Inglorious

by Joanna Kavenna

  ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘I just don’t do things that way.’

  ‘Well, you have to. Otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. They’ll ignore you. The reason they treat you this way is because you never stand up for yourself. In this, you’re hopeless.’

  ‘Hopeless?’ He looked hurt.

  ‘Only in this. In this you are spineless. What would be so wrong about saying what you think?’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, what does that mean?’

  It was ironic, how ambitious she had been for him. She jostled at him; she hardly ever praised him. That was her fault. Those evenings when she picked at him, explained what he was doing wrong, standing on the pedestal of her so-called career, she had slowly forced him into action. Liam was tortoise-brained, he liked to move to the slowest available timescale, but eventually she made him resolute. Bedding Grace was a coup de théâtre. Perhaps it was an act of revenge. That evening, she recalled, they had passed some hours discussing his latest small failure. Rosa was steely and certain of herself. At the end of the beating he picked up the bill. It didn’t help to pity him. Still, the hours they had passed discussing his job! Tearing him apart, mostly. Why did she care so much? She had been too engaged with it all; she had been too frantic. Evening after evening they had debated their small lives, writ them large together. And though she saw her enthusiasm – her concern for these elements – as incomprehensible, quite inscrutable from her present state, it remained strange to her that it should be impossible to return to these evenings, that she would never sit again in a small Italian restaurant with Liam. At the time it had seemed ongoing, each evening part of a limitless series. Her relationship with Liam, because it had endured for so long, allowed her to develop an illusion that they – alone of everyone – might transcend the absolutes of space and time. Because they returned daily to the same point – the two of them, waking in bed together, in their familiar bedroom with the same sounds for each morning – it seemed as if this pattern would recur for ever, an eternal recurrence. Eventually she found this stifling, but for years it allowed her to evade reality, delude herself about the incessant passage of days. Because of this she had failed to notice many signs. In the last months they stopped eating out. It was all too pursed and formal. In public they were uneasy, suddenly aware of themselves, of the lies they were spinning.

  There were days when she wondered if she had been profligate. If she had been idle, and inert, sluggish in love and then in saving herself. Perhaps she should have fought for him, challenged Grace to a duel. And that wasn’t such a bad idea, she thought. She would have liked the chance to blast a shot at Grace. Pistols out. The foes, cold-blooded and unspeaking each took four steps. The clock of destiny chimed, and the poet, without a sound, dropped his pistol onto the earth. Better to be Lensky, or Pushkin, blasted and shot to shreds, than no one at all. She always liked the absolute insanity of the duel, the loss of a sense of proportion inherent to the ritual. Grace would have tried to talk her way out of it. Laconically, she would have said, ‘Essentially, Rosa you are succumbing to an atavistic – and unfeminine – urge for violence. Why? Why suppress centuries of progress, because you are feeling upset?’ – but Rosa would have her pistol cocked already.

  Sitting in the present, a cold wind swirling at the windows, Rosa wrote: tat tvam asi. In another we recognise our true being. She screwed up the piece of paper and held it in her hand. Bodhi, or something like, the pure beauty of the bed, the origin of the world. The love grotto! The enchantment of the heart, a moment of perfect suspension, above the clashing forces of desire and loathing, a moment of beauty. Love as a casting off of the bonds of the ego. Supplying an instant of perfection, ecstasy in beholding the object of this pure and selfless love! A condition remote from the sneering final stages of her relationship with Liam, it had to be acknowledged. Yet for a few years, Liam was your god. Now she heard the thrum of the rain. A sudden storm had begun. The sash windows rattled and she heard the softened sounds of tyres on the road. The clouds swirled. Later there might be thunder, she thought. Later there might be thunder, she wrote, and tore up the paper and threw the pieces into the toilet.

  She felt sick, but that was because she had drunk too much tea. It was clear she had to get away, out of her head. Out of the city which had a dark cloud hanging above it, apprehension, fear perhaps. She perceived that the flat was small and the house was whirling in space. We are all, thought Rosa, speeding through space, a velocity too wild to contemplate. Of course her surroundings were significant, but they changed so quickly. Time’s winged whatsit, flapping at her back. These feuds, wars, everything spinning in emptiness. And Rosa as her own fleeting vantage point. Changing all the time, even as she tried to think of herself as the still centre. Even Whitchurch was spinning, turning swift circles. She could move as slowly as she liked, and she couldn’t change a thing. The earth wobbles on its axis and turns through the days and wanders round the sun. Everything is speed and light, and will be until the galaxy becomes static and dark. The Vedas talked of a pattern of dreams. Brahma dreamt of a serpent on a river, and on the serpent’s back was a tree, and each leaf of the tree was a dreamer, dreaming their own dream. Every few thousand years Brahma would awake, and a flower would appear from his navel and drift downstream. Or something like that. Definitely a flower and a navel involved. She remembered a song her grandfather had sung her when she was a child. Row row row the boat gently down the stream, Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream. It was a neat little Heraclitan ditty, and he had sung it as a lullaby. Hardly consoling, she thought. Even worse, life is but a dream of a dream, said the Vedas, a dreamer dreaming of others dreaming, more perplexing still. Indra’s net. You were netted at birth, confined and quite entangled. She didn’t trust much, except experience, her own small sense of things. In this she called herself Jamesian, though really she knew little of William James. Any number of labels would fit this feeling, she was sure. And her experience, though she perceived it as her own, her unique perspective on the world, was most likely collective; it seemed unlikely she was privy to any secrets.

  Wiping her hands, she walked to the bathroom. Clean the bathroom! she thought. She ran the tap, and watched the water whirl into the plughole. She touched the plastic of the shower curtain and saw light sliding down it. The universe was riddled with impossible elements, she thought, absurd symmetries. It was curious to her that she was presented daily with irrefutable evidence, these traces of vastness, a galaxy of stars and lights spiralling into infinity, unknown space. Faced with the moon and the stars, now visible in the rising dusk, she was briefly aware of the absurdity of considering anything at all. Reality became a meaningless piece of fabric, tugged around this cluster of humans, as they waited on their fertile rock. And yet people lived with passion, conviction. Even though they saw the stars and accepted the passage of millions of years, antiquity stamped on the surface of the planet. They lived and died for manufactured causes. She understood almost nothing of the materials of her universe. She knew of gases and solar flares, of intense variations in the brightness of the sun. When she thought of the sun she thought in lists of words, of gamma rays and optical emissions. She understood that the sun was a collective term, that the light she saw derived from the photosphere, where gaseous layers became transparent. She dimly apprehended that the sun’s corona, alone, burned at a temperature greater than one million degrees Kelvin, she had once been told. That was the sort of fact she couldn’t process at all. They might as well tell her the earth was shaped like a dinner plate and floated on a pool of eternal water. She had her five senses, concerned as they were with basic survival, and her brain was busy with the functions of her body and something she had been taught to refer to as thought. Then she had this intimation of something else – a knowledge that if she only could – if she only could! – she would break away, break out of bondage, and stand free of it all, transcend it somehow, find the World Wil
l, sink into the Geist, whatever the hell it was that she was trying to unearth – and when she read Schopenhauer she thought it was that, but she was impressionable and another book would cast her thoughts in a different light, shade them in differently. She had all of this to struggle with, and instead she thought about Grace and Liam! It was a travesty, when she could be trying to understand the sun.

  She splashed water on her face. She wore her last suit and forced her hair to settle. Because her shoes were grey and weathered she borrowed a clean pair from Jess’s cupboard and forced them on. When she was dressed and ready, she took a Hoover to the living room carpet. It was goodwill cleaning, an attempt to make things up to Jess. She marshalled objects in the kitchen and hoped that made a difference. She ran a cloth round the kettle. She aimed the showerhead at the bathroom and left it like a banya. Then she took all her papers and her pen and her coat and thrust them into her bedroom. Pausing only to take an apple from the kitchen, she ran out of the flat and vaulted down the steps.

  TRIALS

  Now she was brisk and urgent. It was important not to be late, or she would lose this job, like all the others. Then Mr Sharkbreath would be angry, and her father would sound disappointed again. These were immediate concerns; the rest was indeterminate. Umbrella in hand, she walked back to the station, passing along the queue of cars. IT’S NOT ENOUGH said a billboard. TEARS ARE GOING TO FALL said the next. TEMP TEMP TEMP TEMP said the writing on the red steel of the bridge. She nodded and walked on. The air was damp. It had been raining earlier, and there were puddles where the roads dipped to meet the pavements. She heard fragmented conversations, and the dulled sound of music inside cars. She breathed deeply. She could walk all day, except it made her hungry. She passed a bank of adverts by the tube. Bras, beer and butter. We are meant to be cheerful. She nodded and walked on. A man was leaning against a wall, whistling. He was a tall African, his arms folded across his chest. He ignored Rosa as she passed. A gang of kids cycled past, a few of them spitting into the gutter. ‘Fucking slag!’ one of them yelled and Rosa thought, Do they mean me? There was a poster outside the tube, a decorative frau, legs hairless and shining. Now she carried on walking, avoiding a glittering puddle like a stranded mirror and stepping round a woman with a child strapped to her body. Everything was fine when Rosa walked. She made a steady progress along the road, threading a path from streetlight to streetlight.

  Despite her sense that she was quite out of synch, she was still acutely aware of the things around her. The people filing along, forming impromptu patterns then dispersing. A man in a black leather coat who was dragging a white dog along on a lead. A woman in a burkha. Then a woman walked past, pushing a pram. She was wearing knee boots and a fur coat. Further along a man was sitting outside a second-hand clothes shop, whistling a tune. He was dressed in a smart red suit. In his gloved hands he held a cane. He had a carnation pinned to his lapel and Rosa thought of him standing in front of the mirror, fixing it there with trembling hands. All to sit on a folding chair outside his shop! It was raining softly now. But the man stayed there, stroking his cane. His eyes were turned towards the street, and she wondered what he saw. The cars slipped by. The lights changed and changed again. There was the flower shop, bouquets stacked in buckets. It always lifted her mood when she saw their forms and colours.

  Suddenly the clouds moved and there was a cold bright sun shining on the street. The dog-touting man moved slowly behind her. She could hear the lead jangling. The dog was straining towards a tree. A woman was running towards her, in shorts and trainers. On a pedestrian crossing a man moved slowly. Music was coming from an open window, a radio playing a contemporary tune, something with guitars and a kid singing falsetto. At the gym she saw people sitting outside, drinking coffee. It had once been a hospital, or a lunatic asylum, she thought. She wasn’t sure which. Inside she could see people running on treadmills. There was a sign saying ‘HazChem’ on the wall.

  Now she passed an ancient woman who looked like a sage, quite decayed and withered, moving slowly on her stumpy legs. Propelled by something, some inexplicable urge to go forward. Meanwhile Rosa was solid and vital, not exactly youthful but passably fit, walking towards Holland Park. The old woman was moving along, trembling with each movement, and if she was still standing then Rosa had no excuse. If she had thus far failed to release her cognition from the services of the Will, and the rest, then she really had to try harder. If there were mornings when the street appeared as an endless tunnel, drawing her into a pool of darkness, that was clearly her own small problem. On St Mark’s Road, things were mostly seedy: a group of boys yelling and kicking skateboards off the pavements, laughing as they tripped, cars speeding through the narrow streets, crumbled bricks ornamented by graffiti. DEATH TO YOU ALL. FIGHT THE STATE. Slogans, the occasional cri de coeur, scrawled machismo. FUCK YOU ALL. Maxims: WE CAN DO IT IF WE TRY. Pleas: DON’T LET THE LIGHTS GO OUT. Do not go gentle into that good night. She turned away and went into a corner shop to buy some chocolate. The shop was full of faded adverts for long-vanished brands. She took the chocolate from a grinning man, and fled onto the street. She saw a man in a suit walking swiftly up the hill, so she followed him along for a while, watching the regular movements of his limbs. She stalked along behind him, matching his stride. He had soft blond hair, which curled onto his collar. She couldn’t see his face, until he turned to pull his phone from his pocket. On the corner of Clarendon Road, he stopped and said a few words to someone. She craned her neck greedily towards him, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then he sped up, and waved his arm for a taxi. With a slam of the door, he disappeared.

  *

  Still you must get a job. Find somewhere to live. Talk to Jess – perhaps you can beg her! Talk to Liam. Beg the bank. Collate your papers. Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities. Read The Golden Bough, the Nag-Hammadi Gospels, the Upanishads, the Koran, the Bible, the Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge. Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest. Get to the bottom of this TEMP. She ducked into Holland Park tube and stayed quiet and thoughtful on the platform. She heard voices from the tannoy, injunctions, exhortations. Do not travel without a ticket. Buy a Season Saver. Do not stand at the edge. Do not hurl yourself on the tracks. Do not take the tunnels as a metaphor. Do not despise your fellow commuter. We are all human, only human. Each separate thing, regarded in and for itself, dissociated from the temporal flow of casual laws becomes, when so regarded, an epiphany of the whole, equivalent to the entire unending manifold of time. Mind the doors. There was a busker playing Bach on a flute, the music cracked and beautiful. The platform was grey and stain-daubed. The walls were spotted with mould. Above she saw lines of neon lights, and everywhere she was surrounded by useful objects, fire alarms, signs telling her the way out, should the platform burst into flames. You cannot take the tunnel as a metaphor. Because there are no fire alarms and hammers encased in glass to help you through your own private tunnel, this metaphysical corridor you think you’re in. Not a single miniature mallet to smash a way out. Not a single mallet! Now a train rocked along, scattering the mice and rats to their tubeside hideouts and Rosa positioned herself by a man with a T-shirt saying ‘THE REAL THING’ and read a poem on the wall (poetry on the Underground), which said ‘I am trapped in time/ Living without a purpose/ Waiting for the end’ – Of course not! As if they would put that sort of rubbish on the walls, thought Rosa. That would certainly demoralise commuters, as they stood crushed together, sweating onto each other. Instead, the poem said, ‘We are feverish and then we fly/ All is gracious in the sky/ Like angels blazing higher and higher/ Into a celestial fire/ Oh God – my God, your Allah, your Buddha – you understand our prayers/ They are for peace and for celestial stairs/ To reach the place beyond all cares.’ Beyond all cares. It sounded like the perfect destination. Caring was pre
cisely the problem. She shivered and stared round at the passengers. All of them innocuous enough. Beyond all cares, she thought. She wanted to imagine her mother in a transcendent state, lyre in hand, or somewhere, in some sentient shape, but instead she thought of her mother as scattered dust, wafted across the Mendips on a windy day, having been shaken from an urn by her daughter – tightlipped, quite unaccepting – and her husband – shuddering with horror and in tears. It wasn’t too bad, to be scattered dust in the wind. That really wasn’t so terrible at all. Better than a lot of options, the circles of hell, eternal torment, reincarnation at the bottom of the wheel and the rest. Feel Your Inner Purity said an advert for Japanese beer.

  As the train went through the tunnel Rosa saw the headline on a paper. MODEL, 17, FOUND MURDERED. The platform vanished and she saw blackness and her own reflection, mingled. A poster above her head saying ‘Millions are happy with our insurance!’ Another said ‘Simply inspired’. The heating was on too high in the carriage, and Rosa’s hands were sweating. If the train stopped she would be late, but the train kept running steadily along the tracks. For this she gave thanks to the driver and all the functionaries of the Underground. At Shepherd’s Bush she saw the platform sliding towards her as the train uncoiled itself from a tight corner and came to a sudden halt. The platform had been ornamented with green and red pillars. In the tunnel she heard three men talking about football, and she passed a crowd of women in burkhas holding bags from Harrods. A sign said MILLIONS. They kept on with the bombardment, until you capitulated. They wanted you with your hands up, saying ‘Yes, yes, I’ll buy it! Whatever it is!’ As she stood on the escalator going upwards she saw the face of a celebrity, she couldn’t remember her name. If You Can Imagine It You Can Achieve It said a poster for a motivational agency. But that was clearly untrue, thought Rosa. It was precisely the problem; there was much she could imagine but couldn’t achieve. Dream the dream the dream the dream …