The Picturegoers

by David Lodge

  Four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock rock,

  Seven o’clock, eight o’clock, nine o’clock rock,

  Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock rock!

  We’re gonna rock

  Around

  The clock

  Tonight!

  Mr Berkley found himself responding to the insistent beat. The beat was the only genuinely musical element in it, of course. Otherwise it was largely a stunt—the saxophonist acting like a contortionist while continuing to play, the bass-player straddling his instrument on the floor, as if he were raping it; and it was de rigueur for the pianist to stand at his instrument, and play with one hand, thus giving himself freedom for muscular improvisation.

  The saxophonist began a solo. Mr Berkley glanced at the young man beside him. His eyes were closed; he had passed into the body of the instrumentalist; he swayed back, with knees slightly bent, and on his face seemed to flicker an expression of anxiety as to whether his frame could bear the strain of ecstasy. The saxophone was undoubtedly the true vox humana of instruments. The organ could not approach this strangled cry that came welling up from the bowels, from the primitive consciousness of life, of pain, of joy; the long, tortured note that slowly unwound your intestines to be twanged by the electric guitarist.

  It was the constant enigma of modern civilization: how the cheap, the shoddy, the manufactured, still held an indestructible seed of truth and vitality, could still be a source of salvation. The way a Tin Pan Alley ballad, with its false sentiment and facile melody, could still seem piercingly lovely, and could still evoke genuine emotions; the way a Woolworth’s calendar could make someone see beauty; the way a plastic crucifix could inspire the rarest worship. This Rock and Roll was a manufactured music, with scarcely a shred of genuine folk content. In a year it would be dead, forgotten. The men who now promoted it would have found something new to replace it. In itself it was valueless. Yet in this cinema this evening it had awakened how many deadened souls to some kind of life?

  As this last thought passed through his mind, Mr Berkley noticed a disturbance at the other side of the cinema. The band on the screen were playing See You Later Alligator, and some couples were jiving in the aisles. This is going a bit too far, he thought, as he hurried to the scene.

  In the space Mr Berkley vacated, another couple started to jive.

  * * *

  Harry’s legs ached. It didn’t look as though he was going to get a seat. He had walked a long way that day. He did a lot of walking now—walking and going to the pictures.

  He took a packet of chewing gum out of his pocket, and peeled off the wrapping; it slipped out of his fingers, and fell over the barrier on to the seats below. A man looked up in annoyance.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Harry.

  He tapped his feet to the music. It’s got something, this Rock ’n Roll, he decided. He wanted to clap his hands to the music, but didn’t. There was a little blonde piece beside him; she couldn’t keep still, kept bouncing about every time the band played a number.

  ‘Oh dig that crazy sax!’ she shrilled. There was a ripple of laughter around them. Harry smiled. The place was getting noisy. People were getting up out of their seats and were jiving in the aisles. Harry wanted to take the little blonde piece and jive with her. But he didn’t.

  His arm was grabbed, and he turned to look into the blonde’s entranced eyes.

  ‘C’mon, let’s go, alligator,’ she gasped.

  He shrank back.

  ‘No, I can’t. I don’t know how to do it,’ he stammered. But she wasn’t listening.

  It didn’t really matter. He just swivelled around in the middle, while she danced. He champed on his gum in time to the music, and kept a poker-faced expression. She pushed him into the right positions. She jerked up his arm, and spun round under it. Her skirt rose to her thighs. She had good legs. The whole cinema seemed to be dancing now. There was a terrific din, everybody was singing and dancing. It was great. The lights went on, but the music and dancing continued. The blonde was good-looking in a cheeky sort of way. Her hard little breasts poked out under her sweater; they didn’t wobble, they clung to her twisting body. It was surprising how strong she was. She pulled him past her, and as he went he let his hand float out casually behind him, as he had seen it done, and was overjoyed to feel her small, damp hand fall solidly into his palm. He turned, and they laughed.

  They broke and separated. The space between them seemed to be almost solid, you could see it had edges. They played around it for a while, keeping the rhythm of the music all the time, postponing the pleasure of contact. Together they swooped back. Harry grabbed her hand and jerked her back into his arms. Holding her small, hard waist, he spun her round. Harry laughed out loud.

  * * *

  Doreen hunched miserably over her film magazine in the corner of the compartment, as the train rumbled through the night towards the north. It was the longest journey she had ever made in her life, and she had never been farther north than Harringay Arena. She was being carried into strange, alien territory, grim and bleak, in and out of stations with unfamiliar names, where the porters shouted to each other in uncouth accents. It’s all your fault, you little bastard, she thought without malice, as she stroked her stomach under her new coat—bought that morning to cheer herself up. She didn’t particularly like the tent style, but there was the future to think of. Not that she had much of a future to look forward to. Ah well, no use moping. Things could be worse. Maurice had been quite decent, seemed quite upset to see her go, swore he would try and get a divorce, but the old cow would sooner die, you could tell from her photograph. Anyway, he had given her enough money to have the baby comfortably; and she had already made up her mind that she wasn’t going to have it adopted. She turned back to the magazine.

  Hottest gossip-point round the Hollywood niteries is Amber Lush’s latest escort, beefcake boy Murl Crater. Murl (remember him in Sandstorm?) was the second husband of Barbara Baines, formerly married to Amber’s husband Bill Brix. Amber and Bill are separated at the moment. Asked if she was contemplating a divorce, Amber said: ‘Murl and I are just good friends. He’s so sincere, he helps me to work out my personal problems. Murl is a very rare person, but I’m not rushing into marriage again. I want to concentrate on being a good actress.’ Amber is said to have her eyes on the plum part of Beatrice in the screen version of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  Doreen felt suddenly depressed again. She closed the magazine in disgust. These film-stars were worse than anybody. The man opposite her threw down his Reveille at the same moment, and their eyes met. He smiled at her.

  ‘Long ride, i’n it?’

  Gratefully she responded to the familiar London accent.

  ‘You’ve said it.’

  ‘Going far?’

  ‘Newcastle.’

  ‘Newcassle you mean,’ he said with a grin. ‘They won’t understand you up there if you say “Newcastle”.’

  She pulled a face.

  ‘Nothing like the dear old Smoke, is there?’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘I know what y’mean,’ he said sympathetically. ‘Now my job’s up north, or I wouldn’t be on this train now. I’d be drinkin’ a pint of mild an’ bitter in the “Elephant and Castle”. Bloomin’ shame, they’re gerna knock it dahn.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Yer … What’s yer job?’

  ‘Usherette.’

  ‘What, in the flicks?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Outer work?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Wanner job in Newcastle?’

  ‘Newcassle.’ They both laughed.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘Pal-a-mine knows the man’ger of the Regal in Newcastle. ’E’ll fix you up …’

  Thanks very much.’

  ‘Yer … ’Ere, let me sit on your side. All right?’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  She wasn’t going to encou
rage him. He might be a real friend, or he might not. In any case she could always find out his real intentions by telling him she was pregnant. That was the quickest way of getting rid of wolves. She smiled secretly as she thought of it. The little bastard inside her was a kind of protection. She could look after herself. But there was no reason why she shouldn’t enjoy a bit of company for the rest of the journey.

  * * *

  ‘You mean you never had no girl-friends at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Straight.’

  It seemed to Harry that he had never been so tired. Or so happy.

  ‘I never danced before neither,’ he volunteered.

  ‘You’re not bad.’

  He glowed.

  ‘You ought to go to the Empress Monday nights. They have Rock ev’ry Monday.’

  ‘You go often?’

  ‘Ev’ry Monday.’

  ‘You go with someone?’

  ‘With my friend Mabel. She couldn’t come tonight.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll see you there on Monday.’

  ‘All right. I’ll look out for you.’

  She stopped.

  ‘This is our house.’

  ‘Is it? Number sixty-one. I’ll remember.’

  She sat down on the low wall. There were little spots of cement all along the top, where the railings had been torn out in the war.

  ‘Ooh, my feet!’ She slipped off her right shoe, and wriggled her toes. It was a small, neat foot. Everything about her was small and neat.

  ‘Ache?’

  ‘Do they!’

  There was a pause.

  ‘When d’you have to be in?’ she asked.

  ‘Any time I like.’

  ‘Cor, you’re lucky. Ar’past eleven me.’

  Another pause.

  ‘I enjoyed it tonight, didn’t you?’ Harry said.

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I never enjoyed myself so much before.’ He laughed. ‘That old geyser rushing about all over the place, trying to stop people dancing.’

  She laughed too.

  ‘And when they stopped the film, and everybody made such a row they had to start it again.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Well, I’ll have to go in,’ she said, standing up and slipping on her shoe. ‘G’night, Harry.’

  ‘G’night, Jean.’

  Again the space between them seemed solid. But it was smaller. Harry bent over it and kissed her, nearly overbalancing.

  ‘I don’t usually let a bloke kiss me the first time,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you?’ he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘G’night, Harry,’ she said, and moved away.

  ‘G’night, Jean. See you Monday.’

  At the door she turned and smiled. ‘Yeah, see you Monday.’

  * * *

  For half an hour they had lain in each other’s arms in the creaking guest-house bed, too scared with happiness to move. Then Len began gently to stroke her tender body with his rough fingers. Now he was ready, and he covered her body with his own, and breached her body with his own. As they clung together in that unutterable pleasure, he felt that they were defying everything that had persecuted them. He disapproved of the casual obscenity of barrack-room conversation, but as he groped for words to express his triumphant passion, he found to his surprise that he could not say them to Bridget. They would sound to her like a string of incoherent obscenities:—the Army and—second stag on East Wing Guard and—Sergeant Towser who cancelled his last leave pass and—the troop train back to Catterick on Sunday night and—the cold walk from the station to the camp and—the platform where he kissed Bridget good-bye at the end of leave and—the street corner where he had to run for his bus and—the Teddy-boy who had attacked her and—all the people and all the regulations and all the time-tables and all the clocks that had tried for so long to stop them from having this.

  * * *

  Blatcham station never exuded sweetness and light at the best of times, but the last train from London pulled into an atmosphere of peculiarly depressing gloom and resentment: gloom of the fatigued and silent travellers, and resentment of the station staff, who evidently considered it a gross imposition that they were compelled to keep open the station until 11.20 for a handful of passengers returning from some nocturnal debauch in the metropolis. Most of the lights were already extinguished, and the doors of the station bolted, except for one small aperture through which the passengers stumbled into the street. Buses, of course, had ceased running hours ago, so Mark was forced to carry his bags to his home, a mile away. He had intended to leave them at the station, but the Left Luggage Office, he had just been reminded, closed at 9.30.

  His bags were heavy, as he had brought everything away with him from Brickley. He didn’t want to have to go back there again—not until he was protected by the Dominican habit, anyway.

  In the main street he paused for a rest. The lighted shop windows threw a bleak illumination on to the empty pavements. The arrangements of tins of soup, women’s hats and men’s shoes seemed exactly the same as a year ago. He sensed already the chill, deadly, bourgeois miasma that seemed to rise, choking and suffocating, from the streets of Blatcham. A sensitive soul walked into this town like a white missionary into a malarial swamp. But he was keenly aware that his own missionary life had begun inauspiciously, not to say unheroically.

  It had not been pleasant to leave the Mallorys under a cloud. For, although Clare would never reveal the details of their relationship, and although Mrs Mallory would never tell anyone about their conversation of that afternoon, some hint of his disgrace would inevitably filter through to the other members of the family whom he loved: Mr Mallory, the twins, Patrick, Patricia …

  But he was already a fallen idol in Patricia’s eyes, all because he had not been able to deny himself a sentimental gesture before leaving. When he had finished packing, he had tapped on her door, and she had looked up from her books, grateful for the interruption.

  ‘Hallo, Pat. How’s the work going?’

  ‘Rotten. D’you know the principal parts of insuesco?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Pat, I’m going away. I can’t explain why, but it will probably be for good. I thought I’d like to give you a little memento.’ He handed to her a copy of A Portrait of The Artist As a Young Man.

  ‘Going away?’ She seemed unable to understand him.

  ‘Yes. I’ve written in it.’

  She did not open the book.

  ‘Leaving Clare?’

  For some reason this had been totally unexpected. Patricia had never once mentioned his relationship with Clare, and, absurdly, he had come to assume that it was a matter of indifference to her.

  ‘But you can’t.’

  He writhed with embarrassment as he remembered the conversation, and cursed his lack of perception. He had smugly recognized in Patricia symptoms of what he was pleased to term an adolescent crush on himself. Because his own emotional life was selfish, he had assumed that Patricia’s was also, that she was too involved with her own feelings to trouble about Clare’s. And he had confided in Patricia with the subconscious desire of winning from her sympathy and condolence. Instead an unpredictable loyalty to Clare had arisen where he least expected it, to condemn him. Now he had the measure of Patricia’s disillusionment. How contemptible his flight must have appeared to her whom, not long before, he himself had urged not to try and solve her difficulties by running away.

  He had found it difficult to resist the temptation to tell Patricia, at least, of his intention to become a Dominican, to go out with a bang instead of a whimper. But he had determined not to exonerate himself in the course of his conversation with Mrs Mallory, and he had held grimly to that resolution. It seemed the least he could do—to deny himself the dramatic gesture, to humiliate himself. It was a kind of expiation, the only kind that really hurt him.

  He picked up his bags
, and walked slowly down the High Street. As he walked he pondered dully on the crime he was trying to expiate, the murder of Clare’s happiness. But murder was not the right term. Call it euthanasia: for when love is not reciprocated, it festers. Though she did not know it, for Clare there had been no choice except between a swift or a lingering death.

  But he felt keenly the odium of his position. No murder is as cold-blooded as euthanasia, which lacks even the passion of hate. The surgeon is isolated by his deed, his unnatural callousness lit by a cold clinical glare.

  But these analogies—murder, euthanasia—were summoned up in order to generate a remorse he did not instinctively feel. One could not ignore the existence of situations in which it was necessary to act the part of the cad. That he himself happened to be a congenital cad only made the whole thing more difficult, not easier.

  His mother was watching the weather forecast on television when he let himself into the house. She came out into the hall, surprised by the sound.

  ‘Mark! What a surprise! Why didn’t you phone?’ Your bed isn’t aired or anything …’

  ‘It’s all right, Mother. Don’t flap.’

  He followed her into the living-room. The Union Jack was fluttering on the television screen, and the National Anthem was booming out.

  ‘D’you like the new carpet?’

  ‘Very nice. What was the matter with the old one?’

  ‘Oh, I never did like the colour.’

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He went to bed early. He’s not been too well today. He went to a Masonic dinner last night, and it gave him indigestion.’

  ‘Uhuh.’

  ‘I stayed up to watch TV. Mark, there was a man who won three thousand pounds answering questions on Shakespeare. I wonder you don’t go in for it.’

  He laughed.

  ‘I’d be hopeless at anything like that.’

  His mother seemed slightly affronted.

  ‘But you’re doing English Literature at University.’

  ‘Precisely,’ replied Mark, with a smile.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. He could see that already. It wasn’t going to be easy.