“It would seem, ladies and gentlemen, that there has been a failure of the … I fear the … hope to procure the …”
There was a rough animal laugh from the audience and, all standing up now, they began to shuffle slowly for the doors.
“Get out of my way. Please let me pass,” the young man shouted in a stentorian voice which no one heard for he was shouting inside himself. “I have got to get to a girl over there. I haven’t seen her for nearly a year. I’ve got to say ‘Goodbye’ to her for the last time.”
And the crowd stuck out their bottoms and their elbows, broadened their backs and grew taller all around him, saying:
“Don’t push.”
A man, addressing the darkness in an educated voice, said: “It is remarkable how calm an English crowd is. One saw it in the Blitz.”
The young man knocked over a chair in the next row and in the next, shoving his way into any gap he could find in the clotted mass of fur and wool, and muttering:
“I’ve only spoken to her three times in my life. She is wearing blue and has a broad nose. She lives somewhere in London—I don’t know where—all I know is that I thought she was ill but it turns out that she went to a wedding in Scotland. I heard she is going to marry a young man in Canada. Think of a girl like that with a face as composed as a white rose, but a rose that can laugh—taking her low voice to Canada and lying at night among thousands of fir trees and a continent of flies and snow. I have got to get to the door and catch her there and say ‘Goodbye.’ ”
He broke through four rows of chairs, trod on feet and pushed, but the crowd was slow and stacked up solid. Hundreds of feet scraped. Useless to say to them:
“A fox is among you. I knew when I first saw this girl that she was to be dreaded. I said just now in a poetic way that her skin is the colour of a white rose, but it isn’t. Her hair has the gloss of a young creature’s, her forehead is wide and her eyebrows are soft and arching, her eyes are dark blue and her lips warm and helpless. The skin is really like bread. A marvellous girl—everyone says so—but the sure sign of it is that when I first saw her I was terrified of her. She was standing by an office window watching people in the street below and talking on the telephone and laughing and the laughter seemed to swim all over her dress and her breasts seemed to join in and her waist, even her long young legs that were continuing the dance she had been at—she was saying—the night before. It was when she turned and saw me that my sadness began.
“My wife was there—it was her office—and she said to me in a whisper:
“ ‘She is marvellous, isn’t she? The child enjoys herself and she’s right. But what fools girls are. Sleep with all the boys you like, don’t get married yet, it’s a trap, I keep telling her.’
“I decided never to go to that office again.”
The crowd shuffled on in the dark. He was choking in the smell of fur coats, clamouring to get past, to get to the door, angrily begging someone to light one more match—“What? Has the world run out of matches and lighters?”—so that he could see her, but they had stopped lighting matches now. He wanted to get his teeth into the coat of a large broad woman in front of him. He trod on her heels.
“I’m sorry,” he wanted to say. “I’m just trying to say ‘Goodbye’ to someone. I couldn’t do it before—think of my situation. I didn’t care—it didn’t matter to me—but there was trouble at the office. My wife had broken with that wretched man Duncan who had gone off with a girl called Irmgard and when my wife heard of it she made him throw Irmgard over and took him back and once she’d got him she took up with the Professor—you saw him twiddling his gold chain. In my opinion it’s a surprise that the Exhibition ever got going, what with the Professor and Duncan playing Cox and Box in the office. But I had to deliver my drawings. And so I saw this girl a second time. I also took a rug with me, a rug my wife had asked for from the debris. Oh yes, I’ve got debris.
“The girl got up quickly from her desk when she saw me. I say quickly. She was alone and my sadness went. She pointed to the glass door at the end of the room.
“ ‘There’s a Committee meeting. She’s in there with her husband and the others.’
“I said—and this will make you laugh Mrs Whatever-your-name-is, but please move on—I said:
“ ‘But I am her husband,’ I said.
“With what went on in that office how could the girl have known? I laughed when I said this, laughing at myself. The girl did not blush; she studied me and then she laughed too. Then she took three steps towards me, almost as if she was running—I counted those steps—for she came near enough to touch me on the sleeve of my raincoat. Soft as her face was she had a broad strong nose. In those three steps she became a woman in my eyes, not a vision, not a sight to fear, a friendly creature, well-shaped.
“ ‘I ought to have known by your voice—when you telephone,’ she said.
“Her mistake made her face shine.
“ ‘Is the parcel for the Exhibition?’ she said.
“I had put it on a chair.
“ ‘No, it’s a rug. It weighs a ton. It’s Leopold’s rug.’
“ ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘Just say it’s Leopold’s. Leopold is a dog.’
“ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I thought you meant a friend.’
“ ‘No. Leopold wants it, apparently. I’ve got a lot of rugs. I keep them in the garage at my studio. You don’t want a rug, do you? As fast as I get rid of them some girl comes along and says, “How bare your floor is. It needs a rug,” and brings me one. I bet when I get back I’ll find a new one. Or, I could let you have a box of saucepans, a Hoover, a handsaw, a chest of drawers, firetongs, a towel rail …’
“I said this to see her laugh, to see her teeth and her tongue again and to see her body move under its blue dress which was light blue on that day. And to show her what a distance lay between her life and mine.
“ ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said again but at the door I said,
“ ‘Beds too. When you get married. All in the garage.’
“She followed me to the door and I waved back to her.”
To the back of the fur-coated woman he said, “I can be fascinating. It’s a way of wiping oneself out. I wish you’d wipe yourself out and let me pass. I shall never see her again.”
And until this night he had not seen her again. He started on a large design which he called The Cornucopia. It was, first of all, a small comic sketch of a dustbin which contained chunks of the rubbish in his garage—very clever and silly. He scrapped it and now he made a large design and the vessel was rather like the girl’s head but when he came to drawing the fruits of the earth they were fruits of geometry—hexagons, octagons, cubes, with something like a hedgehog on top, so he made the vessel less like a girl’s head; the thing drove him mad the more he worked on it.
September passed into October in the parks and once or twice cats on the glass roof of the studio lost their balance and came sliding down in a screech of claws in the hurly-burly of love.
One night his wife telephoned him.
“Oh God. Trouble,” he said when he heard her plaintive voice. He had kept out of her way for months.
“Is it all right? Are you alone?” she said. “Something awful has happened. Duncan’s going to get married again. Irmgard has got her claws into him. I rang Alex—he always said I could ring—but he won’t come. Why am I rejected? And you remember that girl—she’s gone. The work piles up.”
“To Canada?” he said.
“What on earth makes you say that?” she said in her fighting voice.
“You said she was.”
“You’re always putting words into my mouth. She’s in hospital.”
“Ill,” he said. “How awful. Where is she?”
“How do I know?” she said. “Leopold,” and now she was giggling. “Leopold’s making a mess again. I must ring off.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Ill! In hospital! The picture of the girl running towards
him in the office came back to him and his eyes were smeared with tears. He felt on his arms and legs a lick of ice and a lick of fire. His body filled with a fever that passed and then came back so violently that he lost his breath. His knees had gone as weak as string. He was in love with the girl. The love seemed to come up from events thousands of years old. The girl herself he thought was not young but ancient. Perhaps Egyptian. The skin of her face was not rose-like, nor like bread, but like stone roughened by centuries. “I am feeling love,” he said, “for the whole of a woman for the first time. No other woman exists. I feel love not only for her face, her body, her voice, her hands and feet but for the street she lives in, the place she was born, her dresses and stockings, her bus journeys, her handbags, her parties, her dances. I don’t know where she is. How can I find out? Why didn’t I realise this before?”
Squeezed like a rag between the crowd he got to the doorway and there the crowd bulged and carried him through it backwards because he was turning to look for her. Outside the door was an ambitious landing. The crowd was cautiously taking the first steps down the long sweep of this staircase. There was a glimmer of light here from the marble of the walls and that educated man gripped his arm and said, “Mind the steps down,” and barred the young man’s way. He fought free of the grip and stood against the wall. “Don’t be a damn fool,” said the educated man, waving his arms about. “If anyone slips down there, the rest of you will pile on top of them.” The man now sounded mad. “I saw it in the war. A few at a time. A few at a time,” he screamed. And the young man felt the man’s spit on his face. The crowd passed him like mourners, indecipherable, but a huge woman turned on him and held him by the sleeves with both hands. “Thornee! Thornee! Where are you? You’re leaving me,” she whimpered. “Dear girl,” said a man behind her. “I am here.” She let go, swung round and collided with her husband and grabbed him. “You had your arm round that woman,” she said. They faded past. The young man looked for a face. Up the stairs, pushing against the procession going down, a man came up sidling against the wall. Every two or three steps he shouted, “Mr Zagacheck?” Zagacheck, Zagacheck, Zagacheck came nearer and suddenly a mouth bawled into the young man’s face with a blast of heavily spiced breath.
“Mr Zagacheck?”
“I am not Mr Zagacheck,” said the young man in a cold clear voice and as he said it the man was knocked sideways. A woman took the young man’s hand and said:
“Francis!” and she laughed. She had named him. It was the girl, of course. “Isn’t this wild? Isn’t it marvellous? I saw you. I’ve been looking for you,” she said.
“I have been looking for you.”
He interlaced his fingers with her warm fingers and held her arm against his body.
“Are you with your wife?” she said.
“No,” he said.
She squeezed his hand, she lifted it and held it under her arm.
“Are you alone?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said. “I thought you’d gone.” Under her arm he could feel her breast. “I mean for good, left the country. I came to say ‘Goodbye.’ ”
“Oh yes!” she said with enthusiasm and rubbed herself against him. “Why didn’t you come to the office?”
He let go of her hand and put his arm round her waist.
“I’ll tell you later. We’ll go somewhere.”
“Yes!” she said again.
“There’s another way out. We’ll wait here and then slip out by the back way.”
The crowd pressed against them. And then, he heard his wife’s voice, only a foot away from him. She was saying: “I’m not making a scene. It’s you. I wonder what has happened to the girl.”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” the man said. “Stop trying to change the subject. Yes or no? Are you?”
The young man stiffened: “This is the test. If the girl speaks the miracle crashes.”
She took his arm from her waist and gripped his hand fiercely. They clenched, sticking their nails into each other, as if trying to wound. He heard one of the large buttons on his wife’s coat click against a button of his coat. She was there for a few seconds; it seemed to him as long as their marriage. He had not been so close to his wife for years. Then the crowd moved on, the buttons clicked again and he heard her say:
“There’s only Leopold there.”
In a puff of smoke from her cigarette she vanished. The hands of the girl and Francis softened and he pressed hard against her.
“Now,” he whispered. “I know the way.”
They sidled round the long wall of the landing, passing a glimmering bust—“Mr Zagacheck,” he said—and came to the corner of a corridor, long and empty, faintly lit by a tall window at the end. They almost ran down it, hand in hand. Twice he stopped to try the door of a room. A third door opened.
“In here,” he said.
He pulled her into a large dark room where the curtains had not been drawn, a room that smelled of new carpet, new paint and new furniture. There was the gleam of a desk. They groped to the window. Below was a square with its winter trees and the headlights of cars playing upon them and the crowd scattering across the roads. He put his arms round her and kissed her on the mouth and she kissed him. Her hands were as wild as his.
“You’re mad,” she said. “This is the director’s room,” as he pushed her on to the sofa but when his hands were on the skin of her leg, she said, “Let’s go.”
“When did you start to love me?” he said.
“I don’t know. Just now. When you didn’t come. I don’t know. Don’t ask me. Just now, when you said you loved me.”
“But before?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
And then the lights in the building came on and the lights on the desk and they got up, scared, hot-faced, hot-eyed, hating the light.
“Come on. We must get out,” he said.
And they hurried from the lighted room to get into the darkness of the city.
(1974)
THE VICE-CONSUL
Under the blades of the wide fan turning slowly in its Yes-No tropical way, the vice-consul sloped in his office, a soft and fat man, pink as a ham, the only pink man in the town, and pimpled by sweat. He was waiting for the sun to go down into the clouds over the far bank of the estuary, ten miles wide here, and to put an end to a bad week. He had been plagued by the officers and crew of a Liverpool ship, the Ivanhoe, smoking below in the harbour. There was trouble about shipping a puma.
His Indian clerk put his head in at the door and said in the whisper of the tropics, “Mr McDowell’s here.”
Years at this post on the river had reduced the vice-consul’s voice also to the same sort of whisper, but he had a hoarseness that gave it rank. He believed in flying off the handle and showing authority by using allusions which his clerk could not understand.
“Not the bloody Twenty-third Psalm from that blasted tramp again,” he said and was glad McDowell heard it as he pushed in earnestly after the clerk. McDowell was a long-legged man with an unreasonable chin and emotional knees.
“I’ve brought Felden’s licence,” he said.
“I ought to have had it a week ago,” said the vice-consul. “Have you got the animal aboard yet? It was on the dock moaning away all day. You could hear it up here.”
“We’ve got it on deck,” said McDowell.
“Typical hunter,” said the vice-consul, “thinking he could ship it without a licence. They’ve no feeling for animals and they’re liars too.”
“No hearts,” said McDowell.
At this low hour at the end of the day, the vice-consul did not care to have a ship’s officer trump his own feelings.
It was part of the vice-consul’s martyrdom during his eight years at the port that he was, so to say, the human terminus on whom hunters, traders, oilmen, television crews, sailors whose minds had been inflated by dealing with too much geography, dumped their boasts. Nature in the shape of thousands of
miles of jungle, flat as kale, thousands of miles of river, tributaries, drifting islands of forest rubbish, not to mention millions of animals, snakes, bloodsucking fish, swarms of migrating birds, butterflies and biting insects, had scared them and brought them down to the river to unload their fantasies.
“Take your boa constrictor …” they began. “Take your alligator … Take your marching ant …”
Now he had to “take” a man called Felden who had tried to stuff him up with the tale that his fourteen-year-old son had caught the beast on his fishing line in a backwater above Manaos.
The vice-consul was a sedentary man and longed to hear a fact. “When do you sail?” he said when McDowell sat down on an upright chair which was too small for him.
“The day after tomorrow,” said McDowell.
“I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see you lot go,” said the vice-consul, making his usual speech to departing sailors. “I’d like to know where the hell your company gets its crews.”
“I’m from Belfast,” said McDowell, placing his hands on those knees.
“Oh, nothing personal,” said the vice-consul. He stamped the licence, pushed it across his desk and stood up, but McDowell did not move. He leaned forward and said, “Would you do me a favour?”
“What favour?” said the vice-consul, offended.
McDowell started to caress his knees as if to get their help. “Would you be able to recommend a dentist in the town?” he said.
The vice-consul sat down, made a space on his desk and said, “Well, that’s a change. I thought you were going to tell me you had got yourself clapped like the rest of your crew and wanted a doctor. Dentist? Afraid not. There isn’t a dentist in the place, not one I’d recommend, anyway. You’ve been here three weeks and can see for yourself. Half the population have no teeth at all. None of the women, anyway. Go down the street, and if you’re not careful, you can walk straight down their throats.”
McDowell nodded. The vice-consul wanted more than a nod.
The Pritchett Century Page 50
