There were, I suppose, eight or nine of us crammed around a single table, and the waitress who came to take our order was not, as it usually was, the middle-aged wife of the café’s Cypriot proprietor, but a young girl, at a guess no more than eighteen. She was quite tall, but pale and wispy, and though I did not notice this immediately, she was obviously very tired. In the presence of so much energy she wilted even more. Actors have loud voices, and we were ordering, and then changing our minds. ‘I’ll have fish and chips, as usual — No! Double egg and chips, please. And — wait a minute — a round of toast. Tea of course. A pot, please. None of your coffee: good God, no!’ Only Sonia noticed that the girl was not bearing up well under the strain of the café’s neon lighting, the steam, the cacophony of young careless voices. She put a hand caressingly on the girl’s arm.
‘Are you okay, love?’
The girl looked at Sonia and I saw the shock of recognition, and then fear on her face. Having ordered the rest of us to shut up, Sonia asked the girl to take a chair and sit down to take the order. The girl refused and stood immobile, seemingly paralysed. Sonia began to interrogate her. When had her shift begun? Had she had a proper break? When did she last eat? How old was she, and how much was she being paid?
This made the girl even more uncomfortable, perhaps because she was afraid that Sonia’s solicitude might lose her her job. She answered Sonia’s first three questions evasively in a barely audible voice, but she would not respond at all to the last two.
Impulsively, Sonia got up and marched into the kitchen to get some answers from Iannis, the proprietor. Meanwhile the girl took our orders. We spoke to her quietly and politely, feeling subdued and a little guilty. Presently Sonia returned.
‘I’ve had a word with Iannis. As I thought, she’s been on since lunchtime without a proper break. It’s disgraceful exploitation. This is the sort of thing that is bringing the country to its knees. I think we ought to boycott this place in protest. You’ve got here in microcosm the whole reason why Capitalism is rotten to the core . . .’
I can’t remember the rest of what she said, but it was a rant. It left us profoundly uneasy, and fearful too that this delightful period of relaxation between the shows was going to be violated by some turgid political harangue. We had to get her off the subject. During an awkward pause Tom Carter, with whom I shared a dressing room, came up with an idea.
‘Hey, Marcus,’ he said. ‘Show us that cap you bought today.’
The cap had already become a bit of a joke in our dressing room. Before the Saturday show I had been wandering about the stalls at Camden Lock, which is a couple of hundred yards down the road from the Round House. My eye had been taken by one of those black leather caps with shiny peaks, of the kind you now only see worn by moustachioed, leather clones in gay bars, but which in those days were more generally favoured, especially by those with leftist leanings. There are pictures of Lenin and other Bolsheviks — even Stalin, I believe — sporting similar headgear. I had no politics at all at that time, and I just thought it suited me. Perhaps it was an unconscious assertion of identity, of rebellion against my tidy, moneyed background, but I don’t think so. However, when I showed it to my fellow actors in the dressing room before the show I was told that I was a poseur, a ‘wanker’, and was generally laughed at. That is why I had not worn it on the way to the greasy spoon, but had just stuffed it in the pocket of my donkey jacket in case it rained. Tom had spotted this.
So, knowing that at least it would get Sonia off the subject of Worker’s Exploitation, I produced the cap. It did much to break the ice. The company immediately divided itself into two noisy factions. The larger one, headed by Tom, said it was pretentious and ‘naff’, but Sonia and a few others came to my defence. ‘Put it on,’ she kept saying. ‘Go on! Put it on!’
I put it on.
‘There! Look at that!’ said Sonia triumphantly. ‘I think it suits you absolutely brilliantly.’ It was charming of her. I thought at the time she came to my aid simply because she hated to see anyone bullied or teased, but later I was to take a more cynical view.
In the interval of the evening performance, Sonia drew me aside. If she had been charming to me in the greasy spoon, she was even nicer to me now. She told me how much she liked my performance, my enthusiasm, my dedication to the company. Following the success of the Brecht she was planning further productions; this time touring Chekhov, perhaps even Shakespeare around the country. She seemed to be taking me into her confidence. I was flattered. She had a habit of fixing you with an intense, almost unblinking gaze that was both alluring and disconcerting at the same time. Then she mentioned that her brother Ed, a lecturer at the LSE was giving a talk the following afternoon, a Sunday. Would I be interested in coming along? After all she had said it would have been rude to refuse her; and to invent an excuse under the gaze of those wild green eyes was unthinkable, but I knew what it meant.
She and her brother Ed, an academic economist of some repute, were co-founders of the Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, or the R.S.W.P for short. It was never a very large organisation, even at its zenith, but thanks to Sonia’s name and cash it hit the headlines fairly often. So, you see, I knew that I was being invited to a meeting whose chief aim was recruitment. I went, fully aware of the dangers, but thinking that I could show a moderate interest, sufficient to guarantee me a place on that Chekhov tour, without having to bind myself hand and foot to dogma and party. These are the kind of best laid plans, I find, that always go awry.
The talk was given in a seminar room at the LSE. I remember a dreary nicotine- and dung-coloured room, with clanking chairs and neon lights that made everyone look pale and ill. Someone had turned up the heating too high, and the windows, which looked out onto a dingy internal well, refused to open. Sonia came in late and sat at the back, ostentatiously, it seemed to me, demonstrating her humble assumption of the role of disciple to her brother.
Ed Tombs was as tall as his sister, but otherwise bore little resemblance to her. His features were coarser, his black hair curlier and more untidy. He was balding, and sported a beard of nondescript type. He wore pale, shapeless clothes. There was something appealing to me about his obvious lack of personal vanity. I had yet to learn that such carelessness often conceals a far deeper vein of self-regard.
He told us that Capitalist society was on the verge of extinction. You’ve got to remember that this was the end of the seventies, in the chaotic Callaghan era just before Thatcher and the collapse of Soviet Communism, so the thesis was by no means as implausible as it seems now. He explained the ideals of the R.S.W.P., which were simple and radical. Workers would seize the means of production and ‘expropriate’ the giant corporations. Do you know the word ‘expropriate’? Handy term. It’s the one Stalin used to dignify his bank robberies when he was a revolutionary. The society ushered in would be just and, of course, supremely democratic, ruled by a series of workers’ councils, guided by a central praesidium, annually elected. It all sounded admirably fair and simple. The problem is that the revolutionary socialist society, like any such system, secular or religious, is a straitjacket. Human nature is far too varied and excitable to respond well to any kind of dogmatic regime. But in those days I was a stranger to human nature; my expensive education had seen to that. I knew next to nothing about myself, so how could I be expected to know anything about other people?
Ed was, in his way a very good speaker: I suppose he had that much in common with Sonia, though his talent was differently manifested. He expressed himself clearly, forcefully, without resorting to sloppily emotional phraseology, or cliché. He had the gift of passionate rationality; and in a world where Irrationality sits on a double throne next to his brother Injustice, that is very appealing, especially to a painfully inexperienced young man, as I was at the time.
Well, I offer no more excuses: the long and the short of it was that by the end of Ed’s talk I was a convert. I had had my Road to Damascus experience. Factors other than Ed’s
evangelical logic had played their part: my deep admiration for Sonia, my own lack of a sense of who I was, the intensity of the atmosphere, even the excessive heat that emanated in waves from the old cast iron radiators. It was as if two hot dry hands had been pressed against my temples, forcing me to listen. I knew I had a headache, but it didn’t seem to matter. I found I was being talked to by a severe looking young woman called Deirdre, with short, straight hair. She, I later discovered, had been assigned to me to complete my indoctrination.
I won’t go into details; they are still rather painful to recall. The main facts are that I put myself body and soul into the hands of the R.S.W.P., and within a week I had moved out of my cosy little flat in Acton and into a squat in what is now a very posh part of Notting Hill Gate. This was not for financial reasons, because I was still earning good money at the Round House, but so that I could live with other party members, and more particularly Deirdre. I still remember our ecstatic but loveless couplings with shame: not, I must admit, because they were loveless, but because the sound of them could be heard all over that dank and echoing squat.
As a member of the R.S.W.P. I found that I had no time to myself, none to reflect or consider. This, I am sure, was deliberately contrived. Life was full of activity, some of it interesting, but most of it not. I enjoyed the meetings and debates, the joining of picket lines. These events were imbued with the sense of an impending apocalypse in which I was going to be an important figure. I saw myself as one of Ed and Sonia’s chief henchmen; I even fantasised once or twice about taking over from Ed in a civilised coup, though I kept that very dark, even from myself.
This was thrilling, but there were other aspects to the R.S.W.P. which were sheer drudgery and worse. Most of these concerned the R.S.W.P. newspaper which was called Red Worker.
I call it a newspaper, but it rarely consisted of more than eight pages, sometimes only a folded sheet of A2 paper. It came out weekly, and one of the dreariest and most dispiriting duties of the R.S.W.P. rank and file was to have to stand at street corners or on picket lines, or outside meetings and sell it. The few who bought it only did so out of pity, or a kind of listless curiosity. The theory was, you see, that the Party could fund itself through the sale of its organ, but the truth was it rarely broke even, let alone made a profit.
I was also involved in the editorial side of the paper which was rather more interesting. The Red Worker meetings were presided over by Ed, who decided what the front page story was to be (nearly always some tale of government atrocity against striking workers) and would present us with his leading article for the inside pages. These tended to have titles like ‘Nationalism versus Internationalism’ or ‘Corporatism and Social Fascism’, and were written in his characteristically dry clear style.
It was notable that Ed’s belief in Worker’s Control did not extend to allowing anyone except himself to have much say in the paper’s content. If he wanted copy, he would solicit articles from one of us and sub-edit ruthlessly. He was there to supervise the ‘paste-up’ of Red Worker on Thursday nights and take the artwork to the printer’s, but he never joined us on the streets to sell the paper. Dissent from his views was not tolerated; comradeship was kept within rigid, and somewhat hierarchical, boundaries.
One of the things I was slowly beginning to discover — it just shows how immature I was — is that people’s niceness and nastiness have little or nothing to do with what they believe in. Sonia, for instance, has always had a heart as big as a hillside; her brother Ed’s was an icicle, and yet they subscribed to precisely the same creed: Ed made sure of that.
Red Worker was run from a small office in Clerkenwell which we shared with something called the AFA, the Anti-Fascist Association. Do you remember the AFA? They were very big on the evils of racism. Nothing wrong with that, but if you see racism as the root of all evil, it can rather limit your point of view. That’s what we thought, anyway, but basically we were on their side, and it was all supposed to be terribly comradely. As it turned out, of course, we had rows with them the whole time: about the rent, the phone and electricity bills, when we could use the place. (I got into terrible trouble once for leaving an empty box of Black Magic chocolates in the waste paper bin. Racist chocolates, you see.) It was a bad relationship: we hated the AFA and they hated us with a bitterness that only one sect of the same religion can feel for another.
The office was on the third floor of a large old building containing similar offices, mostly housing obscure organisations with grandiose titles like the League of Communal Virtue, the Astral Philosophy Society, or Transcendental Therapists International. I never saw anyone go in our out of the building except us and the odd (very odd) Anti-Fascist, so I never met a Transcendental Therapist or an Astral Philosopher going up or down the bleak stone stairwell. I came to wonder if they existed at all.
A few weeks after the end of the run of The Good Woman of Setzuan, while we were doing the paste-up in the Red Worker office one night, Sonia approached me with that solicitous air that I had come to know and dread. She was going to ask me to make some great sacrifice for the Party. I knew also that, though it was Sonia who made it, the request originated from Ed. She had the ability to make any demand on one’s time or energy seem like the conferring of a mysterious privilege; only in retrospect was it revealed as an imposition.
‘Marcus,’ she said. ‘I am going to ask you to help us out with something, because Ed and I have absolute trust in you. We need someone to guard The Red Worker Offices at night. As you know, the R.S.W.P. is coming in for a lot of harassment from the authorities. They really feel threatened. What Ed puts up with at work from government stooges is just incredible. His flat is likely to be raided at any time, so we’ve secretly moved most of our important files here. But they may be on to us. Of course they’re not going to do this publicly, with a search warrant or anything. What they’re likely to do is an unofficial raid which they make to look like a break-in afterwards, so we need someone in the Red Worker Offices at night to guard against that. Now we’ve had a rota going for some time, but lately people seem to be crying off. I must say I’m very disappointed in them: it’s such a vital task. I won’t mention their names. I wonder if you’d spare a couple of nights a week? Would you do that? Ed and I would be incredibly grateful.’
I said I would, and she kissed me on the cheek. When I told Deirdre about the arrangement she simply nodded and said, ‘Right on!’ It was obvious she had been consulted before I had, but that was how things happened in the R.S.W.P. I wondered if I was being tested in some way, like those medieval squires who were made to stand guard all night over the Blessed Sacrament on the eve of their chivalric investiture.
The first night, I rather enjoyed. Clerkenwell is a part of London composed almost entirely of offices and warehouses. The odd shop or sandwich bar existed purely to serve the workers, and therefore closed when they went home. At night the streets were silent, deserted, and grey. Silence in a city at night has a special quality; it is the silence of suspended animation, a kind of temporary death. Only some distant city church clock chiming the hours broke the stillness, or, once or twice, the violent roar of a car or motorbike driven by a returning reveller. I felt held between moments of time, and that if I had a pair of wings I could have flown out of this life into another. It was the first time in the months since I had joined the party that I was able to be alone with myself.
My sense of solitude and liberation was enhanced by the conditions of my service. I was told that my ‘guard duty’ would be more effective if I were to keep the light off in the offices. The object was to save electricity and not to arouse suspicion. I suspected also that were the AFA to know of our nocturnal vigils they might object, or demand that we pay more rent.
On my second night of guard duty, a couple of days later, I found that the novelty of my circumstances had worn off and I had begun to feel restless. I had brought along a torch so that I could read, but my racing thoughts turned pages of print into meaningl
ess runes. (My dullness was enhanced by the fact that I had dutifully brought with me only one book, Ed Tombs’s groundbreaking work The Semiotics of Revolutionary Culture, whose prose was like a featureless landscape full of signposts.) The silence which before had liberated my senses now had a deadness to it. I began to fret about the value of my activity in guarding this small circulation political sheet against, quite possibly, an illusory threat. This time I was carried not beyond myself but within, and there I found a desert.
At about three o’clock I must have passed into a doze, only to wake some time later to a very unexpected sensation. I felt a prickling on my scalp and heat in my cheeks. My ears burned. It was as if I were blushing with embarrassment; but for what?
Then I noticed that the dead silence was no longer dead. There was a noise of a kind, but I could not tell at first whether it was inside my head or out of it. It is difficult to define; all I can say is that the airwaves had somehow been disturbed. I went to the window and looked out. The street was deserted and grey, the surrounding buildings were grey, as was the light itself. Yet things moved in the street, unnumbered things, or rather the shadows of things: memories of innumerable goings troubled the grey light and made it shudder. The street below had become a river bed over which flowed the minds of countless people, heads bent, thoughts on other things, on home and money and work and routine. I had not thought that death had undone so many.
I blinked, shook myself, turned away from the window, and the illusion was gone. It was gone, but it remained a memory. A distant church clock chimed four. Another four hours and the ordeal was over. I swore that I would never consent to do guard duty again. Something inside me had been shaken, and I did not know what. I only knew that if I told anyone in the Party about it I would be sneered at and mocked for my ‘petty bourgeois fantasies’.
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 12
