As Near as I Can Get (10 page)

She came back the next night, to my surprise, and it seemed to me, for a moment, that a small measure of tenderness was going to sweeten our relations but in the end it was much the same struggle as before. When she left on the following morning to resume, I subsequently learned, cohabitation with her second husband, though only for a few weeks, whom she had met casually in the street, she passed once more for me into the realm in which she had existed before her arrival, a realm of party references and pub gossip, though now amplified by occasional impersonal meetings, and in which she remained up to the melancholy end.

And for some reason, probably economic, I had to leave Rodney Street shortly afterwards and so Mrs Baillet was never more than a breathless but model landlady to me.

It was Charley Nelmes, the Baptist, who called Mary Spender a slut. Mary wanted to be an actress. At least, I heard her say so one day while I was drinking gin in the Rainbow Club and two girls were frisking lightly in
time to the beat booming from the juke box. These two smiled at each other, an intimate, collusive smile, that exchanged an awareness of sexual power, in the knowledge perhaps that my eyes, apparently fixed broodingly on the dark corner by the cloak-room, were helplessly tugged in their direction whenever a sharp swirl, centrifugally lifting their bell dresses (fashionable then) exposed a flash of leg above the knee.

‘Flash!' called a grinning street girl (this one a sturdy but still handsome woman at least in her mid-thirties) to her younger, harder and more brazen-looking friend when the obliging wind once suddenly, for an instant, displayed the wares of the latter's naked buttocks to the street.

‘I want to be actress.'

Delicate, delicate—delicate apprehension, assessment, appraisal, delicate association….

My mind, wrestling with its own reluctant relays, trying to prise out a delicate phrase that earlier that day had seemed exactly to delimit some minutely specific human activity, collapsed at the impact of these words, not
because
of their minimal content, but because of the soft, bubbling, beckoning good-humour of the voice in which they were uttered. Abandoning the struggle (the correct phrase ‘delicate discrimination' suddenly popped to the surface on the following afternoon when, while purchasing cigarettes, my glance rested on a roll of peppermints), I looked at the speaker. It was Mary Spender, whom I had seen before and she was with a hirsute, supercilious seeming man, whom I had never seen before nor ever did again. These two and the dancing girls (dancing on as the shining box, primed with coins, handed itself discs of frozen rhythm) and myself were the only ones, other than Maltese Henry, the lethargic barman, in the tiny subterranean bar of the ‘Rainbow' that summer afternoon.

Mary was a large-bosomed, good-natured,
scatterbrained
blonde whose ineligibility for any conceivable stage career was clear at first glance. Application, elocution,
empathy
,
memory and whatever other qualities are indispensable for holding an audience were obviously not available to the squirming, hebephrenic, giggling girl I saw cuddling herself against a complacent, bearded male. I watched her for a while, enchanted when one of her random movements cocked her head in such a way that our eyes met and she instantly and generously offered me a promissory wink.

After that, however, her companion began, less, I sensed, from genuine erotic hunger than from a narcissistic desire to show his effortless dominion over her, to caress and explore the girl's body with such ostentatious impropriety that even Mary began to show signs of reluctance and finally Maltese Henry told him laconically to ‘give it up', which, with a smile and a shrug of affected amusement, he did, shortly afterwards rising and beckoning Mary away with a jerk of his head. I sat on, getting rather warm and excited on the gin, waiting for—yes for Charley Nelmes who was supposed to be coming to take me to see someone who might give me a job, photographing people in squares and public places. Nelmes never came and I never got the job but lived for the next three months on two-hundred pounds unexpectedly inherited when an old, one-eyed aunt, who lived in South London and whom I had met only once, died of some sort of cancer. Instead, I wandered disconsolately out of the Rainbow at about half-past five, an hour and a half after Nelmes should have arrived, and saw some ivy growing round a steeple, all that was left of a church that an aeroplane had brought explosive from Germany to demolish.

While I was watching the ruined steeple, vaguely discontented with the breath of the old, non-kinetic, serious world that it introduced into the familiar glass and chromium and weaving throngs of Dynapolis, untoward movement on the pavement opposite attracted my attention and I saw Peter and Tommy Richards, drunker than I was, dancing unskilfully but conspicuously and a
policeman
urging them to cease before he was compelled to arrest them.

The two or three months on Aunt Ruth's two-hundred pounds was very pleasant, sun-warmed, leaf-shaded, in the aura of young girls on heat and young men dead to industry and striving, most of us, ultimately, unsuccessfully, to hoist ourselves up to the sphere of the thought of the world, where the current of change sweeps on and on, blowing the future through the stuffy living-room of the present.

I left Mike Rea's place again and took a large room with a kitchenette in Duck Street and this was the most agreeable dwelling place I ever had in those years. Something about Duck Street—it was near the park and there were two good pubs not far off. It was a dead-end street with a nursery school at the far end which ensured a steady supply of tiny, absurd children trickling up and down—Duck Street hung for me between the past of stability and personal and family growth and the future of annihilation or colonization of the continuum. Duck Street was benign, and I was just old enough and sufficiently often, by now, not at fever pitch to have some sense of my surroundings other than in terms of drink and girls. The Greek alphabet and some of the grammar, for example, yielded to application in a comfortable chair near the window of my
comfortable
first-floor room in Duck Street from which, between assaults on that intricate syntax, or after the declensions and the moods, I would see Dave and Rosemary arriving to attempt once more to implicate me in their failure to thwart the time-ghost and love long.

More than that lovely alphabet, whole, real Greek sentences, epigrams, apophthegms, assembled by real Ancient Greeks, in their stable world, and longer passages, painstakingly construed with cribs and dictionaries from the spidery promise of the original, became gradually accessible. Probably I never acquired more Greek than Shakespeare but the acquisition of that little, the mysterious metabolism of mind through the ages, supplied a not inconsiderable
part of the excitement and contentment of those months in Duck Street. True, there were parties as well, becoming something stronger after midnight sometimes, when the long, intoxicating talk would be suddenly deflected, perhaps by a girl yawning, quietly slipping off her dress and getting pseudo-sleepily into bed, back into the primary source. These were never the sort of orgies of erotic myth-literature with people plunging improbably into unadulterated voluptuousness but rather slow drifts into intimacy until finally, with the light out, three or four couples in the room would manifest, in sighs and more unorthodox respiratory sounds and those creaks and jingles of unco-operative material reality, the lineaments of both gratified and in the process of being gratified desire.

‘I want to be an actress.'

I think Mary must have spoken these same words to me on the occasion, about a month after I saw her in the Rainbow Club, when she became my girl. This was in the ‘George'. For an hour I had stood amongst the growing throng without seeing a familiar face or seeing a few faces that I knew by sight but none that I knew to address.

A strange sort of neurotic had attracted some attention. Flawlessly dressed in city clothing, he had hung his bowler on the bannister support, uttered a whistling chirp and, patting his bald spot with one hand and his waist-coated abdomen with the other, performed a compulsive little shuffle and slide in the centre of the floor. Mr Grieg, the bluff, tough, bespectacled manager, obviously recognizing an old nuisance, had started, thrown out one arm and called the man's name:

‘Now then, Mr Grant——'

But the performer, instantly folding his personality back into its disciplined, daytime manner, interrupted with crisp dignity.

‘Perfectly all right, old boy.'

Unfolding his
Times
he moved decorously to a seat, sat down and began to read. Hardly a minute later,
however
,
in fact the instant the last suspicious tendril of Grieg's glance had been dispersed by his conventional manner, Mr Grant had been on his feet again, chirping and sliding. This time Grieg had gone so far as to thud round from behind the bar and take the offender's arm but so
disconcerting
was the ingenious neurotic's discontinuity of manner that he once more succeeded in calming the irate manager and apparently in remorsefully transcending his abnormality. At the third offence, however, some three minutes later, he was ejected, offering very little resistance and somehow, although manifestly harmless, having failed to acquire any substantial degree of local support. It was as if, beyond the superficial absurdity of his behaviour, people sensed a mockery of their own conduct, as if, in the abrupt switch from conventional respectability to grotesque cavorting, and above all in the ease with which he effected the transition, lay a criticism of all human conduct.

But no such deeper implications seemed to have impressed themselves upon Mary whom, when I looked back along the bar after having watched the unhappy man being firmly but considerately escorted out by Grieg, I saw giggling as she held a half-pint of bitter to her lips. She raised her hand and made a corkscrew in the air for my benefit and I grinned at her.

A few pints later, Nelmes was with us, making bitter jokes but failing to subdue the spring-time mood that, partially resulting, no doubt, from a peculiarly poignant and satisfactory response to the excellent beer and also from the warmth and willingness of Mary's ample body against mine (for accessibility had by then been tacitly granted), had mysteriously overwhelmed me. Jock Taverner arrived, from some South American port, with his
sea-going
sweater and beard, and finally Peter came with Stoney Cohen, a huge, moon-faced cheerful doctor.
Football
fans, with rattles and harsh, Midland tongues, stormed noisily into the saloon but were absorbed in the general hubbub.

‘Wales—with its hills—with its coal——'

‘'im again!'

‘Three pints of bitter—sorry——'

‘Yo from Buh-ming'am?' grinned a red, rough face above a huge yellow rosette. Then, with a jerk of the head at the obese Jewish doctor, the football fan confided in an equally gritty countenance. ‘I think 'es from Buh-ming'am.'

‘I'm afraid not,' murmured Stoney politely, before
rolling
back with our bitters and continuing to tell pleasing and witty little anecdotes from his practice.

Later a political discussion developed. I had been sitting quietly for some time, watching, as often as I could through the throng, a chesty, suave man called ‘Swishki', or something pronounced in that way, whom I had once met and whom I had imagined (can't think why) to be in some way influential in the theatre. But now ‘Swishki' appeared to be in animated and familiar discussion with a short, sandy-haired layabout whom I knew to be a cadger and general waster and I found it difficult to reconcile my previous opinion with his present, loose, colloquial intimacy with this man. But I was only marginally wondering about Swishki while most of my mental energy was taken up with trying to decide whether I was more attracted by the notion of staying for another, and then another, and possibly yet another, drink or in cashing the bond of Mary's docility and removing her as swiftly as possible to Duck Street.

‘It wasn't, you know.'

Perhaps the soft interjection was not in exactly these terms. Perhaps the engaging, intent, intelligent face, starkly framed in lank, black hair, that turned smoothly and casually from the next table to challenge something that Jock had just said, did not employ the above words but some analogous form ‘It wasn't really like that' or ‘Not according to'
The
Times
or my own experience or general opinion. I forget as I have forgotten exactly what the
discussion
was about although remembering that it centred around the notion of ‘the symphony of Europe' At any
event, we all instantly recognized the authority, though none of us the person, of the interrupter. Politics, I have always thought, is the hack-work of art.

Ned Collins (as I subsequently learned the intruder into our group was called) swung round his chair and joined us and I watched with absorption the interaction between his persuasive, documented, stylistically-distinguished mode of argument and Jock's passionate assertiveness, through the general clumsiness of which, Jock's genuine political
passion
occasionally thrust a bloom of incisive analysis.

It was weeks before I discovered that Ned Collins was a journalist who had already, at the age of 25 or 26, established a substantial reputation for himself. On this occasion, I merely succumbed to the charm both of his intelligence and of his lunar beauty. Strange beauty the man had, a pale face, not lean even a little chubby but with sufficient modelling of the features to prevent any shapelessness, surrounded by a corona of black, shining hair, and his face wore, as its everyday garment, an expression of mild,
sardonic
amusement which was, at least to me, most attractive, so much so that I glanced covertly, once or twice, at Mary to see if she might be succumbing only to be reassured by the continued impartial distribution of her inane good-humour.

‘What's this then?' asked Mary, abruptly halting at the mouth of the underground station when, a little before eleven, our discussion and group having been dispersed just before closing time by the rumour of a party in Hammersmith which had seduced Jock, Peter and Stoney away, I had been eagerly leading her back to Duck Street.

‘What?' I asked, puzzled and disconcerted. ‘What do you mean?'

‘I don't go this way. Who's he then, the black-haired weirdy?'

‘I don't know,' I murmured, suddenly diminished by this apparent confirmation of my earlier suspicion.

From the pubs, the theatres, the cinemas and restaurants,
the stream of homeward-bound pleasure-seekers was thickening, the flow irritably divided, at the stairhead of the underground station, by the obstacle of a stationary, plump blonde and a gangling, scowling young man, Mary and I.