As Near as I Can Get (25 page)

‘Why did you do that?' asked Edna harshly, and went off to comfort Mary.

‘I did it,' grimacing, I murmured in elaborate
clarification
to the empty room, ‘because I don't see why I shouldn't go and have a drink. I don't believe Mother is in any
condition
to be offended. I don't believe, predicate or not, that Mother “exists” any more. I believe it's the living that need reverence, not the dead. Do you understand now?'

After that I prowled restlessly about the room, smoking heavily, uneasily aware of some radical flaw in my case, and disinclined to locate it, until the two girls returned.

There was a bar on the train going back. Having failed to discover the lavatory at the end of the coach in which I had been sitting for the hour or so since leaving Bulham, the railway village, I had pushed open the unorthodox swinging doors leading into the next one and found myself in a shoddy and unconvincing replica of an old-fashioned inn. Bar counter, benches and tables, swinging lanterns, leaded windows with artificial whorls in them and a
barman
polishing glasses—all clicking along the track at sixty miles an hour. Still—I glanced at the clock and found that I was fifteen minutes overdue for a legal pint and promptly ordered one. A third of it sloshed over the side as we rumbled over points and I conveyed the remainder to one of the tables and sat down.

In a way I had been glad when Edna and Mary had begun to get chummy. No, that isn't right, I wasn't glad that they were getting on well together but that I was being progressively released, by contemplating their developing amity, from something oppressive. Not sexual (say, a
belated
incestuous regret that I had chosen the wrong sister as a child), nothing like that—and I hate the word ‘spiritual'—but I had kept getting strange feelings about Mary, wanting to comfort her, to hold her gently, to clasp her knees, all sorts of disconcerting but appallingly compelling impulses and twice, looking at her fresh, nice face, when she was occupied and didn't know I was observing her, I literally felt tears start into my eyes.

But then, on Sunday, the girls started talking about
homes and husbands and Edna—God! Couldn't Mary sense, see, understand?—Edna, in the most glaringly vulgar
nouveau
riche
way kept talking about Sir Philip's dinner party and ‘Our friends, the Ditheringhams' and the fine ‘class of people' she knew and Cannes and God—anyway, watching Mary actually egging her on I had writhed
mentally.

Looking back, I see other possible interpretations (after all Mary, like all girls, had an instinct for glamour and her family thing would have kept her from my own type of merciless, egoistic analysis), but at the time I took the opportunity to escape mentally from the disturbing
tenderness
I had been feeling for Mary, and, on the Monday, physically from Hardiman's Hay. I told them, not quite accurately since I could, probably, have managed a couple more days, that I was imperilling my job and Mary let me go without a word.

And I felt relieved in the train and I felt cheerful after the first, and even exultant after the second, pint of
railway
bitter (flat). It seemed to me suddenly that I had a real, authentic, full life to go back to with friends and a home (Mrs Wick's was, in fact, the most homelike
boarding
house I had lived in) and, generally, a familiar,
gratifying
—well—life.

Then I thought of Lt Flindle. Now I am sure, in this case, I had never once thought of this episode since it had occurred. In fact, I had probably deliberately, with that involuntary, but incomparably more efficient, deliberation of the subconscious over the conscious mind, buried the humiliating memory. And yet, sitting there, in that galloping tavern, just starting on a third cheery pint and with nothing remotely relevant in the neighbourhood it came back to me as vividly as daylight. Of course, the recent past, back to the village, mother's death, family reunion and so forth probably provided appropriate enough stimuli but what did my concealed mind intend by presenting me with that poignant memory just then? What, in fact, it
produced
?
Mere renewed, and perhaps reinforced, restlessness and distress? Something better, I think—it was another of those irritably suppressed pleas for something better which the next pint and the easy thought about tomorrow's
commitments
so easily thwart. Until, at least, you end up in a monastery.

Anyway, I saw the wartime afternoon, a fine one in spring and there was mother hanging out a few bits of washing (she never managed the authoritative spread of flapping laundry that other women seem to produce), and me snapping a clothes peg and wondering how to make a rubber-band pistol out of it, when the young officer rolled up in a taxi to the next cottage.

The Flindles, who had only been our neighbours for a year or two, were market gardeners and colloquial sort of people but I suppose they must have scraped to give their son an education and he was admittedly, at least so the impression made on childish eyes assures me, physically splendid and he got a commission. And there he was, beating irritably on the door of the secured cottage, (the Flindles had gone away for a few days and I suppose he had been granted an unexpected leave), resplendant in his varnished belt and trim uniform and peaked cap. Mother, somewhat thoughtfully, watched him finish knocking, walk back and forth, peering and poking around and then start over in our direction. It can't have been as shocking as I remember it but—

‘Have you seen my parents, Mrs Peebles?' he asked, somewhat gruffly.

‘Well—they're away,' murmured Mother.

Of course, she should have explained clearly and concisely the situation, should, in fact, have called him over and explained it when she had seen him arrive, but it wasn't in Mother to do so. She hung up a torn stocking and then, the subaltern's almost palpable air of continued interrogation reaching even her, murmured that she didn't think they were coming back until tomorrow night.

‘But my leave ends then!'

‘Yes, well that's what they said.'

He stared at her rather hard for a moment and then could not forbear urging:

‘Look, didn't you see me knocking—I mean, if you knew—now my taxi's gone!'

‘Yes, well they're away I'm afraid,' Mother rather stiffly and not very helpfully, reiterated.

I had been standing some ten feet away, gazing at the splendid officer and now I saw him lick his lips in irritable bewilderment and then begin:

‘Well when you see them—oh never mind, I'll
telephone
.'

With which he turned and started away towards the road. As he passed me, close enough for me to hear, and not prepared to restrain his disgust for the sake of a child, he murmured angrily and distinctly, ‘Potty old bitch!' and strode on leaving me in the grip of inexplicable anguish. As Mother, after following the lieutenant's progress to the end of the garden, began to peg clothes again, I crouched down, with a sort of hollow, desperate need to conceal my distress, and pretended to be still engrossed with my clothes pegs. But I felt wretched and disillusioned, wanting both to kill the brute who had insulted Mother and to reproach her bitterly for her foolishness. Until then she had just been ‘Mother' and now suddenly she had been transformed by a thoughtless, and not far from legitimate,
rebuke
into a vacant, ineffectual woman who could be treated contemptuously by anyone. Before long, I crept into the house and cried passionately.

I remember noting, as I took an initial pull at my third pint, that the force of that childhood incident was still strong enough to make my face and neck prickly with
retrospective
embarrassment. I no longer felt bold, nor cheered by the thought of my life in London (a furnished room and some bar-fly acquaintances). ‘I don't know', I thought, as we rocked on towards the metropolis and the beer sloshed
back and forth in my glass, ‘this or that—how to live—appropriately….'

And now, in perverse conclusion, I will introduce myself. My name is Alan Vauxhall Peebles and the things that you have been reading about occurred not many but some years ago when I sought to be a poet. Since then I have married Edie and we have two little girls and in the day I go to a great glass tower and dictate letters and at night I come home and romp and squeal with Tibby and fat little Mabby or talk mortgages with Edie. And this is living. Sometimes I lean from my window in the evening and see the current dancing past and wonder if this is really the family brook as I usually manage to convince myself and whether my home, metaphorically, is really a sufficiently sturdy and soundly-built dwelling to endure beside that dangerous, leaping torrent. But I must stay here now, with my three women, until the foundations quake, if they are going to fail, or some incalculable force from this changing and alarming landscape procures final ruin.

This, I say, is my life and if my boyhood years of word-intoxication bred no treasure for the libraries, it at least generated that uneasy confidence in my choice that I have gained as a result of having inspected those of many others. If now I spend some part of my free time divorced from my family by study walls it is not (well—not predominantly) because of some lingering heat from youthful fires but because—

It is because there was a rhythm, perhaps merely a tremor, of meaning in those desperate years, which I have never seen expressed. When I read books, novels, memoirs, studies, I wonder how, using the methods these authors use, they would have evoked my early life. Is their time (their
classical sequence and narrative direction) the ‘time' I knew, permanent suspense, endless eventfulness or one long, incomplete event in which the movements, the social developments, the news, the very physical countenance of the world, while in permanent motion, seemed not to exist in time, the linear time of their works, but rather to seethe like boiling soup, to rap out a sequence of ideas like a ticker machine for a message that remained a riddle. In this medium, a sudden perspective, of taxis and birds, of a bombed, peeling building, a neon-lit street late at night, stilts of sunlight striding on the Thames, the milling shoppers in Oxford Street at noon, contained as much development, as much plot, as much human interest as the apparently arbitrary configurations of our lives.

Isolated things—which seem to have a meaning and no meaning, to be an essential part of my life but not part of a story—and yet if I strive to the utmost in self-analysis, propel myself as near as I can get to those incandescent moments which seem somehow to have been the chief illumination of my youth, I fancy I can isolate a common element. I will call it wonder. Perhaps this wonder is basically general, the residual wonder which must subsist in every mind at the condition of being human, of being a vulnerable, two-legged, thinking animal prowling (now mechanically assisted) across a denser globe whirling through emptiness. Stars and galaxies flash in the unthinkable remoteness of this medium. Beneath us matter merges into a pulse of energy and above into featureless repetition. And floating, as it were suspended, in these inexplicable reaches of the micro and macroscopic worlds, we have to earn a living and follow politics and participate in society.

Perhaps that is why this essential, recurrent wonder, normally tramelled and obscured in the mesh of everyday life, sometimes infuses some familiar and commonplace thing which, for a moment, glows with the vivid radiance of cosmic significance. And then someone honks irritably on his horn, the baby cries or the boss comes into the office
and life sinks once more into routine. But they are waiting, all the time, the thoughts that ignite wonder, ready to remind one again of the ultimate reward of human life, the mystery and splendour of consciousness.