A Word Child (7 page)

‘I'll come.'

‘There you are! You see! You just like a skirmish!' She pronounced it ‘skairmish'.

‘No I don't.
Think
about what I said, will you. We've got to end this, Tommy. And it's no good talking about just being friends either. So long as we meet you'll go on loving me, and that's what's so hopeless, especially if you want a child. It's unfair to you.'

‘You say that to pretend it's altruism!'

‘What the hell does it matter what it is. We're finished. Now I'm going home.'

‘You can't go, it's not ten yet.'

‘If I stay I'll get angry and smash things. And you've got a cold.'

‘I haven't. Go then. I'll see you tomorrow… at Crystal's… won't I?'

Once a month Crystal invited Tommy to a brief drink at six o'clock on a Saturday.

‘Maybe. Don't you give that bloody cold to Crystal. If you find tomorrow morning — '

‘Oh you do nothing but give orders and lay down rules!'

‘Good night!'

I careered away down the stairs, pulling my mackintosh on as I went. Outside it was raining a small cold rain and the street lamps were spilling big blurry reflections onto the wet pavement. I set off walking north. I felt upset and alarmed. And tomorrow was Saturday. I was more connected with young Thomas than I had realized when I had decided, for such excellent reasons, to leave her. Had I ever considered marrying Tommy, stowing myself away as Tommy's husband, an equivalent of the suicide which I could not commit because of Crystal? No. Life does not end even with the most desperate of marriages, it prolongs itself drearily: new occasions for cruelty, a life of crime. I was not as bad as that. Besides, my bonds with Crystal made death by marriage equally unthinkable. Of course I had lied to Tommy at the start. I had implied too many encouraging half-truths, to pave the way to bed. I had got myself into a false position and, I suspected, would not be able to get out until I felt so frenzied by the pain of it that I would be prepared to use an axe. I knew soberly that I had not yet reached the axe-using stage. Meanwhile I could not afford to sympathize with Tommy: that awful withdrawal of sympathy, like our refusal to sympathize with the dying. But I would have to wait a little while yet before I could finally dispose of Thomasina Uhlmeister. There was moreover another factor. For reasons which I shall explain shortly I did not want to break with Tommy until I could see more clearly what Crystal felt about Arthur Fisch.

SATURDAY

‘I
SAY, Hilary, that Indian girl was here again last night.'

‘What was she wearing?'

‘A sort of long blue jacket and trousers with peacocks on.'

I had not noticed the peacocks, but it was clearly the same girl.

‘Did she ring the bell?'

‘No, she didn't. She didn't the other time either. She was just hanging about.'

‘But she said she wanted me?'

‘She did the other time, because I asked her if I could do anything.'

‘And this time?'

‘I said hello and she just smiled.'

‘Mysterious. Did you remember to buy those candles?'

‘Hell, no, I forgot again. I'm sorry.'

It was Saturday morning. I was in the kitchen ironing handkerchiefs. To avoid the torment of social life at the launderette I had bought a washing machine. I would not let Christopher use it. Of course Crystal would gladly have come over and washed and cleaned, and of course I would not let her. The flat was my private hell. It was only moderately filthy. Handkerchiefs were the only things which I ironed. Unironed handkerchiefs could lead to madness. Before that I had been browsing in a Danish dictionary over my toast and tea. (On week-days I breakfasted on two cups of tea. Toast was a week-end treat.) Before that I had attempted to shave, after having absently, while thinking about the past, squeezed all the shaving cream out into the basin and screwed the tube up into a twisted ball. It was now only nine-thirty. Sweet Christ help me until opening time.

Christopher had paid me some rent, not much, but it had improved our relations. He was sitting on the kitchen table swinging his legs and brushing his long golden hair, pausing every now and then to extract balls of glittering fuzz from the brush and drop them with care upon the floor. Brushing of hair always set my teeth on edge since experience at the orphanage but I said nothing because of the rent. We now, after the interlude recorded above, reverted to the sort of conversation we usually had on Saturdays. I had admired one of his mandalas and said he ought to have been a painter. He had idiotically taken this seriously and said yes perhaps he ought. I had told him he had not enough industry and self-discipline to make himself anything. He said with revolting humility that indeed he would never be a saint. I said hang saint, he would never do anything properly. He said how true, except live, which he implied I could not do. He said I was a typical anxiety-ridden product of a competitive society and ought to practise meditation to calm my nerves. I said I would rather be anxious than drug myself with a lot of false lying oriental mumbo-jumbo. He denied it was mumbo-jumbo. I said if it were not mumbo-jumbo how was it he had never been able to explain it to me in ordinary words.

‘It's beyond words.'

‘Pshaw!'

‘I mean, it's like an experience, not a sort of belief.'

‘What's it an experience of?'

‘It's like mind is everything.'

‘Is this electric iron mind and this handkerchief and this gas stove?'

‘Yes.'

‘All part of the same mind?'

‘Well, ultimately — '

‘So the mental and the physical are really one?'

‘Yes, you see — '

‘And the difference between one mind and another is merely apparent?'

‘Well, yes, and — '

‘So really nothing exists at all except one big mind?'

‘Yes, but it's — '

‘And you tell me that's not mumbo-jumbo?'

‘But it's not like ordinary abstract thought — '

‘I'll say. A man on the wireless last week was saying everything in the universe was determined in the first hundred seconds after the Big Bang. He was lucid by comparison.'

‘I know you dig concepts — '

‘There's nothing else to dig.'

‘But you see, the basis of all being is mental, I mean it's got to be, so you are sort of in all things right from the start. You see, I make that iron exist, I mean it looks different to a spider, doesn't it?'

‘But a spider is part of your mind too.'

‘Yes, of course, and what the spider sees is part of my mind and then I realize that I don't really exist at all as me, I'm really everything and I have to try to experience everything as me — '

‘I don't see why. Is this supposed to be moral? Why is it moral not to believe in a lot of separate things? Why is it moral only to believe in oneself? I thought morality was forgetting yourself and making careful distinctions and respecting the existence of other people.'

‘But this is forgetting yourself and when you realize you are everything then you love everything and you're good automatically — '

‘And even if we are all thoughts in the mind of God or whatever why should you be able to become God?'

‘What's stopping me? You see God isn't a big person, you see it isn't personal at all, that's the point.'

‘But we are persons.'

‘No, we're not, that's just the old Christian nonsense, personality is an illusion.'

‘Unless other people have definite structures they can't have definite rights. No wonder you don't want to vote. If nobody exists why bother.'

‘You see, Christianity gets it wrong because of a personal God, it's the most anti-religious idea ever. The idea of God looking at you makes you feel you're a little real thing, a nitty gritty, whereas you must think that you are God, that you're universal mind, you see it's just the other way round, it's the female principle, you see Christianity is such a male-oriented religion, it's all about father, that's why unisex is so important, you see we in the West with our Jewish father figure civilization, I mean — How did you get on with your father, Hilary?'

‘Fine.' Full fathom five my father lies, of his bones are coral made.

‘What did he do?'

‘He was a diver.'

‘A
diver
?'

The front door bell rang. I went to the door, stepping over the wreckage of the telephone. I wondered if it was the Indian girl.

It was Mick Ladderslow and Jimbo Davis, both carrying cushions. Mick was a burly chap with reddish hair and huge glowing drugged eyes. He had great prestige because he had once got as far as Afghanistan where he contracted jaundice and was returned to England at Her Majesty's expense.

He marched into the flat without the ceremony of words. Possibly he grunted. Jimbo was slim and wriggly and apologetic with a long-lashed gentle expression. He rarely spoke beyond murmurs of ‘yes … yes …', and confronted with human beings would drop in a bow, sagging a little at the knees, expressive of a sort of surprised respect. He now, whispering to me ‘Yes, yes, Hilary, hello, yes', took hold of my hand (he always did this) and drew it downwards in an intimate sort of way as if he were about to press it against his thigh, more like a holding of hands than a shaking of hands. I suspected him of being sorry for me. I did not mind this in Jimbo. The two boys and their cushions (I suppose they were making some kind of nest in there) disappeared with Christopher into Christopher's room, and I returned to my ironing.

The front door bell rang. I went to the door. I wondered if it was the Indian girl. It was the porter, who said that the rubbish chute had been cleared at considerable expense to the management and that I would not be able to imagine the filth some people thought fit to pour down it and did I know that plastic bags had been invented just for this purpose to prevent rubbish chutes from becoming jammed and stinking because people with no more sense and manners than pigs threw their potato peelings down them without even the benefit of a bit of newspaper? I replied with suitable spirit to this rhetorical question. The Saturday wrangle with the porter was mechanical and regular and today neither of us had our heart in it. I went back to my ironing, completed it, and began rather feebly to sweep the kitchen floor. The floor was coated with grease and needed washing, indeed scraping. I propelled a cluster of bread crumbs over the greasy surface. When opening time came I would be off to the pub, possibly to the bar at Sloane Square (the Liverpool Street one was closed at weekends), if I felt like riding the trains for a while, or eke to one of the locals, where I would spin out my drinking time, have a late sandwich and face the horrors of the afternoon. I could do my weekly shopping, buy a few tins and some sliced bread. Then in summer I often dozed in the park. In winter I might return to the Inner Circle, or eke go home and to bed and to sleep until the pubs opened again, a device which appalled Christopher who felt a genuine moral horror at this wilful waste of consciousness.

The front door bell rang. I went to the door. I wondered if it was the Indian girl. It was a strange thin young man with long straggly hair and an orange moustache, wearing faded jeans. I said, ‘You want Christopher?'

‘What?'

‘You want Christopher?'

‘Do I?' A comic.

‘Well make up your mind.'

‘What do you mean, make up your mind? Who is Christopher anyway?'

‘My lodger.'

‘What are we talking about?'

‘Good-bye,' I said, beginning to close the door, only the young man had put his foot in it.

‘Wait a mo, wait a mo. Are you Mr Burde?'

‘Yes.' Another mysterious person looking for me.

‘Well, just think. I'll let you guess who I am. Just guess.'

‘Look,' I said, ‘I don't like guessing games and I don't like people who put their foot in my door, it's a nasty habit. Either explain yourself or fuck off.'

‘Dear me, what naughty language! Now just think. Did you or did you not ring up yesterday to ask if somebody could come round to remove your telephone?'

‘Oh — why didn't you say so?'

‘I didn't have a chance, did I ? You were on about Christopher as soon as you opened the door. Hello. Are you Christopher?'

The telephone engineer greeted Christopher who had just emerged, opening a vista of Mick and Jimbo reclining.

‘My name's Len.'

‘He's the telephone engineer,' I explained.

‘Now, what's your problem. Bless me, look at that, it looks as if you've had the IRA in here, what a shambolic scene, whatever occurred?'

‘I pulled it out,' I said.

‘Pulled it out! I'll say you did. An unprovoked attack on a poor little defenceless telephone that was minding its own business and not harming anybody. The junction box busted, the handset smashed into little pieces. You realize you'll have to pay for all this, don't you? It's not your property you know. Kind old Mother Post Office only lends you these gadgets, my, my! And think of all the poor people wanting telephones. Wilful damage to a perfectly good up-to-the-minute handset, why it's a crime, makes me feel quite faint. Do you think I could have a cup of tea?'

I retired into my bedroom. By this time Mick and Jimbo had emerged from the nest. All four boys went into the kitchen and I heard animated voices and the clatter of crockery. They were at once a fraternity. Here at any rate class no longer existed. The Beatles, like Empedocles, had thrown all things about. At their age I was a fierce tormented solipsist. I lay down on my bed and wondered if I should try to sleep until they were open. By some miraculous retardation of the pace of the expanding universe it was not yet ten o'clock. So far so good, however. I had not yet pulled the curtains back and the bedside light was still on. I switched it off. I closed my eyes and an awful cinematograph show of events out of the past started up automatically. I tried as usual to preserve myself by thinking about Crystal the way some people with such problems think about the Virgin Mary. Only now the saving image did not rise alone, another rose with it. Arthur.

The front door bell rang. I got up and went to the door. I wondered if it was the Indian girl. It was Laura Impiatt.

This was unusual but not totally unprecedented. ‘Come in, Laura. The place is almost full but there's room for you.'

Laura was looking her most energetic and eccentric, her greyish hair streaming back and front onto her shoulders from under a beret which had been pulled down well over her ears. Beneath a voluminous grey cloak a tweed skirt reached her ankles. ‘I
say,
Hilary, it's
cold
out,
winter
has come. Oh it's
warm
in here, oh how
nice
!'

‘Come in. Unfortunately the only place where I can entertain you is my bedroom. The boys have jammed the sitting-room with furniture, there is no room for human beings.'

Laura followed me into my darkened bedroom. I switched on the light and kicked a lot of clothing under the bed and drew the crumpled coverlet up over the crumpled sheets and blankets. I felt no embarrassment. Why? Because I was depraved, saintly? Or because of some sort of merit, decency, calm, warmth of heart in Laura? I recalled Tommy's idea that Laura was ‘after me'. Nonsense.

‘Hilary, could we have some daylight? There is some you know.'

‘Not much here.' I pulled back the curtains and the grey light of the dark inner well sheeted the windows like gauze but did not enter. ‘Is it raining?'

‘No, rainy and cold but quite bright. Do turn off that lamp, it looks awful. May I put my cloak here? Who's chattermagging in the kitchen?'

‘Christopher, Mick, Jimbo and one Len, a telephone engineer.'

‘How
young
they are. It makes one feel ancient.'

‘Golden lads and lasses must like electricians come to dust. You however are eternally young. I love that swirling skirt. You look like Natasha Rostova just in from a brisk walk along the Nevsky Prospect.'

‘Silly
dear
Hilary.'

‘What a nice party on Thursday.'

‘Did you think so? I find Clifford Larr a bit depressing. We'd have had more fun by ourselves.'

‘Fun? What's that?'

‘Hilary, you're not to go off into one of your
things.
I know you want me to mother you, but I won't.'