by Paul Ableman
26
The Last Prayer
DEAR ESSENCE OF Freud, Marx, Einstein, Darwin infused into me by the ineluctable process of cultural assimilation, enable me, though familiar with the intolerable ambiguity of my own consciousness, to perform one single act from unmixed motives.
27
VIOLENCE?
They say ours is a violent age. True, we are tugged violently about by violent machines. Jungle villages are sprayed with flame. But the faces of Londoners are not marked by casual violence. The burly violence of squalor is rare. Ours is the subtle violence of needle to vein, of bleak retort to crumbling mind. Ours is metaphysical violence: the knowledge of stored canisters primed with Armageddon.
I met Steve on the porch. Behind us, in the phantom corridor of the sodium lights, swept the traffic. Dingy hedges enclosed a grimy plot of uncurbed weeds. I said:
— Hello? You—visiting Rachel?
— Hargh. Har—yes I am.
His eyes glinted in the gloom, glinted in support of a smile that contained reserves of appraisal. He exclaimed:
— Oh god. Oh my god.
He brandished the gleam of his half-bald head. He looked limp and yet ready to spring. He pressed the bell-button again.
A young woman lay face down on the divan. Two naked, rosy little girls played on the shabby carpet. Steve and I entered the dilapidated room. A grey-haired man, of taut and humorous countenance, heaved on the collapsed sofa. He responded, with a snort of recognition, to Steve’s entry:
— Ah yes. You.
Steve lunged about the room like a beast testing a corral and then slumped into a chair. The grey-haired man asked:
— What have you got? Oh Christ, I said I wouldn’t. Here—
Thin Rachel, combing fine hair, pale rose slip alone veiling her upper body, entered briskly. She scolded the children and blew a murmur of greeting at Steve and me. The young woman on the bed shook herself round to confront Rachel, her skirt now rising to her stocking-tops. The elder little girl coquettishly proffered me a broken bus.
— No, what have you got? I know you’ve got something.
The mischievous quality of Steve’s smile rendered suspect his denial.
— I haven’t got anything. If I had I’d—God, I’ve been swallowing things—all day. Hargh. God, I know where—there is something. By God, I’m going there too—before we go to this—party. Where’s your stuff?
The grey-haired man launched himself unsteadily from the sofa. He lurched over to Steve and sat down near him. He placed on the corner of the table between them a packet made of folded newspaper. The young woman sat fully upright on the bed’s edge. Bored, she tugged the pleats of her tight dress outwards from the knee. Rachel, combing monotonously, asked her:
— Feel better?
— Oh I feel—no, not really. Oh, where’s Vic and Jean?
A pertly-smiling young man entered, glanced about and moved to Rachel. He murmured, still smiling, in her ear. She stopped combing and gazed at him. She exclaimed:
— But that’s not possible! I—well, why don’t you phone her?
The young man murmured again. Rachel shrugged and resumed combing.
So he was Rachel’s latest. Happy he. He looked like an alert delivery boy but something in his stance told of mind. I had abandoned the attempt on Rachel almost a year before, discouraged by her admission that she didn’t fancy me. This admission had been made in front of one of her girl-friends to whom Rachel had elaborated:
— I can always tell when I fancy someone—I turn blue. Really, blue.
I had certainly produced no such vivid effect.
I stared at a stuffed drake in a glass case. Next to it were volumes of radical politics. I glanced down at Steve who was just completing, with shaky skill, the rolling of a big, conical cigarette. I watched him light it and suck in a charge of the hallucinogen, cannabis Indica. Then he handed the joint to the grey-haired man. When my turn came, I declined. I could drive competently on a half-bottle of whisky but was unnerved by a few puffs of marijuana. The grey-haired man passed the cigarette on to the delivery boy and then complained urgently but humorously to Steve:
— The hell with this shit. Look, you’ve got something better. Look, I know you have.
— No.
Rachel, still combing, left the room. Soon the sound of the bath filling stopped. I heard a faint splash. Rachel was now nude under hot water.
Outline for a Metaphysical Short Story
An old, humane priest goes to the confessional. He hears confession. Sins of the flesh. He barely listens. He has encountered, over a span of forty years, every subtlety of perversion, every ingenuity of indulgence. He has himself virtually outgrown temptations of the body. His attitude is one of steady compassion. He hears a hushed, humiliated voice offer its latest puny lapse. He urges recourse to prayer and prescribes penance. The penitent meekly departs. The priest murmurs a few devout words and also leaves the confessional.
Later that day, he strolls in the church grounds. He breathes in the pungency of a rural summer day. He looks up at the elms surging towards the sun. He looks down at tall grasses smothering the tombstones. He sees a thistle and then a mayfly crawling round its mauve tuft. The soul aspires towards the light but its wings are clogged with sin. The world deposits a tarry layer of sin on the naked purity of the new-born soul. The priest recalls the wretched voices choking out deeds of vice. The mercy of God is commensurate with human wickedness. And yet—shall all be saved? Sad voices itemizing their services to the dark rival.
The priest more senses than feels a tiny stir on the back of his hand. As he lowers his glance to the glossy red dome of the ladybird a strange notion comes to him. The voices, the voices of shame, the voices that justify his ascetic life and which only the vested authority of his apostolic church can re-harmonize with God’s programme for the world—what are the voices, still in guilt-hushed tones, now saying?
Father, I walked in the street. Father, I ate my dinner. Father, I have to confess, I slept again last night.
The priest’s glance follows mechanically the trek of the bright insect down his third finger but within him a faint tremor starts and alerts his old body. He smiles uncertainly. He directs his memory to a recent confession. Faint but true there comes to him the remorseful voice of a girl admitting that she has again yielded to the importunity of the sailor, her lover. Yes, now the distinction is clear once more. Such are the items that disqualify a soul from admission to the Kingdom. But then, as the priest turns over his hand to permit his tiny guest the dignity of an upright exploration of his palm, the humility sloughs from the girl’s voice and it rings with pride: Father, I washed my hair last night. Father, I went to my work in the factory. Father, I made love to Ralph in Owen’s meadow.
The priest gazes fixedly ahead of him and then commits an act of fatal violence. Forgetful of his delicate visitor he suddenly clenches his fist. Unconscious of the dab of orange wreckage on his palm, an expression of bewilderment dawning on his wrinkled, benign face the priest gazes up at the white blaze above him and a voice thunders: Father, I shone today. Another booms: Father, I grew and shook in the wind. And as he turns his head slowly about with such a wondering gaze that a spectator might have thought he was viewing the tangible world for the first time, a great chorus of voices sings in his ears: Father, I put forth flowers. Father, I hummed in the air. Father, I nosed through the earth. Father, I did as I am in the world!
*
Rachel, head tugged to one side by the traction of her comb, walked out of the room. The sound of the bath running stopped. There was a faint splash. Rachel was now nude in bright water.
Well I knew a few things about some of them but the filaments of knowledge scarcely bound me to the group. I recognized Jean when she arrived. She had once been a writer’s girl friend. I remembered her, six years ago, chafing in the garish den of the Vesuvius Club; a strong, haughty girl gazing with alternate fascination and contempt at the grimy-shirted hum
an furniture of the Club for Refugees from a Productive Society. Now she strode in with Vic, whom I had seen—whom I had seen, dark, tall, thin and as crisply intellectual in appearance as in speech.
— Come on, what have you got?
I saw Steve at last slip the grey-haired man a narcotic pill. Promptly swallowed. Now he was—friend of—who knew—whom Jim had known—
Their louche and lurid lives unfurled in Rachel’s slum living room, swirling over the exquisite baby health of her illegitimate daughters. I had realized that the delivery boy was not a delivery boy. This became clearer when he described a deed of arson but the wit and fluency of his description still failed to suggest that he was anything as special as an Oxford double-first. He told Vic how he had lurked, pressed behind a door, while police beat through the flames towards him, how across gardens and walls and night-emptied streets he had galloped away from the indignant constables and the flaming house he had ignited.
The grey-haired man now governed the extravagant school but it was his predecessor—yes that was whom Jim had known—who had been the pattern of misrule. Distracted pupils, coming to him for advice from dormitories shared by both sexes, might be offered the suggestion:
— Try heroin. I would. Try horse. Go on a journey to the end of the night.
I felt old amongst adventurers. I felt old and I heaved myself to the window to inspect my bourgeois car. It jutted conspicuously from the kerb. No other parked cars obstructed the flow of the fast traffic. Better move it.
Around Brittany we had driven in this car. The other car had died on the motorway with a stranger at the wheel. This was a better car. It was old but noble and it had borne us smoothly round Brittany.
You were so thin.
— I wish you wouldn’t smoke so much.
— This is my first today.
It was always your first today. And a couple of minutes after finishing it you would light your second today and a couple of minutes later your third and—
You were so thin.
Then you developed bronchitis. You stood in the shop, coughing and flushed, surrounded by patterned fabrics, staring at the glass door. I barged in and your face lit up. I still mattered to you.
— You must see a doctor!
— I have. He gave me some medicine.
Cough syrup! An irresponsible practitioner who hadn’t bothered to sound you. But I was too busy having nightmare fun to bother. It was only after Lily said that she was worried that I took you to another doctor. The conscientious Pole examined you and sent you to bed for a fortnight. Every six hours you swallowed a black and red capsule charged with a grey-green powder that slew germs. I had money in the bank from a merchandizing publisher. And when, still thin and weak but purged of pathogenic bacilli, you stood up I escorted you to my smooth car and carried you to Brittany.
As we were bucking down a South Breton road, nudged by squalls so fierce it was hard to keep even that heavy car on a straight course, I heard your cough of wry laughter.
— What?
— I feel like an orphan—out on a treat. When it’s over I have to go back to the—orphanage.
Six huitres? Oui, monsieur. Fruits de la mer. Coquilles. Crustaces. I could at least feed you up. You could at least go back fit to the orphanage. Une douzaine d’huitres? Et apres? Un Chateaubriand. Bien cuit ou—bon, et comme boisson? We had more money to spend on this trip than ever before. We stayed in decent hotels. Six belons? Oui, monsieur. Apres vous pouvez choisir entre—dining in moderately good restaurants we observed the new French around us: bland, prosperous, dull. Bereft now of the vitality which once made Paris the world’s capital for citizens of the spirit, the new French retained only gastronomic discrimination. In small towns, the new industrialists sat planning development schemes over their impressive meals. I said:
— Finish your gateau.
— Oh I couldn’t! Honest, I’ll be sick.
— That lot—they’ve eaten just about twice as much as we have. Look, now she’s bringing them cheese—
Oh God! Don’t say that! Orphan! You’re not an orphan. You’re my—my—you’re—
We hurtled between scrubby fields. I said:
— They’re fast. They don’t look it but they’re really fast.
It took five or six miles to pass the Peugeot, speedometer registering over ninety, and another five or six miles to dislodge its image from the rear-view mirror. We came to Carnac.
Amber sands. A golden winter eve.
The fringe of summer villas and hotels was boarded up. Except for workmen on the mole, we had the reach of soft sands to ourselves. Would we? I think. Two or five years ago, we would have retreated down the lane of sand and swum in the stinging sea. Not because younger and hardier but more together.
We smoked a cigarette on the sea-wall and then:
— Come on. We’ll go find the site.
Back through Carnac Plage, lapped with pines, in the red beat of the failing sun. Pleasure villas. Ephemeral people who use them as compared to the ones who raised these stones of pain. Yes pain of yearning, pain of an aspiration so dim as to fade in the shadow of a reed, pain of a vision so insubstantial as to vanish at each blink of leathery eyelids, pain of an infinitely remote apprehension of dominion: a homeless beggar’s risible conviction that he is really Caesar.
A red car lurched ahead of us into the field of the menhirs. Two quiet, photographic Germans climbed out and wandered obligingly to a distant corner. Blessed winter touring. Spared the blasphemy of this awesome place shrilling with coachloads of chatterers.
In three-quarter mile rows that track the sun’s path at the summer and winter solstice the menhirs of Carnac streamed about us. More fortunate than later temples. Raw boulders are poor plunder. And so this prodigious work of neolithic man, arrogant as New York, had reached us almost intact. Coarse, weathered granite. Stark stones heaved to this site and propped erect by hairy astronomers from beyond history. Pathos and glory and a terrible challenge radiate from the menhirs of Carnac. These stones, for more than four thousand years, have been summoning us.
I said:
— Let’s find a hotel.
Love her. So thin. Miss Thin. God orphan! Beg her, now, live together again. Nothing—girls, freedom—nothing was better than being together. She sang. Italian upstairs said: she is always singing, your wife. Singing—I make her sing. I hand her happiness and that makes her sing. Not only her voice. Have you noticed? Her face sings too. Her eyes and her hair and her nose too sing. Sing all day the song of happiness. And our little lump, bit of us, me, sings too. Beg her—but—but—now? Right time? Or too late? Irreparable? Growth and decay and can ripeness return? Sex—the other night at the hotel. Was sorry her period had ended and had to—try. Wife, dear, thin patient, orphan (God!) but—sex. Clumsy, glum coupling and—tonight? Is it if sex good what excuse for continued separation? God, I’m rotten. Beg her—should—spiritual regeneration—should beg her—
— Won’t have time for much of the North coast—don’t want to miss Mont St. Michel.
An old-fashioned hotel in a pretty town. Curtain divides room into bed and living space. Window looks on walled garden. Own bath. Eerie enlarging mirror for shaving. At dinner more oysters. Chap there eating an acre of sea-bed. Brick dabs of urchins. Must try them. Spiny crayfish.
We motored off, the British tourists, skimming through Southern Brittany. We wound through a delicate lane to a tiny settlement on sea-flats. Here the sea was crated and lapping wavelets washed thousands of baby oysters. Faintly concave belons, brown inside and sweetly marine.
— Shall we have a drink?
Dizzy walls of a hollow castle. We sat insecurely high above a marsh. We waded that day and laughed. It was the best day. We were growing back together. Orphan! My wife—my inexpressibly beloved wife—we will triumph. On.
We swept diagonally East across Brittany to Milton’s ‘guarded mount’. God-cumbered Brittany. Relics of mediaeval France. Not here the sharp executives of the
new industry but booted peasantry trudging the roads. Gnarled old women—the shapes they achieve!—stumping the road. Vegetables and God. Fish and God and—
God!
There she aspires. A pinnacle of geology and Gothic dream. Beyond the sweep of the causeway, seated in a bay of sand and crawling tides, a vertical town and cathedral. We glided up to its walls. Low tide. The sea shimmering in the distance. On foot we mounted the steep street. Crêpes. Postcards. Pewter. Guide-books. Antiques. Hotel, hotel, hotel—
— Ils sont tous fermés, monsieur. La saison est finie. Attendez, si, il y en a un d’ouvert.
Which we found and were lodged in a room on the landward side. High tide would island us.
— Come on.
I was excited. From Carnac to this. We climbed, climbed—
— Deux billets, s’il vous plait!
Guest chambers, refectory, cloister in the sky, storerooms—dizzy, buttressed drops of a fortress-church. They had come far in stone technology, these builders, from the stubborn toilers of Carnac. Library. They had learned that God, like the sun, is up. Sinister. The monks who raised this complex eyrie groped already towards space-ships.
So we dined and slept on Mont St. Michel.
And the next day climbed once more to that incredible cloister. The illusion was certainly heightened by the glass panels that had been installed to protect visitors but it was like the control room from which God runs the world. The lips of meeting tides edged slowly across rippled sands. Silver sea-rivers emptied into the bay. Quicksands. Legends of impetuous lovers sucked into the prudish earth on their way to trysts. The land as yet inchoate although the Creator had dabbled in a few spires and roads as pledge of his intentions. All quick, all issuing from a racing loom of light. Unique. I said:
