THE CEILING OF Mr Maurice Berkley’s office next to the projection room was cracked and peeling. Every square inch of the Palladium cinema, Brickley, except the foyer, desperately required redecoration; but Mr Berkley remarked this particular area of decay because he was staring at the ceiling from his couch, where he was wont to relax for half an hour before changing into his dinner-suit. Why he persisted in the empty ritual of changing his clothes at a quarter past six every evening, he found difficult to explain. It certainly didn’t impress the customers, as they sloped furtively across the foyer, out of the anonymity of the pavements, into the anonymity of the auditorium. Nevertheless he swung his feet to the floor and reached out for his dinner-suit. As he slicked down his scanty hair, and tugged his bow-tie deftly into shape, he decided that he changed clothes for his own sake. Like the dress uniform of some historic regiment buried in the khaki uniformity of a modern army, it was a defiant, hopeless gesture to a drab, uninterested world. Hopeless, because nothing could recall the days of glory, when the Palladium had been the Brickley Empire—the grandest music-hall south of the River, and first stop on the suburban circuit for the big names of the West End. All that remained of that era were the faded, curling photographs of once-famous artistes, who grinned vacantly from the walls above their scribbled messages of inadequate goodwill: ‘To Maurice, with love, from an old trouper’ … ‘All the best in life—Maudie Jameson’ … ‘To Maurice, with many happy memories, and best wishes for the future—Joe Blakey’ … Was this, then, the future to which they had consigned him?
He skirted the desk on which lay the still imbalanced ice-cream accounts, and softly closed the door on the accusing columns of figures.
From the head of the circle staircase he looked down at the bare, cheerless expanse of the foyer. In the old days it would have been a bright, babbling crush of people, and he himself would have been threading the crowd, greeting an old friend, politely refusing a request for complimentary tickets, directing the Press to their seats … Sighing, Mr Berkley began to descend the stairs. Saddened, he had watched music-hall die of TV, entertainment tax and the contempt of the young; shamefaced, he had witnessed the failure of sleazy nude shows, with titles of laboured suggestiveness, to win back the customers; stunned, he had stood by while his theatre was knocked down to a cinema-owner. He had been faced with two depressing alternatives: the undignified status of cinema-manager; or unemployment. Being a realistic man, Mr Berkley had chosen the former. But the salt had gone out of his life.
Now he stood uneasily beside the box-office, trying to catch the eyes of his customers, if only to smile at them. But they avoided his glance, as if he were some kind of policeman. Morosely they queued for their tickets, joylessly they took them to the ticket-girl, and swiftly they were swallowed up by the booming darkness beyond the swing-doors. Against their cheap frocks and sports coats, his dinner-suit conveyed an impression of unnecessary and eccentric self-display. He exchanged a few words with the girl in the box-office (but what did she know of boxes?).
‘How’s business Miss Gray?’
‘Oh, just about as usual Mr Berkley.’
Which meant just about as bad as usual. Not only had Mr Berkley endured the indignity of managing a picture-palace instead of a theatre: there was the further humiliation that the Palladium had never been a success as a cinema. The conversion had been effected at the very moment when cinema receipts had begun to slump after the post-war boom. The new owner had made a bad speculation, and tended to channel his irritation on to Mr Berkley. If the owner decided to cut his losses and sell out, where would Mr Berkley be? The news that the Rialto in Bayditch was to be converted into a warehouse, lay heavy, an undigested lump of worry, in Mr Berkley’s memory. Well, let it lie there. He positively would not be a warehouse manager.
He eyed with distaste the interior of the foyer, where ill-advised attempts had been made to impose a veneer of ‘contemporary’ on the rich, old, Edwardian décor which, even at its shabbiest, imparted a feeling of comfort and opulence, a sense of insulation from the everyday world, which Mr Berkley always insisted was an essential part of the experience of going to a theatre. But then he was no longer manager of a theatre.
Restlessly he paced over to Bill, the aged commissionaire, like himself a veteran of an earlier and better era.
‘Not like the old days, is it Mr Berkley sir?’ said Bill, greeting his employer’s obsession fondly, as if it were a cat. The man’s sycophancy nettled Mr Berkley unreasonably, and he turned away with a muttered ‘No’. He retraced his steps to his office, steeling himself to grapple with the ice-cream accounts. As he mounted the stairs he intoned to himself a cinema-manager’s catechism:
Q. What does the margin of profit or loss depend on?
A. Ice-cream.
Q. What therefore, does my livelihood depend on?
A. Ice-cream.
Q. What therefore, is the source of all happiness?
A. Ice-cream …
When the Palladium was made into a warehouse, he prophesied bitterly, it would probably be used to store ice-cream.
Mr Mallory always liked to drop from the bus while it was still moving. He did so now, with practised aplomb, and sauntered after it as it braked to a halt. On the running-board his wife lurched as the movement was snatched from under her feet, and catapulted crossly on to the pavement.
‘Oh no, don’t help anyone,’ she remarked, as he hurried forward, too late. He swallowed the apology that had risen to his lips.
‘Come on, the programme will have started,’ he merely said.
Not that he was anxious to get to the cinema. He hated hurrying his leisure. The week’s work was behind him; idleness lay ahead—if he didn’t lift his eyes too high. Tomorrow was Sunday. There was one precept of Christianity he would always conscientiously observe: keeping the Sabbath holy by abstaining from servile work. In that particular respect at least he had always been, unconsciously, a Christian; so he had realized when Father Kipling had explained to him the doctrine of Baptism of Desire. Perversely, this was the one commandment his wife, who had been largely responsible for his conversion, insisted on breaking regularly.
To his mind, even a mere bus-ride to a cinema, on a Saturday evening, should be free from the hustle and bustle of everyday travel. On Monday morning, of course, he would be gripped again by the same frenzy as possessed everyone on the Southern railway in the rush-hour. He would claw and push and run with the herd. But a journey to a pleasant, idle destination should be undertaken without this vulgar fuss and hurry, with leisured ease, oblivious to the crude demands of time, the ultimate entertainment being postponed and savoured in anticipation. It was bound to be a disappointment anyway.
If he were alone, for two pins he would not go to the cinema at all, but just stand at this busy junction, observing the passing show, sharing the relief of a city relaxing its strained, tired nerves at the end of a working week. One of the chief occupations of his youth had been to stand at a street-corner with some pals, just looking and talking … he brushed aside the recollection, which honesty forced upon him, that as a young man he had lacked the means to do anything else. Now he could do something else, now he had money in his pocket, the democratic entertainment of street-corner lounging seemed like an unattainable luxury. There was something at once soothing and invigorating in the atmosphere of Saturday night, which he wanted time to absorb. The traffic was moving more quietly now, with more grace and control than during the day; gear changes were sweeter, acceleration less fierce. And the people seemed to take the evening like a reviving drink; one could sense a week-end cheerfulness in the air. From a radio shop late to close, a negro’s voice carried to the street:
Everybody loves Saturday niiight,
Everybody loves Saturday niiight,
Everybody,
Everybody,
Everybody,
Everybody,
Everybody loves Saturday night.
There was always a certain amount of truth in these popular songs.
He paused to buy an evening paper from the nimble-fingered newsvendor, who drew it with a flourish, like a sword, from the sheaf under his arm. Mr Mallory scanned the football results which occupied most of the front page, and noted philosophically that he had failed to win a pools dividend. A waste of time and money, Bett called it, but she didn’t understand that he cheerfully paid out 3s. 6d. a week, not with any real expectation of receiving £75,000 in return, but simply to add a little interest and excitement to life.
He raised his eyes from the paper and took in the scene with a benevolent regard. He felt no contempt for the flashily dressed youths who sauntered by, nudging and butting each other; and only gratitude for the pretty, gaily-dressed young girls, eddying past in giggling, self-conscious groups. He could pick out in the throng a few late shop-girls prinking home in high heels, their neat little bottoms tightly sheathed in narrow skirts, expensive hair-do’s bobbing; once home—homes so much more soiled than their clothes—the sheath would be exchanged for something wide and rustling; a comb through the glossy perm, a flower at the throat, a squirt of deodorant, a fresh layer of powder, a quick renovation of faded lipstick—and they would be ready, smiling, and indefatigable for the palais or whatever else. Who could blame them if they didn’t get up and go to church next morning? Only people who had enough time on their hands to compose letters to the Catholic papers about ‘pagan’ England.
‘Well then, come on, if you’re going to,’ said his wife.
Really Tom was getting so strange these days, this irritating, absent-minded sort of smile on his face, as if he could only concentrate on the thing before his eyes and was rather pleased with it—a habit which somehow seemed to put all the responsibility and worry on her shoulders. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for staring after young girls, there was no harm in it she knew, and she should be past the age of jealousy. She had put on so much weight in the last few years it was too late to do anything about it now. ‘What do you expect after eight children?’ she had blurted out one day when Tom was teasing her, and then wished she hadn’t. She disliked showing Tom her real feelings. It placed her at a disadvantage. But she didn’t give herself away so obviously as he did, staring after those bold girls, with more money than sense, tight skirts that were almost indecent, well the way they walked anyhow. She recalled, but without affection, the days of her own youth, of her wretched financial dependence on her parents, and the Irish village where to walk through the streets on a summer’s day with bare forearms was the act of an abandoned hussy.
She slipped a hand under her coat, and felt the small lump under her left breast. Impatiently she pulled it out again. It was becoming a nervous habit. Yet she couldn’t suppress the absurd hope that one day she would put her hand there and the lump would have disappeared. She wouldn’t go to a doctor. She had never been to a doctor in her life, except for the babies, and then she had hated the things they did to you. Besides, she knew enough—too much—about lumps from other women …
‘Take us in, Mister?’
Four grimy, wizened urchins, with an appallingly young infant in tow, involved themselves strategically with Mr Mallory’s legs, and peered searchingly up at him. Before he could reply, his wife had taken command of the situation:
‘Be off with you, you little spalpeens, and take that child home. He’s no age to be on the streets with the likes of you.’
The Irish always came welling up in Bett at times like this. Himself she customarily addressed in the flat, laconic accents of South London.
They passed into the foyer of the Palladium.
‘How the mothers can let them, I just don’t know,’ she continued. Mr Mallory contented himself with a vague murmur of agreement, and joined the brief queue for tickets.
He noted gloomily that prices had gone up again, and resigned himself to paying extra. Bett got a headache if they sat too near the screen. As they made their way to the swing doors with Stalls glimmering over the top, Mr Mallory said: ‘I thought Patrick and Patricia were going to this programme.’
‘Didn’t I tell you at tea, only of course you don’t listen. They went together, earlier. I don’t want them to be up late.’
‘Hmm. I didn’t think Patricia would be seen dead with her brother.’
‘She wanted to see the film, and I wouldn’t let her go on her own,’ stated his wife simply. Mr Mallory felt a twinge of sympathy for his daughter.
‘And Clare and Mark?’
‘I don’t know where she’s going tonight.’
The girl tore their tickets in half, and they passed through the swing doors and curtains into the hot darkness of the cinema. Once again Mr Mallory thought how easy it would be to buy the cheapest tickets, and show the usherette inside the torn portions of dearer ones which you had saved from a previous occasion. Or did they change the colours every now and then? He would never have the courage to try the experiment anyway. He hung back as he heard his wife wrangling with the usherette.
‘Are you sure there are none in the middle? What about those two? Tom!’ She wheeled round.
‘Anywhere will do, dear,’ he said mildly. Someone hissed ‘Sssh!’ and Mr Mallory manœuvred his protesting wife into the nearest vacant seats.
The Palladium. That was it. Mrs Skinner who polished the candlesticks had been quite definite that it was the Palladium.
Father Martin Kipling, parish priest of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Brickley, tried to ignore the little flutter of excitement inside him as he paced evenly towards the temple of Mammon towering above the busy pavements. Somehow one couldn’t help calling a picture-palace a temple of Mammon even if one was entering it to see an edifying film like Song of Bernadette—it tried so hard to look like one. Its ugly, florid architecture was even now bathed in a neon flush of hell-fire. It was not one of those modernistic slabs of ferro-concrete, but apparently a converted theatre, probably Edwardian, and had an air of ill-disguised dilapidation which intensified its baleful aspect. Over the entrance an enormous, crudely coloured representation of what might have tempted St Anthony in his less discriminating moments leered from a couch. Father Kipling lowered his eyes swiftly. Why was she there? She had nothing to do with Bernadette.
It was not surprising that he felt a twinge of guilt as he approached the shrine of materialistic paganism, a fear that his dog-collar might cause scandal to an onlooker unaware of the purity of his purpose. He felt an absurd urge to button-hole the nearest man and explain earnestly: ‘You know, I haven’t been inside a picture-palace since before I was ordained. Of course I’m allowed to go. Being secular you know. They leave it to my discretion. But I don’t think it quite becoming for a … But this time, you see, it’s a film I particularly want to see, Bernadette you know. All the Catholic newspapers particularly recommended it, I remember. Everyone seems to have seen it, even Canon Birley. So I thought I would take the opportunity. But I wouldn’t like anyone to think I made a practice …
With a slight shrug of irritation, he dismissed these nagging anxieties from his mind, and applied himself to mastering the unfamiliar ritual of entering the cinema. Song of Bernadette—a poster (albeit a rather small one) caught his eye. Well that was all right. And this was the Palladium. The omnibus conductor had very kindly pointed it out to him, and the name was unmistakably emblazoned all over the building’s façade. Palladium. Strange that for all its strident modernity the place should bear a classical name. But he was frequently struck by the same phenonemon in the names of various sordid products such as cosmetics and permanent-wave solutions. What impact the manufacturers expected to make on classical dons and theological students, to whom a knowledge of Latin and Greek was now virtually limited, he couldn’t imagine. Palladium, a defence or protection, from the Greek Palladion, the statue of Pallas, on whom the safety of Troy was fabled to depend. How many of the thousands who patronized the place knew the derivation of its name? But perhaps it was not such an inept appellation after all. There was something slightly craven and defensive, something suggestive of a retreat, in the way people were converging on the cinema.
‘Take us in, Mister?’
The question startled him.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he said politely, and peered down through his spectacles at the group of rough dirty children who surrounded him.
‘G’orn, Guv, take’s in.’
Father Kipling smiled uncertainly, and decided on an I’m-in-the-same-boat-as-you-fellows approach.
‘Well, really, you know, I don’t think I can afford it.’ Things had come to a pretty pass when children begged unashamedly on the streets for money to indulge in luxuries such as the cinema. He began to feel quite indignant.
The ring-leader scrutinized him as if he could scarcely credit the evidence of his ears. He glanced meaningfully at his companions, and began to explain.
‘We don’t want you to pay for us, Mister. We just want you to take us in.’
‘Jus’ say we’re with yer,’ backed up another.
‘’Ere’s the money, Guv.’ A grimy, shrivelled paw held up some silver coins.
‘But why?’ asked Father Kipling, bewildered.
The leader took a deep breath.
‘Well yer see, Mister, it’s an “A” and you can’t get into an “A” …’
Father Kipling listened carefully to the explanation. At the end of it he said:
‘Then really, you’re not allowed to see this film unless accompanied by a parent or guardian?’
‘That’s right, Mister.’
‘Well then, I’m afraid I can’t help you, because I’m certainly not your parent, and I can’t honestly say I’m your guardian. Can I now?’ He smiled nervously at the chief urchin, who turned away in disgust, and formed up his entourage to petition another cinema-goer. Father Kipling stared after them for a moment, then hurriedly made good his escape.
Inside the foyer he was faced with a difficult decision: the choice of seat. The prices all seemed excessively high, and he was conscious of a certain moral obligation to go in the cheapest. On the other hand, this was a rare, if not unique occasion, and as he had few enough treats, he was perhaps entitled to indulge himself to the extent of a comfortable seat. He couldn’t choose the middle price, because there were four. As he hesitated he caught the eye of the commissionaire staring at him, and he hastily purchased a ticket for the second most expensive seat.
For the next few minutes he seemed to be in the grips of a nightmare. When the young woman at the swing door had rudely snatched the ticket from his hand, and just as rudely thrust a severed portion of it back again, he was propelled into a pit of almost total darkness and stifling heat. A torch was shone on his ticket, and a listless voice intoned:
‘Over to your left.’
In the far recesses of the place another torch flickered like a distant lighthouse, and he set out towards it. When he couldn’t see it he stopped; then it would flicker impatiently again, and he would set off once more. Beneath his feet he crunched what appeared to be seashells; he gasped in an atmosphere reeking of tobacco and human perspiration. Dominating all, the screen boomed and shifted. At last he reached the young woman with the torch. But his ordeal was not over. She indicated a seat in the middle of a full row. The gesture was treacherously familiar. Horror of horrors! He had genuflected! The usherette stared. Blushing furiously he forced his way into the row, stumbled, panicked, threshed, kicked his way to the empty seat, leaving a trail of execration and protest in his wake. He wanted to die, to melt away. Never again would he come to the cinema. Never again.
Hands thrust deep into the pockets of his beltless, once-belted, black, sharp-shouldered raincoat, Harry moved alone, on noiseless crêpe-soled shoes, threading his way through the crowd, never breaking his step, twisting his shoulders to avoid the contamination of their brightness, happiness, stupidity. You could read in his face that Harry was different from them; he didn’t wear flash clothes and take cheap little tarts to the pictures, not Harry. He wore black, all black, except for the white, soft-collared shirt, and he took his pleasures alone. Any girl could tell at once that she’d get no change out of Harry; she’d tell from the pale, taut face, and the hands thrust deep in the black pockets, that Harry was one who walked alone, one to be feared and respected. He wasn’t interested in any of these little tarts dressed up to kill. He preferred to wait until he could have class.
‘Take us in, Mister.’
Poker-faced, terrible in his black suit and raincoat, he sliced through them, a big, aloof fish through a shoal of sprats, ignoring their insolence.
‘Oooer!’ called a mocking voice from behind. ‘Oo’s ’e think ’e is—Robert Mitchum?’
Fury burned inside him. Ignorant little bastards, didn’t know who they were talking to, how near danger was. But his face showed no flush or twitch of anger. He had perfected the disguise of his feelings, preferring to ignore, for the time being, the insults and the indifference of the ignorant sods around him. One day he would show them all. Meanwhile he treasured up the insults and the indifference, feeding his store of hatred, which one day he would dash like vitriol in the face of an appalled world.
Reluctantly he queued for a ticket; resentfully he removed one hand from his pocket and put two coins on the metal ledge.
‘Two and nine and ten Woodbines,’ he said curtly.
‘Didn’t nobody teach you to say please?’ inquired the girl.
He cauterized her with a savage glare, palmed his cigarettes and twisted aside. Her turn would come too, that poxy blonde, when she lay tied naked to a table, and he slowly swung a red-hot poker in front of her eyes, bulging with terror:
‘No don’t … I’ll do anything … anything … I’ll give you a good time …’
He cut her short with a cold smile.
‘I don’t have to ask your permission for that, baby. Besides, I always had a weakness for pokerwork. …’
Inside the usherette indicated a seat in the middle of the central block. He ignored her gesture, and with hands still deep in his pockets, slumped into a seat against the cinema’s wall.
Doreen, the usherette, shrugged her shoulder-straps, and, erect in her Second Skin corselet, her tummy gently perspiring through the new Miracle Fabric, her breasts held lovingly aloft in the ‘A’ cups of her Treasure Chest bra, turned the indifference of her smoothly sheathed back upon the indifferent Harry, and walked, as gracefully as was possible against the incline, up the aisle. Queer lot she was getting that evening, what with that fussy woman and the clergyman and now this bloke who preferred to sit right at the side, where everybody on the screen looked long and thin like in the Hall of Mirrors at Southend.
With calculated gallantry Mark Underwood assisted Clare Mallory off the bus. He wasn’t naturally polite, but the pleasure she derived from such tokens was so ridiculously out of proportion to the effort required that it would have been both churlish and impolitic not to gratify her. As they walked towards the cinema she slipped an arm through his. There were times when he liked this demure gesture a lot, but this evening he found it difficult to suppress the desire to shake off her hand. He fumbled for his handkerchief, making this the pretext for disengaging his arm. Clare waited patiently until he had finished, then put her arm through his again. He didn’t want to be touched. But he didn’t want her not to be there. He wanted to worry her, to inflict his depression on her.
Masochistically he probed for the root of his discontent. Oh yes. The story. Of course he should never have sent it to those people. ‘We sell your story and keep 15 per cent of the payment. If we don’t think it will sell, we will tell you why and suggest how you can improve it.’ It had been the last sentence that had really hooked him. The polite inscrutability of rejection slips was driving him mad; perhaps the London Institution of Fiction would explain the mystery. But the pseudo-academic name should have warned him that behind its façade was just another quack peddling literary cure-all pills.
Dear Mr Underwood,
My Chief Reader was so impressed by your story A BIT MUCH, that he passed it to me for my special attention—something which, I am sure you will appreciate, I am not able to give to every work which passes through this organization. I enjoyed reading it, for it shows unmistakable talent, but I do not think you are quite ready to publish yet, though you are very near it. To be quite candid, your story lacks dynamism of characterization, slickness in dialogue, and a scientifically constructed plot.
What I would recommend is that you enrol in one of our Advanced Students’ Correspondence Courses, which I myself specially designed for promising young writers like yourself. If you prefer, you can submit your story for a Detailed Criticism for one guinea, or a Complete Scientific Analysis and Rewrite for three guineas. In any case, I have enclosed a copy of the illustrated booklet Fiction: a Science not an Art which gives details of all the courses and professional advice open to you. I hope to hear from you soon.
Wishing you a steady flow of editors’ cheques, I am,
Yours sincerely,
SIMON ST PAUL
Principal L.I.F.
The recollection of the neatly-typed words on the too-opulent note-paper made him want to spew. When he got home he would pencil ‘BALLS’ in crude, heavy characters across the letter and post it back. Or else annotate that bloody booklet with deflating quotations from Virginia Woolf and Henry James. On the whole he rather thought he would do the former: it would require less effort, and the immediate impact would be greater, especially if Simon’s sycophantic secretary opened the letter. (He was bound to have a sycophantic secretary; she was probably his mistress too.)
Still, he could not help feeling that the only adequate retort would be to get the story published, and there seemed no chance of that. His mood had not been improved by reading in that evening’s paper a review of a play by some seventeen-year-old barrow-boy, which had been successfully presented at a West End theatre the night before, and which as far as he could judge, had said most of the things he himself had been pondering for the last two years.
‘Never mind!’ he exclaimed abruptly. ‘To the pictures! To the pictures! To the warm embrace of Mother Cinema. Where peanut shells are spread before your feet, and the ice-cream cometh!’
This sort of deranged poetic declamation never failed to amuse Clare.
‘Well, at least you’ve said something,’ she remarked, ‘even if I didn’t understand a word of it.’
She smiled, but the smile hid a certain anxiety. She was a little tired of falling back on the amused, uncomprehending, common-sense, womanly response to his behaviour. Sometimes she knew he was not talking pure nonsense, and wished she could appreciate the jokes and allusions. In fact it was a mystery how he could tolerate anyone so hopelessly uninformed as herself. ‘You must educate me,’ she had said to him once. ‘I’m not absolutely stupid you know; it’s just that you’re not encouraged to read very widely in a convent.’ But he had just said ‘I don’t want you educated. I’ve got educated girls round me all day, and they give me a pain in the … neck.’ ‘But I want me educated,’ she had complained; but he had only laughed and hugged her with his arm. And that had been nice, she remembered bashfully.
Also it had been nice to know that he didn’t care for the girls at his college. He seemed strangely reluctant to take her anywhere where they might encounter his college friends, but she had a very clear idea of the girls, with their urchin-cuts and trousers and feline spectacles—all of which features seemed much more likely to appeal to Mark than her own puzzled and timid experiments with her appearance.
He returned her smile, thinking how sweet it was, and how its sweetness, its slight suggestion of patient suffering pluckily disguised, might become rather cloying in time, an annoyingly insistent claim upon the emotions, like a dog’s eyes. Nevertheless, as he turned to look at her, he felt a wave of affection for the delightful picture she presented: the clumsily applied lipstick of the wrong colour; the superb clarity of complexion (why did so many nuns have faces like polished marble); the too-long skirt; the blouse, bought on a wild impulse, its plunging neckline abbreviated, on a modest afterthought, by a brooch representing Our Lady of Lourdes, with arms extended as if to tug the offending garment together; the short, tent-like coat that made her look pregnant, and in fact disguised a firm, well-fleshed and almost flawless torso. Clare was a treasure, and only he had the map. It pleased him that she should resemble a child who had blundered into a big store and amused herself by ‘dressing-up’, because it guarded the secret so much the more effectively.
‘You look very fetching this evening,’ he said.
‘Do you really think so, or are you only saying that?’
‘No, honestly.’
‘Well, that’s nice then, I never know whether you regard me as a girl or as a huge joke.’
He chuckled, rocking somewhat from the accuracy of her stroke.
‘Won’t we be late?’ Clare asked.
‘The later we are the better. The second feature’s only some second-rate crime film.’
They passed a shop which called itself Modern Menswear.
‘Do they?’ inquired Mark. ‘So much?’
‘Do who what?’
He pointed.
‘Do modern men swear?’ It seemed awfully feeble. Clare laughed merrily, shaking her head.
‘You are a fool, Mark.’
In the window of the shop the suits stood stoically, crowded shoulder to shoulder like men in a rush-hour tube. Gaudy shirts thrust out their chests, and detruncated trousers crossed their elegant legs. A multitude of banners and posters exclaimed hysterically ‘Giant Sale!’ ‘Total Clearance!’ ‘Premisses [sic] to be Demolished’ ‘Unrepeatable Offers’ ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’ Though the shop was closed, and he knew that there would be nothing he would want to buy anyway, Mark stopped and ran a critical eye over the merchandise.
‘Not a bad tie, that, for the price,’ he remarked, indicating a black silk tie with a discreet lightning pattern. ‘Club tie for the Schoole of Night.’
‘I’ll buy it for you,’ said Clare.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, moving on to the next shop. It sold lingerie.
‘Tell me,’ he said, pointing to a suspender belt. ‘Tell me, do you wear that over or under your pants?’
Clare felt her stomach knot, and blood rush to her face so violently she could scarcely see.
‘I think you’re … not very nice,’ she said, and began to walk on.
Without hurrying obviously, he managed to catch her up.
‘I need the information, you see, for a story I’m writing,’ he explained casually.
‘Then it must be a vulgar story.’
Mark was about to object that it depended on what you meant by vulgar, when he reflected that the statement was probably valid whatever you meant by it, so he merely replied, ‘Very possibly.’
As they walked on in silence it occurred to him that there was room for a London Institute of Pornography, of which he might be the prosperous Principal.
Dear Author,
I have read your novel Undress Rehearsal with interest and appreciation; but to be quite candid, your understanding of the technicalities of feminine underwear is woefully inadequate, and your seduction/page ratio is well below the required average. May I recommend that you take our correspondence course ‘The Mechanics of Masturbatory Literature’ which I myself designed for ambitious pornographers like yourself?
‘It’s under,’ said Clare suddenly. She blushed deeply. He smiled.
‘Thank you Clare. I just wanted to know.’ He chalked up another minor tactical success in the siege of her innocence. It was just as well, he reflected, that Clare did not know how he had first found the answer to his question.
Clare was glad she had managed to say it, and hadn’t let him be cross with her. Nevertheless he was a bit queer, or ‘rude’ as they used to say as children. She supposed it was because he was a writer and had to know things. It was nice anyway to think that she could help him with the writing.
‘Take us in, Mister?’
Mark looked down at the group of urchins skipping backwards before him.
‘Do you solemnly promise to sit in the corner of the cinema farthest from us when we get inside?’
‘Yer, we always do, Mister. Trust us,’ said the leader, winking cheekily at Clare.
‘Where’s your money?’
‘But, Mark, you’re not going to take them in?’ said Clare.
‘Why not?’ he said, taking the warm silver coins and counting them. ‘You’ll have to go in the two-and-nines,’ he added.
‘But suppose their parents are looking for them?’
‘My dear girl, this is how their parents get rid of them. And don’t tell me the film’s unsuitable. Most of these kids have home-lives that would give the censor fits.’
The kids were looking crestfallen, and the infant, sensing the general depression, began to whine.
‘Woi we got to go in the two-an’-nines, Mister? We ain’t got the money.’
‘Well, I can hardly say I’m looking after you if you go in different seats from me, can I? And I personally intend to go in the two-and-nines. However, I suppose I can scrape together the extra. Come on.’
And in they went, with Mark putting on a little act for the benefit of the commissionaire, calling out, ‘Come along, Jimmy, don’t leave Bobby behind, Joe,’ and Clare’s heart thumping, but filled with a sudden surge of affection for Mark.
From his seat on the top deck of a traffic-locked bus, Damien O’Brien watched the charade with tight-lipped disapproval. That fellow Underwood was doing his best to degrade Clare, and she was almost co-operating. He could not understand how a girl who had once intended to be a nun could keep company with a person so obviously worldly and unprincipled.
A man, breathing heavily, slumped down beside him. Damien glanced at the frayed, greasy cuffs of the man’s raincoat, and wrinkled his nostrils as the pungent odour of beer reached him. He wriggled into the corner of his seat as the bus lurched forward and removed from his vision the scandalous advertisement of some half-naked film actress, spread across the entrance to the cinema. It was time some organization of Catholic action organized a protest against such advertisements. He might bring it up at that evening’s meeting … The thought recalled him to the beads he was fingering in his pocket. He passed on to the Third Joyful Mystery of the rosary: the Birth of Our Lord. The image of the crib in the seminary chapel at Christmas flashed upon his mind. What a moving and eternally significant group! Our Lady gazing tenderly at the Child, while St Joseph stood, proud and watchful, at the door of the stable. The Holy Family. God had decided that he, Damien, should not become a priest. The vow of chastity was no longer an obligation, and although he had toyed with the idea of a private vow of celibacy, he had rejected it as being liable to cause misunderstanding. No, it was the ideal of the Holy Family that allured him, the ideal which no priest could realize. And Clare Mallory was the obvious, providential partner for such a work. The moment he had heard that she had left a convent after being a novice for two years had been like a moment of prophetic revelation. She was his cousin, it was true, but twice removed. What could be more fitting than that they should join forces, and overcome their spiritual setbacks by realizing an ideal comparable to a successful religious vocation? Her great kindness in finding him more suitable accommodation than he had first obtained on crossing to England, had encouraged his hopes, which he had only very discreetly hinted at, knowing from personal experience how sensitively one required to be treated on returning to the world from the cloistered calm of the seminary. And then Underwood had arrived on the scene, like the Serpent into the Garden, deceiving everyone with his so-called charm, and insinuating his disturbing influence between Clare and himself.
Underwood hadn’t, of course, appreciated the delicacy of Clare’s situation, which somehow gave him the advantage, as she never took offence at anything he did or said. Underwood had been with the Mallorys barely a week when he asked Clare if she would like to go to the pictures with him—in front of the whole family too—just as he himself had decided the moment was propitious to suggest to Clare that she might join the Committee of the Apostleship of Prayer (of which he was secretary) as an Ordinary Member. No one but himself seemed to appreciate the indecorum of Underwood’s invitation—that a girl not four months out of the convent should go gallivanting off to a picture-palace with a virtual stranger. In fact, when he mentioned his concern privately to his aunt Elizabeth she had laughed, and said:
‘Ah you’re a queer gloomy sort of fellow, Damien. Sure it will do the girl a world of good to see a little life now she’s left the convent for good. I wonder you haven’t asked her yourself before now.’
It wasn’t, of course, that Clare preferred Underwood to himself: he wouldn’t do her the injustice of supposing that. No, it was this accursed urge she had to ‘convert’ him, an urge which Underwood encouraged for his own purposes, keeping up a pretence of interest, and even consenting to go to Mass again. It was useless to point out to Clare that the fellow, even though he did seem to have been baptized a Catholic, was a confirmed sceptic; in fact, she had turned on him quite sharply when he had expressed this opinion. Her retort still stung: ‘You seem to think that Mark is incapable of faith just because he’s cleverer than you or me. I don’t think that’s very charitable, Damien.’
Clever. That was the trouble with Underwood, he was too damned clever—or at least he made Clare think he was, and she grovelled before his almighty brain, which after all didn’t amount to more than a cynical wit and a few quotations. And in any case she had been going out with him more and more frequently lately, to theatres and cinemas, which couldn’t be attributed entirely to disinterested motives. Yes, the more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that he would be doing her a favour to point out the dangers of her behaviour, the danger of her motives being misinterpreted, and of these wordly amusements actually gaining a hold on her. And perhaps he might convey some hint of the pain it was causing to himself.
The bus stopped with a jolt, and clutching the Minute Book of the Apostleship of Prayer, Damien hurriedly alighted from the bus and made his way to the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour.
Picking absently at a pimple on her chin, Patricia Mallory sat waiting for the gangster film to end so that she could see the first half-hour of the main film. She hated going in halfway through a picture. But Mummy would insist that she went to bed early because she was ‘swotting’—(how naïve and superstitious it was, her reverence for study—but useful sometimes)—and also insisted that she didn’t go alone to the pictures, which meant taking Patrick.
‘Patrick, don’t fidget,’ she hissed.
He ignored her rebuke. In fact he had only spoken to her once that evening, to ask her for the money for an ice-cream, which she had had the satisfaction of refusing. After all, she didn’t get much more pocket-money than he did, considering all the extras she had to buy—stockings and lipstick and aspirins and so forth—while he lived as economically as a young animal. Boys had all the best of it really, no headaches and suchlike, not expected to do much around the house, no wonder Patrick did well at school, whereas they somehow expected her to do everything, to study and help with the housework. And when that day before the exams it had been just too much to bear, and she had shouted that she must have some time when she did nothing, not study or housework, but just nothing, and cried and made a scene, they had all looked very surprised and shocked and hadn’t understood at all. But Mark had understood, though he had only been with them a short time, and must have been terribly embarrassed by the scene, he wasn’t used to the family with people always bursting into tears, other people didn’t live like that, with emotions going off like mines under your feet, the trouble was there were too many of them living at too close quarters … And she had dashed upstairs and slammed her door and locked it, with her mother’s annoyed worried voice coming up the stairs with, she could just imagine, the corners of her mouth drawn in, how old that made her look, ‘Well, she can stay there as long as she likes, the silly great baby. Perhaps she’ll appreciate how well she’s treated when she’s hungry.’ But Mark had understood, for she had met him when she unlocked her door and crept out to the george, and he had grinned at her, and invited her into his room and given her some chocolate and a book to read, it was called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which she took back to her own room. And she had read it through, soaking up like a dry sponge its sadness and revolt and rebellion and need to be free, and how she wished she could have met Stephen when he was her age, and talked to him and said how she understood. The chocolate too had enabled her to stay upstairs for a reasonable time, to compose herself and gain prestige, so that she had command of the situation when she finally went downstairs, and behaved very calmly and sweetly, and sat with her knees together and her skirt smoothed demurely over them, saying thank you and making conversation, while all the rest were confused and embarrassed and didn’t know where to look. Really that day had been a turning-point, for she had built her examination answer round the book Mark had leant her, and Miss Brooks had been so impressed with it she had shown it to Mother Superior, who made a tremendous fuss because one of her pupils had been reading James Joyce; and that had rather made her reputation among the girls, and placed her almost on a par with Lucy Travers who had nearly been expelled for coming to school on her boy friend’s motor-bike.
In fact that book had made her decide to be a writer, and she found that unlike all her previous determinations—nun (shapeless clothes, straight hair, quiet voice, kindly to juniors), Olympic athlete (too few clothes, short hair, hearty voice, encouraging to juniors), and ballet dancer (flared skirt and flat shoes, severe scraped-back hair, no voice, oblivious of juniors), this new enthusiasm, which under ridicule had swiftly shed its trappings (dark clothes, unkempt hair, resonant voice, baffling to juniors), still retained its hold on her imagination.
She suddenly saw the silhouettes of Mark and Clare against the screen, as they sat down a few rows in front. She also became vexedly aware that she had drawn blood from a pimple on her chin. She was glad that she and Patrick would be going home before Mark and Clare, so that they wouldn’t meet.
She wondered if Clare minded Mark helping her with her work. He did help her an awful lot. And if it wasn’t for her friendship with Mark, how would she keep her sanity and self-respect under the absurdly puritanical discipline imposed on her by her mother, which made it almost impossible for her to make friends with anyone her own age—not that there was anyone worth knowing in Brickley anyway.
‘Patrick, do stop fidgeting.’
Father Kipling gradually emerged from his confusion and embarrassment, and began to assemble the data of his situation as a first step towards restoring his shattered self-possession. He risked a glance to his left, but the stout lady on whose corns he had been accused of stepping with such brutal violence, had apparently forgotten the injury and was gazing fixedly at the screen while her hand moved rhythmically from a noisy paper-bag in her lap to an equally noisy mouth. Emboldened, he looked around him, and found that everybody seemed to have forgotten the disturbance, which had apparently been nothing more than a temporary interruption of their trance-like communion with the screen. Relieved, he turned his own attention to it.
After several minutes of close application, visual and auditory, he was still defeated as to the form and purpose of the performance. It was not Bernadette: that much was obvious, and disturbing. He turned to his left, changed his mind, and turned to his right, where an odoriferous young woman sat fondling her hair.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘but could you possibly tell me if there is another film being shown this evening. You see I was under the impression …’ But he was already wilting under her insulted, contemptuous gaze.
‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ she drawled coldly, and turned to mutter something to her companion, who leaned forward to examine him. Father Kipling pressed back against his seat, and resolved to wait and see.
In the warm darkness Len felt for Bridget’s warm, moist hand, and warmly she squeezed his rough, strong fingers in return. They had been in the cinema about ten minutes now, and already the warmth was making Bridget pleasantly drowsy. Gradually the ache drained out of her legs into her feet, and, as she eased off her shoes, was absorbed by the carpet. With the ache vanished the strain and irritation of another day behind the counter of XYZ cafeteria: the burnt toast, the greasy rags, Raymond the Italian washer-up who pinched on sight … a good job for him Len didn’t know. She rested her head in the crook of Len’s neck and shoulder, and he chinned her curls. The pupils of her askew eyes kept sliding to the bottom corners of their sockets from weight and weariness; after a time she happily allowed them to stay there, and closed her lids on the black and white crooks and detectives punching each other’s jaws. Distantly she heard their grunts, the crunch of flesh and bone, the crash of splintered furniture. Len sat very still. Then, as she expected and wanted, he moved his arm up and over and round her shoulders.
If only the stubborn plush barrier of the seat-arm would melt, she would be in absolute bliss. But the seat-arm was the little piece of grit she encountered so often at the happiest times that she had come to think of it as inevitable, and almost necessary. Never had she known a moment of happiness without that little piece of grit pricking her. Whenever she was with Len it was wonderful, but there was always an end to it, a comfortless kiss on the porch with Mrs. Potts probably peering through the curtains at them, she wouldn’t have men in the house at any price. Mostly the kiss was at the bottom of High Hill where Len caught his last bus, because usually he didn’t have time to see her home, and though he would have walked home she wouldn’t let him, and anyway there was his mother … It would be the same this evening and every evening until he went into the army, which would be even worse—they didn’t dare talk about it, but it was hanging over them all the time. In the end, when Len had finished his apprenticeship and his national service, they would be married, and how wonderful that would be, no more good nights then, and no more cafeteria for her, but there would be babies and Len’s moods and night-shifts and illnesses, always something. Perhaps if it wasn’t for the something, life … But Bridget’s dim speculations petered out as she surrendered drowsily to the luxury of Len’s strong arms around her shoulders.
Doreen for a moment turned a straight back on the incoming customers, and, with feet together, watched the only bit of the film she could still enjoy at the end of a week’s repetition, where the gangster’s moll insulted the vicar who was cleaning up the racket, wearing the most heavenly black nylon négligée, almost see-through, but just saved by frothy lace all down the front, and black lace undies dark underneath, no wonder she was mad that he wouldn’t make love to her.
As he eased his shoulders through the door, the minister turned and slid his eyes up and down the négligée.
‘Why don’t you take some of that paint off your face? It may be quite pretty underneath.’
‘Get out!’
Father Kipling goggled at the scene. This bovine person in the flashily-cut suit was apparently intended to be a clergyman, though his parish seemed to consist exclusively of night-clubs, and his ministry of punching jaws. He received the advances of this disgracefully undressed Jezebel with disquieting composure. Really, it wasn’t surprising that the Protestant churches were in decline if this was the state of affairs.
‘Bet she takes off her make-up,’ said a woman in front of him.
Sure enough, the actress sat down before her dressing-table and wiped experimentally at her face.
‘How remarkably acute,’ thought Father Kipling.
‘Told you,’ said the woman, nudging her husband triumphantly.
‘All right, all right, I heard,’ he said.
‘Mum, I want to go ’ome,’ whined a child who was sitting with them.
‘Ssh!’
‘Mum, can I ’ave a lolly?’
‘Give ’im sixpence, Fred.’
‘’E’s ’ad two already.’
‘Well you know we won’t get a moment’s peace without.’
‘Damn,’ said Mark, as they seated themselves. ‘There are your parents just over there. Patrick and Patricia are here too, aren’t they? Soon have the whole bloody family.’
‘Mark,’ she reproved sadly.
‘Sorry.’
He had agreed that she could rebuke him for bad language, ‘as long as I’m not expected to reform’. The force of this condition was only too apparent to her, and yet this was the dream she cherished—to reform, or rather, to convert Mark. It would not be easy. He was so bitter and cynical sometimes, and so flippant. ‘A confirmed sceptic’ was Damien’s verdict; but she couldn’t agree. After all, Mark had been a Catholic once. And already she had persuaded him to go to Mass again, to give the Faith a fair chance. Yet, she had to admit that there was a hard core of reserve and secrecy in him which she despaired of ever penetrating. Perhaps this was her fault.
Since leaving the convent she had suffered from a kind of spiritual numbness which, she knew, was a common malady of religious, and probably ex-religious too. She was just going through the motions of piety at the moment. But she longed to be able to communicate to Mark some of the enthusiasm she had commanded in previous years. At school, for instance, when she had been captain of St Agatha’s House, ninety per cent of her girls had been daily communicants. Mark had teased her about this achievement, maintaining that it reduced Holy Communion to the level of a hockey tournament; and she was obliged to question the value of that kind of religious zeal since it had recoiled so disastrously on her in the case of Hilda. Nevertheless, she knew that she had once possessed a gift for generating religious feeling in others; but it had been a gift which had derived directly from her own piety. Mark’s religious life was of far greater interest and importance to her than her own at the moment, but she longed to be a participant in, not merely a spectator of, his rediscovery of the Catholic faith. She was racked by a sense of impotence, like standing on the sidelines with a pulled muscle when your team was on the verge of winning the match.
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear so much, Mark. Especially about Mummy and Daddy.’
‘Sorry, Clare. You know how much I like your mother and father,’ replied Mark in a low voice. ‘It’s just that you’re so shy and withdrawn with me when they’re around, I was afraid that you wouldn’t let me do this.’
He put his arm round her shoulder. Inevitably she blushed.
‘I don’t mind. While there are no lights,’ she whispered.
He turned his head to look at her. How did she manage to make it sound as daring and exciting as a midnight swim in the nude? With Clare he was reliving all the breathless excitement and sense of discovery that accompanied adolescent love, without its pain and misunderstandings. He delighted in the frugality of her kisses, looked forward like a young kid to the one, chaste good-night embrace—chaste, but perhaps a little warmer each time, each time a little more reluctantly broken. It was fascinating to watch Clare, like another Chloe, fumbling innocently towards real passion. For the time being he was content to play the part of an only slightly more knowing Daphnis. It was typical of the whole family, he decided, this refreshing delight in ordinary experiences which most people were either too sophisticated or too bourgeois to appreciate. It had laid its spell upon him as soon as he had spent a day at 89 Maple Road, and had kept him there, a willing prisoner, ever since. He would not quickly forget the impact of that first afternoon.
Back from a month’s hitch-hiking and youth-hostelling on the Continent that summer, he had gone up to London four weeks before the term started, ostensibly to lay the foundations of his final year’s study, but in fact to avoid a prolonged stay with his parents at Blatcham.
He had never felt any affection for Blatcham, a dull, featureless town set in the no-man’s-land between London and ‘the country’, belonging to neither, but affecting a combination of both. In practice, the men of the town exhausted themselves in the diurnal pilgrimage to the City and back, leaving their womenfolk to wave vacantly after their receding figures each morning, before they returned to the dusting of clean furniture, the knitting of Fair Isle jumpers, and the bored manipulation of television knobs.
Nevertheless, after the dubious comradeship of barrack-room life, even Blatcham and his parents’ solid, comfortable villa seemed to represent civilized living; and for most of his first year at college he had lived with his father and mother (who hadn’t seen much of him during his National Service), travelling up with his father each day. But the constraint of their carefully insulated lives gradually became intolerable. Their almost congenital blindness to the claims of any life different from their own, aroused in him alternating anger and pity, emotions to which they were equally impervious. In his note-book was his bitter and unfilial appraisal of the situation in his second term:
My father suffers from chronic catarrh, though he cannot be persuaded to admit the fact, and generally abstains from the use of a handkerchief. Sometimes it seems to me that the very arteries of his brain are clogged with snot, so difficult is it to penetrate there with any new idea. He sniffs unceasingly, drawing up into his head quantities of mucous that must curdle and thicken into a morass which stifles the faintest stirrings of intellectual curiosity. I would like to admire and love my father, but the mere sight of his scanty hair combed painfully across the bald, bumpy scalp, the furrowed lumpish face, the sagging chicken-neck, the dark striped suit tight under the armpits, all buttons fastened, shiny over the haunches, swollen with too much sitting, as he carefully licks an envelope before sealing it with unnecessary pressure, affixing the stamp at exact right-angles to the corner—all this is enough to fill me with a desperate irritation which I have to struggle hard to suppress. It seems incredible that a person whose vision of life is a mere chink in the wall of his self-satisfaction should, by mere plodding, have secured such a comfortable salary; though it is fortunate, as it relieves me of the responsibility of planning a career with the possibility of having to support my parents in their old age.
My mother is well-intentioned but stupid, her ambitions embarrassingly petty: security, a nice house, a car. Had she been thwarted of these, some sympathetic quality, some pathos, or hint of suburban tragedy, might have made her more endearing; but having achieved them all before she was thirty, she could conceive of nothing beyond their meaningless multiplication: another insurance policy, new loose covers, a bigger car.
The war left us untouched: my father was exempted from military service because of some trivial medical defect, and took the opportunity to feather his nest in the Civil Service. The greatest hardship we endured was the sheltering of an evacuee family, whose lives we made so unhappy that they left us voluntarily after three weeks. We have no relatives or friends whose deaths caused us genuine pain. We have had no spectacular good fortune. There has been a paralysing absence of deep joy or sorrow from our bleak triangular existence, which, when I have left, will be but apathy’s shortest distance between two points. I have woken up to the fact that if I go on any longer endlessly discussing the rise in prices, the gardening programme for the next week-end, the traffic in Blatcham, the traffic in London, the punctuality of the morning and evening trains, and the temerity of our coalman in motoring to Italy for his holidays—imperceptibly the capacity for living, in any significant sense of the word, will slip away from me, and I shall be left mouthing the expected responses at the tea-table.
I must go; but I do not wish to hurt. They are mildly puzzled that I should be willing to suffer the discomforts of living in a bed-sitter in London merely to avoid excessive travelling (my excuse), but they do not suspect anything. Our conversation is a game I deliberately lose again and again to disguise my real feelings. They are satisfied. It relieves me of guilt. I will leave them slumped before the TV, and quietly open the door and slip out into life.
He had over-written the situation, but he had no regrets about his decision. In his second year at college he shared a flat with two fellow-students, and lived a free, unreflective, experimental and, on the whole, happy life, which he characterized as ‘the welfare Bohemia’. The drink was beer, the books were Penguins, the entertainment continental films, and the girls suburbanites disguising their respectability with tight trousers and unkempt hair. It was a game, but rather pathetic effort. One should live either like Oxford before the war, or like Paris after it, he decided—either have too much money or none at all. The compromise afforded by a benevolent State was feeble. That, at least was how he felt now. At the time he had thought the life gay and enviable enough.
But for his final year at college he had felt the need of some change of existence and environment. For one thing, the amount of work to be done for Finals was oppressive, and the distractions of shared accommodation and the time-absorbing chores of keeping house, however haphazardly, were unthinkable. Digs were indicated. But the task of finding comfortable digs was formidable, as he learned to his cost in a week’s weary trekking across London.
But when he alighted at Brickley station one afternoon, with a crumpled Accommodation Advertiser in his hand, he had a presentiment that this time he might be luckier. The place was so ugly that it could not possibly be either fashionable or fashionably unfashionable: the sort of place no one lives in from choice—only if one were cast up there by birth or chance. Nevertheless its ugliness held him with an obscure fascination that was to grow more and more insistent, until it entirely occupied the vacant space in his mind that should have held an affection for home. In future years, he felt sure, when he experienced a pang of homesickness, it would not be for the neat, clean villas and smug, dull shop-fronts of Blatcham, but for the grimy, arid streets of Brickley; for the tall, decaying Victorian houses, from each of whose windows sagged the washing of a different family; for the long, maddening rows of squat, identical nineteenth-century workers’ homes with big new cars parked outside in incongruous opulence; for the worn, soft pavements; and for the honourable scars of the blitz, of the suffering he knew only by repute, the patches of new bricks, slates, paving-stones, the pre-fabs sprouted like mushrooms from the dung of destruction, new raw blocks of flats, and even the occasional neglected bomb-site, its stark outlines softened by the work of weather and vegetation, a playground for children, and for him a kind of shrine too.
But of course the main reason why Brickley would always retain its hold on his emotions and imagination was the Mallory family, to whom he had been led by that terse advertisement in the Advertiser: ‘Board and lodging for business gentleman or student £2 5s. per week.’ 89 Maple Road was a tall, deep, narrow house with a basement. The Mallorys occupied only the ground and first floors, but he never became really acquainted with the other occupants of the house. They were the dull bread that sandwiched the rich and abundant humanity of the Mallorys; they crept apologetically in and out of the house, plainly overawed by the family’s vitality. Once Patricia and himself had surprised a thin, etiolated little man softly ascending the stairs from the basement—to judge from the towel in his hand en route for the bathroom.
‘Oh, here’s Mr Parsons,’ Pat had exclaimed, in a tone of such greedy enjoyment, that the poor little man had shot one startled glance at them both and scuttled down into his dim abode again, muttering that he had forgotten something.
There had been the same zestful enjoyment of people in Mrs Mallory’s smile of inquiry as she opened the door to him that hot summer afternoon, her hair turbaned and her hands gauntleted with flour.
‘The room? Ah, of course, and me forgetting all about it. My, but you’re sharp. I only put it in the paper the day before yesterday. You must excuse the condition I’m in, but I’m baking this afternoon.’
She pushed back with the back of her wrist a wisp of auburn hair which had escaped the turban, and led him into the kitchen. The architecture of the house was quite extraordinary, and to get to any room one had to pass through dark, perverse little passages with unaccountable ascents and descents of steps. As he stumbled over the first hurdle Mrs Mallory apologized:
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I should have warned you about that step. This is a terrible house till you get used to it. And then it’s worse. Are y’ all right now?’
‘Oh yes, quite all right,’ he replied, deciding that the slight accent in her speech was Irish.
‘You know, that step’ll be the death of me one of these days, the times I’ve tripped on it. Sometimes I feel like kicking it, I’m so vexed. But then I offer it up to Our Blessed Lord, who fell three times, and hurt himself a good deal more, I don’t doubt.’
Irish and Catholic, he decided, with a certain uneasiness. He eschewed Catholics on the whole. They resurrected the odd, remote period of his Catholic early childhood, and he had no wish to roll back the stone from that tomb. His mother had been a Catholic, and had married his father in a Catholic church. He dimly remembered kneeling to say the Hail Mary with her, in his pyjamas. Then he had been sent to a convent school for his earliest schooling. Neither of his parents had gone to Mass however—a cause, he seemed to remember, of considerable pain to him, not so much spiritually as socially. When, after they had moved to Blatcham, he was sent to the County school, he had himself given up going to Mass without reproach. Doctrines of mortal sin and hell-fire had caused him some moments’ anxiety; but the threat of immediate punishment by human authority was more compulsive, and as the two were confused in his mind, the absence of the latter led him to forget the former. When he attained the age of philosophical curiosity he remembered these doctrines only to dismiss them, with a passing irritation that they had ever influenced him. In fact he deeply resented this tenuous claim Catholicism had upon him—the undeniable fact that he had been a Catholic, a fact from which his Catholic acquaintance derived an exasperating satisfaction. ‘Oh, you’ll come back in the end,’ they would say confidently at the end of every inconclusive argument. God, in their view, seemed to be a sort of supernatural Mountie who always got His man. The whole thing was a further source of unfilial resentment: it was the final indignity that his parents had imposed upon him—that they, utterly soulless as they were, should have taken it upon themselves to saddle him with a religion.
The kitchen into which he was ushered confirmed his suspicions about Mrs Mallory’s religious background: the evidence of the plastic holy water stoup askew on the wall, the withered holy Palm, stuck behind a picture of the Sacred Heart which resembled an illustration in a medical text-book, and the statue of St Patrick enthroned upon the dresser, was conclusive. Not that these constituted the only decoration. 89 Maple Road was like the dwelling-place of some inadequately evangelized savage tribe, where the icons of Christianity jostled incongruously the symbols of obscure pagan cults. One day, to satisfy his curiosity, Mark counted fifty-five articles adorning the walls of the house. These included, besides a fair proportion of devotional objects: faded photographs of people whose names were forgotten, out-of-date calendars, pictures torn from magazines, fretwork cut-outs of atrocious design, plaster plaques, souvenirs of obscure seaside resorts, and in a dark corner of the hall—the item Mark treasured most of all—a small wooden panel, on which was painted a dog’s pathetic face, inscribed ‘Please don’t forget my walk’, and furnished with a hook from which depended an ancient, broken dog’s lead: the memorial of a mongrel run over by a lorry six years before. All the articles shared the neglected appearance of this last item: each enshrined a sentimental memory which no one bothered to recall, but which no one could make the effort to erase. The pagan gods were no longer invoked; but a proposal to remove them, Mark quickly discovered, carried with it a suggestion of sacrilege.
As Mark received his first impression of the kitchen, Mrs Mallory chattered on about the vacant room.
‘We’ve never had anyone before—we never had the space for one thing, with a family of eight children. But now they’re growing up and leaving home. James—that’s my eldest—was ordained at Corpus Christi, and he’s gone abroad to the African missions. And Robert’s doing his National Service—he’s in Germany. So the boys’ room was being wasted, and with four children still at school we can do with a little extra, so we thought we’d have a lodger.’ She used the last word—anathema in Blatcham—without hesitation or self-consciousness. While she spoke she washed her hands, took off her apron, and freed her hair from its turban. The bulkiness of her body was a monument to the labour of frequent child-bearing, but the richness and abundance of her auburn hair surprised him as it came toppling down. It was a young girl’s hair.
With what seemed miraculous speed she had produced a hot, tangy cup of tea, and he was being pressed to a slab of home-made fruit cake. It was all so different from the treatment offered to him that week by shrivelled, embittered landladies, in dressing-gowns and carpet-slippers, who suspiciously permitted him a brief glance at ‘the room’ before enumerating the rules of the household, and who affected to be insulted when he declined their accommodation—it was all so different that he listened in passive contentment to Mrs Mallory’s chatter about her son James, whose severe portrait held pride of place among the religious and secular bric-à-brac on the mantelpiece. Then he suddenly realized that she had casually asked him:
‘You are a Catholic, aren’t you, Mr Underwood?’
‘No, Mrs Mallory. What made you think I was?’
She looked confused.
‘But I thought—the advertisement …’
He glanced down at the newspaper where the Mallorys’ advertisement was ticked off, and immediately saw that printed beneath the address, so that he had thought it had belonged to the next advertisement, was the postscript: ‘Good Catholic family—co-religionist preferred.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see the co-religionist bit.’
She giggled.
‘That was Patrick’s idea. I think he was afraid we’d all lose our faith if we allowed a heretic into the house. Seriously, though, Mr Underwood, it’s not that we have anything against non-Catholics, in fact I’ve far more against some Catholics I could name—no, it’s just that it could be uncomfortable and awkward for a non-Catholic living with us—no meat on Fridays, everybody rushing about like mad things on Sunday mornings, and so on … I remember my aunt Jemima, she was a Baptist or one of those queer religions—I don’t know why my uncle Michael ever married her, but marry her he did, and brought her back to Ireland to stay with us, and I don’t know what she grumbled about most, the religion or the lack of plumbing.’
He was glad of this turn in the conversation, for the religious content of her previous remarks now appeared in a less propagandist light. But, as he discovered later, none of the family flaunted their religion in the eyes of strangers. Until he became really intimate with them the Mallorys retained a pleasing modesty before him where their religion was concerned. Their communal prayers were conducted without fuss, and his own abstention was taken for granted, even by the young ones. Not that they didn’t care. One night he had overheard one of the twins at her prayers say: ‘ … and please let Mark be a Catholic like us.’ He had been moved. It was difficult to react in any other way to a kid saying her prayers.
Almost with an effort he had guided the conversation back to the room, and Mrs Mallory led him to it. It was not bad, not at all bad, plain and bright. The inevitable religious and sentimental rubbish on the walls could soon be replaced by his Paul Klee prints. There was a writing-table and a good arm-chair.
‘I’ll take it, Mrs Mallory,’ he said.
He wasn’t ushered to the street door after he had fixed up the details. Somehow he found himself back in the kitchen again, accepting a second cup of tea. He must have sat in that worn and battered kitchen for hours, but only towards the end of the evening did his buttocks begin to ache from the hard contours of the Windsor chair, so engrossed was he in his experience of a strangely novel way of life: novel to him, yet having an indefinably natural quality. It was the kind of life one could live for years, he thought, without becoming bored or dulled by routine. There were many things about the family which antagonized him at first. Occasionally amusement would turn into irritation at the fifty-five ugly ornaments that littered the walls, the clutter and confusion of the scullery, the essential utensils that were always missing, the incorrigible accumulation of useless junk in corners, cupboards, everywhere, the blind indifference to the latest books, plays, news (Mr Mallory was the only member of the family who read a newspaper from one year’s end to the other). But gradually their charm and good nature wore down his resistance. He recognized ruefully bourgeois upbringing or superficial sophistication behind his own criticism. He never got round to substituting his Klees for the photographs of Rugger teams and First Communicants in his room. He began by patronizing the Mallorys; he ended by admiring them.
On that first evening, however, such considered judgements were out of the question, and he was content to sit back and observe the tide of humanity that seeped in and finally flooded the small room as the alarum clock on the mantelpiece ticked tinnily on into the evening. One after another the members of the family were greeted, introduced, put in their place, fed. Monica and Lucy, twin girls of twelve, with short spiky plaits, battered at the door, toiled wearily into the kitchen, and allowed their satchels to slump on to the lino.
‘Pick them up,’ ordered Mrs Mallory from the scullery, ‘and take them into the hall.’
Subdued by Mark’s presence, they obeyed her. But shyness soon thawed, and they began to blurt out incomprehensible accounts of an insane French mistress. Mrs Mallory snorted incredulity.
‘But she did, Mummy!’
‘It was awful!’
Patricia padded into the room, smiled wanly, reached for the aspirins on the mantelpiece, and squatted by the stove, which was not alight. Mrs Mallory expatiated on her absent children, James the priest, the eldest daughter Christine, a nurse, Robert the next eldest son, a National Serviceman in the artillery, who was due to go to a teacher’s training college when he was released. Gradually Mark was piecing the family together. Patrick blundered in, dumped his ravaged attaché case on the floor, ignored his mother’s rebuke, eyed Mark suspiciously, and applied himself to tea. Mr Mallory, moving, despite his evident exhaustion, with the grace that characterized all his actions, stole almost unnoticed into the room, and threaded his way across it towards a high-backed leather arm-chair in the far corner, with the air of a shipwrecked man who has gambled his last shred of energy on a desperate attempt to reach a raft. Having achieved his refuge, Mr Mallory sighed happily, and, taking a cup of tea from his wife, consented to give audience.
‘Tom. This is Mark Underwood. He came about the room.’
‘How d’you do, Mark,’ said Mr Mallory, nodding pleasantly over his tea-cup.
‘I’d like to take it, Mr Mallory, if that’s all right by you,’ said Mark.
‘Certainly. If my wife’s agreeable.’
‘Grand. Then that’s settled,’ pronounced Mrs Mallory.
‘And how are you two?’ inquired Mr Mallory, tugging the plaits of his twin daughters, who squatted beneath his knees.
‘Owwweeer!’ screamed Monica.
‘Eeeeeowwww!’ shrieked Lucy.
‘Stop that racket at once you little divils,’ said their mother.
‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ said Patricia sardonically. ‘They read nothing but comics, and now they even talk like comics.’
‘Thinks: Patricia is a rat,’ said Lucy sotto voce.
‘All girls are soppy. One makes allowances,’ stated Patrick pontifically from the table. ‘But you two are the silliest, daftest pair of idiots …’ His eloquence dried up, and he bit disgustedly into a slice of bread and jam before continuing. ‘I was on their bus the other day, and the way they were fooling around I was ashamed to recognize them.’
‘Thinks: Patrick is a rotten sneak,’ said Monica.
‘What’s this about the bus?’ demanded Mr Mallory, pulling on Monica’s plait.
‘Ouch! Well … Gulp! Did you have a nice day at the office, Daddy?’
There was a burst of laughter, in which Mark joined, at this transparent evasion.
And then Clare had come in. She stood at the door for a moment, hesitating until a place was cleared for her, and slowly unbuttoning the navy-blue schoolgirl’s raincoat she wore. Her auburn hair, a vivid fragment of her mother’s, was scraped back cruelly into a pony’s tail; Mark almost felt the strain along her brow. She was dressed and she moved as if impatient of her own beauty. He perceived that hers was a more than ordinary shyness, that she was unused to society; and the way everyone’s face lit up at her entry suggested that she was a special favourite, or had recently returned to the family after a long absence.
‘I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve been helping Miss Skinner with the syllabus. You wouldn’t think infants would need a syllabus, would you?’
She was introduced to him. The appearance of a personable girl of a suitable age naturally provoked a reflex of ordinary curiosity; but he soon perceived that this was something, new, rare and challenging.
After tea, which he was willingly persuaded to share, Mrs Mallory explained that it was the family practice to recite the rosary together. Would he mind …? He begged them to proceed as if he were not there.
They all got down upon their knees, and drew out their beads. Mr Mallory recited the first half of each prayer, and the others repeated it in unison. The experience was uncanny and disturbing. He felt quite alone. Among those kneeling figures his sitting posture seemed awkward and unnatural. Gradually the youngest children began to fidget, and he felt less of an intruder on a perfect act of worship. Indeed the Rosary had always been a monotonous devotion; it was not surprising the children were distracted. Ten Hail Mary’s to one Our Father and one Glory Be. In the cosmic league table of his infantile mind this had seemed to settle pretty conclusively the precedence of Our Lady over the Trinity, with God the Father runner-up as he had a whole prayer to himself, and a mention in the Glory Be. Perhaps it wasn’t so inaccurate an assessment of the Catholic Faith either.
He took advantage of his position to study the girl Clare. She presented a very charming picture—and picture was the word. In contrast to the awkwardness of her entry, there was now a conscious grace in her posture, as if it were part of her prayer. Her body was quite erect, yet without strain, her eyes closed, her hands carefully joined, finger to finger, through which her beads were passed steadily, by some undetectable knack. Altogether she seemed a person used to praying. Her face was as smooth and clean as sand left by the receding tide, a face in which devout concentration had appeared without a trace of self-righteousness. Nevertheless, the warm, full lines of the body, suggested rather than revealed by her unflattering dress, the shapely bosom, full hips and long legs, seemed intended for something better than praying, traditionally the plain girl’s substitute for sex.
As the clearing of the tea-things, and the washing-up were being organized by Mrs Mallory, with the reluctant help of the twins, and the other children became absorbed in homework, Mark had an opportunity for a word with Clare.
‘You pray a lot, don’t you?’ he asked.
She blushed, and answered, ‘I did once.’ Then she blushed more deeply still, and added: ‘Well not so much really. Not compared to some people. Why do you ask?’
‘You do it very gracefully,’ he replied, smiling.
‘Do you think that’s very important?’
‘I suppose it isn’t—if you believe in prayer.’
‘Don’t you then?’
‘Unfortunately—no.’
‘How funny.’
He regretted having turned the conversation on to religion, as it seemed to have come to a full stop. But after a short pause Clare volunteered:
‘I was a novice for two years. Perhaps that has something …’
‘A novice?’ he inquired blankly.
‘In a convent you know. Before becoming a nun.’
‘Oh. And you became one?’
She laughed.
‘Of course I didn’t. I’m here.’
‘Oh I see. Yes, that explains about the praying, doesn’t it.’ They seemed to be getting on famously.
‘Didn’t you find it difficult to settle down to ordinary life again?’ he inquired.
‘Yes, I do,’ she answered. He noted the tense. ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’
‘No, thanks.’ Checking the question that rose to his lips as to her motives for leaving the convent, he said:
‘I suppose you’ve gathered that I’m coming to live here?’
‘That will be nice.’ She blushed violently. ‘For you I mean. This is a very nice house.’
‘I’m sure I shall be very happy here,’ he replied.
The only shadow cast across that first, pleasant evening was a rather grotesque and ominous one—the dog-like facial silhouette of Damien O’Brien, with the sloping lines of his forehead, nose and jaw almost parallel. One could forgive his ugliness—though it was difficult not to be disgusted by the small pale eyes, the rough, scurfy skin, the yellow crowded teeth—if he hadn’t been so insufferably oblivious of it himself. His arrival interrupted Mark’s tête-à-tête with Clare, and as Mark took his limp, clammy hand, he looked into eyes full of hostility and suspicion. At that moment he was, paradoxically, more certain of Damien’s rivalry than of his own attraction to Clare.
‘This is Mark …?’ Clare began.
‘Underwood,’ supplied Mark.
‘Mark Underwood. He’s a student at the London University, and he’s coming to live with us. This is Damien O’Brien, Mark, a cousin of ours over from Ireland.’
‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance,’ said Damien stiffly. There was very little brogue in his voice, and he seemed to have carefully sifted his diction of Irish idiom. His speech was characterized by a queer old-fashioned formality. ‘I studied for three years at Maynooth,’ he volunteered.
‘Maynooth is the largest seminary in Ireland,’ explained Clare.
‘In the world, Clare,’ Damien corrected. Another disappointed religious? The coincidence was odd.
‘I called to thank you again for finding me such grand digs,’ said Damien to Clare.
‘You make too much of it, Damien, really you do,’ she demurred.
‘Indeed I don’t,’ replied Damien.
‘Indeed he doesn’t,’ agreed Mrs Mallory, who breezed into the room at that moment, having overheard the conversation from the scullery. ‘You see,’ she explained to Mark, ‘when Damien here got flung out of the seminary by the good fathers …’
‘Mummy!’ exclaimed Clare, laughing.
‘Ah go on with you, Damien knows it’s only my fun. Well, when he left the seminary so, he comes to London, like they all do, hoping to find the streets paved with gold …’
‘I did not hope for any such thing, Aunt Elizabeth. But Ireland has no work for her educated sons.’ (So we’re educated, are we? said Mark to himself.)
‘ … Hoping, as I said, to find the streets paved with gold,’ continued Mrs Mallory blithely, ‘he found himself something terrible in the way of a room, and th’ old woman who kept it swindled him entirely. And when Clare here saw the pitiable state he was in, she hooshed him out of it and put him in some clean, decent lodgings with Mrs Higgins next door here, who’s a decent sort of woman, for all her faults.’
‘And very grateful I am too,’ said Damien, staring at Clare. But she had not looked in his direction …
Mark turned to look at her now. The film was entering a rather brutal phase, and she was pressed back against her seat, her lips slightly parted with revulsion. Yet the screen compelled her attention. Any dramatic or cinematic performance, however crudely executed, seemed to draw from her the same rapt, child-like attention. To her, as to a child, what she saw on the screen was real. However unpleasant or improbable the action, its visible enactment by recognizable human beings urged the truth of what was being presented, and she seemed oblivious of the artificiality of the whole affair, of the cameras and mikes and props just out of sight. Sometimes he envied the primitive intensity of her dramatic experience.
The little girl walked into a church and knelt with face upturned to the altar. A shaft of light slanted down upon her face.
Praying for big tits, thought Harry. He stirred restlessly. Too much religion about this picture.
Gradually however, crime asserted itself. A smile slowly appeared in Harry’s face, and spread like a crack running through dry earth. This was the gear. The gang running the racket had slugged the soft vicar bloke and tied him up, and now they had got the tart who was trying to go straight because of the vicar, and they were torturing her to tell them the combination. Serve her right, the poxy little traitor. A squat, hairy man, known as ‘Brute’, sucked deeply at his cigarette, and threatened her face with the glowing end. The economy and effectiveness of this torture appealed to Harry, Unfortunately the tart broke down without being touched, and began to whimper the numbers. The whine of police cars interrupted the scene, and Harry witnessed regretfully the capture of the crooks—not effected without some vicious exchanges of fire however. At least two of the police were killed, and the leader of the crooks, who swore he wouldn’t be taken alive. Not a bad film in the end. Not bad at all. Harry winced as the lights went up.
The audience stirred uneasily in the sudden light, yawning, blinking, looking up and around for something to fix their gaze on. The abrupt abstraction of their entertainment left them for a moment baffled and resentful, though impotent. Then to their evident relief, a record boomed out. ‘Love is a many-splendoured thing,’ sang a vowel-murdering voice to the accompaniment of a quasi-heavenly choir.
People whistled it, hummed it, tapped their feet to it. Shades of Francis Thompson, thought Mark:
Bridget’s heart swelled with the soaring and swooping notes of the melody. It was so beautiful. She closed her eyes and let herself float on its cadences, as if she was being rocked by the motion of the sea. She longed with love for Len. ‘Isn’t it lovely Len?’ she murmured.
Len was a bit puzzled by the ‘many-splendoured thing’. He wasn’t quite sure what it was. But he liked the song on the whole. The tune had a sort of lilt to it, and the words were simple, apart from that first line.
He would have died before saying it, but he did feel like a king when he was out with Bridget, so pretty and smiling and adoring.
They were playing Laurie Lansdowne’s record of Love Is A Many-Splendoured Thing again. Doreen listened through to the end, singing the words lightly under her breath. She never got tired of hearing it. There was that parcel from his Fan Club to be opened when she got home.
‘Let me out Len,’ whispered Bridget, as the record ended. ‘I must see a friend.’
‘Right,’ he replied gruffly, and stood up to let her pass. ‘Like an ice-cream?’
‘Mm. Lovely.’
‘What kind?’
She hesitated.
‘What’s flavour of the month?’
‘Banana, I think.’
‘Banana, then.’
On the screen the management appealed to patrons not to leave their seats. The sales attendants would visit all parts of the cinema. Nevertheless two queues were already forming in front of the two ice-cream girls down at the front. If he didn’t go now they might run out of banana. Though someone might pinch their seats if he left them. After some moments’ deliberation, Len laid his coat across the seats and, glancing warily over his shoulder from time to time, walked rapidly down the aisle to join the queue. As a precaution he carried Bridget’s handbag with him, though he felt rather a fool with it He held it by one corner, so that no one would think it belonged to him. Still, anyone might think he was paying for the ice-creams with Bridget’s money. Altogether he was glad to be back safely in his place, balancing a banana ice on each knee, waiting for Bridget to come back before he started. Meanwhile he gazed stolidly at the advertisements for local shops, cafés, hairdressing salons, that were whisked on and off the screen.
In the passage Bridget collided with a black-suited youth, who swore rudely, and swung into the Gents without apologizing.
‘Well!’ muttered Bridget to herself, rubbing her arm. ‘The nerve. Lucky for him Len didn’t see.’
Squatting gingerly on the cold seat she dwelt with pleasure on the protection Len’s hard muscles afforded, the lovely helpless feeling when he took you in his arms.
Harry pissed savagely into the wall behind her back. Seeing a block of camphor in the channel by his feet he directed his urine at it like a hose, but succeeded only in spattering his suède shoes. He buttoned his flies slowly, studying the pencilled drawings on the peeling distemper, and the words he didn’t have to spell out laboriously to understand. Yes, that was what he’d like to do to that curly-haired little tart. It was what she needed. It was what they all needed. Take the cockiness out of them. Tarts. Harry combed his long, oiled hair with care, and adjusted his mouth in the mirror to a thin-lipped, contemptuous smile.
‘Coming next week!’ Into the passive audience a portentous voice pumped monotonous imperatives and superlatives:
‘You will thrill as never before … you will laugh as never before … you will cry as never before.’ Rapidly the trailer ran through the gamut of cinematic experience: ADVENTURE: horse-riders galloped pointlessly through a copse. PASSION: a girl sagged back in a man’s arms as he kissed her wetly. SUSPENSE: tense, unintelligible scraps of dialogue were exchanged. AGONY: a woman awaited the result of an operation on her lover. LAUGHTER: the comic relief fell backwards into a pool. Coming next week. Could it not be averted? No, it was coming, coming next week.
Mark glanced at the people around him. Now and again, the brightness of the screen illuminated their torpid countenances: torpid, yet with a vague, undefined yearning in them. Like fish in a glass tank, their stupid, gaping faces were pressed to the window on a world they could never hope to achieve, where giant brown men stalked among big-breasted women, and where all events kindly conspired to throw the one into the arms of the other. The hysterical affirmations of the trailer’s commentary rolled easily off each person’s saturated consciousness; yet perhaps only the assurance of this window on the ideal world, on the superlife, made the waking nightmare of their daily lives tolerable. It was in a way a substitute for religion—and indeed a fabulously furnished pent-house, and the favours of awesomely shaped women, offered a more satisfactory conception of paradise than the sexless and colourless Christian promise—the questionable rapture of being one among billions of court-flatterers.
On the other hand, there were religious people among the audience. Mr and Mrs Mallory for instance. What was the cinema to them? Perhaps just an opportunity to let someone else take over the burden of living for a few hours. But life didn’t appear to oppress them. He gave it up.
But himself and Clare—why were they here? When they might be doing something significant. He tried to think of something ‘significant’ they might conceivably do together. Art? His mind seemed to have temporarily borrowed the technique of the trailer. He saw himself scribbling furiously in the early hours of the morning. Pouring out his inspiration white-hot. But Clare, what was she doing? Brewing the black coffee? Typing the MSS.? Filing the rejection slips? He dismissed the image impatiently.
Significant. Something significant. Making love? In some wild, extreme and instinctive way that would express their contempt for the pantomime endearments of eunuchs and whores offered for their diversion on the screen? He saw himself and Clare spread a mattress on the floor before a roaring fire in a darkened room, and the flickering red light on their naked bodies as he exultantly deflowered her. The image provoked a sharp abdominal reaction, and he was jerked back into reality. The young virgin at his side would not see such an exercise as significant—merely as sinful.
Then, something significant she did. He could not think of anything. Except perhaps praying. That was something she did remarkably well, it seemed. But himself? He had gone so far as to attend Mass again after so many years, and, with the help of a book on the subject, found it quite interesting, considered as a liturgical drama. (In fact he had once been able to correct Damien on some obscure historical point concerning the Kiss of Peace, which had been worth the total effort.) He had, in a way, come to respect religion—but to commit himself to the extent of personal prayer? No. ‘What is prayer?’ he had asked Clare. ‘The lifting up of the mind and heart to God,’ she had replied. He remembered that much from the catechism. Lift oneself up to someone who wasn’t there, in case He was? He would rather look a knave than a fool on the other side of death, rather depart into everlasting fire (where, according to Shaw, the company was so amusing) than redden under the mocking laughter of Chaos and Old Night, those two cosmic wide-boys to whom religion was a huge practical joke for tricking a man out of his fair share of lust and selfishness. ‘You really fell for all that stuff about heaven and hell …? Well, there’s one born every day …’
Perhaps that was why he and Clare were sitting here, because they could agree on no common activity. It seemed an awful waste. And it raised again the puzzling question of why Clare should be necessary to his contentment. His arm was beginning to ache, and he withdrew it from her shoulders.
Why had he taken his arm away? Had she not done something she should have done? Had she rebuffed him by some unconscious lapse in the strange new etiquette of … She was always at a loss to define her relationship with Mark in words that would not either overstate or understate the reality. Love? The mere word made her blush—(this hateful blushing!)—despite her ignorance of what it might mean. Friendship? Even she knew it was more than that, or entirely different. Affection? She was not his aunt. With a certain guilty and timid pleasure she was forced back on ‘love’. But what was it? Fragments of fifth-form Tennyson and Bridges tangled absurdly in her mind with ‘The Purposes of Christian Marriage’ expounded by a blue-faced priest at a recent mission sermon in Brickley. Neither seemed remotely connected with what she was experiencing at present—the strange traffic of hours of worry and misery for an occasional moment’s happiness, the need to be with him all the time, and the need to disguise that need, the constant embarrassment of not knowing whether she was being too forward or too cold, whether she was welcoming occasions of sin, or, as Mark had hinted more than once, dragging the convent watchfulness into ordinary life, where it strangled innocent pleasure.
She still remembered vividly that when she was in her last year at the convent as a pupil, she and another girl who intended to take the veil had been skilfully abstracted from a particular R.I. lesson given by Sister Anthony, a grimly efficient nun who was generally given the unpleasant jobs, like dealing with the occasional boarder who smelled. She had been immensely curious as to the content of that lesson, but too proud to ask. It never failed to arouse giggles when mentioned, and the sophisticated Christina Lloyd had referred to it as ‘How not to make friends and influence people’. She was convinced that the solutions to all her doubts and difficulties lay in the lesson which had been denied to her. Her exclusion still rankled: why shouldn’t a novice know about such things?
She had read books of course: pamphlets snatched hurriedly from a rack in some dim corner of a church, with titles like Growing Up, and Holy Purity, but they were all equally unhelpful. ‘A good Catholic boy or girl should not indulge in passionate kissing’ they said. But what was passionate kissing? She wanted to know if Mark should put his arms right round her, if their bodies should touch, and for precisely how long they should kiss. Not that she thought of such things when he kissed her good night, but afterwards she was always troubled by scruples of conscience. She couldn’t bring herself to ask a priest in confession. That was bad. But she was too shy. Or was it that she was afraid the priest would say she had been doing wrong, that she must retrace her steps, deny Mark the intimacy she had so far allowed him—which, she was only too well aware, would be to deny herself. Perhaps, having known him for such a short time, she should never have allowed him to kiss her at all. She just didn’t know. After all, she had known him for such a short time.
She remembered the first evening so clearly, when she had returned home, fagged from working late at the school, to find Mark seated among the family like some lean, brown prophet from out of the desert. Was she foolish and vain in thinking that his dark eyes had flickered with a special interest when she was introduced to him, and that every time she looked at him that evening she looked straight into their thoughtful depths? Fortunately the blushes that followed inevitably on these glances were unnoticed in the babble and hilarity of the family circle. And how irritating Damien had been that evening. He had never stopped harping on that wretched room she had found for him. Why was it that whenever you did someone a good turn, they entwined you with their tentacles, and most unfairly made their debt a kind of claim on your attention and friendship? It always seemed to have been her eagerness to do good that led her into trouble. That, after all, had been the cause of her leaving the convent under a cloud. She had only tried to be kind to Hilda Syms …
The painful memory scuttled towards her like a spider out of a dark corner. She squashed it with a slight shudder, and concentrated deliberately on the screen, which was showing the credit titles of the main film of the evening.
Father Kipling was beginning to worry. He had been in the cinema for over an hour now, and still Song of Bernadette had made no appearance. As the lights dimmed his hopes rose again. But no. While The Cat’s Away was announced as being considered more suitable for adult audiences. Perhaps it was another short film however. The curtains on the stage drew back to reveal a wide, slightly concave screen on which, heralded by a frightful squeal from some invisible jazz-band, appeared the mysterious words ‘AMBER LUSH’. Not till they were followed by ‘And LEN GESTE’ in While The Cat’s Away did he suspect that Amber Lush might be someone’s name. ‘I baptize thee Amber Lush.’ Frightful thought!
There followed in rapid succession a series of strange, uncouth names—Mo Schnieder, Xerses Smith, Fritz Pitz, Lulu Angel—connected with equally bizzare functions: continuity, lyrics, additional dialogue. Finally it was announced that Color was by Technicolor, whoever, or whatever, that might be. He had always thought colour was by Almighty God.
The first scene represented a luxurious room overlooking—was it not Brooklyn Bridge? He seemed to recollect having seen it before in a geographical periodical. One could not but be impressed by the magnificence of the scene, the wonderful panorama of the river. The room itself, though ugly and strident in appearance, was richly furnished with deep-piled carpets, broad, low sofas like beds, and gadgets with unimaginable functions cunningly disposed around its broad area. In the far corner, beside a kind of highly polished bar littered with bottles, a man sat slumped in an arm-chair, clinking lumps of ice in a large glass of some pale yellow liquid. He was in his shirt-sleeves, with the collar undone and the tie loosened in a rather slovenly manner. He seemed to be of an artificially preserved middle age, and wore an expression of comical gloom.
‘This,’ said a choric voice, ‘is a portrait of a man whose wife has gone home to Mother.’
An appreciative chuckle rippled through the audience. They evidently perceived some joke unrecognized by himself.
‘It all started over such a little thing,’ continued the voice. ‘Just because he didn’t like his wife’s new hat. After all, it wasn’t such an awful hat. Or was it?’
The scene melted into a picture of a really execrable hat—a kind of inverted lampshade decorated with seaweed. This time Father Kipling laughed with the rest of the audience. Very cleverly the picture was lowered to take in the wearer’s face—an angry, rather hard-faced woman. She was having a furious argument with the man seen earlier, now dressed in a light-coloured suit. Suddenly it flashed upon Father Kipling that this was happening in the past. He felt quite pleased with his perspicacity, and wondered if everyone else around him had understood.
‘If that’s all you think of me,’ said the woman, ‘I might as well go home to Mother.’
‘Well, why don’t you. Try yelling at her for a change,’ replied her husband crossly. A smile lit up his face. ‘That I would like to see.’
‘All right then, if that’s how you want it. And I’m taking the children and Betsy Ann with me.’
‘Take anything you like. Take the icebox, take the television, take … take the bed!’
With fascination and amusement Father Kipling followed the rapid preparations for departure. A cheerful-looking negro servant (evidently Betsy Ann) said to her mistress: ‘Sure Massa Kennedy will starve without us ma’am; why, he can’t look after hisself no more than a baby.’
‘Exactly,’ replied Mrs Kennedy. ‘That’s why I expect to have a long-distance call to Mother’s tomorrow morning. Perhaps this will teach him to appreciate his wife.’
Now the film was faded back to the future—or was it the present? Goodness, he was getting quite confused. Anyway the man, now back in shirt-sleeves, slapped his thigh and stated emphatically:
‘No woman’s gonna get the better of me.’
He consulted a telephone directory, gargantuan like everything else in the room, and lifting the receiver snapped, ‘Get me the Ajax Home Help Service. Zero Two Double-Four Six’
‘Enter Amber,’ prophesied Mark silently. Sure enough, it was the world-famed yellow hair, pouting underlip and undulating body, coaxed into a dress three sizes too small, that stepped from the elevator and advanced hippily towards the door of Len Geste’s apartment. The latter’s astonishment on opening the door and identifying the vision as his ‘home help’ contrived to be funny despite its predictability. And this, he knew, would be true of the whole film, the course of which he could anticipate in every detail. Yet it would all be so professionally done, it would all cater so efficiently for the lowest and laziest responses, that he would enjoy it as uncritically as any of those around him, who knew of nothing better.
He censored the undergraduate arrogance of this last thought as soon as it formed. He was no longer sure that there was anything better to know. His mind shrank nowadays from exposure to those gloomy, clumsily executed foreign film ‘classics’, those pathetically dedicated productions of esoteric poetic dramas on which his fellow-students expended their enthusiasm and energy. He was getting to the stage where the unambiguous sexual appeal of an Amber Lush seemed more honest and significant than the pretentious obscurities of the cultural establishment.
In the Mallorys he felt he had rediscovered the people. The phrase smacked somewhat of ’Thirties affectation, but there was no other way of stating the fact. And it was a fact. But the popular art he looked for to accompany this rediscovery was sadly lacking. What he was witnessing was a fair sample of popular entertainment, and it was quite artificial and valueless: a circus cynically provided for the bread-filled masses by big business. Surely there must be an alternative? Something solid, earthy … But what could be more solid, more earthy than that? he reflected, as Amber, lifting a leg to examine a stocking, tensed her skirt over one of her famed buttocks.
What a delightful girl, thought Mr Mallory, slumped comfortably in his seat, with his legs in the aisle. Voluptuous, yes; like ripe fruit waiting to be plucked and squeezed—but waiting, innocent. Yes, innocent. Never mind if she had been married three times, to him she was still innocent. He would think no evil of that round, babyish face, haloed with a poignant silliness. Lord, but these girls were bad for a man. They were beautiful, much too beautiful. They made him unhappy, discontented. Look at those magnificent breasts, how they jutted out as if eager to escape the constriction of clothing, and how they swept in sharply to a firm, flat diaphragm, how the curve of her rump bit deeply into her thigh as she lifted a leg … how could a man see all this, and then go home and caress sincerely the undramatic slopes of his good wife? It would be like the South Downs after the Pyrénées.
Through a haze of growing drowsiness, Mrs Mallory disapproved of these exaggerated figures you saw everywhere nowadays on the films and in the papers. It wasn’t good for the children, especially Patrick and Patricia, growing up. Perhaps she shouldn’t have let them go and see it, but what could you do, there would have been a terrible row with Patricia that would have done more harm than good. What a beautiful room though, no cleaning to speak of, everything smooth and fitted, not that she liked the style much, didn’t have much time for this contemporary, though Patricia was always on at her to paint the walls in the living room different colours, wasn’t homely enough for her taste. The film was a lot of rubbish as usual, a waste of money, but Tom would insist on going every Saturday night, he was such a fanatic for a fixed routine, and if once she let him go on his own, well, there was no knowing where it would end. Though she was so tired after that shopping, and having to wait twenty minutes for a bus and then stand, wished she had given that conductor a piece of her mind, that she could have done with an early night. What Mass tomorrow? Better go to eight as usual to have breakfast ready for the others back from nine, must remember to set alarm clock or is it … With the index finger of her right hand just touching the small lump on her left breast, Mrs Mallory dozed.
Father Kipling was shocked to find himself studying closely the very striking golden-haired young woman as she lifted her leg. Really, this was too bad. This Jezebel was of a most disquieting physique, and she was exploiting its disturbing properties by every gesture and art of dress. He was saddened by the presence of so many young people in the cinema, even some of his own parishioners—had he not seen two of the Mallory children when the lights were on? Surely this was to expose them to the influence of Satan, always tireless in leading young souls into sins of the flesh. And when was Bernadette going to appear? Reluctantly he resolved to interrogate the stout woman on his left.
‘Excuse me, madam …’ he began in a whisper; but stopped, as she continued to gaze raptly at the screen, guffawing from time to time. He touched her arm, and she started indignantly.
‘Excusememadam,’ he gabbled, ‘but could you tell me if Song of Bernadette is being shown tonight?’
‘Not as far as I know, mate,’ she answered cheerfully, ‘Amber Lush film tonight i’n it?’
The woman with the whining child in front of him turned in her seat, and said:
‘Song of Bernadette’s on tomorrow, Sunday.’
There were several irritated ‘Shh’s’ around them.
‘Thank you, madam,’ hissed Father Kipling, sinking back into his seat.
So that was it. How very trying. After all the expense, inconvenience, embarrassment, to have missed the film he had expressly come to see. How had he contrived to muddle the dates? He felt the incongruity, nay more, the unseemliness of his situation, more keenly than ever, now his one pretext for being in the cinema was removed. There was no reason why he should continue any longer to witness this unsavoury performance. Now, for instance, she seemed about to undress—well really! Good gracious, she was undressing! But this was disgraceful. Why one could almost see her … He could swear he could see her …
Behind his spectacles, Father Kipling strained his eyes to see if he could see her …
With envy and with cold lust Harry watched the antics of Amber Lush. He slipped from his pocket a slim flick-knife. Amber unzipped the front of her dress and stepped out of it. Harry applied his thumb to a stud, and a blade shot out of the handle. Amber moved behind a screen, and began tossing her underclothes over the top. A brassière flew out of the door, and landed on the head of Len Geste, sitting in the next room. Harry cackled. A pair of rank, sweaty tit-holders on his head. Slipping the point of his knife under the upholstery, Harry made a long slit in the seat between his legs. Amber now emerged from behind the screen in a carelessly tied négligée. As she bent forward to pick up a slipper she paused, and the cameras lingered on her drooping breasts. Harry swallowed, and his spit was like bile in his throat. He wanted a tart like that and a car like that and a swank apartment like that, Christ, how he wanted them. He pushed his hand through the slit and grabbed a handful of Amber’s sorbo tits. Savagely he tore out a great lump and kneaded it between his fingers.
Clare frowned. Surely all this was rather unnecessary? It was certainly embarrassing. Not for the first time she felt glad of the protective darkness of the cinema. Surely this woman was not considered beautiful? Her figure was too … well, big. She had always been embarrassed by her own tendency to plumpness, and had welcomed the enveloping folds of the nun’s habit. Even now, when she was free to try and make herself attractive, she counted her full bust and rather prominent seat embarrassments rather than assets. Yet this woman, in whom the same features appeared, grossly exaggerated, seemed deliberately to draw attention to them, and, to judge by the vulgar whistles from one section of the audience, was considered attractive. What did Mark think?
Amber’s vital statistics were 38–22–38, and Mark thought of the contemporary cult of the bust, and what it might signify. Of course the female breast was ‘vital’ in a more than journalistic sense—it was the fountain of nourishment, of life itself. Blessed are the paps that gave thee suck. But child-bearing was not in favour nowadays. Amber herself had enjoyed three totally contraceptive marriages. Was the attraction sheerly erotic? Yet the dimensions of some of these film-stars might seriously incommode the performance of the sexual act. Mere size was not sufficient. It had to be combined with a small waist measurement, and balanced by a hip measurement, as near as possible, equal to the bust measurement. In the difference between the identical first and third vital statistics and the second, there resided a mystical erotic tension. In classical times the tension was aesthetic. According to the Greek sculptors, ideally the distance between the nipples, between the lower breast and the navel, and between the navel and the division of the legs, should be exactly the same. But today the Venus de Milo wouldn’t make the front page of Reveille if she was dressed up in a bikini. The bust survives the city. Would Amber’s pneumatic charms, protruding from some faded and flickering revival in A.D. 2000, survive Hollywood?
‘Come on Patrick. This is where we came in.’
Patricia tugged at her brother’s sleeve. Receiving no response, she pinched his arm.
‘Ouch! Brute.’
‘Are you coming?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll tell Mummy.’
‘Tell her.’
‘Why won’t you come and do as you’re told?’
‘I want to see the film.’
‘You’ve seen it once.’
‘So what?’
‘Mummy said we were to be in by nine.’
‘She did not, she said half past nine and it’s only ten to nine now.’
‘Well I’m going.’
‘All right.’
Really he was the most exasperating boy. Well, she had a headache, and had to wash her hair—why should she wait until he was sated, which wouldn’t be till the National Anthem was played if she knew Patrick. The discovery that he could see a film as many times as he liked for the same price as one time had rather turned his head, and he sat doggedly through the most boring films until he was forcibly removed from the cinema. Well she wasn’t going to get worked up about it. Let him stay. She would be blamed for it, naturally, but never mind.
‘For the last time, Patrick, are you coming?’
No answer. As soon as she left her seat and turned her back on the screen, she regretted her move. Depression and worry seeped under the exit door, and trickled down the aisle to meet her. Once she had pushed through the swing doors she was swamped. Immediately, the awful flat feeling you always got after the cinema enveloped her. Suddenly you became aware of what a false, worthless film it had been, and that the same old life was at home waiting to be lived.
‘Kiss me, Len,’ whispered Bridget. Obediently he bent his head and kissed her lightly.
‘What’s the matter, Len?’ she asked, dissatisfied. He couldn’t deceive her. A kiss was as precise as any instrument he used on the bench at work. He fended her off mechanically.
‘Nothing, dear. Why?’
Bridget was silent. She let her head fall back on his shoulder, and squeezed his hand tightly. This he recognized as no loving pressure, but a desperate clutch at departing happiness. His own happiness had slipped away when he first glanced at the illuminated clock on the cinema wall, which had the letters THE PALLADIUM arranged in a circle instead of numbers. It had been half past D then; now it was M to I.
He was worried about seeing her home, about not being able to see her home. Every time they went out he worried about not being able to see her home, and every time it spoiled his evening almost before he had begun to enjoy it. He would have cheerfully walked home for Bridget’s sake, but if he was late in, Ma was bound to have an attack, just out of spite. Still, the fact remained that he could see her home, and hang the consequences. Perhaps that was what nagged at him. If it had been utterly out of the question, he would feel easier in mind. As it was, he had to make the same difficult decision again and again. Bridget hated it as much as he did—more, probably, as she had to walk home through the dark streets, and she got frightened easily—but somehow she seemed to be able not to think about it, until the actual moment of separation arrived, and then she was nearly in tears. That made him feel terrible. It wasn’t fair really—he felt that she should be like him, and let the misery of parting into her mind by degrees, so that it wasn’t so crushing when the moment came. As it was, she wanted to be happy when he was miserable, and then she broke down just when he had steeled himself to withstand the separation.
But there was one appalling separation yawning up before them, which even he could not bring himself to consider calmly: National Service. Instead of getting better, things were going to get worse. When, O when, were they going to get married? He couldn’t save, let alone support a wife on his apprentice’s wages. Army pay was even less. They were both determined to start off properly—no furnished bed-sitting room for them, and turned out as soon as a baby arrived. Bridget wanted a family, and so did he. Neither, money apart, did he want to get married while he was in the army. It didn’t need much imagination to realize what it must be like to live from one leave to the next. If it was agony saying good night to Bridget now, when he could see her the next day, what would it be like to say good-bye and not see each other for a week, a month, a year? There was Bill Baker, who used to work at the next bench: went into the army, got married on his embarkation leave. Now he wrote to the boys in the workshop about the brothels in Hong Kong (‘It’s one bloody great brothel’, he had said in his last letter), while his wife was, by all accounts, the easiest pick-up any night of the week at the Bayditch Palais.
Bridget would never become an easy pick-up. But you could understand a bloke who went to a brothel when he was 10,000 miles away from his wife. He couldn’t swear that he wouldn’t himself, though he had never had a girl in his life. And if you didn’t blame the bloke, could you blame the girl? It wasn’t their fault. It was those who sent him away. What right had they? What right?
Len fretted under an impotent sense of injustice. The mood passed rapidly, leaving him tired and miserable. He knew he didn’t really care about anyone else. He didn’t care if Bill Baker caught the pox and his wife ended up under the Bayditch railway bridge with the lowest women in the neighbourhood. They could all go to hell if only he could stay with Bridget.
Sometimes he wished they hadn’t met so young. If somehow he were offered a miracle by which his memory of Bridget could be wiped out, and he would meet her and fall in love with her again in five years’ time, he would have accepted it.
The tide was on the turn now. Slowly the customers were beginning to ebb away. For Doreen the evening’s work was almost over. Her feet throbbed, and the backs of her knees ached, but, mindful of the magazine article ‘Graceful You’, which she had read that morning, she stood erect, a foot from the back wall of the cinema, her weight evenly distributed between her feet. By the central exit, the other girls slumped and sagged against the wall, whispering. Occasionally a coarse laugh rose above the whispers, a laugh she was intended to hear. Because of that day off she had had last week. Now they sneered every time Mr Berkley spoke to her. Well let them, the cats. Just jealous they were, mostly married they were, and knew they didn’t stand a chance. Not that Mr Berkley had done anything or said … But he was nice. A bit old. But very nice.
People were going now, the rows were thinning out, and the laughter was patchy. Every now and then there was a muffled clatter of seats tipping up, half a row would heave to their feet, clasping coats to their laps, and allow a few people to stumble into the aisle. Leaning against the slope these would toil slowly towards the exit, pausing at intervals to look over their shoulders, in case they were missing anything; and when they got to the back of the cinema, they would linger over putting on their coats, stealing glances at the screen. Silly fools. Why didn’t they stay in their seats?
What a gorgeous apartment it was in the picture. Just Amber’s luck to stumble on a job like that. Think of having that bathroom all to yourself, hot water galore and a thing for showers if you wanted one. Everything warm and clean and white.
Patrick was bored with the film. He waited impatiently for the really funny bits to come round again. There weren’t nearly enough. The grown-ups seemed to find it funny, but he couldn’t see the point of the jokes.
The person next to him stood up and pushed out. A man moved up from a few seats away, and sat down next to him. Pity Patricia had gone off in a huff so early; he could probably have been persuaded to leave now. Couldn’t go yet, of course, after that row.
Suddenly he felt a hand on his leg, and the unexpected contact sent fear pulsing through his body. It was as if frightened messengers were running helplessly between his leg and his brain—‘It’s someone touching me!’—‘Someone touching me?’—‘Yes, it’s someone touching me.’ It was the man who had moved up and sat next to him. His heart pounded. He must be a pickpocket. What should he do? Shout for help? Either he would be murdered immediately, or the man would protest that he had done nothing. He hadn’t done anything—perhaps he didn’t know that his hand was there. He tried to imagine how silly it would be if the man didn’t know his hand was there. But he knew the man did know. He didn’t dare turn his head to look. It became terribly important that he should disguise his own knowledge. He laughed emptily at a joke in the picture. The man beside him laughed too, and that frightened him more than anything. He didn’t move—just kept his hand there. O God, please help. This was to punish him for being naughty to Patricia. Please, God, and I’ll do anything You like.
With a tremendous effort Patrick stood up and fled from the cinema.
‘You look tired, Miss Higgins.’
‘Saturday night’s always a bit of a rush, Mr Berkley,’ replied Doreen, trying to ignore the ill-concealed interest of the exit-cluster.
‘Well, you can have a good lie-in tomorrow morning,’ he answered. ‘You might as well go now.’
‘Thank you, sir, but it’s my turn to see the customers out tonight.’ There was no point in aggravating the other girls.
‘Never you mind; I’ll see to that, Miss Higgins. You run along home.’
Doreen left. There was no point in aggravating Mr Berkley, either.
Mr Berkley glowed with the appreciation of his own magnanimity. Miss Higgins deserved a little kindness. She took her job with exemplary seriousness. Trim little figure too …
Mr Berkley moved on to the group of usherettes by the main exit. They became sullenly silent at his approach.
‘Mrs Bertram, I have asked you before not to wear that jersey under your tunic.’
‘I can’t ’elp it, it’s me chest.’
‘I don’t see how it can be necessary in a warm place like this. I must insist that you wear a blouse like the other ladies. Now will you all please draw back the curtains in front of the exits.’
He passed on. Muffled insults thudded into his back. He leaned over the back row of the stalls, and gloomily watched the closing scenes of the film. Beneath him interlocked couples writhed in their awkward embraces. Why on earth did they bother to come to the cinema? The seats were ill-adapted to love-making. Perhaps they had nowhere else to go. The cinema was a kind of low-voltage brothel for half its customers, and an ice-cream parlour with entertainment for the other half.
The film faded out on a scene of universal and improbable felicity. As soon as it became evident that this was the end, there was the usual frenzied stampede to avoid the Queen. Three minutes after the lights came on, there were only a few stragglers by the doors, and the inevitable woman, who had lost her scarf, poking about under her seat.
Mark and Clare shuffled out with the yawning, patient crowd, urged on like cattle by attendants anxious to get home. Suddenly Mark found himself suffocated by an enormous depression, which closed over him like tons of cotton wool. Grimly he resisted the urge to fight his way out, to scream and thresh and tear his way into the open air. It wasn’t just claustrophobia, though no doubt that had something to do with it. It was difficult to describe or diagnose these fits, to which he was periodically subject. Holding out Clare’s coat for her to slip on, nudged and bumped by the struggling crowd, he wanted to put up his face and howl. He felt he was a prisoner inside his own body, which was compelled to act exactly like the rest of the crowd, to go through the same motions as these dumb, patient beasts, holding out a coat, queuing for a bus, boarding it, twisting in his seat to capture the change from his trouser pocket, asking for two fares to Ringwood Road. The fact that he would have to say ‘Two to Ringwood Road, please’, or, rather, the foreknowledge that he would have to say it, seemed suddenly intolerable.
‘How ’bout walking?’ he said to Clare, as they pushed mercifully out on to the cold pavement.
‘It’s rather a long way, isn’t it, Mark?’
‘Look at queue,’ he articulated with difficulty, nodding in the direction of the bus stop. The words were like felt in his mouth.
‘All right then. If you want to.’
He set off with a long fast pace, hands clenched in the pockets of his duffle-coat. Clare hurried along beside, and a little behind him. Sometimes he would pause and wait impatiently for her to catch up. They walked in silence, threading the dull, chill streets. Wisps of fog clutched at her throat and made her cough. She was cold in her short jacket and thin blouse. She was puzzled and unhappy and a little frightened.
As they left the main road and began to climb up High Hill, Mark’s steps became slower and more plodding. At the top of the hill, he sank down on a wooden seat of neglected appearance, inscribed ‘Traveller’s Rest’.
‘Sit down,’ he said.
Clare hesitated, looking at the wet, dirty surface of the seat with disfavour, conscious of the oddity of sitting in the damp, cold darkness at the side of a London street. Mark stared bleakly before him. Then he looked up at her, and something like human recognition flickered in his eyes.
‘Sorry,’ he said, smiling wearily. ‘Here, sit down.’
He spread his handkerchief on the bench, and she sat down.
‘Sorry to be like this,’ he apologized, taking out a cigarette. She didn’t like it if he smoked when they were alone. Somehow it meant that he didn’t want to be touched, or to touch her. It kept her at bay. She sat uncomfortably erect on the seat, holding her back away from the wet grimy wood.
The seat was placed at a cross-roads that scored High Hill like a hot cross bun. From it you looked directly down the hill to the London plain. It was one of the highest of the first hills that ringed London, and on a fine day you could see the whole city, right to Highgate in the north, spread out before you in a smoking, shimmering expanse of buildings, punctuated here and there by the splayed fingers of river-side cranes, and great buildings like St Paul’s and their own cathedral. She knew the landmarks well: when the younger children were babies she had often pushed the pram up to the top of the hill and—the memory came back to her suddenly—she had often sat looking out from this same seat. At night it was a glittering mass of lights, as if some great hand had flung down a fistful of stars. Tonight, however, the panorama was veiled by fog, hanging densely over the river, and slowly creeping through the low-lying streets. But Clare did not miss the view. The mournful lowing of the fog-horns, and the muffled, lonely rattle of a suburban train, which were the only sounds that carried to her ears, seemed sufficiently appropriate to her mood.
‘Then why …’ She stopped.
‘Why what?’
‘Why be like this, Mark?’
‘I don’t know. I just get these moods. I feel so fed up at the moment.’
‘Have you had another story sent back.’
‘You’ve guessed it.’
‘I’m sorry, Mark. It’s a shame. I think your stories are awfully good. I know …’
‘For God’s sake don’t.’
There was a silence, and then he must have heard her catch her breath.
‘Oh Christ. I’m sorry, Clare. Look, I didn’t mean to be rough. Here, borrow my handkerchief. Oh blast, you’re sitting on it.’ He put an arm round her and she smiled feebly.
‘It’s all right. I’m silly.’
‘No you’re not. But look, it’s like this: I think my stories are good, and you think my stories are good. And all my friends think my stories are good. Now that’s fine, but it’s all completely beside the point. Because someone in an office miles away, who doesn’t know me from Adam, whose only interest in my stories is to decide whether people will read them, he doesn’t think my stories are good. Now he may be soulless and mercenary and semi-illiterate, but I’ve got to admit that he is the least biased of all of us; and that’s what stings. I suppose I can’t face facts. I’ve got all the ambition, but no talent.’
There was another long pause, as Clare searched desperately for some comforting word that would bear exposure to his present mood.
‘Mark … if only you had faith …’ she murmured.
‘What kind of faith?’
‘Oh, any kind. Faith in yourself. Faith in God.’
‘I don’t inspire faith in myself. And God can’t help me, I’m afraid. My problems aren’t religious. I’ll try and explain. Look: out there is London; beyond is the world. I can’t see it because of the fog. But even if the fog cleared, I wouldn’t know what it all meant. Looking out over a city gives me a sort of sick feeling—a sense of the appalling multiplicity of life. I get a sort of dizziness—that helpless feeling you get when you read that a star is ninety million light years from the earth. I think of sewage pulsing through thousands of miles of pipes, of trains crammed with humanity hurtling through the tube, of the people who never stop walking past you on the pavements—such infinite variations of appearance, none of them alike, each with his own obsession, his own disappointment, his own set of values, his own magazine under his arm catering for his own hobby—railway engines or beekeeping. One feels that one wants to gather them all in like a harvest; or stop one, understand him, absorb his identity, and then pass on to the next one—but there’s no time, there are too many, and you’re swamped.’
He paused for a moment, thinking. Clare sat very still.
‘What gets me is that so much of life passes you by, without so much as touching you, and it’s beyond recall. Art? It’s like being asked to conserve a waterfall in a thimble.
‘Listen. As I talk to you now, a conductor is punching a ticket on a 53 bus in the Old Kent Road; down there in Bermondsey a drunken docker is getting into bed with his daughter; in Buenos Aires a beggar spits; in Pittsburgh someone puts a nickel in a juke-box; in a Chinese village they are crucifying a priest to the door of his own church; in a Paris cellar they are staring at a naked dancer; in a Birmingham hospital an old man dies on the operating table; in Germany a soldier shivers on guard; somewhere a boy wets his bed, a woman screams in childbirth, an athlete tears a muscle, a man pencils an obscene drawing on a wall, a poet finds his word; in the Grande Chartreuse a monk prays; in Delhi a legless man drags his torso along the gutter; in Baghdad an Arab scratches his stomach. And so on. And none of us knows or cares about the other. To each, all that matters is his own existence. The world is held in a state of hideous indifference and selfishness—if it weren’t I suppose we’d all go mad. But as a writer I feel painfully conscious of this infinite pullulating activity, I feel I must try and fix this multiplicity. If life was like a film which you could stop or slow down at will, you might be able to study it, to find a pattern, a meaning. But you can’t. Even as I described them, each little precious atom of individual experience had perished irretrievably, become something else. And there were countless millions of other moments of experience that I didn’t have time to mention.’
He stopped suddenly, and looked at her. He laughed.
‘D’you think I’m mad?’
‘No, Mark.’
‘Let’s go home.’
‘Yes.’
Reluctantly they dawdled towards the hated corner where they had to say good night. Len took his arm away to look at his watch. Three minutes left.
‘D’you have to look again, Len?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, cross and unhappy. He thrust his hands into his coat pockets.
‘Len, don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
She stopped, and looked up at him in dumb misery. Her face was blue under the street-lamps.
‘Oh, Len, why does every evening have to end like this?’
‘Is it my fault?’
‘Of course it isn’t. It’s no one’s fault. But … well, what’s the use of getting worked up about it?’
‘I’m not worked up about it. You’re the one who gets worked up.’
‘That’s because you’re … like this.’
He knew that she was trying to be good, and brave, and that he was hurting her, but somehow he couldn’t help it. Because he wanted to go home with her and stay with her and sleep with her in his arms. And nothing else would do.
‘I don’t like letting you go home on your own. It worries me. It’s not safe around here.’
‘I know it’s because of me, Len,’ she said softly. ‘But just be nice to me before you have to go.’
‘There’s my bus,’ he said, looking over her shoulder.
He took her abruptly into his arms, and pressed a kiss on her lips. There was no pleasure in it.
‘Good night, Bridget. I love you.’
‘I love you too, Len,’ she whispered. But he had broken away, and was pounding after the bus. She watched his broad, heavy form thud on to the running-board and climb the stairs. He didn’t look back. She watched the bus till it turned the corner.
Across the street she caught sight of someone watching her from a shop doorway. Turning on her heel she began to walk smartly up the hill towards home. As she left the main road, the lights became more feeble and more widely spaced. She hurried across the great oceans of gloom and rejoiced each time she reached an island of light. Round the throat of each lamp-post there was a scarf of fog. Out of the dank, uncared-for gardens the great gaunt houses towered above her. Why were there always so few lighted windows in this street? A negro suddenly padded out from an alleyway, and she gasped with fright. But he passed on. Not fair really, the way you naturally expected a black man was up to no good. But she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t like them. She hurried on; the steel tips of her high heels clipped the paving-stones with a lonely sound.
Someone kicked a pebble behind her, and she glanced nervously over her shoulder. A youth. Was he following her? Of course not. Why should he? Yet he looked like the one who had watched her at the street-corner. Couldn’t you stop for two seconds on a public street without being thought one of those?
She turned sharply into the dark chasm of Dean Street, glancing casually over her shoulder again. Yes, it was him, and he was crossing the road to follow her. She accelerated her pace almost to a run, and tripped on a projecting paving-stone. Almost crying with vexation and fear, she recovered herself and hobbled on. If only she’d worn flatties that evening. Thank goodness it wasn’t far now.
Emerging from the long, blank walls of Dean Street, she took the short cut across the bomb-site as the lesser of two evils, scrunched across the freshly-laid gravel of Barn Street, and almost fell up the steps of number 46. She lost several seconds fumbling for her key in her handbag, then remembered that it was in her overcoat pocket. She let herself in. Before turning on the light in her room she tiptoed to the window and peeped out. A white-faced youth in a dark raincoat slouched past without giving the house a glance. Most likely she had frightened herself for nothing. Nevertheless she was glad to be inside. As she turned back into the room, it seemed a bit spooky, with the dark outlines of the old-fashioned furniture, and the heavy plaster relief on the ceiling which always looked about to fall, faintly illuminated by the glow from the street-lamps outside. She switched on the light and drew the curtains. Then she lit the gas-ring and prepared a cup of cocoa. She began to hum ‘Love is a many-splendoured thing’, softly, so as not to disturb Old Mother Potts. She sipped her cocoa slowly, giving the hot-water bottle time to warm the bed and toast her pyjamas. She knelt and said her usual prayers: three Hail Mary’s, an Our Father, an Act of Contrition. She couldn’t go to sleep without having said them; it was the only thing the nuns at the home had taught her which had really stuck. Good job Sister Grizelda didn’t know she didn’t go to Mass any more. Even at this distance, the thought of her wrath was scaring.
Bridget pulled back the bedclothes, and sat down on the warm place made by the hot-water bottle, which she guided carefully down into the cold depths of the bed with her feet. She turned off the light, and snuggled down, tugging the blankets over her head.
She drowsily reconsidered the film. Pity that Len Geste had been married; Amber had been much nicer than his wife, and it would have been nice if they could have got married. She began to reconstruct the film to her own pleasure, substituting Len for Len Geste—funny they had the same names—and herself for Amber. Of course there wasn’t much story if Len wasn’t married, but the story didn’t matter much anyway. The scenes she lingered over were the kisses, the nice things Len said to her, the wonderful clothes she had, the super flat they had, the kitchen with the gadgets for all kinds of things, and the big low sofas with Len, Oh I’m crazy about you. Oh, darling …
And Bridget slept.
Harry prowled on through the dark, deserted streets, hands plunged into the black depths of his raincoat, his crêpe soles sliding occasionally on the damp film of mud that coated the pavement. So the little curly-haired tart had slipped him. Bet she thought she was mighty smart. Well she would find out just how smart one day. It was healthier to let some people have their own way. Himself, for instance. He got … annoyed when people crossed him. Especially tarts. He wasn’t used to being crossed by tarts. He didn’t like it.
A giggle from a doorway startled him, but it was only somebody touching up his piece. Dirty bastard. Harry spat. A cat slunk from his approach. Harry prowled on.
At the Triangle he stopped at the coffee stall for a cup of the hot, bitter brew, and a pork pie. He ate and drank dourly on the rim of the bright circle of light, warmth and chatter that radiated from the stall, challenging with his stony glare the noisy joviality of the other customers.
‘It’s bein’ so cheerful as keep’s me goin’,’ said one of them. ‘Like our little ray of sunshine here,’ he added, indicating Harry. Smarting under their silly bloody laughter, he gulped down his coffee and stalked away. He turned down the cobbled hill that led to his house. On the river the ships were moaning about the fog. Turning into his house he fouled his shoes in some dog’s filth, and swore. He slipped the key noiselessly into the lock, and eased the door open. The smell of stale fat lay heavy on the air. The hall light wasn’t working, and he felt his way silently up the stairs. A voice sounded thickly from his mother’s room. He didn’t recognize it. The door suddenly burst open, and a fat man in long yellow underpants lurched against the banister.
‘Where do I piss?’ he demanded.
Harry pointed along the landing. His lips curled in disgust, he entered his own room and switched on the light. The raw bulb cast a harsh light on its dirt and disorder. Harry carefully draped his suit on a hanger, kicked off his shoes, and threw himself down on the lumpy, unmade bed. He found a half-smoked Woodbine on the floor, and lit it, letting the smoke drift slowly past his eyes. Christ, what a life.
Somehow he must get to the States. That was the place for a guy who wanted to make the big time. Plenty of money, cars, suits, shirts. A dame like Amber Lush. She had class all right. He would have class, all class. An apartment like the one in the film, with a bar and refrigerator. A big black Cadillac, and a bright yellow convertible for taking his dame down to the beach. Tough, unsmiling men under him, obeying his every command, ruthlessly eliminating the opposition.
Suddenly pain seared his lips. With an oath he tore the cigarette stub from his mouth and flung it to the floor. He peeled off his damp, sour-smelling socks, and took off his shirt. Shivering, he switched off the light at the door, and felt his way back to the bed. Getting in, he pulled the blankets around him, and, straddling the naked thighs of Amber Lush, grunted with pleasure.
Mr Mallory tugged at his tie until it came apart, and pulled off his jersey in the way that was bad for it. He tossed them over the back of a chair. He was glad that they had stopped in at the Bricklayers Arms for a drink. Extravagant really, drinking spirits, but so what? If it made you feel cheerful, it was worth it. Even Bett was quite good-tempered now. Made her look younger. Pretended she didn’t like gin, had to be coaxed to take it like medicine—but it took some of the starch out of her—eased the strings of her corsets, so to speak. Those corsets, underwear pink, now rested, exhausted, on a chair. His wife, in night-dress and dressing-gown, sat before the dressing-table, brushing her hair. He had wrenched one shoe off without undoing the laces, and stood now in a stork-like posture, arrested half-way through the removal of the other shoe by the beauty of his wife’s hair. Tell her.
‘That’s a fine head of hair you’ve got still, Bett,’ he said. She began to brush it with special care.
‘It’s an experience the younger generation miss you know, seeing a woman let down her hair. Why, when I married you it gave me more of a thrill the first time you let down your hair than the first time you let down your drawers.’
‘Tom!’ rebuked his wife. But there was no edge to her voice. She didn’t even reprove him when he let his trousers slide to the floor, and stepped happily out of them without bothering to hang them up. With a faint surprise he felt a stirring in his loins. What was it—the drink, or Amber Lush? Moving over to the dressing-table he put his arms round his wife’s ample body. She stopped brushing with mock annoyance. He grinned at their reflection in the mirror.
‘You ought to be in films yourself you know.’
‘Oh yes?’ she inquired ironically. ‘On the wide screen?’
‘No, honestly. I mean this fashion for buxom film-stars, with plenty of curves. Now that is a bust.’
‘Don’t be vulgar, Tom,’ said his wife happily.
‘Hallo, what’s this lump?’
‘Oh nothing.’
‘You sure?’
‘Yes, it’s been there for years. It’s nothing.’
Mr Mallory’s ardour wavered for a moment. He wobbled like a tight-rope walker who feels his confidence vanishing: the gravitational forces of worry began to assert themselves.
‘You ought to go to the doctor’s,’ he said uncertainly.
‘Don’t talk to me of doctors. It’s nothing I tell you. Does it show?’
Mr Mallory lunged forward on the tight-rope.
‘You needn’t worry,’ he said, pinching her affectionately on the rump where it overlapped the dainty dressing-table seat. ‘You’re still a fine figure of a woman. That Amber Lush is a bag of bones beside you.’
‘Now stop it, Tom.’
‘And maybe I could teach that Len Geste a thing or two.’ He hoisted her up from the seat, laughing and protesting in his arms.
‘Come on, let’s try one of those open-mouth kisses, all spit and breath.’
After a few seconds his wife came spluttering to the surface.
‘Oh, Tom, you are a fool, really. At our age.’
Deftly he reached out and turned off the light.
‘It’s a very nice age,’ he said.
Fifteen minutes later she said:
‘Tom, are all the children in?’
‘What children. We haven’t got any children. We were only married this afternoon, remember?’
She giggled.
‘You are a fool, Tom.’
It had been a particularly trying evening for Damien. Attendance at the meeting had been poor. Even the parish priest had been absent, and the curate didn’t command the same prestige and authority. Then on his return there had been that regrettable scene with Mrs Higgins when he complained of the way her daughter strewed her underclothes all over the bathroom to dry. He had had difficulty in making Mrs Higgins understand that it wasn’t the inconvenience he objected to, but the immodesty. Why, at home his mother and sisters would not think of even washing such garments in his presence. Then the young baggage herself had come in, and appeared highly amused by the whole affair. He had stalked angrily out of the room, leaving mother and daughter giggling impertinently. He flushed at the memory. Really he was most uneasy in this house. He deeply regretted that he had not insisted on taking the room next door which Underwood now occupied; but Mrs Mallory had said that she didn’t want to take him away from Mrs Higgins, who was a widow, and hard-up. But his aunt was too soft-hearted. Mrs Higgins wasn’t hard-up. At least, she quite spoiled that daughter of hers, who must spend large sums of money on clothing and similar luxuries. Really it had been a most trying evening. And now this disturbance.
Crossing himself slowly and precisely, Damien rose from his knees, and closed the breviary with an irritable snap. He liked to read the Office every day, though it was difficult to find the necessary time and peace in the hurly-burly of modern secularized society. But it was completely impossible tonight, with the murmur of Clare’s and Underwood’s voices floating up from the street. He padded to the window, and squinted down at the steps next door. Chalky-blue in the street-lamp’s light, they stared blankly back at him. Clare and Underwood must be inside the porch. Why? Why were they there, talking? It was most inconsiderate of them. Surely they must realize that his window was just above them, and that some people might be trying to make their devotions? Clare, too, ought to have more care for her good name. Why, they might be a couple in the shadows behind a dance-hall. He strained his ears to catch the conversation below, but without success. Perhaps if he eased the window open a little …
‘We ought to go in now,’ Clare whispered to Mark.
‘Cold?’
‘No, but it’s late. And suppose someone in the house should hear us.’
‘You’re shivering. I shouldn’t have made you walk home. You haven’t enough clothes on.’
‘No, I’m all right, honestly,’ she replied, but allowed him to put his arms round her.
‘Better?’
‘Mmm. But really we ought to go in. Mummy will worry.’ She struggled feebly against the temptation to surrender to the peace and happiness of the moment—a kind of harmony of mutual exhaustion that, she felt, must exist between two people who have shared some trial or adventure, and reached a special understanding in the course of it. Love—if this was love—dealt out its rewards in an eccentric way. The moments of joy and understanding never came when you wanted them—at a home-coming or for a special occasion—but on a damp, dirty seat on top of a hill, or with a good-night embrace in a cold, draughty porch.
Mark put his hands under her coat, and gently massaged her back with his broad, flat palms, smoothing away her cold, her stiffness and her reserve. His fingers manipulated her spine, making her squirm pleasantly, and push her body against his with involuntary force. She closed her eyes. Now his fingers were playing over every bone and muscle in her back as if they were the strings of an instrument, and in his sensitive hands her body suddenly became extraordinarily responsive. And all the time he was kissing her, nibbling kisses around her throat and under her chin, and she wanted to exhale everything from within her, to flatten herself against him, but all that came out was a kind of moan with his name mixed up in it. And his other hand crept slowly up her side, and she shuddered as his hand crept slowly up and closed over her breast and a window squeaked loudly overhead and she had said ‘No, Mark!’ and had broken from him and was fumbling with the latch, and was inside and upstairs before she began to blush.
‘No, Mark! ’ He was quite sure he had heard her say that. Locking the tail of his night-shirt between his ankles to prevent it riding up, Damien got carefully into bed. What had Underwood been up to? Some familiarity no doubt. Well, that would show her what sort of a fellow he was. She would see that he had been right after all: Underwood was no good. You could tell it as soon as you set eyes on him. That sly grin, all those immoral books in his room. That kind only wanted one thing from an innocent young girl. Well he wouldn’t be allowed to ruin a good Catholic girl like Clare—he himself would see to that. She had been foolish, and a little ungrateful, but he would not desert her. Soon she would be rudely disillusioned about Underwood, and when she was weeping with shame and anger he would come to her and comfort her. ‘No, no!’ she would say. ‘Please go away. I feel so ashamed. You are too good to me. I have not been kind to you in the past. Why should you be kind to me now?’
‘I am prepared to forget all that, my dear Clare,’ he would reply, ‘if you would consider favourably the idea of our marriage.’
‘You … marry me?’ she would exclaim, dry-eyed with surprise. ‘But why? How long …? I am not worthy.’ This last said with a pretty droop of the head.
His imagination sped on to the wedding night, and to an idea which had been pleasantly preoccupying him of late. Clare, exquisitely beautiful, began shyly to divest herself. She smiled gratefully as he left the room in deference to her modesty. When he returned she was attired in a soft white night-dress, her long auburn locks resting lightly on her shoulders. Decked to please him, she came to him, gave herself passionately to his embrace. But he steadied her, calmed her.
‘Clare, most married people spend the night of their wedding indulging in the pleasures of the flesh, thoughtless of God. I suggest, my dear, that being two people specially dedicated to God, we spend this night instead in watching and prayer.’
Surprise, admiration, and joy flooded across her face in quick succession.
‘Damien, you are so strong. And I am so weak.’
He caught himself falling asleep. He rattled off a quick Act of Contrition, and thumbed hurriedly through his mental picture book of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. His soul tidied for the night, he composed himself for sleep.
In the privacy of her pink bedroom at the top of the house, Doreen gleefully unpacked the new panties. She had received them that morning from the Laurie Landsdowne Fan Club. That was a marvellous record of his, Love Is A Many-Splendoured Thing, they never got tired of it at the Palladium. The panties had Laurie’s own finger-prints on them. She giggled, wondering what the lodger would think of them when he saw them in the bathroom. He was a queer one and no mistake. Gave her the creeps. Ooh, she couldn’t stand him. No sense of humour. And so ugly. Seemed to be frightened of girls.
Boldly undressing beneath the leers of her photographic gallery of film-stars, she slipped on the pants and opened the wardrobe. In the long mirror a perfectly normal image confronted her. She turned and peered over her shoulder. Like the finger-bones of some amorous skeleton Laurie Landsdowne’s printed hands gently clasped each swelling buttock. Stretching her own hands over the imprints, Doreen began absently to manipulate her bottom, as she hummed:
Suddenly she felt the weariness attack her legs again. Slipping on her black see-through nightie and white bed-socks, she got between the warm bed-clothes and switched off the light above her bed. Stretching luxuriously, she placed the hot-water bottle under the joints of her knees, and felt the tiredness blissfully released from them. Soon she was dropping off to sleep, dreaming of pantie-raids in an American girls’ college—she had read about them in the newspaper. Grinning, muscular, alphabet-chested college boys invaded the shrieking delighted dormitory gathering handfuls of frillies. Then, oddly, Mr Berkley threw his leg over the sill, and advanced towards her with a roguish gleam in his eye. Tantalizing him with a wave of her bra, she challenged him to the chase …
Mark pushed open the door of his room, switched on the light, and stepped wearily inside. He threw himself down on the bed. So Clare was still a respectable girl. You could always tell a respectable girl. Their bodies could be mapped out like the butcher’s charts showing the different cuts of meat. You could only touch certain parts before marriage. Touch one of the forbidden areas—breast, rump or loin—and you encountered resistance. Still, he couldn’t grumble. He’d had quite a good feel around. She was yielding slowly. Take your time.
It was the little speech on top of the hill that had got her defences down. To be fair, it hadn’t been at all a bad piece of rhetoric. It was worth noting down while he could still remember it.
He swung his legs off the bed, and turned towards the desk. His note-book lay open. He read the last entry:
‘If you remove the “s” from nostalgia you get notalgia which means “back-ache”.’
Now that was extremely interesting. But it was so lonely. His writing resembled rockets going off singly at long intervals. This note-book habit was terribly dangerous, unless one was quite prolific of fresh and startling ideas. Otherwise one came to regard the little stockpile of metaphors and apothegms as the essential foundation of one’s work, to be eked out with parsimonious care. He would probably write a completely worthless short-story just to enshrine that one flash of word-play, which itself seemed feebler the longer he looked at it. He decided not to enter the hill-speech in his note-book.
He lit a cigarette and fell back on to the bed. Funny how reassuring was the action of lighting a cigarette. There was nothing to it, yet in the moment of static concentration, hunched over the flame, and the triumphant flick of the head as the first smoke came, one experienced a fleeting sense of identity: one was a man lighting a cigarette. Perhaps it was because a cigarette cost tuppence, and therefore to light up was an act of calculated extravagance. Anyway, it gave one a sense of being, for once, decisive and positive: it was a defiance of circumstances, a reckless devil-may-care defiance of circumstances.
Were other people like this, he wondered—always observing themselves, trying to surprise themselves in a spontaneous emotion? It was the penalty of being (or trying to be) a writer. To create characters you took a rib of your own personality, and shaped a character round it with the dust of experience. But it was a painful, debilitating process. Usually the characters were still-born, and the old Adam got weaker and weaker, less and less sure of his own identity.
Through the thin wall to his left the over-worked lavatory clanked and gurgled after someone—who was it?—sounded like Patrick’s heavy tread—had used it. Gradually the frenzied gurgling was hushed to a faint dripping. He waited to see how long it would take to be quite quiet. It was one of those times when there seemed to be nothing else to do but measure something quite meaningless, like the number of red motor cars on the road, or the time a cloud took to cross the moon. Now all was still.
But someone else was coming. The lavatory-seat was never cold in this house. Even so, it was late for all this activity. It must be Clare—yes, those were her floppy slippers. The seat squeaked, and he heard the rustle of her skirts. Carefully, as if it were a Boy Scout’s game, he visualized the movement accompanying each sound. In America you could buy a record of a girl undressing: a good sideline for the London Institute of Pornography.
It was a good job girls like Clare had to relieve themselves: it made them face the facts of human nature. Otherwise they were prone to think themselves bloody little angels. But perhaps even the angels had to pass their nectar. The toilet roll rattled as two sheets were torn off. There was a silence, then a hiss, then a deep, resonant battering of water by water. It was strangely musical. But someone had said that before. Joyce in Ulysses, of course. But that was a chamber pot. Yes there was that marvellous bit as it filled up: ‘Diddle iddle addle addle oodle oodle hiss.’ The acoustics were different: this was a single deep note, like a bass. It would be fun to write an ode: On Hearing His Beloved’s Urination:
Clare was sustaining the deep note very well. It was a kind of robustness attractive in a woman. Like Yeats’s great-bladdered Emer. Apparently there was a kind of competition among the Celtic goddesses to see who could make the deepest hole in the snow with her urine. You could imagine them squatting in a row, with the steam rising all round. They should make it an event in the Olympic games—Winter Sports.
It was strange really, this attachment to the cloacal in writers and intellectuals. There was Yeats and Joyce and Smollett and Swift and Rabelais and himself. Well he was attached to the cloacal all right, but was he a writer or an intellectual? Why not simply admit that he liked smut—made respectable by the presence of literature, of course.
The steady flow trickled into silence. Again the rustle of skirts, the jerk on the chain, again the ponderous deluge. Clare flopped out in her loose slippers.
D. H. Lawrence had written somewhere that the writer who confused the excremental flow with the sexual flow was the real pornographer. But Lawrence was fundamentally effeminate. He couldn’t face the fact that the excremental flow led you to the channel of life. It was the irony of the thing that appealed to the healthy masculine mind:
Take the little wedge of flesh itself, ‘those mysteriouse parts’ as Spenser called them. He was as bad as Lawrence. The latrine wall’s four-letter word was much more satisfactory. Clare’s—
He sat up, suddenly and unexpectedly revolted. He was getting bored with his mind. It was like being trapped in a cinéma bleu, seeing the same film over and over again. He was nauseated, and felt a desperate need to cleanse himself in some way.
Awkwardly he dropped to his knees. He didn’t want to pray to anyone, but just to humiliate himself in his own eyes, to make expiation. He said a Hail Mary, then started the Our Father, and got stuck at Thy will be done. Give us this day our daily bread. No, there was something in between. Never mind. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. He rummaged in the toy-cup-board of his childish memory for old scraps and fragments of prayers. Hail holy Queen, Mother of Mercy Hail our Life our Sweetness and our Hope. O clement O loving O sweet Virgin Mary. O Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us, O Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us.
He realized that he had been reciting this infantile jingle over and over again. Wearily he got to his feet and undressed. Slipping on a dressing-gown he went out to the lavatory. It was occupied.
Patricia was wide awake as soon as the door squeaked and Clare tiptoed in. She took off her coat, put on her slippers and flip-flopped out to the george. By arrangement the curtains were drawn so that Clare could go to bed by the light of the street-lamps without disturbing Patricia. When she returned, Patricia yielded to the temptation of observing her unnoticed. The planned modesty of undressing, the careful folding, putting on hangers and stowing away of clothes, bespoke the convent, and carried a mute condemnation of her own explosive methods of undressing. The dressing-table mirror reflected the dim, blue rectangle of the window, and Clare was silhouetted against it. Really, she had the most marvellous figure. If only she wore a decent bra. Goodness knows where she found the things she wore. In fact, with a little application, Clare could be a real beauty. She could tell her what to do, but she was a little shy of her. She didn’t quite know how Clare would take it—it would be a bit cheeky. Still, it wasn’t surprising that Mark was keen on her. How keen she was on Mark you couldn’t tell. She was so innocent that you couldn’t apply the usual tests. You’d think that sharing the same room these last months Clare would have blurted it all out, but she was strangely reticent about things that were really important, such as Mark, or the reason she had left the convent. So were most of the family really, they had formed deep friendships outside, but they never really let themselves go in the family circle. Mummy, for instance, was full of love really, but she seemed to distrust it, and when anyone tried to make a fuss of her, even Daddy, she said they were being soft. Only Mark seemed to be able to compliment her, but he did it in a half-joking way. That last book he had loaned her was rather weird. Mother Superior would have kittens if she caught her reading it. But that was what she liked about Mark, he treated her like an adult. She knew what was right and what was wrong, what would do her harm, and what wouldn’t. After all, you had to gain experience somehow, and a Catholic couldn’t get practical experience. It had to be books. Sunday tomorrow. There, Clare was getting down on her knees, as if to underline her own lack of real piety. She usually said her prayers in bed. And Clare said such terribly long prayers. The whole rosary at least. Perhaps she’d better say some more. Hail Mary full of grace …
Hail Mary full of grace … Clare stopped. It was no use repeating the words of the prayer faster and faster, like a skipping rhyme, when her mind was feverishly occupied with other things. Was it wrong of Mark to put his hand there? Was it wrong of her to like it? Had she liked it before she broke away? Had she broken away because it was wrong, or because of the noise of the window? Should she be angry with him? Or couldn’t he be expected to know better—was it really her fault that it had happened? These questions pulsed in her head and made it ache. Should she go to Communion tomorrow? Well, it couldn’t be a mortal sin, because there hadn’t been full knowledge or full consent.
She hadn’t considered the possibility of being in a state of mortal sin since that Christmas when she was eight and Boxing Day was a Sunday and she had pretended to be ill because she didn’t want to go to church two days running. All that week she had gone about in fear and trembling in case she would die before she could go to confession on the Saturday. It was significant that now she felt no such guilty panic—just a tired academic curiosity. This was due partly to her spiritual lassitude, partly to Mark’s influence. He had the same effect on her as certain books he lent her. He said she should learn to accept the presence of immorality in life and literature without condoning it. But it was a trick she found difficult to learn. Often the casual disregard in such books of every moral principle she had been taught to observe and respect, threw her into a whirl of doubt and uncertainty, and she had been shocked lately to find herself wondering whether the Catholic moral code wasn’t just a tedious and complicated game with which theologians amused themselves at the expense of ordinary people’s happiness.
Rule-of-thumb moral theology would indicate that she should give up Mark’s company. But Mark wasn’t just a disturbing influence; he was an unhappy boy without a Faith. To give him up now would be cowardly—there was an element of risk in everything worth the attempt. Of course she would only be a medium for God’s grace, but unworthy as she was, she might represent Mark’s last chance of salvation. For he did seem to like her, to find some relief in talking to her. And already she had persuaded him to go to Mass again. Tomorrow he would be kneeling beside her at Mass. It was quite an achievement, considering how short a time he had been with them. But there was a long way to go yet. God must do something to help. Please God, You must do something to help. When the priest elevates the Host at Mass, You could appear to Mark. You’ve done it before. Sister Veronica had told them of many such miracles. And Mark was worth a miracle. At least, to her he was.
The clock in the Anglican church-tower at the top of the hill struck three. Only very remotely did Father Kipling’s ear record that, as always, the note was flat. He was deaf, and almost blind and dumb too. He lay prostrate before the altar of his church, as he had done on the day of his ordination.
‘Lord,’ he groaned, ‘I am a sinner.’
It was a shattering admission to have to make. Oh, of course, he was a sinner in common with the rest of fallen humanity; but up till now this had been a mere formal admission, his confessions brief, dull accounts of a few trifling venial sins—a moment of irritation with a sleepy acolyte, an uncharitable thought about his housekeeper’s cooking. But now he found himself, at an unseemly age, steeped in real sin, yielding willingly to the temptations of impure thought—a sin almost certainly mortal, a sin he had always held in particular abhorrence, and treated with special severity in the confessional. It was horrifying. He felt physically sick as he pictured himself straining forward in his seat to stare at the lewd posturings and licentious antics of that infamous woman, like a spectator at some pagan orgy. Worse still, he was bound to admit that when she had walked into that man’s bedroom by mistake, he had actually wished, at heart, that they would consummate their unlawful desires. He had actually been disappointed when he had been reunited with his wife. He had connived at adultery. It amounted to that. He shuddered. And was this the man to care for the spiritual welfare of two thousand souls, to inspire them with zeal for the virtues of holy purity and marital chastity? A man who crumpled at the first brush of temptation?
But how had it escaped his attention that these cinemas were such cesspools? He could not think how his parishioners were able to reconcile the patronage of such corrupt entertainments with attendance at Mass and reception of Holy Communion. They must be warned of the grave dangers to their immortal souls from this source. Perhaps, after all, his misdemeanour would be put to good use by God, working in His mysterious ways.
Wearily he rose to his knees and looked up at the crucifix. He began to recite the fourth Penitential Psalm:
Turn away Thy face from my sins, and blot out my iniquities.
Create a clean heart in me O God, and renew a right spirit within my bowels.
Cast me not away from Thy face, and take not Thy holy spirit from me.
Restore unto me the joy of my salvation, and strengthen me with a perfect spirit.
I will teach the unjust Thy ways; and the wicked shall be converted to Thee …
Father Kipling repeated this last verse to himself as he locked the church doors. The night was cold, and he fumbled in his pockets for his gloves, only to find that he had left one in the cinema. It was not the only thing he had left there.
In the presbytery he sank into his old arm-chair, and dozed uneasily for a few hours before the first Mass.
The clanking of over-taxed plumbing woke Mark. Nobody in the house seemed to understand that you had to let the cistern fill before pulling the chain. They just yanked at it again and again with stubborn impatience. He peered at his watch and groaned into the pillow. Ten past eight. Soon Clare would come and make sure he was awake. Why was it that when you woke up the most important thing in life was that you should stay exactly where you were?
There was a tap at the door, and Clare came in with a smiling morning face and a steaming cup of tea. She was fully dressed, but her scrubbed, shiny face and fluffy, newly brushed hair made her appear ridiculously young and more enchantingly unsophisticated than ever. In the presence of her moist, bud-like freshness he felt old, coarse and soiled. He was made guiltily aware of the rough stubble on his chin, his greasy, unwashed face, the stale taste of last night’s tobacco in his mouth, the rumpled bed-clothes sealing the rank air round his body.
‘You’re like some beautiful but accusing sunbeam shining into a den of vice,’ he said.
‘I hope this is no den of vice,’ she replied, carefully placing a newspaper under the saucer on his bedside table.
‘You remind me of duty. You’re so disgustingly awake and industrious and clean. Three qualities which I find uncongenial.’
Clare drew back the curtains and opened a window.
‘It’s a fine day.’
‘For heaven’s sake, if you must open that window, close the door. There’s a howling draught.’
‘Well you could do with some fresh air in here,’ she said as she returned to the door. ‘Don’t be long getting up, will you Mark, or we’ll be late for Mass.’
‘All right. Clare.’
‘Yes?’ She paused by the door.
‘I’m sorry about last night.’
She blushed. ‘That’s all right’ she murmured, as she passed through the door.
‘And, Clare.’ She pushed her head back round the door. ‘Thanks for the tea.’
‘That’s all right.’ She smiled.
Well, that was one good job done. It was always best to get apologies over as soon as possible. Thanking her for the tea had been a happy inspiration too. She had a touching appreciation for such little gestures. In fact, it was so easy to draw appreciation from her that it was like cheating.
He sipped his tea, letting it scald away the bad taste in his mouth. He was almost certainly the only person—except Patrick (who had served at some appallingly early Mass) and perhaps Mr Mallory—who was drinking tea at that moment. All the rest would be heroically fasting for Holy Communion. Heroically? Or perversely? The Pope had recently issued an edict allowing the Faithful to drink non-alcoholic beverages up to one hour before Communion. But Mrs Mallory and her children had declined to take advantage of the new regulation, almost as though they suspected it of being a trap, a little too easy. They preferred to win salvation the hard way. It was the same with the evening masses which were now becoming common. Mrs Mallory stubbornly refused to attend them, although, as a hard-worked housewife, she was precisely the sort of person they were designed to help. She insisted that she felt ‘wrong’ all through Sunday if she didn’t hear Mass in the morning. There was something at once admirable and irritating about this family’s ability to bring the body into subjection. It wasn’t that they didn’t like tea. They did. And it wasn’t that they liked getting up. They didn’t. But somehow they managed to get up and not to drink tea.
The house resounded now with their energy: the bustle was like an accusation. He threw back the bed-clothes; found it, as he expected, cold; and pulled them over him again. There was a rap on the door.
‘Mark!’ Clare reminded him.
‘Oh, all right. I’m getting up,’ he grumbled, throwing back the blankets a second time. Scratching his head, he peered into the mirror, and scraped the sleep from his eyes with a finger-nail. Pulling on his dressing-gown he staggered, weak-legged, out to the bathroom.
Well, here he was on his knees again. He felt rather sheepish and embarrassed remembering his collapse of the night before. The explanation was perfectly obvious of course: the libido, deprived of sexual fulfilment, conspired with the ego and the super-ego for religious fulfilment. In the abasement before the supernatural it found a substitute for the abandonment of the sexual act. Prayer was spiritual orgasm. If he could have copulated with Clare, or merely stroked her breasts a bit, he would never have toppled to his knees in so abject a manner.
Kneeling in church was a rather strange way of witnessing to one’s intellectual independence. But it was essential if he was to regain Clare’s confidence. Like a trout, she could be caught by very skilfully and delicately tickling her religious susceptibility; tickling her belly would have to come later. He must beat Damien at his own game. Thackeray had said that every woman was a match-maker at heart; but she was also a missionary at heart. She always wanted to reform her man—it gave her desires a certain respectability. The challenge of his scepticism held a greater attraction for Clare than the holy, still and cold conversation of Damien. All she needed was a little encouragement. That was why he was here.
The church was stuffy: only one tiny window was open. The congregation did not seem to mind. But they were stuffy too, in ugly felt hats and buttoned raincoats, behinds tilted ungracefully on the edges of the benches, mostly staring vacantly ahead, with a few ostentatiously following the service in their missals, making a great show of turning over leaves. Here and there a child fretted, bored and uncomfortable, penned in by dull, sabbatical adulthood. Rows of grey, cross faces. Why were church-goers so unlovable? There was no getting away from it, all the beautiful, witty, intelligent people were sufficient unto themselves. It was only the failures and defectives who slunk into the temples and listened greedily to their promised revenge—they and the prosperous who wished to insure themselves by an hour’s boredom and discomfort against a reverse of fortune in the next world.
Yes, that was all very well, but what about the Mallorys? They were beautiful, they had a rich sense of humour, and they were undeniably intelligent. The Mallorys upset all his pet theories. It was damned annoying.
Father Kipling emerged from the sacristy, paced slowly across the altar, genuflected, and mounted the pulpit, pausing on each step like an old man. Clasping the pulpit with two hands, he gravely regarded the congregation as Father Francis finished the Gospel. He continued to gaze at them as they noisily settled themselves, and for several moments after, until there was almost complete silence. Mark sensed that people were curious, and slightly uncomfortable under that unblinking gaze. They were not used to the preacher seeking to make an impression, unless he was some missionary, and it troubled them.
Father Kipling looked tired and strained. When he spoke it was in a dull, lifeless voice.
‘Today is the last Sunday after Pentecost. The 6.30 Mass was for Mrs Duffy’s intention, the 7.30 for …’ The notices droned on. ‘Your charitable prayers are asked for the following who …’ Always the same names insinuating themselves on some pretext or other—illness, an anniversary, or at the last resort, death. ‘May their souls, and the souls of all the Faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.’
Father Kipling proceeded to read the Epistle, stumbling through the awkward syntax. St Paul: surely, after Henry James, the most unreadable of all the great stylists. As he finished, a few eager souls leapt to their feet to show that they knew the Gospel came next Sluggishly the rest of the congregation heaved up, listened, at last with some show of comprehension, and subsided again. Father Kipling waited until everyone was still, and then he cleared his throat.
‘My dear brethren in Jesus Christ’—the congregation dutifully nodded their heads—‘I had intended to talk to you this morning on the subject of Grace—the Grace we derive from the sacraments, particularly Holy Communion. Without this Grace, this supernatural food—our souls will wither and die. Therefore it is most important that every Catholic should understand what supernatural Grace is, and how it is to be obtained.
‘However, this topic has had to give place to an even more urgent matter. Before the graces of the sacraments can be obtained, with the exceptions of Baptism and Penance, it is essential that the soul should be free from mortal sin. And a potential source of grievous sin for many people now in this church has come to my notice. I feel, my dear brethren, that it is my duty to warn you.
‘Last night I went to a picture-palace. I went in the belief that the well-known religious film Song Of Bernadette was being shown, but I was mistaken. My subsequent experience was shocking and painful in the extreme, but instructive. I saw a scandalous presentation that deliberately exploited the basest passions of man, and that viciously attacked the foundations of a Christian society—the family—all in the name of entertainment. I saw a woman employ all the arts of coquetry to degrade the sex which was glorified by the Mother of God. I must conclude that the entertainment was typical, for I was the only member of the audience, as far as I could tell, who was shocked. Everyone around me laughed and smiled as if it was the most natural thing in the world to see the precepts of clean, decent, Christian living travestied upon the screen. I noted angrily that there were children in the audience—many, mercifully, too young to be contaminated, though they should have been in their cots. I noted sadly that there were some of my own parishioners there too.
‘You have heard me speak unfavourably of the cinema before, my dear brethren. You have heard me urge you to give up patronizing it as a penance for Lent, or in order to contribute more fully to some charity. But whereas in the past I regarded it simply as a profitless, worldly pleasure, I now regard it as a source of serious sin, a dangerously infested swamp in which the unwary soul may easily be swallowed up, and so perish.
‘I address myself particularly to parents. Remember, my dear brethren, that the moral welfare of your children is your solemn responsibility. I beg you not to expose them to the temptations of the flesh such as they find flagrantly exhibited and condoned in the picture-palace, at an age when they are most vulnerable to such influences. Remember that when you give them money for the picture-palace, you may be enabling them to purchase the loss of their immortal souls. And remember that you must yourselves set a good example by avoiding these demoralizing entertainments. Do not over-estimate your own strength. The evil effect of these shows is gradual and insidious: it gradually undermines religious principles, renders the conscience slack and tolerant of sin. Behind all is Satan’s cunning and directing power. In the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ’ (dazed and punch-drunk, the congregation still remembered to nod) ‘I exhort you to avoid these temples of Mammon and Belial.
‘It will not be easy: that I know. For many of you it has become a habit. You have seen nothing evil in it. But from the pulpit of your church, I, your priest, beseech you to give up this habit. With God’s help nothing is impossible, and He will bless your sacrifice.
‘As Saturday evening is apparently the most popular time for people to visit the cinema, I propose to transfer the Thursday Benediction to Saturday. On Saturday evening, my dear brethren, I wish everyone who would normally have gone to the picture-palace, and thus put his soul in deadly danger, to come instead to the church, to give honour and glory to God, and to join with me in saying the Rosary for the conversion of England. Who knows, from this humble beginning in Brickley may spring a full-scale crusade against immoral and worldly entertainments. But at the very least we will have the satisfaction of knowing that we are witnessing to the principles of Catholic Christianity. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.’
Father Francis rose to begin the Creed in a numbed silence, suddenly punctuated by the sound of a loud handclap. It was not, however, the instinctive applause of some enthusiastic listener, but the noise of the organ getting up steam. At the Offertory more coins than usual were dropped to the floor. Mark wondered if Father Kipling had been in the Palladium the previous evening. The lascivious woman sounded like Amber Lush. It had been an extraordinary sermon—easily the most impressive he had heard Father Kipling deliver—but it had missed the point. The menace of the cinema was not surely that it was lewd and sensual, but that it encouraged people to turn their back on real life. Escapism had always been a fundamental and harmless function of popular art; but the cinema invested such escapism with a new and sinister plausibility, projecting a seductive image of a stream-lined, chromium-plated, hygienically-packed, deep-frozen, King-sized superlife, which could be vicariously and effortlessly enjoyed by slumping into a cinema-seat. Father Kipling was fighting a losing battle. The cinema, or the whole system of processed mass-entertainment for which it stood, had already become an acceptable substitute for religion. What was more alarming was that in time it might become an acceptable substitute for living.
The ancient organ wheezed into life, and the congregation staggered into the opening lines of Just For Today:
This, of course, was the most revolutionary doctrine in the Christian code. Be not solicitous. But there wasn’t a single person in the church who would apply the words of the hymn to his own careful accumulation of Savings Certificates and Insurance Policies, his persistent intriguing for promotion. When you considered the matter, the so-called Bohemians were the only true Christians. They toiled not, neither did they spin; often they didn’t know where the next meal was coming from, or where they would sleep from one day to the other. Yet they were condemned outright by the cautious, prudent, God-fearing church-goers as beyond the pale.
Of course you could give the refrain an ironical twist, and interpret it as a careful reservation made by the singer: all right, help me to mortify my flesh—but just for today mind. Tomorrow I’ll have one hell of a good time.
He felt the same wry amusement as Thomas Hardy must have enjoyed when he heard the anecdote, related in Under The Greenwood Tree, about the church where the Ten Commandments were inscribed by some tipsy masons who left out all the ‘not’s’.
It would be difficult to persuade Clare to go to the cinema now—or any of the Mallorys for that matter. Although going to church was like going to the cinema: you sat in rows, the notices were like trailers, the supporting sermon was changed weekly. And people went because they always went. You paid at the plate instead of at the box-office, and sometimes they played the organ. There was only one big difference: the main feature was always the same.
Yes, that was something you couldn’t get away from, and instead of becoming more boring, it became more interesting with each repetition. That was the difference between drama and ritual probably.
‘Dominus vobiscum.’
‘Et cum spiritu tuo.’
‘Sursum corda.’
‘Habemus ad Dominum.’
‘Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.’
‘Dignum et justum est.’
‘The pressing nature of this dialogue,’ he read in his missal, ‘shows clearly that we are coming now to the very heart of the Mass.’
‘Sanctus,
Sanctus,
Sanctus.’
The bell rang out three times, and the congregation pitched noisily on to its knees. It fidgeted, sneezed, coughed, whispered. How could they be so inattentive, if they really believed in the stupendous thing they claimed would happen shortly? Perhaps, for them, it was too common an occurrence. Christ risked making himself cheap by mass-production. Mass-production. Rather good that. More than ever he was convinced that Catholics did not really believe what they professed to believe. Because, if it was true, that at the Consecration God was really present on the altar, whole and entire, under the appearance of bread and wine, as Clare’s dog-eared Catechism stated—then it was quite simply the most important thing in life. If you really believed it you would shiver in dreadful anticipation of this tremendous mystery, you would follow each movement and word of the ritual with breathless attention, and at the climax, at the moment of divine epiphany, the universe would collapse and swirl around you, and you would pitch forward on your face with a low moan. Human nature could not endure such a strain. As to Communion, the cannibalistic fusion with the Godhead, one could conceive of entranced Oriental fanatics performing such a rite, but these drab, smug, self-righteous people who coolly lined up to snap their dentures on the living Christ—could they know what they were supposed to be doing? Yet if you tackled them on the subject, even kids like the twins, they were quite cheerfully positive about it. Yes, of course they believed in the Real Presence. But how could they walk about with such terrible knowledge? Browning, hoary old Protestant that he was, had detected the essential indecency behind the candles, the incense and the flowers:
And see God made and eaten all day long …
That was the bald, terrific idea these people asked you to swallow like a pill. Christine Mallory’s fiancé was not a Catholic, and had been taking Instructions. ‘He’s stuck on Transubstantiation,’ Mrs Mallory had said in casual conversation one day. ‘A pity if she can’t have a nuptial mass.’ Speaking for himself, he choked on it.
The bell rang again, and at last there was silence of a sort, interrupted by an occasional baby’s whimper. Everyone was bowed and hunched, but there was no feeling of worship or devotion. Now here was the large print in his missal:
WHO THE DAY BEFORE HE SUFFERED TOOK BREAD INTO HIS HOLY AND VENERABLE HANDS, AND WITH HIS EYES LIFTED UP TOWARDS HEAVEN, UNTO THEE, GOD, HIS ALMIGHTY FATHER, GIVING THANKS TO THEE, BLESSED, BROKE AND GAVE TO HIS DISCIPLES, SAYING: TAKE AND EAT YE ALL OF THIS, FOR THIS IS MY BODY.
The priest stretched up, lifting the Host on high. Mark stared at it, and belief leapt in his mind like a child in the womb. The pale disc was snatched down by the priest, but Mark continued to stare at the space in the air which it had occupied. The chalice rose in its place, containing the consecrated wine, but he could not recapture the extraordinary awareness that had filled his being for a fleeting second. It was as if for an instant the scales had fallen from his eyes, and he had seen how simple it was really, how it all fitted together. But now he was back on the ground again, a little puzzled and disgruntled, like a man who has been ignominiously picked up by a great bird and dumped back in the same place again.
The bell rang for the sixth time as the priest bowed low. There was an almost audible exhalation from the congregation as the tension was relaxed; people permitted themselves to shift their positions, blow their noses, cough, scold their children. Clare recalled a time when she had resented this relaxation, which seemed to imply that the miracle of the Mass, the miracle of God’s love which had made her heart swell with adoration, was not still continuing on the altar. But now, though she strained towards the elevated Host, saying silently, ‘My Lord and my God,’ her faith was only of the head. In her heart was nothing but a sense of strain and the hollow echo of St Thomas’s words. Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was like love—you couldn’t explain it or produce it at will; it was just there, or it wasn’t. Sometimes when Mark was rude and indifferent, she just couldn’t recognize him as the person who had enkindled such a flame in her, couldn’t begin to make contact. Suddenly they would be strangers: speaking different languages, they would just stare blankly at each other. The blank face—the blank, pale disc that hovered like an enigmatic moon over the priest’s fingers. In her head she knew that it was Mark, that it was God, but her heart did not thump with the knowledge. She had not felt that excitement at Mass since leaving the convent. Since then, only Mark had given her the same sensation. It seemed one couldn’t have both at once.
She had scruples as to whether she should receive the Blessed Sacrament while she was in such a cold, loveless disposition. But she had asked Father Francis in confession and he had said yes, many people experienced the same spiritual deadness at times, even the saints, and the sacraments were themselves a means of overcoming this. But she knew that when she returned from the Communion rails, God would only be a slightly sour taste on her tongue; and that when she bowed her head and covered her face with her hands, shutting out everything else, she would be in the hollow cavern of her heart again, asking her own echo the way to God.
The thin, pale sunshine gave little warmth, but it was a welcome extension of the autumn, and unusually fine for the last day of October. Outside the church many parishioners lingered, distributing leaflets and gossiping. Mr Mallory, whose stomach was noisily urging its case for a prompt breakfast, collected his offspring and set off home. Every Sunday morning when his wife woke him he soundly (if silently) cursed his adopted religion; but the hell of getting up when all sensible creatures were lost in lovely sleep, was more than compensated for by the feeling of well-being after Mass, which made him beam and glow like an advertisement for salts—‘It’s Inner Cleanliness that counts!’—and look forward with relish to eggs and bacon with a righteous sense of having earned them, and the lazy hours to follow.
It didn’t seem to take Bett the same way though. She always seemed snappy and impatient when she came back from church. Perhaps it was because she went to an early Mass to have breakfast ready for them when they returned; but she didn’t like lying in bed in the mornings anyway, and as he had said many times (admittedly without great enthusiasm) they could quite easily go to Mass together, and wait a little longer for breakfast. No, she liked to hint obliquely that no one’s pleasure or comfort was obtainable without some sacrifice on her part. This morning, as always when they had made love the previous night, she had been short and bad-tempered, complaining of a headache. Often in the past he had tried to keep her in bed in the morning, but always she had pushed off his sleep-drugged advances with a brusque reminder that she had work to do, stubbornly shutting her mind to the tenderness of a few hours before. In the cold morning light the lover died, and the housewife was born again. It had taken him a long time to adjust himself to this, but now it no longer irritated him, and he felt only pity for his wife.
He took in the familiar surroundings with a refreshed, amused eye. For most people, he reflected, Sunday should be renamed Carday. Cars had replaced gods. With the same heroic self-denial as early church-goers, the car-owners were out in their numbers, washing-down, polishing, tinkering. In the afternoon they would don chamois gloves and make aimless ritual drives into the Green Belt, in-laws glumly ensconced in the back-seat, stopping at the side of an arterial road to circulate solemnly a vacuum flask. Some youths astride shining motor-cycles had congregated outside a closed motor-cycle shop. Mr Mallory heard the mutter of their liturgy as he passed: ‘ … Overhead valves … con-rod … horizontally opposed twin … two-fifty two-stroke … swinging-arm …’ It was like an open-air service.
They met Damien hurrying to the ten o’clock Mass. His raw, ugly face was still bleeding from two shaving cuts.
‘Hallo there, Damien,’ said Mr Mallory. ‘You’re slipping. I thought you usually went to the seven-thirty?’
‘I overslept, Uncle Thomas,’ replied Damien liverishly. ‘The London streets are so noisy at nights I find it difficult to get to sleep.’ He hurried on.
Somehow Mr Mallory couldn’t honestly say he felt any affection for Damien. It wasn’t simply because he was ugly—he knew men equally ugly and ten times more lovable. But because his personality was objectionable one held him responsible for his ugliness—it became impossible to overlook it. He was cold and dank like the inside of a morgue. He had no sense of humour, and he would keep harping on his seminary training instead of thrusting it into the background and making a fresh start. The fellow carried his failure before him like a monstrance.
His eye fell on Mark, just ahead, clowning to amuse the twins, uninhibited by the glances of passers-by, or by Clare’s mild remonstrations. He was really a very likeable lad, though a bit mysterious and withdrawn at the deepest level. However, for someone supposed to be very clever, he seemed to get a great deal of pleasure out of ordinary things. And he had been a healthy influence on Clare when she most needed it—when that creeping Jesus of a Damien had threatened to infect her with the mildew of his own damp piety. His wife had disapproved of this development at first—he suspected that she had paired off Damien and Clare in her mind—but when it transpired that Mark had been baptized a Catholic, and when he started to go to Mass again, she had become favourably disposed to the idea of their going out together. Personally he thought Bett was counting her chickens. Mark showed no signs of being really inspired with religious enthusiasm, or, for that matter, of having matrimonial intentions where Clare was concerned. Bett just didn’t realize that keeping company was no longer a walled alley leading to the altar. He only hoped Clare didn’t think so.
Mr Berkley blinked resentfully in the morning sunlight. He hated the morning, hated the light. He was a night-bird. He liked to be in a warm, dimly-lit room, thick with cigarette smoke and vibrant with witty conversation, with the dark outside, protective and all-enveloping. He hurried along the deserted early-morning pavements to the cinema. The exit-doors were open to allow the air to circulate. He passed in.
The familiar waste-land of the empty auditorium engulfed him with its seedy, oppressive presence. Even in its golden age as a theatre, its morning aspect had imparted the same momentary shock of disillusionment—as a tousled, unpowdered woman to her lover of the night before. But the disgusting habits of cinema-goers had intensified the squalor of the scene. He crunched pea-nut shells under his feet and waded ankle-deep in ice-cream cartons, paper bags, cigarette packets, half-eaten apples. The Palladium was a woman growing old, and since all theatres are coquettes, this was a tragedy. The sunlight that inched its way into the stale gloom shed a tactless illumination on the threadbare carpets, the worn seats, the peeling gilt décor. Like an elderly coquette hiding her wrinkles, she didn’t allow much sunlight into the auditorium, but it was enough to give the game away. Poor old coquette. Nobody would spend any money on her, beyond a splash of cheap cosmetic on the exterior. After being a highly-prized mistress she was now little better than a common prostitute, and her owners were now interested only in squeezing the last drops of revenue from her tired body.
And there, fittingly ministering to her in her decay, were two old crones, daughters of the game, ex-chorus girls who hadn’t married earls, Dolly and Gertrude. The two old dears slowly but methodically sifted the rows of their debris, creaking and grunting with every movement as if it would be their last. Mr Berkley walked round the back of the auditorium, and stood in the shadow of some curtains.
‘Warm today, Gert.’
‘Yerse. Better than that cold though.’
‘Gerna rain though. It said so on the wireless.’
‘Don’t I know it. Alf kep’ me awake orl night with ’is roomatism. I didn’t get a wink. Shokin’ it was.’
Dolly cackled.
‘’Ere, Gert! Can Alf use one of these?’ She held up a contraceptive sheath.
‘Oo, Doll! You are rude. You ought to be ashamed of yourself showin’ such a thing to me.’
Dolly cackled as she dropped it into her dustpan.
‘I don’t know what they’ll bring to the pictures next,’ she wheezed. Her cackle turned into a bronchial cough. Gertrude stopped working, and collapsed ponderously on to a seat.
‘Ooh, me feet … Yer know, Doll, when I was about fifty, and goin’ through you know what, well this Sunday I was feelin’ there wasn’t much left to go on livin’ for. Fact, for two pins I’d have taken the joint out of the oven and put me ’ead in instead. Well, in comes Alf, with ’is belly full of old and mild as usual, and asks me why do I look as if I’d lost a pound and found thruppence. Well I felt that fed up I told ’im straight out. “Never mind, old cock,” ’e says, “we won’t ’ave to bother wiv French letters now.” Cheered me up somethink marvellous it did.’
‘’E’s a good sort, is Alf,’ said Dolly, nodding gravely.
‘“Never mind, old cock,”’ ’e says, “we won’t ’ave to bother wiv French letters now.”’
‘You don’t still … do you, Gert?’
‘What, at our age? It wouldn’t be decent, dearie. Besides, Alf can only just about drag hisself to the King’s Arms and back once a day, and then e’s finished. ’Ow’s your Stan?’
‘Oh, can’t grumble. Still ’as trouble passing ’is water, but the doctor give ’im some new medicine. Comes of drinking too much in the past, I told ’im. But ’e don’t listen.’
‘What doctor’s that?’
‘The young one what took over from old Wilkins.’
‘Oo, ’e’s lovely, i’n ’e? ’E’s got such lovely warm ’ands. Old Wilkins used to make me shiver every time ’e touched me.’
Mr Berkley smiled behind his curtain. A couple of genuine characters. Real Cockneys of the old type, once the music-hall’s main source of supply, and now, like the music-halls themselves, nearly extinct. The good old songs round the pub piano were dying with them. Nellie Dean, Daisy, Knees Up Mother Brown … Humorous, good-natured, industrious, resilient. Vulgar perhaps, but how honest, realistic and uncomplicated Dolly’s and Gertrude’s attitude to sex appeared in comparison to the modern cult of ‘luv’, with its tedious machinery of psychology, pop songs, broken-heart columns and cinematic sex-symbols. Once Dolly and Gertrude had been in the back row of the chorus at the Palladium, and Gertrude had even had a solo spot with a comic song … he had seen a photo of her somewhere as Burlington Bertie … Now all they had to show for it were lumpy figures, thin hair, flowered cotton overalls and carpet slippers, as they swept the scene of their former modest triumphs. It seemed rather pathetic, but they never permitted you to feel sorry for them.
‘Good morning, ladies,’ said Mr Berkley, stepping forward.
‘Mornin’, Mr Berkley,’ they answered. Gertrude rose from her seat with dignity.
‘I was just takin’ the weight off my feet, Mr Berkley. They’re swollen somethink shocking,’ she explained.
‘I’m so sorry to hear that, Mrs Halibut,’ said Mr Berkley sympathetically. ‘Have you anything for me this morning?’
‘Only this glove,’ said Gertrude, drawing a man’s black kid glove from some hidden recess in her attire. A few rows down Dolly was hard at work. ‘Well!’ she exploded indignantly. ‘Just look at this, sir. Don’t it make you wild.’
He inspected the badly-slashed seat.
‘Hmm. Made quite a mess of it, hasn’t he. Why d’you think they do it?’
‘It’s them young Teds, sir, you mark my words. A lot of ’ooligans what’s got nothink better to do. Ooh, if I caught them, I wouldn’t arf box their ears. They wouldn’t do it again in an ’urry.’
Mr Berkley shook his head sadly.
‘Well I’d better go and make a note of it. Good morning, ladies.’
‘Good morning, Mr Berkley.’
As he climbed the stairs to his office he inspected the glove in his hand. Black was an unusual colour for a man’s glove. A clergyman perhaps. A clergyman’s gage.
The front door slammed shut, and cut off abruptly the babble of the family’s voices. They were going to Benediction. In the silence that followed their departure the muffled movements of the other occupants of the house became surprisingly audible. Reluctantly Mark opened Klaeber’s forbidding edition of Beowulf, and propped up Clark Hall’s translation in front of him. No work done that day. He would have to grind on till one o’clock. It was an agreeable house to live in, but the atmosphere was not conducive to study. Always you felt the warmth and humanity pulling you downstairs like a magnet.
Another Sunday had almost passed; another pleasant, uneventful Sunday. Uneventful—yet, as he recalled the day’s happenings, they stung his memory with tiny, pleasant sensations, tastes, smells: there was the taste of eggs and bacon which really did break a fast, the scent of the first cigarette, and the agreeable weight of the Sunday paper in his hands.
After breakfast he had flattered his ego by assisting Patricia with her homework. Though teaching was so wretchedly paid, he was beginning to think that it was the only possible profession for him—passing on information to others gave him such profound pleasure. Patrick, crouched over his books at the other end of the table, never asked his advice; but then Patrick had always been faintly hostile and jealous of a masculine encroachment on a territory that had been his alone since the departure of the two eldest boys. Not that Mark had minded in the least. In fact he found Patrick’s grim determination not to be charmed rather amusing. Though there had been something a little strange about Patrick that day. He had been very quiet. He hadn’t, as was his practice, eaten a second breakfast when the rest of the family returned from the nine-’o-clock Mass. He hadn’t joined them in their walk that afternoon. He was nursing some secret or other …
Later in the morning he had accepted Mr Mallory’s offer to buy him a drink in the plain, four-square, oddly restful pub at the end of the road. They had talked about cars, of which Mr Mallory was a salesman. They discussed very thoroughly the merits of the Bentley Continental, with all the candour and eloquence of two men who would never conceivably own one. Nevertheless Mark wondered why, since he was in the trade, Mr Mallory did not own even a modest vehicle.
‘Very simple, Mark. Couldn’t afford it. Can’t run eight children and a car. They’ve all had good schooling, and there was James’s training—you’re expected to contribute something. But I’ve no regrets—I don’t really want to own a car. Too much worry and hard work looking after it. Why, wouldn’t have a moment’s peace on a Sunday, what with tinkering all morning and driving all the rest of the day.’
On their return Mr Mallory said Grace for a splendid, old-fashioned roast prepared by Mrs Mallory, refulgent and perspiring in the kitchen. Mr Mallory and Patrick habitually washed up after the Sunday dinner, and with a glowing sense of virtue Mark offered to help them. The gesture lit a smile in Clare’s face that was well worth his trouble.
Damien had called in the afternoon, and joined Mark, Clare and the rest of the children (except Patrick) in a walk round the park. Neither the latter’s damp, dying appearance, nor Damien’s similar demeanour, had affected their energetic nonsense with an old tennis ball. They trailed home under a red, smoky sky, to the cosy, fire-lit parlour and high tea.
It was all very different from his life of the past year, when Sunday began at about noon in a room that smelled of bed, crawled sluggishly through an afternoon of too many newspapers, and, in final desperation, sought escape at a film or some theatre club.
It wasn’t with such a Sunday that he made the most significant comparison, however, but with the Sundays of his childhood. His memory was indistinct—a few details only stood out in odd clarity: listening to ‘Palm Court’ on the radio, followed with awful inevitability by ‘Variety Bandbox’, the last hours of the week-end petering out, wasted, joyless, empty; bed, and school again the next day. His father dozing open-mouthed in his chair, his mother knitting vacantly, neither understanding the misery of their son, who fidgeted by the window, not knowing what to do, but knowing the futility of asking ‘What shall I do?’ He wasn’t able to remember many details, but he could remember that feeling, the sickening slump of the heart that was Sunday in his boyhood, a day his parents kept holy with somnolence, dullness and decorum. For hours he would sit by the window, and look out on the empty, Sunday street, as the church bells tolled dismally from different points in the town. Rain brought a little variety and relief, as he listened to its faint patter on the taut pane, pressing his hot cheek to its cold surface, watching the dull, grey street become a glittering river.
He had wanted for nothing—and for everything. He had been well-clothed, well-fed, carefully guarded against illness. Yet retrospectively he envied the Mallory children their hardships—the shared beds, the shoes that pinched, the heaps of washing, the inconvenience of too many babies in too short a time, the lack of privacy, the meagre pocket-money, the quarrels and tears, because with these things went other things infinitely precious, laughter and love, tenderness and the joy of living, things signally missing from his own childhood.