As Near as I Can Get (23 page)

But in spite of these compelling, indeed irrefutable, considerations, stronger and stronger waves of self-pity surged up within me. I had nothing, no home or only a furnished room, no family or only an estranged one (not true for I corresponded intermittently with mother and saw Mary occasionally), no wife and now again no girl, an evil job (in fact, helping to print a satirical and, initially, quite successful, broadsheet for a tolerant and generous drinking acquaintance, I was better off in this respect than I had ever been before) and no real friends. Suddenly, I felt my heart thump as a little thrill of authentic panic ran through me. I was getting old! In three more years I would be thirty. For seven years—God!—yes actually, for seven long years, I had been in London! But—how—where had they gone? The offices, the factories, the railway station and the other places where I had earned my living wage passed through my mind, and the pubs and the furnished rooms and the girls and boys I had known tumbled after them. Seven years? Had these glancing impressions devoured seven long years? Of course, I wasn't
old
—I knew that, but I was no longer, in the absolute sense, young, right at the
beginning,
with unlimited possibilities. And what had I done? Three little lyrics, unnoticed by all but a few friends (Peter had liked them immensely), in an amateurish little
periodical
that had folded on its fourth number—that was the total, the entire real achievement of those—seven? Really seven long years?

It was probably a sudden fervent appreciation of
Weedon'
s friendship, intensified by these dismal reflections, that, after we had been issued with our two cups of foaming coffee, made me ask, more to resume contact than from any keen interest in the matter:

‘Who's that Ricky?'

Weedon had been gazing, with his dispassionately intent,
faintly wondering, expression, at two American sailors, stretched hypotenuse-wise in their seats and at the two pretty, tarty girls with them, but turned with a quick,
mischievous
smile, indicating that he considered the question potentially productive of fun.

‘Ricky? At the Cambridge, do you mean?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ricky is Richard Pringle, the fourth son of Lord Pringle, the only male suffragette.'

At this level of gossip and technique, Weedon's world was full of absurdities, paradoxes, irrationalisms which
continually
challenged one's more trivial assumptions. He knew the scandalous and ludicrous truth behind this fashionable wedding or that solemn undertaking and was, indeed, so adept at overturning the conventional view of things as to give the impression, sometimes, of inhabiting a world in which the psychological dynamics were either arbitrary or deranged. If everyone else knew from the Press that, say, the foreign ministers of two unfriendly powers had met to
reconcile
outstanding national differences, Weedon, with a good deal of probability, as the uneasy facts that later trickled out would confirm, was able to assure you that they had both been ‘interested' in one of the page boys of the Geneva hotel at which they were both staying and that, in fact, the loftier grounds for their encounter had only been hastily discerned by their respective governments after less statesmanlike motives had brought them frantically together. So little did conventional motivations figure in Weedon's everyday outlook that it was surprising to find that he was orthodox, and even conservative, in more intellectual matters. Philosophically, he was, I suppose, a liberal-atheist, softened by a certain sybaritism, of a nineteenth century kind, accepting conventional intellectual categories and classic historical and social causality. I often wondered at the contrast between his keen eye for the irrational, for the false, but time-hallowed, assumption, in mundane affairs and yet his rather unimaginative
weltanschauung
.

Now I looked at his eyes glowing with enthusiasm for the ridiculous, his rather heavy underlip almost perceptibly trembling on the brink of anecdote, and his charred teeth bared by a broad grin. Half-resentfully I surrendered to the invitation and to the necessity, which he seemed
effortlessly
able to enforce, of asking absurd and undignified questions.

‘What do you mean—a male suffragette?'

‘He was, in actual fact, a male suffragette.'

And Weedon related a grotesque and, if neglected by most historians of the period, possibly authentic episode concluding with an account of how one of a number of women, arrested for militant demonstrations somewhere in London, had proved, at the police station, to be none other than Lord Pringle, clad in a skirt and shawl.

‘What—do you mean he was a transvestite?'

‘No. He just wanted to identify himself with the cause.'

‘And he managed to get a peerage?'

‘He got that earlier, for devaluing the rupee.'

Partly dutifully and partly because Weedon's ingenuous enthusiasm was infectious, I laughed, but he was, I sensed, aware of my underlying reserve. Often his accounts reduced me to helpless laughter but, at that moment, I found his method essentially offensive. If I wanted to know anything about Ricky, I wanted to know it at a more—a more adult level. I wanted to know something that could be significantly related to the cheerful, non-dancing, patrician mascot of the Cambridge whose
underlying
sadness had to be inferred from his apparently having nothing better to occupy his evenings than watching alien (surely we must have been to him) juveniles jiving.

We fell silent again, I mentally tracing, with growing dismay, the course Pete and Mike were at that moment presumably taking across London to the snug attic overlooking Regents Park.

‘Jane used to come here,' said Weedon meditatively.

Although the remark was sufficiently introspective to
require
no response, and although I was deriving a sort of compulsive, masochistic satisfaction from ever more vivid imaginary evocations of the relations between Pete and her brainless new consort, Weedon's words set up a small, reluctant eddy in my mental flow which ultimately forced me to ask, ‘What?'.

‘I said, Jane used to come here.'

He smiled at me, a shade sadly now, the high spirits abated.

‘Jane who?'

‘Jane Paget—I don't think you knew her.'

I looked at him, wondering whether to confess that I had known Jane, and thus risk being diverted from my glum, but somehow satisfying, brooding, or simply to murmur something deflective.

‘Yes, I did,' inevitably, after another pause, I admitted. ‘Jane—how is she?'

‘Jane?' asked Weedon, more briskly and apparently with some surprise.

‘Do you see her?'

‘I
did
.'

It had happened, according to Weedon, more than a year ago. At some party, Jane had been diverting those around her with her customary allegations of the treachery and faithlessness of everyone she had ever known, concluding with the resolution to ‘end it all' on that very evening. The more susceptible in her circle of hearers had been dissuaded, when she had stalked resolutely from the room, from following and reasoning with her by the more experienced ones who had been able to assure them that it would have been any other behaviour on Jane's part which would have been uncharacteristic to the point of inviting alarm. And the party had gone on until, lurching into an upstairs bedroom in search of privacy some hours later, a couple had found Jane motionless on the bed, an empty phial that had contained her hostess's months supply of barbiturates beside her.

‘She killed herself?'

‘Yes,' Weedon uttered the monosyllable with a heavy, slightly reproachful intonation. He looked at me hard, with a faintly-challenging smile as if inviting me to ask, as I did:

‘Why?'

But then the expression deceitfully changed and, with a sigh, he uttered his characteristic ‘Well….'

A moment later, he offered tentatively, ‘She was always threatening to.'

‘I thought they were the ones who didn't.'

‘I know.'

It may have been self-defensively but it was months later before I suddenly remembered a possibly relevant
episode
in my own brief association with Jane Paget. Then I remember thinking, with a queer little stab almost of pride, ‘I wonder if
I
had anything to do with it' as I recalled the way I had greeted Jane on the first of the two nights we had spent together. I had said something facetious, stupidly facetious, like ‘I could never love you, Jane'. Could that have been one of the few authentic pricks from which she had fashioned a cactus world that it was better to get out of? However, although I could make this seem logically plausible I was unable to feel it, and this was mainly, I suppose, because it would have required a good deal more confidence in my personality and influence than my always depleted self-confidence could supply. But it was also
because
, in spite of the fact that when I left Weedon that evening, to wait in a sudden shower for a number 89 bus and then to swish home to Crawley Green past the shops and offices and glistening pavements, I deliberately assembled from the melancholy elements of the evening a sombre, romanticized cautionary tale, the apex of which (the first of us to go, symbolizing the end of an epoch) was Jane's suicide, but which also embraced Ricky and his
eccentric
father, the couples spinning in the Cambridge,
Weedon's
corrupt, benign intelligence, and, still keenest of all,
the wordless Pete's oblivious raptures in the arms of the scowling Mike, in spite of this—in a sense I didn't believe in Jane's death at all.

Gone? She would turn up again, in some pub, at some party—they always did. People ‘died' for a month or a year and then you met them again and found that they had been in existence all along, as you had. You couldn't contract out, not of the nuclear age, not of the mid-twentieth
century,
not of the great jive session round the crater, for it was not taking place in time at all. At a certain moment in the early summer of 1945 the world had stopped and we who had been living since then really inhabited a hiatus in history. At some crucial moment to come, the thing might start up again, and then men and women could die once more and self-slaughter have some meaning. Until then….

You are here, Jane, here in the bar of the ‘Starling',
waiting
for Otterley to come in so that you can complain about what Nadia Grunwald just said—here as we are all here. After all, to escape, there must be something to escape from. And what could that be but—the future?

I recall the slender shoot of annoyance that, before sternly trampling it under, I fleetingly detected thrusting its head above the surface of my genuine distress when I learned of mother's death.

‘Telegram for you, Mr Peebles. I'm putting it under the door', enunciated Mrs Wick, my landlady. Mrs Wick, who was kindly but remote and somewhat forbiddingly
valetudinarian
(from arthritis), articulated her sentences with deliberation, as if consistently doubtful of her hearer's ability to understand anything. I recall the grave, measured fall of her words, never conveying other than the most
banal or trivial thought: ‘I'm—putting it—under—the door', ‘Could I—have—a—moment—of your—time?', ‘I fear—the bathroom—light—was again—left—burning'. But now I also remember that, while originally (because of benign smiles, talk of charities, loans of small sums, etc.) crediting her with, and seemingly having since accepted as an authentic endowment, a kindly disposition, strong, almost violent, opposition testimony was at the time
supplied
by someone who should have been in a position to know.

This was Carol, the Irish girl who came in daily to keep the house, make beds and so forth, and with whom I had a verbally uninhibited, but physically immaculate,
relationship
.

‘What did'je do, last night?' Carol, always carefully knocking before being invited in, would unceremoniously demand. Then, carrying the vacuum cleaner to the centre of the room, and without giving me time to recall that she must have been thinking of a date I had mentioned but which had been subsequently cancelled, she would face me with an intent, quizzical look and ask, ‘Did'je do her?'

‘No.'

‘Why not? I thought you was going to? Wouldn't she have it—or what?'

Then, after another searching, but not obviously immodest or provocative look, she would busy herself furiously with the cleaner, perhaps muttering a moment later:

‘Sure, I don't think you're any good at all.'

I had assumed that Carol had a congenial relationship with her employer. She always seemed to have time for a chat, with me or the milkman or one of the other lodgers, was neither censoriously addressed, nor, as far as I could judge, overworked and certainly never evinced any real sign of discontent. It was with considerable surprise, therefore, that I heard her refer, quite casually, one day, to ‘the old devil'.

‘What old devil?'

‘What old devil! Herself—Mrs Wick.'

‘She's not an old devil.'

Carol, taking refuge in eloquent silence, dusted madly for a few moments until her simmering indignation could no longer be denied speech. Then she hurried over to me, admonitory finger raised: ‘Do you know what she is, then?'

From the torrential indictment that filled the next ten or fifteen minutes and which incorporated such relatively venial items as Mrs Wick's failure, on the alleged grounds of economy to replace a damaged broom for a period of several weeks, only one allegation seemed to me to be immediately telling: Carol's wage. This did seem low.
I
earned less than the national average and she got less than half of that. How could she live? But, in fact, I did a bit of checking up with acquaintances and found that, while absurdly low for the hours and amount of sheer physical energy expended, Carol was apparently getting about the average for her work. Still, her venom depressed me. It seemed disheartening to find all this complexity and malevolence beneath what had seemed a simple and candid relationship. And actually I don't believe Mrs Wick was, mean or
tyrannical
—a bit neglectful, perhaps, from age and physical debility, but, essentially, a kindly old woman. Nor was Carol really malicious but more—histrionic perhaps—
anyway
….

‘I'm putting it under the door,' came Mrs Wick's
startling
(I had been standing at the window gazing down at the green board over the paint shop and meditating) announcement, causing me to whirl, almost guiltily, to see the door still reassuringly shut and the little yellow envelope projecting into the room.

Hyperglycaemic coma—anyone but mother—what with the strict medical instructions and….

Instead of going next door to Mrs Flindle's cottage and phoning the doctor, mother, when she had felt the first,
premonitory symptoms, which, God knows, as Dr Regan subsequently declared, she had been emphatically enough instructed to recognize, had apparently simply gone to bed with a hot water bottle (another thing she had been warned against). She did not appear, somewhat strangely, since it is apparently a normal manifestation of the condition, to have vomited but simply to have lapsed into an ultimately fatal coma, her blood saturated with sugar, and Mrs Flindle, calling for some reason the following morning, had found her dead.

When Mary had first told me, some years before, that mother had developed diabetes, we had exchanged guarded forebodings, but Mary, having already tentatively sounded mother, rejected any suggestion of moving her, even as much closer to qualified attention as the mile into the village. Well, she had apparently not contracted the worst sort of diabetes and should, with just a little care and self-
responsibility
, have been able to treat herself with insulin injections and so forth, as thousands of other diabetics successfully do.

Mother? Had I believed that? So characteristic was her final folly that my vengeful conscience has never since allowed me to maintain it. And yet—I suppose I substituted (after all Mary did too) hope for conviction. Mother—in a dream all her life—perhaps, truer, a daze. In fact, she wasn't very bright and when I think of Mary, Edna and I, all of us at least normally alert citizens and compare us with mother, I feel that we must either have received our relative mental vigour from father, bombed to death at the beginning of the war when he was just beginning to get on as a commercial traveller, or that mother must have been a sort of missing link in her own family. She listened to the wireless; she mildly revered the royal family. She accepted whatever came along.

But, after I had opened the envelope and noted the brief message, and after a swift, and more swiftly dismissed pang of dismay at the destruction of my plans (nothing important
—a dinner that evening at Weedon's flat; a date with Edie), the images of mother that, with poignant clarity, suddenly dazzled me were quite unlike the above objective reflections.

I walked over to the wardrobe, rested my head on it and, three or four years old again, could almost feel the sunny flags of the kitchen floor on which I was playing with some mercury, the breeze flowing through the open doors and hear mother's casually affectionate voice saying, as her hand suspended the plump strawberry over my head, ‘Open your mouth'. Scene after scene, moment after moment, walks, with the three of us dancing around her, across to Spiller's farm, shopping expeditions to the village, evenings in the parlour with a log fire smouldering and smoking, flared and sank in my mind, but my thoughts recurred again and again to the kitchen and the
strawberry.

‘Damn!' I thought, trying to convert some of my burden of guilt and remorse into contempt for people unlike mother, ‘she was all right. She may not have been—terribly exciting, but she was all right. She wasn't, anyway, obsessed with things, with position, with cars and objects and acquiring things. She was just a decent country—damn!'

I couldn't stop crying. Whenever I thought I'd calmed down and blinked unsteadily out of the window, a new paroxysm began and shook me as if from without. I don't think I'd shed tears for a decade, and I suppose there was something cumulative about my hysteria. ‘Be so good,' I
remember
urging myself, trying to heap against my
tumultuous
grief random and intentionally mannered injunctions, ‘as to master yourself! Kindly take thought. Practise a little reserve. Retain sufficient—Damn!—oh, Damn!'

In the train, I sat opposite a closely-cropped young man of about my own age, almost albino-blond and with an oval head, who stared at me unblinkingly. After several times attempting, by means of stern, protracted return glances, to discourage this scrutiny and failing, I suddenly
felt an intense and, since it was quite disproportionate to the offence, irrational loathing for the stranger and an impulse to choke him. Without actually carrying me sufficiently beyond the frontiers of sanity to threaten implementation of the desire, the feeling was nonetheless strong enough to drive me out of the compartment for a smoke by the door of the toilet. Then I felt very calm and reflective and I think—I think….

Since I know now that the girl friend I then had was destined to become my wife, that Messrs. Multiboard Ltd. (plastic-bonded partitioning material), who then had a lethargic order clerk would later see the same face behind one of their junior executive's desks, it is easy to allege that, as I stood for half an hour or so of the three hour journey in the draughty corridor, I was consciously taking stock, concluding a period of my life. And yet I think there is some truth in it. Edie was never just another girl friend. There was a tacit acceptance of at least a potentially more durable relationship in our meetings even then.

As for the office—to my initial astonishment and subsequent shame and rage (which even then were discerned by a dispassionate little accountant in my mind to be a trifle forced) I had realized, about an hour after it had happened, that the lingering and seemingly aimless session, neither chat nor interview, which the Sales Manager had unexpectedly initiated after a chance corridor meeting with ‘Settling in, Peebles? Happy with us?', would bear no other interpretation than that of an attempt to prospect me for possible promotion.

Even as I scornfully recurred to the notion in the days that followed (becoming ‘part of Multiboard'! Me!) all sorts of treasonable and intrusive little side reflections flickered about the idea. It was true, wasn't it, that I was getting on a bit to be always doing the humblest job everywhere? Rubbish, you're a poet! Am I? Of course! And a wife and kids? Who wants a wife and kids, you ass! Not a bad firm, I suppose—What? A damned, great, glossy
commercial horror! Jackson, personnel chap, isn't too bad—got a beard….

It was, perhaps, anticipation of my imminent surrender, and a preparatory attempt to bolster my humility, that made me, standing in the corridor watching the little flooded fields of the barren, wintry countryside, here relatively unspoiled, slip by, recall once again my visit, years before, to Louise's home at Copse End, a far, western residential suburb of London.

You had to go, beyond the last underground station, a couple of miles on a bus, past playing-fields and rows of mellow mansions. And this I had done. But although, laying in bed the night before yearning for Louise, who, the night before that, had become my mistress, knowing that it would normally be five days before I could see her again, the novel idea of visiting her at home had seemed like
inspiration,
now, as I descended from the bus at the top of a little rise of trees and open ground, misgivings arose.

It was quiet. It seemed a long way from the neon howl of the West End, from the only districts, having been in London at that time less than a year, that I knew.

The clean, corruscating pavements, tangles of willows glimpsed through chinks in board fences, broad, empty streets, substantial, weathered houses intimated standards and patterns of behaviour that perhaps, that probably, I had never assimilated. Could one just come barging out to someone's home in this way? Unwillingly, I recognized that my doubt and discomfiture stemmed from class feeling. Louise was—Louise, my girl, now my mistress, and if we but infrequently ‘spoke the same language', at least we shared the same emotionally-conditioned silences—but her family? True, according to Louise they knew about me and, at least, did not disapprove but what would they be like? What cryptic values, by which they would be silently
judging
me, did they embody?

For the first time, walking down that long, arboreal, residential street, I saw my own family exclusively in
terms of class and, ruefully, murmured ‘lower middle—if not lower, lower middle', worse still, I felt a slight spurt of gratification at the thought of Uncle Edward, who owned a small spinning mill, ‘middle middle—perhaps even upper middle middle'. Misgivings about my clothes, hairstyle, accent, place of residence (the Southampton Road! God!) and, indeed, almost every objective fact about me, had so mangled my nerves that, by the time I turned into Mayhew Street, only the recognition that the visit had become a matter of prestige and also a still potent, if somewhat intimidated, longing to see Louise, prevented me from going back.

However, Mayhew Street itself was something of a relief. The houses were smaller and newer and did not speak so unequivocally of leisure and tradition, of opinions and the channels of power by which these could be implemented. They were grander, certainly, than the Southampton Road, or Victoria or the village, but not as intimidating as the earlier mansions. And so I marched round the little, more ornamental than practical, drive (into which, nevertheless, a medium-sized car had been jammed) and rang the
doorbell.

I have read that afternoon over and over again in my mind trying to understand how I consistently misinterpreted it at the time. For instance, how did we get past the initial encounter? I rang the bell and Mrs Petheridge opened the door.

‘Yes?'

‘Good afternoon, I'm Alan.'

‘Alan?'

‘Alan Peebles. I wondered if Louise was in?'

‘Louise? I'm afraid she's not. Was she expecting you?'

‘No, I—I just thought I'd—I might call in——'

‘Louise is away for the week-end. She's gone to—you'd better come in, Mr er——'