Near the door, talking quietly to another neat little man, was John Stilwell.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You went by Dieppe Jane tells me, quicker than you thought hey?’
‘Yes it was.’
‘Thought so.’
I was half-way along the corridor, more or less pulled together again, when I heard light running footsteps behind me and felt a clutch at my elbow.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget, ever. He’ll remind you,’ and into my hands she thrust a knobbly brown paper package. She was gone as quick as a child who has just to touch base before running back to where she started: thin legs flying outwards and the lollop of her hips, like when she had run down to the Pari-Mutuel to put her money on the wrong horse. The curve of the hotel corridor had an airless finality. In my damp palm my fingers explored the unforgiving contours of the carved goblin.
‘What is that thing?’
‘Jane gave it me, as a souvenir I suppose.’
‘It’s repulsive isn’t it, but then souvenirs usually are. It looks quite studenty on that bookshelf though.’
It wasn’t clear why Helen had asked to come and see me, but as soon as she had climbed the stairs to my freezing attic in Back Buildings, it seemed obvious that there was no particular reason and didn’t need to be. She had a natural friendliness which somehow tended to be overlooked because of her upright motionless figurine of a body. Her open cheerful way of talking did not translate into her body language, so that she gave the impression that she might be thinking severer thoughts which she was reluctant to bring to the surface.
‘Do you know who I’ve got downstairs? My dad.’
‘Why didn’t he come up with you?’
‘He’s so silly. He said he’d just drive me down here because I’ve failed my driving test again and it would be a ghastly surprise for you dumping himself on you after he’d bored you stiff last time. So he’s sitting in the car reading Bertrand Russell.’
Mr Hardress was in the driver’s seat frowning at the book propped on the steering wheel as though it was an impenetrable manual of some kind, perhaps the owner’s handbook.
‘The conquest of happiness, my aunt fanny,’ he said, after only the briefest hallo. ‘Hasn’t a clue. He ought to stick to philosophy. That History of Western Philosophy is a marvellous book, I thought so anyway, you probably thought it a bit juvenile.’
‘Haven’t read it, I’m afraid.’
‘I expect it’s only people like me who bother with it. They think we aren’t up to the real thing, so they give us the kids’ version.’
‘That’s rubbish, Dad. What’s stopping you reading the real thing?’
‘Ignorance, my dear, sheer bloody ignorance.’
He gave us one of his grim smiles. There was a paler, more withered look to him or perhaps it was just that the sun was not shining as it had on Minnow Island. (‘Is your mother called Minnow too?’ I had asked Helen on the way back. ‘No, Minerva. Her father taught Latin, wasn’t at all keen on Dad, not the kind of son-in-law anyone would fancy really although he must have been good-looking.’) With the two of us in our raincoats peering in through the car window, Hardress must have looked to passers-by like someone being questioned by plain-clothes police.
‘All right then,’ Helen said to me, ‘you tell him what he ought to be reading, give him a reading list as though he was a mature student just starting.’
‘Oh I couldn’t,’ I said.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘you can think of them over lunch.’
In the dank pub by the canal we had flabby Cornish pasties and beer that tasted of the disinfectant the pub smelled of, and Hardress talked non-stop as though he had just returned from a long solitary journey and had a huge assortment of things he wanted to unburden himself of.
‘Full of anger my father was, poured off him like sweat. When I was growing up, I took him at face value, thought it was all anger about injustice, poverty and that, which it was, but it was just anger too, kicked the cat, kicked his bike (we didn’t have a car), kicked Her too, always called my mother Her when he was in a rage. I used to think that was the drink, she said it was, everything was blamed on the drink in those days, quite right too usually. I’ve inherited a lot of all that, but not the politics, not actively anyway, I’m more interested in the logic of action. Take Suez.’
‘Oh Dad.’
‘No I’m not going to say what you think, about it being a pathetic reversion to imperialist aggression, though it was. What I couldn’t understand was why, having started, they didn’t go through with it to the bitter end, or, to put it another way, why they ever thought they could get away with it. Trouble was they didn’t have the balls, you needed a real pirate like Churchill to pull off a stunt like that. Well what have you got for me, sir?’ He took the scrap of paper on which I’d written down while he was talking the only books I remembered being told to read.
‘The Concept of Mind G. Ryle, Sense and Sensibilia, J.L. Austin, The Truffles in the Wood, W.R. Scrannel, well, that’ll do to be going on with. Are you sure about the Truffles one, doesn’t sound like philosophy to me.’
‘Afraid I haven’t read any of them myself yet.’
‘I’ll send in my exam paper before the end of term.’
‘I expect they’re terribly dry. Everyone complains about how sterile philosophy is at the moment.’
‘Do they now?’
He was not at all put off by the prospect, excited if anything. And before the month was out I got a letter in exquisite handwriting, neat and clear, not taught like my coarse italic, but the outcome of a natural dexterity.
Thank you for recommending those three books. They are just what I hoped they would be, especially the dryness of them. I think it is right that philosophy should try and clear away the language muddles and category mistakes (see I’m picking up the lingo already) so it can’t help being a bit dry. It isn’t for philosophers to tell us how to live or what to believe. That is for us, otherwise what the fuck is the point of it all? I especially liked the Scrannel book. As you will recall, if you have read it by now, the point is that bad philosophers spend their whole lives in the pursuit of certainty which in most cases isn’t something that you should be looking for (exceptfor mathematics etc). All you have a right to expect is varying degrees of probability according to what field you are in, but most of the time there are no truffles in that particular wood, and you’re wasting your time looking for them. (Funny isn’t it about truffles being a delicacy. I had them once in France and they were like rubbery licorice only without the taste. Must be because they are so hard to find.) Anyway, how dreary life would be if bit by bit you could ink in the certainties until there was no terra incognita left on the map. Uncertainty is the only refreshing thing, and so I found your books very refreshing and not dry at all It was a pleasure to come and see you with Hel. My wife says I hang around her too much but she’s got a mind of her own and she doesn’t mind telling me to piss off when she wants.
On the subject of uncertainty, I’ve certainly got a basinful of that with this new freelance lark. It’s quite something being your own boss. You begin to realise what a soft option it is being a wage-slave. Well, we mustn’t weaken.
Yours sincerely Martin H.
PS Would you like to come with Hel to the Asses Night Out (=Association of Sound Engineers Annual Ball). We’ve got four tickets and somebody’s got to share the agony.
It was surprising from what little I knew of him that he should even think of going to a ball. I imagined him dressed in old jeans, refusing to eat the haute cuisine, perhaps even bringing his own sandwiches. But there he was, waiting for me as I got out of the taxi, a bright showy little figure in a dinner jacket, his hair now cut short, almost down to bristles, which made him look like an actor in training for some demanding part that required spiritual concentration and a lot of interviews.
‘There you are then. Welcome to the evening of a lifetime.’
Behind him, there was Min i
n a mauve dress which was billowy but at the same time gave her a vulnerable look as though she had been surprised with no clothes on and had wrapped herself in the nearest curtain.
‘Evening, Ted. Lionel, how come they let you in? Boris, I don’t believe it. Min, have you met Boris the Beast of Borehamwood?’ He bobbed from side to side on the shallow steps of the Ballroom entrance, acting like a frantic greeter. His colleagues responded to him cordially enough but with a hint of surprise, perhaps even caution as though there might be some catch in it.
‘Don’t see much of the lads these days. No great loss I suppose, bunch of cowboys really.’
He led us into the huge ballroom. There must have been a hundred tables, a thousand people milling about in search of their places. On the floodlit platform at the end, two men in grey uniform were fiddling with the microphone that sprouted out of a spangled lectern with a scarlet-and-gold coat of arms on it. In the smoky half-light, it seemed about half a mile away.
‘Just like a bloody Nuremberg rally, except that the sound always goes wrong. I think they do it on purpose just because we’re who we are.’
A toastmaster in a scarlet tailcoat told us to be upstanding for the grace and a man in a dinner jacket with a purple vest intoned in a dolorous chant: For all thy great gifts O Lord we give thanks, for the gift of speech and music and the power to transmit those precious sounds across thy globe, and we ask thy blessing on the broadcasting industry and all who labour in it, and especially on these thy servants gathered here tonight, and for what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.
‘Stupid prat, who let him in? They’re 95 per cent atheists in this room and the other 5 per cent are off their trolleys.’
‘There’s always a grace, dear.’
He still sounded jovial enough, but something about the set of his lips suggested that his fragile calm was beginning to fray. A waiter bent across him and began distributing bread rolls with a pair of flimsy tongs. Martin Hardress caught his arm and pinned it down on the table.
‘If,’ he said, ‘if I’d wanted a clip round the earhole from your little tongs, I would have asked you first, wouldn’t I?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But I didn’t, did I?’
‘No, sir.’
‘So I think you can take it for granted that I didn’t want a clip round the earhole and that your little tongs are surplus to requirements.’ Keeping the waiter’s arm pinned to the table with one hand, with the other he removed the tongs from the waiter and carefully bent them double, then handed them back. ‘Now, would you hand round the bread properly?’
‘Oh Dad.’
‘They’ve got to be told. Just because this is a cutprice do, they think they can treat you like dummies.’
The trembling waiter fled, dodging between the closely packed tables with the bread basket clasped to his bosom.
‘Now we haven’t got any bread,’ Helen said.
‘Oh don’t you worry, it will descend from heaven. I’ll just go and ask that bishop to organise it.’ He made as if to rise from his little gold chair, but when his wife pulled at his jacket he sat down quite meekly and permitted himself one of his grim smiles.
‘Will you stop it, Dad?’
‘Oh there’s nothing to stop. It all stopped dead years ago. This country’s just one huge full stop. Look at Bryan there, BBC Assistant Director Engineering in brackets, don’t forget the brackets because in brackets is where he belongs.’
‘Dear, it was really nice of Bryan to send us the tickets. They did their training together, you see.’
‘Martin, great to see you, and Min, you’re looking gorgeous. So glad you could come.’ Close up Bryan was larger. He had fulvous tufts of hair in his ears and a nice rueful smile.
‘Thank you very much for the tickets,’ Min said. ‘It’s a lovely occasion, it really is.’
‘Well, what are friends for? Alas, duty calls. I must look after our guest of honour and between you and me he takes some looking after. See you later and we’ll have a proper natter.’
As the Assistant Director passed on, leading the celebrity to the top table in a cloud of assorted aftershaves, Martin raised his eyebrows.
‘Well that’s what success does to you. He used to be all right, old Bryan. But that was years ago.’
‘When we lived in Petersham, they used to come for picnics. That was when he was still married to Thelma.’
‘Ditched her, then ditched the next one. She’s got a health food shop in Chobham now.’
He relapsed into a gloomy silence and ate with a slow, suspicious chomping as if engaged in the task professionally.
‘We’re selling Minnow Island, you know, if we can find a buyer. Looking for a flat, something smaller, nearer to Martin’s work.’
He scowled at Min. It was not clear whether he wanted this news kept dark or he wanted to release it himself. Yet his good humour seemed to be returning. Without any encouragement, he began talking, with that light fluency that seemed to come to him now and then like a patch of sun moving across a lawn that was in shadow most of the day.
‘I’ve been thinking again about uncertainty and that Scrannel fellow. Of course it’s all very right and proper that you shouldn’t look for certainty where you’ve no reason to find it. That’s absolutely right, and as soon as you’ve grasped this a whole lot of nonsense just melts away and you understand just how many millions of people have wasted their lives looking for something that isn’t there and that if they stopped to think honestly for a moment they’d know wasn’t there. But then of course you can’t stop. Once you’ve started breaking down the old certainties or at any rate the old pursuit of certainties, what’s left?’
Preceded by only a faint crackle on the mike, a Yorkshire voice broke into our seminar, one of those gravy-rich voices which now and then rumbles off into the noise of a load of gravel being tipped out into the road. The celebrity was off.
You would not have thought him a comedian, he was tall and muscley, looked as though he had just jumped off a tractor. His manner was loud and distracted at the same time. His act was a man being heckled by his wife from the next room or upstairs: the man’s voice a weak, tremulous alto, the wife a rich, confident baritone. Have you got your sandwiches, the wife said. No, no, I don’t want any sandwiches. They’re cheese and pickle. I don’t like cheese and pickle, the pickle gives me wind. No it doesn’t, don’t blame the pickle, it’s in the blood. Your mother was just the same, give her a pickled onion and she was a one-woman hurricane, Hurricane Gladys, she caused a lot of damage in Florida, did Gladys. My mother was a good woman, loved all God’s creatures. She were a right little St Francis, that woman, preferred the budgie to her own flesh and blood, hush, she’d say, listen to Winston, he knows, you know. Should have called it Goebbels, that bird . . .
Martin Hardress shut his eyes, put his hands behind his head and leaned back as blissful as someone taking the sun in a deckchair. The grim lines returned when the celebrity started handing out the awards. There was a special award to Bryan for distinguished service to the broadcasting industry.
‘If that means he’s screwed every trainee producer he’s crewed with, he really deserves it, it’s that hangdog look that pulls them,’ Hardress said in his dry distant voice which didn’t really seem to come from him, not least because his lips scarcely moved, so that I felt like looking round the table to see who the ventriloquist was. He seemed to occupy his body only at intervals, when he felt like it. But if he was keen on the subject, as when he talked about philosophy, he seemed to be all there, trembling with life.
By now we were quite drunk, like the other thousand people in the ballroom, who were beginning to glisten and paw each other. A band began to play theme tunes from radio shows – ‘Music While You Work’, ‘The Archers’, ‘Down Your Way’ – and then there were foxtrots and quicksteps and sambas and cha cha chas and even a veleta. And although the steps of the veleta were beyond us, there was a tipsy stateliness ab
out the other couples that carried us along. Helen clasped my waist with fierce little fingers and looked mock-stern. There was not the tiniest spark of desire between us but we were both in love with the cosy intimations of our childhoods that came with each new number. Glenn Miller now – ‘Little Brown Jug’, ‘In the Mood’ – then a salute to Irving Berlin: ‘Cheek to Cheek’, ‘I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me’, ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’.
When we got back to the table, Martin Hardress seemed to have taken against something his wife had said. She was twisting her hands together as though trying to dry some small article hidden in them. Quite without warning, he stood up placing himself so close to my chair that I couldn’t sit down.
‘There’s something you should know,’ he said, ‘And I think we ought to get it quite clear. You’ve got to look after my girl. Properly I mean. If you let her down, if you treat her like Bryan would, I’ll kill you. That’s straight, it’s not meant as a joke.’
‘But we aren’t, I mean, I haven’t any –’
‘You can say anything you want tonight because we’re all pissed, but don’t forget what I’m saying to you, don’t think I’m not serious. You can’t just waltz away from this one. This isn’t a joke.’
‘I didn’t think it was.’
‘Martin, please.’
‘So that’s understood then.’
He sat down and looked immensely sad. His wife came and sat next to him and took his hand. Helen and I spoke in an undertone, scarcely able to hear one another, as though we were alone with her parents in a small room and didn’t want to disturb their concentration. We pretended to argue about the name of the last tune and how you spelled veleta, and then, more quietly still, about how soon we could go home.
Three or four days later Helen rang.
‘I don’t know why I’m ringing you because we don’t really know each other that well, but he’s gone and we’re desperate and we can’t think what to do or who to talk to.’
‘Gone? Your father?’ I didn’t really need to ask, but I did for form’s sake.
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