiring. Listening was tiring. Putting on the right face for the right people, and keeping it on was tiring. Still it had to be done. One had to keep busy. Penny left her seat at the dressing-table, and switched out the light. She was glad to think that the moth, which had been battering itself so foolishly against the light, would find a temporary rest. “But I suppose,” she thought as she got into bed, “he’ll only go away and do exactly the same thing somewhere else.”

  *

  It was the city. It was being in a city. If one lived alone on a desert island, surely one would come to terms with it. One would forget how to speak, lose time and memory, lose one’s very humanity, becoming after a while only part of what was there already.

  It was the city. It was knowing that there were people all around within sight, within touch, within hearing, within smell, and yet one made no connection with them. All around were the visible signs of a complex social organism, and you knew—you, Charles knew, the girl in the cinema knew, the caretaker’s widow drinking Empire wine in her dirty basement knew—you knew that something was wrong, that not all the pieces of the organism fitted together, that you did not fit. Something was wrong, but it was not important. Only the useless bits did not fit.

  Yesterday there had been no more than a shadow, no more than something to endure. But loneliness, Charles had discovered, is infectious. He had caught loneliness from that girl like a disease, and it was mortal. His detachment, that clear wall which cut off his involvement with other people, saving him so much, had now begun to close in like some hostile element which would smother him to death.

  But this was nonsense. He was depressed—no more. Everyone had fits of depression sometimes.

  Just depression. What comfort did that bring? There were some depressions which could not be endured. Castlereagh had cut his throat. “Nobody came.” “I was such a clean woman.”

  Charles had been walking since early morning, walking without purpose, walking for something to do, first east and south across Kensington Gardens to Gloucester Road, then west to Earl’s Court, west and north to Hammersmith, further west to Chiswick, then back east to Shepherd’s Bush. Now he sat on a bench on Shepherd’s Bush Green, a triangle of sparse grass with the traffic ceaselessly passing on all three sides. Whichever way he looked, the lorries and cars, the buses and trolley-buses flowed past him, insulating him from the two cinemas, the shops, and the people on the pavements. He was on an island already—not quite deserted, for children played there—but it was an island within the city, with carbon monoxide and diesel fumes instead of sea air, and the fluctuating brroom of engines instead of the sound of the surf.

  Noise. So much noise in the city. How long was it since he had last heard silence? In the city noise was a condition of life. One’s ears allowed for it, one’s brain stopped recording it, until every now and then, somewhere in all that web of communicating nerves, that coral of a brain, something said, “Noise. Notice the noise. Listen!” and it all came flooding in. The still centre, Charles thought; how I long for that. Perhaps if one could reach the centre of anything, one would find silence there. Perhaps at the centre of this Green, at the very heart of it there would be peace, a silence from the city.

  It was just a game to begin with, just a device to pass the time. He surveyed the three corners of the Green, and drew an imaginary line bisecting each angle. Where the lines met
, the centre would be. Of course, this imaginary calculation could not be exact, but if he were to take it as approximate, and cast around a little, perhaps he might happen on the silence, might fall into it suddenly, that little bubble of silence in the exact centre of the Green.

  He took his rain-coat from the bench, and walked to his approximate centre, made his calculations afresh, and shifted ground. Now he must cast about. He could still hear the incessant noise of the traffic; there was no change in that yet. He put his rain-coat on the ground to make his starting point, and began to pace around it in a widening spiral. Slowly; it must be done slowly. The spot he searched for would be very tiny; he might walk straight over it by mistake, without noticing any break in the constant din of the city. He walked slowly with small steps, stopping after each step to listen.

  He was so absorbed in his search that he did not notice the children, who stopped their game, and gathered to watch him. “Look at him,” one of them said. “Just like a bloody dog. What’s the matter, mister? You lookin’ for a place to pee? It’s over there.”

  A pause. A shock. The sudden intrusion into his privacy. “No,” Charles said. “No. It’s all right.”

  “Watcher goin’ on for then?”

  “I——” Embarrassment. Confusion. Shame. Charles, blushing, picked up his rain-coat, and began to walk away. I don’t know. The children shouted after him—” It’s over there.” “He’s looney. Hey, mister; you’re looney, aincher?” “Garn! Like a bloody dog.” I don’t know why. Pm not responsible. The shame of it, to feel himself the same now as the people who talked to themselves, the people who twitched, the people who burst out in sudden rage against strangers, the lonely dotty bits of the social machine that didn’t fit, and were twisted by their dottiness into shapes that would never fit, couldn’t fit, no matter how the machine itself might try to find a place for them. He couldn’t walk any more, not where people could see him; he had to go home. But when he reached his basement flat again there was nobody there, and he could not settle to reading, or to listening to the radio, or to sitting still, or to pacing up and down. Most of all, he could not settle to himself, so that for the third day in succession he was driven to the cinema.

  Although it was early in the afternoon, the cinema was crowded. So many of us, Charles thought as he was directed to a seat. We don’t much care what’s on. We don’t mind the stuffiness, or the cigarette smoke, or the glare against the eyes. We don’t mind about the headache, or the people walking over us, or the reaching hand in the dark. We just want something to occupy our minds. We don’t want to have to think for ourselves, feel for ourselves, live by ourselves. Perhaps I ought to buy a telly on the H.P., and spend the afternoons watching show jumping. Like mother.

  In time, the film ended. Should he see it round again? But now his restless fit had returned. He would be better in the street, in the air, better going somewhere, even though the air, when he reached it, was grey, the pavements grey, the houses and shop-fronts grey and grimed and drab. Deciding where to walk was so difficult, when anywhere was as good as anywhere else. He walked the length of the Portobello Road, from its mewsy Notting Hill Gate beginning past the antique shops to its working-class end. He struck up towards Westbourne Grove, but already he began to be tired again; he had walked so far that day. He was tired, tired, and the streets stretched before him like a lifetime. He passed an old woman in scuffy, worn-down shoes and a black dress. Should he stop? Should he speak to her? Should he say, “Sister!” to the old woman? Was that why the saints behaved so, crying, “Brother!” to the scabby beggar, “Sister!” to the old woman dying of scurvy and malnutrition in an attic—and the cry not of compassion, but a cry for help, of helpless protest.

  He was walking down a long street, and at the end of it the houses seemed to close in and come together. There was no way out, but he did not have to walk to the end of the street; he could take a side turning. Which? On the right was “The Duke of Wellington”, a public house. To go “on a blind”—it would be a way of getting to sleep at least. He discovered that he only had seven and fivepence in his pocket, and therefore could not afford to drink anything but beer. He bought a pint of bitter. All the benches were full; he would have to stand at the bar. The beer was thin and cold. The pub had neither a piano nor a darts board, and most of its customers seemed to be Irish. Charles was uneasy to be standing there alone. He began to imagine that everyone was watching him. He did not dare to look up, but drank his beer in small sips because he disliked the taste of it. He turned away from the room to face the bar itself, but there was a mirror there, and his own glance, he discovered, was as hard to meet as the others. His nose itched, but he did not dare to scratch it in case he should draw attention to himself. Did they resent his coming as a stranger into their local? His leg itched. Perhaps he had caught something from the labourer on his right. He could not draw away, for the Irish, he knew, were quarrelsome when drunk. His stomach itched where the belly-band of his trousers pressed against it. Surely the woman sitting with her man at a table by the door was watching him? He felt his fingers curling with tension and embarrassment. The itching danced and shifted about his body. There were people wherever he looked. It was impossible to stay. He put his half-empty glass down on the counter, and left the pub. Immediately the itching stopped.

  Drink was no good to him then. He decided to go back to the flat. The rain began again. He walked quickly, splashing through puddles, while the rain soaked his trousers below the knees. He would need a bath when he got back. A bath would kill time.

  Killing time. Each of us gets only so much time, and when we kill it, we are killing ourselves. Charles had tried that already. Should he try again? He sat in the bath in his basement kitchen, and considered the ways open to him. An opened vein? He imagined himself, white and limp as a plant which has grown in darkness, floating like weed in the blood and water. No, it was too ludicrous. What if the water grew cold before he was dead, and he had no strength left to turn on the geyser? Not an opened vein! He pulled out the plug and let the water run away—so much for that. Then he sat on in the empty bath, hugging his knees. It was a sort of self-abuse, he supposed, this playing with the idea of death—playing, teasing, circling around it, putting out a hand to touch it, holding it, stroking it, letting it go. Still, it passed the time. He shivered, and reached for the towel.

  He could go to bed, but he would not sleep. He could go out again, but he would be driven back in. He could stay in until restlessness forced him out. Outside were the streets and the rain, inside was only himself and the nagging persistence of just this consciousness of being himself, of being alone, which only sleep would obliterate—and so he was back at the beginning again, for if sleep were all he wanted, then why not sleep for ever? What holds me? he thought. What holds me? What can I expect but this and worse for the rest of life? People talked about despair, but despair implied endurance, a struggle, hope that had to be killed. Charles had a new concept—the barrier of pointlessness. Some people never reached it at all; others reached it early.

  The rain and the dusk made the room chilly. Charles turned on the gas, and let it flow for a while without lighting it. He remembered what Peter had said in hospital: “We can’t take away your braces or razor blades, or blunt the edges of your kitchen knives.” No. But there was always cowardice to keep one alive. Gas was like drowning, like being smothered. Charles turned the tap off again. And yet—the temptation remained. Fear and temptation—a leap away, a step towards, backwards and forwards until finally an accident happens, a finger pressed too tightly on the trigger, a false step on the ledge, and the great decision has taken itself, and taken you for a ride. He turned the tap on again. He would do nothing final. There would be no newspaper stuffed under the door or in the chinks of the window-sash. He leaned back in his chair, smelling the sweet and ominous scent of the escaping gas. It was a test of the will, that was all, to see how long he could hold out before turning it off.

  The telephon
e rang. It was Mrs. Baker. “Mother!” he said, and then—realizing with surprise that the words were true—” I was just going to ring you. Hold on a moment while I light the fire.”

  *

  At least he had something to tell the Group on Tuesday. “Well,” Ethel said, “it was about time something happened to you.”

  It was surprising how pleased they all seemed to be about it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Holiday Abroad

  Colonel Baker sat on the terrace of an hotel in Palma de Mallorca. Away from the old town, the hotels spread out towards the west in a wide curve along the bay, with the promenade and the sea below them, and the road to Terreno above; they are modern—indeed, recent—in shape and colour, and do not much resemble the buildings of Palma itself. The hotel at which the Colonel and Julian were staying was placed towards the middle of the curve, and had been recommended to them by the Tourist Office. It was of the second class, but it had a swimming pool.

  The swimming pool could be reached by a stairway from the terrace, or by a door from the reception hall of the hotel, but not from the road, because it was exclusive. Wicker chairs were set on the concrete around it, and in the corner of the wall and the stairway was a small bar, from which a record-player was operated; there were only six records, because the hotel had not yet been in use for two years, and to build a record library takes time. The pool itself was small and blue, and kidney-shaped, and for most of the time it was occupied by a German. When the German was in it, there was not much room for anybody else. He was a blond, tanned German with the build of a boxer, and a disconcerting oeillade, which he directed liberally at anyone over the age of fifty, irrespective of sex. The Colonel was embarrassed by him, and preferred to sit on the terrace and gaze at the sea, rather than to rest in comfort beneath a striped umbrella in a wicker chair by the pool.