A Weekend with Claude

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Julia put a bandage over the mark, on top of her stocking. Shebah grimaced throughout and groaned and bit her drooping lip and cast comical glances at us all. We put her on the wrought-iron bench just outside the back door on the paving stones, under the wistaria, with a stool to prop up her injured leg, and a travelling rug wrapped round her: she looked like a passenger on a veteran car rally. I kissed her cheek and felt that after the china breakages she probably felt better for being shot at, less under an obligation to Claude. She ate a big lunch and Claude for his part seemed to present her with the tastier bits off the ham. It will give her something to remember, something concrete, personal, to add to her list of Jewish persecution.

  Meanwhile we lie here waiting to go to the bus stop to make the return journey. I could find it in my heart to wish there was no return. As Victorian Norman says, the mind boggles. Claude is going to take a photograph of us before we go. I like photos of me and people I know. I’m a lucky girl to be surrounded by friends.

  3

  ‘She looks an interesting sort of girl,’ said the man.

  Claude didn’t reply. He stared out into the yard, at the small garden beyond the barn where Lily and the others had posed for the photograph. ‘Hurry, Claude,’ she’d said, ‘we don’t want to miss that bus.’ Shebah, surprisingly, hadn’t minded the camera – had minded it less, in fact, than the isolated Edward, who had deliberately chosen to ignore Lily’s hand reaching to hold his. Apart from the proximity of their fingers there was nothing to show that she had tried to reach him.

  ‘Lily’s always in some sort of trouble,’ said Julia, ‘but she has amazing resilience.’ She stacked the empty cups on the draining board and put away the sugar and the biscuits. ‘I have the greatest admiration for her,’ she added, not quite sincerely.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ The man had forgotten for the moment that he wanted to leave.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit difficult really to explain,’ said Julia. ‘She had several unhappy love affairs. Then she met a man called Billie and got pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, that sort of trouble,’ the man said, and saw that his wife was looking at him.

  ‘Is Billie in the photograph?’ she asked.

  ‘No, he went away before he knew Lily was pregnant. He went away once before to Australia, but he came back again. Then she met someone else who wanted to marry her.’

  ‘How convenient.’ For some reason the woman sounded angry. ‘So she’s all right,’ she added, listening to the bitterness in her own voice.

  ‘Lily will never be all right,’ said Claude.

  ‘Do you really know that?’ said Julia. ‘Or do you mean it’s inevitable?’

  The woman was surprised at that particular question. She supposed that people living together must influence each other, though she herself didn’t feel influenced in the slightest by her husband. But then they never talked about anything complicated. But that wasn’t right. Nobody at this moment was discussing anything complicated. She frowned and said, ‘I do think there’s a lot of immorality these days,’ and floundered, regretting something. ‘I mean, an awful lot of people just put up with things. They don’t give in.’ She saw that her husband was staring at her, as if she had betrayed him, as if she had meant that they were merely putting up with each other.

  ‘There aren’t any people who put up with things,’ said Claude. ‘There are only people who have neither the opportunity nor the need.’ When he turned round from the sink he was smiling. ‘If you’ve never been in the position of either Lily or myself,’ he went on, ‘you can hardly know whether giving in applies.’

  ‘You must admit,’ said the man, feeling liberated by the sudden friendliness apparent in Claude, ‘that there’s an awful lot of letting go these days.’

  ‘There’s not enough,’ said Claude cheerfully, taking the photograph from Julia. ‘Mind you, we let go a bit that weekend, didn’t we, girl?’ He put an arm round Julia’s waist and she leaned against him.

  ‘It was a nice weekend,’ she said.

  She looked down at the snapshot into the face of Victorian Norman. ‘You might have shown it me before,’ she said mildly. ‘I didn’t even know you’d had it developed.’

  But Claude had gone out of the kitchen and was in the front room of the shop attempting to clear a place for the newly bought plates. It was a pity, he thought, that there wasn’t time to get to know everyone.

  He couldn’t find a space to put down his china, so he took it back into the kitchen and replaced it on the cleared table. The photograph was no longer there. Upstairs he could hear Julia talking to the man and the woman. He stood undecided at the sink and looked again into the garden, to where the group had lain in the grass. After a moment he went up the narrow stairs. The man was holding a gun in the crook of his arm.

  ‘I see you shoot, old chap,’ said the man.

  ‘Not really,’ Claude said. ‘At one time my eldest son and I had a target up in the garden, but I rarely bother now.’

  ‘Bit different from the weapons we had in the war, eh?’ observed the man.

  Claude didn’t answer. He held his hand out and took the gun and went to the window.

  ‘Oh, Claude, not now, darling,’ said Julia. ‘You’ll wake the baby.’

  ‘It’s all right, girl, it’s not loaded.’ Pushing wide the window, he pressed the gun to his shoulder and looked along the line of the barrel at a patch of grass, the rusted frame of a child’s tricycle and a statue without a head. He took aim and pulled the trigger, firing an imaginary pellet at the statue.

  ‘It’s quite well made,’ he told the man, straightening up and placing the gun on the piano top, carefully, so as not to dislodge any of the numerous ornaments. ‘It’s remarkably accurate for its type.’

  ‘But hardly capable of killing?’ asked the man, uneasily.

  ‘No,’ said Claude, and shut the window. He sat down on the sofa beside the woman. She was now wearing spectacles, studying the photograph.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, pointing at the figure on the left of the picture. Whoever he was, he seemed a little isolated from the others and his face was indistinct.

  ‘That was Edward,’ said Julia. ‘He was awfully nice. Quiet, but very nice.’

  ‘Awfully quiet and awfully nice,’ echoed Claude.

  ‘And who’s that?’ asked the woman. ‘That person on the bench?’

  ‘That’s Shebah,’ said Julia. ‘A friend of Lily’s. It’s a very typical pose. She won’t tell anyone how old she is and she’s devoted to Lily, though they fight all the time.’

  The woman looked at the girl who had been pregnant. She wasn’t very much to look at with that beaked nose and her untidy hair. She wondered how long and in what way Claude had known her and whether he had often sat with his arm about her shoulders. Had he met her perhaps when she’d come to the shop to buy something? Probably not. She didn’t look the kind of person who could afford to buy anything.

  ‘And that one’s Norman,’ said Julia. ‘Everyone calls him Victorian Norman because he wears round high collars, and Lily says he’s Victorian. I don’t know why really. He works in a factory and he once lived in a room above Lily. He’s self-educated. He doesn’t like to say how old he is either.’

  She bent her head and peered at the celluloid image of Victorian Norman. It was him – and yet it wasn’t him at all, she decided. He was dressed as he should be with the high collar framing his face, and his Chelsea boots were just visible in the grass, but in the end it was only a photograph and lifeless. She bent closer and imagined that his nostrils were flaring slightly, that he was about to laugh in that manner peculiar to him …

  4

  VICTORIAN NORMAN

  In a decent society we should all be pushed to the wall – if not shot, then at least put outside the confines of the city, to roam like wolves in the great wastes beyond the gates. I might be salvaged, were I to deny my friendship with them, having held a Union card for so long. Or equally I could turn informer.
Parasites, I could say, clinging leechlike to the firm skin of the State. Hardly Shebah, I suppose, with her determination not to recognise the Welfare State, but emotionally she is a parasite.

  Certain persons in the factory – my girl-friend’s father, for one – might not have much to say in my defence: ‘Courted my daughter for three years, and not a word in all that time to me. Working on the bench right next to the man, and not even a nod of the head. The wife gave him Sunday lunch every Wednesday night for three years, and still he never spoke. Got some flat in the city where he takes our Jean for weekends. Also, his hair is too long and his manner of dressing is odd. When somebody’s mother dies on the telly he usually laughs.’

  And of course there is my persistent record of refusal to do overtime. I could plead that there were factors outside my control which made it impossible to break with my undesirable friends. I would in the end survive. There might even be more opportunities open to me now, were I to return to conformity. To give expression to my affection for Lily I appear to be ‘one of them’. I have only gradually come to understand the difference between myself and these others. They have broken the tape of environment emotionally, whereas I have done it mentally. Which leaves me free to return to harbour whenever I choose. Lily left home very early, in a wild stampede of open revolt, splintering in the process the whole framework of her background, so that now she is sad to find that she has nothing to return to but ruins. I spent ten years preparing my family for my departure. At thirty I at last lifted the brass knocker of the house in Morpeth Street. When I entered and put my corporeal body fair and square into the dark interior of the now familiar hall, I shivered with delight. It was the shiver of the natural swimmer who until this moment had not known the exact location of the river. With Lily gone, nothing has altered – save that she has gone. When I think of her, which I do some part of every day, it is with seriousness. There have been so many words we have spoken to each other. In one day I almost see her a dozen times in the street. Sometimes it is the line of her jaw, sometimes a lank length of hair lying across the velvet collar of a coat. I am always surprised at what I feel when I actually come face to face with her. For one thing there are brown stains on her teeth from too much smoking, and for another I had forgotten how parched are her lips. Her whole mouth puckers with dryness. When she looks at me, which she did just a moment ago, not smiling but with intensity, I want to laugh. I can feel my mouth begin to tremble at the edges. She is trying to tell me that I alone understand, which I don’t, and even if I did, the effect is somewhat spoiled by my having watched her look just as intensely at almost everyone. She has indiscriminate intensity of manner. Also, I am disillusioned by her to an extent that I find remarkable, as I did not intend to have illusions. When in the beginning she called me her rock of ages, I did not suppose I would become a rock. When she constantly referred to my qualities of steadfastness and my integrity, I did not comprehend that it was her feminine way of obscuring the fact that she felt no desire for me. The advantages have only slightly outweighed the frustrations. It has meant I could watch her undress for bed, that I could soap her back, her faintly sallow back curved over the plastic bowl in the sink, and that I could keep track of her numerous attachments. On occasions I could be her petal, her gold flower, her dulce boy, her jewel. Lulled by her glucose endearments, my fingers, slippery with soap, would begin a shy glissade over the surface of her damp and bony ribs, only to find that in a moment the golden boy, the petal boy, would be banished utterly and the man of rock be called upon. Towel draped about her chest for protection, she would extol my many virtues, rubbing herself dry the while, edging sideways and with decorum into the all-enveloping folds of her cherry dressing-gown, leaving me alone at the sink with outstretched hands still damp with soap, outmanoeuvred to the last. It’s true, of course, that I am Lily’s very own personal rock, that I can behave as spinelessly as I like with other women, without damaging our relationship. It’s true also that Lily herself chooses endlessly and unerringly to become involved with men who lack totally those steadfast qualities she so admires in me. At the moment the thoughtful Edward, sitting on the grass with shoulders hunched, looks the exception to the rule, but then he hasn’t known Lily very long and the foundations of his character have not yet been exposed to her full and merciless attentions. It’s to be hoped that the little frown between his brows is caused by the glare of the sunlight, or the smoke from his cigarette, and not by any uneasiness he may be feeling due to the frequent disappearances of Lily throughout the long night. I could lean forward and whisper my congratulations in his ear, if only to enjoy the astonishment blossoming on his pleasant face. It is not given to us all to achieve fatherhood so quickly or so effortlessly. And if Lily’s choice was made in haste, at least he was chosen. If he is an honourable man there may even be a wedding. Shebah can be both bridesmaid and godmother, and Claude will be best man. The sun will shine and Lily will hold flowers against her bulging waistline, and with any luck I shall be left alone with the gentle Julia.

  The tragedy of Claude and Lily lies in the regularity of their nonconformity. Everything being permissible, they are lost to the delights of the unpermitted. Julia and I, not being so emancipated, can appreciate to the full the bittersweet flavour of infidelity. In the brief seclusion of the bathroom last night she struggled rapturously to remove my hands from the buttons of her blouse. From her armpits came the seed-cake smell of the virtuous female.

  Though I do not believe in God, despising with true party fervour the opiate of the people, I am wrapped tight in childhood bands of Sunday school faith. That I am mortal – meaning that I am doomed to die – does not, as it does for Shebah, cause me to be in mourning for my life. When I climb mountains I am intensely aware of my healthy body breathing air purified by height, and were I to receive some warning of impending death I would most certainly lift up mine eyes to the hills. Though as a Marxist I would be conscious of the puerile sentiments of my dying mind, as a sensualist I could only sink down on my knees with heartfelt praise. The little things that hold me close to the centre of my own universe fling Lily into the void. I have no illusions as to my usefulness in the social scheme of things. That I work for a fair wage does not mean that privately I contribute constructively to anything but my own shadow. I more than accept the realisation of my own unreality, whereas Claude and Lily and the biologically tormented Shebah wrestle day long, life long, in a ludicrous attempt to tear the stars from the sky and bring them within reach of their destructive fingers. That they never succeed only darkens their blood and does any amount of damage to their overloaded brains. It would not surprise me if Lily died of an explosion in the head, eyes charred in their sockets, features contorted with agony. I shall merely fall into a profound sleep, and only a pocket mirror held to my lips will show that my lungs have ceased to function. Likewise my little Julia. Last night I received nothing and everything from her inhibited being. That is to say, I was given in abundance the sweet smell of her hair and skin, the trusting proximity of her body, the dulcimer tones of her ladylike voice.

  Shebah being here this weekend has partially spoiled my enjoyment. In the confines of the kitchen in Morpeth Street she was sufficiently restricted to be cautious. Her discretion guaranteed that she remain once weekly in her wickerwork chair by the cupboard. But the air here, and the trees and the flowers, not to mention the pride-swelling injury to her leg, may well unhinge her. Accustomed as she has been all these years to perpetual vistas of chimneys black with soot and a day-by-day denial of her existence by a hostile world, she could not be blamed for growing lyrical about this experience. It is not often one spends a weekend in the country. If she so far forgets herself as to let slip some echo of this visit to my girl-friend when next they meet, how shall I counteract her words? I find that the business of lying is exhausting and robs the deceit of its bloom. Lily has no such difficulty. She would hardly recognise the truth if it hit her in the face. She will tell Edward, if she has not al
ready done so, that Claude’s rifle fire this morning was meant for him. ‘Because you see, Edward,’ she will tell him, not for a moment allowing him to be torn from the eloquence of her eyes, ‘he loves me, he always has.’ I must admit I am curious to know for whom the shot was intended. I cannot believe that Claude is an inferior marksman. Therefore I cannot believe that he aimed at Shebah. Perhaps he fired at me, angry at my evening-long attention to his mistress. Perhaps the sane and loyal Julia, seeing him bulky in the open window of the upstairs room, flew like a bird while his finger already whitened on the trigger, and jerked his elbow outward. The reality of the shot is established, though the identity of the victim is unknown. I cannot believe that Claude cares enough about Shebah to wound her. Only Shebah and Lily care that much about Shebah. Lily thinks Shebah unique and magnificent in her arrogance. If I am Lily’s golden boy, her petal boy, then Shebah is her diamond brain. Shebah’s magnificence Lily attributes to her temperament and her race. I ascribe it to the absence of her ovaries. An insistently expressed egotism is the keynote of the hypogonad character. Coupled with, and dependent upon, this is an active resentment towards a world that is inadequately mindful of imagined excellence. Give Shebah back her ovaries and Lily would cease to find her interesting. As to Shebah’s arrogance being in any way racial, in all history only the Jews went so passively to the slaughter.

  Between Lily and Shebah lies distance measured in years. Between Lily and me there is a distance which is due to the difference in our sex. There are, of course, other kinds of distance that are calculable. There is a distance between people that is measurable, caused by the class system. The sun is about ninety-three million miles away mathematically. Visually it is just behind that tree and a little below that cloud. Lily is much nearer and Shebah is so close that I can feel her bare toe protruding from her openwork sandal, irritably jigging up and down against my shoulder blade. She would probably like to give me a strong kick in the back of the neck, just where it joins my spinal column, and pitch me forward on to my nose, but then she has to pretend that she is weak from loss of blood. Not that she bled at all, or if she did it was an internal bleeding and not for the eye to see. Consequently I cannot give her the sympathy that may be justly hers. Everything depends on other factors. For instance I am only sprawled here on the grass in all this heat because it is summer. It is a seasonal sprawling. Also, if it were not Whitsun or Bank Holiday or whatever it is, I would be at the factory. And if I were not Lily’s best friend I should not have been invited to spend the weekend at Claude’s, he being Lily’s best friend. We are all best friends and it is not a limited company. Across Claude’s face continually flits the expression of a man in search of God. ‘I cannot give you the whole,’ he says, ‘I can only give you a part.’ He blended perfectly into the purple sofa in Lily’s living-room in Morpeth Street. The candle dripped wax on to the brick hearth and garlands of coloured paper, put up for Christmas and long since forgotten, criss-crossed in loops of orange and blue above his saintly head. His head was saintly merely in its appearance. He constantly told Lily she ought to cleave to him and become one. Once he woke in the middle of the night, in spite of his double dose of sleep-inducing pills, and pissed into the Victorian chamber pot that stood on a small table beside the brass bed. The pot being full of dried earth, hard as rock, could not absorb his offering, and the liquid spilled on to the wooden floor, waking Lily, who in the light of the still-burning candles saw him on tiptoe, bunching himself in his two hands, the shadow of his body huge across the fireplace wall, a drunken dancer tripping the light fantastic. The chamber pot belonged originally to Billie, the Wild Colonial Boy. The removal men, responsible for the safe conduct of Lily’s effects when she left Morpeth Street, dropped the pot as they descended the grey stone steps. The fall cracked the chamber neatly into two halves and dislodged the lump of earth. They swept the halves of china into a refuse bin, but the clod lay for two days on the pavement. I did hope a shower of rain might miraculously revive it, but the twig stayed dead and crumbled into dust. ‘How sad,’ said Lily, when I told her. Set all round this courtyard, in Grecian urns and tubs bound with copper, Claude has grown a multitude of plants whose names I do not begin to know. Claude himself hardly knew a few months ago, before his fervour for the soil began.