A Weekend with Claude

by Beryl Bainbridge

  Anyway, Claude’s quite wrong. I’ve never stopped fighting. I’ve never accepted so much as a cup of water. I’ve fought all my life for justice and been broken and destroyed in its cause. However, I suppose Claude was meaning to pay me a compliment when he said I was wise, etc., etc., and I couldn’t tell him to go to bloody hell as I would have liked, seeing I was a guest in his house of china, so I contented myself with ‘Oh darling. Me – accepting? How little you know.’ Which of course only made him feel how humble I was, though as usual with all of them I got the impression that he was only half concentrating, that he was waiting or listening for something else. If I wasn’t so subtle I would have decided long ago that they were all deliberately trying to humiliate and torment me, which is true in a way, but really it’s their thoughtlessness and their preoccupation with sex.

  To which he replied, fiddling and tugging at his curled beard, ‘Very perceptive, my dear, very perceptive. How little I know! But this I do know. While we have sat on this sofa this five minutes, twelve people somewhere have died of hunger. Died starving.’

  I want to scream when they start talking this way. It’s so debasing. Are they talking to me or to themselves? Do I look as if I’m one of the privileged, that they have to relate the statistics of little yellow people clutching rice bowls? It’s not my concern. I have enough to battle with in my own monstrous head without problems of that sort. Not that they do anything about the hungry either. It’s all talk. And if I haven’t starved to death it’s no thanks to anybody but myself. I haven’t been lend-leased or subsidised, and I don’t have the solace of their endless involvements. I’ve had nothing but loneliness and jealousy and ill health. I feel as if I’m constantly struggling under a net cast carelessly by a careless God. I’m the only one I know enmeshed in it, all the others move freely. The appalling thing is that nobody seems aware of my plight.

  Once when that landlord of mine, the Panzer man in the tennis pumps, had thrown bricks at me, I ran out screaming into the road. ‘Help, murder,’ I shouted. People passed by on foot with shut faces, and people went past in the glass cabins of their cars, eyes unseeing, and no one lifted a finger of surprise. The landlord came down the steps with his bicycle under his arm and propped it against the railings while he fixed his cycle clips round the frayed bottoms of his trousers. He mounted his machine, and the white tennis shoes, black laces dangling, trod round and round on the pedals and carried him out of sight. He, of course, had his own sedatives, his rotten Irish Catholic candle-lighting, and his paid women who came nightly, spiking up the uncarpeted stairs in their high-heeled shoes, their very breathing sulphurous with corruption. But I have nothing, no compensations, no curtain of deceit to hide myself from myself – only my poor brain endlessly facing itself. Claude’s remark was only to be expected, because they always make such comments, so I shouldn’t have felt so irritated, so exhausted with bitterness. Knowing so much, my bitterness can only be self-directed, there being nobody worthier to receive it. I had to sit there nodding agreement, rolling my eyes while the blood pounded in my head. There was a small silence in which the record ended. Lily used to have a gramophone in the kitchen, and two records which she played every evening. The battery on my nerves was simply frightful. It’s not that I can’t enjoy music – who better? – but my appointments were for communication, as I used to tell her, not to have to shout my thoughts above a cyclone of violins. I didn’t want Claude to put on another orchestral work, so I said as quickly as I could before he noticed the silence, ‘Do you think, Claude darling, that Edward is right for her?’

  Then he said a most extraordinary thing. I suppose it was only extraordinary in that there’s so much I’m never told. It’s like trying to complete a jigsaw. They toss me all the edges but never the most vital pieces in the centre.

  ‘It’s not a question of rightness, Shebah. He’s needed very much. And I reckon in some ways he’ll do.’

  ‘What do you mean – needed?’ I hate begging them for explanations, but I was so taken by surprise.

  ‘Well …’ He pursed up his little wet mouth and let his chin rest on his chest so that his face was mostly beard and there were plumes of auburn hair springing out of his scalp. Then up comes his head and he puts a large hand on my black-skirted knee and stares at me intently. Really quite dramatic, considering what they’re usually like. ‘Don’t we all need someone, or something?’ he says, the fool, the sly antique dealer, talking to me as if I worked in a factory or was one of those ignorant little things he picks up in his yellow van. They do belittle my intelligence so. He meant of course something different, but until Lily actually confides in me, or until the faint rumours begin to circulate, I’ll never know. Which left me in pain again. Suffocating pain, because I have no outlet for my passion, and the less I can project my passion into words, the more I sense the threat of nothingness. And then he began to talk about the glory that is Lily, which was interesting in one way and not entirely drivel. He said, ‘Of us all, Lily needs nobody. I say this guardedly. The rest of us can find our little treadwheel and go round and round, because basically all we care about is stupefying ourselves. Intensity of life can be found equally well in business or in drink.’

  Here I said sharply, because I wasn’t going to let him get away with it, ‘And the so-called loving you all indulge in?’

  Here his eyes flickered – once, twice – beneath lids tinted pink. He removed his hand from my knee and commenced to tug at his beard worriedly. ‘No, no, Shebah, that’s something quite different. We none of us indulge, as you call it, for the reasons you believe. Some for loneliness, some for forgetfulness, some because they are endlessly chosen.’ The skin of his face wasn’t after all so very young, so extremely healthy. ‘But, you see, Lily has chosen life. She’s the self-creator of her own struggling, her own griefs, her own happiness. She endures self-loss only to fling herself triumphantly back into an emotional battle to regain herself. She won’t, she can’t – seeing she’s the only contestant – give in. That’s the glory of her.’

  Well, I couldn’t laugh out loud in his face, and I hadn’t the energy to start a futile discussion, so again I nodded my poor aching head, and he seemed satisfied and with a little sigh, whether real or assumed, stood up and went downstairs trailing his hand on the surface of the wall.

  The rubbish they talk. Lily has chosen life. She’s the self-creator. It’s almost as if he thought Lily religious. Of course she’s a Catholic, or was, though that was probably a decision taken on impulse. All that business of riding on a tram up or down a hill to a convent in the mist, and joining the nuns at prayer, and letting salt tears run down her cheeks. How her senses must have grovelled before the little lighted candles and the rising voices, really not unlike Blackpool during the illuminations, and the incense burning, and imagining herself in ecstasy and full of divine grace. Her whole existence is a catalogue of sensual indulgences. She’s never self-created anything, only gone blindly into any situation that presented itself. I was there that night the Billie man called on some pretext. I was sitting in the kitchen by appointment and long before his knock came she confided that somebody might arrive – no one of any importance she stressed, purely a matter of business – but would I mind going upstairs and resting on the bed in the bathroom for a little time, should a visitor come. And before she would open the door to him I was bundled upstairs with all my parcels and my carrier bag, still holding a plate of stew in my hand and hardly able to see in the badly-lit hall. I could hear voices, and then there was some banging and then there was silence. I stayed up there as long as I could, as long as was humanly possible, what with the cold and all the insane people rushing in to use the lavatory and their crazy comments, and when I did go back into the kitchen, the panel under the sink was open and there was water all over the floor and on the floor amid the potato peelings and the swillage, grovelled Lily and her Billie – what an absurd concatenation. Such a different Lily from the one half an hour before, eyes shining, mouth
curved in a tender smile, really very pretty, with her skirt marked and stained with tea leaves, and he the great fool, red in the face and a piece of sticking plaster stuck on his dimpled chin. I never liked Billie. When he had gone she sat with her face in her hands, in the midst of all that mess, rocking backwards and forwards. ‘I love him,’ she said, though she wasn’t telling me, ‘I love him, I love him.’ Since that time she’s jumped on the same chair quite a few times and repeated the same sentiments, only about different people. The fact that she emerges triumphantly, as Claude describes it, out of all these situations, isn’t courage but luck. Supreme good fortune. And the opportunities she has had! I sat there last night quite alone, and only a few yards away lay Lily with her latest lover, adrift in each other’s arms. God knows what passes through her mind at such moments. There was never anywhere I could go. I couldn’t get up from the table and announce I was spending a birthday in bed; I possessed no friends who openly encouraged me.

  I went all the way to London so many years ago, by coach, with Monica Sidlow (she hated me too, with her over-active glands, which deposited fat all over her hips and thighs) and we stayed at some theatrical boarding house for one night, before she went on to Paris. What a sight she looked, pouring water into a basin, great arms a-flurry with flesh, and the short muscular legs bare and pallid under the laced camisole. I could have gone to Paris with her, only even then there didn’t seem any difference – Paris, London, all one – I had to take myself with me wherever I went. My love, my married man with the grey calm eyes and the wife who had after all told him to adore me, was coming down by car to fetch me. When he did come I stood as if facing an army, a whole regiment of enemies with loaded guns pointing at my breast, with a fearful excitement building up inside me, and I shouted, ‘Don’t dare touch me,’ so violently that people in the street turned to look at us.

  And he, one long grenadier, his noble face white in the hurrying street, said – pleaded – entreated, ‘What do you want, Shebah? For God’s sake, what do you want?’

  He had a coat (he always dressed most beautifully) made of some dark textured cloth, and the fingers of his right hand touched the lapels nervously, while he stood looking at me. I said, still shouting, ‘Nothing, nothing from you,’ and he turned away and walked very slowly back to his big green car, and I didn’t wait to see him drive away, but buttoned up my little black gloves and pushed the fur of my collar higher around my ears and trotted as fast as my legs would carry me into the unknown crowds. For a time my exultation was so magnificent that I could have walked all day, but gradually the feeling left me and my mouth became dry, and I was after all alone, having accomplished a gesture of nothingness. Why, I ask myself, did I behave like that? Of course I did want something from him; I suppose I was in love with him. Of course he wasn’t mine, he did belong to his wife, and in those days that counted for much, but it wasn’t entirely that. Perhaps it’s because I’m bigger than anyone I’ve ever met. There’s so much of me that there’s no room for transference. Perhaps it’s the Jewish wandering element in me. A wanderer over the face of the earth. As a baby, a tiny Hebrew-nosed infant, with weak eyes closed shut, my mother carried me across Russia. And what hell she went through with my father’s relations! Always walking, always on the move. Even now I can’t keep still, I have to keep going, even if it’s only round and round the blackened streets of the town. I could never tell Lily (because though she might be moved by its symbolic beauty at the time of telling, later she would repeat it to all and sundry, and distort its meaning beyond recall), but it is his coat I remember now more than his face. His lovely dark majestic coat. I’m truly the self-creator of my own struggles. Impulsive it may appear, but underneath there’s an inflexible will that guides my destiny. That’s my great glory – damn, damn them.

  I wondered last night what was up between Norman and Julia. She seems very sweet – but you never know, and Norman is capable of anything. Lily has told me that Norman is the only man she has ever met who wanted sex for the real reason, what she calls the biological urge. Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe it was Norman she was talking about when she said he’d use a keyhole if it was handy. If she told Claude that, it’s a wonder he left Julia alone with Norman, though perhaps Claude wouldn’t mind. They’re all so deep. Why now, should he shoot me this morning? I don’t get the impression, though I could be wrong, that Claude has an inflexible will that rules his existence. And if he has, it wouldn’t seem enough reason to aim a gun at poor me with my countless torments, and pull the trigger. I haven’t done him so much harm, and if I have it was his fault forcing me to drink, though if I hadn’t drunk I would have wept.

  After our little discussion last night Claude was downstairs quite a while. It was almost pleasant sitting there among all those marvellous bits and pieces. I was slightly anxious in case the dogs woke up and started their antics, but I sat very still with my hands folded, and when Claude came back up the stairs with Norman and Julia (both very elated and gay) he shouted out, ‘Ho, my dear, you look like an African carving … better have a drink.’ Norman was laughing a great deal and wriggling about in his clothes and blowing his nose over and over into a spotless handkerchief. The noise he made.

  ‘We’re going to sing “Happy Birthday” to the loved ones,’ shouted Claude, filling up glasses on the piano top.

  So we all trooped to the door and down two little steps and stood outside another door, very old, with a great iron hinge (everything’s too perfect) and Claude started up the chorus. We made a great volume of sound, but I’m not so unobservant as not to notice how close Victorian Norman was standing to Julia, and how his fingers kept digging into her neck, and all the time shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Happy Birthday, dear Edward.’ It was very stimulating. Even I felt slightly absorbed, because it was an absorbing thing to do, disturbing them like that.

  Behind the door I could hear Lily laughing. Of course she had to laugh just to show there was no ill-feeling, and Claude put his hand on the latch of the door and would have gone in, only Julia said protestingly, ‘No, Claude, no,’ and we all went back into the other room still singing. It was so simple to have another drink; I felt through drink that I might be more included, not so dreadfully impaled upon my own character and personality.

  ‘Why don’t you sing Lily’s song?’ said Norman, damn him, hunching his narrow shoulders and walking rapidly up and down the room. So I did. Heaven knows I’ve sung it often enough in the past. I sang it because I like to have a rousing chorus, though I think to Lily it represented a kind of comfort to the heart. Years ago Lily invited me round for the evening of the Day of Atonement. It wasn’t my usual appointment night, but she said come round anyway, because she can be kind, and all my people had deserted me, and it was a time of great sadness for me. When I went into the kitchen there were candles, and hanging from the ceiling a gaudy red star made out of shiny paper, a Christmas decoration, and I felt like saying ‘I’m a Jew, not a Communist’, and on the table plates with little rolls of bread on them with scraps of sardines inside, and a gherkin on a saucer. On the draining board there was a bottle of whisky and a bottle of wine. So typical to have spent so much on drink and so little on food!

  ‘Oh darling,’ I said, ‘why the celebration?’ All my people were fasting and praying that night, but she just smiled and said, ‘Happy birthday, Shebah’ (what fools they all are), and I put my bundles down on the green velvet chair, absolutely mesmerised by that great shining scarlet star, hanging on a thread of cotton from a hook in the stained ceiling. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ she told me, leading me up the hall and into the living-room. There on the purple sofa, reading a book, was Claude with a thin emaciated face, appearing almost holy. Of course I knew he’d been sick, but I’d thought he was in some sort of mental home, and he said, quite unlike himself, ‘Hallo, Shebah’, and gravely regarded me out of saintly eyes. He looked as if he were some figure on a tomb, with his two little feet neatly together and his beard in a litt
le point, and a gown in neat folds about his body. It was all so unexpected. People kept arriving and bringing things, chocolate raisins and bottles of wine and a bag of nuts, and them all wishing me happy birthday in that insane way and getting very drunk.

  We had to stay in the kitchen on account of Claude needing peace and quiet, but one or other of us would trip along every now and then to the cool of his lying-in room, and we all thought how changed he was, how like St Sebastian, St Joseph or Christ, all except Lily who refused to comment, just went on drinking wine and talking to her American by the sink. He stood with his arms folded, hardly uttering a word. Poor devil, arrested against the draining board, subjugated to Lily and ten thousand dreams of American superiority tinkling invisible to ruin among the debris in the sink. He wouldn’t go and see Claude at all. Once when Lily was about to take some bread to Claude, he said in that inhuman drawl, ‘I reckon he’s had enough attention’, and she ate the roll herself. Of course she does adopt this complacent feminine attitude with all her lovers, which may fool them but hardly fools me. Victorian Norman was on the floor, almost under the table with Lizzie’s friend Patricia, whispering into her ear with the perspiration running down his face. Lizzie was sitting on her boy-friend’s knee, really a very sweet girl, though just like all of them. And Lily so fond of her, which is strange because she’s quite pretty, and in the end I expect she’ll do Lily down. They all do. I never liked Lizzie’s boy-friend, not a nice man, almost dreadful but saved by a sense of humour, always more than ready to insult me. He sang ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ in a trained voice, shifting his eyes from side to side throughout, a cup of whisky clasped in his hand. Then I sang ‘Let’s Start All Over Again’, and they clapped and made loud noises of appreciation, all except the American Statue of Liberty, who gazed coldly at us out of sloe-shaped eyes, dry as prunes. Of course he was Jewish. Little Lizzie went in to see Claude and was away rather a long time and the boy-friend padded along the hall to fetch her. Voices were raised in anger. Then they both returned, he with a face suffused with annoyance, saying Claude wasn’t all that sick, and she patting his crimson cheeks mouthing ‘There, there’, as if comforting a child. They all have so much physical contact. Hours went by in a rustle of undeciphered murmurings, a tracery of fingers endlessly stroking heads of hair, a dozen licentious violet mouths pursed up to imprint kisses on each other. Winding together, all of them, even poor saintly Claude new to his mortification, touching, clinging, reaching. How apart I sat, how alien. They all live coupled lives and I alone am singular, isolated. Of course the Professor when he was visiting Lily didn’t maul her in front of me, but then he was too bewildered. He used to come sometimes for lunch and coincide with the policeman. No one ever explained why the policeman called. Surely not him as well! He used to chain his cycle to the railings outside, and Norman said we should be thankful he wasn’t in the mounted division. The Professor sat locked in a prison of detachment. His vast body overlapped his upright chair. Only his eyes remained alert, dismayed, drowned in their own philandering. He accepted his mug of stewed tea with disbelief, while Lily, supreme in her slum kitchen, hummed for my benefit something from Gilbert and Sullivan. She always has a line of song for every occasion, sung badly of course, but comical. She told me that the day she was born, her moment of entry into life, the Bolton Borough Band were on the wireless and a Mr Gearn was giving a euphonium solo. All lies but very interesting. And she said miles away, under the earth in the Llay Main Colliery in Wales, a boy was working, and just as her mother shuddered in the final birth pangs, a piece of steel flew out of a wedge and opened this particular boy’s jugular vein, so that he expired on the instant. I suppose it’s possible. She asked me when I was born. She was bored, because for once there were no men calling and though she pretends to be cultural she has no consistency, and we sat hunched over that blue oilcloth on the table and she wrote things down on a scrap of paper. She’s so convincing that I did begin to tremble slightly with a kind of excitement, as if there would really be some clue as to why my life has been one of such suffering and torment. I was a bit wary at first of giving the true year of my birth. It sounded so ancient, so pre-existent – October 29th, 1899. I flounced a little and evaded her question but finally she made me tell her and I regretted it immediately, because I’m sure she’s told everybody. I don’t know why she makes me tell her things. God knows, no one else would even dare to ask. Anyway, she wrote down the date and then counted on her fingers (there seem such gaps in her education) and looked up knowingly, ‘Ah that’s interesting. Three nines are most interesting …’ What rubbish. ‘Why, darling?’ I said, humouring her, but all the same there was a little bead of terror and delight rolling through my bloodstream. ‘Well, it leaves 18 and 2, which makes 20.’ At least she added it up correctly. ‘So take 20 from the three nines, or 27, and what have we?’ she asked. ‘We’ve seven left,’ I said, while her pencil went on doodling across the paper. She was drawing a great clump of flowers in and out of all the dates.