The World in the Evening

by Christopher Isherwood

  In the spring of 1934, she wrote to Mary from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands:

  ‘We’re at a hotel on the beach. From our windows, we can see the fort—a white cube with one black window in the middle of it, like a dot on a die—and the rocks spread with drying laundry, and the funnels of steamers in the harbour behind the roof-tops on which people grow flowers and keep chickens and goats. A reef makes the bathing safe from our beach; but the sharks come in close to shore by the slaughterhouse when offal is thrown into the sea, and there are said to be manta rays, too—great horrible creatures that wrap themselves round you like an overcoat and then vanish with you into the depths. (You know, I’ve just realized that I mentioned them for the same reason that one used, as a child, to wish wolves would howl around the house at Christmas-time—to add to the snugness of being indoors!) Away to the south, there’s a huddle of brown hills around the extinct crater which forms the centre of this island. Today they’re piled high with rain-clouds—such a towering topheavy stack of them—it looks ready to topple over and drench us. But, down here, the Playa is still basking in hot sunshine.

  ‘Since our arrival, I’ve felt happy, serene, almost secure. Not for any good reason. The news certainly isn’t any less depressing, or Hitler any less frightening. Are you getting used to the Nazis; fatalistically indifferent to them? I’m afraid I’m beginning to feel like that, a little. And then, out here in the midst of the ocean, there’s this vastness of water and sky all around: it seems to swallow your anxieties and fears. Fear flourishes in dark corners, gloomy hotel bedrooms, narrow streets; it simply cannot exist in this light.

  ‘We have our political excitements here, too; but they’re strictly local. On May Day, the servants in this hotel were forbidden to work by their unions, which are very strong here. A couple of waiters did, nevertheless, but they were dreadfully frightened, and first drew every curtain in the lounge, lest some of their colleagues should see them from the street and throw stones. And, just a few days before we arrived here, one of the cooks, whom even the rest of the staff admitted to be quite incompetent, was dismissed. Encouraged by his union, he immediately sued the hotel for a thousand pesetas damages. The manager, in self-defence, had to collect the signatures of the guests to a written complaint about the food, so as to be able to prove in court that he’d been forced to get rid of the cook!

  ‘Did I ever mention a youth named Michael Drummond, whom Stephen and I rather adopted, that first summer at the Schwarzsee? He has unexpectedly reappeared after all these years, and is staying here. Talking about our labour problems reminds me of him, because last night he infuriated a retired English colonel by declaring that the servants had had a perfect right to desert us on their holiday, and that we, the guests, should have had the courtesy to cook for them and wait on them ourselves! I secretly agreed with Michael but didn’t have the courage to say so. As for the colonel, who is rather a sweet old conservative lobster, he became so indignant that he turned bright scarlet and looked ready to be dished up and served with melted butter as the entrée at a workers’ banquet.’

  *

  The casual way in which Michael was introduced into this letter didn’t ring quite true. Elizabeth seemed to be trying to suggest that his arrival was of no particular importance to either of us, and that he was practically the same boy we had known seven years earlier in Austria. And yet, when she wrote this to Mary Scriven, Michael had been with us for more than a week already; Elizabeth had remarked, several times, how much he had altered, and she must have been quite well aware of the new relationship which was developing between the three of us.

  I didn’t even recognize him at once, that first evening. It wasn’t that he’d changed so much in appearance. It was his manner that was altogether different. He walked into the hotel with the air of a veteran traveller who is equally accustomed to luxury and discomfort, and doesn’t much care which he finds; scarcely bothering to glance around him. On his back was a bulky, heavy-looking rucksack; and a camera in a leather case was slung around his shoulder. He appeared to have no other luggage. As he crossed to the desk, his movements were so purposeful and unself-conscious that he seemed, as it were, less visible than the other arriving visitors, whose awkward newness, loud foreign chatter and crude curiosity made them as obvious as advertisements.

  Just as I was going through the process of realizing who he was—thinking No, it can’t be but, yes, it is—he turned and saw me. He didn’t seem at all surprised.

  ‘Hello, Stephen,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘You probably don’t remember me, do you? I’m Michael Drummond.’

  ‘My God,’ I said, ‘Michael! What are you doing here?’

  ‘You haven’t changed, you know.’ Michael regarded me with a slightly amused curiosity. ‘Or not nearly as much as I’d expected.’

  ‘Well!’ I grinned at him stupidly. ‘This is amazing! Are you going to stay here long?’

  ‘I don’t know. That depends.’ Again, I was aware of his amusement; and it puzzled me.

  ‘I must run up and tell Elizabeth,’ I said. I didn’t know why, but I felt embarrassed. ‘She’ll be awfully pleased. We’ve talked about you so often and wondered what you were doing.’

  ‘Have you?’ I think he knew this was a lie, but he didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were still on my face, but I got the impression that he hardly attended to what I was saying.

  ‘No. It’s really extraordinary,’ he said, as if talking to himself. ‘You’ve scarcely changed at all.’

  When Elizabeth and Michael met, she threw her arms impulsively around his neck and kissed him. I saw Michael stiffen slightly as she did this. Then he smiled politely. But he didn’t return her kiss.

  At supper that night, we questioned him about his doings since our last meeting. The conversation went easily enough, but it wasn’t intimate. Michael’s tone was impersonal and extremely polite. He would tell us whatever we wanted to know, nothing more. Each piece of information had to be extracted from him separately, and it would be followed by a short silence, until our next question. He didn’t ask us anything about ourselves.

  Since leaving Oxford, we learnt, he had become a freelance news-photographer, wandering around the world in search of material. In 1932, he had taken pictures of the riots following one of Gandhi’s arrests, he had been in Manchukuo, and he had covered the election of President Roosevelt. He had left the States and arrived in Berlin in time for the Reichstag fire. Later, he had been expelled from Germany by the Nazis for snooping around their concentration-camps, imprisoned by the Czechs while investigating the Nazi party in the Sudetenland, and had his camera broken by a stray bullet during the bombardment of the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna, that last February.

  ‘My Goodness,’ Elizabeth exclaimed, ‘you were lucky!’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I was. The film wasn’t damaged, and I had some quite good shots.’

  ‘No, I meant you might have been killed.’

  ‘Oh,’ Michael looked vague. ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  ‘And now you’re working in Spain?’ I asked.

  Michael nodded.

  ‘Do you expect trouble here, too?’

  ‘There’s sure to be, before long. Either Catalonia will break away from the Republic or the anarchists and syndicalists will start something, with or without the communists—’

  ‘I’m dreadfully ignorant,’ said Elizabeth. ‘What, exactly, is the difference?’

  ‘To explain that,’ Michael told her, smiling slightly, ‘I’m afraid I’d have to deliver a long political lecture.’ He said this pleasantly, without the least air of superiority; and then added, as if to close the subject, ‘Of course, there might also be a fascist putsch.’

  ‘But whatever happens,’ I said, ‘you’ll be on the spot.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Michael agreed, impersonally; rather as if I’d remarked that tomorrow would probably be fine.

  Elizabeth asked if we couldn’t see some of his pictures.

  ‘I hav
en’t got any with me that are worth showing. Actually, you know, I’m a rotten photographer. I’ve never really learnt how to use a camera properly.’ Michael grinned, and suddenly, just for a moment, he was like the boy we’d known at the Schwarzsee. ‘The magazines I sell my stuff to don’t seem to mind that, as long as there’s plenty of action. So all I do is to get right into the middle of things and blaze away. If it’s out of focus, that only makes it look more dramatic.’

  We both laughed at this, and the atmosphere seemed to have grown warmer. I suppose Elizabeth thought so too, for she tried a more personal line of approach.

  ‘But, Michael,’ she said, ‘you haven’t told us much about yourself, you know. You can’t spend all your time, surely, amidst these scenes of violence and carnage? What do you do for relaxation?’

  ‘Well, I’m kept pretty busy, of course.’ Michael’s face had instantly assumed its mask of well-bred politeness. He was on his guard, again. ‘I play quite a lot of tennis.’

  ‘And I suppose you have plenty of friends?’

  ‘Naturally one meets a great many people,’ he agreed, ‘in this job.’

  ‘That must be fascinating.’

  ‘Some of them are quite interesting. Yes.’

  At this, Elizabeth gave up. During the rest of supper she asked Michael no more questions; instead, she talked about our own travels, trying hard to put him at his ease. He appeared to listen carefully, and he smiled at the right places in her stories; but, after we had drunk four or five glasses of wine, I realized that he wasn’t completely attending. In spite of themselves, as it seemed, his eyes kept leaving Elizabeth’s face and turning to mine. And there was an expression in them which I couldn’t interpret: it was some kind of a challenge or question, I thought. As though he were claiming a private understanding between the two of us, from which Elizabeth was excluded. His eyes made me feel vaguely uneasy, and I kept avoiding them; but I was also rather intrigued.

  Elizabeth was watching Michael as she talked to him. I’d come to know that gravely thoughtful look of hers so well, it meant that she was deeply and sympathetically concerned about the person she was looking at. When she watched someone like that, she reminded one of a doctor making a diagnosis. Later, when we’d told Michael Goodnight and were upstairs in our room, she said: ‘He’s lonelier than ever, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. I suppose he is.’

  ‘I’m worried about him, Stephen. He’s under some terrible strain.’

  ‘What kind of a strain?’

  ‘I don’t know. But he’s been hurt, somehow—I’m sure of that. And he’s gone deep inside himself. That handsome face and those nice manners—they’re not him, at all.’

  ‘He was always shy, you remember?’

  ‘That’s the whole point. He used to be. He isn’t now. The shyness was only a thin crust, and he kept breaking through it. He was up near the surface, all the time. Now there’s no crust on the surface. But somewhere, deep, deep down, there’s a dark little cave of solid rock, and he’s hidden inside it.’

  ‘You make him sound like a mental case,’ I said.

  ‘Darling, you think I’m exaggerating, don’t you?’

  ‘Well—let’s say, dramatizing.’

  ‘Perhaps I am. I hope I am. It isn’t that I expect him to have a nervous breakdown or anything. At least, not yet. But—did you notice his eyes?’

  ‘What about his eyes?’ For some reason which I didn’t care to analyse, I was unwilling to tell Elizabeth how I’d felt at supper, when Michael had kept looking at me.

  ‘That’s where it shows—the strain he’s under. Even though he tries so hard to hide it … Promise me something, Stephen.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If he should ever venture out of that cave of his, and try to tell you what all this is about—promise you’ll be very gentle with him. He mustn’t be hurt any more.’

  ‘Why should I want to hurt him?’

  ‘You wouldn’t. Of course you wouldn’t. But it’d be so easy, without meaning to. He’d be bound to express himself awkwardly, because it would be so difficult for him to speak at all. What he said might strike you as funny, or even shocking. And you might show it—’

  ‘Since when have I been so tactless?’

  ‘Oh, darling, please don’t misunderstand me! I only mean that Michael has two or three skins less than the rest of us. You see, he’s still completely innocent.’

  ‘What makes you so sure of that? He’s certainly knocked around as much as most people of his age. Or a good deal more.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean innocent in a conventional sense. Yes, he’s had what’s called experience, I’m sure; and it’s hurt him. But it hasn’t made him cautious and calculating. Not yet. He’s still learning about life in the most painful way—like a baby who thinks the fire in the grate is a beautiful new kind of flower, and tries to pluck it. He’s still pathetically defenceless.’

  ‘But, Elizabeth, how can you possibly know all this? We’ve only been with him for a couple of hours, so far.’

  ‘I don’t know it. I feel it. And I do so hope I’m wrong.’

  ‘But you’re certain you’re not.’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Elizabeth laughing, ‘you always make such fun of my intuitions. But they have been right quite often, haven’t they?’

  ‘They have, indeed … Well, then, assuming you’re right about Michael, I still don’t see why he should come to me with his troubles. I’d have thought he’d be much more likely to confide in you.’

  ‘He won’t, Stephen. I know he won’t.’

  I grinned: ‘You mean, you feel he won’t? In that case, there’s nothing more to discuss. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  Michael was with us throughout the next day, and all day long I felt ill at ease with him. Elizabeth had certainly been right about one thing, I thought: he wasn’t entirely present. The real Michael—whatever kind of a creature that was—stayed hidden in its deep cave. And the handsome body of the young man with whom we lay on the beach and splashed about in the water and ate lunch gave an air of unreality to everything we did. By not being a complete person himself, he made me feel as if Elizabeth and I were also puppets, going through an imitation of real human beings enjoying a seaside holiday. Even his eyes didn’t betray him, now. They carefully avoided mine.

  I knew, of course, that I would have to talk to him alone. I didn’t particularly want to do this. I was mildly curious about his problem—if he really had one, as Elizabeth believed, and wasn’t simply a thick-skinned bore—but I certainly didn’t want to have to try to solve it for him. I didn’t fancy myself as a father-confessor. These years of living with Elizabeth had made me ruthless in one respect. Much as I welcomed amusing visitors and casual acquaintances, I was always on guard to protect her and myself against the demands of the sick, the dependent and the sad. Michael’s innocence had been charming at eighteen, but, if he hadn’t gotten rid of it by now, that was just too bad. I refused to re-adopt him at twenty-five, especially as a problem-child.

  The moment for being alone with him came after supper. I don’t know if Elizabeth really wanted to correct the proofs of a short story, as she told us, or if she simply meant to leave us together. Anyhow, she went upstairs, and I suggested to Michael that we should take a walk on the beach.

  It was quite dark by that time, and the sky was crowded with stars. Michael obviously wasn’t going to start the conversation, and his silence quickly began to get on my nerves.

  ‘Isn’t it a wonderful night?’ I said, for the sake of saying something.

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  ‘Have you ever seen the Southern Cross? The first time I did, I was terribly disappointed. It was so much smaller than I expected.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve never been south of the Equator.’

  There was a long pause. Well, that certainly hadn’t been a brilliant opening, I thought. But he might have helped me out. He really is a bore.

  I tried again: ‘Do you
expect to do any work, while you’re here?’

  ‘I don’t imagine so. No.’

  By this time I was getting rattled. ‘It certainly was amazing,’ I said, ‘running into you again like this.’

  Michael turned his head toward me. I couldn’t be sure of his expression in the darkness, but he sounded angry and tense: ‘Why do you keep on saying that?’

  ‘Do I?’ I was so taken aback that my tone was quite foolish. ‘Well—it’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Michael, with a kind of angry sarcasm, ‘that you won’t be happy till you’ve made me admit it?’

  ‘Admit what? Michael, what on earth do you mean?’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean.’ The way he was talking now made him seem like an altogether different person. ‘You must know why I came here. You couldn’t possibly not have guessed.’

  ‘I thought you simply decided to take a holiday.’

  ‘Why do you think I chose Las Palmas, of all places, and came straight to your hotel?’

  ‘You mean, you came here specially to see us?’

  ‘To see you.’ Michael put a slight emphasis on the pronoun.

  ‘But—but that’s wonderful!’ I said, in a false, hearty voice.

  ‘Is it?’ Again, Michael turned to look at me, and I was embarrassed.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ I said, to cover this up, ‘how you knew we were here.’

  ‘That was the only accidental part of it. Remember those friends of yours in Malaga, Dr Vallejo and his wife? I went to see him two weeks ago, to get some facts for a story I was doing on Luis Companys. He happened to mention that he knew you. They showed me a postcard you’d just sent them, with this address.’

  ‘And so you decided to come on over?’