‘I always feel guilty when I come out to dinner,’ Persia said.
He looked insulted. ‘Why?’
‘You could give the spare money to someone.’
‘I’ll spend my money,’ he answered, in single words.
‘Gluttony is just indulgent,’ Persia said. There was a certain relief in defiance. To horrify him was in a way to almost reach him.
He coughed, and stood up, and shook out his trousers, and sat down again.
They stared at each other helplessly and angrily and did not have anything further to discuss, and could not even mention the state of the weather or the restaurant, or the drinks, for they were disappointed and rubbed.
At last after a long time of jiggling their glasses in their hands, and raising them to their lips, trying not to do so simultaneously in which case it might have appeared that one was trying to copy the other for want of something better to do, they sighed, and settled back with one accord into the sofa like lines of chorus girls crossing their legs simultaneously.
Sitting against the side of Adrian, which could almost have been touched, Persia knew of his bones and flesh and body and breath. That he was real beyond his immediate hair was questionable, so strongly did he believe in the limits of substance. He shifted and coughed, and might have been out of story books and pumpkins with velvet robes. He was of promise, even accepting the immediate predicament, and like uncrossed mountains to have been explored and questioned.
‘Labor’s made another blunder,’ he said.
‘They don’t make blunders.’
‘Of course they do. They all contradict each other in public.’
‘That’s open government.’
‘That’s open fighting.’
They paused, looked at each other, and looked away. A political argument promised no reward. You always used sentences which had been used before, and you just said them again, not really believing them, because nobody knew truly what happened in cabinets and benches and committees. So you just pretended to know so that you could sound intelligent and people would think you read the papers, which was a dubious virtue anyhow, adding nothing to the spunk of the world. So that unless the situation was totally and irrevocably irredeemable, or there was in fact an historian among you, it was better to read editorials, however biased they might have been, and to keep your mouth shut.
They sat some more, and then Adrian asked, would she like another drink, and she said, yes. So he stood up and shook himself out again, like dogs leaving a place of fleas, and went over to the bar. After he had given the order for the drinks he turned and shook hands with a slight, scruffy boy. He began talking to him.
Then when the barmaid had put three drinks on the counter, and Adrian had paid for them out of his wallet, and the other boy had made deprecating gestures which were not sincere, and Adrian had begun to smile to a small degree, he motioned the boy towards Persia with a shrug, as if an apology, and the boy and Adrian stood above Persia who remained seated, and looked down at her.
‘This is Paint,’ Adrian said. ‘We played squash together once. Because of a mutual friend.’
Persia saw then that Paint was neither slight nor scruffy, and was in fact magnetizing everything about him so that it was all pulled by his eyes which joined him to the outside world. His eyes were quite brown and very strong, as strong as the strongest cough medicine so that when you went into them you were spluttering and strangling for fear of never being able to escape. Because, when he had put you in his line he held you there, down and firmly, pinned like struggling beetles under examination, then free again, having been made real by his eyes which had looked, and therefore established you as a person forever more.
‘Hello Paint,’ Persia said. He was easy to reach, and open.
‘God I’ve got a stiff back,’ he said.
‘Why is that?’ Persia asked.
‘I’m just learning to play the violin.’
‘It must be most beautiful to hold it like a sound from your throat.’
‘I shouldn’t have ever begun. But the more they all told me not to, the more I wanted to. They had a conductor on a radio talk-back programme. I rang him up and asked him if I should learn. He asked me how old I was. I said twenty-three. He said you’d be better to stick to a keyboard instrument.’
‘How does it feel? To play the violin?’
Adrian, excluded, fumbled with his drink.
‘It is very delicate, and could easily be destroyed,’ Paint said, and was looking at Persia until she was reversed.
‘Is it hard to make sounds?’
‘Sounds are easy,’ he said. ‘The hardest thing is to be in the right place at the right time.’ Persia looked away, but he swayed on his heels unconcerned, gulping down half his glass in one mouthful, and some dripped onto his shirt, which was Indian, and rather frayed.
‘Do you like music?’ he asked Persia. They had forgotten Adrian and were young and together and radiant, so that he became just an older man who had put them side by side and filled their hands with drinks.
‘I like it too much so that I cannot listen.’
‘Yes I know. I know how that feeling is.’ His eyes were quite triggered and balanced, and ready to discharge in fireworks. Then, because he was balancing on the edge of being too grave, he dropped himself, and picked himself up again in a different order, and laughed.
So they could laugh because they were ready to laugh, and because of the way the night had been put.
‘Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing when I stand with this teacher, in her room, and she says, flat or sharp, and I am in the wrong place.’
This was too much for Adrian, who pushed himself out of where he had been deposited, and walked over to the bar again.
‘Yes, it is worrying,’ Persia said.
‘I didn’t know he took out young girls,’ Paint said, nodding towards the man at the bar.
‘I live in the same block of units. We’re only strangers.’
‘So am I. Although I played squash with him once a week for two years.’
‘Did he talk?’
‘Yes.’
They laughed a bit and Adrian saw that they laughed, and over no matter but that of laughing, because if your mouth was smiling anyway then you had to make some sound to fill its shape. He could be seen to look at his watch, and then move over towards them, still carrying his almost empty drink, and pushing aside gently a woman who stood in his path, expanding her breasts under the concentration of her study of him.
‘We probably should be going to sit down,’ Adrian said.
‘Is it time?’ Persia asked.
‘We have been talking for over an hour,’ Adrian remarked.
He stood quite still. His expression had been put in a place to hide anything which might have been underneath.
Persia, remembering that it was his party, and that he had invited her, and that sometimes they had met completely, put her face into answering his face, and Paint saw their meeting, and how Adrian was grateful for it, and how freely Persia gave it.
‘I must be going too,’ he said. ‘I just came to see the place. I’m over here to visit a friend. Luckily I didn’t even have to pay for my drink.’
They all stood up. The conversation fell off in bundles of loose ragging around their feet. They saw for a moment how they were without words, and then Paint went away. He could be seen pushing through doorways and up the tiled hall. He was just small and insignificant as he went. From his back you could not tell he had something important caught inside himself, except for the bounce, which told of war against his walls.
‘What is he really like?’ Persia asked Adrian as he pulled back her chair.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I wondered about him.’
‘Do you like him?’
‘Yes. I do like him.’
‘He lives in a dilapidated house in Glebe.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘I don’t understand him. I
can’t talk with him.’
‘You’re not his friend?’
‘Of course I am. I played squash with him for two years.’
They were at a table against a wall. Persia wondered if Adrian had specially rung up and ordered an intimate private corner. Opposite, another couple cheered each other in wine. They gazed and ducked and blushed and dimpled. The girl wore an engagement ring. It seemed that having established their precise relationship they could now settle back and enjoy themselves, even air their satisfaction of a solid state.
But the evening which had promised to show something, showed nothing, and Adrian remained across the table, keeping his hands within his own body, working his way through mussels with veined wrists, twisting the knife to open the black gritty shells, yet never volunteering one touch of himself to Persia.
The other couple, by the time the fruit salad arrived, were bent deep into each other’s eyes, hands clasped, pretending to be, if not actually, oblivious to the rest of the world.
By agreement neither Adrian nor Persia mentioned charity, brotherly love, money or meanings. They stuck to such topics as mortgage rates, values of land and television, these being introduced by Adrian, while he held forth upon them, as if Persia was interested in the game, as she pretended she was, not knowing whether he smelt her pretence, or believed in his own fascinating selection of topics.
She wondered if his small selection of safe topics was deliberate, keeping him conveniently distant and isolated. Even in his drinking, he was the epitome. He selected a good wine with a minimum of drama and demolished it in like fashion. But he was careful to keep in the exact middle of falling so that he was not anywhere except so slightly loosened that Persia could not have hoped to outwit him in any way. But equally he was careful to make sure he was slightly inebriated so that he cleared out his stuffing and became charming, open-hearted and encouraging. To see him drunk would have been like flawing your own mother in an argument. To have seen him with his own limbs not obeying his supremacy, would have made the night worthwhile. But he stayed within his own definition, and held onto himself like skippers on railings over seas.
At eleven o’clock he looked at his watch.
‘You’ve been looking at your watch all night,’ Persia said.
Adrian stared back at her and did not answer.
After a while he said, ‘I think it’s time to go.’
‘You’re always worrying about going, and wanting to leave, and sorting time.’
‘Of course.’
Then they did not say anything.
‘I can time my own life,’ Adrian remarked.
‘You can’t.’
‘I disagree.’
He did not understand even that there was no regular progression and you could not show it to him. He did not know that he was not a part of anything, but just an attachment which was carried along.
‘Once I was sick,’ Persia said.
‘That was bad luck.’
‘I made myself better.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘It was a miracle.’
The man Adrian was angry now. His lips which believed in themselves only, and their own thickened flesh, set into their version of how they should be, and his face was very still. The more inside he churned, the more outside he stilled, like dangerous lakes with suction.
‘How exactly were you cured?’ he asked. Each word was neat, and the threads clipped.
‘It was all to do with time.’
‘The illness probably ran its natural course.’
‘After three hours?’
He drained his glass, and tried not to look at his watch.
‘Also I believe in ghosts,’ Persia said.
But he was silent now, and resigned, like priests who know their congregation will always sin.
‘Why?’
‘Because the library is full of books about them.’
‘It is also full of books about natural selection and life originating from one cell.’
He stood up. He looked down at Persia with compassion. He was sorry, she thought, that she could not ever escape herself, and had to be a woman with limited logic and a wardrobe of emotive judgements. He took her arm and guided her towards the door where he left her while he negotiated over the bill, handling the Neopolitan waiter with such charitable kindness that never once indicated the man was a foreigner.
Then they went out into the night which leapt at them and bit them about, and was savage, because it was a darkness which was strong. But although it was thick and fought like a trodden dog, Adrian pushed through it, assured and controlled, and mastered the last corner, which was hollow from no light. He was total in himself, and Persia ran to keep beside him, and hated, and admired, and resigned from the struggle.
In the car the vinyl was wet and soggy from the mug of night. They stuck slightly to the seats. Adrian pushed on the radio and turned the key to start. They strapped themselves into their belts. The dashboard was light but the rest of everything was not. But before he actually turned on the engine which was somewhere far away from the bonnet, he looked once at Persia, and said, ‘You’re a funny girl.’
He tried then very much not to be far above, and fought with his contents to bring them down to a mean level, and even trod on his voice with his tongue so that it would not be too sure. Persia remembered that she was on a sticky seat in a dark car with a man who was a stranger although she had met him on several brief occasions, and the man was noble, and dark. It was unavoidable not to feel honoured, not to appreciate the way he tried to lie himself down, like kings who settled on the floor to fondle children.
So Persia said, ‘Yes, I know,’ and tried not to be strange but to fit into how he would have liked her to be.
‘Do you really believe in those things?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Really.’ They peered at each other and the seat belts held them constrained.
After a long time of the night leaking in the windows and threatening to flood, Adrian said, ‘Perhaps I’m angry because I admire you, and resent it. You’re difficult, and irrational. But I can’t help it.’
Persia gulped in some night and swallowed it and tried to remember he was making a compliment, which he had fought himself to make, and which had formed against his better reason, and which did not mean to be condescending.
‘I find it hard to believe you admire me,’ she replied, and tried to be humble, which was important if their relationship was to burst through into a new shape.
‘I do. In ways.’ Adrian fiddled with the tuning knob.
His bungling was bad, and he was, for once, caught up, confused. He turned the key and the engine began to be in existence, because of its noise, which claimed reality.
They drove. There were shops and then not shops. He was this magnificent person who belonged only to himself, a great brooding lion on a rock.
‘Cecil told me I was cold once,’ Adrian said.
There were houses, which went past on islands.
‘Are you apologising?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Then what?’
For a long time there was just the engine and the road which was beneath.
‘Perhaps sometimes I would like to be closer. To certain people.’
There was a peace then which made a window you could open. For now it was enough to stare out, pressed against the separation which would yield, and open into the full world.
‘I’m glad,’ Persia said. The seat belts, binding them in isolated units in the propulsion of vinyl and oil, kept them apart and silent, as though the words which had just been spoken belonged to some other actions, and had nothing to do with the present situation. But Persia reminded herself that they had in fact come from Adrian’s body and Adrian’s mouth, and had been his admission or attempt to cross and approach, and she had merely to stand and wait, directing by some magic means this greater, stronger person to her feet. She was very proud.
Adrian pressed the garage door ope
n and the car slid into the underground concrete resting place of vehicles, among the tube lights and lock-up doors. They sat parked in his own ordained space, their seat belts now unfastened, the engine gone again into the silence, and because there was not much world, and bearing in mind their earlier exchange, Adrian was able to take Persia’s hand after a great effort, and with a certain clumsiness.
He held her hand, and the two hands were between the two bodies, joined on the vinyl seat which was ridged and stitched and of factories. And neither quite knew what to do then, or how to dis-join without appearing rude, or whether to enlarge upon the joint. Persia looked at his hand, which was large, and had veins and mountains and nails. To have her hand inside his hand was the most strong binding, to feel her nerves and strips of muscle encased in the larger structure of an alien being of an alien sex.
Another car came into the underground cement which was marked and allotted and divided according to status. Adrian put Persia’s hand away. He climbed out and opened the door for her. She stood beside him and was afraid of everything that he was. He was too much in one place like spilt perfume. Going towards the lift they went separately as separate bodies, and he pressed the button, and the door opened with light, boxed and distributed in portions.
At the door of Persia’s flat she said, ‘Would you like to come in?’
‘No,’ he answered.
‘Thank you for the dinner,’ Persia said.
‘See you tomorrow,’ Adrian said.
They shifted a bit, and redistributed themselves, and he coughed, and put his arms in a place which made them look wrong, and then said, well, and pushing Persia through her door, stood watching as she closed it behind her.
*
Cecil touched the old worn silver binding. His finger prints were buried among all the other generations. He was proud to hold age, and in his way conquer it. His hand would never hold the child’s hand, but with old glass and silver he could perhaps encompass an equal richness of life.
The Beginning of Everything and the End of Everything Else Page 3
