As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  She let Rodrigo kiss her, Ned squeeze her hand before they left her. Ned came back into the room and showed her what he had written on a pad during the seminar: “When Myshkin met Birkin, He was eating a gherkin. But when Birkin met Myshkin, He talked about Pushkin.” “Notice the ‘but’,” he said.

  She answered, “Yes. It makes me laugh. Now go away, Ned dear.”

  She stayed in the room after they’d gone. The light almost died away. She stared above the chipped primrose paint and the vast grubby window space through which the shadow of the angle of another block of buildings loomed obscurely towards her. She must have dozed off, for she came to, shivering slightly, to a bright electric light and a young man chalking on the blackboard—equations or something, probably some awful language lab thing for tomorrow. Getting up stiffly from her chair, she put on her dirty old fur coat, thinking how nice to live in a world of figures instead of a world of words, so empty it must be and easy, and—she giggled with real pleasure that broke through her numbed misery—so “non-being”.

  *

  She had “run away”. She was “on the run”. She was “in hiding”. The phrases and the images that accompanied them had pursued her all the way in the train going North. As she sat calmly and sedately reading Portrait of a Lady in the spring sunshine almost hot through the window, her leather coat shining clean, its brass buttons burnished, her boots a miracle of good polishing and professional lacing, she felt as though those in the carriage—the pearl ear-ringed lady in the astrakhan coat going home after a dinner-and-show-night with friends in London, the two men who checked specifications and exchanged thrusts of office politics in the guise of bonhomie—were covertly noting her dishevelled hair, her torn mud-stained trousers, her one bare foot, her victim’s anorak, so that when at last, traced by the police, or, at worst, by police dogs, identification should be required, they could identify Alexandra Grant, aged twenty-one, last seen by a lorry driver on the A.1 going out of London wearing, etc.

  And now, in this box-like bedroom, with the bamboo design wall-paper, the orange glass bed-lamp, the travel-poster oil painting of a Mediterranean harbour, the two taps that always ran at the same time either burning hot or freezing cold, she anticipated the clatter of feet coming up the stairs. There would be loud whispers and the landlady’s voice shrilly demanding entry (but at this hotel she had found only an elderly porter and a young waiter). There would be the policeman with his “Miss, this” and “Miss, that”! No doubt the welfare officer too, a bright, trained, belittling enemy of a woman; or maybe, for the worst must always be feared for the missing, the pathologist (deep incisions on the inner thighs suggesting the attack of a maniac), with an overcoat, a black homburg hat and, of course, the small professional doctor’s bag. She sat on the unmade hard little bed, with its rumpled, stained, pleated orange satin eiderdown, around her the debris of breakfast in bed, and she made it all as funny as she could, for she was so frightened.

  Frightened of being alone, frightened of past, present and future, frightened of the faces that came to her now, she felt sure, quite involuntarily. She had put herself on her honour that it was not, as so often in the past, a half truth, that she had not at all this time, as often previously, closed her eyes and thought of how horrible it could be and then let it happen. She was frightened, too, yes, genuinely frightened that at any moment, in these strange surroundings, down in the dreary dining-room that rose to shrimp cocktail and fell to O.K. Sauce on every table (how Mama would go on about it, as if it mattered!), there would turn a back at the table in front of hers, or suddenly in the corridor on the way to the loo, or, worst of all, a little scratching tap on her bedroom door (ominously gentle, yet gently imperative) and there one of them—the man with the huge bristled purple growth on his lip, the white wrinkled woman with the yellow-toothed smile, the little man whose head bobbed and whose cheek ticked and whose left eye ran a blood-flecked rheum of glaucous egg white—would be “come to find her”. “I’ve come to find you, my dear.” She tried to make the voice creepy-funny. But, in this menacing world where every time she walked on a crack it meant the baby would be born dead, or every time she counted the damp stains on the ceiling and they made thirteen it meant the baby would be born blind, the threat that one of those haunters, those faces, would come alive was absolutely real. It would be to punish her for her half-self-deceptions about running away.

  She had run away. She had done so in a moment of determination not to let Them have any say about the baby, in a moment of alarm that Their anxieties and shames (His shame, Her anxiety) about an illegitimate grandchild might, in fact, persuade her to the abortion she knew it would be wrong to accept—the abortion She so humanely and so sensibly, He so conveniently and comfortably, urged upon her, Their beastly conventional bourgeois abortion.

  She had chosen at random a Northern town to hide in (the North that she knew not, so warm and un-N.W.3, un-New University, the North where Heathcliff and Cathy had known the passion that was missing, that indeed she’d sought to eliminate, from her life). She had dressed, carried downstairs quietly a good-sized suitcase, already packed for Sicily with Them, and had come by train to the chance town.

  All this was a true flight, and she a true missing person. But then, in choosing the town, she had consulted an A.A. map, and doodled on a piece of paper, writing on it again and again the name of the place she had chosen, and then she had meant to destroy that tell-tale sheet (yes, she had meant it, must have done, for it would be ridiculous to advertise one’s secret destination); indeed it was only in the taxi a quarter of the way to King’s Cross that she had remembered her failure to destroy it, and she had thought of going back, but Mama would almost certainly have returned from the chemist’s (His airsick pills, His prescription for tummy upsets abroad) and so it seemed necessary to chance it and to go on. But in deciding not to turn back, she had told the taxi-driver something of her story, not, of course, all, but that she was running away from home, for, truth to tell, she was rather hysterical. An elderly man he was, and he appeared (she couldn’t much like him for it) not much interested, not even when, worked up by his indifference, she had said that if They got her abroad, God knew, They might force the abortion on her. So he probably wouldn’t have returned to inform.

  Information laid against one Alexandra Grant that on the same morning she did knowingly and maliciously act under false pretences, namely to mislead her parents and other authorities to suppose that she was running away from home, when that, in fact . . . For really it did look peculiar. So many things: for example, that in giving the taxi-driver her short, garbled hysterical outline of her plans, she had let fall the secret name of the place she had chosen at random . . . but then, on arrival at King’s Cross, she could so easily have chosen somewhere else, except that when, with closed eyes, her finger had descended on that name on the map she had known that now it would be all right, she was not mad, the baby would not be born an idiot or destined, after a short brilliant erratic youth, to twenty years’ confined schizophrenic oblivion. You do not lightly change a destination which insures you against such horrors as those.

  She tried to laugh at superstitions that could reach such lengths, but it seemed too likely that this very absurdity of belief that now controlled so many of her actions revealed, if not congenital madness, then some grave temporary mental disorder which needed proper care before her confinement. And who knew, They might, in their fuss to get in time to the airport, not see the doodled tell-tale name. The inward-looking, uptight old taxi-driver (she saw him now as senile, criminally unfit to be in charge of a motor vehicle) might not return to Number 8 with a “was you worried about the young lady in the leather coat, Sir?” And They (He in his intense self-concern, His wretched old novel, She in her concern for Him) might just take off to Palermo, offering the final proof that she, the peculiar, the abnormal, the unattractive daughter, was unloved. What should she do if her call for love was unanswered? What could she do save start, with her tw
enty-one years, with a good sum from Mama in the bank, her own native wits, and a baby coming, to plan and run her own life? And that was what she wanted to do, intended to do, but she needed a sign of Their love first to give some promise of a light in the window should her erring steps ever retrace their way homeward. Some sense of a path not cut off behind her.

  And, of course, she knew really that she would get that sign. He would grumble, She would be coldly silent, but They would come after her, if They hadn’t missed that clue, or, even if They had, eventually They would come. Their voices would sound below in the dusty plastic-flowered gloom of the bar entrance hall, and then . . . she suddenly knew that then she would have to run again from sheer shame. To have lost Him a part of His precious few weeks’ holiday from the B.B.C., His few weeks’ devotion to His book; to have made Her put Him second to something else, perhaps to have cost the money of three cancelled passages to Palermo (although this, with her mother’s money, meant nothing; but one mustn’t ever say so). Their cold hurtness, or, perhaps, Their genuine warm love, if it came, would be too painful. She tried to feel her action as something of which she should be ashamed, as something she had cruelly done to Them, but she could only feel it as a weapon of hurtness—in Their battle to make her do as They thought right. They would accuse her of hysterical pretence, as she was now accusing herself, and the genuine fear, the real wish to run away, the true longing for some recognition from Them which lay beneath all this game would never now be believed. She could not face Their cold, kind hurtness. Before They arrived here she must pay her bill and go on elsewhere, pursue in earnest the flight that she had begun half in trickful enticement.

  Putting her satchel bag (providentially twenty-five pounds in notes and £250 in travellers’ cheques) over her shoulder, she opened the door. Something in the smell that came up the stairs—dust, beer, scented disinfectant and horse manure—made her feel sick. Not the morning sickness, she felt sure. But she had been kept awake so much of the night by the loud clashes of the shunting yard, the sudden deafening crescendos of passing trains.

  And yet as she accounted for the symptoms, they vanished. Perhaps they had only been her own creations, physical cries for help, since her alarms and fears had not been allayed. God, if this was to be life, the body as well as the mind a factory turning out real that seemed fake, and fake that could be taken for real, it would be exhausting indeed!

  And then, facing suddenly a monstrous tall art-nouveauish pot filled with crimson-dyed teasels on the first-floor landing, she realized that this was it, she had arrived—at the first stage anyway, appropriately as the embryo was growing in her womb. She was shedding the three centuries of blind rationalism, of empty humanism, she was experiencing a new way of feeling. Welcome confusion! She was beginning a new life on every level and she would need all her animal senses to see what was what. She could not be weakened by fighting Them or fighting her way out of all the tangle of shame and guilt her relations with Them brought to her. She would pay and go to where the simple tranquillity of her childhood holidays could help her to live anew, to sit by the Lot or the Dordogne, watching the blue flash of the kingfishers as they streaked into their nests in the banks, deciding where best to introduce the baby to the new good world that was coming, whether with wily, cool Rodrigo, or with wise, muddled Ned, or with both, or with herself alone.

  She got ready to say in the awful bourgeois voice that was a still-needed disguise in this society, “May I have my bill, please?” when she heard from the bar Their voices—“No, we must collect ourselves for a quarter of an hour over a sherry, otherwise we shall scare her into some silly step of panic defiance.” “For God’s sake, Zoe, a sherry! If ever there’s a ‘situation’ to face, you behave as though it was 1911. A strong dry martini and a pint of draught bitter, please.”

  Smiling wildly at the cashier in excuse, Alexandra ran upstairs again to the third floor. The very familiar sound of Their interchange made her soft with unaccustomed love for Them. That They should come to her aid and, above all, that They should come so hopelessly unchanged, so entirely unaware of all that had altered in and for her; and this, after all the hours, exhausting hours, she had spent in the last few days explaining to Them the full meaning of the new world she was entering, made her feel tender towards Them, almost as much as she did towards her coming baby. And she could not afford that tenderness, could not be sure where it would take her.

  She went back to her room, repacked the few things that she had taken out for the night, and, suitcase in hand, pulled open the heavy emergency exit door at the end of the corridor and stepped out on to the iron fire-escape. It was an action familiarly appropriate. And the scene before her, as she looked down from the iron stairway, was surely the right surrealist industrial setting: to the left were many railway sidings and beyond them a sort of Victorian-castle kind of station; and to the right, stretching on and on, miles of factory—some blackened red brick and old, some glass equally, more filthily, blackened with soot, but new.

  All the time she could hear the swishing of the endless stream of cars on the new nearby by-pass road. It seemed to her that here—ugly, contradictory and utilitarian—was the grim reality on which Pannini and Meissen at Number 8 and the Hepworths at her University depended, it was right that she should dig down to these painful, raw roots before extracting the decaying tooth for ever.

  Then she began rather gingerly to descend the iron escape stairs, only to see below in the little garden of the hotel, now part car park, part patio, two people staring up at her. They were shouting something—a fat, blonde-dyed-haired woman in what seemed a white silk shift, and a straight-backed, pouter-chested man with handle-bar moustaches . . . Of course, they must think she was leaving without paying her bill—and suddenly, it occurred to her that, of course, she was doing exactly that. She took the suitcase inside and left it in the corridor—there would be more than enough in it to cover what she owed for one night. Now, indeed, she thought, I’m a missing person, as she stepped out once more on to the iron stairway, suitcaseless, and intent upon her next move, to thumb a lift on the by-pass.

  The man shouted in his Yorkshire voice, “Don’t come down there. It’s not safe.” The fat, baby-faced woman called shrilly, “No, stay where you are, love. It’d kill more than any fire, that staircase would. They ought to have something done about it, they really ought,” she told the man. The heat was intense for April. The woman sat down in a hammock that was slung between two budding lilacs above a very small rockery; she fanned her fat, pink flesh that wobbled over her décolleté white dress like melting jelly over a mould; from a paper bag she was eating some sort of sweets which she stuck each in turn on her thumb before she gobbled them. The man bent over the rockery. He was planting out bedding annuals.

  Alexandra’s increased fear of the anyway alarming giddy-making stairs kept her rigid, gripping the rail. The man stopped working again, went up to the woman, swung her fat legs up into the hammock, tucked her into it, kissed her on the mouth, she held him tightly, then he went back to his planting. They were in a world on their own, creating a ludicrous love scene in this English Northern industrial setting. For a moment, despite their physical ugliness, Alexandra felt like saluting them as fellow drop-outs. But then she thought that they were after all no more than an inefficient, indulgent bourgeois pair of elders. Failure of this kind, as Elinor, for once rightly, had said, was only the reverse side of the bourgeois gold medal. She turned into the hotel, determined finally and calmly to deal with her parents.

  She walked straight down to the bar. She chose a quotation that she knew would enrage Him. He hated Alice as whimsical upper-middle-class reading or some silly thing like that, when anyone could plainly see that it was a marvellous and funny book. There had been rows with Mama when She had introduced them into the nursery.

  “I am not,” she announced, startling Them both, and indeed the barman, by speaking loudly before They had seen her, “part of your dream any more than
Alice was part of the Red King’s. ‘If that there king was to wake up, do you know where you’d be?’ Well, I know where I’d be, if you two woke up from your dream which is not very likely. I’d be exactly where I am, living my own life. Do you hear? Living my own life. And now, go away.”

  She screamed this last command, but her scream died away in sobs and tears.

  Perry, not moving from his bar stool, said loudly, “Oh, Christ! Fuck!”

  Zoe, in a low voice, murmured wearily, “Oh, dear God.” She added, and she obviously tried but failed not to shake her head a little sagely, “Oh, Ally, all these grand experiments in tenderness. How can they be right, if they make you so unhappy?” But Perry banged his hand on the bar top.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! As if she wasn’t hung-up enough already on this absurd idea of happiness. Happiness!”

  Zoe slid herself off her stool, but so slippery was the scarlet Rexine that she lost her balance and, kicking out, knocked over a small table, scattering wrinkled stuffed olives and dusty chips, breaking the glass dishes that contained them.

  “Oh! this bloody hotel!” she shouted. “This bloody hotel!”

  There and then, in this shiny platinum saloon bar in that cheap little hotel, with a sprinkling of regulars trying to resume their regular talk to disguise their shocked curiosity, mother pulled daughter to her and, stroking and kissing, she eased Alexandra into hugging her tight. Each tried to find her heart for the other by sobbing it out. But each knew this was an interlude, not a solution.

  *

  And now the Sunday drinks guests were gone. Martin came back from seeing them off. He had one leg slightly stiff, otherwise he might have been a young man who had swelled and thickened rather than someone who’d grown old.