A Word Child (10 page)

‘Are you all right, darling?'

‘Yes, I'm fine. Are you all right?'

‘Yes, fine. I'm so glad about Christmas.'

‘I'm not! And I don't think it should begin in November.'

‘Well, everything's nicer when you can think about Christmas. I so much want to see the Christ Child in Regent Street.'

‘The Christ Child in Regent Street?'

‘Yes, the decorations. They've got such a lovely thing of the Christ Child in lights. I thought perhaps you might take me, like we did once?'

‘And we had dinner in that grand restaurant after, do you remember?'

‘Oh, I did love that. And they had black bread.'

‘I don't remember the bread.'

‘Well, it was almost black. Oh, I meant to tell you, there's this new health food shop — '

‘
Health food?
'

‘But it's nice, it has nice things, I got some special brown sugar and a special loaf which they said — '

‘Crystal, for God's sake don't start buying fancy foods. Ordinary food is good enough for us.'

‘All right, dearest — '

‘These places just exist to sell expensive rubbish to silly women.'

‘I'm sorry, I won't — '

‘Come now, dear, I'm not really vexed. Tell me about your new lady. Do you think she'll ask you to do other things?'

We talked about Crystal's lady. This lady knew another lady and if the cocktail costume was a success there might be quite a stream of ladies. Crystal told me about bargains she had found when shopping for ‘linings', then about something she had heard on the wireless about dogs. I told her about the office pantomime. We talked about what we would do when we went to Regent Street. I reminded her of the little fountain of the embracing bears and said we would go there again one day. I did not tell her about Biscuit. Told as a story this would sound rather weird and might frighten her. It would have spoilt the cheerful silliness of the chatter in which Crystal and I expressed our love. Tonight however this was spoilt in any case, since I increasingly knew that I would have at last to raise the question of Arthur. It was not clear why this was
now
necessary, but, as a result of secret silent movements in both our minds, it was so, and we both knew it as we smiled at each other and reminisced about the horrid old days in the caravan. About Oxford of course we never spoke.

Crystal was wearing a shapeless dove-grey woollen dress with a green scarf tied round the collar. This suited her more than most of her clothes. Her thick fuzzy orangy hair, more like a kind of solid stuff than anything composed of strands, was pushed well back behind her ears, and her big much-chewed lower lip was prominent and moist. Her big golden eyes, appearing even larger behind the thick spectacles, were troubled with emotion but maddeningly obscured. Her small plump hands danced on the tablecloth, collecting crumbs and fingering them to pieces. The traffic gurgled jerkily in the North End Road. She was staring at me and wondering whether to touch my hand which was lying near to hers on the table. I felt in an anguish of irritation.

‘Crystal — '

‘Yes, Hilary — '

We always called each other by endearments or else by our names, never by nicknames. I think Crystal's name meant a lot to her. Crystal Burde. It had been a talisman, a sort of strange consoling thing of beauty in her life: a significant fragment of a splendour past or to come. My name, I felt, derived from hers by some sort of linguistic law, and it was she alone who beautified it.

‘Crystal, I — I saw Arthur in the office yesterday.' This was fairly obvious, since I saw Arthur in the office every weekday.

‘Oh yes.'

‘You arc rather fond of Arthur, aren't you?'

‘Yes, yes — '

‘Crystal, you would like to marry Arthur, wouldn't you?'

I had not, a second beforehand, intended to ask this terrifying question, or to ask it in this form.

The round spectacles regarded me, then turned away. ‘You put it — as if — '

‘As if I expected the answer yes?'

She said nothing, and after a pause, trying to keep calm, I said, ‘Well, I do expect it. Am I right?'

Crystal's hand was now touching mine, her knuckles brushing the back of my hand making trails in the long black hair. I made no responsive movement. Crystal said, ‘You know that all I care about is you and your happiness.'

‘OK, and all I care about is you and your happiness. Crystal, we mustn't just mesmerize each other here. Things do happen, times do change, and even we two have our separate histories. You could be happy with Arthur, you could have a real house and children. It's no fun for you living like this.'

‘Fun?' said Crystal, withdrawing her caressing hand. ‘Fun? Do you think I care about that? My life here — ' She could not find the words. ‘Oh, you know — '

I knew. ‘I want you to marry and be happy,' I said. Was there a shade too much pressure in this? Would she think I was saying it because of Tommy? Oh
God.

‘I am happy.'

I'll leave it here, I thought. I have said enough to open the door for her if she wants to go through it. Oh let her not want to. Better not let the talk come round to Tommy. Get away now.

‘You want to get married too, after all,' said Crystal.

‘So you
do
want to get married?' I said.

‘I didn't say so — '

‘You said “too”.'

Crystal, gathered away into herself, staring now at the tablecloth, gave out a sort of shuddering sigh.

‘All right. Yes. I do want to get married, I think perhaps I do — want to get married to Arthur — I suppose — '

I had tried to imagine that she might conceivably say this, or I had thought that I had tried, but the shock was very violent and I had to concern myself at once with concealing it. ‘I see,' I said quickly, ‘good, good — '

‘But I don't really want it,' said Crystal, who was now watching me carefully, ‘I don't want it
at all
if you would anyhow, for a second, prefer us to go on like this. You talked of changes and I thought perhaps — you see — well, I care for Arthur, but compared with you Arthur is nothing. I thought you might prefer — '

‘Never mind about me.'

‘Oh don't be — silly — how could I ever possibly be happy if I had not been and done whatever you wanted?'

‘Whatever you do,' I said, ‘you will be and do that. I'm so glad — I really am glad — that you've decided — about Arthur — at last.'

We stared at each other, both appalled.

‘I haven't decided,' said Crystal in a whisper.

‘Yes, you have. Be brave, Crystal,' I said. ‘Write to him if you want to, tell him!'

After a silence she said, ‘So you will marry Tommy.' She uttered this flatly, not as a question.

This was the corner into which I had prayed not to be driven. I replied with a light briskness. ‘I expect so. Maybe, maybe not. Like you I'm not much of a decider.'

Crystal sighed again, her lower lip trembling.

‘Oh God,' I said at last, ‘oh God, if I could only see inside your mind!'

‘If I could only see inside yours!'

Crystal took her glasses off. Huge glittering tears were filling her eyes and leaping off her plump cheeks onto the tablecloth. I watched her for a moment. I imagined myself kneeling on the floor, as I had so often done when we were children, and grimacing like a devil into the folds of her skirt. I kept calm.

‘Oh, Crystal, cut it out, cut it out, dear, cut it out.'

MONDAY

O
N MONDAY winter had really come. Monday was one of those yellow days which are so very Londonish, not exactly foggy, but pervaded from late dawn to early dusk by a uniform fuzzy damp cold dirty yellowish haze. Sunday was windy, the last fling of the wild west wind before he had business elsewhere. Monday was still.

Sunday produced no noteworthy events. I stunned Christopher by spending the whole day at home. I did this because I thought it possible that Biscuit might call. But she did not. (Had
they
locked her up?) She would have been a distraction and I needed one. I lay on my bed hour after hour waiting for her (waiting for what?) and reflecting about Crystal. The terrible thing had happened, it seemed. It had at last become
fairly
clear (or had it?) that Crystal really did in some sense want to marry Arthur; and if this was so the insane-making possibility that I would be sacrificing my own interests for nothing would at least be excluded. Had I been keeping Crystal all these years in a cage from which she would be glad to escape? No, it was not like that. She had been sincere when she had described herself as ‘happy'. But with an impressive and surprising resolution she had been capable too of conjuring up other possibilities. I may have seemed in these pages (so far: and there will be no improvement) to be a monster of egoism, but I was just capable of willing Crystal's happiness as something separate from my own. The idea of her marriage sliced into me like a knife. It was not exactly jealousy. Crystal had said ‘compared with you, Arthur is nothing' and that I knew was the truth. It was just a sense of utter dereliction, the end of the world, the vanishing forever of some absolute security, some indefeasible right to be protected and cherished. So many things would change, I dared not list them, and would these changes not rip me and leave me in tatters? Did Crystal herself realize what her marriage would involve? Possibly not. Against these desperate thoughts I kept thrusting forward the idea of Crystal's happiness. When we had talked after her weeping I had seen (or imagined?) some shadow of pleasure in her, as if she were suddenly amazed at herself for conceiving of another mode of being, and not just the endless round of Thursdays and Saturdays. I hated the sight of that shadow; and yet if I were to press her to this action, it was as well to know that I was not doing so under a misconception, but had rightly guessed that this was what she wanted. Unless perhaps what I had seen was not an anticipation of her happiness, but an anticipation of
mine
(with Tommy)! Of course I had deliberately misled her about Tommy. We had not spoken of that again. How much was she being influenced by this fake idea, and how much did it matter if she was? Some of the time, as I lay there in tormented thought, it seemed to me that Crystal really did want this marriage with Arthur, however readily she might have sacrificed it under slightly different circumstances. And if so, did this mean that Crystal could be saved and become an ordinary person after all? If only, if only I could be certain that she was not simply doing it for my sake. The best and final consolation was that nothing yet had actually happened. I managed to sleep in the afternoon. In the evening I saw no one. Not that I preferred it so, I was just short of people.

Monday, as I have said, dawned cold and yellow. I did the walk to Gloucester Road and arrived fairly early at the office. I was surprised on emerging from the lift to see that Mrs Witcher and Reggie Farbottom were there before me. They were standing at the door of the Registry. As soon as they saw me they gave a little scream and started to giggle and ran back inside. A few steps further on I met Arthur. He was very red in the face and began to say something. Feeling exceptionally bad tempered I walked past him without a word and entered the Room. I saw at once what had happened. I also saw that I must make an instant and not unimportant decision.

The Room had been rearranged. My desk had been moved out of the bay window and put facing the wall on the near side where Reggie Farbottom's desk used to be. Edith Witcher's desk had moved onto the carpet and into the bay in place of mine, and Reggie's desk was now just behind hers, also on the carpet and facing out of the window.

There was a lot of loud ostentatious giggling going on behind me. I turned round. Arthur, red and agitated, was standing at the door of his cupboard. Mrs Witcher and Reggie were having a little struggle in the corridor which ended with his pushing her in front of him into the Room. They were both now pretending to be helpless with laughter.

‘Hilary, we thought — be
quiet,
Reggie! — we thought it would be much easier for you to be nearer Arthur — Oh, Reggie, do stop making me laugh so — do be serious — '

‘I am serious,' said Reggie. ‘What could be more serious than nearer Arthur?'

‘Reggie, please!'

‘But really seriously, Hilary, — ' said Reggie, holding up the wilting form of Mrs Witcher, who was squeaking with nervous mirth, ‘it's turn and turn about now. We reckoned it was fair. We was feeling frustrated! You've had that place for years and we reckoned it was Edith's turn. And anyway she's a lady. Or something.'

‘Reggie!'

‘We reckoned it was fair do's. Democracy and all that. No need to take on.'

‘He isn't taking on!' said Edith with an affected scream.

Skinker the messenger arrived. ‘You've moved Mr Burde's desk.'

‘How true,' said Reggie.

‘But Mr Burde's always sat there in that window place.'

‘All the more reason for this,' said Reggie. ‘The old order changeth, giving place to new. That's all right, isn't it, Hilary? You don't mind, do you, dear?'

‘I don't see that it's right,' said Skinker. ‘A man's place is his place. It's Mr Burde's room, in' it?'

‘It's our room too,' said Reggie, ‘and there are two of us and only one of him, two against one, and his Arthur has got a room to himself, it's logical. Come on, Edith, stop suffocating, assert your rights, get your behind onto that chair, he won't have the face to pull it off it.' He pushed Mrs Witcher on into the window and sat himself behind her, swivelling round to see what I was going to do. Arthur and Skinker also stared at me, waiting for the explosion.

I walked out and went into Arthur's cupboard and sat down at Arthur's desk. Arthur followed me in. Skinker stood sympathetically at the door, clucking with concern. Triumphant though still nervous laughter echoed in the Room, voices intended to be heard followed after me.

‘Talk about paper tigers!'

‘You could knock me over wiv a fevver!'

‘You were quite right, Reggie. Stand up to a bully and he just collapses!'

‘Get us some tea, would you, please?' said Arthur to Skinker.

‘Mr Burde's a deep one, in' he,' said Skinker and disappeared.

Arthur closed the door. ‘Hilary, aren't you going to — ?'

I shook my head.

‘Well,' said Arthur doubtfully, trying hard to read me and to find the proper thing to say. ‘I agree it's not worth fighting people like that. And I suppose there is something to turn and turn about — I mean I suppose it's not — or perhaps you think — or something — I mean.'

I did not help him out.

Arthur climbed onto the desk and sat there, his knees close to my shoulder. He was probably relieved at not having to second me in some scrimmage. He made as if to pat me, then fluttered his hand back to his lapel. ‘You certainly flummoxed them, Hilary. That was the last thing they expected.'

I had flummoxed myself. Had Crystal's decision just deprived me of will-power or was this simply the inevitable beginning of some end which I had not foreseen as starting now? Officewise, lifewise, the beginning of the end? Why was I totally unable to react? Was I afraid I might kill them? No. I had behaved quietly not out of any decent or even intelligible motive but out of an absence of any motive at all. Perhaps this was the collapse of a bully, perhaps this was what collapsing bullies were like. For a desperate man, any setback can tap a deep base of nightmare, every sin represents the original one, indeed is part of it, every crime is The Crime. A sort of quiet ecstasy of pure hate possessed me. I hated Arthur. I hated his stupid knees and shabby shiny shapeless blue trousers which were pushed up so near to my face that I could positively smell them. I abhorred his capture of Crystal about which, I now saw as in a vision, I would have to behave perfectly. What had just happened in the Room was nothing, was a symbol merely, a blank occasion of some older larger state of the universe. A vista, a view of the light, a gateway to salvation was closed, the immuring process one stage further on towards the final pit and pendulum. It was as if an abstract form of some past
or perhaps future
suffering had coldly come upon me. Misery and sin are inextricably mixed in the human lot. I experienced the inextricability.

‘Are you all right, Hilary?'

Arthur's cupboard was tiny, constructed of slatted wood like a shed, unpainted on the inside. A high window gave upon the corridor. There was an electric light, only Arthur had not switched it on, perhaps because he did not dare to expose my face. I looked up into Arthur's mild anxious eyes. My future brother-in-law already looked a different man. Would he and Crystal discuss me with sympathy and concern?

Skinker arrived with the tea. He was a kind man, and had been trying to think of something suitable to say. ‘Our Lord said we was to turn the other cheek.'

The matter was thus summed up as a slap in the face, meekly received. ‘Thanks,' I said to Skinker. I took the tea. ‘Thanks,' I said to Arthur, and patted his shoulder. I went with the teacup back into the Room and sat down at my desk.

Edith and Reggie, who had been anxiously waiting for me, began giggling again. There was a charged silence while I drank my tea and fiddled my papers into shape.

Reggie said at last, ‘Say something, Hilary.'

‘What do you want me to say?'

‘Say you're not cross.'

‘I'm not cross,' I said. I was not.

It was Monday evening. I let myself in with my key to the flat in Lexham Gardens. ‘Hello.'

‘Hello, darling,' said Clifford Larr from the kitchen.

‘It's so bloody hot in here.' I dropped my coat in the hall on a lemon and white striped settee thing, and went on into the kitchen where Clifford (a serious cook), dressed in a long blue apron, was pouring some oil into a bowl.

‘How was your day?'

‘Something terrible happened.'

‘Oh?' He looked up, interested.

‘Mrs Witcher and her minion moved my desk out of the window and puts hers there instead.'

‘Was that all? Then you moved yours back again?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘You know why not. What's the point?'

Clifford, the oil bottle still poised in one hand, looked at me coolly. ‘You want me to sympathize with you. You want me to appreciate some interesting suffering. No. I just think you were a fool. You have lost another trick in the game of life. You will never be able to get your place back now, never. It's gone for good.'

‘I know, why rub it in? I don't want you to cry over me.'

‘I can't be bothered with the metaphysics of your self-pity.'

‘Who's asking you to bother, fuck you?'

‘I think less of you, that's all. And there is less of you. Because of this defeat there is that much less of you. Someone has taken a slice off you, Mrs Witcher has, she has drawn your blood. And since you let her do so she will do it again. You will become a dull man whose sufferings will interest nobody.'

‘I am that already, according to you.'

‘And your clothes smell. I wish you'd do something about it.'

‘Do you want me to smash something before the evening has even started?'

‘You get excited so easily.'

‘You are deliberately hurting me.'

‘Oh don't be so boring. I can see that you are going to bore me tonight.' He was now stirring his horrible blackish oily mixture.

‘Am I? Crystal is going to marry Arthur Fisch.' I had not told Clifford anything about this romance.

Clifford went on stirring. His face changed, contracting, then slowly relaxing into an almost angelic calm. ‘You needn't go as far as that to amuse me.'

‘It isn't a joke.'

After a pause, Clifford said, ‘It couldn't happen.'

‘What couldn't?'

‘That marriage. It couldn't happen.'

‘Why not? Would you prevent it?'

‘No. But confess. You're not serious.'

It rarely happens that one can construct a friendship with someone which is as complex as one's thoughts about that person. Clifford Larr interested me very much. I felt admiration, affection. But our relations, though close, remained curiously abstract. This was partly of course because he ran the whole thing, decreeing himself mysterious, a sort of elusive prince. We were not lovers, of course. I was irredeemably heterosexual. That he was homosexual, invisible to me at first (because I tended not to notice such things) was later the essence, the cornerstone, the key: yet a key that could not be used, or which only opened doors to reveal other ones. This was the quality of his unhappiness, which hung like a canopy over our, so oddly as I said abstract, even formal relations. That he had hoped to find a partner in me, had with the most exquisite tact and discretion tried me for this role, now seemed to belong to the remote past, a kind of legend of a time which may not even have existed in reality, but which pervaded and determined the present, coloured it certainly. Nothing was said of course, and I received no confidences about Clifford's life. The only link with his other existence was Christopher Cather, who figured here as a portent rather than as a source of information. I had met Christopher through Clifford. It was conceivable that Clifford and Christopher had been lovers, though they apparently never saw each other now. I preferred not to think about it. This was not because of any dislike or disapproval of homosexual practices. I harboured no prejudice of this sort. If I shuddered at all it was at what was sexual rather than at what was homosexual. It was that my friendship with Clifford Larr took place under the sign of a vast reticence. It depended on a kind of vow of silence. At any rate it depended on my being passive, incurious, even seemingly insensitive. Second fiddle, of course. But also in a way set up as unsatisfactory, something of a brute, as if unconcerned, and
ipso facto
perfectly discreet. How was it that I understood all that, the essential structure of the thing, without any explanation, and that I also knew that Clifford knew I understood? It was part of this vast understanding that I never felt that Christopher had been planted on me as a spy, and that Clifford was well aware that Christopher and I never discussed him. Discretion was doubtless something which Clifford imposed on anyone who came near him. If there were to be revelations, and he sometimes teased me with the possibility of one, these would be a grace decreed by him. They could never be extracted by questioning, indeed questioning was made almost impossible by the rigidly impersonal-personal tone of my communication with Clifford. He wore always round his neck upon a chain the talisman which Laura Impiatt had imagined to be a cross. In fact it was a man's signet ring. Sometimes when I was with him, Clifford, undoing the front of his shirt in the disgustingly hot centrally-heated atmosphere of his flat, would let the dangling ring be visible, would almost seem to display it. I looked at it, I once even touched it, but I had never so far asked him about it. This was in accordance with the myth of our relations. There was an inhibition of tenderness, a check of curiosity, a sheer silence which, by making me play, under his direction, a slightly unnatural role, provided him perhaps with a weird substitute for the sexual connection which we did not have. Another aspect of this silence was the total secrecy which, again at his wish, covered our Mondays. Perhaps the secrecy mimed a state of affairs which might have existed but did not. I myself would have been glad to let it be known that Clifford and I were friends. I was proud of this friendship which would certainly have improved my standing at the office. There Clifford was an important man, a dark horse, admired, yet also feared because of his sharp tongue; and it is always flattering to be petted by someone who is generally feared. I sometimes wondered if Clifford simply felt ashamed of me, ashamed of liking me, and so did not want our names linked. Even this possibility contributed to the odd tension between us which clearly gave him some satisfaction or he would have dropped me without a pang and forgotten me instantly. That one might at any moment be thus dropped and forgotten was of course itself part of the tension.