As Near as I Can Get (7 page)

That was the first time I saw Vanessa. The second time, two or three days later, in the same bar, I not only saw her but addressed her (she was alone), not only addressed her, but chatted with her, later walked with her, held her hand, under laburnum and wistaria, and finally, in the mouth of the narrow footpath or defile between buildings, a little way from the Redfern Hostel in which she was
living
, held her lightly-clad body against mine, stroked her shoulder, arm and back and felt her lipsticked lips against my own thin, dry ones.

The three tight-trousered, bare-armed athletes who had seemed, on the first evening, such a formidable obstacle to any prospect of an intimate acquaintance with the girl, were vanquished as much by the benign, patronizing tone
as by her words when, in response to my cautious query, she replied:

‘Oh them? Oh, they’re just—just good Joes. American boys are terribly immature.’

In a district rich in pretty girls Vanessa still exacted attention. Giddy with pride, I stumbled after her into cheerful, buzzing bar-rooms, covertly noticing the way the blazered swains of the local play-set followed her with their glance even while ostensibly maintaining jocular
interchanges
amongst themselves. And the girls paid her the tribute of that long look of critical appraisal, which
inevitably
signifies admiration.

She let me take her living hand. She permitted me, under the green nets of the lamp-lit trees, to encircle her supple waist with a trembling arm. We walked, she no longer noticing things and I aware of one thing only, the miracle of her yielding presence at my side.

Soon we were meeting daily, first gazing, in pitiable vulnerability, into each other’s faces and then, with a gasp of secured reassurance, falling into each other’s arms. When we were apart, I chucking mail-bags into reeking goods cars and Vanessa visiting the Dunots, whisky exporters associated with her father’s business (‘He’s just an
American
business man, a small one….’) in Topeka, or
performing
some other social obligation, we thought about each other. At first, I could not get over being incredulous, could not convince myself, without endlessly recurring to the fact in the attempt to assimilate its extraordinary truth, that it had happened, that I was allowed to be in love with her and that she loved me, that the sweetness of her youth and health belonged in my arms. I thought of the end of our first evening together. Near the hostel in which she was staying was a narrow passage or right of way between buildings. In the mouth of this defile, under the summer moon, we had stopped to stay good night and, as I had gazed down at her white face, she had suddenly smiled happily. I placed my two palms on her waist and
drew the girl towards me and when we kissed the feel of her warm, slightly-clad body against mine, the smell of her faintly-perfumed body, the warmth of the summer night had blended in my mind into such a powerful impression that when I had tried to speak her name, the word had emerged as a sob.

At work, during our fairly regular, if unofficial, breaks for a smoke, I would retire, with my newly-lit fag, as far as possible from my grunting and faintly-hostile fellow-workers, to sit on a barrow in the hissing station and think about Vanessa and wonder if I could somehow cease to be a porter in a railway station and live with her.
Instead
of my customary sense of superiority in the
purposeful
lowliness of my position and affected scorn for the glamorous voyagers departing for leisurely holidays in
unspoiled
parts, I began cravenly in my mind to cadge a place amongst them for a dark, ‘hauntingly-lovely’ girl and a tall, ‘romantic looking’ youth who were plainly ‘so much in love’.

The Dunots went away to Cannes and left us, or rather left Vanessa, the key to their small, chic mews flat. She had been supposed to accompany them but had written and obtained, on the improbable, but apparently compelling, grounds of a fictitious opportunity to take a summer course in ‘gliding’, parental authority for remaining in England. I moved, temporarily as it turned out, out of Mike Rea’s quarters above the street market in the Southampton Road and Vanessa and I lived in the Dunot’s maisonnette
together
for six weeks.

‘Seen the f—— rota?’

‘Cor!’

‘Eva Constance—that’s her! Over by the bookstall—the blonde tart!’

‘You on late shift this week?’

‘’Oo? Never ’eard of ’er.’

‘The singer—the—don’t you know nothing?’

‘I know that Lofty’s gonna get a thick ear if ’e don’t do something about that rota. My missus’ll give it ’im.’

The tanks were massing again at some disputed frontier. The distinguished Swedes and Indians were off again to arbitrate, to pump a little verbal lubricant into the jagged spaces, inhabited by Earth’s population, between the iron ideologies.

‘Although the President remained in Washington today, cancelling an official visit, it was denied that this was in any way connected….’

‘While there can be no question of condoning
aggression
….’

‘A surprise move from the Far East today aroused
speculation
….’

‘The distinguished diplomat descending from his plane at….’

‘Undoubtedly serious but also, by a strange paradox, perhaps the most hopeful opportunity since the war of strengthening the foundations of mutual trust by
compelling
world leaders to re-examine….’

‘… winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics said
today
at his home in….’

‘Pravda….’

‘Nah, it ain’t the Russians. Do you want to know who it is? It’s them Indians.’

‘Lofty did the rota? I might have f—— known it!’

‘I wish,’ I muttered wistfully to Vanessa, on our first evening in the Dunot’s house, ‘I wish….’

‘Do you like flounder? Plaice you call it?’ she asked briskly.

The room gradually went dark. It was a lozenge-shaped room of which I remember a thin, tall, white vase that lived, like a private Zeitgeist, amongst us. Everything else was low or had its vertical lines cunningly blended with vertical planes: bookcases, stuffed with modern art and novels, a grand piano, plastic and wire cradles for sitting in, polished horizontal surfaces for putting things on (journals open at glamorous diagrams of transparent homes; an ascending white vase like the ghost of the
twentieth century), rugs, lamps and a small, jocular coffin full of cigarettes.

‘It’s gone dark!’ cried Vanessa, now a second ghost at the kitchen door, a dusk away from me behind the piano. ‘Now it’s gone purple. What is it?’

The hue, in fact, was lilac, but a deep, eerie lilac through which, at any moment, one felt tremendous daggers of
lightning
might lance in some ultimate experiment involving the total atmosphere.

‘It’s a cloud,’ I murmured, wondering myself at the
unearthly
effect.

Still clutching a half-pound of margarine, she wound her way across the room to the window and stood gaping out, so bemused by the pseudo-eclipse (really the
accumulated
discharge of hundreds of factories held down by a layer of warm air) that, for a few moments, she gave no response to my close presence behind her, to my hands
sliding
furtively up from her waist, to my urgent thighs
tightening
against her firm buttocks.

A few windows lighted up across the mews, at the open end of which a gaudy bus plyed slowly past. The leaves of a colour-drained sycamore lay limply on the faded day.

‘A dog …’ murmured Vanessa, in absent surprise at the unconcerned mongrel nosing its way briskly up the mews. ‘No!’

With a sudden, deft plunge my eager hands slipped
inside
the loose neck of her summer blouse and found, each one, its objective. Her own hands were instantly at my wrists, but only for a moment was their pressure a serious attempt to dislodge my grasp, after which it manifested, by convulsive squeezing, acquiescence and finally
encouragement.
Between my delicate fingers, the tiny buds of her nipples grew. Her breathing deepened and accelerated to match my own and, with an exultation that remains even now one of the most vivid impressions of my adult life, I withdrew my hands, stooped low, lifted her and carried her up the stairs to the first bedroom I came to. Ignoring her
tightly-shut eyes, her parted lips, her beckoning
outstretched
arms, as she lay nestled on the soft eiderdown, until I had pulled and worried myself out of my clothes (except for time-consuming and relatively unimpeding shoes), I lay down with an involuntary groan of desire
beside
her and enfolded her fully-dressed (faintly-dressed) body in my arms. And fully-dressed she remained when, in the glowing bedroom, into which the sun had crept back, and after, with a little (only a very little) gauche assistance from her, my excitement had been copiously quelled and hers too, so little hindrance had her filmy knickers supplied, had been brought by my gentle hand beyond its peak, and after too, the sweet, helpless, period of intertwined slumber that had followed, we awoke.

That bright evening, for the dispersal of the inspissated smoke left a sky of limpid blue and mellow, slanting
sunbeams
, was the kindest of our whole relationship (
dispassionate
term adopted by a sinless age). Liquid with
tenderness
, Vanessa grilled the ‘flounder’, her surprisingly
accomplished
preparation of the meal repeatedly interrupted by caresses, glances, murmurs and for an hour, for a night, the ‘I love yous’ were simple, hopeless expressions of a helpless truth. And it was bliss. I always remember it and the basic memory has become so firmly set, from repeated handling, that it requires exquisite retrospective surgery to detach from the main fibre the little icy sinews of continued thought, of restlessness and of already-incipient contempt for my newly-won mistress.

But she was a snob and a racialist (shrinking at the change-returning black hand of a ‘nigger’ bus-conductor) and provincial, provincial—with no notion of life on terms other than those of ‘nice things’ and conventional ideas. Strange how the balance of my awareness of her shifted over the weeks that followed from almost exclusive sensitivity to her slim, lovely body and fetching countenance to what it was when I could contemplate her nudity (climbing out of the bath; voluptuously curved over the task of applying
crimson varnish to her toenails) without even a ripple of desire interrupting the stream of my contemptuous analysis of her latest pretty or whimsical remark.

The next day she had a headache and by the time I knocked (we had not yet obtained a second key) in the evening, the externally active phase of her menstrual cycle had begun and a plug of gauze, absorbing the sanguinary debris of her untried, shedding womb, kept me impatiently at bay. And at the end of the week:

‘Just for a moment. It’ll be all right. I won’t——’

‘No! You
must
use one. I don’t want to get caught!’

And so we never ‘knew’ each other at all, for a barrier, if a thin one, of ‘medicinable gum’ from some damned Arabian or, more probably, Malayan tree, subtly but
effectively
kept us apart, until finally, that is a few weeks after our first meeting, I was conscious of the inert, lightly-
gasping
form beneath me, in the greenish dusk, as no more than a sort of erotic liability and my desire flamed once more along the dancing street.

Amongst the girls. The floating girls, the gliding girls, the tripping, mincing, flaunting girls, surging in seductive battalions through the rumbling conduits of the metropolis at morning and evening rush hours, swaying down Regent Street, clustering in giggling flocks beyond the plate-glass keeping them from the gauze and flounces of ephemeral garments, whispering confessions to each other in tea-shops and snack-bars, the great reservoir of temptation in which it seems that the most insatiate lust could be effortlessly quenched but which always resolves itself into the
prospective
wife of Sid, a garagehand in Ealing, or the purveyor of ‘a nice time, dearie? Two pounds.’

As I packed my things, on that chill, August evening, I felt silly and once or twice almost giggled to myself like a schoolgirl. I kept trying to think of a medieval French poet, whose very words, scrawled, the legend at least runs, in the brothels and wine-cellars of that plague-ridden, priest-haunted, violent and superstitious huddle of hewn
stone that was then Paris, were neatly imprisoned in my jacket pocket, and I once paused, with socks in my hand, in surprise at not knowing whether words moved through time or the world span on an axis of words, or whether history was genuinely explanatory or just a wobbling beam of light picking out perhaps a thistle and a cairn in a vast landscape, but almost immediately giggled again and shivered. Moving lightly, the incipient dread that I had thus far, by deliberately automatic decision and action, warded off, mounting rapidly, I trod down the sounding stairs and advanced towards Vanessa, who was listening to the wireless.

‘I’m off.’

As I watched the transparent sequence of her reactions, eyes in a fading smile turned upon my case, jerked up head conveying the first shaft of bewildered reproach and then almost immediately, terribly (and, that was it, predictably) the tremble of the chin and the dark eyes blurring and blinking as they filled, I knew what it was that I had secretly decided to ignore. The whole process, the whole development of our affair, from trembling adoration and desire, to boredom and physical indifference, had been subjective, had taken place in my mind while I had always, by progressively emphasizing my native taciturnity, by discreet murmurs, by facile agreements, permitted Vanessa to assume that nothing had changed. God! In the pubs, when she and they, the beaming, gleaming Aussies and Yanks and bowler-hatted budding executives had twitted and trilled the long evenings away and I had drunk and read, or drunk and gloomed, or, once, drunk and argued my way into a daunting, but soon forcibly terminated, physical
encounter
with a—what was he? that glib nihilist with a stoker’s arms—I had permitted my own keen awareness of her companions’ contempt for me to overflow into an accusation of treachery and duplicity on her part. But, of course, she hadn’t been disloyal, had, in fact, been true, and mysteriously, in spite of our utter incompatibility was still
attached to me by the original bond of sexual submission, that tie which is so often steel cable to the girl and rotten twine to the man.