As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  All that Alexandra could offer was some share of the humanized milk food mixed with hemolac and lucidac which a guzzling Oliver was now taking as his first variation from her breast. But the swollen baby was more difficult and spat out the spoonfuls of macrobiotic infant health all over its mother’s sad little pallid naked body. Alexandra at least was able to wipe it up. But the mother was cheered at the sight of the food. “Just because we’ve substituted a vegetable culture for their mineral culture of technology.” It hardly seemed to apply, Alexandra thought, to the fishermen she had seen.

  Wiping up was one of her principal services to this endless chorus. She could offer them no words—men or girls. She held their hands as they talked, or stroked their hair, or when, as occasionally, their eyes or their noses or their mouths exuded excessively from some ecstatic habituation that she could not identify, she would wipe them up. Occasionally she would embrace or kiss, but few were lusty enough to be importunate, and none succeeded in turning such eroticism as her involvement with Oliver had left in her away from Ned’s now delicately bisque clean flesh and rough red bristles or from Rodrigo’s now golden silk hair and smooth cinnamon flesh; nor, for all she could tell, did many of them seek to have her.

  Some liked to quote to her—“Like Mailer says, we must set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self”; or more often, “Like Leary says, if we could once again dance around the phallus and grow golden corn from our dung”; or, “Like Laing says, the Dreadful has already happened.” Alexandra, in part, did not fully listen because she could seldom contribute to what she heard. Once when a man, returning to Sweden to a peasant life in television, excused himself by explaining that “media people enjoy their work, media is substitute play”, she tried to refute him by explaining how little Perry enjoyed his work with the B.B.C. But when she was forced to explain that her father worked in administration, her illustration seemed without conviction. Another time a young German told her that L.S.D. was the electron microscope of psychology; and this led her on to speak of her godfather’s work on rice hybridization. For a while the German appeared to fear that Hamo had performed some vile technological rape on the sacred food, on brown rice (zezania senolica), but when she said that no, it was the sort of rice that Indian people ate and Japanese and that, he calmed down.

  There was a time, too, when she had thought for half an hour that she was making something constructive. A young man came daily to read to her from his meta-novel; try as hard as she might she could not fix her attention to this narrative of events on the inner cosmic plane. Then, as her attention wandered, she found herself making a montage of words and phrases that she happened to catch when his voice came through to her. His delight at this adventitious art proliferating from his own was gratifying; but then Alexandra found that the very few phrases or sequences that offered any satisfaction to her ear, her reason or her sense of the absurd were, without faking, so very small. Gradually she allowed chance events and chores—a small crab surfacing from a hole in the sand, the smoke hieroglyphs of a high-up jet, the sand-flea settling on Oliver’s leg—to create an adventitious visual pattern that drowned the meta-novel’s words and her own derived montage.

  But if Alexandra had nothing to say to her fellow Communards, Rodrigo made up for it whenever he found one of them engaging her company. He would appear, late in the morning, like a Wodehouse drone, having spent many hours of swimming, sun-bathing, exercise in seclusion, and lengthy because inept care for his clothes and his small tent, before he felt prepared to astonish the Community and, with luck, detach Alexandra to a public beach. Every encounter with Rodrigo or Ned seemed to Alexandra a threat to her gently rocking, swelling happy life, a call to decision, to an unnecessary future time. Much though she loved their physical presence, indeed was habituated to it (why else should she be there?), she was glad now when Rodrigo’s impact was broken by the presence of a Communard in full spate. And not for herself alone, because to see Roddy loose himself upon these intruders into the privacy that he wanted, was to see for a moment a break in that glacial, dandiacal misery which had now frozen tight upon him in these uncongenial surroundings, a frozen misery that made Alexandra feel herself to be the Ice Maiden, for she could not bring herself to end (or even to seek to end) the hang-up which kept him by her side.

  He found a special fierce delight in quoting at the Communards from their own sacred books in inapposite contexts. When a billowy, naked American girl with a childlike, owlish, spectacled face began suddenly to vomit on the sand at her side, he stood, superciliously looking down, asking with one superb golden eyebrow faintly raised, “The sickness attendant on living with the Bomb?” And when a long thin Vercingetorix-whiskered English wandering bird squatted to crap within Alexandra’s range as he continued the saga of his migrations, Rodrigo explained with mock admiration, “How splendidly you nail the old Pauline lie that people neither shit nor piss nor fuck.” The Communards were unaffected by his sarcasms. They thought him an up-tight misfit; and so, of course, he was. But, for Alexandra, his evident delight in these ironic releases gave her some feeling that her elegant, relaxed, fun-sharing lover was still alive to escape out of the Englishman Abroad frozen in starch, if and when they should all three escape from the dilemma into which their frivolous, happy, ironic adventure into half-magic had led them.

  Delighted at such times at the almost dancing movements of Rodrigo’s figure as he celebrated victory (however unnoticed by the defeated), she would reward herself and him by an afternoon’s escape to the public beach. Delving into her many carefully packed bundles, she would put on her white bikini and long gold and white silk robe she had bought in a phoney tat shop in Tangier, and he would get out his white shark-skin trousers, kept so immaculately pressed and cleaned at the cost of so many hours’ inexpert, incompetent attention, and don them over his gold strap.

  They would swim and lie in the sun for an hour or two, among the autumn’s surviving tourists, and the Moroccan emancipated bourgeoisie, and, if they were lucky, perhaps a splendid group of Moroccan grandes dames hidden in black djallabahs pacing the sea’s edge like so many chess castles as their children paddled. Local youths who would pester her if she were alone, now circled around to decide whether Rodrigo offered profit enough to allow them to purchase elsewhere.

  Small Moroccan children, drawn by the sight of the spoon-fed Oliver, would accept in turn helpings of macrobiotic health with giggles that vied with physical nausea, until Rodrigo began to urge caution when she resumed Oliver’s feeding with the same spoon.

  “But, Roddy, you don’t object to that pinchy-faced Louise’s baby or those Swiss children with the scabby legs.”

  “The Community has rightly been cordoned off by all decent Moroccans, Ally. But that does have the advantage of cordoning off Moroccan bacteria.”

  “ ‘The Natives’! You go on like one of those stories that are always on tele—Somerset Maugham or Noël Coward or something.”

  “It’s just true. That’s all. Of course, these people are much nicer. Those elderly black ladies are enchanting. So discreet! Covering their faces! If only all old women did. My mother and aunts! But there just are diseases and dirt here. And Europeans even when they’ve dropped out just wash much more and have better health. Especially with Elinor’s Community discipline. Though I’m always cheering wildly when somebody defeats her vigilance and shits in the Council Room.”

  Rumours of Elinor’s battle to control the Community physically as well as spiritually were always leaking through into Alexandra’s sealed happiness chamber, but she determinedly refused to give them attention, lest they should increase Elinor’s power to erode her contentment. Suppressing her interest in this, however, only made Rodrigo’s natural colonialism more annoying to her.

  “All Moroccan people I’ve seen wash and wash and wash,” she cried. “I see it’s not good, Roddy. At least not until I marry a suburban business man. Then you can call again. You’re made for all tha
t adultery and stuffy, weepy meetings in railway stations.”

  “That’s not fair. It’s just that this awful place makes me atavistic. My adulterous aunt weeps buckets just by thinking of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter. You’ve no right to put me in a leper colony and then jeer when my nose falls off. Yes, you have the right, because you’re so lovely.”

  And then and there, despite the enchanting black djallabahed ladies, he embraced her with flailing excitement. And then they tried to reach each other again through solicitude for Ned.

  “Why does he stutter so much when he talks, Roddy, and talk so much for that matter? Is it acid or Elinor?”

  “Not acid. No, I think he’s always high on pot. And then Elinor’s taking all her hang-ups out on him. But he enjoys it all, Ally. We’ve got to face that.”

  “What? Changing the mime four times a week? And having a fresh troupe every other day? He can’t. He was such a perfectionist with ‘Batteries’.”

  “Well, so he is with ‘Territoriality’ and ‘Megalopolis’ and ‘The Lost Eden’ and ‘High but Cool’. The truth is that he did drop out because he’d have got a very bad degree.”

  “No, I won’t believe that. He’s much more brilliant than us.”

  “Yes, much more brilliant. But not half as clever. Certainly as you. And anyway his brain’s working now at about three times the speed it should, what with finding that the Community was a kind of non-thing with no hope of a proper troupe, and rolling joints all the time, and fighting his thing about Elinor who’s half-crazy anyway trying to crack her own hard-boiled ego. He’s like the Red Queen, you know, running twice as hard to stay where he is. Mentally, I mean.”

  “Yes, I did understand that. Anyway he’s not any sort of a queen whatever you may have wished.”

  “I just liked to stroke him, that’s all. If you don’t know the limits of my bisex yet, I really don’t see why we’re talking.”

  “I don’t either really. Let’s go.”

  Holding each one a handle of Oliver’s carry-cot, they set off from the public beach back to the Community beach just like any mum and dad driven off the Costa Brava by rain.

  Ned’s irruptions into the almost ceaseless sound of the Community voices were less violent, but infinitely more voluble. Whatever his motive, he always ostensibly came to Alexandra on mime business. And since this allowed him to evade open distress at their trilemma, Alexandra welcomed it for him and for herself. What he said, then, simply cut off the wash, wash of the Communards’ confessions on the instant. “Look,” he would say. It was always “look”, though he meant “listen”. During the Territoriality mime, “Look, you’re one of the hartebeestes!” to the Communard, “don’t, like, look towards her while you’re talking. She’s an eland. She has her territory, you’ve got yours. That’s how you feel. Let your body show it. No bloody charm, like, no communication. Just talk to yourself like you were browsing and chewing the cud. It’s what you’re doing anyway. Only time you notice is hartebeestes’ rutting season and that’s not in the mime. Or if a leopard comes or a lion. Then its scent. Head turning so. Body quivering. And sway. Not all this human needs and stuff.”

  Alexandra said, “When the chocolate-coloured camel whose front legs were hobbled couldn’t get at her cream-coloured calf, she noticed all right, Ned.”

  “Motherhood,” Ned dismissed. “Anyway,” he took a pink oleander flower from the Communard’s shoulder-length silky fair hair, and stuck it in his pubic hair where it nodded absurdly at the youth’s prick, “he’s got that. He can’t be a mother hartebeeste. Go and, y’know, get the movements from Elinor,” he told the young man. “She’s got a breathing exercise to make the body relax in indifference. Spiritual unconcern, she calls it.”

  “That Elinor’s got hang-ups you can see a mile away. Why do you let her do her thing here. You’re just gonna bum each other out, man.”

  “Go and see her like I say.”

  “What you say. You’re the director. It’s your hassle. It’s no skin off mine.”

  When he had gone, Ned sat with his back against Alexandra’s knees. His arms came above his head. His hands stroked the inside of her thighs.

  “All this mother stuff,” he said, “you and him. That little twerp.” He made sucking noises at Oliver who immediately began to chuckle and kick with pleasure. “And Elinor being spirit mother to the lot. Or trying to be. Only they won’t do her thing.”

  “Don’t let’s talk about her.”

  “All right. But it’s harder for her than you. Trying to lose her will by imposing it, y’know, and not being able to anyway. It’s all stupid. Women and wills! When there’s a man to fuck them! All the same it’s better than imposing your will on a poor little bastard baby who can’t even stick his prick up at you. Isn’t it, Olly?” He cooed this time at Oliver, who in turn burst into ever more delighted giggles. Then, sitting relaxed, Alexandra and Ned sang in a low voice together their half-mock version of “We shall Overcome”. They were quite like any mum or dad on the Costa Brava when the sun was shining, until Ned was on his feet again, stuttering about “The Lost Eden”.

  “It’s like, y’know, the yokels have got to use their limbs in double joint so that they give the kind of Wordsworth sort of natural joy, but what Marx said is all there too—rural idiocy. Kind of happy slobbering. Like him.” He pushed his finger into Oliver’s plump knee. The baby chuckled, then Ned was gone.

  Otherwise the Communard talk had just gone on as a regular background like the tide-wash upon the shingle. Or as she had come in the end to think, like the bleating, the urgent bleating of sheep. For they were asking all the time for something she could not give. “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, But, swoln”, except that only Louise’s baby was swollen and most of the rest were skeletons.

  Nor had it been much different in the increasing hours, increasing as the days grew rainier and the nights colder, that she spent with Thelma in her hotel—Thelma, rake-thin, legs match-stick and knotted with blue lumpy veins for all the world to see below her stained, pleated skirt, skeleton-white face out of which looked two incredibly beautiful eyes; Thelma shivering and twitching, wrapped in her food-clotted mink coat.

  “I was there at a good time, hon,” she would say, and the ice cubes would clack against her glass as she shakily refilled it with Scotch, “but I had a lousy time while I was there. Why? Because I was a louse. And loused it all up like lice do.”

  Later when they had been downstairs to the dining-room and Thelma had piled all her share of the special couscous made for her at double rates on to Alexandra’s plate and drunk two more Scotches instead, she would come back to one of the highlights of her own lousiness.

  “Yes, hon,” she would say, pulling the mink tightly around the tweed trousers she had donned against the long, fly-blown mirrored dining-room’s draughts, “I was one of the brave ones. I didn’t testify. I told McCarthy go chase himself. How come I didn’t go for a stretch? Because I was in hospital, hon, having surgery. Excused from testifying on account of having surgery. Women’s surgery! Can you sink lower? To be exact, having my Fallopian tubes blown. Oh, yes, they excused me. While men like Chaplin and Brecht and Hammett either gave as good as they got or went inside. Women’s surgery! You can hear the old buzzards on that bastard’s committee laughing over that bit of filth. Their chuckles must have reached the ears of my dear Senator husband. He was in the House of Representatives then. And if he heard of a piece of filth he had to get his hands on it. He heard of me. So a year later he married me.”

  And afterwards, upstairs in Alexandra’s room, bending over Oliver in his cot who, as usual, chuckled and reached out his little hands as soon as he saw her beringed, rheumatism-swollen, whisky-trembling fingers making pokey-pokey at him—she laughed her rasping, cough-spluttering laugh and said: “He’s gonna be quite a man. Quite a beautiful man. Aren’t you, lover?” And then as she tottered her way to Nembutal and bed, she finished her usual saga, “And I know. For I had three lovely m
en for husbands, hon. Before I married the jerk I’ve got now. And I threw them all in the trash can along with the rest of my life some place, somewhere, some street, but I don’t remember the name or number. Did you ever hear Beatrice Lillie sing, ‘You’re rotten to the core, Maud?’ No, of course, you didn’t. It’s way back. But in the cool currency of our time we thought it witty. Well, let me tell you, Maud, you were lucky. I never had a core at all.”

  Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.” But Alexandra saw no way of doing it. She only hoped, perhaps, that by letting their bleating break into her sweet content, she could atone a little for her happiness. Oh sweet content, oh punishment. Oh damn Eng. Lit., that brought to one’s mind always metaphors, symbols, quotations, and characters from books. The truth was, she thought, as she swung a little yellow-feathered bird on a string in front of Oliver’s spellbound eyes, she didn’t, looking back from Goa’s beaches to Morocco’s, really care. She had been there with her baby, and now with a new ocean swinging to and fro, they were here. That was all that mattered. And the Indian ocean slapped a great mass of seaweed, brighter red, brighter emerald than the Atlantic offered, upon the sea-shell line in front of her and she was forced to remember two special heaps of seaweed that had swept into her Moroccan bliss, and being swept out again, had left her life different.

  First, there had been the business of the comforter. She had seen these rubber objects in a shop in the left-over colonial main street of Larache when walking with tottery Thelma. Suspended from a hook by loops of blue or pink ribbon they were. She hadn’t any idea what they were for.