by Paul Ableman
Extraordinary amount of time I spent queuing, largely, I suppose, because, in compensation for the disappointment of every single one of the above expectations, I took refuge, after the tedious days of filing Messrs. Perman Glass Products Ltd’s letters, increasingly often in the cinema.
That was exciting! I remember the guilty thrill of standing outside one of the metropolitan cinemas specializing in French or Italian films on a chilly, October evening, lured by the stills in the glass frames and memories of favourable reviews I had read, and knowing that, while ostensibly debating the matter with myself, I had secretly determined that I would go in, perhaps for the third time that week, spending far more than I could legitimately afford so that dinner the following night would have to be cheese rolls and milk.
One paid the money, received the ticket, walked in past the sweets and cigarettes stand, through swinging doors, over muffling, heavy-pile carpets, had one’s ticket torn raggedly in half by the uniformed usherette and finally entered the bleakly-lit hall, with its tiers of occupied seats and was directed to a vacant one. A curtain covered the screen. Music streamed from the loudspeakers behind the screen. The lights were still on and one waited for the stirring moment when one suddenly realized that they had begun almost imperceptibly to dim and, a little later, behind curtains that had seemed opaque but now proved to be diaphanous, the great screen came to life. Another few moments and one was no longer sitting in a hall just off Oxford Street but winding through the outskirts of Paris in the cab of a lorry in the early hours of the morning, or peering in at the window of a room in a Roman tenement or meeting the almost overwhelmingly human baker of a small French village, whose wife was rather elusive.
Without that—without the cinema—things would have been bleak indeed. The only other thing, strangely enough, that was at all exciting was the queuing. I suppose it was the nearest I came to meeting people, the sort of people I had hoped to meet, indeed anyone at all other than Mrs Coates.
‘Off to the cinema again? I don’t know how you stand it, Mr Peebles. On these cold nights! Does your mother know?—you spend all this time—and money—in the cinema?’
And finally, in fact, the queues were productive of more than mere visual acquaintances. It was in one of them that I met Louise.
If it had been one of the French films that then ravished me, she would have been standing in a sort of light-flecked haze at the mouth of a Metro station. I would have materialized from nowhere.
‘Who are you?’
‘No one.’
‘Nor me.’
And, linking arms and gazing, she up and I down, into each other’s eyes, we would have melted into the light-flecked haze to reappear, I in shirt-sleeves and she hugging a sheet to her bare shoulders (and I lighting a cigarette and gazing at the sad morning stir in the mean, romantic streets of Paris) in a cheap little hotel.
In fact, it was damned awkward and called for a lot of sheer pluck and prosaic self-encouragement. For when I did finally say baldly ‘Hello’ to the perceived, female form beside me, not having had the temerity to confirm by a direct glance my impression that she was young and pretty, it was only after having several times found myself in a similar inviting position and then, after perhaps half an hour of striving to move numb lips, shuffling alone into the cinema. With Louise, it took about twenty minutes. ‘Go on, say “hello”. What harm can it do? But why “hello”? Well then something else. She can only ignore you.’
‘Hello,’ I said grimly, gazing at her with anguished eyes.
‘Hello.’
So little had I anticipated the possibility of any exchange beyond the outrageous initial greeting that I fancy I merely stammered foolishly:
‘I mean—I’m sorry—I mean—you don’t mind?’
‘Mind what?’
‘Well—I said hello.’
‘I know you said hello.’
‘Shhh!’
She had spoken in a normal conversational tone (quite self-possessed, unlike me) but I had suddenly shrunk in horror at the thought of the people behind us participating in our gauche exchange. I visualized the long tail of the queue, a ripple of merriment running through it, beginning to stir in anticipation of an unexpected diversion. I glanced over my shoulder and was relieved to see only a little, flat-faced man reading a newspaper, and everyone else stonily reserved.
After that, in my recollection, we were always queuing, for the first few months anyway. She was a student at London University. Of what? Geography? English?—no, I think it was Geography. I recall that she went off once for a week to do, was it, regional geology? She lived in a far, western suburb where once I visited her.
Always queuing—always October, mist and moisture and visible exhalation.
‘Where are we going?’ she’d ask when I met her at the underground station.
‘Shall we queue up for the gallery of “Dead Ducks”? I wouldn’t mind seeing that French film “Au Revoir, Cheri”—revival—if you haven’t seen it.’
And so we’d stand for another half, or three-quarters of, an hour in the queue for the cheapest seats, armoured by health and the brisk circulation of youth from the cold, moist evening.
There was, in those days, a small, shabby, red-brick, with an unpleasing grey-brick pattern on its façade, house in a moderately mean street behind Victoria Station which sheltered only two people. I was one of them—and I was there because things had gone all wrong. On my arrival in London, rather tired from the long train journey and bewildered by being suddenly confronted with the impersonal Metropolis, which did not present, to my first glance around after issuing from the railway station, any charming squares overhung by attractive, low-priced garrets, I had compromised, as I suppose many new arrivals do, by deciding to get a room for a night or two anywhere and then find more desirable living quarters at my leisure. I had then wandered off behind Victoria and been snared by Mrs Coates.
She plonked her great, matter-of-fact personality down on me the very first day of my arrival and kept it there, crushing the romantic images of myself and life in London which I had brought with me, out of existence. Perhaps it was a good thing. (Strange how a disaster, at some subsequent moment whips off its mask and reveals itself to have been really a ‘good thing’). Anyway—Mrs Coates—great, sturdy white-haired, frowning matron, not even a regular, boarding-house keeper. She ran a canteen for a living and Mr Coates, perhaps shrivelled by some momentary displeasure of hers, had faded away years ago but left her the house.
‘You’re looking for a room are you, young man?’ she had asked slowly, using the period to rake me with a searching glance.
She had caught me gazing at a ‘Bed and Breakfast’ sign in a window—and, doubtless, looking dejected at the thought of having to settle, even for the shortest possible period, in such a dingy and cheerless establishment. However, although surprised at being thus accosted in the open street into nodding and uttering a wry ‘yes’, doubts as to the potential relationship even then entered my mind.
‘Looking for a room, eh?’ and she had continued to prospect me with her eyes. ‘Look, you come with me.’
‘Well——’
‘It’s not far—just down the street. You can see the house from here. Come on.’
And, of course, I had accompanied her. A few minutes later:
‘Well?’ and on a note of slightly menacing assurance, she clasped her hands in front of her and invited me to survey the chamber into which she had just led me. I had already noted from the hall and staircase that the house, while wearing the identical dismal exterior of the one in front of which she had pounced on me, was genuinely comfortable and attractive inside and there was no doubt that the reasonably spacious, fully-carpeted, simply but not vulgarly-furnished room (marred, it is true, by a rather narrow window giving onto the dull and dusty terrace of identical houses opposite) would be quite acceptable for a few days. Nevertheless, a strong cautionary instinct whispered that it would perhaps be better if I did not lay my hea
d, even for a single night, under the same roof as the lady I was soon to know only too forcefully as Mrs Coates.
‘Well, young man? Do you like it?’
‘It’s a very nice room.’
‘Of course it is. It’s been ready for a year—just like this. Do you like the furnishing?’
And she went on to tell me about the pains she had taken over the furnishing, not only of the room, but of the whole house, of the shops she had toured, the specialist journals and interior decorating columns she had consulted and, perhaps most significantly, of points, some of which seemed to me, although I knew virtually nothing about the matter, eminently sensible ones, in which she had found herself in disagreement with the authorities.
‘It may not be a fashionable street, but that’s no reason for just sitting back, is it? You don’t have to live in Kensington to have a bit of taste, do you?’
‘No—no—of course not.’
‘Do you want the room?’
‘Well—that is—how much——?’
‘How much is it?’
She glared at me through her spectacles for a moment so vehemently that I began to fumble mentally after apologies for my indigence. But then I realized that what I had read as a glare was merely the naturally severe expression produced by her large, angular features and sheath of stern, white hair, that, in fact, somewhere behind this forbidding façade lay a smile.
‘How much have you got? Not much, eh? Are you a student?’
‘No.’
‘Not a student?’ and now, perhaps, a flash of genuine reproach came from her eyes. ‘Now then, what are you? You’re not a working man—I can see that.’
‘No—at least——’
‘I’m not renting this room only for money, young man, I don’t mind telling you that. There’s never been a room in this house rented before. Jack’s dead now. Well then, what are you?’
She had thought that I was a student? Why? I don’t look especially studious, I don’t think, if not specially ignorant. Surely the tall, thin young man, clad anonymously in his ‘demob’ suit, whom she chose to accost that day, might have been a young clerk, or apprentice labourer or any other perfectly unintellectual member of the public. And yet—I feel equally convinced that if I had been, say, an impoverished farmer’s son from Galway hoping for a job on steel erection, Mrs Coates would have strode past without a word. Some almost chemical sympathy made her glance, pause and finally speak and the person she addressed was not the miserable young non-entity but the aspirant poet. She was drawn to cultural things, things belonging to a world that a woman whose parents (all this, of course, I learned subsequently by degrees) had been not merely working class but lumpenproletariat from the dock slums, who had left school at twelve to snip aprons in a factory, who had married at seventeen a (rather timid, apparently, and sexually sterile but otherwise unremarkable) working-class man, had no natural access to.
‘I’ve just come out of the army,’ I muttered, jealously unwilling to disclose anything of my real hopes or aspirations. ‘I’m going to get a job.’
‘Are you?’ she gazed at me for another long moment, ‘and you like the room?’
So I lay that night in the comfortable bed brooding uncomfortably on the compact I had inexpertly tried to avoid but which we had apparently finally concluded: I was to pay nothing until I found a job and then what I could afford. Yes, but I had only intended to stay a few nights. Gloomily I examined the disparity between the romantic garret and gay life of my intentions and the Victoria and Mrs Coates that had mysteriously engulfed me.
How long was I with Mrs Coates? Nearly a year—no—May to December, I think it was, when I first met Mike Rea, say nine months. I got a job, through the labour exchange, as a filing clerk and the rent which Mrs Coates finally established was so low as to be almost nominal. I hated the job but, for some months, it seems to me, I became reconciled to my life, getting to know (‘becoming part of’ was how I regarded it) London, doing some of my own work and going to the cinema and theatre. I even congratulated myself on the excellence and cheapness of my quarters and the hope of garrets and gaiety faded from my mind.
It was when the idea of taking Louise back to my room, ostensibly and even genuinely for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat, but essentially, of course, in the hope of some more rewarding physical contact than a good-bye kiss at the booking-office of an underground station, first occurred to me that I suddenly and keenly recovered my first misgivings. What on earth was I doing with Mrs Coates?
It was drizzling. I was waiting for Louise. I paced smoking up and down under the canopy of the entrance to the underground station, wondering where we would queue that evening. I had kissed Louise twice and been out with her perhaps four or five times. She was only allowed out by what I assumed must be rather old-fashioned parents once a week. Suddenly the idea of taking her home with me, almost intercepted by the opposing one, so swiftly did a certainty of the impossibility of this in a house run by Mrs Coates overtake it, passed through my mind. And then a wave of indignation winged after the former two. Why not? Who was Mrs Coates—? I gazed at the free people walking in the street and a distinct thrill of dismay went through me. But—how had it happened? How had I, the most ardent seeker after an independent, full life, become a bullied adolescent? Now wait—was I bullied? Would she object? I could recollect nothing in any exchange we had ever had relevant to Mrs Coates’s views on sexual morality and yet I felt as sure as that she would frown upon anyone spitting on her carpet that a girl could not, other than surreptitiously, be introduced into my room. Well, couldn’t it be done surreptitiously? But, at this, I became appalled at my pusillanimity. I had slipped, without realizing it, into some monstrous relationship with the woman. It wasn’t that she dominated me exactly but that—Good God!—there we were, sharing that house, like—like anything, husband and wife, mother and son! Why hadn’t I seen it? How had I managed, all these months, to imagine that I was just a lodger paying rent? And how could I get out of it? It suddenly seemed blindingly clear to me that I could no more simply give Mrs Coates a week’s notice than I could offer Louise a pound to go to bed with me (as, miserably, I had done, for the first time, with a skinny, inert street girl a few months before).
We had had long talks, Mrs Coates and I, by then. I had told her everything. I knew all about her. She marshalled me in the matter of the right things to eat, keeping clothes in tolerable shape, going to the pictures. I had even read poems (none of my own) and explained them, or, at least, my own feelings about them, to her. Yes, and—horror! I had told her about Louise. Imperceptibly, she’d become, if not a mother, at the very least in loco parentis to me. And yet, by mutually practised devices, the nominal rent, her strangely continuing to address me as ‘Mr Peebles’ and my never having urged ‘Alan’ upon her, I had been able to maintain the consoling fiction, indispensable to the cherished feeling of independence, that I merely rented a room in her house.
There was, at Messrs. Permans, where I worked, a fairly-spacious storeroom in which were kept old files, documents, ledgers, bundles of ancient trade-journals and so forth. Because my legitimate duties fairly regularly necessitated my entering this chamber, I had been given a key to it. It was this key, or rather what it made possible, that enabled me to find my job even grimly bearable. Because of it, I spent almost as much time searching for crumbly old account books and such like, which I might then plausibly convey to this sanctuary, as I did in the prescribed execution of my duties. Once inside, of course, I would dump the papers anywhere, light a cigarette and, parking myself on the radiator by the narrow window, gaze out at London, smoke and daydream. On one dreadful occasion, I recall, my thoughts were playing electrically around what, stooping behind her to replace a file, I had, a little while before, heard Mavis immodestly whisper to one of the other typists: ‘I couldn’t move—he had his hand up my dress’. So evocative did I find this remark (particularly as my eyes had sometimes rested appreciatively on Mavis’s full, tightly-
sheathed figure, if less enthusiastically on her long, thickly powdered face and dyed red hair) that, prudence vanquished by a sudden disreputable desire for privacy, I had locked the door from the inside. A moment later, to my intense dismay, the door rattled and the perishing accountant’s voice said, ‘Didn’t Peebles go in there?’ and then, after a mumbled reply from a third party, added, ‘Run and get the chief clerk’s key. I haven’t got mine.’
For an anguished two or three minutes I hovered by the door, trying to weigh the alternative merits of either marching boldly out with some casual explanation, which I was totally unable to devise, for the accountant if he should still be in the vicinity or else pretending to busy myself rooting amongst the old files and greeting the others, when they entered, with ‘well-feigned’ innocence and the unconvincing explanation, if pressed, that I had inserted the key on the inside purely to keep track of it, but how had it got turned?—‘must have done it without thinking, I suppose’. Finally when, more to terminate the suspense than from conviction that it was the wiser course, I gently opened the door, the corridor proved to be mercifully empty, and, hastily and furtively locking the door again from the outside, I stole across to the ‘Gents’. From there, humming softly, I emerged a moment or two later, in ocular demonstration for the accountant, now returned, of the reason for my delay.
After that, of course, I never locked myself in again (indeed, for perhaps a week, so intimidated had I been, I really did visit the place only for legitimate purposes), but contented myself with using the storeroom as an indispensable avenue of escape from the office. The window was not the least of its attractions. From its seventh floor altitude, one could see a fair stretch of central London, in the middle distance Big Ben and Nelson’s Column and further away the gaunt chimneys of one of the immense power stations. I remember that sometimes London seemed motionless and austere, mere architecture, and at other times I had a sense of the thriving life of the city, full of the potential for adventure, a theatre of human activity.
