by Paul Ableman
‘Well, I for one, don’t love Simon.’
‘Oh, don’t you?’
Goaded by this blunt assertion beyond the restraints of gentility, the dog-lover addressed his antagonist directly for the first time.
‘I bloody well don’t! You can’t love a bloody dog!’
‘Oh, can’t you? Very interesting. I should say it was a matter of democratic procedure, wouldn’t you?’ and the dog-lover, before turning his attention back to the prancing animal, shot the other a glance of authentic dislike in which one could sense a world of class animosity of a kind that is supposed to have been neutralized by the ‘great social changes’ of our era.
‘Now talk bloody sense! What the hell’s democracy got to do with it? Some of you people think——’
But the rest of the remark was lost in a series of short, piercing barks from the contentious beast itself and the speaker, with a look of disgust, picked up his paper again and continued to read. But I sensed that this was more a flourish than a genuine resumption of interest for, after a very short period, he drained the last sixth of his pint, stood up, put on his (rather opulent, I noticed) overcoat with great deliberation and strode out, not failing to urge very forcefully as he passed the other.
‘A bar’s for men not for bloody animals.’
Which was answered, after the door, admitting a little gush of snow and icy air, had closed behind him, by a period of brooding outraged silence.
I remember that clash, without issue in violence, because of the later one on the same evening, which did find, rather terrible, physical expression. Now, however, knowing myself cut off, at least in that place, from my book, I finished my own pint, ate the last morsel of pie, got up, put on my ‘mac’ and left.
As soon as I got outside I felt happy. Cheerful thoughts had, in fact, while I had attempted to read and later listened to the squabble, been playing in the background of my mind. Actually, they must have been one of the factors thwarting concentration, for, several times, after starting to read, I had paused and allowed awareness of some pleasant background knowledge to try to struggle into consciousness. But it had eluded me.
Now, whipped by the freezing wind, seeing the pedestrians bent against it, the crusts of frozen snow on the car roofs, the lights glinting in the wet, icy streets, the great turmoil of clearing the metropolis once more for the night, I realized what it was. And, with the realization, came doubt and a residual feeling of shame. The pleasant thought was Nelly—Nelly Nelmes, whom I had known on and off for years, and had kissed casually in pubs and at parties, but never more. Indeed, prolonged intimacy had blunted desire, robbing the potential conquest of all but physical confirmation. However, a few nights ago we had suddenly, I think both with surprise, acquired a new and deeper sympathy, so much so, in fact, that Nelly had seemed almost like someone met for the first time. The conversation that had mediated, but I don’t think produced, this change had concerned animals, or rather, perhaps, the idea, which intrigued us both, of animals living amongst us and retaining their life rhythms in the midst, and in the teeth of our human constructs. It seemed we were both fascinated by the notion that to the saurian rock dove, known weakly to peanut distributors in public squares as the pigeon, London is only marginally better than, and qualitatively no different from, any rock-bound coast. I had even confessed to her my particular esteem for sea-going mammals, that suckle amidst the waves, and generously infuse the primitive matrix of life with a little land-won intelligence.
Funny how even Nelly’s physical appearance, stocky, blonde and childishly pretty, had altered in my mind and her features and figure now seemed instinct with a charm I had never endowed them with in the past.
It had been appreciative, if unconscious, thoughts of Nelly Nelmes which had buoyed up my spirits throughout the day. But now, having admitted this to myself, I was compelled to revive the absurd debate which had already occupied a good deal of my mental energy. Was it right? Wasn’t there something—what?—disreputable, almost incestuous, about suddenly being attracted by someone one had known intimately for years? Silly! After all, she was like a new acquaintance. Yes, but, in objective fact, she wasn’t a new acquaintance, but someone you’d drunk many a silent, or predominantly silent, pint with, whose bottom you had cheerfully, and without any appreciable erotic feeling, slapped, who had been like a sister to you. But she’s not your sister! Nevertheless….
So it went. Although, I knew that I wanted to see Nelly, that, if we could recapture the intimacy of the other evening, seeing her and being with her would make me happier than anything else I could think of, I was hampered by the absurd equivocation I seemed unable to shed. Finally, as a compromise, knowing that I would, in fact, gravitate towards the centre of the town and the pubs where she might be found, and also as a response to the still-dense, rush-hour traffic which made the struggle for buses and underground trains, particularly if one were in a reflective mood, disagreeable, I decided to walk for a while, perhaps stopping for a pint and a few pages of Russian literature on the way.
I had to walk further than I had intended. There were queues at all the bus stops and I strode past them. When I reached the underground station at which I had vaguely thought of getting a train it turned out to be closed. The iron gates were drawn and a policeman was warding off the irritated press. I passed on. By now I was cold and also exhilarated. It began to seem rather stirring to be battling a blizzard in the heart of London. The snow was thickening on the pavements beneath me, cushioning and transforming them. The wind drove great flights of snowflakes into my face. I could hardly see from street-lamp to street-lamp. I crossed the Bayswater Road and walked beside the park, which was turning, under the influence of the blizzard, into a sparkling and unfamiliar wilderness. Suddenly, it came to me again, a feeling that seemed to echo many in early childhood and, I fancied, a few similar moments in mature life, a feeling that, stimulated doubtless by the actual scene but seeming to embrace far, far more, could only have been expressed in some such appreciative exclamation as ‘how lovely! How lovely is the world!’ In a sustained rapture, forgetting or losing for a spell, all the qualifying factors, even the inhuman rhythms of the machine city, I strode on through the snowfall until regretfully finding myself at the next underground station.
On the final leg of the trip, I felt eager to arrive, picturing in my mind the huge, animated bar of the ‘Horseshoe’, which I knew Nelly favoured, and also feeling suddenly anxious for it now occurred to me that Nelly wasn’t patiently waiting for me to resolve my psychological conflicts but, a companionable girl who usually had men around her, might even now be cementing a liaison with someone else. What the devil had I been thinking of? Moping around over purely academic issues when life was uncertain and bombs were big and the whole show was merely an experiment conducted by gelatinous super-scientists on Neptune—where was Nelly?
I burst into the ‘Horseshoe’, prepared to battle my way through the noisy throng and verbally despatch whichever layabout was presumptuously making up to my newfound darling—and I had a queer shock! The place was empty! But where—what…? Of course! It was too early—and the blizzard….
I gazed woefully around. The row of stalls stretched empty and bleak to the barren, curtained alcove at the rear. The great, horseshoe bar curved in untrammelled serenity round the room. At its furthest point, a short, disgruntled-looking sailor was munching potato crisps and behind the bar two barmen were polishing glasses—otherwise the room was as bare and forbidding as a barn. Damn! Where was Nelly? Where was anyone? Perhaps—but even as the thought of trying the ‘Starling’ stirred in my mind the realization that the two operative factors, hour and weather, would also be influential there, and indeed anywhere else, made me pause. Oh well then—bitter and nineteenth-century St Petersburg. I ordered my pint, carried it to an empty stall and prepared to read.
And then, at last, I did get into my book. The first pint lasted me for about half an hour, and at the end of that period I was so deepl
y immersed in the narrative that, although several times raising the empty tankard to my lips and irritably determining to get it filled, almost another half hour passed before I actually did so. Then I marched blinking across the room, vaguely noticing that I now shared it with a dozen or so others, but finding the whole pale scene, blizzard and bar and England and the twentieth century, merely a ghostly murmur behind the thunder of my book. It was, in fact, after I had finished reading an episode, a conversation in a slum room between a civil servant and a student that seemed to me to have been created at perhaps as incandescent a pitch of imaginative intensity as anything I had ever read, and while I was, although allowing my eyes to trail idly on across the page, in reality striving to assimilate the concentrated fare, that I became aware of someone beside me. As I glanced up, a familiar voice said:
‘Yes now, there he is, our little friend——’ followed by a throaty chuckle.
‘Hello Kingsley?’
‘Can I get you a pint?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you reading, eh?’
A bit cramped and never particularly addicted to sedentary drinking, I stood up and accompanied Kingsley over to the bar.
This man was the first negro I had ever known well and, in the early days, struggle as I might in self-contempt against it, I had not been able to escape feeling slightly self-conscious about being with him. He often teased me about my height, in fact, only just over six feet, but emphasized by my thinness, and this was probably a form of self-mockery. He was himself very short, perhaps five feet three or four, and very broad, with a large rump and a large rounded chin, giving him the broadest grin conceivable, bespectacled, with somewhat protuberant eyes and dense fuzz of little curls on his head—very odd-looking. I had been conscious of the contrast we had made, walking or talking together and had striven to ignore it. And then one day, I had said to myself, ‘Why try and pretend that these things don’t exist? He is a negro, and something of an oddity to boot, and civilization for the last few centuries anyway has generated this exaggerated awareness of racial differences. The falsity is in maintaining that you can be friends with Kingsley in exactly the same way as with Clark or Peter or someone you were in the army with. Stop this doctrinaire pretence that you have “no racial feeling” and simply get on with knowing the man’.
And this seemed to work, in that we became, quite rapidly, sufficiently good friends for superficial things to dwindle out of sight. Strange how a common response to, say, a poem by Baudelaire instantly creates a bridge of understanding no matter what extremes of social or national background seem to separate two people.
I recall one perilous incident before we had become close friends, perhaps, by a blessing of chance (since it might, I suppose, have turned out quite differently—and miserably), it was this incident that confirmed our friendship. Actually, I think it was. We had been talking and drinking and drinking and talking and now we were talking about a certain book by an English novelist which I maintained was the only authentic comic novel in English. But Kingsley wouldn’t have it. I am sure to this day that I was right, at least in the sense that my arguments were relevant to the proposition, for I sensed, without being able to put my finger on it, that some psychological block was coming between Kingsley and a perceptive understanding of the book. He wasn’t considering it with anything like the depth of critical penetration that I knew he was capable of. Instead, however, of being able to locate the key inhibition in Kingsley’s mind and to demonstrate it to him, I merely kept multiplying positive examples and arguing in the, for the purpose in hand, futile mode of ‘yes, but what about this passage or that passage’ and so on. It was, I think, as much from progressive dissatisfaction with my own ineptness as from impatience with Kingsley’s apparent obtuseness that, after a particularly glaring example by him of a missed point, I cried out:
‘No, but listen, you stupid nigger——’
And then stopped, appalled, as suddenly crowding in upon me came applauding legions of phantom Klansmen and old-style imperialists, and genteel racists and fascist theoreticians, the whole rabble army of those with a vested interest, if only of self-esteem, in ignoring the overwhelming evidence for the essential similarity of human beings everywhere. I stared at Kingsley, in terror of the veil of doubt and hurt that I feared would come over his face. But it didn’t happen. As deeply committed to the argument as I had been, he simply glared back at me and roared:
‘Stupid nigger yourself! Can’t you see——’
And then, suddenly grasping the message of my frightened gaze, his own eyes contracted and, for an instant, he stared silently back at me. But, of course, it was too late. The acid of outer hate had already been dissolved by his absurd, reciprocal insult and, almost at the same instant, we grinned, our grins broadened and a moment later we both laughed aloud.
‘Anyway,’ I resumed, ‘whichever of us is or isn’t a stupid nigger, it’s quite clear that only one of us understands Smollet! Illiterate pig!’
That had been nearly a year or more ago. Now I accompanied Kingsley to the bar, and, while he ordered the drink, gazed idly around, still in the grip of the mighty allegory I had just been reading.
When was it—then or later? I recall, much of it vividly, everything that happened that evening, but the detailed order of things, at least from this point on, defies my recollection. Had they already, while I glanced around, noticing bushy-bearded Tony roaring (he always roared) at Nadia Grunwald, various strangers, two dim little girls I had seen before and other familiar faces, arrived, the three bearers of violence? Were they already clustered near us, down the bar, still adequately diverted by the magazine they were snatching out of each other’s hands, and their periodic raucous bursts of laughter at things it contained, to keep them from glancing around in search of further destructive entertainment? Or did they arrive later? I can’t remember, while recalling that, at some period, as Kingsley and I chatted, my eyes were increasing doubtfully attracted from time to time to this ominous little gang. No, of course—it was before they arrived that I saw Nelly.
I must have forgotten her before that, what with the pleasant talk with Kingsley and a feeling that, whatever else happened, there would always be ale. But suddenly I saw her. Probably I had shifted my position a little and there, tucked behind the curtain of the little proscenium that separated a small chamber from the main part of the saloon, was Nelly. Puzzled at first, my eyes moved from her to the pale, haughty-faced youth whom I had been glancing idly at from time to time without realizing that the concealed companion with whom he had been conversing was my Nelly. She was gazing across the proscenium and so at right angles to my own line of vision. With mounting dismay, recalling the intimacy implied by the casual demeanour of the young man, I watched the pair. Kingsley must have asked me something to which I failed to reply for now there was a slight edge of impatience in his ‘Well?’
‘Mm?’
‘Well—don’t they?’
He meant, I suppose, don’t films convey certain things more readily than words do, for this was the subject we had been discussing. But, although understanding his question, I was too shocked by what I had seen to make an adequate reply. I merely mumbled ‘I suppose so’ or some such listless agreement.
‘You what? What is it? Are you listening?’
In fact, I was suddenly weary of the conversation. I had a sense of things piling up—negative things, hopelessness, despair, beginning to reveal their true, terrible mass which only the blind energy of youth is capable of fatuously ignoring. That damned Russian book—brilliant but, in its ultimate statement, desperate—for there was no room in that universe for evolution and only the struggle itself was stable—a preordained struggle that could never seek further victory than its own perpetuation. Is that what it’s for—the parks glittering under the snow, and the glittering buds in May and the stars glittering in the depths of space? A mighty intellect says so—Damn Nelly! I felt that she was lost to me, and, in fact, although my
feeling was based on a total misinterpretation of the situation, an absurd, classical misinterpretation, this proved ultimately to be the case. We never did recapture our moment of intimacy. It was, in fact, months before I saw her again, for the young man she was with took her two hundred miles away, and when I next did see her she had found herself a new boy-friend. True, we were technically intimate once subsequently but that was casual (although it had a protracted, surgical sequal), a mere extension of our long familiarity, almost accidental since I don’t think she really knew, when she crawled under the blanket at that party, that the randy young man there ahead of her was me.
Soon Nelly and her brother (as, months later, after Charley Nelmes had again followed his sister down from, I think, Huddersfield to London, I discovered that my rival had been) left the ‘Horseshoe’. I was watching them in the bar mirror and for a moment I thought of turning and confronting them, but I felt too depleted and gave the cause up as lost. Nelly and Charley—strange pair, Nelly completely indifferent to Christian morality and Charley a staunch, dull friend in later years, indifferent to everything else.
‘There she goes,’ I murmured sadly.
‘Who?’
‘Nelly—do you know her?’
‘Nelly? I do know a Nelly.’
‘Nelly Nelmes? No? She’s just left. I feel low, Kingsley, distinctly low. How do you feel?’
‘I feel well, and I wish to continue to feel well. I haven’t had a love affair for three years. Are you proposing to be maudlin?’
By now, the place was beginning to fill up. But, of course, I had been deprived, by having seen, and seen depart, Nelly, of any real interest in new arrivals. I remember wondering if belligerent Tony, a sturdy and reassuring, if not always comfortably predictable, presence was still with us, and then glancing around to find he wasn’t. Most of the stalls were full and the amount of vacant floor space was decreasing. The snow seemed to have stopped falling but, as could be seen when the doors opened, a substantial layer of it had been durably deposited on the pavement. Gradually, what with the ale and Kingsley’s attractive company, my spirits began to rise again, but our talk was now desultory and soon something happened which sent them plummeting down again.
