As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  And He, “Splendid specimens of the Hungry Generation’s Tread,” but giving her a special smile to admit that He was only human, fallible, might have misjudged the worth of her followers.

  And, Mama, unfolding, did one of her rare hostess sweeps, and in a minute her voice could be heard distinctly.

  “But, Rodrigo! Ned! How nice! Come in!”

  “She stood at the door welcoming them in,” but no chestnut tongue-twisters could make her heart beat slower, her thighs run less with anxiety’s sweat.

  *

  An open door, but no escape. Some hope perhaps through sensory evasion. Feeling the creases, the orderly, exact creases of the solid, expensive, correct tweed of his trousers, pinching that razor edge, tightening his fingers’ hold upon such sober substantiality, might blur if not blot out the cracked, self-pitying note of Perry’s voice, Zoe’s anxious, unassured sounds heralding further unexplored confusion. Useless to deny that this apparently perfect family fusion had suffered some powerful fission, but he could not, would not be drawn into testing, evaluating the causes. But, far worse, the ragged-boy misery of Alexandra’s pinched, large-eyed face and wan figure—how could he help her, he of all men asked to meet boyish despair? How much he longed that he were young enough to share her misery—two ragged street urchins shut out from the chattering family feast—mudlarks! he thought, that was what he would wish to be with her, pinched-cheeked ragged mudlarks, but for all the mud and squalor up to all sorts of boyish larks. Physical pressure surely, if firm enough, would save him from letting in such chaos. Chaos and guilt. Through the good rich tweed, he gripped his own thigh to banish in sensation his utter impotence to re-order a demolished structure, to offer any sieve through which to restore the fruitful selectivity of Number 8 as he had always graded that cherished group. He to re-order, to restore! A sterile mutant had no place in this warm granary. And now something of the unknown confusion had been announced by Zoe.

  “Ned. It’s so awful, I never can remember your other name.”

  And a bearded mumble.

  “Phillips! That’s it. But you’re one of those essentially one-name people, and I mean it as a compliment. A young man from the mysterious North.”

  Hamo felt his heart jump; but here was no second Brian. Rather a beard covering young flesh—something he had rigorously trained himself never to see, for this blasphemy against the ideal human form was one of the disgusting aspects of modern life, one that, if not insulated, could make obscene one’s daily conference with one’s fellow men. So to Ned, with formal bow and automatic smile, nyet. Smiling would do, it seemed, for the beard, whose swallowed remarks were audible to no one, nor clearly expected to be. If silence or mumbling was the youthful fashion, he could replicate to order. He sat back, relieved and, with the beard, let five minutes of Grant chatter flow over him.

  Then . . . suddenly, his bowels heaved, his scrotum tightened, the room, the beard, Zoe, the gilt, the porcelain, Pannini’s church, the gold-foil corks, the beaded dress all whirled and grew dim. Surely, even the agonies buried so deep within him for fifteen years could not have such force to tear him apart, as they wrenched themselves free from their tightly bound grave-linen There, in the doorway, where he had stood many millions (it seemed) of times that made up, in fact, just one era of happiness, was Leslie, aged twenty, yes, surely not yet twenty-one.

  “Rodrigo Knight,” Zoe announced.

  Straight chrome-yellow hair, small ears, large blue-green eyes, high cheek-bones, rose-flushed, down-powdered golden skin tight to the skull, small teeth, wide mouth, slender neck, chest 30 surely, waist within a fraction of 24, and tapered hips that sloped back and away to give promise of firm full buttocks. Not to choke was all the problem. And then, quite involuntarily he caught the youth’s eye and his glance was returned, seemingly conscious, provocative.

  Alexandra’s admirer! Leslie returned again and still willing in Alexandra’s admirer—or, perhaps, for by elevating women he too often, he knew, denied them physical humanity, perhaps her lover. Escape he must, from that. He could leave—but not, due to his own old-maidish fears of lost planes, missed trains, until Erroll came. He would go to his lifelong refuge, to the lavatory, but the thought of the seat warm still from these slender thighs (for that was where the late entering young beast must have been) made such retreat too pleasant to be right. But, in fact, surely that glance must merely be the acquiescence of good manners—indeed the now voluble speech with its carefully worldly, elaborate (mannered? good-mannered?) drawl suggested the sort of deference that too often deceived one into imagining compliance.

  “I think your loo-lady is very special, Mrs. Grant. Isn’t it Queen Mary? I’ve seen her picture somewhere before. That primæval hat and all that ‘trespassers keep out’ wire or net round her neck and bosom. And what a welcome change from Lord Kitchener. I am really against loos with Lord K.”

  Turning to him as though he knew anything of what such nonsense was about. Challenge or politeness, the look must be met by a frown, even by a softened look towards the unspeakable beard to underline the contrasting receptions. But to no effect, or, rather, for a moment the easy torrent was turned on to the others.

  “Some friends of ours in Sussex have the most terrific loo. With an absolutely genuine early box-seat in real mahogany. You know, that wonderful kind that looks like polished chestnuts. And a pull-up chain! I mean it was always there. They didn’t collect it or anything awful like that.”

  “Mama collects all the time.”

  “Ally means I’m talking too much, Mrs. Grant.”

  “Oh, no, Rodrigo, it’s much more direct than that. She just disapproves of my collecting.”

  “I could have meant both, couldn’t I? Anyway, it isn’t me that disapproves of your buying pictures and china like that. It’s you. You wouldn’t want to do it if you didn’t disapprove of it.”

  “Do you all invent characters for older people like she does for us, Rodrigo?”

  “Well, I think it’s only ‘doing the novel’. We get into the habit of making convenient mock-ups.”

  “But I thought ‘character’ in the novel had been dissolved.”

  “Oh, Mama, please!”

  “Yes, I know, darling, not in neo-trad and all that. After all, we have a living exponent of solid character creation here with us now.”

  Perry, refilling glasses, offering pâté and hunks of French bread, placed his hand for a second on Zoe’s plump shoulder so what she had said must have been loving, and not, as it sounded, jeering.

  Rejoicing that the structure—at least the Perry-Zoe section—was not quite so destroyed as he had feared, he yet felt only the more isolated, in so obviously understanding nothing of the mysterious links that threaded the whole. Looking at the beard—hunks of bread and pâté and gulps of champagne disguising its anti-social silence—he hoped that around that corner of the room the cold wind of isolation blew a little also, as around his own. But now Perry widening another breach.

  “Nevertheless, for a writer of the English language to have a daughter studying the English language who yet says ‘pictures and china and that’.”

  “It’s what Grandmother says. I thought we mustn’t lose our roots.”

  “Roots! All this loose romanticism! What the Little Mam sweated herself sick for in all that ‘how’s things tonight, Mabel?’ and smoke was to give me a formal control over the language I speak and write. To allow her son and grand-daughter to celebrate their roots coherently.”

  “Gracious, darling!”

  But Zoe stroked his arm. Alexandra’s beads glittered aimlessly with her body’s trembling. The beard’s hand had found hers.

  “Words . . . celebration . . . like, y’know, shit.”

  Such as he could hear had a snarling sound to its flat Northern vowels.

  Only slightly shaking from a sobbing gulped down, Alexandra said, “In that case why don’t we say ‘toilet’ and not ‘loo’?”

  And Zoe, hands to ears as though ge
nuinely shattered by noise, “Oh, no, no! Not all that, darling. We had the whole of that ten years ago at least.”

  But Elegance was ready with social tact, and really, the golden-brown fair skin cried out to be stroked.

  “Aren’t such changes in vocabulary only what there should be in a mobile society? I mean my parents always say ‘lavatory’. But I’d hardly like to remember all the efforts I’ve made to change to ‘loo’.”

  The appeal of the youthful mockery of himself, of such an innocent young self-confessed thruster, was presented straight, oh God! at him; the blue-green eyes rounded in mock innocence stared at him demanding his delighted amusement at this naïve self-accusation.

  “And what do you say, Mr. Langmuir?”

  He could have sworn that the youth had, as Leslie long ago, swelled his cheek out with his tongue and slightly winked, so that, from all those years away, he found a coquetterie he thought for ever gone. He could feel himself fluttering his eye-lashes.

  “Oh, I? I say ‘gun room’.”

  And, as though miraculously ten years had never sped, the mock retired-colonel primness brought laughter from them all, Elegance leading with: “You’re the immovable object then in our irresistibly fluid society.”

  But snap, something of the lovely, sloppy sensuous mouth closed tight with self-congratulation at the repartee and, so closing, brought little lines at the corners of the lips into sight; and suddenly, there was a faint hair recession to be seen at the right top of the brow, a roughness everywhere upon the golden skin, the pale rose of the cheeks revealed in closer view small patches of redness, perhaps little broken veins—twenty-four years old, surely, or at the very least, twenty-three. At any rate, beyond the pale. Relief at a danger vanished, a sudden trap that had threatened most indecorous capture happily sprung, made him smile so spontaneously at this young elegant, now no threat, now indeed nothing, that he could sense at his side Zoe’s disquietude, her body tautening with conjecture.

  He wondered a little sadly that, after all these years of friendship, she could have any fears of his looks at Alexandra’s admirer, lover; but then had young Elegance been, indeed, eighteen or twenty, what guarantee would he have cared to give for the quality of his glances? Certainly her alarm at what she thought she saw was enough for her to forget the unspoken ban of six years or more, a ban she had herself imposed. Was it to punish or distract that she now said the never-uttered names?

  “Did you know, Hamo, that Leslie and Martin have bought a house on Corfu? For retirement, if you please. Leslie’s thirty-four and I doubt if Martin’s fifty yet. The way people prepare for death nowadays. I call it obscene.”

  He had by good fortune no need to reply, for Perry’s indignant voice now invaded the whole room.

  “You don’t admire Bloom in the toilet, the intimate portrait of the saint in the shithouse! My God! I’m not asking you to accept all Joyce’s verbal fireworks, but the basic common humanity of Bloom!”

  And the beard scattering saliva in his excitement.

  “I sho’dn’ have thought that just ’cos you can’t accept that synthetic icing-sugar of so called poetry and stuff, y’know, you ness’rily have to swallow, I mean, all that indigestible journalistic realist dough.”

  And the din burst.

  But for him it could only be a distant noise of battle, bawling about books, and jangling generational noises, for at the moment of Perry’s provocative remark that let loose the noise, looking at Rodrigo, he saw quite clearly the creases in Leslie’s neck as he had seen them in that same room ten years ago. And the sight let loose visual waves that bombarded the identity he had so carefully constructed over the last years and fractionated it far more completely than any audio waves of literary chatter could ever do.

  They had arrived too early for Sunday dinner (Perry and Zoe not yet returned from the cottage). Leslie, as usual, had sixth-form essays to correct. In his own head an equation; and, thinking it through, he had been gazing unseeingly ahead, when a last splash of the dying summer sun lit up, almost bloodied a surface that banished all figures and left him only with unease, turning to disgust. What were those folds and lines, that coarse grain, those pits? Then he knew that they announced to him a man’s flesh—how any man, not to say woman, could touch or get pleasure from such texture, as though one were to stroke and fondle a macadamized road surface, or, since it was “living”, rather, perhaps, an elephant’s, a rhino’s hide. Better really the pink and white softness, the disgusting marshmallow gooeyness that women brought to mind. And then Leslie had turned his head, the folds of his neck had straightened out, the flesh had become once again taut yet smooth, soft yet firm. All the same one of the few lines of Shakespeare that he remembered from the dreary wastes of school English lessons stuck in his mind during the following months and would not budge—“What’s done cannot be undone.”

  Not that he had not tried. Now, as Alexandra’s elegant young man’s neck revealed itself in its turn as simply the maturing neck of Alexandra’s young man, those hours, days, months, that whole desperate year returned to him in a series of fast blows of memory, like the series of stars enclosed in the balloons that come from punched heads in strip cartoons—Owooch! To meet the impact of such a knock-out, to find his feet again, before he was counted out, he knew that he must be alone, with his back to the wall, only so could he sieve the sterile experience from the fruitful, go back over all the painful, often absurd testings by which he had at last reassembled the fragments of his life into its present reduced, yet verifiable formula.

  He got up from his chair and walked from the room, unnoticed in the insane babel of voices clashing in subjective argument. Opening the lavatory door, he caught only a flash of soft powder-blue that denoted her late gracious majesty (the Garter?). He could only think it a blue that might distract. Pictures in the lavatory! It showed how undesirable were all departures from strict convention. But there in its proper place was the wooden seat, the proper good place from schooldays onward for reflection. Here he could review watchfully but shortly the orderly system by which he had arrived here, a system now under the threat of rout from chance words, impressions, lights and sounds. One thing he noted, with approval, his back was up against the wall. It was a salutary reminder of his solitary defensive position in life, a rebuke for fostering illusions of fellowship in the very house where he had sentimentally indulged them for so many years.

  How good if Mrs. E. or Erroll were here to arrange these thronging, jostling memories, under his direction, into an absolving pattern. But to the comfort of his hidden sexual life Mrs. E. lent only the aid of an unseeing eye, and Erroll a friendly smile. How Erroll, though, with his tedious talk of cutting and montage, would have loved the job of cutting up these memories to make a tale to show—“the art of the cinema”, the only pretentious phrase that ever came to his assistant’s lips. But he had to do the job for himself, as far as he could, for, in great part, the memories, too headlong for producer’s discipline, rushed in and showed themselves. All he could do was to separate them out into scenes: the Ludicrous Love Life of Hamo Langmuir; and then to let each scene, wobbling a little in memory’s uncertain blur, a little hazy, click into place, not that of time’s simple sequence. To start with his own defence. That he could choose. He remembered exactly when he had presented it to Leslie, and a worse time and place he could hardly have selected.

  He had chosen Sunday evening, 6.30 p.m., seven years ago. He had come into the large, splendidly equipped kitchen (the furnishing had cost more than that of all the other rooms put together) of their Islington house—“Leslie’s laboratory” had been one of their ironically offered whimsicalities—Leslie had been cooking for a small dinner-party, one of the dinners he was so rightly proud of. He had come, it could hardly have been worse, at one of those crucial moments when a sauce must be kept stirring (all Leslie’s sauces demanded perpetual motion), an oven door opened, a roasting bird revealed to be basted in its own juices—a balancing trick requiring,
as Leslie frequently remarked, full concentration. Sitting down, he had said, in what no doubt had been a ponderous tone: “The trouble is that your chickens have come home to roost.” He writhed on the wooden seat as he remembered.

  To keep his temper, Leslie had answered, “Could you leave whatever it is until later, lovey. Anyway this is not a chicken, it’s a duck.”

  “Yes, of course. Only I’ve been thinking it all through and I do just want to plead for myself that we wouldn’t be in this ghastly mess if you hadn’t made me see things straight when we were at Cambridge.”

  Leslie had shut the oven door, carefully, not banging it. “Yes? I can deal now with what you want to say, if it’s not too long. It was only while I was doing the sauce and the bird. Don’t take any notice of my stirring, just go on.”

  “We’ve been through such ghastly months trying to pretend this hasn’t happened when it has. Or trying to make it work when it doesn’t. It’s just humiliating us both.”

  “I’ve not been humiliated. I’ve offered the same goods as per order. If you can’t come for them, that’s your fault, not mine. No, sorry, rub that out. But if we’re going to discuss this, and I do think your sense of occasion is a bit at fault, I’m bound to say bitter things, so you must expect it.”

  “All right. We can leave it until after they’ve all gone and discuss it then. Only you’ve told me to work it out for myself and I do believe I have arrived somewhere.”

  “For God’s sake, out with it then. Better a ruined dinner for the Easons and Perry and Zoe, than us sitting there bursting with suppressed emotion and Zoe looking all womanly concern. Better, too, than another session until the early hours. We’ve had a solid three weeks of those. That ghastly youth Jackson said yesterday, ‘Do you know, Sir, you’ve said Thomas Cromwell three times this afternoon when you meant Oliver. Isn’t that a psychological thing?’ I longed to tell the little beast that it was only what happened to you when your boy-friend keeps you up night after night to tell you that he sees you have to shave and that makes him vomit. No, I’m sorry, lovey. If you knew—what worries me most is that all these ghastly long arguments and failures in bed and all-night soul searchings must take their toll on your work. And that’s what’s important. Anyone can teach a lot of kids, who don’t want to know, exactly who the gentry were who joined King Charles’s standard, but only you and Jesus Christ can feed the hungry millions. So go ahead. Zoe’s the only one who knows a bigarade sauce when she tastes it, anyway.”