by Paul Ableman
At the first rattle of the trap-drums, or rather when the clarinet, a moment later, announced the theme, I turned to Pete, took her right hand lightly in mine and was soon twirling, releasing and improvising with the effortless authority of a veteran. Of course, it wasn’t exhibition dancing. I hadn’t jived for years and had never had the occasion, as I would have lacked the will, to devote any great energy to perfecting variations, but it was—I feel sure of that—good dancing. For that whole evening my ear remained married to the rhythm and my feet, and agile body too, to my ear in an unprecedented way. And why I was able to dance really fluently for those few febrile hours, and I have debated the positive influence of Pete and the negative one of Ronny without feeling any conviction that these really explained it, I still can’t imagine. But I did. Pete noticed it. Cunningly, I interpreted, correctly I am sure, as approval, even admiration, the slight flicker of a glance she favoured me with as, with precision timing, concluding a long throw that had sent us swirling away from each other, our fingers met lightly but securely again and I swung her back into the elastic cushion of my curved arm. I caught sight, with a particular flush of pleasure, of Ronny’s gaping face fixed upon us.
‘She’s a very good dancer, isn’t she?’ asked Ronny when I rejoined him and, as I nodded casual agreement, I did not miss the flattering implication that my own prowess entitled me to pass judgement on Pete’s.
Then—that chap, gaunt, patrician—he must have been the only visitor above, say, thirty-five in that athletic cellar. His own virtually patriarchal status, as the contrast seemed to confer upon him, although he was actually, perhaps, in his late fifties, was revealed in the silky sheath of white hair on his head, his slight, bent form of medium height and the rich cross-graining of delicate wrinkles about his eyes and mouth. I had not noticed him earlier but now, as I graciously accepted Ronny’s offering of a new glass of wine, I was aware of him hovering near. Several times he glanced quizzically full into my face only to bury the promise again in an introspective smile. Finally, I trapped one of his glances with a direct, but affable ‘What?’
‘Remarkably—mm—remarkably pretty girl.’
His voice was silvery and exact, and had perhaps been finally honed, after the tutors in the private school-room, by the dons of the other, tranquil Cambridge. He edged closer, his nervously mobile neck sending his thin, refined face on a little dance of its own, as the couples began dancing again, as Ronny’s anatomical bumps continued to dance and as the drum-sticks in the drummer’s hands danced across the hollow drums.
‘She is, isn’t she?’
‘You know her well?’
‘I’ve only just met her.’
The arrows of his amiable inspection shot to various parts of the room.
‘The anomaly of a hereditary legislative body—eh?’
‘What?’
‘You’d better dance with her again.’
‘She is dancing.’
‘The House of Lords? Eh? Do you think it should be reformed? I do.’
For the next hour, between dances with Pete, I found myself intermittently in the company of the white-haired man. I was a little disconcerted, since I had assumed that, like me, it was his first visit, when he greeted my partner, who had accompanied me back to where he and Ronny were standing, with an affable ‘Hello, Pete, my dear—you’re jiving beautifully this evening’ and also when various youths, clearly regulars, threw a cheerful ‘Hey, Ricky,’ at him when passing.
My second dance with Pete was another complacent event. After Ricky had indicated to me that, without there having been a break in the music, Pete was no longer dancing, I had glanced across at her to encounter immediately the invitation of interrogatively raised eyebrows. Excusing myself, I had moved condescendingly over to her and we had had another exhilarating session.
Of course, there was a belated reaction to the series of little triumphs and self-congratulations in which I wallowed that evening. About a week later, as I was waiting, on a pearly morning, in the cold, naked street, for a bus, I felt that I had been an utter ass and that everyone must have been gurgling with furtive amusement at my smug capers. But actually I don’t think I was as bad as that, a little bumptious perhaps, but not offensive.
Anyway, we had another dance and returned together to Ronny and Ricky and drank more wine. Suddenly there was an uproar. A number of hoarse, cockney voices rang out, but not, it seemed to me, on the tense key of genuine violence but more on a crudely-bantering, rather cheerful note. We glanced over to a table in a dim corner at which four or five youths had risen and were gesturing cryptically at each other. One of them abruptly broke away, clutching his smart suède jacket in demonstrative way and, turning back to the others, who were cheering loudly, exclaimed:
‘You silly c—— you didn’t have to——’
‘You told me to!’ insisted another, grinning. ‘Didn’t he tell me to?’
‘I didn’t tell you to——’
I gathered that they had been performing some trick with a glass of wine which had spilled on the indignant one’s jacket. There was now a rather heated exchange of insults with the injured youth striving, I felt, not so much to obtain an apology as so far to impose his grievance on the others as to compel them to stop laughing at him. And finally he succeeded, but only at the cost of making the whole incident graver than it need have been and being himself escorted firmly out by the doorman.
‘What was all that about?’ asked a deep, mellifluous voice at my elbow and I turned to see the haggard, interested face of Leslie Weedon.
I briefly explained to him the little I had seen of the disturbance and when he had grasped that it had been, intrinsically, neither very impressive nor very entertaining, he gazed at me with a broad, teasing smile and said:
‘I didn’t know that you jived?’
‘I don’t—very often. Come to that, I thought you were a square too.’
‘Well,’ Weedon drew himself up, a mangled twist of discoloured paper (he rolled his own thin, deformed and reeking little cigarettes) between his lips, and gazed sadly, reflectively about the room. That ‘well’ of his, a perpetual guarantee of moderation and admission of a possible alternative, was the most characteristic and endearing conversational feature of this amoral, clever, humane man.
‘Funny,’ I murmured.
I gazed at the whirling couples, at the exertions of the sweat-glistening instrumentalists and suddenly shifted mentally quite outside the scene. Funny—yes, it was and where had it come from? New Orleans, did they say? Chicago? And where had it gone to? Here to this basement off Shaftesbury Avenue but also, at this very moment (rhetorically ignoring global time variations) couples would be enmeshed in similar rhythm on floors in Tokio, Moscow, Delhi, throughout Europe—almost everywhere the pulse of that negroid beat had subjugated the youth of the world.
‘How closely,’ I asked, formulating the question, in deference to Weedon’s keen intelligence, as exactly as I could, ‘is jiving related to traditional African dancing?’
‘Mmmm,’ Weedon considered, ‘not very. Oh, it undoubtedly has its origins there.’
I knew that he was an amateur anthropologist or rather, from having seen an abridged version of Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ in his hand the last time we had met and from the relative ease and authority with which he introduced anthropological glosses into our discussion, I had inferred this. Now, we talked about Africa and dancing and cultural dissemination, continually stopping to share each other’s wonder at an evocative point, until the excitement of the theory so far overwhelmed my enthusiasm for the practice that it was with mounting reluctance that I broke off periodically to dance with Pete.
On one of these occasions, I found Weedon, with a casual partner, dancing close beside me and realized that he was, if not absolutely ‘square’ at least sufficiently quadrangular to be a mild menace on a dance floor. His eyes bulging from his sallow face and his lungs pumping out short, canine pants, he cavorted with the dismayed gir
l in a series of jerks and twitches that owed virtually nothing to the authority of the instructive beat. But my patronizing, if affectionate, smile died at the reflection that this surely indicated only that he was the less easily manipulated, the lesser robot.
We were still talking about dancing, still with special reference to jiving but now in a more general, social, sexual, historical, etc., context, when closing time drew near. Ronny was still with us but silent after having been cowed by several brusque dismissals (alas, by me) of contributions he had attempted to make to the discussion. True, he was not really equipped to participate but instead of greeting his blunders with patience and elaboration, as I should have done, I had accepted the unkind and perishable satisfaction of a smart jibe. Nevertheless, unlike Ricky, who was sitting, apparantly contentedly but without saying much, in a group of young people some distance away, he had stayed by us. I hadn’t danced with Pete for two or three dances when the band played the final number and the doorman called ‘that’s all now’, but I suddenly saw her glancing at me significantly and, excusing myself to Weedon, went over for the prize award of the evening.
True, when she looked at me meaningfully and asked, in a low, urgent but impersonal, voice ‘Are you going to see me home?’, I failed to receive the flattering offer with the sang-froid that, ideally, I should have displayed. Indeed, in the first moment of gratified surprise, I fear I blinked like a schoolboy and said ‘What?’ but I recovered quickly, murmuring in regretful but self-possessed tones, to her repetition of the invitation:
‘I’m afraid I can’t this evening, dear. But there’ll be other nights—do you think?’
‘I hope so,’ she muttered, presenting me with another short, intent glance before moving away in the direction of the cloakroom, leaving me bemused, deliciously bemused, puzzled at my refusal of the rich and unexpected opportunity and yet aware that somehow the conservation of it implied by rejection offered, in a sense, a more durable pleasure than acceptance could have done.
And that was my first evening in the Cambridge, or some of it. One can’t tell all, not of an evening, not of a moment. There are no genuine boundaries, not even cells, in the continuum of experience. And what one tells is not the best, the most significant but merely what strikes one at a particular subsequent moment. A different moment of narration would yield a different narrative. And significant? When, how, will I be able to reap the significance of the precise and precisely recurrent vision of a neat youth, never seen again nor then met, which mysteriously returns at random and improbable moment. I remove my tie, turn to get a coat hangar and there, between me and the wardrobe, he suddenly sits, with a candle and a glass of wine in front of him, released for an instant by some unfathomable relay from the cerebral prison in which he serves a life (my life) sentence.
Other nights at the Cambridge? I went there once or twice a week for the best part of a year. Pete turned out to be a nymphomaniac. I use the term circumspectly, aware that it has acquired at the hands of those sometimes unaccountably conservative beings, the reviewers of novels, a meaning sufficiently imprecise to make it applicable not only to girls who actually enjoy carnal congress but even, in extreme cases, to mere adulterous wives.
I had better supply a definition for the occasion. If by nymphomania is understood, as some technicians in the field understand it, a woman incapable of obtaining sexual orgasm and goaded by repeated frustration to ever greater abandon, then Pete does not belong in the category. For she certainly, as soundless cries of mounting excitement, culminating in gasps and sighs of release, testify in my memory, was eminently capable of getting satisfaction from sex. No, I use the term to convey the sense of urgent, but discrete, sexual desire in a woman, desire almost totally unassociated with any appreciation, or even sense, of the personality of the donating partner. In other words, it didn’t much matter to Pete whom she slept with. She was like a man, tending to crave variety but content with anyone, reasonably virile that is.
Strange girl! Amoral, but in a different way from, say, Weedon. His amorality was the product of sophistication, of finding himself unable, in an age of total revision, questioning, analysis, in which, for example, religious phenomena are made to disclose erotic foundations, and erotic devout, to adhere to a doctrinaire and primitive code of conduct quite out of tune with the subtle, Protean and often terrible contemporary reality. Not that he was bad. Of course, he wasn’t bad, although in his flouting of conventions and even the law (permitting his flat to be used for illegal abortions, for example) he would doubtless have seemed diabolical to many an, at their own level estimable, old believer. But what made Weedon a humane and civilized man was not acceptance of the absolute authority of anything, the Mosaic tables say, or the common law of England, but simply the refining influence of thousands of years of growing away from the jungle.
But Pete? She was no intellectual—in fact, I shouldn’t be surprised if she belonged in that sinister category which periodically, as the result of a poll or sampling undertaken by some enterprising journalist, alarms and dismays good democrats by proving to be ignorant of such vital facts as the names of eminent politicians. I doubt if Pete knew, for example, the name of the Prime Minister, certainly not what party he belonged to, or such other basic information as that America was West and Russia East of England, perhaps not even that England was an island. And yet, although she may have escaped the education, she had acquired the accent, insofar as one could judge from the extreme infrequency and brevity of her utterances, of a standard, middle-class English girl.
She worked in a shop and lived in an attic, with a low sloping roof above a bed and a battered chest of drawers, near Regents Park. She can’t have had any thoughts other than of dancing and sex—can she? No, that isn’t quite Pete, not just a pleasure-mad girl. Then…? Sometimes, watching her staring intently at the band, tapping her foot to the rhythm, I sensed a sort of neural delicacy that might have provided her with a non-cerebral but perhaps, in its own way, just as acute instrument of perception. Perhaps she lived nervously as others live intellectually or emotionally.
I really don’t know. And yet I knew her, as well as anyone, as well, for example, as Weedon who subsequently ‘knew’ her that well too, and confirmed my opinions, or rather speculations.
The second time I went to the Cambridge she wasn’t there and on the third I left with her. We went, silently, on a bus, to her attic and yes—during that trip I’m sure I was aware of activity, oscillatory, vibratory, like the activity of an untuned radio, or better, though I have never heard it, of a radio tuned to the depths of space. Surely she was receiving messages, thrills of perception but from a region, and in a code, so far unsuspected by human science. But perhaps I am making her seem a little eerie, and, whether or not I am instilling it during narration, she does, in retrospect, seem slightly unearthly. But this was also a very pretty thoroughly human, girl and no such reservations marred my excitement as we tiptoed up the stairs to her attic room.
‘Sit down,’ she ordered and, while I obediently waited on the low, lumpy single bed, she began clearing away scattered cups and plates, finally disappearing with a set of them, presumably to a kitchen or sink.
I sat on somewhat tremulously, hardly bothering to inspect the room. Through the dormer window I could see a house opposite and, to one side, the light of a street lamp shattered by foliage. Staring at this, I suddenly thought: ‘I should have said “We’re friends”’ and was so moved by a mixture of regret and relief that I stood up and went to the dormer window and looked out. When those three razor boys had approached us, Kingsley and me, in the ‘Horseshoe’ the year before, I should have said simply ‘We’re friends’. What had I said? Something (wrong, false, self-conscious) that I couldn’t remember. Why hadn’t I said simply ‘We’re friends’?
It had been one of those things, those slips that shame one, remorselessly demonstrating one’s smallness, weakness, humanity. Several times the incident had recurred to me in the past few months but e
ach time, reluctant to subject myself again to the humiliation, I had shaken it off by turning my attention to whatever was at hand. But it had apparently been fermenting, working, disseminating some subtle hormone through the buried levels of consciousness.
Late that night, or rather early that morning, after Pete had returned and again driven the matter from my mind, and after we had lain clothed for a while on the bed, finally rising to throw off our clothes and then clamber between the coarse and none too sanitary sheets, and after, finally, a long, liquid and sweet physical union ending, after the simultaneously-reached apogee of excitement, in a voluptuous drift into deep slumber, I found myself fumbling thickly out of sleep while Pete, struggling in my groping arms, reassured me with:
‘Yes, yes, certainly we are, yes——’
And as I came quickly back to awareness of the little, stuffy room, and the London night beyond, not even the compensatory presence of Pete could reconcile me for being deprived of my dream. I yearned, actually sobbing once or twice in helpless regret, for the monster I had just left there, a being, neither man nor woman, nor white nor black, but whom, with the visionary authority of dreams, I had known to represent all men and whom, in one splendid moment of categorical fulfilment, I had been reciprocally, but not carnally, embracing to the refrain of ‘We’re friends. Aren’t we? Friends—we’re friends!’
When Pete left me, it was mainly, I suppose, a blow to the poor old amour propre but no—not entirely. I was genuinely a little in love with her by then, even if the whole rhythm and manner of the affair had been unfavourable to the development of deep feelings. Casual. Still, after four or five nights, enough to institutionalize the business, of leaving the Cambridge, and spending the night, with her, I must have looked pretty woebegone when she suddenly concluded it.
‘Are you ready?’ I had asked, as usual.
