by Paul Ableman
— You—you’re insane!
Under Meg’s selfless pain Craig raved to the telephone. The landlord would hear, the police. Why must he feud merely to live? He paid enough. Didn’t they know, downstairs, that every leaf stirring outside made a roar in his living room, and then they discharged their whole enormous brood to riot in the garden? Craig flung away to the swimming baths and, while he was gone, a genial chap in a bowler raped his daughter on the heath. This he accepted with fatalistic calm and the little girl seemed to revel in the adventure. She giggled:
— I should have bitten it off.
Craig smiled resignedly. He invited me to collaborate with him on a play about a solitary man in a white room who hears the sound of human coupling through the walls. He invited us to eat duck.
When we weren’t eating duck with Craig, how did we live?
During those periods when we had a car we circled London. It took you several years to master drinking. Grinding home from Soho in a taxi I chucked handkerchiefs, a chiffon scarf, a pair of old woollen gloves and my own woollen scarf out of the window. Traffic noise muffled from the driver the sound of your upheavals. I watched him cautiously as I trapped most of another purple stream of vomit in a glove. Aware that your gastric revolts often lasted for hours I didn’t want him to turn us out of the vehicle.
Several nights we stole flowers. One night I put a wreath of lime in my hair and talked to you and a man, with gravity, on licensed premises. We were aware of the terrible and irredeemable urgency of the moment. How could ‘now’ express our love? We knew that only death could prune the irrelevant from our union, and our torrential vitality extinguished the possibility of suicide.
You bled in Paris. You were bleeding when we left Victoria. You were so lovely I choked. How can a man practise medicine for thirty years and fail to recognize spontaneous abortion? That was our first trip abroad when Maurice accepted my startling novel. You loved the cafes, the croissants, the street life. But the haemorrhage got worse and, reluctant to curb a moment of our holiday, you still couldn’t entirely stifle the cramp with codeine.
I lay luxuriating in corrupt emotion. You were on the other side of Paris, in a fragment of England. The Latin Quarter rattled around me. I repeated your name in ecstatic incantation. Suppose you died? My throat cracked as the first of a cataract of voluptuous sobs broke loose. The blight of an artist is that he not only lives but must always observe himself living.
The great, fertile land of France. From the British Hospital I conveyed you by train to Chartres and a clapboard room. After a ludicrously brief convalescence in Chartres, we were driven by van to Orleans. The van had a corrugated body. French roads were humming with corrugated vans. Orleans was broken and seedy but we found a good four-course meal. The van taking us to Orleans crossed a plain of sky. I searched for bed-bugs at the head end of the mattress. The van to Orleans had only a seat for the driver and I reproached myself bitterly. You had come from uterine steel to a van full of oily tools. You were pale, squatting amongst the tools. I loved you so. Was technological genius rampant in the great land of France?
We found smoky wine, were rocked into nausea through the Alps, met a black priest in Lyons:
— My son and my daughter, behold me, a humble agent of the risen Christ. We are parked together on this ramp amongst the tender birds, in the French city of Lyons. My particular speciality is canon law. I come from New Orleans where I used to be a nigger boy. Rome is the dynamo of Christianity….
And how did we live? In each other’s longing. If you died in the night, or jeered at me, I would be shaken from the hideous dream by great, wracking sobs. Groping blindly, lost, and then slowly gulping precarious relief, I would huddle into the warm hollow of your arms, trying to press you into impossible immortality. You were there, my heart and darling, but you would not, could not, be there for ever. Cruel the wastes, cruel time and the earth that could secrete a thing of flame and tenderness and would ineluctably murder it. In those moments, in the paroxysm of love, time and our life together seemed to be draining perceptibly from the universe. The room quivered at the instability of human fusion and the parting of death seemed a desirable escape from the inevitability of final parting.
Less convulsive, but beyond expression too, were those moments, perhaps after much gaiety, when one of us would break down under the burden of joy. From a smile or a laugh your chin would suddenly tremble, your face furrow up like a child’s and you would fall into my arms.
— Oh—Billy—I can’t stand it—I love you so—
Or, inexplicably in the midst of a tranquil phase, the pang would strike me and, laying aside book or knife and fork, I would rise numbly, move to your side, kneel down and wordlessly lay my head in your lap. As you stroked my neck and cheek, you would murmur:
— Billy—Billy dear—I know—
Ten years—more—a current of rapture. Not one moment of those years but is a trophy.
Then how did we live?
Nietzsche deprived us of God and Freud of human integrity. If you died in my dreams it could only be—because I killed you there.
Eating Duck
It was not a very large duck. We descended two flights to consume this bird. Craig seemed excited by the idea of eating duck. When isolating us preferentially from the malevolent rabble who otherwise polluted the house, he had enthused:
— We’ll have a duck.
Craig seemed mildly surprised at the quantity of tomato juice and vodka we consumed before the duck. He soon stopped asking:
— More wine?
And just poured it. The duck arrived cushioned in sweet, tender peas. It was flanked by roasted potatoes. Craig showed us a painting he had recently acquired. It depicted a shed. Craig explained that it was an excellent painting for an actor.
— Any actor would like this painting.
— Did you buy it?
— It was a birthday present.
Craig sang coster songs and Jewish songs. He played a record of himself singing an old Russian song. Competitively I recited imperfect versions of modern poems. Since we were both unsuccessful artists (I reserved a silent claim for the innate superiority of the creator to the exponent) we discussed at some length the manifest ignorance and corruption of the authorities in our respective fields and sighed a good deal at the ludicrous disproportion between merit and reward.
6
WE LEFT THE Yorkshire moors and curved South-East.
— Fuck it, we can’t live in total isolation!
The moors had been mad with pheasants. Gloomy clouds massed behind the reservoir. Gloom annexed a horizon of moorland. Other people are discontinuous.
Trudging up the vale from the hotel, we came to ranked guns. The desperate whirr of displaced pheasants ended in a barrage of gunshots and a plummeting bird. The same sportsmen met evenings in the bar.
— The hump bridge? Manage to drag your rear wheels round you can take it at sixty.
Each morning we trudged off into the past. The stream and lane became a ditch and path and we tramped up into the great air of the moor.
— Fuck it, we can’t live in total isolation!
It was our last holiday, our last attempt to re-seal all the punctures in our life. Then why was that barmaid there? She looked as if she might, if you met her beneath the rose-trellis in the crisp of the night, and if you murmured:
— Ah, my sexy pet, ah!
She looked as if she might—
Other people are discontinuous but inexorable. I want to explain something. You are me. That is the crux of marriage. You are not discontinuous like the others. Each time we quarrel, it is someone quarrelling with himself.
We walked on a ridge above a river. In that rotting farm-house a cowman and his wife passed forty tranquil years. He reared beasts and healthy children.
Purple raindrops jewelled the air.
At night, in the bar, the sophisticated barmaid teased her kind:
— The best joke on contraceptives I’ve
read—
Her erotic challenge irradiated the corridor bar. The handsome sons of local money strove to equal her provocative candour. You and I were Bohemian oddities.
A turkey strutted across the lawn. I crunched swiftly to the boot of our hired Vauxhall for your make-up box. The vale was delirious with health and peace.
Purple raindrops jewelled the air.
We slid down a steep grassy slope towards a reservoir. Small boys, hardy and courteous, drifted past us. They paused to draw crude maps. Questioning disclosed that they were on an educational mission to probe the headwaters of the furthest lake, beneath its tomb of clouds in the dangerous and boiling distance. We crossed the dam. The broad water breathed latent power. High on the shelved slope, huddled in an earthy hollow from the keen wind, we munched eggs and pasties.
We left the pheasants to the heath and the guns and hummed down into a valley of tranquil order. We rushed through English air to the sea. I asked:
— Shall we call in and see Brian?
— I thought—I mean—I thought it was just going to be us—our holiday—
— Well—
We haven’t seen him for years. He only lives a few miles off our road. Fuck it, we can’t live in total isolation! Hideous, shameful resentment began to constrict my lungs.
— Shall we have a drink?
In the tiny bar of a cottage pub an ancient woman brought us beer. Its bright amber intensified the shabbiness of the posters on the wall. A quaint train steamed across a yellow England. A buck swaggered towards a bleached sea. He cast an admiring eye on a tempting damsel stretched on the sand. They both wore the bathing dress of the thirties. They’d both be elderly now! God time! Its voracity.
— Ready?
A mile or so beyond the pub I stopped the car and screamed at you. Crude huts dotted the sea flats. Fear for the integrity of my larynx halted me when my voice collapsed in a squeak of hate. You glanced sideways at me with chaste, tremulous dignity.
— I bring you nothing but love—
You once said, and when had it ever lacked truth? You brought me nothing but love and joy and tenderness and in requital I screamed abuse at you. You said:
— Really, we’d better part.
The thin road shot through sea wastes. Clumps of dingy weed sprouted from cindered tracts. My dear—oh my dear!
— Shall we go on? Do you want to see this—bloody sanctuary?
I eased the little car down a tight strip of road. On one side dunes and on the other a broad marsh. We stopped at the lighthouse point. Squalid dogs snarled towards us and we were both afraid. Part? Not live together? In—conceivable—
— I’m scared of those bloody dogs.
The dogs promptly turned tail and trotted away to the single terrace of sordid houses. And we both laughed. A rueful glance completed the reconciliation. We were together again, but not totally restored. It had happened before, so often, the spurt of fury and then the long, silent incubation of our need for each other until one of us mustered the giddy daring to admit it. It had happened too often before for us to pretend that the new rapprochement was likely to be durable. There would be a next time—and a next and—God, it must never degenerate into permanent grumbling, into acceptance of, and even dependence on, a state of muted and unbroken resentment. Sooner part than that! Inconceivable!
We stood on the dunes and watched coasting ships. I thought: England is modalities of sky. They talk of Greek light and Italian light but these merely illuminate life on the earth. In England we live in the sky.
Soon we motored away from the beach to visit Brian and Barbara. Barbara was politely distressed by our unannounced visit. She had a tableful of art historians coming to dinner and barely enough grub already. Still she’d do her best. She served a fish pie. Each art historian felt bitter about living in the provinces. They strove to cap each other’s sophisticated tales of the capital.
— He’s living with Mary Phipwick’s sister. Have you met her? Yes, isn’t she a delicious little whore?
Brian sat at the head of the table, harassed by Barbara’s peremptory commands.
— Brian, give Diana some more fish pie. Brian, go and see if the coffee’s bubbling over. Brian, when will you learn instant obedience!
But I admired my old friend. He now knew a great deal about what men have ever done to modify hard substances and surfaces. He governed an art gallery. I mentioned the water abbey we had visited on the moors. In the eighteenth century, he told us, the spectacular ruins had formed part of a nobleman’s estate. To heighten their romantic appeal the landowner had dressed up one of his servants as a monk and made him wander about amongst the largely-intact buildings. A powerful community of masturbation and economic God decayed into the props of a servile actor. Brian explained all this in clear, fumbling words lit occasionally by a happy phrase.
— Brian, don’t take all the cheese!
— Huh? Oh—sorry.
Then coffee and bright chat in the living room. I said that the computers were coming. You didn’t say much. Data was never your domain. I used to wonder how someone who could discern a quality in a gesture and dance through all the labyrinths of feeling could inhabit a world unstructured by fact. You sat studying the human reality while we deployed battalions of information. You sat, shy and radiant, amongst a congress of pedants.
And the morning set us spinning towards the smoke again.
— Well, it wasn’t too bad?
I suggested, not very hopefully, and you indignantly insisted that it had been very bad indeed.
— Graduates!
You denounced Barbara. She had found contentment in their snug suburbia because a few of the neighbouring housewives were graduates. Half England is humming into London today. We should go to the theatre more often. That bloke’s mad. If we could only lead slightly more open lives. Not only sex. Swing past that lorry. Cut in—that Jag’s too far out—made it! Sex too of course. Sex. No time for sex in China. Half a mile of clear road. Get up to seventy. Darling, we’re going home to the smoke again. I love it when you and the baby wait for me in the window, singing that little song. I love it when we all have tea in bed in the morning. Damn, lights! Darling, we’re going home together again. Back to our life.
I squeezed your hand as we waited for the lights to change and you glanced round and smiled wryly.
7
THIS BOOK SEEMS to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC. I don’t know at this stage if I will adhere to VAC. The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum. The abbreviation had the further advantage of evoking generalized images of technology and I conceive the world of the mid-twentieth century as a global laboratory through which wary laymen wander. I think that we are, in fact, those interstellar scouts of science fiction tales who come upon the planetary relic of a stupendous science. The neat twist conferred by reality is that we have constructed the alien world ourselves and in our own time.
I knew that that moment was decisive, the evening we had dinner together, although I didn’t admit to myself that I had known for months afterwards and the knowledge masked itself from me at the time behind a façade of necessary but light-headed integrity.
We had been living apart for an incredible week, I in the flat, you in my mother’s house. It was for me a disagreeable arrangement because it ostentatiously located the responsibility for our separation precisely where it belonged, in my selfish desire for a spell of freedom.
You had olives, pâté, dry martini waiting for me. I noted that you were carefully groomed but your fiery and gentle beauty were still my daily fare, our week’s separation having heightened rather than clouded my awareness of you. We were playing a game. We were incontrovertibly one. You would forgive me.
Later, outside The George, as we sipped aperitifs under the race of clouds, you said something gay and witty. I swept you into a hug and exclaimed:
— There’s no one like you!
It was our last spontaneous embrace.
The dinner was mediocre but we sat happily opposite each other as thousands of times before. As always when close to you I was at home.
After dinner we strolled down Heath Street. Soon I murmured cheerfully:
— We’ll have one more drink. And then I’ll take you back.
You would, of course, accept this. Two weeks weren’t very long. And physical reunion now would destroy the meaning of our separation.
As we chatted over the last drink, I allowed my thoughts to play agreeably over the possible agreeable consequences of the phone calls I planned to make after we had said good-night. I became aware that our chat was one-sided. You responded but did not initiate. The tilt of your head, your proud, faintly-incredulous smile, the sideways flicker of your glance expressed a message in a code I knew well, but I refrained from the slight effort at decipherment that evening.
— Ready?
— Yes.
We swung down through the steep suburb. You sat still and elegant beside me. Up or down these pleasant streets, past the house with the iron bar of inebriated music frozen into its gate, past the cancer hospital’s grim masquerade as a Victorian family mansion, past the seven white cherry trees massed in a sharp corner, we had trod hand in hand, on the way to a party or a pub, in the early days before we acquired our first rickety car.
