As Near as I Can Get

by Paul Ableman

  ‘Two pints of bitter, please.’

  ‘That was him,’ confided Stan animatedly a little later when we had paused, possibly to watch a form of religious service taking place across the road, or lewd women in doorways, or a distressingly authentic-looking mechanical seal in a tobacconist’s window, on a street corner, ‘her cousin. I haven’t seen him for—well, I haven’t seen him—he doesn’t come around here—you can see the sort of type he is——’

  ‘Yes, he does,’ I corrected him, ‘he must come around here because that’s just where he was, just now. Wasn’t he? You can’t deny that. Anyway, he’s not anyone’s cousin that I know anyway——’

  ‘Anyway he is, you twat,’ insisted Stan, ‘that girl’s cousin. The girl I was talking about, who doesn’t exist——’

  ‘That may be who you say he is, anyway,’ I admitted.

  But I had come to accept Stan’s melancholy tale and to be a little affected by its undeniable poignancy. The uniformed Christian across the road was leading a rousing hymn and we crossed over to listen.

  ‘If someone knows the name of a likely winner, he tells his pals about it, doesn’t he? It’s a good tip. And that’s why I’m standing here before you this evening, because I’ve got a good tip. I know the name of a winner: Christ. I want to tell you how Christ came into my life. Now, you probably put three or four bob on a horse every week, or fill in your treble chance. I used to open my pay envelope and hand the lot over the counter. The time came, I had to start borrowing to buy milk for the baby….’

  We listened to the meeting for a while, looking to see if any of the demurely-garbed female salvationists were sexually desirable and one distinctly was. Under the crested bonnet, a pert, vivacious little face glanced laughingly round and under the navy bombazine of her uniform quivered a lithe, responsive little figure. Others amongst the knot of loungers had also noticed her appeal and a daring buck called in hoarse cockney.

  ‘Take the uniform off, ducky, and I’ll take you dancing.’

  He grinned self-appreciatively for a moment and then added.

  ‘Keep it on if you like.’

  ‘Pleasant peasant,’ remarked Stan.

  But nothing developed. The girl smiled hesitantly but warmly in the youth’s direction, clearly concerned to use such looks as she had in the service of Christ and a moment later she made a testimony rather convincing in its simplicity and conclusively acquitting her of any suspicion of serving a naïve Christ primarily for sensation. And the comrades of the brazen barrow boy nudged him away for the unruly proletariat live, in general, in far greater awe of convention and legal prescription than the educated classes and their street insurrections rarely shake society.

  ‘Up, Roger, up.’

  ‘Greetings, slaves.’

  ‘The men look bitter. They look very bitter.’

  ‘Four surging tankards, please. The drama opens on a bleak playing-field in Huddersfield. A lonely old man, in dingy silhouette, is grasping a goal post. He has come here to relive the robust diversions of an athletic provincial youth before burgeoning intelligence and accumulating awards propelled him inexorably into the laboratory. A low whistle is heard. He starts guiltily and peers into the gathering smog—anyway, that’s the opening. I’ll work in a tart and we’ll start shooting in September. Did I tell you, Mrs Mason and I are no longer cohabiting? At least together. She is doubtless cohabiting somewhere else and I am cohabiting in Beaufort Gardens with a girl called appropriately enough Gardenia. Gardenia Mann, sensuous and Semitic, and Victor and I have come here this evening—haven’t we Victor?’

  ‘Yes, Roger.’

  ‘I say, look around you, old chap. I say, do look over there. Under that bit of burnished pewter. What’s going on over there?’

  ‘Chaps drinking, Roger.’

  ‘Who are these two, Victor?’

  ‘You’ve just bought them a drink.’

  ‘Conceivably, but I asked you who they were.’

  ‘I don’t think I know them. Are you friends of mine? Are you friends of Roger’s? The little one looks friendly but the big one doesn’t, Roger.’

  ‘Resistant, eh? Not going to succumb too bloody lightly to our sparkling personalities? Whom do you prefer, Mozart or Beethoven?’

  We stood in a little group, jostled by the continually growing throng, at the end of the bar with the pork pies and pickles. My own tendency was to observe, as far as possible without participation, the conduct of the two young, beefy, arrogantly-immaculate film men, but Stan, foolishly I thought, since he had not their surface verbal dexterity any more than I had, couldn’t resist displaying his own cumbrous wit. To the initial question about composers, he retorted, with a sly grin, by uttering the name of a negro jazz musician. At first they were fairly considerate and eased their own banter around his inept remarks and only I, increasingly humiliated by his blunders, silently repudiated him. Later, however, flaws began to appear in the smooth surface of their repartee, and one had a sudden, distressing vision of a life spent striving to apply, and only patchily and infrequently succeeding, a gloss of sophistication to things. I noticed that they were holding hands. And later, when one of them said something viciously wounding, something which contrasted their own intelligence, affluence and good looks with Stan’s lack of all these things, in a ‘throwaway’ voice to sharpen the effect, I felt guilty at my earlier lapse of loyalty. I could see that Stan was hurt although he went on grinning amiably and, by tacit consent, a little later, we edged away and buffeted out through the throng and found ourselves again, getting on for closing time, in the pitch and ruby, bustling, murmuring, motoring street.

  ‘Nice chaps,’ said Stan. ‘I’d better be going. Got to catch a train.’

  I seized his arm, and told him we had to have one more drink, and squeezed his arm and felt very affectionate towards old Stan.

  And that was nearly all. I don’t think we managed a last drink. The ‘Starling’ was discharging its prey when we got there and, as we tried to force our way in against the current, the prim manager waved a reproving finger at us. All I remember is that Stan disappointed me. As I walked with him to his underground station, or we had a final cup of coffee or whatever happened, he said something about ‘queers’, something that had been formulated, it seemed to me, at precisely the level of jealous vindictiveness with which earlier, one of the two ‘queers’ had made a remark about ‘squalid little failures’ and I had a glimpse of the disheartening circuit of abuse which transmits so much of the world’s psychic energy and could not help reflecting to myself that, picturesque and even endearing though he was in some ways, Stan had a mind that was essentially envious and trite, and then I realized, with an even more rueful start, that I was doing it too.

  The underground train drummed west from Piccadilly. In a carriage whose occupants probably included representatives of eight or nine races and twice as many nationalities, I thought of ‘queers’ I had met, from gentle, girlish, and often uncompromisingly masculine-looking, creatures serving behind counters or bars, and whose main social aspiration seemed to be a desire to be on gossipy, confiding terms with females, to the polished, intellectually-dexterous, physically sturdy but often emotionally tender chaps who seem admirably adapted to life in a rocket-bomb world until they gas themselves in the kitchens of their dainty flats.

  Up the silent stairs. A sudden serenity of moonlight on Culverton Square. Feverish sleep.

  Mary and I had always quarrelled for she had been obedient and I rebellious. And yet, of course, she had been like me, in many ways, a sort of negative version, so that she could always sense the grounds of any attitude I took up and undercut it. I remember Mary going to the shops for mother, down the sandy hill (that became a wooded-cutting past the hotel), along the straight, mile-long lane between the potato fields and into the village. After agreeing to go, and preparing to go, and being instructed in what to do and what to fetch, she would turn, at the moment she had been waiting for, the moment when she had concluded he
r arrangements and was committed to the expedition, and hiss at me in a sort of impersonal way, as if reluctantly admitting a disgraceful truth:

  ‘You ought to go!’

  And I, whose brain, from the moment mother had sighed ‘Who’s going to the shops?’ and Mary had replied immediately ‘I will’, had resonated to the impulse of the latter’s mounting indignation, had now to defend myself from her genuinely moral feeling by mockery.

  ‘Me? To the shops? Why’s that then? I thought you wanted to go? You offered, didn’t you?’

  Tall, nervous, three years my senior, clad in the faded cotton of the rural poor, Mary would ignore me for another spasm of hectic activity, finding a basket or checking to see if mother, as she often did, had forgotten to list some essential commodity, before again launching a breathless assault.

  ‘You ought to go! You never do anything. Anyway, you’re a boy!’

  ‘A boy? What’s being a boy got to do with it? What do you always volunteer for, if you don’t want to? What would you do if you didn’t go anyway? You haven’t got anything to do!’ I’d finish contemptuously, and then with a faintly uncomfortable grin, watch her as, with no more words, she would set hastily and hotly off with her basket down the steep garden path and away between the concealing hawthorns.

  ‘Edna?’ I would shout after a moment or two, listening eagerly for the surly or tolerant, depending on whether my younger sister was pleasurably (lying on the back walk teasing and squeezing a kitten; listening to a murderous, broadcast serial) or otherwise occupied, reply.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s go down to the pond.’

  ‘Why?’

  But she would usually consent at last and then, deliciously contented, while Mary pattered warmly through the long afternoon to the village and back, I would devise and enact thrilling games with my amoral, relatively shallow, slight and vital younger sister for whom, I still imagined, I had a much greater affinity than for the elder. Endless days in the sun, or rain, with things that floated, trees, animals, berries, and, most stirring of all, each other’s bodies for inexhaustible diversion.

  Once Mary caught us, injudiciously close to the house and separated only by a clump of golden-rod from the standpipe she must have been visiting. Engrossed in delicate exploration, and compelled by its nature to downcast glance, Edna’s faint gasp of surprise (though, characteristically, scarcely of dismay) barely warned me until, working down her dress and reaching for her discarded knickers, Edna amplified thinly ‘She’s seen!’ For some time, alternately giggling hysterically and savagely reproaching each other, we crouched in the undergrowth, debating what to say to our fussy sister and wondering whether mother, always unpredictable, would take a stern view when she learned of our (as they now, at least to me, seemed) disgusting exploits. Then:

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Edna burst out, jumping up and marching brazenly towards the house. Following some tremulous minutes later, I found Edna ostentatiously eating a cold, boiled potato while Mary, more vehemently energetic than ever, rattled round the kitchen with brooms and dustpans and preparations for the evening meal. But it was I, later, when Edna, by now completely oblivious to the incident, perhaps having somehow convinced herself that Mary had not really grasped what she’d seen, was listening to the wireless, prone on her stomach on the black, woolly living-room rug, who found Mary sitting on an upturned bucket in the back garden and discovered, as I gingerly approached her silhouette against the crimson disk of the sun sinking behind the Connerton Hills, that she was crying steadily and passionately.

  Thoughts of Mary and Edna, neither of whom had I seen for over four years, thickened in my brain that sleety, dingy November of my twenty-second or twenty-third year and, it began to seem, not implausibly the world’s last. Whirlpools of stellar energy were being, and had been throughout the year, unleashed in various remote (except for the presence of some billions of fish, birds, insects and other unprotesting lower forms and a few impotently protesting native tribes) parts of the world. A brief hundred years after expanding steam had first efficiently liberated us from our own or animals’ muscle-power, it was possible to pack the sun into metal cannisters and release it in a single burst of fury. And during that year, as they violently abused our terrestrial sphere with mere tests, the respective spokesmen of the ‘powers’ growled, in accumulating headlines of radiant madness, their preference for annihilating the planet rather than risking any alteration in the way the production of commodities was administered.

  The freezing rain, thickening periodically into sleet and then relenting back into water again, drizzled down throughout the day. At half-past five, the mouth of the underground station harboured rain-coated, fidgeting groups of people. Red and blue and green smudges in the slimy, glistening road reflected the neon signs of shops and restaurants. The slow, jammed traffic, packed with homeward bound people, swished past, or chugged motionlessly when barred by the red eye of the traffic light.

  Straight from my latest job, a two-month veteran of being a general hand in an engraving works, I walked dripping into the almost deserted saloon bar. A pint of bitter and the evening paper and a half hour, as the beer filled the gastric cavity and found its swift way to the bladder and its active element, indispensable alcohol, began to perform its soothing work on the brain, of striving to digest the latest developments: a bellicose speech by a retired marshal, a ‘promising’ new toxin, a threatening situation on an obscure (obscure enough?) frontier, more tests, more spectacular than ever.

  ‘Good evening, Peggy.’

  The barman, although atypical in appearance, being a tall, well-groomed and flashily well-dressed man of about forty, was nevertheless characteristically occupied in examining his evening paper to discover not what new and daunting turn the twentieth century had taken but which of several horses had arrived first at the end of a muddy course. Down the bar a small man, suggestive of an erect tortoise, except for the emplaced cigarette fizzing between accustomed lips, was apparently similarly occupied. Smooth, polished wood, carved wooden screens and the grave, conspicuous pendulum clock waiting, in a few hours’ time, when there would be more activity inside than outside the saloon bar, to register the legal deadline for the consumption of intoxicating fluids.

  ‘Same again, Peggy?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  Peggy, whom I could see around the corner in the narrow, anachronistic stall known as the ‘Private Bar’ or ‘Ladies Bar’, was a woman of about thirty-five with a mild, vacant look, obviously a regular. Her make-up was faded and her green coat shabby. I felt that she was probably a mother, that if one got talking to her, she might well at some point declare ‘I’ve got to collect my little girl from the nursery’ and I also felt that there was now no man in her life. The ingredients of the tale that I allowed to form lazily in the margins of my mind as I sipped my bitter and glanced at Peggy, who was gazing dreamily over her glass of held Guinness, were a possessive mother, a plausible, irresponsible man and Peggy’s (presumptive) ingenuous and gentle nature. The possessive mother had finally died, the man had seduced the girlishly inexperienced woman and, after perhaps a few months of apparent fulfilment, she had found herself pregnant and abandoned and committed by her gentle nature to a lifetime of hard work in a dull, poorly-paid job in order to raise the child she would never abandon.

  Perhaps, indeed probably, what now presents itself to me as recollection is really a subsequent fabrication, engendered by the clarity with which that moment recurs to me. There are other aspects of it which come back with hardly inferior vividness: the patronizing way the barman, who looked and spoke more like a junior executive in some cynical, profiteering firm, asked ‘another one, Peggy?’ while already indifferently levering the metal cap off the bottle; the fact that the little tortoise-man looked up at me just then and winked and I recognized, with a curiously disproportionate shock, one of the checkers from the engraving works.

  In fact, the real reason why that solitary pint in a murky, stiff lit
tle saloon bar remains fresh and immediate in my mind is probably because, from a few paragraphs of my evening paper, a little later, I derived a sensation of vertigo from a prospect that suddenly presented itself to me as—chaos!

  It wasn’t much, that article, the sort of article we read every day—general comments on the world situation. This one was by a candidate at a by-election but I forget which end of the political spectrum he would have found most congenial if elected. He was talking about the customary things—national integrity, steps that should be taken to ease world tension, the necessity for preserving adequate forces—and suddenly——

  It seemed mad—madder than Lear—more terrifyingly mad than the worst delirium of a constrained maniac, because he sounded so reasonable. But he was juggling, this amiable young man, not with a ‘dead geranium’ but with my home. Not the house I lived in, of course, nor the city I inhabited, nor my country—but with the terrestrial sphere itself, with the earth, betting the validity of his own particular little complex of prejudiced assumption and inherited value against the safety of my planet.

  And they were all doing it, the retired marshal who once commanded infantry on the Somme, the candidates, the elected ‘representatives of the people’, the ministers, the party secretaries and presidents and prime ministers were all doing it—raving about with torches in a world of paper, so hypnotically intent on their theological absolutes that they were forgetting all about us. And not only about us, but about our fellow lodgers, about cats and lions, dogs and mules, badgers, butterflies and the glistening seals. All vital things had slipped from their minds, through the lattices of their various ideologies. What did they know of the tides, the motion of the sea, the spray-drenched rocks encrusted with tough molluscs, the long, soft beaches along which curl children and the breaking waves? None of it was in their minds when they discussed the world situation and issued their ultimata. Not the human life cycle, not day and night, spring and winter, youth and age, not even that ‘History’ they were so adept at invoking, no, not even history which, God knows, has seen the emergence (and ultimate subsidence) of causes enough for which men have willingly dismembered each other but which has always, at least, been informed by a sense of human continuity. But no human continuity, no future, no past, no long-term view could be inferred from the current pronouncements of our leaders when they reviewed their apocalyptic armaments and confronted their microphones.