A Word Child (6 page)

‘You and your stupid rules!'

‘You've got a streaming cold. I'm going home.'

‘Go then, go!'

Tommy lived in a lost region on the confines of Fulham and Chelsea, with distant hints of Putney, not far from the New King's Road, uncheered by the proximity of any tube station, in a little neat flat in a little neat house in a terrace of little neat houses, each with its tiny ornate portico and its tiny cracking flight of steps and its smelly basement full of dustbin litter. I usually reached her by walking from Parson's Green. I got to her place after seven, sometimes well after seven, as I had something to do before. This was another part of my routine. After leaving the office I would travel either to Sloane Square or to Liverpool Street to have a drink in the station buffet. In the whole extension of the Underground system those two stations are, as far as I've been able to discover, the only ones which have bars actually upon the platform. The concept of the tube station platform bar excited me. In fact the whole Underground region moved me, I felt as if it were in some sense my natural home. These two bars were not just a cosy after-the-office treat, they were the source of a dark excitement, places of profound communication with London, with the sources of life, with the caverns of resignation to grief and to mortality. Drinking there between six and seven in the shifting crowd of rush-hour travellers, one could feel on one's shoulders as a curiously soothing yoke the weariness of toiling London, that blank released tiredness after work which can somehow console even the bored, even the frenzied. The coming and departing rattle of the trains, the drifting movement of the travellers, their arrival, their waiting, their vanishing forever presented a mesmeric and indeed symbolic fresco: so many little moments of decision, so many little finalities, the constant wrenching of texture, the constant destruction of cells which shifts and ages the lives of men and of universes. The uncertainty of the order of the trains. The dangerousness of the platforms. (Trains as lethal weapons.) The resolution of a given moment (but which?) to lay down your glass and mount the next train. (But why? There will be another in two minutes.)
Ah qu'ils sont beaux les trains manqués!
as I especially had cause to know. Then once upon the train that sense of its thrusting life, its intent and purposive turning which conveys itself so subtly to the traveller's body, its leanings and veerings to points of irrevocable change and partings of the ways. The tram of consciousness, the present moment, the little lighted tube moving in the long dark tunnel. The inevitability of it all and yet its endless variety: the awful daylight glimpses, the blessed plunges back into the dark; the stations, each unique, the sinister brightness of Charing Cross, the mysterious gloom of Regent's Park, the dereliction of Mornington Crescent, the futuristic melancholy of Moorgate, the monumental ironwork of Liverpool Street, the twining
art nouveau
of Gloucester Road, the Barbican sunk in a baroque hole, fit subject for Piranesi. And in summer, like an excursion into the country, the flowering banks of the Westbound District Line. I preferred the dark however. Emergence was like a worm pulled from its hole. I loved the Inner Circle best. Twenty-seven stations for fivepence. Indeed, for fivepence as many stations as you cared to achieve. Sometimes I rode the whole Circle (just under an hour) before deciding whether to have my evening drink at Liverpool Street or at Sloane Square. I was not the only Circle rider. There were others, especially in winter. Homeless people, lonely people, alcoholics, people on drugs, people in despair. We recognized each other. It was a fit place for me, I was indeed an Undergrounder. (I thought of calling this story
The Memoirs of an Underground Man
or just simply
The Inner Circle.)

Today, Friday, I had been at Sloane Square. The two stations are dissimilar, indeed in a sense opposites. Sloane Square has a simple bright modest up-to-date air which can cheer in a homely way, whereas Liverpool Street is menacing and metaphysical and vast. The bars differ too, in that at Liverpool Street you can actually stand on the platform with your drink, whereas at Sloane Square you watch the trains through a window. I had had the needful refreshment in the cosy bright retreat, and had arrived chez Tommy at half past seven. Tommy had a bit more sense of style than Crystal and her flat was comfortable and pretty in a muddled sort of way. She had a television set but covered it with a Cashmere shawl when I came. (I detest television. I am told that the average person now spends twelve years of his life watching it. No wonder the planet is done for.) Tommy childishly collected ‘pretty things', cheap stuff from Japan and Hong Kong, Victoriana, junk shop sub-antiques, vases, plates, scrolls, fans, figurines, model animals, quaint unclassifiable entities which no one else wanted. Anything cheap and gaudy attracted her. (Hence the passion for the theatre.) The flat was crammed. (It was also speckless, spotless.) Perhaps, as for many unhappy women, simply shopping had become an addiction. She continually bought cheap jewellery, cheap clothes, never a serious garment which looked like anything, just a mish-mash of togs which she put on in random variations. Her hands were always covered in rings. I do not think that she possessed a dress. This evening she was wearing a garish yellow kilt and green tights and a long dark blue sweater with a leather belt and a necklace of black glass beads with a jet locket. She was slim and graceful but not especially good looking apart from her eyes and her legs. Her eyes were long and faintly almondesque, unlike Crystal's which were large and round like a cat's. Her legs were long and shapely. A woman's legs can be perfect: Tommy's were. I never told her so. I had to keep any advantage I could. Her face had lost the freshness of youth and the cheeks were slightly pockmarked. I found this quite attractive, though again I never told her so. Her hair was a mousy brown and hung about her in limp unravelling natural ringlets. She spoke with a mincing precision in a lightweight slightly Scottish voice. She had a fastidious little nose and a fastidious little mouth, features which could express a remarkable amount of sulky stubbornness and become thoroughly repulsive when they did so.

‘Well, why aren't you going then? Why are you sitting there drinking when you've had enough to drink already judging by the smell of you? You do plague me, but you don't mean anything by it, do you? We're still us, aren't we, darling? Aren't we?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I don't think we are.'

‘Wouldn't you rather be in here with a woman that loves you than out there in the rain and the storm? Wouldn't you, wouldn't you? Oh you do hurt me so with your vague threatening talk, you're as bad as a gangster, you deliberately spoil our days, you sit here and drink and sulk and spoil, and you won't give me another day, why can't we meet on Wednesdays?'

‘You know we can't meet on Wednesdays.'

‘Why not? Just because you decree it? I'm sick and tired of living by your decrees. Wednesday isn't a day. Why can't I have Wednesday too?'

‘Wednesday is a day.'

‘How is Wednesday a day?'

‘Wednesday is my day for myself.'

‘You're miserable by yourself, you just mope. Don't you, don't you?'

‘I enjoy misery and moping.'

‘Anyway I don't believe you. You're a proven liar. I don't believe you see Mr Duncan on Mondays. And I don't believe you're alone on Wednesdays. There's some other woman.'

‘Oh Thomas darling, don't make things worse by being silly and vulgar and please please take that horrible aggressive look off your face. I'm so tired.'

‘Tired! Tired! I'm tired too.'

‘You've been doing nothing all day except trailing round the shops buying rubbish.'

‘I've been writing my lecture for Monday.'

‘Ha ha.'

‘And I've been making glove puppets.'

‘Glove puppets, God! We're glove puppets.'

‘All right. You scorn what I do. I scorn what you do.'

‘You don't know anything about it.'

‘And there is another woman. It's Laura Impiatt. You see her on Wednesdays. I know her style, she collects men, she's after you.'

‘Don't be boringly catty about other women. It makes me feel your sex really is inferior.'

‘I'm not catty, and I'm not talking in general, I'm saying about an individual person!'

‘That's not an argument, neither is shouting.'

‘You make me cross on purpose so as to muddle me.'

‘It's not my fault if you think intuitively rather than logically. Women are supposed to be proud of that.'

‘If we met more we'd quarrel less. I must see more of you. I'll come to the office.'

‘If you do it'll be the last time you see me.'

‘When are we going to paint the flat like you said? You said a man was never more innocently engaged than in painting his flat.'

‘Tommy, we can't go on like this.'

‘I don't want to go on like this. I want to marry you. I want a baby. I'm thirty-four.'

‘I know you're thirty-four! You mention it often enough!'

‘You've taken years of my life.'

‘Only three, dear.'

‘You owe it to me.'

‘No one owes anybody anything for that sort of reason.'

‘You came after me — '

‘Be accurate. You came after me.'

‘I want a baby.'

‘Well, go and get yourself stuffed somewhere else.'

‘You talk in a coarse common way, you use hateful rude language, and you do it to hurt me. Don't you? Don't you?
Don't you?
'

‘Oh stop asking these maddening pointless questions!'

‘Who's shouting now?'

‘You just keep evading my arguments, you won't listen to anything you don't like.'

‘I haven't noticed any arguments. I love you. I don't want just any baby. I want your baby.'

‘Well, I don't want a bloody baby and I don't want to get married and as you want both it follows that we must part.'

‘We can't part.'

‘If I could make you believe that we
could
the thing would be as good as done.'

‘That is why I shall never believe it. We're each other's last chance.'

‘I may be yours. You're certainly not mine, thank God! Look, Tommy, let me go. Let's have a clean slice not a bloody massacre.'

‘You're never nice to me now — '

‘How can I be nice when I'm trapped?'

‘You aren't trapped or else everyone is. We could have freedom together if — '

‘Who said anything about freedom?'

‘You did, you said you were trapped.'

‘I don't care a fuck about freedom, I don't think there is such a thing, I just don't like the sensation of being trussed.'

‘After all, most marriages are second best, and — '

‘When I don't want a marriage at all you hardly recommend this one by admitting it would be lousy!'

‘I didn't say that, and it wouldn't be second best for me because I love you — '

‘I don't want your love, Tomkins, so it gratifies not. I'm afraid this is not one of your clear-headed days.'

‘But what's your reason for spoiling things?'

‘There isn't a reason! Love can end. That's just one of the horrors of human life. My interest in you was purely physical anyway.'

‘Oh you wicked liar! And there is a reason. It's Crystal.'

‘It isn't Crystal. Just be careful, Tommy.'

‘Is she going to marry Arthur Fisch?'

‘No.'

‘You won't let her.'

‘Be careful. Do you want me to break something?'

‘You think you can always defeat me by violence, don't you! Oh you should be so ashamed! I mended that little vase you broke. Look. Things can be mended.'

‘Don't try and touch my heart, it isn't within your reach. You talk as if there were just one or two difficulties and if they were fixed we could live happily ever after, but everything's wrong here, everything! God, can't you see the difference between big things and little things? Perhaps no woman can.'

‘Who's generalizing now?'

‘Don't madden me. I just don't want to marry you, I don't even want to go to bed with you any more, very few human arrangements can last long and this one has run its course. There's nothing more to it, no secret motives, not even anything to argue about.'

‘Why are we arguing then?'

‘Because you won't face facts.'

‘I'll tell you why we're arguing. Because we're bound together. You can't leave me. All you can do is talk about it. If you could go, you'd go. The arguing is instead, so that you can pretend to go and not go. Why don't you face a fact or two?'

‘If you want to be shown what going is like — '

‘All right. Do you mean that you won't come next Friday?'

After that there was silence, except for the wild west wind rather gently shaking the windows, as if afraid of its own strength, and pattering the panes with little ripples of rain. We had had, before dispute made eating impossible, the beginning of a supper (lamb cutlets and broccoli) and a good deal of wine. We were still drinking the wine. I had taught Tommy to drink. We were sitting at a round table covered by a pretty French table cloth, a brilliant red cloth thickly covered with tiny green leaves. The lamps glowed, perched among the bric-a-brac, it was like sitting in a shop. Tommy's small hand, the fingers covered with little enamel and silver rings, began to crawl across the table towards me. Tommy's question was a jerk of the noose. The situation had its own characteristic hopeless mechanical structure. A lot of what Tommy said was true. She had been a surprise package. After I had despaired of communication this soft-voiced clever little Scot had managed to get through. For she was clever. She argued quite well, she remembered things, one had to keep one's wits sharp, there was even a pleasure in arguing with her about leaving her. There was even a sense in which the argument was, as she said, a surrogate for the parting, at least tonight. With her grammar school education and her extensive vocabulary and her sharp little mind she might have been somebody if the theatre had not done for her. She was gallant and intelligent, she tried to coerce me with her words, not with her tears. We did indeed understand each other and this was rare and now that we had given up the sex act I still enjoyed the word act with her, simply the unusual experience of communicating. Only nothing further followed from this. With relentless authority my own special personal aloneness was calling me away, my own pain was calling me into its privacy, out of this irrelevant scene of minor gratifications. I wanted now to clean the whole business off myself and be done with it. It had become an idle nonsense. And yet: just tonight and because I was so tired I could not say that I was not coming next Friday. The achievement was beyond me.