‘The Jews are a very sympatico race you know, cocker,’ he continued, taking me by the arm and not so much leading as pushing me towards his bedroom. His fingers, clamped round my upper arm, were like steel; his voice flowed on endlessly.
‘Generations of persecution have given wings to their sensitivity. If you blind the nightingale the song will be sweeter. It is nature. All life is a circle and the end of all our beginnings is to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.’ He opened the bedroom door and thrust me inside.
Quite so. I did not know the place, nor had I at any time. I looked intently at the elegant bed, the shell-pink walls, the bitter glimpse of Julia’s nightdress half-showing beneath a pillow. Claude undid his shoes. His articulation continued, spattered by grunts as he struggled with his socks. ‘Nothing you do will in the end appease the monster that lies in wait for you. For every crime there is a punishment. Every hurt given, every lie told, every atom of suffering deposited by you on the surface of another human being will bring its awful reward. Neither money, nor power, nor threats, nor pleadings, will avail you.’
He sank on to the bed, thrusting out his naked feet, and lit a cigarette, puffing at it energetically, brows deeply furrowed. Suddenly, behind a cloud of smoke, he asked abruptly, ‘Did Julia seem to like it?’
‘Well, yes and no,’ I said. ‘More polite than anything, I think.’
I watched his big toes paddling in the quilted coverlet and hoped I was hitting the right conversational note. He put his cigarette down on the edge of the bedside table and began to lift his shirt up from the waistband of his trousers. Was he going to bed, or about to perform some naked dance? Was he perhaps trying to show me that he too was adept at removing his clothes with speed? If so, he was less than convincing. He took at least half a minute to get the shirt over his head, and emerged with scarlet face and disordered beard. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said, rising to his feet and drawing in his stomach. ‘That is to say, I mind very much – or would if I could. But the heart’s died on me, man. I am but a shell that once lay near to the sea. I imagine I hear the sound of it yet, but it’s all a dream.’
He looked thoughtfully at his feet and slapped with one hand at his huge diaphragm. The drink had larded him with fat but he was still impressive. His skin was perfectly smooth, without blemishes. ‘I am going to attend to my roses,’ he informed me, and reached for his dressing-gown that hung behind the door. He seemed undecided what to do once the cord about his waist was tied. He put one arm inside the pouch of his gown and began to pace across the room.
‘Of course she’s devoted to me …’ He paused and rubbed at his hidden armpit. ‘She’s utterly loyal … if it’s loyalty one wants?’ He gazed at me as if I had a problem.
‘I know, I know what you mean,’ I said emphatically, nodding my head vigorously like some bidder at an auction sale. I had no idea what he meant but he seemed in need of affirmation.
‘Of course I don’t believe a word Shebah says,’ he went on, striding past me to the window. ‘It’s all in her mind, and even if it were true it doesn’t change things any.’ He stared out of the window for a moment. Then he turned and seized me by the lapels of my jacket.
‘Now look here, mate,’ he shouted, transforming himself into the bully at large. ‘Keep your hands off my woman. I won’t stand for it, do you hear?’ He trembled with indignation, head thrust back like an illustration of an actor in one of Shebah’s out-dated theatre books, face registering rage with nobility, mouth firmly closed. Before I had time to respond in any way myself – I was just about to contort my facial muscles into a portrayal of fear with cunning – he released me and said quite calmly, ‘Study the humble bee, cocker. The order of their life is beyond belief.’
He adjusted his dressing-gown and went like a Japanese warrior out of the room. I flattened my hair smooth with my hand and eased my jacket back into shape. The way in which clothes hang on a man can be indicative of character. Though not as orderly as the humble bee, I am neat.
When I returned to the living-room it was empty of Claude and Lily and Julia. Only Shebah, enthroned in her papal chair, sat facing the far wall, arm outflung. I sat down behind her and watched her fat wrist, circled with its handcuff bracelets, twist back and forth above the carpet. After a little while, with a great deal of shuffling and groaning, she began to slew the chair round to face me. In spite of her constant references to her delicate state of health she has the strength of a man. As if driving a difficult and outmoded automobile, she manoeuvred to a halt and, breathing heavily, stared at me with passion. The black beret she always wears was askew on her grey head. My affection for her, though not often manifested, is real. She shares my disillusionment with Lily. She has, in a different way from me, been deprived of her just rewards. She was forced to her chagrin to play the buffoon for Lily’s Friday night carnivals. While I was kept from physical union, Shebah was frustrated in her attempts at full communication. Echoing Claude’s statement, Lily gave a part but never the whole. I began in my mind to dissolve the fat from Shebah’s hips and waist, draw back the folds of her ruined face.
If she can be believed, and why not, she has hinted at affairs of frantic love. Whether they were consummated she has not divulged. What outrageous admirer prised wide her thighs and perpetrated love? The gulf between her notion of an affair and mine, is, like the sun from the earth, ninety-three million miles distant – and yet, it appears, it is she who has been consumed by fire.
As her eyes were telling me across the flower-strewn carpet last night, ‘What do you know, darling?’ As if to underline her contempt for my ignorance of life, she raised one bangled arm and fluttered her fingers. A graceful movement. That is why later, when she stumbled against Claude’s china cabinet, shattering the glass a little and jostling the ornaments within, I felt such surprise. She is not clumsy; her gestures, even those of contempt, are always defined.
Presently Julia, ever busy in her protection of Claude’s property, came in, and crouching down behind the sofa began to clean the harp which lay on its side. She gave me a little rag dipped in paraffin with which to wipe the strings. Secure in the knowledge that I was doing a useful job, I lay down beside her on the floor. Claude, returned from the garden, sat on the piano stool and closed his eyes. I could hear the voice of Shebah rising and falling, and once I heard Claude say, ‘Yes my dear, you may be right’, in reply to some comment she had made. Behind the sofa, immersed in my restorative labour, all was peace and calm: a little oasis of shade in the hectic furnished room. In the old days at Morpeth Street we would all by now, have been sickly clinging to our pillows; Lily’s pillow at least, if not Claude’s, would be damp with tears. Maybe the difference in the atmosphere was created by the sane and tidy Julia. I no longer wanted to caress her, or to anger my host, nor did I particularly want to clean his harp, but I was a guest and my bed was to be the sofa behind which I lay. I was too inhibited by upbringing to retire there and then. So I continued to rub, rub, rub, with my little rag up and down the silver strings, pleasantly aware of the smell of Julia’s hair without being disturbed by it, and thought of my girl-friend a little, and then of Lily, and then of myself. The danger of being on intimate terms with Lily lies in the inevitability with which sooner or later, however environmentally opposed to her mode of thinking, one is contaminated sufficiently to start the sickening process of self-analysis. I did indulge in analysis in the days when I lived at home, but then I liked myself more. Though I am not naturally honest, I have been so by chance. I was mainly thinking about the time Lily attempted to die.
The night before, she had gone classically through the motions of betrayed womanhood – a delicate and crumpled crying before an audience of five grouped round the kitchen table, an attention to tea-making, to being hospitable even though the world had disintegrated so dramatically about her ears such a short time before. Carefully she cleaned her teeth, following this with a girl-guide utterance of obscenity. It was difficult t
o tell whether the expletive was occasioned by her constantly sore gums, or by the traumatic homecoming of Billie. Perhaps it was due to the toffee she insists Billie gave to her, nestling within a jewellery box. I cannot make that part of her story out. She had not yet got at the gin bottle and it’s hard to see how she mistook a wrapped sweet for an engagement ring. She said good night as charmingly and emptily as usual, performed the ritualistic round of handshaking that she affected, a habit instilled in her by her dead and homburg-hatted dad, gave her bargee laugh exposing all her large and now cleaned teeth, told me to make sure we were locked up for the night, and went to sleep in the bed of polished brass.
When, the next morning, I telephoned, the predictable Lily should have answered my persistent pronouncing of her name – a slurred tearful reply at most. Her silence, the emphatic drop of the telephone on to the floor, filled me with alarm. Had I not telephoned, Lily would have had the funeral we have so often talked about – all poppy wreaths and strong men reduced to tears, and a tipsy vicar flinging himself into the freshly dug grave uttering cries of lamentation.
I have rationalised her actions in the only way of which I am capable. She would have replied to my voice if she had not drunk most of the contents of a bottle of gin left by Billie. The alcohol had obliterated her very strong sense of social etiquette and liberated her stubbornness – hence her refusal to speak. The gas she was inhaling had affected the muscles of her throat, had paralysed her organs of speech. Lastly, her emotions had led her to a final pitch of absurdity and she had given way utterly to irresponsibility. That love of life she so often elaborates upon had evaporated like ether exposed to the air. Nothing remained of Lily but poison in the bloodstream, gas in the lungs, and an immature mind seeking escape. She has told me she merely wished to sleep soundly for a few hours, but I can’t accept the explanation. Knowing her incapacity for drink, she would have been sleeping long before the need to turn the tap of the cooker.
Whereas Lily before this regrettable incident was a creature of light and shade, amusing and enchanting, harmless and without evil, she is now bracketed firmly in my mind as a hopeless neurotic, a feeble member of society, an enemy of the people. Feeling this, I can still love her, but I no longer feel at ease with her. She has crossed the borderline ahead of me. Shebah is only Lily taken to extremes of eccentricity forty years along. Lily’s continued hold on her ovaries may in the end help her to survive, but only comparatively. At least she will be spared hair on her upper lip. Without waxing so lyrical as Claude in his assertions that it is a privilege to live, I do feel that we have no right to choose the moment of our death.
It is still my belief that she will one day be the victim of a murderous assault. Once, coming home late to the house in Morpeth Street, I found the front door ajar. The normal conclusion, the obvious one that somebody had not closed it after entering, did not occur to me. I took out my handkerchief and carefully wiped the curve of the brass knocker and the latch itself. In the dark hall I listened before opening the door of Lily’s room. I switched on the light. Lily, in the raincoat she sometimes wore as a nightgown, sat up in the bed and stared at me with sleep-laden eyes. She reached for the packet of cigarettes she always kept under the pillow. I told her about the front door, and that I had expected to find her dead, arms held out in supplication, slivers of flesh scraped from her attacker’s face wedged in the little fissures of her nails. She understood that my sympathies would naturally lie with her assassin. Just in case, we closed the heavy wooden shutters over the long window, excluding the moon dipping like a toadstool into a glass of aniseed. I even bought a bolt and nailed it on the inside of her door, but mostly she forgot to use it.
I was feeling unexpectedly disturbed, thinking about all this, when I suddenly heard a thud. Julia knelt upright so that her head was above the level of the sofa and she said, in a tone very chill but still lady-like, ‘Oh Christ!’
Shebah was huddled against the wall, hands covering her face.
‘How’s it going, man?’ asked Claude – apparently of me, though he did not look in my direction.
‘Fine, fine,’ I replied, distracted somewhat by the little moans of distress issuing from the cowering Shebah.
She moved suddenly as if propelled by an almighty hand and touched the case of china figures. I thought she was in one of her appreciation-of-beauty moods, a little accentuated by drink, her pigtail sticking straight out under the black beret, her whole body writhing against the cabinet. How often she has begged to be given patience to endure her load, she with the soul made for loveliness. It appeared to me that she had thrown patience aside and was about to seize her rightful portion, and she might have done if Claude hadn’t cried out ‘Leave it, Shebah’, very stern, as if he was addressing the dog, and on that too harsh note of command Julia ran forward and cradled Shebah in her arms. In a spastic fit of lamentation Shebah tossed her head and jerked the spectacles from Julia’s nose.
Claude came to inspect the half-cleaned harp and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Well done, man,’ he said, and rubbed his chest, leaving a smear of grease. Shebah continued to wail and I sank down into my little world inhabited by a harp, a yard of carpet, and a shadow cast by the golden lamp on the piano.
I felt that the evening’s entertainment was almost over, that the manly Claude was about to take down the tent. He began collecting wine glasses and bottles, and presently Shebah made a round of weepy good nights. She who had often cried out ‘But Life is Sweet, my children’, more because she liked the poetry of it than because she believed in the sentiment, now stumbled on white sandalled feet out of the room, evidently convinced that life was vile. One of her scarves, like Salome’s veil, caught on the door and drifted to the floor. Julia brought blankets from the bedroom and made up my bed on the sofa, like the good little woman she is, smoothing my sheets and plumping up my pillow. They left me, Claude with many instructions about switching off the lights and securing the window, and Julia with a sweet smile playing upon her pale lips.
‘Sleep well, Norman dear,’ she said without malice, patting the flank of the brown dog that lay asleep on the floor.
I took off my clothes and shoes and lay on the sofa.
When I heard the sound of bedsprings jangling in the outer bedroom – Claude’s own particular brand of psychological torture, meant especially for me – I rose and went to the china cabinet and eased open the door. Inside there was a white dog with a coloured snout lying on its side, and a little box decorated with flowers which was in two pieces, and a pair of figures which seemed untouched. One was of a girl in dress and bonnet leaning her elbow on a bird-cage stand, fist bunched against her mouth, and one hand held towards me. A little bird perched on her open palm. The companion figure was a pretty man in knee-breeches with a dimpled face. He was supported at the buttocks by a tree trunk twined about with ivy. As far as I could see both figures were intact. I tried dropping them on the floor but they rolled harmlessly on the carpet. The sleeping dog twitched its ears. I took the china figures into the bathroom. Laying a towel across the cork bath mat and taking the precaution of turning the taps of the hand basin full on, I bent down and struck the two figures one against the other. The hand holding the bird broke at the wrist and rolled under the bath. The little man’s leg broke into two pieces. I took the spoiled figures and the pieces back into the main room and replaced them on the shelves inside the cabinet. The dog during my absence had climbed on to the sofa and lay with its tail on my pillow. When the lamps were extinguished there was a rind of light outside the closed windows. The springs of Claude’s bed trembled in a final cadenza.
This morning Claude brought me a cup of tea. When he opened the windows, birds sang and sunlight glinted on splinters of glass on the carpet. He went downstairs and came back with a brush and swept the floor, a tuft of beard clenched between his teeth. He did not look in the cabinet at all and when he came to fetch my empty cup he smelled of scented soap and toothpaste, and on the surface of his pink and
fleshy chest, revealed by his open dressing-gown, there were two marks faintly scored. Scratch marks of fingernails. Not his.
In the bathroom I looked to see if there were any chippings on the floor, but found nothing but dust and a hair grip, belonging presumably to Julia. I put the clip in the pocket of my jacket without any real reason. I’m not in love with Julia. Shebah tried to turn the handle of the locked door and swore and moved away sighing heavily. I cannot imagine that she wanted to wash, only that she wished to pass water. It may be that she urinated with fright when ten minutes later the pellet hit her in the ankle. I do not know why I harbour at times such intense feelings of antagonism towards her and Lily. Though not an ordinary girl, lying there in a patch of sun Lily is still deserving more of compassion than hatred. My ambiguity distresses me, being at the root emotional, and I do not care for emotions. I do not detest my parents for their futile adherence to the conventions, their blind belief in the dignity of human toil, their comical loyalty to the Royal Family. I do, it is true, take some measure of delight in puzzling my workmates at the factory by a deliberate show of eccentricity, but there is no malice intended. I do not, as Lily does, suffer from being related to my mother and father. Should my own father, as hers did, confide to me one tea-time, that life was a cheat and a delusion, I would agree with him without identifying myself personally with his statement; nor would I feel the weight of seventy wasted years. I do not expend energy on uselessly worrying about whether I am understood. It is not necessary to be understood in order to live. Believing, as I do, in Marxist ideology and yet actively participating in the survival of capitalism, I am in much the same dilemma as Shebah: the martyr without a cause. I am cut off from fulfilment. But I do not sympathise with Shebah; I recognise that she is dangerous. The kindness she has received from Julia and Lily, following the breakages last night and her wound this morning, have sunk her into a coma of satisfaction, as she sits on her bench, sugary and quiet. Having obtained such a liberal injection of pity she may well demand another and larger dose before long. Fortunately I do not have to travel home on the train with her. Some other luckless traveller will find her swooning across the carriage seats, clutching her leg as if the marrow had run out. Even Claude at lunch time gave her more ham than the rest of us.
A Weekend with Claude Page 8
