Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  Walker began to feel a new kind of hope, a new region for deconstriction emerged; he said, ‘It sounds very attractive to me.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the man, ‘but it is only unstable societies that believe so in the very young. In old China, when you wanted to flirt a young lady, you told, “How very charmingly old you are looking today!” In America, you must always tell, “How young you are looking, my dear!” ’

  ‘Tea, gentlemen?’ The waiter had reached their table.

  ‘Ah, yes, that is why we are here!’ said the foreigner. Walker, being a provincial, was impressed by cosmopolitanism; and his companion seemed a man perfectly at home in these plushy surroundings of travel. He reminded Walker of those courtly sinister foreigners who, in old British films, frequented the Orient Expresses, diamond-headed pins in their dark cravats, murmuring, ‘We are taking your frendt away with us for a pairfectly simple brain operation.’ The accent of Mittel-Europa gave him an automatic air of wisdom. Now, as the waiter began to serve plates of sandwiches, their crusts cut off, he took up his napkin and tucked one corner into the collar of his formal shirt. An adequate Virgil. His expression was one of bonhomie. When the rest of the tea came he attacked it with energy; his long hands flitted over the table like a card-player’s, dealing cress sandwiches here, currant cake there. ‘In England,’ he said, ‘the afternoon tea. In America the martini. Why is this difference?’

  ‘A difference in temperament,’ said Walker.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man, eating a sandwich, ‘but why? I will tell you my theory, I always have a theory. It deals not only with this question but also with another – why the Americans believe in progress and why the English believe in things as they are. Is it not because in England, for reasons of weather and that national temperament we are talking of, it is necessary to make the days seem shorter? One serves tea and fruit-cake and what is the consequence? One goes to sleep. In America it is necessary, for the obverse reasons, to make the days seem longer. One serves martinis, and the consequence is, one starts on another day, at night. You drink this thing and at once you want to go out dancing, or sleep with a girl, or paint the town red, as is said. The English give tranquillizers, the Americans give pep-pills. So, what is produced? According to my theory, every American has the sensation that his life lasts exactly four times as long as an Englishman thinks.’ The foreigner cut a cream cake and stuck one piece between his lips. ‘What is produced, the American starts to change the world, because he must live in it for so long. He wants many things of it. When he dies, he is very pleased with himself, except that the world is now so changed he does not understand it in the least. In the meantime, the English keep changing the guard only and make the best of a bad job. When they die, the world may have changed, but they blame others for it.’

  The wheels clattered beneath the train, and they passed through a station with a sign on it saying Necropolis. But Walker looked ahead to this world of zest he was going to. Could he stand it? How would he do? His doubts now were about his reserves of energy. The biggest problem in his life up to now had not been incapacity but lassitude. There were times, and they came often, when he thought himself a failure; and when he went into the matter he decided that the reasons for this were not that he couldn’t think well or act wisely, but that he could never quite bring himself to the pitch of making an effort. He was a man whom the quotidian destroyed, whom custom staled.

  He said, ‘Well, at least it all sounds exciting,’ and knew he was expressing a profound hope.

  ‘Exciting?’ said the foreigner. ‘Ah, you want excitement. Well, you will find it. America has always been a place for starting again.’

  ‘That’s what I hoped,’ said Walker.

  ‘Ah, you are Henry James in reverse. European experience coming to seek American innocence.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m the experienced one,’ said Walker.

  ‘Ah yes, that is true,’ said the man. ‘It is now a case of European innocence coming to seek American experience. Today it is the young people, the young countries, who have the experience. Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.’

  ‘Are those girls corrupt?’ asked Walker, looking back down the car.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man, ‘they have had Europe terrified for three months.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Walker. ‘What have they been doing?’

  ‘I will tell you,’ said the man, ‘they are bagpipers.’

  The waiter came by to clear the tables, and the man said, ‘Wait please. More tea here to be drunk.’

  ‘What did you say they were?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Bagpipers. You do not believe me? Vell, it is true. There are forty of these girls, and they are a bagpipe band from Hillesley. You have heard of Hillesley?’ Walker shook his head. ‘Vell, Hillesley is a very expensive girls’ college in New England where good, rich American girls go, to learn how to be more good and more rich and more American.’

  ‘Why do they play the bagpipes?’ asked Walker.

  ‘They play them because it brings prestige,’ said the man. ‘In colleges of that kind, prestige is of importance, and at Hillesley the most exclusive thing there is the bagpipe band. For many years this has been one of the cultural treasures of America, this band. And now they have gathered up some money and showed it all to Europe.’

  ‘You know a lot about them,’ said Walker, ‘and about America.’

  ‘Of course, I have looked at the Americans very closely. In fact . . . I am one myself.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ said Walker.

  ‘Oh, there are a lot of surprises with America. Yes, I am an American citizen. Of course, I did not always live there. When Europe was better I lived in Europe. Now I come and visit it. Like the bagpipers.’

  ‘How did the tour go?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Mine or theirs?’ said the man. ‘I will tell you about theirs. It was a great success. They have had enormous audiences in Paris and Rome and Salzburg and Vienna and London. Europe is fascinated by American girls playing the bagpipes.’

  ‘Scotland too?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Of course, Scotland,’ said the man. ‘In Scotland there is great interest in the bagpipes.’

  ‘But they do have their own pipers,’ said Walker.

  ‘Yes, men with bare knees, but these are pretty girls, with bare knees and rich fathers, playing the bagpipes. These girls have done for the bagpipes what I think was never done for the bagpipes before.’

  The waiters made another attempt to clear the table, and this time succeeded. The sugar bowls rattled on their trays as they gathered up the last crockery and silver and collected up the cloths. Walker looked out of the window, and found countryside. The train was rattling over embankments, through cuttings, under bridges. The man opposite put his head against the bulge of the seat and was evidently lapsing into sleep. Soon they would be in Southampton, where the real voyaging would begin. Walker turned for solace to the Guardian, which called up an old familiar world of Scandinavian furniture, car seat-belts, and amiable liberalism. On the letter page a latterday Nietzschean, his address a rectory, wrote in to say that God was dead. Someone else warned of the dangers of the bomb, and someone else of those of school uniforms. Walker sympathized warmly with all these sentiments; this kind of decent, modest radicalism was his intellectual milieu. It had served him ever since he had left the confinement of his parents’ home; it was a perpetuation of the concerned student politics he had taken part in throughout his three years at university. His unassuming faith in the faint but gradual betterment of the world was supported here; when experience seemed sombre, and the bland egalitarianism of the new Britain began to jar, he could turn here to find that it was, after all, for the best. It gave him a sense that Britain was not quite so aimless, not quite so devoid of any standards whatsoever, as various occasions inclined him to believe. Since conse
rvatism was a defunct intellectual fashion, and since extreme radicalism required a confidence in the resources of the proletariat for which Walker could not find too much evidence, this was the even keel he sailed on. But there were times, yes, there were times, when another vision of the situation intruded; when he felt that he was living in the midst of a vast degeneration, a major abnegation of any regard for the quality of human life. All the social forms which had kept intellectual and moral and spiritual aspiration alive somehow seemed to have lapsed; they seemed to have lapsed in the years since he was born. When he thought this, Walker saw his life as a kind of impatient time-serving, an empty performance composed of aimless doing without end in view, without future. Then the impulse towards designing and shaping, the impulse towards giving meaning, came to him, and sent him forth on pilgrimages. But what if there could, now, be no meaningful pilgrimage? What if voyaging was just events and not lessons? What if there were no gains to be made? If that were true, if it could be proved to himself that that were true, it would be the darkest discovery of all. Perhaps, though, one never made it; perhaps such searches were real and false at the same time. Perhaps, like the man opposite, one amassed facts, made comparisons, turned oneself into the sociologist who saw and documented but could not judge, could not learn any truth that helped the heart. Then all the choices one made, all the deeds one performed, were whimsical. They served only the day and the hour, the things that Walker had been serving for too long. Walker finished the paper and then, seeing that his travelling companion was awake, he offered it to him.

  ‘Very kind,’ said the man, ‘but no, thank you. I always believe that reading someone else’s newspaper is like sleeping with someone else’s wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it. But you may read my newspaper if you care.’

  ‘I have no foreign languages,’ said Walker.

  ‘Of course,’ said the man, ‘I forgot, you are English, we all speak yours. Vell, you will not need to worry about that in America.’

  ‘No,’ said Walker, looking out of the window; the train was going through backyards and suburbs where people took dogs for walks. They slid past level-crossings, signal boxes, goods-yards.

  ‘I suppose this is Southampton,’ said Walker, looking for a glimpse of the sea. ‘Now the ship.’ But there was only town, sitting toad-like and sombre; then, suddenly, he noticed a glimpse of water where spidery cranes hung like rudimentary wings in the air. Gulls flapped over an estuary. Now he could smell the sea and hear it. By the line-side, goods in boxes were labelled to exotic ports. His throat went dry, the quiver in his stomach returned, he felt all the menace that the Englishman feels when he steps off his island into the void. Now it would begin. The great cavern of the terminal station suddenly swallowed them. They sat in the half-dark until the train stopped.

  ‘Vell, no doubt we shall meet again on the ship,’ said the man. ‘Tourist class is a very small society. Oh, please, introductions. My name is Dr Jochum.’

  ‘Mine’s Walker.’

  ‘How do you do?’ said Jochum, rising and shaking hands. The train gave a final rock as they nodded to one another across the handshake. There was a gaggle of noise along the car. ‘And I will introduce you to those bagpipers,’ said Jochum.

  ‘All of them?’ asked Walker.

  ‘As many as you can manage.’

  ‘Ah, that’s the problem,’ said Walker, ‘where to start and where to stop.’

  He went along the car and got off the train, tipping the conductor who had put his luggage out on the platform. Train smoke blew; a kiosk sold small cigars. Notices pointed the way to the Ocean Terminal and the customs. He lifted his cases, putting the typewriter under his arm, and followed the notices and crowds. In the line at the immigration desk, someone behind him was talking in a supercilious accent about the provinciality of modern Cambridge: ‘Actually the only way I got anything out of university at all was talking to the girls on the tinned goods counter at Sainsbury’s.’

  A man rushed by with a porter. ‘Be careful, that’s a double bass,’ he cried. A notice said: Keep ceaseless watch for Colorado Beetle. The immigration man spared Walker from England very easily; he thumbed his passport, checked the contents of his wallet, and then he was beyond his own shore, officially in passage. Beyond, in an open hall, was the customs shed, where a uniformed excise man glanced at his luggage and ushered him forward. Through the glass window he could see the vast black side of the ship. A moment later he was walking up the gangplank and into a maw giving on to a passenger concourse. Wooden walls shone and white-coated stewards bustled; a chalked notice told him to book his dinner place in the Winter Garden Lounge. A steward took the enormous paper ticket he had been instructed to hold in his hand. Then he led him through dark wooden-walled passageways and down innumerable staircases. On the walls, arrows pointed disturbingly toward the lifeboat stations. After a long walk, the steward dived into a tiny narrow passage, pulled a curtain aside, and revealed his cabin – a small square box with four bunks, three of them already claimed, presumably by persons with more rapid forms of transport. On the wall was a large picture of a healthy-looking girl strapping round her bosom a lifejacket she did not appear to need; it was captioned: Directions for Adjustment. ‘Don’t open the porthole, sir, or you’ll sink the ship. We’re below sea-level down here.’ ‘All right,’ said Walker, but it was a thought to keep in store for the bad days ahead.

  He waited until the steward had gone and then began to look around. There was little to see. The cabin in which he was to spend the next six days was very small indeed. The bunks were set on either side of a narrow strip of floor, two on each side, one above the other; the central space was so tiny that two persons dressing at the same time would probably end up in each other’s trousers. The tiny wardrobe was already full when he opened it, and the top was stuffed with orange life-jackets. There was one drawer left in the tiny chest of drawers, but the top was already covered with various items, including a number of books – Axel’s Castle, Romantic Image, Ideology and Utopia, The Open Society and its Enemies – all in English paperback editions. There was a tiny wash-basin, about the size of a big girl’s navel. It contained a small bunch of white heather, and, looking at it, he discovered that the message on it read ‘Bon voyage and all my love, darling, Elaine.’ This was very touching, and he squeezed the bunch into one of the four toothglasses and managed to make space for this on top of the chest of drawers. Then he got up, with the aid of a ladder, on to the top bunk on the seaward side, which was the only one left and was slightly curved to allow the ship to come to a point at both ends. Above him, for he was close to the ceiling, he could hear a scampering noise – other passengers, perhaps rats. The ship swayed slightly and he felt more uneasy than ever. He put his head on the pillow and went to sleep.

  When he woke up some time had gone by, but the ship still seemed to be relatively still. He climbed down the ladder and went to book his place for dinner. Outside the cabin, the ship was confusing – little passageways, little cabins, little bathrooms, led in all directions. In front of him two Americans walked down the corridor; one, with a cropped poll, said, ‘Yeah, I grant you, he’s very civilized, but deep down don’t you think he’s sick sick sick?’

  ‘Well, right, so Mozart’s sick,’ said the other. ‘Who isn’t?’ He followed them and they brought him up to the next level. Inside a cabin a group of old English ladies were guffawing and one said, ‘Fancy, isn’t it a big ship? Think of all the dusting!’

  Walker realized that he had committed himself to an institution. Like most young Englishmen, he was used to this; he had been to school, university, hospital. He found it, indeed, a natural situation; there were times when marriage seemed to him unnecessarily small as a unit; it was very nice, but why only two or three or four of you? He was accustomed to giving up the right amount of individuality, of retaining just sufficient selfhood to get by in a cro
wd without producing such an excess as to clog the system. These were simple modern arts, and he had grown up in their service. But they had their delicacies and complications. He remembered this when he got up on the main deck and looked at all the notices telling of the coming delights on shipboard – bingo, cinema shows, fancy-dress dances, get-together balls, competitions for the most original headdress, the most original footwear, and the like. Such societies were competitive. Built into the pattern of them was the assumption that one had to capture the best-looking girl, the best-placed deck-chair, the best seat in the dining room; in these systems prestige all went that way. Skill and perpetual alertness for every advantage were required; one’s social antennae had to be out all the time. But what with the retreat into the privacy of marriage, and that lethargy which had let him go to sleep exactly at the crucial moment, he had destroyed himself, certainly diminished his chances. He would be lucky if he didn’t spend the rest of the voyage as outsider and outcast.

  He looked into the ship’s library; there was a collection of books and a stock of notepaper with the ship’s name on it, but the books had been picked over and the paper was already being systematically stolen by a chain of small boys in short trousers. In the modern world, it was public living that was hard living; private life was simple enough, but the communal centres were murder. Here went on the displays of delinquency, and malice, and emptiness; here one despaired of man. Walker looked next into the tea lounge. Padded chairs with wooden arms were fixed to the floor; in them were seated middle-aged English aunties who looked triumphant because they had found out how to get tea. ‘It’s very nice here, but it’s not like your own home,’ one of them was saying, standing up and shaking out her dress. In a corner by the door a bald American was apparently holding an informal seminar on Pasternak; he could be heard saying, ‘It may be panoramic, but the basic structure is a set of symbol-clusters or rather central events or discoveries around which the characters are drawn together in an unrealistic and stylized way. No?’