We trooped downstairs to the dining hall in the basement, where the light pine of my youth had been darkened by time and spilled food; where the honours boards had spread across the walls like creepers; where the long tables reminded me of lunchtimes spent bending cutlery and whizzing salt cellars up and down like drinks in a Western. From backstage came the steamy reek of communal cooking and the clatter of a thousand knives and forks being dropped into a metal bin.
I sat between Penny and Simmons while Colonel Barker from the top table wished us officially welcome again, then bawled ‘Bon appétit’ as if he were on the parade ground. Simmons had emerged after all these years looking fairly normal: even his ears seemed to have grown back closer to his head. He turned out to know a lot about railway arcana: dead stations; tunnels people had simply forgotten about, like in Conan Doyle; tales of Blitz nights in the Underground. Penny and I got along well, too, with one of those drinking people-and-places conversations. On the opposite side of the table were faces which, projected back into soft-cheeked spottiness, were recognisable as Lowkes, Leigh, Evans and Pook. News was heard of Gilchrist (in the wine trade), Hilton (a plate-glass academic) and Lennox (back at the school teaching). Thorne had dropped out of sight; Waterfield was in a French jail serving six months for pimping.
At first, my scorn flashed into place automatically: like a batsman, I went on to the back foot for every ball, regardless of length. But as the dinner wore on, I found myself almost enjoying it. Perhaps it’s hard, having escaped school and its influences by efforts you yourself deem heroic, to credit others with the same tenacity, the same gritty autonomy. The idea that some of them might have found it an easier, less heroic process than you did is even less acceptable.
‘Publishing, I hear?’ Leigh (known all those years ago as Ugh) shouted across at me as I launched a geological probe into my trifle in a search for solid bodies. He had a whiny, imprecise voice I’d always disliked; what seemed at first a regional inflection turned out to be only casual articulation.
‘More or less; bit of research too, though. Firm called Harlow Tewson.’
‘Of course, of course. I’ve got your gardening book. It’s quite good, actually; only trouble is it’s so big you need a wheelbarrow to help you get it down the garden.’
I tossed him a heard-it-before smile for the trim suburban quip. The book in question was admittedly bound in imitation weathered teak and was quite heavy; but only a numbskull would consult it anywhere except in the house.
‘Yes, yes,’ he went on, with a more-of-this-to-come look, ‘I left it out one afternoon and suddenly thought, I’d better fetch it in before it sprouts roots and I don’t recognise it any more and start staking it. Ha ha. We’ve got your kitchen book as well.’
This was a thick, square volume, bound in a sort of tin foil, with a portrait of the Queen on the front cover; it was designed to look like a Coronation cake-tin.
‘Yes, many’s the time I’ve given it a shake to see if there were any biscuits inside. Ha ha. Why do you think people are always making things nowadays to look like things they aren’t? Do you think it’s a sort of profound escapism? Do you think the motives are economic or psychological?’
‘What do you do?’ (I didn’t care to follow up that pissy point, thank you very much.)
‘Oh, same sort of country, really. I run a little firm called Hidebound Books.’
What, Leigh? I’d somehow assumed the little … well, nothing specific, though a whole range of unspecified possibilities. So they hadn’t all become bank managers as Toni and I had predicted.
‘We’re only a tiny outfit, but …’
‘Of course – you published Toni’s Muted Manglings.’
Hidebound Books – the name was planned to contain a double irony – published small neat paperbacks on a variety of subjects; partly gap-filling; partly judicious reprints; but a fair proportion of original stuff. Toni’s monograph was in a series called – after Orwell – As I Please. In it he argued how all important books are on first publication significantly misunderstood, whether they are praised or panned. If they are panned, there are always those ready for an acrimonious public dispute; but if they are acclaimed, then no one cares about the critics’ mistakes. Flaubert said success is always off the mark. It was the farcical bits in Madame Bovary that made it a hit. In Toni’s view, the psychology of those who acclaim success for the wrong reasons was even more interesting than that of those who decry it for the wrong reasons.
‘Yes, we did. It didn’t get many notices, but then you wouldn’t expect it to: it was too hot to handle for most of the critical establishment. I quite liked it.’
Leigh then explained to me his principles of business, which seemed to hinge a lot on what he referred to as ‘creative bankruptcy’.
‘No – really, we’re on the up. Setting up a new imprint at the moment. We’re going to call it Scavenger Books. Translations of spunkbooks – you know, what other people call seminal works. Mainly French, I should think.’
‘Sounds fun.’
‘Tempting?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We need someone to run it. You’ve had a good education.’ He waved his hand round at the dining-hall (as rowdy now as two decades ago); he smiled what looked to be a non-commercial smile. ‘We’ll match your salary; travel; get to meet a few penseurs.’
‘Harlow Tewson aren’t going bankrupt to pay my salary.’
‘I don’t think we will. Look, I’ve even got a card.’ (A fancy piece of Kate Greenaway, with tulips curling tweely round his initials) ‘Give me a ring.’
I nodded. The evening began its decline with sweating cheese, coffee and brandy (only fit for tipping in the coffee). Colonel Barker rose, and I suddenly remembered that when we misconjugated verbs he used to twist our ears hard in opposite directions. Yet as he stood there, waiting for his former pupils to quieten down, his medal occasionally dispensing a flash of light from his tub of a belly, he suddenly seemed incapable of ever being frightening again; he had become the sort of person that you might offer your seat to on a train.
‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘I was going to say “Boys”, but you’re all a lot bigger than me now – Gentlemen, whenever I come to these dinners, I always think that things are not half as bad as the newspaper johnnies keep trying to make out. I really do. I’ve talked to quite a few of you this evening, and without any swollen head stuff I’d like to say I think the School can be jolly well proud of you.’ (Banging of cutlery, stamping of feet – it was like the announcement of house colours) ‘I know it’s fashionable nowadays to disparage anything that’s been successful for a number of years, but I’m not going to jump on that boat. I think that if something’s been successful for a number of years, then that’s because it’s GOOD.’ (More stamping) ‘Still, no politics, no packdrill, so I won’t waste your time with what I think. I’ll just put it this way. When you’re as old as I am,’ (cries of ‘Don’t believe it’ and ‘Shame’; Barker smiled; his voice took on a warm croakiness) ‘you’ll know how I feel. I’ve seen a lot of charges pass through my hands: it’s like watching a mighty river of boys flowing down to the great sea of adulthood. And we masters are a bit like lock-keepers. We tend the banks; we keep traffic flowing; occasionally’ (he looked serious) ‘we even have to jump in and pull someone out. And though the water may get choppy at times, we know that this mighty river of boys will get to the sea in the end. Tonight I feel sure that my own modest efforts on your behalf have not gone unrewarded. I’ll be able to retire to my lock-keeper’s cottage with a sense of pride. I thank you. Now an old man will let you get on with your coffee in peace.’
I got home drunkish (Tim and I had a couple for the rails at the station bar at Baker Street and smirked at Barker’s speech) but cheerful. Marion was already in bed, with a huge Blooms-bury biography holding her down like a paperweight. I unlaced my shoes, clambered on to the bed and stuck a hand down the front of her nightdress.
‘Forgotten what they
’re like,’ I mumbled.
‘Then you must be drunk,’ she answered, but not reprovingly.
I took out my hand, pulled the front of her nightdress towards me and breathed heavily down it. I peered in.
‘If the tip turns green … Yes, there we go. You’re right again, my love, as always. I’ (hoisting myself into a kneeling position and gazing at her uxoriously) ‘I have been offered a job this evening by Balldrop Leigh.’
‘What as?’ She took my hand away from the front of her nightdress, towards which it had been confidently returning. ‘What as?’
‘Balldrop was called Balldrop,’ I went on in the tone of one interviewed in old age, ‘because when we went swimming at school, in the nude, as we did until we reached the sixth form, by which I mean that in the sixth form we no longer went swimming at all, but when, previously, we did go, it was always in the nude, and Leigh, I remember, indeed I think anyone of my generation will recall, we can phone Penny if you don’t believe me, he’ll confirm it, had one ball which hung down, oh, I should say, trick of the memory and all that, but I should say a good two and a half inches below the other. It was the time that elastic-sided boots were becoming fashionable, and we, my friends and I, that is, used to say that Balldrop was the only boy in the world with an elastic-sided scrotum. And now Balldrop is offering me a job. I can’t understand it. Haven’t I got a job?’
In the course of this speech I managed to insinuate my hand under the bedclothes and work it up under Marion’s nightie from the other direction.
‘What as?’
But at that point my hand reached a destination of equivalent – if not (who can say?) greater – value to its earlier, thwarted one.
‘Stud?’ I merely replied, feeling puzzled.
6 • Object Relations
‘So this is it?’ Toni had said as he stood slyly quizzing my vegetable patch. I hadn’t answered; why let someone else cut in on your self-reproaches? You don’t need friends for that. When I’m chamoising the car in the front drive and some half-familiar face walks past and smiles and raises his stick and points approvingly at a sprinting patch of deckle-edged ivy, don’t imagine I can’t hear the voice we all give free lodging to in a room at the back of our skulls: the one that goes, fine, all right, fair enough, but someone else – someone who might have been you – is even now sledding through a birch forest in Russia, pursued by wolves. On Saturday afternoons, as I track the lawn mower carefully across our sloping stretch of grass, rev, slow, brake, turn and rev again, making sure to overlap the previous stripe, don’t think I can’t still quote you Mallarmé.
But what do these complaints urge, except pointless excess and disloyalty to one’s character? What do they promise but disorientation and the loss of love? What’s so chic about extremes; and why such guilt about the false lure of action? Rimbaud journeyed to Cairo, and what did he write to his mother: ‘La vie d’ici m’ennuie et cûte trop.’ As for that sled-and-wolves stuff: there isn’t any evidence of a wolf ever killing a man, anywhere. Fancy metaphors can’t all be trusted.
I’d call myself a happy man; if preachy, then out of a sense of modest excitement, not pride. I wonder why happiness is despised nowadays: dismissively confused with comfort or complacency, judged an enemy of social – even technological – progress. People often refuse to believe it when they see it; or disregard it as something merely lucky, merely genetic: a few drops of this, a dash of that, a couple of synapses unclogged. Not an achievement.
A noir, E blanc, I rouge …? Pay your bills, that’s what Auden said.
Last night, Amy woke and began to grizzle quietly. Marion immediately stirred, but I patted her back into sleep.
‘I’ll see to her.’
I slid out of bed and made for the door which we left propped open so that we could hear Amy. I found my slightly clotted brain praising the constant carpet, the central heating, the double glazing. I was about to feel ashamed of my relief, my pleasure in this material comfort; then I thought, why bother?
By the time I got to Amy’s room, she was silent. I was a little alarmed. I fear for her when she cries, and fear for her when she goes quiet. Maybe that’s why you find yourself praising the central heating.
But she was breathing normally and lying safely. I mechanically straightened her bedclothes and headed downstairs; I felt fully awake now. I wandered into the sitting-room, emptied an ash-tray, and pushed back the sofa with the pressure of a bare big toe (speaking the advert ironically to myself, ‘Ah, those Touchglide castors’). I walked through the hall, glancing at the wire letter-cage on the front door (‘Room 101’, I always think), and went into the kitchen. The cork tiles are warm to the feet, even warmer than the carpet. I heave myself on to one of our cane bar stools – the sort with a low back rest – and feel lurchingly master of all I survey.
In the road outside is a sodium lamp whose orange light, filtered through a half-grown fir in the front garden, softly lights up the hall, the kitchen, and Amy’s bedroom. She enjoys this civic night-light, and prefers going off to sleep with her curtains drawn back. If she wakes, and there is no orange glow pervading her room (the lamp operates on a time-switch, and goes off at two in the morning), she becomes fretful.
I sit on my bar stool in my pyjamas, grip the sink unit, and tip back on to two legs. Then I shift my weight and move on to a single rubber-capped stool-end. I feel a kind of lazy pleasure at being able to do this without overbalancing. I feel a kind of lazy pleasure too at the smooth, clean, dry expanse of stainless steel in front of me. I rotate on the single leg of the stool, holding tight with one hand, then passing the other one behind my back so that I am gripping with both again. Now I am facing in to the room. The table laid for breakfast, the neat line of cups on their hooks, the onions giving off a crepuscular glisten from their hanging basket: everything is orderly, comforting, yet strangely alive. The spoon by my breakfast bowl implies the grapefruit cut and waiting in the refrigerator, the sugar on its surface already hardening into a crust. Objects contain absent people. A poster, flat and pinned, of the château of Combourg (where Chateaubriand grew up) narrates a holiday four years ago. A phalanx of a dozen glasses on a shelf implies ten friends. A feeding-bottle, stored high on a dresser, predicts a second baby. On the floor next to the dresser is a plastic travel-bag with a bright sticker we bought to amuse Amy: ‘Lions of Longleat’, it says, with a picture of a lion in the middle.
I swing round again, strangely comforted, and face the window. The orange light has turned the stripes in my pyjamas brown. I can’t even remember what their original colour is: I have several pairs in different colours, all with the same breadth of stripe, and they all come out a muddy brown in this light. I reflect on this for a few moments, to no particular end. I follow a half-factitious line about the nature of the light: how the sodium with its strength and nearness blots out the effect of even the fullest moon; but how the moon goes on nevertheless; and how this is symbolic of … well, of something, no doubt. But I don’t pursue this too seriously: there’s no point in trying to thrust false significances on to things.
I stare out of the kitchen window for a few minutes, directly at the street lamp which shines through its gauze of fir. Two o’clock occurs. The lamp snaps off, and I am left with a lozenge-shaped blue-green after-image. I continue to stare; it diminishes, and then, in its turn, and in its quieter way, snaps off.
Metroland Page 16
