A Weekend with Claude

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘At seven years of age there was a great change in your life, and one that influenced you throughout the years that followed.’ Of course I must have told her at some time how my poor father left London and came to the north just before my seventh birthday, and how I went to the Hebrew school, and how I felt I was forever doomed to unhappiness. That was the year I knew I was unique and singled out for some great destiny. Of course I never imagined just what kind of destiny. I thought it was something glorious, something miraculous. I didn’t dream that greatness was a word that could be equally well applied to states of poverty and misery. However, I said, ‘Go on, darling, that’s clever,’ though clever it was not.

  ‘What hour were you born?’ she asked, staring at me as if she believed I was mesmerised by her. I can never tell if she’s acting or not. ‘In the afternoon,’ I said, though God knows if I was correct. Who the bloody hell cares now – certainly not my poor dear mother, gone beyond recall. There I was, an orphan, for all I had been born of parents in 1899, talking such rubbish with a chit of a girl whose egotism is only exceeded by mine.

  ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘let me see.’ And there was a little silence during which I may have laughed scornfully though now I can’t remember. ‘Right,’ she said quite loudly, and sat up straight and laid her pencil down on the piece of paper. ‘At the moment of near birth two cousins chose to marry not far from your home. An Albert Cohen and a Georgina Goldberg. They stood in the Empress Rooms at the Kensington Palace Hotel and were married by the Rabbi and two assistants. At the Lyceum, Henry Irving was applying powder to his brow during the matinee interval of Robespierre. At the Shaftesbury Theatre the stage was being swept for the evening performance of the Belle of New York. The Boers had been bombarding Mafeking for two hours, and would continue to do so for another two, managing to kill one dog, breed unknown. The dear Queen went out for a drive with Princess Henry of Battenberg, and remarked that the weather was mild. General Harrison, ex-president of the U.S.A., stood on the deck of the steamer St Paul, bound for New York, waving a little square of white handkerchief. His wife remained below. At the precise moment you slid with curled palms on to the cotton sheets of your mother’s delivery bed, Prince Frederick Augustus of Saxony fell from his horse and sustained a slight fracture of the skull.’

  I didn’t laugh. How could I? It might be true. She has such a fertile imagination.

  ‘Oh darling,’ I said. ‘Darling, what if it were true?’

  ‘Well, it is,’ she asserted. ‘Oh yes, and here’s a very strange thing. Someone far away in Bohemia or Moravia’ (I’m quite sure she had been reading a book on the period) ‘was writing a letter to the newspapers saying he was disturbed by the growing amount of anti-semitism. Now if that’s not an omen, what is?’

  I wrote it all down in my notebook in shorthand – what she’d told me. I felt quite unwell. Almost as if I’d been present at my own beginnings and if I’d only had the knowledge or the strength I could have cried out ‘No, not now – later. Don’t give birth to me now, it’s not fair.’ It isn’t fair. I shouldn’t have been born then. I still have it all in my notebook though I can’t read my own writing. She seemed to know a lot more about when I was born than about when she was born. Except the text from the Bible on her day was ‘And God saw everything he had made and behold it was good’. She wouldn’t tell me what my text was. Maybe she genuinely didn’t know, but it still worries me, not knowing and thinking that maybe she knows, and it might be much more enlightening than all that rubbish about the General with his handkerchief, and Augustus falling off his horse.

  I asked Claude last night if Lily had ever told him about the day he was born, but he was too distracted, too depressed suddenly to concentrate on anything poor little me had to say. ‘Have another drink,’ he said, pouring out more of the dreadful stuff and encouraging me to sing again. He began to walk restlessly about the room and put on a record whose words I couldn’t catch – except for something like ‘Who’s as blue as me, ba-a-by?’ My head really was tormenting me: eyes smarting, heart swelling up and up like a brown paper bag – the agony before it splits. I turned my back on them all, hoping they would at least have the decency to notice I was suffering. I felt so light-headed. There’s such a bundle of me always, nothing like the real me at all (though it’s only to be expected that I should be all swollen and gorged after an operation such as I had) and I might almost be in disguise. I do wonder who those stubby little feet belong to, and what trick of the light makes my hair look like Flanders wire, and why my teeth have all rotted away, because inside I’m just as I always was – a trim little figure, not thin ever, but firm and shapely and such beautiful glossy hair, and such an air about me of gaiety and flirtatiousness and womanly warmth.

  ‘What’s up, Shebah?’ asked Victorian Norman, from somewhere. Don’t think I couldn’t guess how his hand, hidden from view, was caressing the neck – such a ladylike column of a neck – of Julia. Maybe Claude knew it too.

  ‘Don’t you bloody well know?’ I shouted, because I don’t have to be polite to Norman. Friends we are. Friends! Lily did a painting last winter of the three of us sitting on the sofa, with the paraffin lamp dangling just above my head. Why she had to put that in I can’t imagine, though there may be some symbolism. It was very clever, the painting, because though she couldn’t have intended to capture it quite so subtly, we all looked so joined together by blobs of paint, so chummily bunched together, and yet on each of the three faces (though it doesn’t look in the least like me – and why she had to paint those scarves round my head I don’t know) there was such a look of distaste, such enmity in spite of the friendly grouping. And that’s how we are really. I despise this so-called friendship, and I despise Victorian Norman and his disrespect, and I despise Lily for her so-called kindness, because she never stops picking my brains and taking the credit for it. They are all headed for disaster and they all approach it with such overwhelming ennui and lassitude. It hardly matters where I’m heading or in what frame of mind, seeing I was born in 1899 and have received nothing but blows on the head ever since. Claude came round the back of my chair and peered into my face. ‘Go away,’ I said, flapping at him with my handkerchief, sniffing and yet still smiling, though there was a little gust of irritation beginning to eddy upwards.

  ‘Ah, my love,’ he crooned, the lying swine, squatting at my feet. Behind us no doubt Norman and Julia were quite at liberty to do exactly as they wanted.

  ‘An excess of secretion from the lachrymal gland flowing on to the cheek as tears,’ said Claude, quite insane, while I dabbed at my poor weak eyes, and all the gay cheekiness evaporated slowly, and I felt so angry and so weary. I wanted to hit him. I don’t utterly dislike Claude. He can be kind.

  ‘You’re all such fools,’ I said. I can’t remember exactly what I said, though I could have bitten my tongue in two afterwards, with regret. I must have said that Lily really thought him a bloody fool and that she only continued the friendship for all the outings it afforded her and the free drink, and a lot about Norman being after Julia and how Lily was encouraging him. And after all that, after speaking so indiscreetly and with such malice, though it was the truth, he said so calmly, still sitting at my feet with his fingers playing with his beard, ‘Very probably, Shebah, very probably.’ I can’t help myself, I don’t want to be disloyal, though God knows they all crucify me ten times a day, but I get so irritated and my words are only a form of vomit. I have no control and no ease till the last little morsel of half-digested hatred is spat into their faces. I sat feeling dreadfully weak then and ashamed. Suddenly two tears welled up in Claude’s eyes and spilled, without breaking, on to his shirt. I could have died. I couldn’t tell him it was excess secretion from his lachrymal gland or whatever, and I couldn’t erase what I had said, but fortunately nothing followed the two tears. His eyes dried up, and behind us there were scuffling noises and the voice on the record stopped asking ‘Who’s as blue as me, ba-a-by?’ tho
ugh I might have told him.

  ‘Get up, Shebah,’ Claude said, ‘come and look out of the window and smell the air.’ He pulled me up out of the chair quite gently, though for all I know it might have been then, in that singular moment, that he decided to shoot me when he got the opportunity. Norman and Julia were no longer in the room. I was quite startled. He didn’t seem to notice – just took hold of my hand and drew me to the window and began clearing the objects from the sill and putting them on the gramophone lid: a little white figure with a parasol and a large silver tea pot and an orange candlestick with a small stuffed bird sitting within its centre cup. The little bird rolled on to the floor when he moved the candlestick and I picked it up for him – such a soft-textured creature with glass eyes sewn into the down on either side of its pointed beak. We leaned together on the wide sill overlooking the little yard and the garden beyond. ‘Aaah,’ I said, taking only little snapping gulps and wishing I could unsay all I had said a moment ago. ‘Aaaah,’ he breathed, inhaling the cold air and swelling his huge chest. The light from the room shone right on to a tree below and made its leaves so green, so lovely. The wistaria curled over the sill we leaned on, and Claude played with its leaves as if they were an extension of his beard. I was worried about Norman and Julia. I hoped they weren’t out there in the grass beyond the light. I didn’t want Claude to be made more unhappy, though maybe I don’t understand any of them. I asked Claude about Lily, tentatively this time. I really didn’t want to do any more harm. ‘Do you think she loves Edward?’ I said, and it was difficult for me, because I had spoken so slightingly about love.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, and turned to look at me, half his face in shadow, and one eye in utter darkness. ‘There will,’ he continued, and God knows what he meant, and probably it was all words, ‘be a worse agony yet to come.’

  ‘But why, darling, why?’

  ‘I can’t tell you, Shebah. I only know it to be true. Lily will fall, and Billie will be as nothing.’

  ‘Oh yes, darling,’ I said, ‘that was dreadful. Poor darling Lily.’ And I meant it. I do mean it. She was unhappy – so excited about Billie coming home and so hopeful for the future and we all stayed away deliberately, and then I met Norman in the street and he said, ‘Haven’t you heard? Lily is very ill, and Billie is gone.’ Of course I don’t know what happened, even now, but I did hear she tried to kill herself. It’s hard to be certain about Lily. It’s so short a time ago, and yet here she is seemingly none the worse for it and with another devoted lover already breathing her name as if she were a goddess. Nothing seems to check her or break her growth. Any setbacks only serve to accelerate her progress.

  ‘Yes, dreadful,’ said Claude.

  I did feel it was real for a moment. Of course sitting here now with them all sprawled out on the grass it doesn’t seem dreadful at all. They’re so resilient. But the air last night, so chill, so cool, and the quiet room so filled with treasures, and the wine inside me and my guilt, and the memory of those two realistic, unchangeable tears that had spilled so terribly from Claude’s eyes, made everything seem truly without hope. And I almost – yes, almost – felt I’d crossed the gulf that separated them from me, because for once I hadn’t merely shared and sympathised with their general suffering but had in some way contributed to it. It did occur to me then that it was this factor, this tangling and goading that went on between them, that united them so strongly. They are all partial fashioners of each other’s despair, a touch here, a deceit there, words spoken out of turn, hypocrisies, insincerities, insanities binding them like glue and making them in the end indestructible.

  I was so busy last night thinking these thoughts, which are all so much damn rubbish, and worrying my head for answers, that I didn’t realise Claude too had left the room. Without him at the window it was just another window and I felt cold, so I put all the things back on the ledge and the little brown bird, which reminded me of a song, and I hummed the tune and felt quite clear-headed.

  All through the night there’s a little brown bird singing,

  Singing in the hush of the darkness and the dew …

  Propped against the wall was a painting of a nude woman with long hair, and a little dog snuffling in her lap. A very golden painting, though my eyes are half useless. I had to bend down to look at it closely and I half fell over, which made me laugh, and there I was sprawled on the carpet laughing and one of the dogs woke up and pushed its nose into my chest. Really very like the painting. Though the days when I loll about without my clothes are long since past. Not that they ever began. I didn’t want Claude to think there was an atmosphere, so I began to sing ‘Let’s Start All Over Again’. I felt the more noise I made and the more gaiety there seemed to be distilled, the quicker the sadness would evaporate. And I didn’t want anyone to think I was listening to conversations, though everything was very still, and I didn’t care to think what Victorian Norman was about.

  I kept remembering something Lily had said about Miss Evans, the hair-remover – how she’d gone into her son’s room and found a used ‘conservative’ on the mantelpiece. At the time they all laughed themselves silly over it and I thought they were mad, but I can see now that it’s somewhat humorous, though perhaps with spending so much time together, I mean a whole weekend like this, I’m becoming as obsessed as the rest of them. Not that I know for sure what those things look like, though in that house when Eichmann Hanna was bringing his women in every night there were some disgusting things thrown down the toilet. The extremes there are in living. Flushing the toilet in that evil-smelling little cubicle and through the broken pane of glass, one star, six-pointed and diamond-white, a million light years away, still giving forth such a pure and crystal memory above my weary head.

  I got up off the floor and peeped out of the window into Claude’s garden, but I couldn’t see anything but a multitude of leaves, and while I was looking Claude himself came back into the room, as noiselessly as he had left. I did feel better, more naturally gay, and he looked gayer too, more calm, and his eyes though still half barbarous, smiled at me. He is a barbarous man despite his preoccupation with glass and china and everything fragile: a primitive man, half covered in hair, moving about the bejewelled room, humming softly, picking things up continually, searching with his hands among the pictures and the ornaments for yet more packets of cigarettes and more bottles of wine. Save for the absence of wings he looked like a great furred bee. There was still no sign of Julia and I thought I had better sing again to make things easier. At that moment, Lily, in a pink-striped nightgown, almost jumped into the room on top of me, with Norman behind her.