A Weekend with Claude

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Norman,’ she said after only a moment, ‘I do think I should tell Claude about this table.’

  I could only agree, and we walked back along the narrow strip of barn. Claude was waiting for us. He was standing by his roses, not touching them, just watching the slight movement of the leaves as they bounced gently in the night breeze. I do wonder if he’d have continued to spy through the small window had I not seen him. Knowing Claude, it is possible. The thought is an erotic one, even more stimulating than the taking of the submissive Julia. As we went into the house Claude laid his arm across my shoulders and squeezed my upper arm with his stubby fingers.

  Shebah was sitting in the living-room, the two dogs at her feet, her hands folded on her lap. She gave me a look of hatred and then one of sweet reproach.

  Claude poured us all another drink and then suggested that we should sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Lily and Edward. I almost felt that with his attention to detail he would show us a hole in the wall through which we might watch silently or otherwise the celebrating communicants within the bedroom. But all we did was to stand bunched outside the latched door and sing our greetings.

  Inside, Lily gave a ho-ho-ho of polite laughter. She is constantly trying to please, to win approval, to make amends. This I understand only because she has tried, in part, to explain it to me. She has gone to bed with numerous strangers rather than offend. Claude did attempt to enter the room, but Julia restrained him. Shebah, surprisingly, was trembling. The bracelets on her plump arms slithered with agitation. Still singing, we returned to the living-room to resume our positions. Julia sat in the large armchair and crossed her legs. Her hand came down to straighten her dress, but she caught me looking at her and rubbed her knee instead. The titillation afforded at the thought of Lily and Edward wantonly together in the guest-room, coupled with her little adventure in the barn, so inconclusive to me, had made her coquettish. The warm breeze from the open window blew across her hair. She patted her head with a capable hand and touched her flushed cheeks. We were all, for various reasons, or perhaps the same reason, in a state of elation. It was not only the drink, because we had consumed enough by now to put us all in a melancholy stupor. Shebah, posturing sternly, placed a grubby finger to her mouth and studied the oil painting above the fireplace. Her pig-tailed head turned from side to side in near blind examination. Performing a few steps of what may have been a minuet, she tripped about the glittering room. As if better to observe her, I slid to the floor and leaned against Julia’s knees.

  Absorbed in a vision of herself that was wholly music-hall in origin, the red fingers scrabbling to lift her tight skirt higher, Shebah cavorted with corybantic fervour. Claude weaved his way down the room, arms held out like a wrestler, to fetch another bottle from the cupboard. Shebah misunderstood his mission for a moment and imagined he wished to partner her. At his avoidance, she scowled. Lily, had she been present, would have murmured how sad it all was.

  I felt comfortably at ease. Not for me the complicated subtleties of atmosphere that constantly assail Lily. For myself, I prefer to see things as they appear to be, reality being stimulating enough for my needs. When Lily has drunk too much she turns with an ‘O Christ!’ of longing to whoever is nearest. The intensity of her desire to be liked causes her to weep upon unlikely shoulders. I do hope she conducted herself last night with sensibility as she lay in Edward’s arms. The success of her plan to make him a legal, if not natural, father of her child depends on her avoidance of indulging in the truth.

  When I marry my girl-friend Jean, I shall be happy enough. Though politically I do not recognise class, my inner man rejoices at the limitations that such a system imposes: to be respectable and yet roam at will beyond the barrier. To live wholly in Lily’s world would in the end defeat my aims. I derive enormous satisfaction from being a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Bless the squire and his relations, keep us in our proper stations.

  Up to a point, last night my proper station would have been at the feet of Julia but for the talkative and restless Shebah. Having sung her song of divine forgiveness several times, she sank into a high-backed chair almost in the centre of the room. Her feet stuck straight in front of her, she was completely hidden. Only one hand hung down over the arm of the chair. To Claude, facing her in a cane chair at the end of the room, she must have looked like Napoleon in exile, brooding over past victories. For me, behind her, she was a Zuleika of the river, trailing her scarlet fingers listlessly across the carpet, alone in a punt pulled by the current.

  ‘What’s up, old girl?’ I shouted, kicking the back of her chair with my foot.

  She didn’t reply, merely snarled. My mouth was conveniently close to Julia’s ankle. I licked her skin. She fidgeted but was frightened of moving her foot too brutally in case she kick out my teeth. Taking advantage of her dilemma, I caressed the plump calf of her leg and dug my fingers into the damp bend of her knees. The pleasure I gained from pestering her in such a way was exquisite. Two little hands protestingly caught at my head and shook me.

  ‘Don’t,’ she breathed. ‘Please don’t, Norman dear.’

  She was worried about Claude, but I was not. Having allowed me to stand naked and unadorned in his barn with his mistress, I felt it would have been surprising if he had suddenly objected to my chaste handling of her limbs.

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t,’ she whispered.

  ‘Come downstairs with me,’ I urged.

  ‘No, I can’t, really I can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can. Come downstairs.’

  ‘Norman dear, please don’t. Claude will see you.’

  With a sudden and delightful show of indignation she disengaged her foot and moved away from me. Lying on the floor, I saw only her sensible shoes and her shapely legs. I almost, briefly, felt like one of those men who wear aprons and pay women to walk all over their tortured bodies. Then I suddenly imagined myself very tall, which is wishful thinking as I am extremely small, though in proportion. I cannot remember feeling tall before. Maybe it was a glimpse of Julia’s feet going from me – that and the thought of those perverts of the apron world, giving me a false feeling of superiority and nobility.

  After a time the denseness of the carpet on which I lay affected my nasal passages. When I opened my eyes the room spun like a top. I heard Claude saying ‘You are so wise, my dear, you accept it all.’ With that I jumped to my feet. I saw the back of Shebah’s head and Claude staring up at her face as if she were his dearly beloved, and before he could notice me I went down the stairs. I did hope Julia might be standing by the sink filling the kettle, but she wasn’t. I watered the geranium on the sill and looked for bread in the cupboard. On the wall, above the empty hamster’s cage, was a drawing done by Lily in the days when she first met Claude. It was of herself, of course, staring out forever in the role of the child-woman, endlessly gazing with sensitivity at nothing in particular. I feel it would give Lily consummate relief to say that she did not care about that one living there or that one dying there, and meaning it; just to move away without turning round finally to wave to those she says she loves. The unbearable sadness of her supposed world, her private globe, in which she lies impossibly mangled by unending imagined conflicts, turns her like a fish in a pool.

  I found a pen in the knife drawer and underneath the drawing I wrote: ‘This is a picture of a pregnant girl.’ Then I put the date. I stood in the outer shop and visualised Billie edging his way between the tables and ornaments. Part of him must have been agreeably buoyant at coming to such an individualistic place. When he was here he purchased a stuffed mallard for thirty shillings and told Claude to keep the change. According to Claude, who may have been speaking less than the truth, he dropped it, case and all, in the yard when getting into his motor car. He left the glass all over the concrete. Claude, to be even, directed him a good ten miles out of his route north, and kicked the glass into the flower beds, before taking Lily out for a healing walk.

  ‘She howled like a dog at each tree,’ h
e told me.

  ‘I was utterly mute all the way,’ Lily told me.

  Between the two it is safe to say that Lily experienced a form of suffering. I am not sure what to think about her continual love pains. It is like when I try to explain what it means to me to climb mountains, hills though they be. My explanation is deliberately evasive because I do not intend anyone to understand, though I do offer such items as the air, the view, the combined play of muscles when climbing. I never refer to my mountains as female, nor do I betray myself by the use of the possessive pronoun. When Lily describes her pain, her sadness, her desolation, she shows no such reticence. In the end she talks of abstractions. That is why, when she attempted to kill herself, I experienced a shock out of all proportion to the deed. That she might do so was predictable, that she nearly accomplished it was incredible. There seemed to be a purity of intention that I had not comprehended in her.

  I looked at the drawing again and then went upstairs. Shebah was shouting at Claude. I slipped through the room unseen and went into the bathroom where, washing her hands with lilac-scented soap, stood Julia.

  ‘I wondered where you were,’ she said.

  Her tone was friendly. Possibly she felt I could not commit an offence in a bathroom. As it happened I was no longer intending to do so. I was content to sit on the edge of the bath and have a conversation with her. Women will do strange things out of gratitude. They will even confide why they will not be seduced, forgetting that they pretended they had not understood the intention.

  ‘Do you think, Norman,’ asked Julia, ‘that Claude looks better?’

  She gazed at herself short-sightedly in the mirror above the hand basin.

  ‘Oh yes, definitely. You’ve done wonders for him,’ I said.

  It was after all the truth. She had hidden his bottles of whisky and given him raw eggs to swallow. She had cleaned his living quarters and put the two hundred empty packets of cigarettes into the bin and listened to the nocturnal words mumbled in recurring nightmares. Lily tried to describe what it was he had gone through, but I found it ridiculous and irritating. It had to do with hoof-beats thundering along the corridors of the brain, and an epiphany of someone, less than divine, rising monstrously in the mind, intent on destruction.

  I took this to mean that Claude was miserable because his wife had left him and was feeling guilty because he was to blame. I detest both obscurity and self-examination. I suspect these grief-stricken extroverts who tell their innermost thoughts to strangers on buses. Of course it was Lily who told me this, not Claude, and she’s not a stranger, and I don’t think either of them would talk to a fellow bus traveller. Shebah is perfectly capable of doing so – and in fact indulges quite frequently. It’s the gusto with which they analyse themselves so consciously and the self-induced guilt with which they flagellate themselves that annoys me. I do not experience guilt because I am ready to take the consequences of my own actions. I do not find myself in the ludicrous position of having to lay the blame for my illicit sex life at the breast of my mother who may or may not have denied me her nipples. And if the schoolmistress who picked me off the playground asphalt when I was six years old, and massaged the agony of my bruised genitals, was less than wise, then at least I am in the end sensible enough to be grateful to her. Apart from the irritation which does not make negative the overall enjoyment, I derive much pleasure from the detailed confessions of these traumatic blatherers.

  ‘You have no idea how sick Claude was when I first came here,’ said Julia. ‘Vomiting every hour or so and dopey with pills and quite unable to sit still. Just went round and round like a dog trying to find somewhere to lie down and lick its sores.’

  The image was an interesting one. In starched cap Julia followed the shaggy Claude round in ever-decreasing circles until exhausted he fell on to his paws, only to start up again with an animal yelp of pain.

  ‘And it was simply ages before he really slept at night. Months, you know. He kept seeing a ring she always wore on her finger.’

  It is strange how they all fasten on to some article worn by the loved one. Claude and his wife’s ring – Lily and the check coat of the Wild Colonial Boy.

  ‘Well, I shouldn’t worry now,’ I said, looking down at my feet on the cork bath mat. ‘He’s well on the mend. He looks as if he’s thriving.’ I was feeling sleepy. My head was like lead. I wanted to go to sleep in the bath and, deep down (it was quite a healthy emotion), I hated Claude. The whole house was littered with enemies of the people, traumatic blood-suckers, indestructible and having all the fun. Lily in bed with Edward – half dead a third of a year ago and now needing to eat enough for two – and Claude at any time about to claim his mate for the night. In fact I like Claude. I always have. There is something about his matter-of-fact insanity that I find refreshing. During the last two years I have become almost an authority, in an amateur way, on eccentrics. And Claude is definitely man-to-man in his approach. One couldn’t see him running berserk with a hypodermic syringe, like that doctor from Widnes who, lunging for Lily’s thigh, gave her photograph album an injection of behaviour-liberating pethedine. Claude’s habit of crushing the bones of the hand when saying good-bye is more jocular than vicious. It will be interesting to note the exact degree of pain registered upon the smooth face of the departing Edward when Claude bids him farewell. I suppose Claude’s performance this morning with the air-rifle was a little more than good clean fun, but he did not shoot to kill. Had he mortally wounded Shebah, I wonder where we should have buried the body? The light in the bathroom was very bright. Julia and I were fully exposed and illuminated. Remembering the times Lily has assured me that the reasons for women being unwilling are mainly visual and so obvious as to be generally overlooked by men – the mascara running down the kiss-damp face, the soiled underwear, the cornfield stubble of shaven legs, the stretch lines on the stomach – I stood suddenly upright and jerked the light cord down and released it and us into the obliterating darkness. I was only going to attempt a mild mingling of our mouths, a braille-like roving with my hands. I first removed her glasses and placed them with care on the shelf above the hand basin. I nuzzled her hair with my mouth and mumbled ‘Little pet, little dove’ into her hair. I had just unbuttoned the first two buttons of her blouse when the light was switched on again. I had not even managed to kiss her. Lily stood with the light cord in her hand, dressed in her cotton nightgown, and behind her Claude, not smiling, looking at the two buttons undone on the blouse of his mistress. He put his arm round Lily and dipped his head into her neck, crooning ‘O God, girl’, or something like that, as if he really cared. I was for a moment afraid I had overdone it, that this time he was angry, but Lily looked at ease and she is a barometer of atmosphere. In her eyes there was nothing but curiosity. Then the two of them, Claude with lowered head and Julia with a faint agitation of her eyelids, went out of the bathroom and Lily stayed at my back looking at her reflection in the mirror. We didn’t speak, because she was absorbed in being understanding and compatible with my mood. I did not have a mood to be compatible with and I would have liked to ask her about Edward, except she might have gone on too long and at too great a length, so I just whistled, ‘Devon, Glorious Devon’.

  I’m not quite sure how much Lily feels, despite her constant articulation. Sometimes I imagine if I could ask her quickly enough what she was thinking at a particular moment before she had time to marshal the words in force, she might answer ‘Nothing’: a small, round, flat, air-escaping negative. But I have never been swift enough. The words are all there, pyramid-high and tumbling for exit. The shapes they make build up in her emotional structures.

  In the living-room Shebah was still singing. She stared at Lily as if she had newly risen from the dead, mouth wide open on a high note of shrill surprise. I was not feeling very cheerful. Twice in one night I had been cruelly interrupted in my pursuit of Julia. Altogether the sort of evening that, had I been on home ground, I would have terminated by winding up the alarm clock and g
oing upstairs. I felt, however, that something might yet happen, though not in any spectacular sense, in that overcrowded room, so long as Claude still ran round and round cracking his invisible whip. He lit a cigarette for Lily, who sat like a pink Buddha in the huge armchair, and poured more wine for Shebah. It was surprising that Shebah had not long since keeled over unconscious, unless canny to the last she had been decanting the drink into the many pots and vases about the room. Claude began to tell me something ‘… quite impossible to imagine how much is already there to be released, cocker. We all have our postures, you know. I reckon you’ve got a pretty solid posture.’

  He waggled the bowl of his glass under my nose as if he intended to grind it into splinters up my nostrils. ‘The only thing to do, man, is to become part of the cosmic flow. Spin like a dervish and never bother to find out what it’s about. At my age there’s no time left for conjecture …’

  There was much more, but I was trying to reason out what Claude’s exact age was and whether he looked it. I was seeing him twenty years ago in air-force blue, dapper and bonny with beardless chin. ‘The fantasy life that goes on,’ Claude was saying, ‘is simply incredible. A million commuters in bowler hats avidly chasing fat women and Lolitas between the jumping print of their evening newspapers. A million breasty girls utterly unaware that babies must be fed naturally, not handed the bottle every four hours …’ His mouth opened and shut as the words buzzed like wasps through his jammy lips. ‘… but she was different. Now she was a woman.’ Who was he alluding to now? Surely not Lily.