I was down from the ladder and was rushing to the spot where a policeman was saying, Tut her over there,’ and there was Ellis alone, carrying Mother-the whole of her!—to a bench against the wall, with a trail of water following him and, after the water, a cortége of respectful people. I pushed my way among them and bumped into Ellis, who being short, was shovéed away by the crowd from the bench where Mother lay.
‘She’s all right,’ he said importantly.
Then George and my brother ran up and pushed their way into the scrum.
I can’t give a clear account of what happened. I got to Mother. She looked so slimy and wet and swollen in the face. A lot of people were saying what a scandal it was—a woman drowning a few feet from the shore in a crowd like that and no one taking any notice of her, and arguments about what is nearest to the eye is hardest to see, and strong swimmers are always the weakest, and the same thing happened to a child at the town swimming bath last year, there ought to be a law, and an argument about who pulled her out. Mother came back to life quickly and the crowd thinned away, moralizing. When we got her wrapped up and sitting up, she was soon herself and very angry. I took her to the changing-room and got her dressed.
‘Horrible little man with his arms round me,’ she said. ‘Quite unnecessary.’
‘It was Ellis.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ Mother said. She’d been pulled out by some brute who tore the shoulder strap of her suit, she said. We got the car round and put her into it. Ellis was alone and stood ashamed, at a distance. He conveyed that he had not intended to intrude in a family matter.
‘Come on, Ellis,’ my brother called.
Ellis did not answer; he looked crushed. What he wanted to do was to stand there and give a full account of what had passed while he stood arguing with the youths at the water’s edge. We pushed him into the car and Mother said irritably as we drove off, ‘Ellis, why don’t you take off your waistcoat?’
She glowered and when we got home and gave her a drink she went on glowering. She hated anyone to take charge of her and she hated our few cautious jokes. ‘My shoulder went and I lost my balance,’ she said. She was firm that whoever interfered and brought her in it was not Ellis. He had the tact to say nothing and we were obliged to thank him with our glances.
But slowly, as we began to think back on the incident, we came round, as always in self-defence, to Mother’s point of view. We stopped murmuring thanks to Ellis; it was not quite right that an outsider should rescue Mother. And there was a change in him. He had lost his habit of gazing at Mother and all desire to have an opinion seemed to have gone out of him. Before long, we were relieved to hear him say he must go. We didn’t want him there all night. I went with him to the door.
‘See you soon,’ I said putting out my hand.
He took my hand and held it hard. His hand was not like George’s or my brother’s.
‘Three feet of water,’ he said. ‘Three feet of water. Muddy at the bottom.’ Not in self-disparagement, not an opinion, though perhaps a criticism of something.
Whatever it was, we both gave a shout of laughter and shut the door, and I walked to the gate with him, laughing, and the laughter so shook me from head to toes, that I suddenly kissed him in a ‘Now-what-do-you-think-of-that?’ way. All he said was, ‘Come out.’
‘I’ll walk with you to the corner.’
We marched down the street, silent as soldiers. We said nothing and we could hear only the sound of our shoes. It was as if our feet were talking. At the corner, where the main road begins, cars were rushing by.
‘Come on,’ he said. And again his hand gripped mine and all the houses I knew in that street began to look different. We walked on and suddenly Ellis gave a peculiar jump, like a frog, and we laughed to the next turning and the next, from street to street, bumping together.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To the park.’
‘It’s closed.’
‘I know a place where you can get in.’
And so we did get in. The everyday smell of the pavements went and we stood in the night glow of the grass, under the trees, which were as black as men against the town lights. The sky was like pink water above us and we were sinking, sinking, sinking. My heart thumping for breath, at the bottom of the world, until somewhere near the trees Ellis stopped his little jumps and I sat down exhausted. I was clutching at him, pulling him under with me and struggling with the kisses that came out of him and throwing my hair back to get more. He looked wicked in the dark.
The next day, to the bang, bang, bang of the band, we marched in the pageant. It banged the way my heart banged in the park. I wore a high conical hat with a veil hanging from it. Ellis had a green jerkin and carried a pikestaff. I could hardly bear to look at him for fear of laughing, but when we got near the town hall and the band stopped, I said: ‘Well, Lancelot, show me the back of your hand.’
‘It’s not the same thing,’ said Ellis and started to explain, but I stopped him.
I taught him to swim that summer.
The Marvellous Girl
The Official ceremony was coming to an end. Under the sugary chandeliers of what had once been the ballroom of the mansion to which the Institute had moved, the faces of the large audience yellowed and aged as they listened to the last speeches and made one more effort of chin and shoulder to live up to the gilt, the brocaded panels of the walls and the ceiling where cherubs, clouds and naked goddesses romped. Oh, to be up there among them, thought the young man sitting at the back, but on the platform the director was passing from the eternal values of art to the ‘gratifying presence of the Minister’, to ‘Lady Brigson’s untiring energies’, the ‘labours of Professor Exeter and his panel’ in the Exhibition on the floor below. When he was named the Professor looked with delight at the audience and played with a thin gold chain he had taken from his pocket. The three chandeliers gave a small united flicker as if covering the yawns of the crowd. The young man sitting at the back stared at the platform once more and then, with his hands on his knees, his elbows out and his eye turned to the nearest door got ready to push past the people sitting next to him and to be the first out-to get out before his wife who was on the platform with the speakers. By ill-luck he had run into her before the meeting and had been trapped into sitting for nearly two hours, a spectator of his marriage that had come to an end. His very presence there seemed to him an unsought return to one of those patient suicides he used to commit, day after day, out of drift and habit.
To live alone is to expose oneself to accident. He had been drawing on and off all day in his studio and not until the evening had he realized that he had forgotten to eat. Hunger excited him. He took a bus down to an Italian restaurant. It was one of those places where the proprietor came out from time to time to perform a private ballet. He tossed pancakes almost up to the ceiling and then dropped them into a blaze of brandy in the pan—a diversion that often helped the young man with the girls he now sometimes took there. The proprietor was just at the blazing point when two women came into the restaurant in their winter coats and stood still, looking as if they were on fire. The young man quickly gulped down the last of a few coils of spaghetti and stood up and wiped his mouth. The older, smaller of the two women was his wife and she was wearing a wide hat of black fur that made her look shorter than he remembered her. Free of him, she had become bizarre and smaller. Even her eyes had become smaller and, like mice, saw him at once and gave him an alert and busy smile. With her was the tall, calm girl with dark blue eyes from their office at the Institute, the one she excitedly called ‘the marvellous girl’, the ‘only one I have ever been able to get on with’.
More than two years had gone by since he and his wife had lived together. The marriage was one of those prickly friendships that never succeeded-to his astonishment, at any rate—in turning into love, but are kept going by curiosity. It had become at once something called our situation’; a duet by a pair of annoyed hands. What kept them going was an
exasperated interest in each other’s love affairs, but even unhappiness loses its tenderness and fascination. They broke. At first they saw each other occasionally, but now rarely; except at the Institute where his drawings were shown. They were connected only by the telephone wire which ran under the London pave ments and worried its way under the window ledge of his studio. She would ring up, usually late at night.
‘I hope it’s all right,’ she’d say wistfully. ‘Are you alone?’
But getting nothing out of him on that score, she would become brisk and ask for something out of the debris of their marriage, for if marriages come to an end, paraphernalia hangs on. There were two or three divans, a painted cupboard, some rugs rolled up, boxes of saucepans and frying pans, lamps– useful things stored in the garage under his studio. But, as if to revive an intimacy, she always asked for some damaged object; she had a child’s fidelity to what was broken: a lampshade that was scorched, an antique coal bucket with one loose leg, or a rug that had been stained by her dog Leopold whose paws were always in trouble. Leopold’s limp had come to seem to the young man, the animal’s response to their hopeless marriage. The only sound object she had ever wanted-and got into a temper about it—was a screwdriver that had belonged to her father whom she detested.
Now, in the restaurant, she put up a friendly fight from under the wide-brimmed hat.
‘I didn’t know you still came here,’ she said.
‘I come now and again.’
‘You must be going to the opening at the Institute.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard of it.’
‘But I sent you a card,’ she said. ‘You must go. Your drawings are in the Exhibition. It’s important.’
‘Three drawings,’ said the girl warmly.
‘Come with us,’ his wife said.
‘No. I can’t. I’m just going to pay my bill.’
A lie, of course. She peered at his plate as if hoping to read his fortune, to guess at what he was up to. He turned to the girl and said with feeling:
‘Are you better now?’
“I haven’t been ill,’ said the girl.
‘You said she’d been in hospital,’ he said to his wife.
‘No I didn’t,’ she said. ‘She went to Scotland for a wedding.’
A quite dramatic look of disappointment on the young man’s face made the girl laugh and look curiously at him. He had seen her only two or three times and knew nothing much about her, but she was indeed ‘marvellous’. She was not in hospital, she was beautiful and alive. Astounding. Even, in a bewildering way, disappointing.
The waiter saved him and moved them away.
‘Enjoy yourselves,’ said the young man. ‘I’m going home.’
‘Goodbye,’ the girl turned to wave to him as she followed his wife to the table.
It was that ‘goodbye’ that did for him. It was a radiant ‘goodbye’, half laughing, he had seen her tongue and her even teeth as she laughed. Simply seeing him go had brought life to her face. He went out of the restaurant and in the leathery damp of the street he could see the face following him from lamp to lamp. ‘Goodbye, goodbye,’ it was still saying. And that was when he changed his mind. An extraordinary force pulled his scattered mind together; he determined to go to the meeting and to send to her, if he could see her in the crowd, a blinding, laughing, absolute Goodbye for ever, as radiant as hers.
Now, as he sat there in the crowded hall there was no sign of her. He had worn his eyes out looking for her. She was not on the platform with his wife and the speakers of course. The director, whose voice suggested chocolate, was still thanking away when, suddenly, the young man did see her. For the light of the chandeliers quivered again, dimmed to a red cindery glow and then went out, and as people gasped ‘Oh’, came on strongly again and one or two giggled. In that flash when everyone lookedup and around, there was a gap between the ranks of heads and shoulders and he saw her brown hair and her broad pale face with its white rose look, its good-humoured chin and the laugh beginning on it. She turned round and she saw him as he saw her. There are glances that are collisions, scattering the air between like glass. Her expression was headlong in open conniving joy at the sight of things going wrong. She was sitting about ten rows in front of him but he was not quick enough to wave for now, ‘plonk’, the lights went out for good. The audience dropped en masse into the blackness, the hall sank gurgling to the bottom of the sea and was swamped. Then outside a door banged, a telephone rang, feet shuffled and a slow animal grunting and chattering started everywhere and broke into irreverent squeals of laughter.
Men clicked on their lighters or struck matches and long anarchic shadows shot over the walls. There was the sudden heat of breath, wool, fur and flesh as if the audience had become one body.
‘Keep your seats for a moment,’ the director said from the darkness, like God.
Now was the time to go. Darkness had wiped out the people on the platform. For the young man they had become too intimate. It had seemed to him that his wife who sat next to her old lover, Duncan, was offering too lavish a sight of the new life she was proposing to live nowadays. Duncan was white-faced and bitter and they were at their old game of quarrelling publicly under their breath while she was tormenting him openly by making eyes at the Professor who was responding by making his gold chain spin round faster and faster. The wife of the director was studying all this and preparing to defend her husband in case the longing in those female eyes went beyond the Professor and settled on him.
How wrong I was about my wife’s character, the young man thought. Who would have thought such wistful virginity could become so rampant. The young man said: ‘Pull yourself together, Duncan. Tell her you won’t stand any more of it. Threaten her with Irmgard …’
Darkness had abolished it all.
It was not the darkness of the night outside. This darkness had no flabby wet sky in it. It was dry. It extinguished everything. It stripped the eyes of sight; even the solid human rows were lumped together invisibly. One was suddenly naked in the dark from the boots upwards. One could feel the hair on one’s body growing and in the chatter one could hear men’s voices grunting, women’s voices fast, breath going in and out, muscles changing, hearts beating. Many people stood up. Surrounded by animals like himself he too stood up, to hunt with the pack, to get out. Where was the girl? Inaccessible, known, near but invisible. Someone had brought a single candle to the desk at which the director stood like a spectre. He said:
‘It would seem, ladies and gentlemen, that there has been a failure of the … I fear the … hope to procure the…’
There was a rough animal laugh from the audience and, all standing up now, they began to shuffle slowly for the doors.
‘Get out of my way. Please let me pass,’ the young man shouted in a stentorian voice which no one heard for he was shouting inside himself. ‘I have got to get to a girl over there. I haven’t seen her for nearly a year. I’ve got to say “Goodbye” to her for the last time.’
And the crowd stuck out their bottoms and their elbows, broadened their backs and grew taller all around him, saying:
‘Don’t push.’
A man, addressing the darkness in an educated voice, said: ‘It is remarkable how calm an English crowd is. One saw it in the Blitz.’
The young man knocked over a chair in the next row and in the next, shoving his way into any gap he could find in the clotted mass of fur and wool, and muttering:
‘I’ve only spoken to her three times in my life. She is wearing blue and has a broad nose. She lives somewhere in London – I don’t know where-all I know is that I thought she was ill but it turns out that she went to a wedding in Scotland. I heard she is going to marry a young man in Canada. Think of a girl like that with a face as composed as a white rose, but a rose that can laugh—taking her low voice to Canada and lying at night among thousands of fir trees and a continent of flies and snow. I have got to get to the door and catch her there and say “Goodbye”.’<
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He broke through four rows of chairs, trod on feet and pushed, but the crowd was slow and stacked up solid. Hundreds of feet scraped. Useless to say to them:
‘A fox is among you. I knew when I first saw this girl that she was to be dreaded. I said just now in a poetic way that her skin is the colour of a white rose, but it isn’t. Her hair has the gloss of a young creature’s, her forehead is wide and her eyebrows are soft and arching, her eyes are dark blue and her lips warm and helpless. The skin is really like bread. A marvellous girl-everyone says so—but the sure sign of it is that when I first saw her I was terrified of her. She was standing by an office window watching people in the street below and talking on the telephone and laughing and the laughter seemed to swim all over her dress and her breasts seemed to join in and her waist, even her long young legs that were continuing the dance she had been at-she was saying-the night before. It was when she turned and saw me that my sadness began.
‘My wife was there –it was her office-and she said to me in a whisper:
‘ “She is marvellous, isn’t she? The child enjoys herself and she’s right. But what fools girls are. Sleep with all the boys you like, don’t get married yet, it’s a trap, I keep telling her.”
‘I decided never to go to that office again.’
The crowd shuffled on in the dark. He was choking in the smell of fur coats, clamouring to get past, to get to the door, angrily begging someone to light one more match—’What? Has the world run out of matches and lighters?’—so that he could see her, but they had stopped lighting matches now. He wanted to get his teeth into the coat of a large broad woman in front of him. He trod on her heels.
The Camberwell Beauty Page 9
