The Picturegoers

by David Lodge

  On their return Mr Mallory said Grace for a splendid, old-fashioned roast prepared by Mrs Mallory, refulgent and perspiring in the kitchen. Mr Mallory and Patrick habitually washed up after the Sunday dinner, and with a glowing sense of virtue Mark offered to help them. The gesture lit a smile in Clare’s face that was well worth his trouble.

  Damien had called in the afternoon, and joined Mark, Clare and the rest of the children (except Patrick) in a walk round the park. Neither the latter’s damp, dying appearance, nor Damien’s similar demeanour, had affected their energetic nonsense with an old tennis ball. They trailed home under a red, smoky sky, to the cosy, fire-lit parlour and high tea.

  It was all very different from his life of the past year, when Sunday began at about noon in a room that smelled of bed, crawled sluggishly through an afternoon of too many newspapers, and, in final desperation, sought escape at a film or some theatre club.

  It wasn’t with such a Sunday that he made the most significant comparison, however, but with the Sundays of his childhood. His memory was indistinct—a few details only stood out in odd clarity: listening to ‘Palm Court’ on the radio, followed with awful inevitability by ‘Variety Bandbox’, the last hours of the week-end petering out, wasted, joyless, empty; bed, and school again the next day. His father dozing open-mouthed in his chair, his mother knitting vacantly, neither understanding the misery of their son, who fidgeted by the window, not knowing what to do, but knowing the futility of asking ‘What shall I do?’ He wasn’t able to remember many details, but he could remember that feeling, the sickening slump of the heart that was Sunday in his boyhood, a day his parents kept holy with somnolence, dullness and decorum. For hours he would sit by the window, and look out on the empty, Sunday street, as the church bells tolled dismally from different points in the town. Rain brought a little variety and relief, as he listened to its faint patter on the taut pane, pressing his hot cheek to its cold surface, watching the dull, grey street become a glittering river.

  He had wanted for nothing—and for everything. He had been well-clothed, well-fed, carefully guarded against illness. Yet retrospectively he envied the Mallory children their hardships—the shared beds, the shoes that pinched, the heaps of washing, the inconvenience of too many babies in too short a time, the lack of privacy, the meagre pocket-money, the quarrels and tears, because with these things went other things infinitely precious, laughter and love, tenderness and the joy of living, things signally missing from his own childhood.

  PART TWO

  FATHER KIPLING SLOWLY mounted the shaking wooden steps and placed the monstrance containing the Host above the tabernacle, in the sight of all. As he stepped down and turned to kneel before the altar, he directed a swift, appraising glance at the ‘all’. About twelve worshippers dotted the empty, evenly-spaced pews, like lonely beads on a child’s abacus.

  O salutaris hostia

  Quae coeli pants hostium,

  they sang, without conviction. O saving victim, opening wide the gates of heaven … A motor-cycle roared past the church, tyres hissing on the wet road, insolently drowning the feeble chant. The Saturday Benediction was slowly dying of indifference. Barely twelve people, and those good pious souls who never went to the cinema anyway.

  The crusade against the cinema had never caught the imagination of the parish since he had launched it with such lofty aspirations five—or was it six?—months ago. Nevertheless he had persisted with the Saturday Benediction, and Lent had impelled a respectable number to attend. But now, a week after Easter, his failure stared at him from the empty pews. A pitiful dozen worshippers. Where were the other two thousand souls in his parish? Slumped in their cinema seats no doubt. Failure was embarrassing when one had committed the success of one’s mission into God’s hands. It was almost as if God had failed. Surely He didn’t want people to go to the cinema? Yet nothing had gone right for the crusade. There had been that unfortunate controversy in the local Press with the manager of the Palladium, when he had been compelled, under pressure from his bishop, to issue a statement to the effect that all films were not necessarily harmful in the eyes of the Church. The parishioners had required no further encouragement to flock back to the picture-palace. They really didn’t seem to see anything harmful in it. Mr Mallory had said to him once, ‘With all due respect, Father, I think you’ve got to be more broadminded these days. What shocks you now—and would have shocked me when I was a lad—it just rolls off these kids like rain off a duck’s back.’ ‘Broadminded’ was a popular word, a word he just couldn’t understand. The context was always a plea for tolerance of something which he had been taught to regard as sinful.

  Mr Mallory had advocated switching Benediction back to Thursday night. He said more people would come to Benediction then. He said everybody liked to go out and amuse themselves on Saturday night. He said everyone had to have some relaxation. He was a good man, but typical of his fellow-parishioners. Like converted pagans, they were reluctant to give up their old gods. But did they not realize that the God of Israel was a jealous God? Apparently his wife did, for she was in the church this evening. But their children were not. The Church of Christ was rapidly becoming the Church of middle-aged women. Soon it would be said in England as it was said on the Continent, that a good Catholic is a man whose wife goes to church.

  The Tantum Ergo quavered to its conclusion. Emptying his mind of everything except an awareness of the Presence of his Creator, Father Kipling enfolded the stem of the monstrance in the ends of his humeral veil, and held it high, and made with it the Sign of the Cross in the air.

  Damien shook the bell as he adored the Sacred Host, with faith, piety and love, saying inwardly, ‘My Lord and my God!’ and mentally deposited another seven years in his bank of indulgences.

  * * *

  It was 7.15. Dismally Mr Berkley haunted the foyer of the Palladium, confirming, from the overheard remarks of his patrons as they left the cinema, that his experiment had not been a success.

  ‘Queer sort of ending.’

  ‘Well, I thought he would get his bike back after all that performance.’

  ‘Sort of left you in the air. You know.’

  ‘Not bad I s’pose, but it brought you down a bit.’

  ‘All those foreign voices, it got on my nerves.’

  ‘Bloody wops.’

  Mr Berkley hovered by the box-office.

  ‘How’s business, Miss Gray?’

  ‘Quiet, Mr Berkley,’ answered the girl, without interest.

  He wandered towards the doors that opened on to the wet street, and stared out at the people hurrying along the pavements, feet splashing in puddles, sodden raincoats, barging umbrellas, gleaming cycle capes. Despite the low rain-clouds, it was still light. The hour had gone forward last Sunday. Soon the long, light evenings would be luring yet more customers away from the stuffy cinema.

  Bill, in his faded Ruritanian sergeant’s uniform, edged over to him.

  ‘Not so good, is it, Mr Berkley?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘If we don’t pack ’em in this weather, we never will pack ’em in, that’s what I always say.’

  ‘Yes, always, Bill,’ replied Mr Berkley unkindly. He was fond of old Bill—one felt affection for anything that was sufficiently old—but really he was too much of a prophet of woe. Mr Berkley turned aside and began to study the stills of Bicycle Thieves in the portico.

  It seemed particularly appropriate to him that Antonio was sticking up a poster depicting Rita Hayworth when his bicycle was stolen—a subtle juxtaposition of artificiality and realism in the cinema. But it was artificiality the public wanted—swollen busts and happy endings. His idea of introducing foreign film classics had misfired. Receipts had slumped alarmingly that week.

  Of course there were plenty of foreign films that peddled sex much more effectively than Hollywood, but it was risky to resort to the Continental X-port market. He had learned to his cost, when the ‘Empire’ had staged nude reviews in a desperate at
tempt to keep going, that using sex quite frankly as the basic attraction meant losing the reliable, come-every-week family audience to gain the dubious favours of a fickle, rowdy mob of hooligans. Besides, he didn’t want to awaken the wrath of that turbulent priest again. He had won the last contest on points, thank God, but he knew that a series of ‘X’ films, and the suggestive posters that were essential to their promotion, would give Father Whatsisname just the chance he wanted to point the accusing finger. That would knock the bottom out of his own defence of the cinema as the clean, healthy family entertainment.

  He had seen Father … Kipling, that was it, one day. A Catholic friend had pointed him out as he hurried through the streets with a small boy at his side, clutching a worn black leather bag—probably answering a sick call, his friend had suggested. Grey-haired, stooping, shabbily dressed. Mr Berkley had almost felt pity for him, and genuinely regretted that they should be at war. They were both, after all, in show-business of a kind, both presiding over a declining form of entertainment, both desperately concerned to pull in the customers. They should be allies, not rivals.

  With an effort he redirected his thoughts to the problem of what films the Palladium should show in the near future. Something new, something up to date was needed. Something that was associated with youth. Everyone was mad about youth nowadays. Youth set the fashion, and the old followed. Of course that had always been the case, the young always did set the fashion; but never before did it change so rapidly, never before were the older generation so pathetically afraid of being left behind.

  * * *

  Mr Mallory was not at all enjoying his Saturday evening at the cinema. An uneasy conscience chafed him like his new, scratchy tweed suit, caused him the same persistent discomfort as the broken spring he was hatching out beneath his buttocks. And it was not the film to soothe and smother a disturbed conscience. A worthy, well-made film in its way, no doubt, but rather depressing. Not his idea of a Saturday night’s entertainment. When you went to the pictures you didn’t want to be reminded of the problems that dogged you outside the cinema: jobs, children, money and so forth. Particularly if you had just had a row with your wife, and rather suspected that you were in the wrong.

  But then, damn it, was he so obviously in the wrong? After all, there was no necessity to go to Benediction on a Saturday evening. It was making a fetish of religion. Of course Bett was still a superstitious, God-fearing Irish-woman; you couldn’t expect her to appreciate that a person could have too much of a good thing—even religion. It was a question of religious capacity. Some had more than others. He knew his own religious capacity. He knew whether or not he would benefit from going to church. And tonight he would not have. Bett was not bound to go. It was not as though she had been slack in her church attendance in the past. In fact, she was so far ahead of the majority on points that she could afford to let up a bit. Her religious capacity might be greater than his. In fact, he was willing to admit that it was. But it was a wife’s duty to obey her husband in all that was not sin. That was the teaching of her own Church. It was ridiculous to pretend that there was anything immoral about the cinema. That old fallacy of Father Kipling’s had been exploded long ago, and should never have been taken seriously in any case. In fact, he had forced Bett to admit as much, but she had countered by claiming that nevertheless they should set the children a good example. At this transparent piece of blackmail, he had walked out of the house.

  He had roved the district in search of cinematic distraction, of some foolish, enjoyable, Hollywood farrago, preferably set in the ancient world, with all-Americans dressed in togas, and luscious drug-store dames in tailored slave-rags. He had rejected a British war-film, The Sea Shall Not Have Them (And They Shall Not Have Me Either he had vowed as he passed by), and a jolly double bill comprised of The Return Of Frankenstein and The Monster, before turning into the Palladium as a last resort. Bicycle Thieves did not sound very promising, but he could not return home now. How typically vexing that there should be a rotten crop of films on, just when he really wanted a good one.

  His worst fears had been realized. It was a depressing film. Perhaps on another occasion, in another mood, he would have been more sympathetically disposed towards it, but at the moment it seemed merely the repetition, however well-prepared, of a diet he knew only too well. Not that he had ever been as poverty-stricken as the poor fellow in the film. But the dreariness, the frightful struggle of life, the indifference of people, the troublesomeness of children—he did not want to be reminded of them at that moment. He had made up his mind to be morally irresponsible this evening. Where were the luscious slave-girls with swelling breast and buttocks like ripe fruit, on which he could feed his harmless, middle-aged lechery? He felt cheated. He felt only too conscious of being in a cinema, on a seat with a broken spring, inhaling rank, second-hand air, his eyes smarting from cigarette-smoke, and his head throbbing with the heat. An ice-cream girl lurched slowly backwards down the aisle. Stretching out a hand, he purchased a choc-ice. It was thickly covered with milk chocolate, which increased the sickly sweetness of the ice-cream to a nauseous intensity. Why couldn’t those concerned realize that plain chocolate combined best with ice-cream? War-time restriction on milk-chocolate seemed to have given confectionery manufacturers a fanatical devotion to the stuff. Plain chocolate was becoming quite absurdly rare. It would soon be necessary to organize a National Society for the Protection of Plain Chocolate. The N.S.P.P.C.

  Mr Mallory perceived that his ice was warm and half melted inside its chocolate coating, and that it was dripping on to his new suit. He deposited the sticky, oozing mess under his seat with a nasty feeling of satisfaction at the inconvenience it would cause the cleaners the next morning.

  * * *

  Patricia sensed, with some satisfaction, that she was an object of curiosity to the cinema attendants. A young, unescorted girl in a grubby man’s raincoat, taking a 3s. 6d. seat when the last programme was half-over, upset, for them, the natural order of things. As she was shown to her seat, she noted that trailers were being shown, which indicated that the last, and principal film had not yet started. She took advantage with both elbows of the luxury of padded arms, and felt soothed by the warm, impersonal darkness, the bovine torpor of those around her, and her own pleased consciousness of wasting time and money when she should have been studying. Why did she feel so much more a person when she was not being virtuous?

  A few hours earlier she had been grinding wearily at Latin prose composition, when she had caught a shocked glimpse of her pinched, haggard face in the mirror. The words of A Grammarian’s Funeral came into her head:

  Learned we found him.

  Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead,

  Accents uncertain: …

  Snatching an old raincoat from the hallstand she had plunged out into the rain. ‘Where are you going at this hour?’ Mummy from the kitchen. ‘Out.’ A pleasingly curt, truthful and enigmatic reply.

  They would probably worry like anything. Not that there was any need. After all, she was seventeen, and capable of looking after herself. But they insisted on treating her like a child—or, what was worse, like an adolescent. You could almost hear their good intentions creaking as they made allowances for ‘the difficult age’. Even Daddy, wisest and kindest of men, seemed to suffer from the same delusion. ‘We’ve got to treat Patricia carefully,’ she had overheard him say to her mother one night. ‘After all, she’s at a difficult age.’ Good heavens, did they think her ‘moods’ were due to a mere period, or to a growing bust measurement? When she was fourteen perhaps; but now? Didn’t they think her capable of adult emotions, of real suffering, genuine worry? The younger you were in a family, it seemed to her, the harder it was to convince your parents that you were growing up. If only people would realize that all she wanted was freedom: freedom to think and act for herself, freedom to let life happen to her, instead of having to shape it to her parent’s expectations. If only they realized that she was under st
rain. Only Mark seemed to have an inkling of this strain; but he (thank heaven) didn’t seem to realize that he was part of it.

  She ignored the flickering screen, and let her thoughts drift on, because it was one of those rare times when she was thinking well, when striking and truthful ideas seemed to occur to her effortlessly, rising fully articulated into the mind, when it seemed possible that one day she might write poetry.

  She had gulped in this exciting sense of heightened perception with the wind and rain, as soon as she found herself on the pavement outside the house. While everybody else hurried to their destinations, she had walked slowly and aimlessly through the streets, lifting her face to the stinging rain, and watching the low rain clouds driven across the sky like waves seen from under the sea.

  It grew dark. She took advantage of the last half-hour before the grimy little park closed to wander round it. Fingers touching across her stomach in the pockets of her raincoat, she watched with agreeable melancholy the duck-pond tirelessly forming circles under the ceaseless battery of the rain. Scuffling and tittering emanated from a round shelter sliced into four sections like a cake. It harboured a girl and two boys, about fifteen. They chased each other from one section to another. Their mean, human activity was discordant, and she moved on, until she could hear only the swish of the trees in the wind, and the patter of falling rain.

  Idly she unravelled the muddle of paths, wandering past low, stunted railings, and dwarf ‘Keep off the grass’ signs sprouting from the balding turf; past desolate putting greens; past tightly-shuttered refreshment kiosks; past the narrow lanes marked ‘Men’ and ‘Women’ that commenced at a modest distance from each other and wound through dark shrubbery to merge in a single, dripping tomb, divided by a wall. Affection, melancholy, and other emotions that eluded classification, surged and slopped inside her as she noted each detail as if for the first time—or as if for the last. For slowly, half-consciously, but inexorably, there was growing in her mind the conviction that she would have to leave home.