“… the crucial question, the relationship of the novelist to his characters. Does the novelist approve of his characters? Does he admire them? Does he hate them? Is he indifferent to them? In the latter case of course he won’t be a good novelist. Is he unfair to them? (Was Shakespeare unfair to Shylock?) What does go on in the process of creation? We know that novelists and scientists are very like each other when they make their great discoveries. And there are questions of identity. A novelist may choose irony as a weapon. A novelist may be autobiographical. Where do the novelist’s characters come from? One must argue that they come from experience or from his reading or from a combination of both.”
At that moment quite by chance Tom saw her. For some reason she turned round and there she was sitting about six rows in front of him, the girl he had met in the Art Gallery. And at that moment he knew that Dixon was predestined to be saved. He knew it by pure intuition. It was coincidence in real life. If Crawford hadn’t come to see him, if they hadn’t been at school together, if he himself hadn’t decided to come and listen to the talk, then he wouldn’t have seen her. It was fated. Crawford himself had a hand in the novel, he had a part to play. She hadn’t even seen him or if she had seen him she hadn’t recognised him, but she was his prey. She had become print in front of his eyes, sentences, paragraphs. This time he wouldn’t let her go. He waited impatiently for Crawford to finish.
“… predestined or spontaneous, that is the real question. Isn’t it? That is to say, does the novelist exert complete control over his characters so that he may be considered a Calvinist, or does he give them freedom of the will such that he is a generous God? That is the question. If we had the time we might go more deeply into this question, applying it to various novelists. I myself would put Dickens in the latter class. And perhaps Hawthorne into the former class. However I have merely been propounding theories. I hope that you will yourselves speculate on what I have said.”
He sat down to applause and the man with the grey moustache stood up and asked for questions. There was a long silence interrupted at last by a woman who stood up with a notebook in her hand.
“I should like to ask Mr Crawford,” she said, “what he thinks of permissiveness in the modern novel.”
Tom looked at her in amazement. Where had she been for the past hour? There had been poor Crawford disquisiting, or whatever the word was, on philosophical aspects of the novel in his random way and this was all she could ask. For a moment he felt sympathy for Crawford as he stood up and began to improvise an answer using the time-honoured opening words, “It depends what you mean by ‘modern novel’. If you mean Kafka …” Christ, thought Tom, doesn’t he know that she doesn’t mean Kafka? That she’s never heard of Kafka? What’s the use? What’s the use of it all?
When Crawford had sat down another man got up and said, “That may be very well but we all know—” he turned round and looked at the people behind him in the manner of the practised orator—”we all know, that is all of us who have the well-being of the young at heart, that our bookstalls are loaded with filth. Only the other day a parent came up to me and said, ‘Do you realise that that play you have given my child has words in it and expressions that are obscene?’ And what could I say to her? The fact is that modern art and writing are full of filth and there is no use disguising it by talking about Kafka. How many people read Kafka? We have to be practical.”
And so it went on, while more and more inexorably Crawford’s defences were bludgeoned from angles which he had not expected. Perhaps he was longing for irony to defend himself with but how much irony is there around on a Sunday afternoon? The final question was: “Should we read novels with children in the class or should they take them home?”
Mercifully, the chairman looked at his watch like a harassed referee in extra time and said that there would be coffee and they were all very glad that Mr Crawford had taken the trouble to come along and give them that most interesting talk. Next week it would be Mr Tweet, talking about the “Theme of Childhood in British Literature”.
Five or six women appeared with trays and the company broke up in groups and drank coffee.
Tom made his way to the girl. All around him he could hear the chatter of people released from boredom and dutiful listening. He stood for a moment and heard a woman say, “And Theresa of course who is a very advanced child said, ‘But you must admit that Yeats is very boring really’ and what could I say?” There was a burst of laughter. Then he saw her.
She was standing by herself with a cup of coffee in her hand. She looked exactly as she had done in the museum, self-absorbed and distant as if she were not wholly and physically in the space where she appeared to be. She wore exactly the same coat. There was a thoughtful sweetness about her which he found arresting.
“Hullo there,” he said. “Remember me?”
She glanced at him in a startled way and he thought for a moment that the cup she was holding in her hand would spill.
“I’m afraid I …”
“The museum …” he said. “I met you there on …”
Recognition flooded her face. “Oh, of course.” And then her face darkened again.
“And what are you doing here?” he asked.
“Oh, I was brought along by Mary. She stays in the same flat. She seems to have disappeared.”
“Come on,” he said masterfully. “This is a bore. Let’s go out and get some tea somewhere.”
“But,” she said, “I’m already drinking tea.”
“Put it away. Don’t tell me that you find this interesting.”
“But Mary … I must …”
“Well, tell her then.” That was it, he must be masterful.
He saw her studying him wonderingly. After all he didn’t look very presentable. On the other hand it might be an adventure. And certainly he had come to a talk on The Novel so he couldn’t be all that barbaric, he couldn’t be a ned, he would surely be safe to be with …
“All right,” she said. He saw her talking briefly to a person whom he assumed to be her flatmate Mary and then they walked out together. He found a restaurant and they sat in a corner on the black leather seats. He ordered two coffees.
7
It was quite by chance that Dixon met her again, he wrote that night. One day he left his flat, overwhelmed by tedium, and sat down on a bench in a park. It was a Sunday afternoon and there were a number of people walking up and down, some in shirt sleeves and some not. He started to think about painting and wished again that he were a painter. For a painter everything was simple and almost naive. Reality was out there in front of him. Reality didn’t have a grammatical language, soiled by moral connotations. Oranges didn’t speak: neither did apples. He thought of a mot: “When an apple opens its mouth that is the danger for a poet.” He was quite pleased with this and turned it over and over in his mind, like an opal. In fact he had often seen opals; he had bought his wife one once.
The shadows of the trees composed themselves on the lawn in front of him. Two little boys were turning cartwheels watched by a simmering park-keeper. He looked up at the tree in whose shadow he was sitting. The leaves, he noticed, were turning yellow and between them he could see a bird flying, below some white clouds. He didn’t know anything about birds though he wanted to name it. So he lowered his gaze after a while to the slate-coloured fat pigeons in front of him. And it was then that he saw her walking past. He was sure it was she though she wasn’t wearing the same coat.
He stood up suddenly and said, removing his hat, “Haven’t we met before? In the museum?” He laughed slightly ironically as if he were telling a joke against himself. She stopped, blushed and said, “I … of course …”
“It was last week,” he said, “and you were regarding a stone. Would you care to sit down for a minute?”
She hesitated and then sat down. There was a silence for a moment and then he said, looking keenly at her and with great significance, “My name is Dixon. Drew Dixon.” There was no sign of rec
ognition on her face. He felt very disappointed but told himself, “I am sure she doesn’t read novels.” But it would have made things much easier if she had known his name.
“I’m Sheila,” she said. “Sheila Britten.”
“Aren’t the pigeons lovely,” he said. “So calm and peaceful. And their colours. I like their colours so much.”
“They are very pretty.”
“Do you come here often?” he said. “I don’t know this park very well. I lived in a different part of the city.”
“Quite often,” she said. He noticed that she had very blue eyes, dark blue. She seemed very reposeful. She had the gift of sitting still, a very rare one.
“We seem destined to be running into each other,” he said. “That’s twice in a week.” He listened to the phrases thinking that they sounded banal. The characters in his novels certainly didn’t talk like that; he made them talk in a highly stylised manner. He recognised that his own phrases were uninteresting: he didn’t know her well enough to be ironical. Anyway she was too open.
“Do you believe in predestination?” he asked, watching the park-keeper bearing down on the two boys who ran away.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it. I don’t study horoscopes. My flatemate Mary does, though.”
“It is very warm,” he said, “isn’t it? I was sitting here reading a book by Hesse. Have you read him?”
“No, I’m afraid not. I’m a school teacher. I haven’t much time for reading.”
“Oh, you teach? Young children?”
“Yes, the young children. I am a primary school teacher. I have been teaching for seven years.”
For some reason she felt wholly at ease with him. Perhaps because he had a civilised look about him. He wore a nice white hat and he carried a cane. There was a certain air of the dandy about him but he didn’t look foolish, he looked composed. He spoke in a very relaxed manner. She relaxed. The trees overarching the bench gave shelter from the sun—she didn’t like being too much in the hot sun, being too barely exposed—and she listened to the little children happily shouting and playing. She almost closed her eyes.
“What’s over there?” her companion asked suddenly.
“Oh, that’s the conservatory. They have plants there. It’s very hot.”
“Should you like to go and have a look at it?”
“Well …” On the other hand, why not? He seemed a pleasant enough man. “All right,” she said rising to her feet. Though she was twenty-seven she had a slim figure and she looked girlish. She knew this.
They walked across the park and entered the hothouse. The heat was intense. A foreign couple dressed in large Mexican-type hats were coming out as they entered. The man waved his hands helplessly as if about to say something but perhaps he thought his English wasn’t good enough. He was carrying his jacket in his hand; over his shirt he wore red braces. They walked forward into the blasting heat among the Mexican shrubs in tortured poses, cacti and other plants whose names she couldn’t pronounce. It was like being in a desert, in a place deprived of water and greenery; she thought that the desert didn’t suit him. He looked too European for that strange nightmarish place.
When they came out he said, “Would you like an ice cream?”
Together they walked out between the wrought iron gates and entered a café.
They sat in a dark corner away from the heat of the sun and ordered ice creams. Her white dress shone in the half darkness as did his white hat. He felt daring. He couldn’t remember when he had been last in a café. He would have preferred to take her to a hotel but hotels weren’t open at that time. Later he might suggest it.
He cast a novelist’s eye over the café. In the corner opposite there was a juke box composed of blocks of vulgar colour. He tried to find an exact parallel for it but gave up after a while. He turned back to the girl who was calmly eating ice cream. He thought, I feel almost happy, almost at peace. She is so reposeful. For a moment as she bent over her small, circular plate she reminded him of a painting by Vermeer, cool and mathematical. He wondered whether they were in the habit of washing their plates properly as he began to eat his ice cream.
8
IT TURNED OUT that she was a primary school teacher. As he talked to her he wondered whether she would be suited to Dixon. She didn’t know much about literature but she talked quite freely about the children she taught with an endearing freshness as if they were important to her. She would sometimes get letters and cards from them with drawings on them. Once there was a very long silence which neither of them could fill. It wasn’t that they bored each other, it was that the two of them had come to a sudden stop as if there was nothing in common that they could talk about. And then she said, “What do you do then?” He told her about his attempts to write, about his poems, about the jobs he had had. He didn’t tell her about the novel. She wondered whether there was any money in what he was doing. She didn’t seem particularly interested in money but it is the sort of question one asks when one has nothing particular to say. For some reason he got angry and started a long harangue about a materialistic society, gesticulating freely and at one time nearly toppling her coffee cup. When he was finished she looked at him in an amused manner and said that it wasn’t really as important as all that. Happiness was what was important. He looked at her in amazement: the sentiment seemed so simple and almost naive, so lacking in contemporary sophistication, so untwisted, that he found it almost silly. But she believed in what she was saying. He found himself thinking of an oasis where water glittered while around it grew the shrivelled twisted shapes of trees.
He asked her what she had thought of the lecture and she said that she had not really been interested; it wasn’t her field. It was her flatmate who had wanted to come. Her flatmate wasn’t really terribly interested either but she taught in a large secondary school and she thought she ought to know something about literature. As a matter of fact her flatmate—Mary—didn’t read much either and spent a lot of her time listening to records. She herself didn’t read much except books which she used for projects. She did a lot of that; that was what primary teaching was now about, projects. She said that the children did most of the learning themselves.
She was not at all beautiful nor even conventionally pretty. She had darkish blue eyes and a pale thinnish face and dark hair. He wasn’t really very taken by her. Her mind was more practical than his but he wasn’t illuminated by it. For that matter he wasn’t much illuminated by his own mind. Both her parents were dead and she was used to living with her flatmate. She had been in England for a while and at one time thought of taking a job in South America but she had decided against it. The headmaster of the school was nice, she said, a man of advanced ideas. The staff were nice too. She said at one stage that he looked thin and wondered if he took enough food. No, surely, he thought, Dixon won’t like her. She isn’t civilised enough, fragile enough. He was sure that he wouldn’t take to her at all. He wondered whether he had made a mistake. How could she be made suitable for Dixon?
But at the same time he didn’t want her to leave. He was happy to see her pouring out coffee for him, it created an aura of domesticity. He didn’t like coffee himself, much preferring tea. But he was wondering all the time: how could he make her suitable for Dixon? How could he change her? Would he leave her with the same style of clothes, the same style of dress? She pointed to a woman at the next table, and said, “She shouldn’t wear that hat, it doesn’t suit her, she should wear navy blue.” And he knew that she was quite right. But at the same time it puzzled him that she should be concerned with these quotidian things. He wasn’t used to them either from his father or his mother. She glanced at the menu and said she was sure that it was too expensive. He wondered what she thought of his long khaki coat but she didn’t make any comment on it. He was in fact puzzled by her. She seemed to know things that he didn’t know and yet he considered the things that she knew unimportant in a deep sense. For instance, she pointed to a table mat which
had a tartan motto on it and said that it was wrong. He hadn’t noticed that tartan motto at all. She ought to be the novelist, he considered, she was more observant than him, he wasn’t observant at all. But in point of fact he was sure that she hadn’t noticed the small angels on the ceiling, with their trumpets; he had noticed them immediately. One of them had a missing wing. Perhaps it had fallen into someone’s soup.
She had a small silver watch on her wrist at which she glanced now and again.
“Look,” he said at last, almost mumbling the words, “would you like to come to the cinema this week some time? I haven’t been for a long time and they are showing Shane again. Would you like to see it? On Thursday perhaps?” He had seen the film five times already and never tired of it. There was something about the fable of the mysterious stranger coming to the rescue of the honest and lame man which appealed to a very deep part of his nature.
“Well …” She stopped and looked at him, he thought with pity. Then after what seemed a long while she said, “All right.”
He was ridiculously happy. “It’s at the Regal,” he told her. “You know it? It’s on Regent Street.”
Goodbye, Mr Dixon Page 5
