‘It was worth it.’
‘No regrets?’
‘No, of course not.’
One of the greatest forms of courage is accepting your fate, and I admired him for living with his affliction without blaming anyone for it. His name was Ransome, and he was sixty-five when I first knew him. He got his old-age pension and no more; governments don’t give you any money for fighting in foreign political wars. People like that are treated like nurses—expected to go unseen and unrewarded. So Ransome had to live in a very spare, austere way, living on porridge and crackers, drinking tea, and getting on with his sculpture. It suited him, luckily. He had always lived like that.
Nobody who mattered liked his sculpture; when I went over to his council studio I understood why. His figures reminded me of Ingres crossed with early Henry Moore; they were extraordinarily graceful, and far too honest to mean anything whatever to current trendy taste. There was a quality in them that no artist nowadays can seize anymore; they expressed virtues—toughness, idealism, determination—that went out of style with a vanished Britain that I barely remembered. I asked him why, with his talent, he didn’t progress to a more modern attitude, but he said it was no use; he was still struggling to represent the essence of what he had experienced in the thirties. ‘What I’m always trying to capture,’ he explained, ‘is the light, the vision inside a man, and the conviction which that light lends his action, his whole body. Haven’t you noticed how the planes of a man’s body alter when he’s in the grip of a belief? The ex-bank-clerk acquires the stature of an athlete as he throws a grenade—or, it might be, I recollect the instant where an infantryman in an attack, a worker with a rifle, is stopped by a bullet: I try to reconstruct in stone the tragedy of a free man passing from life to death, from will to nothingness: I try to capture the second in which he disintegrates. It’s an objective that won’t let me go,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want it to.’ He had been full of promise before he went to Spain; he grubbed about and found me some of his old press-cuttings. In one of them he was quoted as saying: ‘A sculptor’s task is to convey the meaning of his time in terms of its overriding idea. If he doesn’t transmit the idea he’s worth nothing, no matter how much fame he acquires or money he makes. The idea is everything.’
I knew what would happen to Ransome’s work when he died. The council would come round, view what Ransome had left behind, and order it to be junked; a truck would arrive, and a couple of men with sledgehammers. The whole lot would be smashed up and go into the council dump; in a thousand years’ time one of his stone faces might be found staring enigmatically upwards from the base of a demolished block. Meanwhile, in our lifetime, horrible pieces of rubbish, commissioned by the ignorant from the ambitious, would continue to clutter London parks, blessed by the senile patronage of the Arts Council. (‘The most terrifying responsibility in stone,’ Ransome said, ‘is that it’s eternal.’) The dwindling number of places in London parks where you could peacefully eat a sandwich in the shade of the plane trees on a hot day would go on being deformed by stone drivel, bronze and marble drivel, eternal drivel.
Now Ransome reminded me of Staniland. When we had known each other in the pub for about a year Ransome asked me over to his studio for the first time. ‘I’m married, you know,’ he remarked as he plunged deafly and fearlessly into the Fulham Road traffic. When we got into the studio it was empty, and I asked him where his wife was.
‘Oh, she’s away.’
‘Visiting?’
‘Well, yes. Visiting.’
His wife was completely mad. From time to time they discharged her from the mental hospital and sent her home, but these spells never lasted long. Ransome would do everything for her: ‘She’s much better,’ he would whisper to me confidentially, ‘much.’ Maisie knew that something was expected of her because there was a visitor, just as when she tried to pull herself together in the Asylum Park for Ransome’s own visits to her. She would try to make tea for us at the studio, but Ransome usually had to take over from her halfway through because she started wringing her hands over the teacups in the kitchenette, seeing them, as far as we could make out, as wrong and too flat. He would finish setting out the tray himself while she sat between two of his sculptures in a wicker chair. She was as white as they, an atrociously thin woman with terrified brown eyes, shuddering with terror.
When it got very bad she would drop her biscuit on the floor and start singing. ‘It’s just to keep the fear off,’ Ransome would say calmly in my ear—he could tell what she was doing from the look on her face. But her tuneless singing always meant that he had to take her off to the corner of the studio where they slept; he had to take her there at once and give her the sedative he had got from the doctor. If I was there, we would put her into bed together and Ransome would say, as he tucked in his side of the sheet: ‘She looks at naked existence all the time, you know, the way we only do with a bad hangover.’ We would stand looking at the sallow agonized face on the pillow until the singing died away at last into a confused murmur and she would sleep. ‘She doesn’t know how beautiful she is,’ Ransome would say to me. ‘I tell her that beauty is proof against every-thing, but she just won’t believe it. I tell her there’s nothing for her to be afraid of, but she won’t accept it; she’s too sensitive, you see.’ The next time I went round with Ransome she would have gone away again.
There was also one dreadful time when she screamed in the middle of tea and biscuits, broke a cup and tried to kill herself with a sharp piece. Ransome and I got it away from her, but she upset the table in the struggle. ‘She doesn’t think she’s worthy to live,’ said Ransome afterwards. ‘But she doesn’t realize, she is life. I love her,’ he added. ‘I could never love anybody else the way I love Maisie. My work struggles to sum her up.’
(I knew what he meant at last, thanks to Staniland, though it had seemed difficult to accept at the time. Skeletal Maisie juggling the teacups with the confused haste of the insane, and the way Ransome felt about her, corresponded to the way I felt about Staniland.)
Ransome would come into the pub for a lunchtime beer, if he could afford it, and talk to me as if everything at home were fine, but it would soon turn out that Maisie had had another turn; the relapses were getting worse, and it was obvious to me that Maisie was going to end up at St Anselm’s for good. It was obvious to Ransome, too; but he never gave up with her, any more than he gave up with his sculpture, and his pursuit of the idea. Ransome was gentle; he never yielded.
He never borrowed money, though I sometimes offered him some. ‘Good God, not from you,’ he would say, horrified.
‘Well, have another beer.’
‘Yes, it’s my round.’
When he was broke he never came into the pub: ‘A true Communist is no scrounger,’ he said. I had just decided to go to police school then, and I remember that when I told him so he looked at me for a time and remarked: ‘Yes, but perhaps you could have been an artist, too.’
I dared not tell him, though I told him most things, that I didn’t have the courage for that.
34
I got out one of the tapes to play a second time. Staniland said:
Duéjouls. I remember a bird fell one morning diagonally past my window while I lay in bed. It was a hot day early in June and the bird, green and yellow, the colour of fresh leaves, hurtled down with its wings closed for a second, like a handkerchief with a pebble knotted into one corner. It tumbled skilfully into the wild vine on the terrace and pecked rapidly at its fleas with its green beak, uttering sweet liquid cries: ‘Miladiou! Miladiou!’
Later: Last night I met the Laughing Cavalier again in the Agincourt. I don’t know whether I can really stand going in there much longer, in spite of my determination. Barbara was not with me. This terrible man hates me. He gives off waves of hatred towards me, even when his back is turned. It’s strange to be the object of raw, naked hatred; it glares out of the person at you like the truth, or a disease. Besides the orange appearance that his hair
gives him he is big, rough, built like a brick shithouse, as they say, and the very archetype of a villain. I am convinced that there is some weird relationship between him and Barbara, too. No, relationship is too positive a word—an understanding, more. I’ve questioned Barbara about it, even—the first stirrings of a new jealousy. It was a stupid thing to do, since Barbara can deny anything point-blank—the words yes and no have the same meaning for her when she chooses: ‘Yes, I was there.’ ‘No, I wasn’t.’ ‘What the fuck difference does it make?’ and so on.
Because the Laughing Cavalier detests me so much, he has become an object of interest to me. After all, hatred of a person is a form of interest in him, and I repay that interest with curiosity. When I found out, through overhearing a conversation at the bar of the Agincourt, that although thirty-eight he still lives with his mother, an awakening of the answer to the problem stirred in me. The Laughing Cavalier comes on as if he loves the girls, pinching this one, patting that one, always a smile, never the perfect gent, putting his arm round Barbara with an unconscious complicity in the gesture and her reception of it that gives something away, even if I don’t yet know what. But I’ll find out in the end—perhaps he wants me to find out, because such knowledge would give him a good excuse for killing me. Meantime, there is one thing I am pretty sure of—that, in fact, he loathes women and is also thoroughly frightened of them, beginning with his mother, of course. Thirty-eight-year-old men oughtn’t to live with their mothers; they become villainous in some way or other if they do. In this case, the little boy has to prove he’s grown-up and becomes a bank-robber. The other thing I do know is that, although I am physically feeble, drunk and middle-aged, I do not loathe women, quite the reverse, and he hates me for it. Every time I tell a story in the bar about my past which involves a woman, I can feel him listening to me from yards away; he is with his friends, but a curious stillness comes over him while I am talking. Later in the evening, he will always find an opportunity to jeer at me—even, just that once, to beat me up outside the back of the pub. But I watch him with his mates; I think he’s a real locker-room boy; I don’t think he could get it up with a woman in a million years; no, he collapses in front of a woman; the harder the woman the bigger the negative kick he gets out of his collapse.
Barbara?
Barbara will do anything for or to anybody, because it doesn’t matter to her what she does. It’s that very flatness in her that I spend my life’s blood trying to penetrate, and it intrigues her in a remote sort of way, watching me struggle with the impossible like a wasp in a glass of beer.
Later: Barbara has gone out as usual. After all, who would want to stay in this horrible little room? Yet I expect her, and beg her in an undignified, pathetic way, to stay in for my sake. She doesn’t give a damn. Oh, God, what a hideous fate to fall in love (and for the first time!) with a frigid iceberg with gross psychic problems and the mind of a petty criminal! I tell myself over and over that I am mad to continue it; but it makes no difference whatever to the way I feel for her. All I can do when I am in here on my own is to scream: how can she flaunt herself in front of all those men in the clubs when I love her? How can she only shrug when any man—myself included—puts his hand on her thigh? What is the matter with me? The whole thing’s a vile joke, an abominable injustice not to be borne.
I lie on our mattress on the floor. It’s my mattress, really, because she is so seldom on it. On the corner of the kitchen table lies an opened packet of razor blades. I feel desperate, filled with the contempt and hatred of others—Barbara, the Laughing Cavalier. I am a vomitorium; I have the effect, simply through being the person I am (something I can do nothing about), of forcing all the evil out of them, of becoming the object of it. Through my head run the words I wrote: ‘Unhook the delicate lace of flesh … then with a bold but cunning curve sweep into the throat and release its voice if you can …’ I am out of bed and have picked up the blades. I unwrap one and look at it. Suicide? Tonight might just be the night.
But no. It isn’t the way. They would think I had been a coward, and then my whole life would really have been wasted (although isn’t all life wasted?). No, I must get them to commit themselves to their own evil; that’s the better way, to compel them to strip off their pretences for themselves. I am expendable myself, just a rat in a laboratory that will serve, with its life, to prove or disprove a proposition. Any life will serve to prove or disprove a proposition.
Yes, you were very expendable, I thought. Later I switched on the player, and Staniland’s voice began:
I remember the bird again. This time I saw it flying onto the terrace under the black sky of an oncoming storm. It resembled a tiny club waiter in its dark green and yellow livery, flying with outstretched arms across the troubled dining-room of the world, imploring everyone to keep calm, they would all be served. Yesterday I couldn’t stand it after three days and nights lying on the mattress and waiting for Barbara to come home, so I got drunk at the Agincourt and then took a bus up to central London. I listened to two middle-class boys across the aisle from me on the top deck, talking in the new fashionable Wapping accent. They were probably in love; they leaned primly against each other as the bus took corners, a thin copy of the real thing. One of them was telling the other about his holiday in France, and how for the first time he had seen things killed—eight trout being knocked on the head by a peasant woman. The other one remarked: ‘Oh, I say! Just like a mugging, isn’t it?’
I suddenly despaired violently of the world. They were our young quiet boys from trendy homes with bad accents, the future of the race: they were pro-Palestinian and would always vote for nice people. They had no more class; they had no more roots—all that had been bred out of them. They moved with defiant hesitation around a Britain that they declared persuasively that they knew. I no longer knew it.
I got off the bus at Trafalgar Square. I walked to Picca-dilly Circus and went downstairs into O’Shaughnessy’s bar opposite the tube station entrance. It was dark and dirty down there, but the Guinness was good. Tramps and perverts sat around drinking it, peevish faces above tankards and crumpled macs; two stout conmen in little green hats tried to sell each other the rights in a television script. The lights flickered, the Irish barmen were rude and spat into the sawdust; a chilly northeaster hurtled through from the half-open door to the stairs. I drank six pints of Guinness, which I held down until ten to three, when I wandered off against the wind into the gents and lost the lot. My head was full of stuff I’d seen on the front page of the Standard coming in, about Poland and West Beirut, and my feet ached; as they shouted Time at three I thought confusedly that I might as well go out and see if I could pick up any ideas for writing which had nothing to do with Barbara. So I walked down into Piccadilly, but remember nothing except a pretty little girl with murderer’s ears who was standing waiting for a 19 bus with a woman I supposed must be her mother—anyway, she had legs like crumpled car bumpers and wore a brightly poisoned hat. Behind her stood an old queen in a good suit with grey hair brushed out under the brim of his six-in-hand Lock’s bowler; he smiled into the glass cover of the timetable and revealed bluish teeth with gold fillings. I didn’t want to see any more. The next thing I knew I was back in Romilly Place. I don’t know how I got there, maybe I walked.
There was still no sign of Barbara when I got in; there hardly ever is anymore. I find the most important question for me now is how to get off the scene. It must have been bad enough getting onto it, if one could remember one’s birth, but surely not as bad as getting off. Existence is barbaric, and I have made the mistake of behaving as badly as it has itself—insulting or abandoning everyone who might have helped me, taking a shallow attitude to deep problems and, conversely, a deep, contemplative view of complete trivia.
Now I am paying it all back—but what is the use of that? The best I can say of myself is that in the process I shot down a few shits—not difficult, however, if you are one.
Tonight I felt like going down to a gh
astly South Kensington pub, so I went. I have a tendency to satire, and I was in the mood where I spotted everything that clumps, trying to draw attention to itself while pretending not to. Tonight it was a group of musical youths over from the Royal Albert Hall. They clumped carefully in and deposited some instruments in cases on the floor; the cases were roughly the shape of a bull’s bollocks. Surrounded by these, they proceeded to trendify over half pints in a very elaborate way, while looking round to see if anybody was listening. Nobody was except me, and they quickly realized that I was fascinated in the wrong way. Why do I dislike people like that so much? They pay their rates, play the cornet for a living, prove that they have no opinions by voting Liberal/Social Democratic Party, and never knowingly take a risk. They pipe and scrape away at Mozart with a horrible willingness and are lavishly feted in underdeveloped drawing-rooms.
I got in half an hour ago; Barbara still hasn’t returned. I’m having another drink though I don’t really want it. Staring up at the ceiling just now, where there’s a coastline of Western Europe formed out of damp—soon I didn’t see it at all. Instead I was back in France, lying in bed in my vaulted room over the terrace, watching one of the hornets that had flown in from its nest in the mountainside across the stream. It was three inches long and when you hit it with the back of your hand it was like hitting bright yellow, poisoned cardboard. They’re so bloody venomous … Christ, when I came to I was running about all over this squalid little London room in my shirttails, knocking things over.
She’s left a coat behind that she plainly doesn’t want, also six hard-rock cassettes that she brought back from one of the clubs. Anyway, now that she hasn’t been home for four days, I have put the coat away where I can’t see it, and have scrubbed the music off the cassettes because I can’t bear it to remind me of her, and am using them to talk on. When I’m too drunk to write I find it eases my pain if I can talk it out. What I suffer isn’t self-pity; it is my coming up against the absolute. The ordeal the writer sets himself is to track down existence and then, both stripped naked, fight it out. Everyone experiences this in the end, some-how or other. But often the contest is short and sharp—the last seconds of a motor crash, a fall from a roof, a heart attack, being rolled and beaten to death in a dark street.
He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) Page 18
