by Paul Ableman
‘I want to be an actress.’
I think Mary must have spoken these same words to me on the occasion, about a month after I saw her in the Rainbow Club, when she became my girl. This was in the ‘George’. For an hour I had stood amongst the growing throng without seeing a familiar face or seeing a few faces that I knew by sight but none that I knew to address.
A strange sort of neurotic had attracted some attention. Flawlessly dressed in city clothing, he had hung his bowler on the bannister support, uttered a whistling chirp and, patting his bald spot with one hand and his waist-coated abdomen with the other, performed a compulsive little shuffle and slide in the centre of the floor. Mr Grieg, the bluff, tough, bespectacled manager, obviously recognizing an old nuisance, had started, thrown out one arm and called the man’s name:
‘Now then, Mr Grant——’
But the performer, instantly folding his personality back into its disciplined, daytime manner, interrupted with crisp dignity.
‘Perfectly all right, old boy.’
Unfolding his Times he moved decorously to a seat, sat down and began to read. Hardly a minute later, however, in fact the instant the last suspicious tendril of Grieg’s glance had been dispersed by his conventional manner, Mr Grant had been on his feet again, chirping and sliding. This time Grieg had gone so far as to thud round from behind the bar and take the offender’s arm but so disconcerting was the ingenious neurotic’s discontinuity of manner that he once more succeeded in calming the irate manager and apparently in remorsefully transcending his abnormality. At the third offence, however, some three minutes later, he was ejected, offering very little resistance and somehow, although manifestly harmless, having failed to acquire any substantial degree of local support. It was as if, beyond the superficial absurdity of his behaviour, people sensed a mockery of their own conduct, as if, in the abrupt switch from conventional respectability to grotesque cavorting, and above all in the ease with which he effected the transition, lay a criticism of all human conduct.
But no such deeper implications seemed to have impressed themselves upon Mary whom, when I looked back along the bar after having watched the unhappy man being firmly but considerately escorted out by Grieg, I saw giggling as she held a half-pint of bitter to her lips. She raised her hand and made a corkscrew in the air for my benefit and I grinned at her.
A few pints later, Nelmes was with us, making bitter jokes but failing to subdue the spring-time mood that, partially resulting, no doubt, from a peculiarly poignant and satisfactory response to the excellent beer and also from the warmth and willingness of Mary’s ample body against mine (for accessibility had by then been tacitly granted), had mysteriously overwhelmed me. Jock Taverner arrived, from some South American port, with his sea-going sweater and beard, and finally Peter came with Stoney Cohen, a huge, moon-faced cheerful doctor. Football fans, with rattles and harsh, Midland tongues, stormed noisily into the saloon but were absorbed in the general hubbub.
‘Wales—with its hills—with its coal——’
‘’im again!’
‘Three pints of bitter—sorry——’
‘Yo from Buh-ming’am?’ grinned a red, rough face above a huge yellow rosette. Then, with a jerk of the head at the obese Jewish doctor, the football fan confided in an equally gritty countenance. ‘I think ’es from Buh-ming’am.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ murmured Stoney politely, before rolling back with our bitters and continuing to tell pleasing and witty little anecdotes from his practice.
Later a political discussion developed. I had been sitting quietly for some time, watching, as often as I could through the throng, a chesty, suave man called ‘Swishki’, or something pronounced in that way, whom I had once met and whom I had imagined (can’t think why) to be in some way influential in the theatre. But now ‘Swishki’ appeared to be in animated and familiar discussion with a short, sandy-haired layabout whom I knew to be a cadger and general waster and I found it difficult to reconcile my previous opinion with his present, loose, colloquial intimacy with this man. But I was only marginally wondering about Swishki while most of my mental energy was taken up with trying to decide whether I was more attracted by the notion of staying for another, and then another, and possibly yet another, drink or in cashing the bond of Mary’s docility and removing her as swiftly as possible to Duck Street.
‘It wasn’t, you know.’
Perhaps the soft interjection was not in exactly these terms. Perhaps the engaging, intent, intelligent face, starkly framed in lank, black hair, that turned smoothly and casually from the next table to challenge something that Jock had just said, did not employ the above words but some analogous form ‘It wasn’t really like that’ or ‘Not according to’ The Times or my own experience or general opinion. I forget as I have forgotten exactly what the discussion was about although remembering that it centred around the notion of ‘the symphony of Europe’ At any event, we all instantly recognized the authority, though none of us the person, of the interrupter. Politics, I have always thought, is the hack-work of art.
Ned Collins (as I subsequently learned the intruder into our group was called) swung round his chair and joined us and I watched with absorption the interaction between his persuasive, documented, stylistically-distinguished mode of argument and Jock’s passionate assertiveness, through the general clumsiness of which, Jock’s genuine political passion occasionally thrust a bloom of incisive analysis.
It was weeks before I discovered that Ned Collins was a journalist who had already, at the age of 25 or 26, established a substantial reputation for himself. On this occasion, I merely succumbed to the charm both of his intelligence and of his lunar beauty. Strange beauty the man had, a pale face, not lean even a little chubby but with sufficient modelling of the features to prevent any shapelessness, surrounded by a corona of black, shining hair, and his face wore, as its everyday garment, an expression of mild, sardonic amusement which was, at least to me, most attractive, so much so that I glanced covertly, once or twice, at Mary to see if she might be succumbing only to be reassured by the continued impartial distribution of her inane good-humour.
‘What’s this then?’ asked Mary, abruptly halting at the mouth of the underground station when, a little before eleven, our discussion and group having been dispersed just before closing time by the rumour of a party in Hammersmith which had seduced Jock, Peter and Stoney away, I had been eagerly leading her back to Duck Street.
‘What?’ I asked, puzzled and disconcerted. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t go this way. Who’s he then, the black-haired weirdy?’
‘I don’t know,’ I murmured, suddenly diminished by this apparent confirmation of my earlier suspicion.
From the pubs, the theatres, the cinemas and restaurants, the stream of homeward-bound pleasure-seekers was thickening, the flow irritably divided, at the stairhead of the underground station, by the obstacle of a stationary, plump blonde and a gangling, scowling young man, Mary and I.
‘Come on,’ I urged, taking her arm and attempting, an attempt which foundered on her massive solidity and my relative feebleness, to budge her physically, ‘we’re blocking the entrance.’
‘This isn’t my line,’ she answered, gazing moodily down the steps as if they led to a new job with long hours.
‘Of course it isn’t. It’s mine. You’re coming home with me.’
‘Oh am I?’ she asked, but, as if all she had really required was clarification, she now started moving again.
No sooner had we established ourselves in the train, however, than she suddenly looked at me coldly and jeered:
‘I’m not coming home with you!’
And she continued this same propitiatory ritual right to the porch and front door of the house in Duck Street into which I only ultimately succeeded in introducing her after a final session of storming and wrangling on the step.
Sloppy, vulgar and sensual, Mary remained with me for the next six weeks, until, in fact, Aunt
Ruth’s money ran out and, under pressure of the renewed stringent need for economy and upon resumption of an ill-paid job (washing up in a restaurant), I had to get cheaper accommodation.
Once while she was standing at the mirror fiddling with some boat-shaped ear-rings that Nadia Grunwald had given her and I was sitting at the window watching a roll of cloud squirting from the rear of a glinting point of metal drilling, in noiseless and barely visible majesty, through the high atmosphere, and thinking of Hellenized Asia, she remarked:
‘Here you know when I met you—that night I came here?’
And then confessed that her display of reluctance had been not merely disingenuous but downright dishonest for she had been evicted from her own room for non-payment of rent that very day and had gone to the ‘George’ with the intention of finding accommodation of some sort for one or more nights and thus avoiding the disagreeable contingency, which apparently was sometimes forced upon her, of having to return to the family home in one of the working-class suburbs south of the river. Her reluctance to do this stemmed less, it seemed, from fear of the severity than from anticipatory embarrassment at the leniency of her probable reception for her father was a bus driver, a lay preacher and a rigorously (and, I got the impression, genuinely) good man, whose uncomplaining acceptance of his daughter’s waywardness was a much greater burden to her than any amount of natural abuse would have been.
‘Mmmmm,’ she half-groaned, half purred when, on that first evening, after I had finally shut the door to my room firmly behind her, with immediate resumption of her earlier docility, she nestled into my arms. I hadn’t turned on the light but a fine, full moon tinged the room with pearl, ‘darling——’
Her strong, soft arms tightened around me and her hands wandered, in sleepy exploration, down my back and buttocks. Docile and langorous, Mary exactly fulfilled in her erotic conduct the popular impression of what girls with her heavy, ripe figure, round, pretty face and blonde hair are like. True the removal of her clothes, with just sufficient assistance from her to maintain the excitement and yet prevent protracted fumbling, revealed breasts rather too ripe and pendulous even for a Big Blonde but the same nudity mysteriously strengthened her features so that, when I knelt beside the bed, touching, with trembling fingers, her flanks and belly, Mary seemed even more desirable than before.
For a moment, after I had undressed and as I approached my rangy body to her full one, a sudden humiliating awareness of the contrast came over me, but then a current of warm invitation flowed once more from her arms, and this sweet warmth engulfing me as, with delicate grasp, she guided my p—— into her slippery and yet palpable c——, I found the simple spasm of creation shuddering through me almost at once. Mary gave a faint sigh, as if at the confirmation of gloomy anticipation, and tightened her legs around my back, determined not to give up without a struggle and her struggle was, it appeared, to some extent successful for she seemed, a few minutes later, when she released me, to have attained at least partial satisfaction. For the next hour or so, as I lay steeped in delicious sleep, I was periodically aware of being convulsively hugged but after that we both slept until well into the morning.
In fact, it was only on that first occasion that I ‘came too soon’ with Mary. After that, we rapidly achieved the most satisfactory sexual harmony I have ever known with anyone.
Duck Street—in the morning. How bright in the bright sunlight seemed the room, the cherry-red pattern on the pleasant wallpaper, my few books on the table, the cheerful Arab rugs on the floor, the wide, stately windows and the high, beamed ceiling. It was a huge room. I suddenly appreciated its patrician expanse for the first time. It was a vast room, big enough for tennis, for the battle of Agincourt, for the resettlement of a whole dam-displaced tribe.
‘The kitchen,’ I said, gently shaking one of Mary’s ample breasts, a little distressed by what daylight revealed of the ravages to her make-up which, the night before, had not been removed from her face, ‘is next door. I trust you can cook, woman.’
While Mary, a mediocre, even utterly incompetent, cook, it turned out, ‘damned’ and clattered in the kitchenette (the dear little kitchen), I experimented with the recurrence of a slight pain I had sometimes detected before, in what I took to be the region of the kidneys, and sternly slashed at fronds of panic burgeoning from half-remembered and doubtless faulty information concerning ‘fatty degeneration’ and ‘granular yellow (or black?) kidney’.
I stood at the window, hand pressed to my hip and then suddenly escaped these hypochondriacal fears as a sharp memory flashed into my mind. There were, as I remember, no children in the leafy street at that moment to supply a stimulus but I suddenly thought of three children and, even more vividly, of the immense leather ball with which, on that first, indeed only, holiday by the sea, they had played. This wonderful lump, almost too heavy for us to shift individually, had been the chief focus and delight of that holiday and I saw Edna and Mary dutifully heaving it, in obedience to some scheme of my own, towards a depression in the sand while I, probably emulating a foreman or overseer I had observed, waved my arms and urged them to greater exertions.
We had all been playing happily together. How strange! And now the memory widened, disclosing spatial and temporal extension, up the beach to the low bungalow we had rented where father had been reading the paper and disclaiming any enthusiasm for salt water and down wondrous streets to the pail and shovel shop and backwards and forwards through golden days. All that had gone, until this very minute. I felt convinced that, until the memory had burst fresh and full of colour into my head, I had never once thought of that long, dulcet holiday in—but the name of the town escapes me.
And suddenly I thought of Stoney Cohen and realized that his participation in the later part of the discussion the evening before had been quite different from that of Jock and Ned Collins. At the time I had merely listened as the latter two had developed their differing interpretations of the recent history of Europe, Jock from a passionately emotional Left-wing, but no longer uncompromisingly Marxist, point of view and Ned revealing, it now seemed to me, in spite of the ease with which he charted alignments, in spite of the penetration with which he exposed motives and sources of interest, in spite of the impressive clarity with which whole epochs and regions were informed by his shrewd intelligence with historical meaning, essentially the mind of the nihilist for which in the last resort the vicissitudes are no more than vicissitudes, the patterns no more than rearrangements of permanently-existing and unaltering ingredients and the ultimate values nowhere transcending those of the mind analysing them. During the inevitable consideration of Germany’s rôle in the Europe and world of the twentieth century, Stoney had contributed a number of sensible and plausible-sounding suggestions, but it suddenly seemed to me that these had expressed not merely the ordinary contributions of an informed mind to an interesting discussion, but the passionate cries of a combatant. Everything that Stoney had said had tended to make Germany less accessible to the intellect, bigger, stranger, more universal, more unfathomable and now, of course, I suddenly realized, or realized its relevance to the context, that Stoney was a Jew. The insular, impartial clarity no less than the vicarious commitment of the other two were closed to him. For how could their ‘Germany’ be the same ‘Germany’ as that of someone whose race had fought a stubborn, millenia-long battle for cultural cohesion only to encounter, in the dawn of the Age of Analysis, its most implacable foe?
In spite of the profound abhorrence, perhaps even defensive disbelief, of the other two, before the Gothic horror of the 3rd Reich, the subject remained for them, like Hiroshima, like the Inquisition, like all the other facets of that core of fury in man which may require a thousand or a hundred-thousand more circuits of the raging sun to cool completely into a core of intelligence, one for objective discussion while for Stoney, surely, it could hardly be accessible other than in mythical terms, the clash of shadowy culture giants over the world. And yet there had been, to the eye,
just three men talking in a crowded pub. How is the past fed into us? How does it adapt itself, with such cunning camouflage, to the present?
‘Do you like it sort of crispy?’ called Mary from the kitchen, before emerging, wreathed in thin tendrils of smoke, with some wafers of ruined bacon.
A year or so later (possibly more for my memory locates the moment in an autumnal city and yet this autumnal quality itself is ambiguous, deriving from my occupation at that time, a fearful office job which I was only able to stick for a few months, melancholy, abhorrent tones but from other autumn memories, bright bar-rooms beckoning out of the mild fog and a girl pattering beside me, cheer and nostalgia), I entered at about half past eight the saloon bar of a rotten little pub, my local at the time, called ‘The Brave Fool’.
While I tried, over a pint of bitter, to shed the afterimage of another desert day and cleanse from my ears the clatter of office machines and the dreadful, lifeless, genteel talk that goes on in offices, the irritating name of the establishment began, as it had before, to stimulate unwelcome cerebration. I was ‘The Brave Fool’—brave and foolhardy, indeed, to venture into the place. Some corruption—of what? The Bear Full? A real or legendary Brave Fool? Who cared?
I felt lonely, having disciplined myself for some weeks to stay at home, in my bleak, furnished room, in the evening and work. And then the books I was reading, Stendhal and Flaubert in translation, by the immediacy and vividness with which they evoked a near but vanished culture increased my sense of loss and insignificance in my own. Where? Who? Who were they? Who was that, that negro across the road, standing vacant and watchful on the street corner? And who were they, in the gliding, chauffeur-driven sedans, studying the evening paper as they were conveyed from ministries and board-rooms to suburban mansions? Did they think they were in control? Did they think they dominated the Niagara of events crashing through our century?
