by Paul Ableman
But, after I had opened the envelope and noted the brief message, and after a swift, and more swiftly dismissed pang of dismay at the destruction of my plans (nothing important —a dinner that evening at Weedon’s flat; a date with Edie), the images of mother that, with poignant clarity, suddenly dazzled me were quite unlike the above objective reflections.
I walked over to the wardrobe, rested my head on it and, three or four years old again, could almost feel the sunny flags of the kitchen floor on which I was playing with some mercury, the breeze flowing through the open doors and hear mother’s casually affectionate voice saying, as her hand suspended the plump strawberry over my head, ‘Open your mouth’. Scene after scene, moment after moment, walks, with the three of us dancing around her, across to Spiller’s farm, shopping expeditions to the village, evenings in the parlour with a log fire smouldering and smoking, flared and sank in my mind, but my thoughts recurred again and again to the kitchen and the strawberry.
‘Damn!’ I thought, trying to convert some of my burden of guilt and remorse into contempt for people unlike mother, ‘she was all right. She may not have been—terribly exciting, but she was all right. She wasn’t, anyway, obsessed with things, with position, with cars and objects and acquiring things. She was just a decent country—damn!’
I couldn’t stop crying. Whenever I thought I’d calmed down and blinked unsteadily out of the window, a new paroxysm began and shook me as if from without. I don’t think I’d shed tears for a decade, and I suppose there was something cumulative about my hysteria. ‘Be so good,’ I remember urging myself, trying to heap against my tumultuous grief random and intentionally mannered injunctions, ‘as to master yourself! Kindly take thought. Practise a little reserve. Retain sufficient—Damn!—oh, Damn!’
In the train, I sat opposite a closely-cropped young man of about my own age, almost albino-blond and with an oval head, who stared at me unblinkingly. After several times attempting, by means of stern, protracted return glances, to discourage this scrutiny and failing, I suddenly felt an intense and, since it was quite disproportionate to the offence, irrational loathing for the stranger and an impulse to choke him. Without actually carrying me sufficiently beyond the frontiers of sanity to threaten implementation of the desire, the feeling was nonetheless strong enough to drive me out of the compartment for a smoke by the door of the toilet. Then I felt very calm and reflective and I think—I think….
Since I know now that the girl friend I then had was destined to become my wife, that Messrs. Multiboard Ltd. (plastic-bonded partitioning material), who then had a lethargic order clerk would later see the same face behind one of their junior executive’s desks, it is easy to allege that, as I stood for half an hour or so of the three hour journey in the draughty corridor, I was consciously taking stock, concluding a period of my life. And yet I think there is some truth in it. Edie was never just another girl friend. There was a tacit acceptance of at least a potentially more durable relationship in our meetings even then.
As for the office—to my initial astonishment and subsequent shame and rage (which even then were discerned by a dispassionate little accountant in my mind to be a trifle forced) I had realized, about an hour after it had happened, that the lingering and seemingly aimless session, neither chat nor interview, which the Sales Manager had unexpectedly initiated after a chance corridor meeting with ‘Settling in, Peebles? Happy with us?’, would bear no other interpretation than that of an attempt to prospect me for possible promotion.
Even as I scornfully recurred to the notion in the days that followed (becoming ‘part of Multiboard’! Me!) all sorts of treasonable and intrusive little side reflections flickered about the idea. It was true, wasn’t it, that I was getting on a bit to be always doing the humblest job everywhere? Rubbish, you’re a poet! Am I? Of course! And a wife and kids? Who wants a wife and kids, you ass! Not a bad firm, I suppose—What? A damned, great, glossy commercial horror! Jackson, personnel chap, isn’t too bad—got a beard….
It was, perhaps, anticipation of my imminent surrender, and a preparatory attempt to bolster my humility, that made me, standing in the corridor watching the little flooded fields of the barren, wintry countryside, here relatively unspoiled, slip by, recall once again my visit, years before, to Louise’s home at Copse End, a far, western residential suburb of London.
You had to go, beyond the last underground station, a couple of miles on a bus, past playing-fields and rows of mellow mansions. And this I had done. But although, laying in bed the night before yearning for Louise, who, the night before that, had become my mistress, knowing that it would normally be five days before I could see her again, the novel idea of visiting her at home had seemed like inspiration, now, as I descended from the bus at the top of a little rise of trees and open ground, misgivings arose.
It was quiet. It seemed a long way from the neon howl of the West End, from the only districts, having been in London at that time less than a year, that I knew.
The clean, corruscating pavements, tangles of willows glimpsed through chinks in board fences, broad, empty streets, substantial, weathered houses intimated standards and patterns of behaviour that perhaps, that probably, I had never assimilated. Could one just come barging out to someone’s home in this way? Unwillingly, I recognized that my doubt and discomfiture stemmed from class feeling. Louise was—Louise, my girl, now my mistress, and if we but infrequently ‘spoke the same language’, at least we shared the same emotionally-conditioned silences—but her family? True, according to Louise they knew about me and, at least, did not disapprove but what would they be like? What cryptic values, by which they would be silently judging me, did they embody?
For the first time, walking down that long, arboreal, residential street, I saw my own family exclusively in terms of class and, ruefully, murmured ‘lower middle—if not lower, lower middle’, worse still, I felt a slight spurt of gratification at the thought of Uncle Edward, who owned a small spinning mill, ‘middle middle—perhaps even upper middle middle’. Misgivings about my clothes, hairstyle, accent, place of residence (the Southampton Road! God!) and, indeed, almost every objective fact about me, had so mangled my nerves that, by the time I turned into Mayhew Street, only the recognition that the visit had become a matter of prestige and also a still potent, if somewhat intimidated, longing to see Louise, prevented me from going back.
However, Mayhew Street itself was something of a relief. The houses were smaller and newer and did not speak so unequivocally of leisure and tradition, of opinions and the channels of power by which these could be implemented. They were grander, certainly, than the Southampton Road, or Victoria or the village, but not as intimidating as the earlier mansions. And so I marched round the little, more ornamental than practical, drive (into which, nevertheless, a medium-sized car had been jammed) and rang the doorbell.
I have read that afternoon over and over again in my mind trying to understand how I consistently misinterpreted it at the time. For instance, how did we get past the initial encounter? I rang the bell and Mrs Petheridge opened the door.
‘Yes?’
‘Good afternoon, I’m Alan.’
‘Alan?’
‘Alan Peebles. I wondered if Louise was in?’
‘Louise? I’m afraid she’s not. Was she expecting you?’
‘No, I—I just thought I’d—I might call in——’
‘Louise is away for the week-end. She’s gone to—you’d better come in, Mr er——’
‘Peebles.’
‘Mr Peebles.’
Something like that it must have been, with my extreme discomposure and Mrs Petheridge’s charm, courtesy and, considered objectively, exquisite capacity for dissimulation, nursing me past the initial incongruities. And after that? It went beautifully, which is why the subsequent shock was so keen. Oh, it was easy later to reassess those bright nods and somewhat protracted periods of reflection, the quick, nervous smile, the faint mocking aura of her hospitality and conversation bu
t, at the time, these merely seemed the expression of her quick and cultured intelligence.
Most marked, definite, memorable face she had, Mrs Petheridge, and that this is not simply an impression fostered by the clarity with which I have retained images from that afternoon is proved, or strongly intimated, by the exact opposite being true of her husband. Small and spreading, hunched over some vines in the garden, or later pottering about the house, Mr Petheridge was anonymous, grey, blurred. When I think of him, I can’t be sure the image is not that of Mr Colquoun, a fellow with an evening paper in the Hart and Horn, or Lewka Poscwiesczi (I think), a Polish fellow employee in a firm I once worked for or any of many grey-plumpish men in the street. He seemed somehow, although probably, in fact, only about half way to his pension, quenched or quelled and perhaps all that nervous quickness, which so impressed me in his wife, had induced a sort of—resignation, a feeling of being out of the running. Whereas Mrs Petheridge….
She was thin, with narrow, fine, slightly-hunched shoulders, an oblong face, bright eyes, a wide mouth with a prominent tooth at each side. Vampire. There’s a painting of a woman, doubtless by Picasso, like Mrs Petheridge, only green or blue. Thin, angular, nervous and curiously feminine. And very intelligent.
‘French—language and literature,’ she replied briskly, when, after having learned that she had formerly been a full-time, and was still sporadically, a school-teacher, I asked her her subject. And it was about French, literature more than language, that we recurrently talked that mellow afternoon.
Quick, cordial memories flash into my mind, with the background civilized and inviting, and the mobile, exact features of Mrs Petheridge visually emphasizing some perceptive comment or suggestion. For instance, we stood for a time by the French windows, sipping dry sherry, watching Mr Petheridge worrying a limp vine, and discussed Rimbaud. That was, I think, when I first began to feel really at ease. I said something bright about Rimbaud—I think I used the word ‘incantatory’—and she agreed with delight. About then, it occurred to me that I wasn’t missing Louise as keenly as I should have been doing, and the impudent thought, giving me considerable satisfaction, that perhaps the mother was just as good (the implication being that she would have been, had I made the attempt, as compliant as Louise), passed through my mind. Then Mr Petheridge came in and laid some twine and his gardening gloves on the top one of three long, recessed rows of predominantly French, paper-backed books and his wife combined her (doubtless customary and perhaps not always so light and chiding) rebuke of this desecration with a flattering reference to my appreciation of books, which increased my gratification. Books, sherry, gardens, an atmosphere of tasteful comfort, all these constituted an environment that had been hitherto completely alien to me and I couldn’t help congratulating myself on how effortlessly I was able both to appreciate and complement them. Mrs Petheridge discreetly encouraged me and I talked a good deal, about my struggles with the French and Italian languages, and my judgements on such of their classics as I had read. And I remember finding that the sympathetic atmosphere itself seemed to generate understanding so that I several times expressed as grave and long-held opinions, notions that had that very moment popped into my mind.
After a natural pause in our discussion, when, for a moment, it began to seem as if the current had been switched off and I was searching through mental files for a new beginning, Mrs Petheridge remarked parenthetically that Louise was currently reading Balzac and had been so impressed by, I think, ‘La Cousine Bette’ that she now planned to read the entire cycle.
‘Oh?’ I exclaimed, surprised at this evidence of a literary bent far in excess of anything that I had credited her with. ‘She’s never mentioned it to me. I didn’t know she—I mean—I must ask her about that on Saturday.’
‘Yes,’ nodded Mrs Petheridge, and then, after a pause during which her bright eyes remained fixed on my face but not quite in correct focus, ‘you do that.’
It was a recollection of that contemplative look, suddenly usurping the place of more congenial memories of the afternoon that, as I sat gazing at the weaving pipes through the window of the underground train, later engendered the first premonitory doubt. Why had she looked at me like that? So swiftly did I then assemble the retrospective evidence that, by the time the train shot into the glare of the next station, my satisfaction had surrendered to grim, rueful, anger. At one point she had asked me how long I had known Louise and then how often I saw her and I had answered, assuming that I was merely rendering precise rather vaguely held facts, with the truth. And my name—on the doorstep, when I had arrived, she hadn’t recognized my name. It wasn’t merely that she had formerly only heard Louise mention it and wasn’t sure of it. She hadn’t known it. After that, it had been easy to secure corroboratory and, it seemed to me, conclusive evidence from another source.
This was the method by which I had obtained Louise’s address. I had often asked her for it but she had always, while assuring me that she wanted me to have it, evaded the matter until—yes—her handbag had fallen on the stairs of the Apollo Cinema one Saturday evening and, assembling the profuse and miscellaneous contents, I had come upon an envelope, an official one from the university, and expressed the intention, immediately implementing it, of taking down her address there and then. Later that evening, she had said something like:
‘Em?—my address—you’d really better not just appear I mean, at the house—you see—you see, father’s a chronic invalid——’
I had accepted this unhesitatingly at the time, and, indeed, when I had arrived at the house that afternoon it had been in my mind. Seeing Mr Petheridge through the window at his gardening, however, I had assumed mere exaggeration, at least in the way I had interpreted the remark, and that the disability must be some relatively trivial one, a touch of rheumatism—something like that.
But now in the underground train I scanned the relevant memory and knew that I had deceived myself. She had said distinctly, and meant me to understand, a genuine, suffering sick man, a chronic invalid. And the old gardener undoubtedly wasn’t that. Louise had lied to me. She had never mentioned me to her parents at all and during that long afternoon, while I had been ingenuously and enthusiastically rattling on about literature, and feeling confident and at home, that woman, Mrs Petheridge, Louise’s mother, had been dissembling. Ironic situation, at least for her! A strange young man knocks at the door and goes on for hours innocently revealing all sorts of secret and, probably, in her eyes, reprehensible things while she cleverly probes and encourages.
An unsettling, shifting flux of emotions played about me for the rest of the ride home, anger, at Louise, at her mother, grudging amusement at my own naïveté, shame, embarrassment, a sense of betrayal, defiant pride, and anger again. And whenever I have thought of the intrinsically trivial affair since, I have felt diminished. Actually, Louise, after, the following Saturday (to my surprise arriving for our customary date), confessing that I had been right, but parrying my reproaches by insisting that she had been simply trying to safeguard our relationship from incalculable parental reactions, also alleged that her mother had, it seemed, rather taken to me, and been surprisingly mild in her admonitions. Nevertheless, Louise only came back one Saturday more—and then I never saw her again. Perhaps, she lied again. I don’t know.
The railway embankment dipped and, at the edge of a little bridge, I saw a small boy in a bright yellow oilskin mounted on the lower rung of a fence and behind him an old lady smiling at the intent solemnity with which he watched our train swing past. Mother’s dead. Simply gone. The watery rhythm of England. A long row of raw, new red-brick houses, the last still skeletal about the roof and the sky trembling at the effort of the broken pearl and purple cloudbank to restrain the radiance behind. I don’t know—this—or that—how to live—appropriately….
I spent a lot of time, during the three days I spent at the cottage helping Mary, who did all the real work, to inter Mother and settle affairs, brooding about Lenin. I had pr
eviously read one short account of The Bolshevik’s life and had retained the overriding impression of constancy. That was why, doubtless, I kept thinking about him, feeling myself to be inconstant, aerial, weightless, with no decision or understanding to show for thirty years in the world of men. I had drifted—but I had thought and tried to give durable form to what I had thought. Lenin, in spite of perpetual immigration, had been fast as granite. Had he been right? What does ‘right’ mean in that context? Had he changed the world? Had he been a function of manifestation of a changing world? Had he hardened into ‘Lenin’ when the Czar slew his brother and remained that, an avenging force, subsequently immune, having already touched reality at one of its furthest limits, to the world? Protean, my world in which truth is permanent qualification—not quite, never quite.
‘Friends, Russians, mob—having denied myself a human rôle these years of exile I come not to praise Russia, but to bury it. There was a Russia, loud with bourgeois merriment at the droll Gogol’s peasant tales. History, availing itself of Lenin’s tongue, abolishes it. Henceforth, Leninism—ism—ism——’
And there was one surprise: the villain Slatterley. I had endowed him, purely, I should think, because his name was so redolent of music-hall villainy (and then his wealth and seducing Edna—probably the other way round, I thought, after having met him), with vague, pantomime props, swarthiness and a moustache, a veneer of charm and heavy-lidded eyes. Perhaps I hadn’t really invented specific attributes but, never having met him, whenever I had thought glancingly of Edna’s husband, Roger Slatterley, the thought had gravitated towards pantomime. And that was him! The plump, dandruff-flecked, whisky-nosed little worrier fussily extricating Edna’s unnecessarily, ostentatiously, abundant cases and hat-boxes (for a week’s stay!) from the big black Humber. He only stayed an hour: ‘How do you do? Could you perhaps—that’s it—thank you. I’ll manage the rest. Is the car all right, here? Do you think I should move it? So this is the ancestral home, Edna. Oops, I’m sorry, pet,’ but it was quite long enough to strip Mr Slatterley of his theatrical accretions in my mind.
