THE POST always came late to the house in Nottingham where the Walkers had a top-floor flat. By the time the postman appeared, pushing his way through the vast banks of rhododendrons that filled the untended garden, the other dwellers in the house – habitual art students, librarians, teachers who put Labour Party posters in their windows at election time and then suddenly voted Liberal – had all long since gone. Elaine Walker rose early, got their child ready for school, took her there on a baby-seat attached to the rear of her bicycle, and was already at work on the morning shift at the hospital by the time the letters flopped through into the basket behind the glass-panelled front door. Only one man was on the premises; only one man heard the sound and was stirred by it. This was James Walker, a stout, slightly thyroidic, very shambling person in his early thirties, victimized by the need for twelve hours’ sleep a day; it always fetched him out of bed, promising good fortune, another acceptance, another invitation. Why did he bother? He was a tired, lazy person, far enough from youth to be bored by new mornings. Only literacy and indignation kept him alive; the books he wrote in the silent flat were harsh, desperate messages of his impulse to marry with the world. He had a hard time of it with the day-to-day, but the little slot of the letterbox was a hole in his universe that left room for the unexpected. So he stumbled down the stairs, a glow on his stocky, lugubrious face, and went, in brown corduroy slippers, to meet possibility.
When the American letter arrived he saw at once that it was impressive. It hung in the wire basket, an envelope of crinkly blue paper, its edges striped navy and red, franked with an enormous stamp, emblemed with the university crest (Benedictus Benedice) in a delicate grey. He took it upstairs and got back into bed with it, pulling the covers over himself to keep warm. Elaine always left him a flask of coffee; he poured some out into the beaker, took a sip to bring freshness, and then slit the envelope with his thumb and took out the inside sheet. It was a sheet of expensive ripple paper, typed in that strange new typeface that only very modern typewriters affect, and it told him, in short, that he was wanted. A request from the world! He sat up in bed and cried, ‘My God!’ He felt warmed, excited, because though he had long held to one of the most fundamental of all literary convictions, that the world owed him a living, he felt curiously disturbed now that it seemed to be offering him one. He got out of bed again, hair tousled, and lit a cigarette, wondering what he should do. It seemed to him, at first thought, that he was ready for this. A break in the universal silence, an opportunity! Here was an invitation to be what he secretly had been for so long, a writer. Though a far from diligent creature, he had now written three novels, all of them described by the weekend reviewers as promising. He had been mentioned in a few articles, and it was evident that there must be a small audience for whom he stood for something. The problem was that he had no idea who this audience was; he had never been clearly accosted by it before. His novels had made him a little money, more than enough to cover the costs of the paper he typed them on and the cigarettes he smoked while he wrote them. They dealt with heroes like himself, sensitive provincial types to whom fate had dealt a cruel blow, for whom life was too plain and ordinary to be worth much at all. In the last pages, the heroes, trapped by their remoteness from history, died or made loud perorations about social corruption. They spoke of the impulse to be better, to lead meaningful lives and, written at the kitchen table he used as a desk, as he looked out at a bored tree, they came out of his heart.
These books had appeared in the United States as well as in England, and it had often struck him as odd that it was from America that most of the few letters he received, most of the invitations to write on his theories of literature or the personal misfortunes that had made him as he was, should come. American glossy magazines with large circulations and advertisements for very complicated corsets printed, between the corsets, the short stories that in England no one would look at; and college textbooks with titles like The Ten Best English Stories About Class reprinted them and sent fees. The American (but not the English) edition of Vogue had mentioned him in their ‘People are Talking About . . .’ column, and he had come to believe that in that foreign land (but not in England) people were. What did they say? It didn’t matter; they spoke. Time had written him up, printed his photograph, called him ‘bird-eyed, balding’. The Buffalo Public Library had bought his manuscripts, which he rewrote for the occasion, since he had destroyed them. Girls wrote him letters, and one ambitious youth in Idaho had proposed to write a thesis on him. Editors and publishers, wrote his American agent, Ellis Tilly, were dying to meet him. And this is me, he used to think, as he carried coal up two flights of stairs, really me. The letter now converted all these hints and promises into something larger, an offer. It said, You count, you exist. It came at the right time; he knew, as he lay in bed in the morning, that he had to stop being promising pretty soon, and become important, or all the fire would go out. He had to flower, to burgeon.
The time was in all ways ripe. The two part-time jobs with which he had until lately filled out his life were coming to an unexpected end. For two years he had been teaching, in the Georgian premises of the Adult Education Centre on Shakespeare Street, an ambling, inconsequential class on modern literature to a group of day-release clergymen. Across the road was the now emptied University College where Lawrence had gone; he could see it from the window as he debated on the disease-imagery of Women in Love. But the group had dwindled, out of boredom or offence, and had now gone. He also used to wear, for a pittance, experimental socks for a local knitwear firm, but a scientific advance had ousted him. Now all he did was to write, alone in the flat, until Elaine came home in the later afternoon, bringing Amanda with her. When he thought about his life, it seemed to him resourceless and minute. The realities he lived among gave nothing back, and he imagined a universe of energy in which he might find himself at home. Now he stood at the window and looked down, through the steaming chimney-pots, at the city centre, with its spires and chimneys, the round dome of the Council House, the squat shape of the castle, the tooth-like slab of the technical college, the high cranes standing webbily up where bookshops were being replaced by office-blocks; the city stood in a bowl, like old flowers, and he felt that its provincial mist had seeped into his soul and stayed there, a standing, always forecast fog. The rain blew in his heart as well as outside the windows. A blackbird, wedged in the budding tree in front of him, sang a spring song; he felt his own need for new leaves. But the sap, indoors, in here, had stopped flowing. He took the letter and went through into the living room, dense with last night’s cigarette smoke. Here they were – his radio, his table-lamps, his coal-bucket, his armchair, the sum total of his visible achievement. A toy panda lay on its face on the hearthrug, as if it was being sick. He recalled an old vitality and felt that environment had squeezed it from him; he seemed to suffer from sleeping sickness or, like the potted plants on the windowsill, from wilt.
But by contrast the letter in his hand wriggled with life. Ah, an envoy! It offered a promise of esteem, a taste of freedom, and a passable salary for being free. And freedom – that meant something to Walker. He shared in his heart, and with energy, the intellectual conviction that tells us we have a big debt to pay off to anarchy for all the civilization we have gathered around us. Disorder he willingly waved forward. For he felt not only bored by what he did, but guilty for it too. Art was life; it was written out of growth, and he had none. And didn’t freedom and anarchy and growth cluster together when the word America was mentioned? A lot of young writers went to America now; in fact, all of them did; it was a necessary apprenticeship. Ought one to reject possibility, or even resist the trend? He belonged, after all, to a generation of literary men, all of whom, thanks to a common educational system and a common social experience, had exactly the same head, buzzing with exactly the same thoughts. It was a virtual guarantee of success, then, that others had been. He dropped the letter on his desk, piled with five first chapters of an evidently unworkable novel, and walked round the room in a burst of excitement, seeing new landscapes in which mesas and skyscrapers mingled together in improbable confusion. Give yourself, said his heart, spend some spirit. But what was there to spend? And how, day-to-day, would it be? No, he was lost; he would have to ask Elaine.
The thought, once thought of, complicated the matter. It was known, even to him, that he was a married man. And Elaine, who had a sick mother to whom she dutifully fed Brand’s Essence, would not leave her; that he knew. Intellectual temptations were not the stuff of her world. And Walker hardly felt that he could manage without her; on the other hand, he realized, with some suddenness, that he wanted to try. The eight years of his marriage had been exactly like the life of a foreigner in England; everything had been comfortable, domestic, snug, but kicking and screaming of the spirit occurred regularly as one thought of the real world outside. Walker had, in his young days, been something of a wild young man; he used to sit in coffee bars, wearing a small, dissident beard, and occasionally he would meet and seduce young groping girls whose parents had annoyed them. He would go to wild parties and walk home late at night through the suburbs, kicking over milk bottles. That was all gone but not forgotten. He had met Elaine about three years after he had taken his degree at the university, met her at a dance. At this time he was still leading a life of furtive studenthood; he had found out that one of the things about a university was that no one stopped you going in, so even then he had gone on attending, playing bridge with the students, using the library, often sleeping in the university grounds. It had been the ideal creative life, though at that time he had not actually written anything; just being a writer was enough.
The writing itself came later, with respectability, after he had met Elaine. She was a big unexpected girl who had been imported in a busload from a nurses’ home to attend a student dance. She wore a dress of some thick material and heavily patterned design like a sofa fabric. He didn’t know why he had chosen her that evening, but within days she was expressing a deep proprietorial interest in him. She took him out to parties, bought him drinks in pubs, made him shave. Her friends, people who played tennis and drove sports cars, were his enemies; her taste for expensive drinks and travelling in taxis made him furious; he was bored and frightened by the trips she took him on into the countryside, she carrying great furry handbags that looked like folded-over foxes. He always felt that one day she would pick him up, shove him in her handbag, and click the fastening to. So she had; that was his wedding day. For their honeymoon, Walker had rented a cottage in Cornwall. Here, amid post-marital struggle and sexual euphoria, he had begun his first novel and evolved an effective method of supporting them both without income; he used to go out each night into the countryside with a long knife and reappear with a broccoli, a swede, a cabbage. But gradually the old marginal Walker, the professional student, was converted into a new figure, Walker paterfamilias, fatter, more adjusted, the owner of his own ton of coal. In bed erotic spontaneity seemed to fade under the professional demands of hygiene. ‘Have you washed your hands and face?’ Elaine began murmuring on the first night. ‘Have you cut your nails? You’re not coming to me with your socks on.’ The train journey back from Cornwall advanced the process further. They sat in an open coach, near the lavatory, the door of which would not stay shut. ‘Go and shut it,’ said Elaine. He did so. The door swung open again. ‘It’s open again,’ said Elaine. From Truro to London Walker tried to find a way of keeping the door shut, until finally he completed the journey in the stifling toilet with his foot against the door. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ he said when he emerged. It seemed to him that they had.
Now the possibility of redeeming this man, in one simple gesture, went to Walker’s head; he got out his raincoat, put it over his pyjamas, and ran downstairs. In the street, trolley-buses swished by in the rain. He went to the callbox, down past the greengrocer’s; liberal housewives from all the other top-floor flats looked up from buying green peppers to stare at his pyjama legs, multicoloured below the gabardine, as if they represented some bawdy invitation. The telephone booth smelled of something very nasty. Walker found four pennies in his raincoat and dialled the hospital switchboard. ‘I’d like to speak to Sister Walker, on Maternity; it’s urgent,’ he said when they answered, putting a note of pleading into his voice; you practically had to say you were giving birth in the callbox before they would connect you. There was a pause and then Elaine’s voice, as professionally stiff and starchy as the uniform she wore, came on to the line. ‘Maternity ward, what is it?’ she said. Walker could imagine her, breathing hard, a dragon in her uniform; she still, after eight years, made him nervous. ‘It’s me, Jim,’ he said.
‘What’s up?’ said Elaine.
‘Well,’ said Walker, ‘there’s a letter in this morning’s post.’
‘Really?’ said Elaine.
‘I’ve been asked to go to America.’
‘Have you?’ said Elaine. ‘And who by?’
‘Well, some university over there is looking for a creative writing fellow and they naturally thought of me.’
‘What does it mean?’ said Elaine after a pause.
‘Oh, I go and sit around and write creatively and they pay me seven thousand dollars for doing it.’
‘I thought you always said that creative writing was ridiculous,’ said Elaine.
‘Well, okay, yes, I do,’ said Walker. ‘Still, every man has his price. Mine happens to be six thousand nine hundred dollars.’
‘They just topped it,’ said Elaine.
‘It looks like it,’ said Walker.
‘Do you want to go?’ Elaine then said.
This was it, and Walker knew it was; he said, ‘Do I?’ and then realized he was being irritating. But how did he know? He tried it another way. ‘Do you?’ he said. Elaine didn’t speak for a moment. Walker felt his ankles getting cold. A brown dog peered into the box at him, and two small boys over the street were apparently accosting people and pointing out to them his pyjama trousers.
Elaine said, ‘No, I couldn’t possibly, could I? You’d have to go on your own.’
‘Think about it,’ said Walker.
‘No,’ said Elaine, ‘you’re the one who has to think about it. I can’t go, but you mustn’t let it stop you, if this really is what you want. Would it help your writing?’ Elaine always said ‘your writing’ as other wives of generous character might have said ‘your drinking’, and probably in her mind the two peccadilloes were of pretty much the same order, the sort of thing you tolerated and indeed indulged. The fact that he did it all day under her constant subsidy, for it was on her salary that they both lived, made no difference whatever to her attitude, and never had; a lot of girls had husbands who wouldn’t work. Walker began to read the instructions on the wall of the booth, which were for some odd reason in German, and said slowly, ‘It might.’
‘Well, you must consider it seriously, then.’
‘Without you?’
‘How long is it for?’ enquired Elaine.
‘A year. An academic year.’
‘Well, a year away from home would probably do you a lot of good,’ said Elaine. ‘Perhaps you’d learn to take care of yourself a bit.’
Walker said hopefully, ‘Could I manage then?’
Elaine replied, ‘You could learn to try.’ Then there were noises at the other end, and Elaine seemed to be shouting something in a voice that boomed off the ceiling. Presently her voice came back on the line: ‘Look, ducks, must go,’ she said. ‘Doctor’s rounds. Did you put a clean shirt on this morning?’
‘I’m not dressed yet,’ said Walker. As he spoke, he realized he had made a fatal move.
‘You’re standing naked in the phonebox?’ demanded Elaine.
Walker said, ‘I’ve got my pyjamas on.’
‘In the phonebox?’
‘I’m wearing my raincoat on top,’ said Walker.
‘You’re a hopeless case, Jim,’ said Elaine.
‘I thought,’ said Walker, ‘that medical rule said there were no hopeless cases.’
‘I thought so too, before I met you. Well, go home, you nit, before you starve to death. And put a clean shirt on.’
Walker said, ‘You’re trying to make me middle class.’
‘I thought you were middle class,’ said Elaine.
Walker, who knew he was, knew it bitterly, said, ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Well,’ said Elaine, ‘whatever class you are today, go home before you freeze.’
‘See you at four,’ said Walker.
‘In a clean shirt,’ said Elaine.
Going back home, the rain wetting the bottoms of his pyjama trousers, Walker tried to imagine what it would be like to be wifeless. Nothing came to mind. But ambition and hope flourished in his heart, and the need to break this static peace became positive. He smelled the polish in the hall, and disliked it. Back upstairs on his desk the letter sat, calling him to America, as once American writers had been called to Europe. There were paperback copies of Henry James and Henry Adams, dusty in the bookcase, to remind him that there was a tradition in this sort of going, to remind him that there were men who had seen the gangplank of the Cunard steamer as the gateway to new pastures of mind. The market-town world that had fed his last books, the world of Dolcis and Marks and Spencers and the primary school on the corner, could only look thin; and thin, too, was the bland, uncreative British liberalism that gave him his perspective on life. Away, I’m bound away, said his spirit. He ate a peanut and groaned at himself. He stood in the room and felt at odds with it. There was no place in it for growth, for more understanding, for higher sympathies. A vision, please, he cried, a vision! He looked again at the letter and sat down at the desk. Hurriedly, before Elaine came home from the hospital with a changed mind, he sat down at the typewriter which she had bought him as a wedding present and pecked out his note of acceptance. Then he dressed, picking out a clean shirt, and went downstairs again to take the letter to the little post office at the back of the greengrocer’s. Here he watched while it was weighed, stamped, decked out with a blue airmail sticker. Then he went outside to the red English post-box and dropped the letter into it with a hand that visibly vibrated with guilt and excitement.
The weeks went by, and the voyage became more and more a real thing. The symptoms began to show: the tickets came from the travel agency, the dollars from the bank, and Harris Bourbon, a mere name writing out of the American heartland, offered to have Walker as his house-guest until he found himself some suitable accommodation in Party. Walker went down to London, to be tested for syphilis and intellectual loyalty at the American Embassy. He arranged his visit to coincide with a sit-down protest outside it; it asserted his independence, and there was little point in making two trips. Sitting on the pavement, hidden out of sight behind a banner, he looked at the building where all his hopes and fears lay. The uneasy morning sickness of the first weeks disappeared, and Walker found himself adapting to the change, and growing spiritually more enormous. There were moments when he had doubts, after reading of race-riots or cyclones across the Atlantic; but more often he felt pleasure and the sense that he was turning into a citizen of the world. Then the actual day of departure came, a bright day in late August when Nottingham sat in comfortable sunlight and the chimes of the Council House clock rang out nine as he arrived at the Midland Station with his departure committee, composed of wife and child.
‘You know,’ said Elaine, ‘I shall miss you. All that time.’
Walker, full of doubts now, trying hard to avoid sentiments of guilt at his leaving, said cheerily, ‘It’s only for nine months.’
‘A lot can happen in nine months,’ said Elaine.
Walker refused to be sad. ‘I hope it doesn’t,’ he said, trotting down the steps of the overbridge, a suitcase hung with ship’s labels suspended from each hand. Twirls of train smoke blew across the platforms into their noses, and people hurrying to work locally jostled by them to pile into little green diesel trains. Further down the London platform black-suited businessmen, holding leather briefcases, stood exactly at the point where the first-class carriages would halt. He put down his suitcases and wiped his brow with his sleeve, while two neglected porters watched and sniggered.
‘Well, this is it, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I hope I’m doing the right thing.’
‘You always have,’ said Elaine, ‘ – hoped, I mean.’ There was a bookstall behind them, laden with westerns and other people’s novels; Elaine went and bought a Guardian, to push into his jacket pocket. ‘For your lively mind,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t forget to take your values with you.’
Feelings of departure hung over them. They stood in silence for a moment, Walker, Elaine and their daughter Amanda, a podgy, puritan, bespectacled creature, carrying his portable typewriter.
‘Now be polite to America, you hear me?’ said Elaine. ‘Think before you speak. Don’t forget you’re an ambassador.’
Walker smiled and said, ‘Some ambassador!’
‘People will judge England by what you say and do,’ said Elaine, looking at him sceptically. ‘Some of them over there will never have seen an Englishman before. Act sensibly. Don’t get in any fights. Don’t join any processions, you know how you do.’
‘I can only be myself,’ said Walker, conscious he was offering the world a valuable commodity.
‘Oh, Jim,’ said Elaine, ‘the flat will seem quite empty when you’re away.’
Walker was fearful of the pressure of sentiment, for there was no confidence in him that all this was proper and right, and so he said, ‘Oh, you’ll get used to it, you’ll enjoy it for a change. And besides,’ he went on, beaming forcedly at Amanda, ‘Amanda will take care of her mummy, won’t you?’
‘No,’ said Amanda, flashing her spectacles, ‘’cause I’m going to America with Daddy.’
‘Oh no you’re not,’ said Walker, looking at the child, the fruit of his loins, with the terror that from time to time she inspired in him, ‘you’re staying here.’
Amanda was firm: ‘Oh yes I am,’ she said. Walker suddenly saw his future threatened, saw an ignominious return home to the flat to sort out this crisis.
He was essentially a rational man and he brought reason to the fore. ‘Come here,’ he said, crouching down, ‘and Daddy’ll explain to you the difference between wants that can be fulfilled and those which can’t.’
‘I don’t like being explained to,’ said Amanda, dropping the typewriter, which hit the ground with a rattle of keys, ‘I’m going to America with Daddy.’
Walker gazed hopelessly at his daughter, a folly of the first year of their marriage, conceived when he was more prone to gestures towards posterity and society than he was now; he now had another response to offer to the future. He tried to go on being reasonable. ‘You can’t go,’ he said, ‘and for three reasons: one, Daddy hasn’t got enough money to take Mummy and Amanda with him; two, Mummy and Gran need their Amanda to look after them while Daddy’s away; three, Peter Panda is waiting at home for Amanda to go and put him to bed in his cot.’
‘How old do you think I am?’ said Amanda. ‘I’m seven and I’m going to America.’
‘You talk to her, Elaine,’ he said.
‘Out of the way, Jim,’ said Elaine. ‘Come here, Amanda, and shut up, for goodness’ sake.’
‘All right,’ said Amanda.
‘Let’s let Daddy go off and leave us,’ said Elaine. ‘He’ll learn to appreciate us more. He doesn’t know how much he needs us, does he?’
‘No,’ said Amanda.
‘So you tell him to be good while he’s away, and not be lascivious. Tell him that.’
‘Be good, Daddy,’ said Amanda, ‘and don’t be sivious.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ said Walker, wondering whether he would. He felt, as usual, defeated by this female conspiracy, but it was the last defeat in that line he would suffer for some time.
‘And write to us, won’t you?’ said Elaine. ‘Tell us about all the fun you’re having. I know if you aren’t having fun you’ll write, but try and report the good things as well.’
‘All right,’ said Walker.
The London train came in, drawn by a black engine, blustering smoke beneath the overbridge. It travelled down the platform and stopped at the far end of it. ‘Come on, you’ll have to run,’ said Elaine. Walker picked up the suitcases and the typewriter and broke into a trot. There was an empty second-class compartment in the last coach, tricked out with maroon upholstery and sepia photographs of winds blowing over the Gleneagles Hotel. Elaine opened the door and he got in and heaved his luggage up on to the rack. Elaine stood outside and watched him; then, as he came back to the door, she reached out and delicately, with two fingers, lifted up the bottom of his trouser leg and exposed him to the knee. ‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘What socks have you got on?’
‘You can see which socks I’ve got on,’ said Walker, ‘so can everybody.’
‘Amanda,’ said Elaine, ‘can you smell Daddy’s feet?’
‘Yes,’ said Amanda, ‘they’re terrible.’
Elaine opened her foxy handbag and pulled out a little pair of rolled socks. ‘Put these on,’ said Elaine. ‘You’re disgusting.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Walker. The guard’s whistle blew and Elaine pushed the door shut.
‘Make sure it’s properly fastened before you lean on it,’ said Elaine. ‘You’d look a fool if you fell out at this stage.’ The engine blew off steam; the wheels gripped; the train began to move. Walker stuck his head out of the window, feeling the sun beat upon it, and felt a great sense of release.
‘Say goodbye to Daddy,’ said Elaine to their daughter as they trotted lightly to keep up with the moving train.
‘Goodbye, Daddy,’ said Amanda. ‘And Peter Panda says goodbye too.’
A seed that had been growing within Walker germinated suddenly, and he tore the veil from unreality in a phrase: ‘No, he doesn’t,’ he cried, ‘because he can’t bloody well talk.’ He looked at Elaine and added, ‘And I’ll change my socks when I like.’
‘God bless you, Jim,’ shouted Elaine, stopping moving.
‘Goodbye, darlings,’ shouted Walker, full of guilt for what he had done, and what he was doing, and the irresponsibility he was performing in leaving like this. He blew a few kisses and then the train took a curve and they were gone from view. The sun shone into the coach. He sat down and felt the train moving through the Nottingham backstreets, with their grey Midland mist, past the cattle market, the woodyard, the Co-operative bakery. Now, suddenly, there was a blurred mass of metal, all angles and fury, like a wild abstract sculpture; the train was crossing the heavy iron bridge over the River Trent, which marked for Walker the boundary between the north of England and the south. Behind him, now, lay decency, plain speaking, good feeling; ahead lay the southern counties, all suede shoes and Babycham. A strange queasy sensation, as if two holes had been bored into the lower part of his stomach, letting the contents flow into his legs, came to him. He was alone; his wife and child were gone; two suitcases and an old typewriter were all there was of him. The cases, which he had bought for their honeymoon, looked unprepossessing; the typewriter, a tired and elderly machine with a black rexine case, added a final parochial touch. Already he felt a foreigner in the world. The fine Midland countryside, with its valleys and long scarps of land, its brick cottages and sharp church spires, sat peacefully and domestically in the heat haze; but already signs of disjunction and southerliness were evident. The architecture was altering faintly; the names of unknown foreign villages showed on signposts; the people began to look different.
Piety filled Walker, a sense of hearth and home, and he went down the swaying corridor to the cubicle at the end of his coach. Here, dutifully, he stripped off the old socks and flushed them down the toilet. He imagined them blowing away, scaring rabbits, confusing chaffinches. Then he put on the new pair and, rising, caught sight of his face in the mirror. ‘Who is this handsome, well-dressed stranger?’ he said, looking uneasily at the ghostly lugubrious face that stared back at him, that domed head, that exportable commodity, that kernel of wisdom he was ferrying across the seas. It looked conspicuously unconfident. The upper part of his features were bony, intelligent-seeming, with bright round eyes and receding hair. Lower down, though, things went rather to pieces; here were jowly northern cheeks, like a spaniel’s, which made him appear to be eating all the time and contributed to an expression both perplexed and sad. ‘You’re off,’ he said, ‘going to the States.’ The face refused to be pleased; it simply looked darkly forward into a future of lost luggage, missed trains, incorrect papers, unbooked hotel rooms, and perpetual loneliness. Walker, shaken, turned away and walked back along the corridor to his compartment, eyeing the girls in the other compartments as he passed. Domesticity, clearly, had softened him, weakened him, left him ill-equipped for this kind of pilgrimage.
An undergraduate with a beard, amassing a vacation fortune, came along the coach with a tea-trolley and sold him a cup of warm mud. He drank it and lapsed into a stupor, so that London’s suburbs were upon him before he realized it. The train was flashing through commuter stations whose walls bore advertisements recommending those three great urban luxuries, theatre visits, evening newspapers, and corsets. Red London omnibuses filled the roads. Then the train slowed and they were into St Pancras, a great Gothic cathedral of a station, testament to the conjunction of travel and moral seriousness. He got out of the train and went along the platform to the taxi rank, where he found a cab to take him across the river to Waterloo. Here the atmosphere was lighter, more disturbing. The style of the station, vain and cosmopolitan, spoke of another and more whimsical kind of travelling. The loudspeakers were playing music; the roof-pillars were slender and gracious; the whole place smelled of cigars and chorus girls and afternoon adulteries. The boat-train wasn’t in yet, so he went into the snack bar and had sausage-rolls and tea. Sophisticated voyagers dawdled in the concourse. Porters pushed leather suitcases around on barrows. London girls with low necklines went on to the platforms. He went out of the refreshment room and found that the boat-train, a line of brown and cream cars, stood in its bay. Exotic crowds had gathered on the platform. Walker gave up his ticket and went down the platform beside the Pullman coaches, conscious of his own inadequate elegance. A stout predatory station pigeon came waddling up to him, getting under his feet; then it dissolved into a flutter of wings and took clumsily into the air; the heavy creature, rather like Walker in appearance, became light, enjoyed itself in the air for a moment, and came to ground further along in front of a group of young expensive-looking American girls, who reached into their purses and began to scatter bread for it. Foreign aid, thought Walker, and wondered how he would fare. He looked curiously at the girls, neat, fresh, delectable, chattering and shining against the Pullman. They were avaricious internationalists, evidently, their legs turned nutmeg by a sun that had come to find them daily in different places; their airlite luggage, which the conductors were carrying aboard the train, was garish with the labels of hotels in Vienna and Rome, Brussels and Paris, places he scarcely knew at all. Their polaroid anti-glare sunglasses had consumed all their European sights. I dreamt I did Europe in ten days in my Maidenform bra, thought Walker, finding the very sight of these international creatures tantalizing and enlarging. They made him feel that he was, after all, in motion, going somewhere, that he was of their band and their temper.
He found the coach that corresponded to his seat reservation and handed over his ticket. The conductor picked up his suitcases and typewriter and led him aboard. Inside, the white tablecloths shone, the pink-shaded lamps on the separate tables cast a saucy boudoir light. The other passengers, of all nationalities, sat in their places, leaning on their elbows, smoking urbane cigarettes, watching him join them on their journey. They all seemed entirely and perfectly at home; they evidently sensed and understood the ship, drifting on her ropes at the Ocean Terminal away in Southampton, knew by experience the six days of travel, the clicking open of suitcases at the customs, the sending of telegrams; they even understood America, big and awful and inviting to the west. Because he didn’t know these things, because he couldn’t predict his future, because he was an innocent at voyaging, Walker grew even more nervous and concerned. He followed the steward down the car, his feet sinking into the thick carpet between the tables. The train, indulging all his English nostalgia for the plushy and the genteel, seemed to him a deceit. It spoke of a time when you could travel over Europe, every signal off, and find the whole world not, as you might terrifyingly suppose, all different, but all the same – all service and respect and three-star comfort. Since the world wasn’t safe and secure, and since Walker knew he was a voyager into insecurity, he felt troubled. It only postponed the moment when the difficulties would begin, when he would start to suffer and be hurt. Walker pitched his mind to meet that moment. ‘Here we are, sir,’ said the white-coated steward, pulling back a deep chair at one of the tables so that he could get in. In the facing seat, at the table for two, sat a German newspaper with large heavy type, held by two hairy hands on which gold rings gleamed. Walker tried to sit down and kicked a foot. The paper collapsed, to reveal one of those wise, heavy, experienced faces that Europe has always been so good at producing; sad faces that make all Englishmen look untutored. Two serious eyes regarded Walker curiously. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Walker. ‘Oh, please, it is nothing,’ said the face, and Walker said ‘sorry’ again and thrust his buttocks into the plush.
In front of him the place had already been laid for tea. A pair of tiny pots of jam, like detached glass eyes, looked at him accusingly. Traitor, they said. Gadabout. Walker avoided them and looked out of the window at the other transatlantic voyagers coming aboard, neat young men in crew-cuts, young women in hats. Many of them looked like students, and he recalled that a year in an American university was quite as much in demand academically as it was for a writer like himself. Most of the travellers seemed to be much younger or much older than he was, and this made him feel the more out of place. Was it only he for whom this was something more than routine, was a terrifying adventure?
The man with the German newspaper suddenly folded it decisively. ‘Vell, here we all are, the Fulbright generation,’ he said. ‘So when does the seminar start?’
‘Pardon?’ asked Walker.
‘Oh, these summer liners, they are always full of scholars. I suppose you are one?’
‘In a sort of a way,’ said Walker.
‘I too,’ said the man. ‘It is always the same: Americans studying in Europe, Europeans studying in America. Why we do this I do not know. After all, all the world is the same now. What we have at home is what we vill get everywhere. All societies are the same; all libraries are the same; what do we think we get out of it?’
This was a depressing thought to Walker, and he said, ‘Oh, we get a lot.’
‘Vell,’ said the man, ‘six years ago, maybe seven, I visited your city here. Then it was called London. Now I have visited again and it is called Nowhere. They have pulled half of it down, and what they have not pulled down they have dwarfed to make it count less. The people, vell, they have lost their style, they don’t know how to be English, and even the food is hamburgers.’
‘Progress,’ said Walker.
‘Progress,’ said the man, ‘that is the optimist’s word for change. However, it is always pleasant to meet an idealist.’
‘Well,’ said Walker, ‘things have got better in England in lots of ways. People have more money and expect more of life.’
‘So it is all for the best?’ asked the man.
‘Some of it,’ said Walker.
‘Vell, I am an old man, so I will give you some advice for living in this world. I will tell you the best profession for a man to enter today. I will tell you how to answer when they come to you and say, you have been a most splendid fellow, so here is a prize, your life over again, what will you do with it? My friend, pick the demolition business. Those men up there on those cranes, hitting down those buildings, they are heroes, kings, gods.’
The train jerked and began to move gently along the platform. There was an explosion of light; they were out from under the protective dome of Waterloo. Great towers of apartment blocks, with knickers flapping on high balconies, stood out against the sky. Green caterpillar-like electric trains flipped by; steam engines with military names stood in sidings. Through a gap in the towers of flats Walker could see the Houses of Parliament, where they governed him from. But whatever they had for him today they could, he thought, keep, for he had done it now, cut the umbilical cord, moved into a new regimen. A tug lowered its funnel to pass under Westminster Bridge. The back streets came into view, with small dirty children playing on pavements, electric milk-carts navigating brick-strewn roads, babies in prams crying outside shops. On a bombed site a group of youths in deviant clothes and hostile shoes stood smoking; Walker felt for them that slight flicker of respect his time had taught him to feel at the sight of the disorderly. The sadder parts of London unfolded further. Someone had painted on a railway wall Ban the bum. The heat shimmered on roofs, and in grassless gardens. Clapham, Wimbledon, Raynes Park went by; both train and Walker were taking on speed, and all the things he knew well, and all the things he had noted and written about, were cut off from him now by this mobile pane of glass. Walker turned his attention within the coach, where the waiters were moving along the tables disseminating afternoon tea. ‘Of course we must celebrate this English rite,’ said the foreigner, straightening his tie, which had a streak of lightning down it. ‘That is the England we come here for.’ Across the aisle an austere, dowagerly looking lady, with a lot of gauzy veils wrapped about a swan’s neck, an apotheosis woman, an English type, rang the bell marked Attendant imperiously. There was a lot of grandeur about, and Walker took his pleasure in it – in the walnut and the brocade, the pink lamps and the brass fittings, the foreign newspaper opposite, the party of American girls chattering somewhere back down the car. It gave him a sense of his own importance, made him feel his situation was enviable. It seemed to him right that travel should not be ordinary, that it should be attended by this kind of special richness.
Two of the American girls came down the car, talking together. He watched them with curiosity. One of them was big and blonde, with a finely cantilevered bosom, and the other was dark and rather morose. The blonde one said: ‘I guess the fountain’s up this way some place.’ A real fountain, tridents, dolphins, high spouts of water, and the conceit, on this train, seemed almost probable. But it was just drinking water they wanted; the man opposite, who had been equally attentive to the pair, rose dramatically to his feet, dropping his newspaper on his shoes, and said, ‘Attention please; I recommend not to drink the water.’
The two girls paused and looked down at the foreigner and Walker. ‘They told us we could drink the water in Britain,’ said the blonde girl. ‘They gave us this orientation course and they said Britain was one of the countries it was okay to drink the water in.’
‘Oh, in hotels, but the train is a different matter. But let us consult a citizen. Our friend here will tell us.’
Walker became embarrassed and looked at the tablecloth. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t really know. I never tried drinking water on trains, but I imagine it’s all right. I never heard of anyone catching anything. I suppose the safest thing would be to stick to the tea, though.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said the dark girl, ‘not more tea. I just don’t know how you people can go on drinking the stuff the way you do. I’d like to see inside your stomachs.’
‘Oh yes, you must take tea,’ said the foreigner, ‘it is a custom, something to tell them in Oshkosh.’ He clicked his fingers and waved to the attendant. ‘Please, these girls would like some of that splendid English tea you are serving there.’
The attendant looked at him and said, ‘All right, all right, we’ll get to everyone in due course, sir.’
Walker looked up and smiled a little at the girl with the cantilevered bosom. ‘I guess if you’re brought up on it you get inured to the stuff,’ she said to Walker.
‘I suppose we do,’ said Walker.
‘You sell a lot of these fine teas?’ the foreigner was asking the attendant in great amiability.
‘Quite a number, sir,’ said the man.
‘Such cakes, such sandwiches, it will put pounds on the bottoms of these girls,’ said the foreigner.
‘They look as though they can stand it,’ said the attendant.
‘They are Americans, you understand, these things are an experience for them.’
‘Quite,’ said the attendant.
‘Well, thanks a lot,’ said the girl with the bosom, and the two of them went back down the car to their seats. ‘If we die we’ll hold you responsible.’
Walker turned in his chair to watch them go. Their buttocks curved the fabric of their tight twill skirts. It was all very splendid, and brought back into Walker’s heart an old instinct which eight years of marriage had kept dormant. Walker rationalized it; it was a necessary curiosity about the world. There was nothing like sexuality to keep a man interested in other people; and since in the modern world there was little other approved relationship available he felt he was growing back into life.
‘Nice girls,’ said the foreigner, sitting down again. The encounter seemed to have excited him rather, and the little performance he had put on had clearly given him a great deal of pleasure.
‘They are,’ said Walker.
‘I have pursued a lot of interest in my time,’ said the man, ‘but there is no doubt of one thing: vomen are the most interesting interest of all. And most of all American vomen. You know, those girls are not just girls. They are central figures in the American mythology. They are charismatic leaders in their society.’
‘I see,’ said Walker.
The man leaned forward, bending his neck over his firm, formal collar. He smelled of aftershave lotion. ‘You see, every country cares for something. In Germany, it is veal and gemütlich. In England it is, vell, dogs and diplomats. In America, it is girls. Young girls, of course. That is why those there are so vell endowed, why they have money to travel and dress so vell. All the energy of their fatherland goes into producing them. That is why you must take care.’
‘I will,’ said Walker.
‘And it is not that they are just girls. Of course that is important. But sociology tells us, vell, it tells us everything, but one of its discoveries is that in America the woman is powerful. So, sex is all different. It is necessary to know this before you appear in bed with one of these ladies. Which is vot all Europeans wish to do.’
‘Naturally,’ said Walker, ‘if they all look like that.’
‘Ah, but beware!’ said the man, shaking his finger like a rather dangerous father, like a Marx or a Freud. ‘This America is a matriarchal society. That means it is better to be a voman than a man. Anxious fathers in the maternity hospitals always are praying, “Let the child please be a girl.” ’
‘Women to be frightened of,’ said Walker.
‘Yes, they will eat you up for their dinner,’ said the foreigner. ‘In America Little Red Riding Hood is a man.’
‘But they’re sexually very lively, I’m told,’ said Walker.
‘Vell,’ said the man, ‘in this modern world we are short of good reasons for relationships. Friendship is now abolished. No groups are secure. Sex is a good basis for human contact; in America it is the only one.’
‘Well, it has its limitations, but it’s nice,’ said Walker.
‘Nice?’ said the man. ‘Oh, there is much more to say about it than that. It is carrying now all the burden that religions and gods carried before. In the bedroom man is worshipping himself. That is why in America it is not only necessary to be a girl but a young girl. In England a voman looks best and dresses best when she is over forty. That is because the English respect experience and thought. In America boties are respected . . .’
‘Boties . . .?’ asked Walker.
‘Yes, the human boty. All the best clothes go to the young. In the street where I live there is an old American lady who always dresses in Bermuda shorts. In Vienna or Paris she would look a noble-woman, or like so.’ The man gestured at the dowagerly lady across the aisle. ‘In America she looks perfectly gross. But the young girls, there is another kettle of fish.’
Walker began to feel a new kind of hope, a new region for deconstriction emerged; he said, ‘It sounds very attractive to me.’
‘Sure,’ said the man, ‘but it is only unstable societies that believe so in the very young. In old China, when you wanted to flirt a young lady, you told, “How very charmingly old you are looking today!” In America, you must always tell, “How young you are looking, my dear!” ’
‘Tea, gentlemen?’ The waiter had reached their table.
‘Ah, yes, that is why we are here!’ said the foreigner. Walker, being a provincial, was impressed by cosmopolitanism; and his companion seemed a man perfectly at home in these plushy surroundings of travel. He reminded Walker of those courtly sinister foreigners who, in old British films, frequented the Orient Expresses, diamond-headed pins in their dark cravats, murmuring, ‘We are taking your frendt away with us for a pairfectly simple brain operation.’ The accent of Mittel-Europa gave him an automatic air of wisdom. Now, as the waiter began to serve plates of sandwiches, their crusts cut off, he took up his napkin and tucked one corner into the collar of his formal shirt. An adequate Virgil. His expression was one of bonhomie. When the rest of the tea came he attacked it with energy; his long hands flitted over the table like a card-player’s, dealing cress sandwiches here, currant cake there. ‘In England,’ he said, ‘the afternoon tea. In America the martini. Why is this difference?’
‘A difference in temperament,’ said Walker.
‘Of course,’ said the man, eating a sandwich, ‘but why? I will tell you my theory, I always have a theory. It deals not only with this question but also with another – why the Americans believe in progress and why the English believe in things as they are. Is it not because in England, for reasons of weather and that national temperament we are talking of, it is necessary to make the days seem shorter? One serves tea and fruit-cake and what is the consequence? One goes to sleep. In America it is necessary, for the obverse reasons, to make the days seem longer. One serves martinis, and the consequence is, one starts on another day, at night. You drink this thing and at once you want to go out dancing, or sleep with a girl, or paint the town red, as is said. The English give tranquillizers, the Americans give pep-pills. So, what is produced? According to my theory, every American has the sensation that his life lasts exactly four times as long as an Englishman thinks.’ The foreigner cut a cream cake and stuck one piece between his lips. ‘What is produced, the American starts to change the world, because he must live in it for so long. He wants many things of it. When he dies, he is very pleased with himself, except that the world is now so changed he does not understand it in the least. In the meantime, the English keep changing the guard only and make the best of a bad job. When they die, the world may have changed, but they blame others for it.’
The wheels clattered beneath the train, and they passed through a station with a sign on it saying Necropolis. But Walker looked ahead to this world of zest he was going to. Could he stand it? How would he do? His doubts now were about his reserves of energy. The biggest problem in his life up to now had not been incapacity but lassitude. There were times, and they came often, when he thought himself a failure; and when he went into the matter he decided that the reasons for this were not that he couldn’t think well or act wisely, but that he could never quite bring himself to the pitch of making an effort. He was a man whom the quotidian destroyed, whom custom staled.
He said, ‘Well, at least it all sounds exciting,’ and knew he was expressing a profound hope.
‘Exciting?’ said the foreigner. ‘Ah, you want excitement. Well, you will find it. America has always been a place for starting again.’
‘That’s what I hoped,’ said Walker.
‘Ah, you are Henry James in reverse. European experience coming to seek American innocence.’
‘I’m not sure I’m the experienced one,’ said Walker.
‘Ah yes, that is true,’ said the man. ‘It is now a case of European innocence coming to seek American experience. Today it is the young people, the young countries, who have the experience. Only the old are innocent. That is what the Victorians understood, and the Christians. Original sin is a property of the young. The old grow beyond corruption very quickly.’
‘Are those girls corrupt?’ asked Walker, looking back down the car.
‘Of course,’ said the man, ‘they have had Europe terrified for three months.’
‘Why?’ asked Walker. ‘What have they been doing?’
‘I will tell you,’ said the man, ‘they are bagpipers.’
The waiter came by to clear the tables, and the man said, ‘Wait please. More tea here to be drunk.’
‘What did you say they were?’ asked Walker.
‘Bagpipers. You do not believe me? Vell, it is true. There are forty of these girls, and they are a bagpipe band from Hillesley. You have heard of Hillesley?’ Walker shook his head. ‘Vell, Hillesley is a very expensive girls’ college in New England where good, rich American girls go, to learn how to be more good and more rich and more American.’
‘Why do they play the bagpipes?’ asked Walker.
‘They play them because it brings prestige,’ said the man. ‘In colleges of that kind, prestige is of importance, and at Hillesley the most exclusive thing there is the bagpipe band. For many years this has been one of the cultural treasures of America, this band. And now they have gathered up some money and showed it all to Europe.’
‘You know a lot about them,’ said Walker, ‘and about America.’
‘Of course, I have looked at the Americans very closely. In fact . . . I am one myself.’
‘You surprise me,’ said Walker.
‘Oh, there are a lot of surprises with America. Yes, I am an American citizen. Of course, I did not always live there. When Europe was better I lived in Europe. Now I come and visit it. Like the bagpipers.’
‘How did the tour go?’ asked Walker.
‘Mine or theirs?’ said the man. ‘I will tell you about theirs. It was a great success. They have had enormous audiences in Paris and Rome and Salzburg and Vienna and London. Europe is fascinated by American girls playing the bagpipes.’
‘Scotland too?’ asked Walker.
‘Of course, Scotland,’ said the man. ‘In Scotland there is great interest in the bagpipes.’
‘But they do have their own pipers,’ said Walker.
‘Yes, men with bare knees, but these are pretty girls, with bare knees and rich fathers, playing the bagpipes. These girls have done for the bagpipes what I think was never done for the bagpipes before.’
The waiters made another attempt to clear the table, and this time succeeded. The sugar bowls rattled on their trays as they gathered up the last crockery and silver and collected up the cloths. Walker looked out of the window, and found countryside. The train was rattling over embankments, through cuttings, under bridges. The man opposite put his head against the bulge of the seat and was evidently lapsing into sleep. Soon they would be in Southampton, where the real voyaging would begin. Walker turned for solace to the Guardian, which called up an old familiar world of Scandinavian furniture, car seat-belts, and amiable liberalism. On the letter page a latterday Nietzschean, his address a rectory, wrote in to say that God was dead. Someone else warned of the dangers of the bomb, and someone else of those of school uniforms. Walker sympathized warmly with all these sentiments; this kind of decent, modest radicalism was his intellectual milieu. It had served him ever since he had left the confinement of his parents’ home; it was a perpetuation of the concerned student politics he had taken part in throughout his three years at university. His unassuming faith in the faint but gradual betterment of the world was supported here; when experience seemed sombre, and the bland egalitarianism of the new Britain began to jar, he could turn here to find that it was, after all, for the best. It gave him a sense that Britain was not quite so aimless, not quite so devoid of any standards whatsoever, as various occasions inclined him to believe. Since conservatism was a defunct intellectual fashion, and since extreme radicalism required a confidence in the resources of the proletariat for which Walker could not find too much evidence, this was the even keel he sailed on. But there were times, yes, there were times, when another vision of the situation intruded; when he felt that he was living in the midst of a vast degeneration, a major abnegation of any regard for the quality of human life. All the social forms which had kept intellectual and moral and spiritual aspiration alive somehow seemed to have lapsed; they seemed to have lapsed in the years since he was born. When he thought this, Walker saw his life as a kind of impatient time-serving, an empty performance composed of aimless doing without end in view, without future. Then the impulse towards designing and shaping, the impulse towards giving meaning, came to him, and sent him forth on pilgrimages. But what if there could, now, be no meaningful pilgrimage? What if voyaging was just events and not lessons? What if there were no gains to be made? If that were true, if it could be proved to himself that that were true, it would be the darkest discovery of all. Perhaps, though, one never made it; perhaps such searches were real and false at the same time. Perhaps, like the man opposite, one amassed facts, made comparisons, turned oneself into the sociologist who saw and documented but could not judge, could not learn any truth that helped the heart. Then all the choices one made, all the deeds one performed, were whimsical. They served only the day and the hour, the things that Walker had been serving for too long. Walker finished the paper and then, seeing that his travelling companion was awake, he offered it to him.
‘Very kind,’ said the man, ‘but no, thank you. I always believe that reading someone else’s newspaper is like sleeping with someone else’s wife. Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it. But you may read my newspaper if you care.’
‘I have no foreign languages,’ said Walker.
‘Of course,’ said the man, ‘I forgot, you are English, we all speak yours. Vell, you will not need to worry about that in America.’
‘No,’ said Walker, looking out of the window; the train was going through backyards and suburbs where people took dogs for walks. They slid past level-crossings, signal boxes, goods-yards.
‘I suppose this is Southampton,’ said Walker, looking for a glimpse of the sea. ‘Now the ship.’ But there was only town, sitting toad-like and sombre; then, suddenly, he noticed a glimpse of water where spidery cranes hung like rudimentary wings in the air. Gulls flapped over an estuary. Now he could smell the sea and hear it. By the line-side, goods in boxes were labelled to exotic ports. His throat went dry, the quiver in his stomach returned, he felt all the menace that the Englishman feels when he steps off his island into the void. Now it would begin. The great cavern of the terminal station suddenly swallowed them. They sat in the half-dark until the train stopped.
‘Vell, no doubt we shall meet again on the ship,’ said the man. ‘Tourist class is a very small society. Oh, please, introductions. My name is Dr Jochum.’
‘Mine’s Walker.’
‘How do you do?’ said Jochum, rising and shaking hands. The train gave a final rock as they nodded to one another across the handshake. There was a gaggle of noise along the car. ‘And I will introduce you to those bagpipers,’ said Jochum.
‘All of them?’ asked Walker.
‘As many as you can manage.’
‘Ah, that’s the problem,’ said Walker, ‘where to start and where to stop.’
He went along the car and got off the train, tipping the conductor who had put his luggage out on the platform. Train smoke blew; a kiosk sold small cigars. Notices pointed the way to the Ocean Terminal and the customs. He lifted his cases, putting the typewriter under his arm, and followed the notices and crowds. In the line at the immigration desk, someone behind him was talking in a supercilious accent about the provinciality of modern Cambridge: ‘Actually the only way I got anything out of university at all was talking to the girls on the tinned goods counter at Sainsbury’s.’
A man rushed by with a porter. ‘Be careful, that’s a double bass,’ he cried. A notice said: Keep ceaseless watch for Colorado Beetle. The immigration man spared Walker from England very easily; he thumbed his passport, checked the contents of his wallet, and then he was beyond his own shore, officially in passage. Beyond, in an open hall, was the customs shed, where a uniformed excise man glanced at his luggage and ushered him forward. Through the glass window he could see the vast black side of the ship. A moment later he was walking up the gangplank and into a maw giving on to a passenger concourse. Wooden walls shone and white-coated stewards bustled; a chalked notice told him to book his dinner place in the Winter Garden Lounge. A steward took the enormous paper ticket he had been instructed to hold in his hand. Then he led him through dark wooden-walled passageways and down innumerable staircases. On the walls, arrows pointed disturbingly toward the lifeboat stations. After a long walk, the steward dived into a tiny narrow passage, pulled a curtain aside, and revealed his cabin – a small square box with four bunks, three of them already claimed, presumably by persons with more rapid forms of transport. On the wall was a large picture of a healthy-looking girl strapping round her bosom a lifejacket she did not appear to need; it was captioned: Directions for Adjustment. ‘Don’t open the porthole, sir, or you’ll sink the ship. We’re below sea-level down here.’ ‘All right,’ said Walker, but it was a thought to keep in store for the bad days ahead.
He waited until the steward had gone and then began to look around. There was little to see. The cabin in which he was to spend the next six days was very small indeed. The bunks were set on either side of a narrow strip of floor, two on each side, one above the other; the central space was so tiny that two persons dressing at the same time would probably end up in each other’s trousers. The tiny wardrobe was already full when he opened it, and the top was stuffed with orange life-jackets. There was one drawer left in the tiny chest of drawers, but the top was already covered with various items, including a number of books – Axel’s Castle, Romantic Image, Ideology and Utopia, The Open Society and its Enemies – all in English paperback editions. There was a tiny wash-basin, about the size of a big girl’s navel. It contained a small bunch of white heather, and, looking at it, he discovered that the message on it read ‘Bon voyage and all my love, darling, Elaine.’ This was very touching, and he squeezed the bunch into one of the four toothglasses and managed to make space for this on top of the chest of drawers. Then he got up, with the aid of a ladder, on to the top bunk on the seaward side, which was the only one left and was slightly curved to allow the ship to come to a point at both ends. Above him, for he was close to the ceiling, he could hear a scampering noise – other passengers, perhaps rats. The ship swayed slightly and he felt more uneasy than ever. He put his head on the pillow and went to sleep.
When he woke up some time had gone by, but the ship still seemed to be relatively still. He climbed down the ladder and went to book his place for dinner. Outside the cabin, the ship was confusing – little passageways, little cabins, little bathrooms, led in all directions. In front of him two Americans walked down the corridor; one, with a cropped poll, said, ‘Yeah, I grant you, he’s very civilized, but deep down don’t you think he’s sick sick sick?’
‘Well, right, so Mozart’s sick,’ said the other. ‘Who isn’t?’ He followed them and they brought him up to the next level. Inside a cabin a group of old English ladies were guffawing and one said, ‘Fancy, isn’t it a big ship? Think of all the dusting!’
Walker realized that he had committed himself to an institution. Like most young Englishmen, he was used to this; he had been to school, university, hospital. He found it, indeed, a natural situation; there were times when marriage seemed to him unnecessarily small as a unit; it was very nice, but why only two or three or four of you? He was accustomed to giving up the right amount of individuality, of retaining just sufficient selfhood to get by in a crowd without producing such an excess as to clog the system. These were simple modern arts, and he had grown up in their service. But they had their delicacies and complications. He remembered this when he got up on the main deck and looked at all the notices telling of the coming delights on shipboard – bingo, cinema shows, fancy-dress dances, get-together balls, competitions for the most original headdress, the most original footwear, and the like. Such societies were competitive. Built into the pattern of them was the assumption that one had to capture the best-looking girl, the best-placed deck-chair, the best seat in the dining room; in these systems prestige all went that way. Skill and perpetual alertness for every advantage were required; one’s social antennae had to be out all the time. But what with the retreat into the privacy of marriage, and that lethargy which had let him go to sleep exactly at the crucial moment, he had destroyed himself, certainly diminished his chances. He would be lucky if he didn’t spend the rest of the voyage as outsider and outcast.
He looked into the ship’s library; there was a collection of books and a stock of notepaper with the ship’s name on it, but the books had been picked over and the paper was already being systematically stolen by a chain of small boys in short trousers. In the modern world, it was public living that was hard living; private life was simple enough, but the communal centres were murder. Here went on the displays of delinquency, and malice, and emptiness; here one despaired of man. Walker looked next into the tea lounge. Padded chairs with wooden arms were fixed to the floor; in them were seated middle-aged English aunties who looked triumphant because they had found out how to get tea. ‘It’s very nice here, but it’s not like your own home,’ one of them was saying, standing up and shaking out her dress. In a corner by the door a bald American was apparently holding an informal seminar on Pasternak; he could be heard saying, ‘It may be panoramic, but the basic structure is a set of symbol-clusters or rather central events or discoveries around which the characters are drawn together in an unrealistic and stylized way. No?’
The whole ship, though, seemed somehow reassuring – with its bulky decor, its fitting of inlaid wood, the dedicated effort of tasteless craftsmen, the solemn commitment to tea, the small orchestras and the bridge, the vestigial displays of deference and service from rubber-lipped stewards. It was a failing reassurance, of course; like a country house made over into a lunatic asylum, it presupposed more grace and quality in its inhabitants than in fact they had. It promised the grand voyage, if people were prepared to voyage grandly, but what Walker had learned in one afternoon was that this was an illusion. He walked around some more and at last came to the Winter Garden Lounge, where the places for dinner were being issued. There was a long queue, of which Walker discovered himself to be the perpetual tail; he was, presumably, the last person in tourist class to realize what was happening. In this room, the decor was slightly more heady; the chairs were of green wicker, the mural displayed a scene of pastoral licentiousness, and there were a few carnivorous-looking flowers set in tubs. The radio was playing Children’s Hour; a pop group, called the Haters, were tunelessly celebrating dim proletarian adolescent oestrus. He stood in line, wondering how in this world he was going to manage. It struck him that one of the main reasons for his attentive concern with sex and marriage and individual people was that he had always felt at odds with this kind of mass situation. It brought out the Shelley in him, seeking the single meaningful soul who could lead him through the mob chaos. How would he manage here? What about the get-together dance, this night? Would persuasive patter come to his lips, would his one dance-step, which he used like a skeleton key for every ballroom situation, fit the case and bring him companionship and escape? The curse of solitude, the one flaw in his argument for leaving home, sat heavy on him. He began mentally to prospect, not for infidelity, but for some nice girl who would understand, hide with him in some dark, quiet place behind the funnel, sit out the journey. But even finding so much required a rare energy and facility, and the lethargy of the last eight years had left him rusty even in those skills. He saw that he was back, a damaged creature, with the old familiar problems of the world.
The queue moved onward and he reached the table at which the uniformed purser sat, fair-haired and amiable. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much left, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some places at the children’s sitting; the only thing for second sitting is one place at a table for six.’ ‘Oh well, I’ll take that,’ said Walker. He placed the ticket he was given carefully in his wallet. Going out of the lounge, he had a vision; he caught sight of himself in a dolphin-etched, full-length mirror. In his brown, fibrous, hard-wearing suit, with its large lapels and wide-bottomed trousers, he looked like a little ghost from the provincial past, tired, deeply out of touch. It didn’t bode well for his chances; it showed him wan, wind-blown, incomplete. He looked for a moment; he flattened a violent spurt of hair on his head, pulled in his stomach, pushed the knot of his handwoven tie so that it covered the collar-button. It didn’t do much.
The ship’s hooter sounded. He found the door that led to the deck and pulled it open. Outside he found himself pinned by the wind and struck by the cold. He went over to the rail, the sea was roaring into his nostrils. Southampton, down below now, sat in an air of quiet pride, as if nothing one could do would change or abuse it. It made him feel almost pleased that he was going, though he still was conscious of his inadequacy, though he knew he was going into a world bigger than he could understand, though a sick feeling in his stomach joined with the disturbing faint sway of the ship to make him feel less than fine. A crane on the shore ran out with a rattle of chain. Far down below him the last passengers came up the canvas-covered gangplank. The ship’s side fell sheer to the dock and the black water. The hook of a crane was hitched to the gangplank and it began to move out of the ship’s side. He walked round the deck to the seaward rail. Salt air blew up in his face; the wind slapped off the waves to hit him; the huge white lifeboats, suspended above, boomed gently in the breeze. The black curdy water floated below; the tugs were on; the sun was lighting the bottom of the sky. It was a confused, undesigned seascape, too much tinged with business and industry, cranes and dockers, to be romantic, too dirty and impersonal and vast for Walker to feel that it was his. Suddenly there came a little lurch; he looked down again to see the tugs pulling, churning a great vortex in the sea. The wild suction, the tossing of dirty waters, whirled violently in his head. ‘Call me Ishmael!’ he cried. A siren roared over him, rattling his eardrums, and grit from the funnel fell on him. On the other side, on the roof of the Ocean Terminal, a small band boomed martial music, and people were waving and shouting. He could see Southampton untying itself and beginning to float away. His sensations reached the full; a multiplicity of allegiances left him confused. He felt doses of guilt for leaving his wife, his child, his home; he felt little spurts of pride at being able to do it; he felt little throbs of queasiness at the awareness of the risks that there were in the doing. It was all a mystery beyond him; he was at the centre of a vast web of forces, but he was bare, forked Walker, alone in the universe, with nothing to claim of it, nothing he knew he ought to do. Yet expectation remained.
It was cold on deck, but he stayed there until dinner, watching the ship go out through the estuary and seeing the shoreline fade. The tugs went off; above him the high red funnel tossed a bluster of smoke into the sky, and the wire struts sang in the wind. To the stern, a trail of seagulls gathered over the wake. Further back was England, with the dusk eating away the headland, cliffs, the squatting houses, the bright metal chimneys of the oil refineries. A vast dark raincloud hung over Southampton, scattering darkness and a hazy summer rainfall. The lights of the ferries, crossing between the mainland and the wooded capes of the Isle of Wight, shone. Triangular sails of yachts showed by the shore; grey defensive ships stood sleek in the channel. Then the sea began to dwarf them all; the meaning slipped, the world became a volume of air and sea, almost an excess of it, in which an occasional ripple perked up, grew into a wave, fell back. The kingdom of necessity was going from view; onward, then, to the kingdom of light. Would the thin fluffy strands of affection that tied him to the shore break? He felt almost nothing; the sensations were over; he belonged to the ship. Presently a fat round steward, a bundle of chimes cradled in his arms, donged out the dinner anthem along the deck. Walker retired down below into the comfort of this travelling institution, hungry for the meal.