Vac (11 page)

About half-a-mile from the pub I stopped the car in a
darkish
street. I lowered the offside window and spoke through it.

After a brief conversational exchange a girl slipped into the seat beside me. Immediately lights glared and an engine roared. I glanced up startled to see another girl’s head
protruding
from a big sedan that squealed off round a corner. I caught a scream of urgent Cockney. I asked:

I flicked my throbbing chariot into gear and swerved off after the other vehicle. No police car, that I could detect, followed us. I glanced at my companion. She was young, with a slightly blotchy complexion. She smiled and said:

Can say we’re friends.

So we exchanged names. Then I asked:

She emitted a faint laugh, like a sigh, and amplified:

We eased round a residential fringe of the garish district. We turned left into a street of stark, brick façades. We turned left again into a blind alley lined with mews dwellings. She said:

I gazed incredulously about. Several windows overlooked us. A street lamp, soft but clear, cast pale light into the car.

She nodded, with a faint smile at my dismay.

She spoke with soft, implausible assurance. I was sick and weary and glutinous alcohol clogged my nerves. I looked down at her youthful, mischievous face. She asked:

I gave her the money and she gave me a small, square envelope. I wriggled out from beneath the steering wheel and knelt in front of her. She raised her feet to the plastic-covered seat and spread her legs. I saw that only her short dress had confined her trunk. I donned a clinging little garment and leaned towards her. She looked very delicate but her small hand took my sheathed urge and seated it in her warm body. As I began heavily to rise and fall I glanced down and saw that her slender loins were rhythmically moving to meet me. She felt nothing, I was sure. But slowly I began to feel and the loneliness melted from my thought-wracked brain as the name she had granted me for expediency chattered from my lips:

A little later, friend, I drove her back to the street where I had found her. Then I drove home, friend, at a sensible pace. Some way on I lowered my window and dropped out a small pouch of viscous fluid wrapped in a twist of soft, white paper. And when I reached my lumpy bed, friend, sleep engulfed me at once.

As I remarked, friend, it was an evening just like this one. Those birds were wheeling just as they are now. Ragged strips of motionless cloud displayed similar bright hues. People were coming home from work and—finished your beer? Not staying for another? Got a date, I suppose, or—cheers, friend! See, I also raise my hand in parting salute. Next time perhaps we’ll have a proper chat. Hope my silence hasn’t offended you? Well—there you go—up the hill—towards your place—

Right.

Now—wonder—how to pass—the evening—

I
REACHED FOR MY
84-shot, drum-loading machine pistol but it wasn’t in its holster. I pushed my hand down into the holster and found that it was full of slime. I pulled back my hand and looked at it. It was dissolving away and the rotted nerves shone like neon. I gave a shriek and reached down with my good hand and pressed the starter. However, instead of the engine starting a panel on the dashboard lit up showing an angry hen glaring at me. I felt embarrassed and I glanced out to see if anyone had noticed. Phil, the licensee of The Nag’s Head, and his wife were peering in at me, chuckling quietly. I pushed my diseased arm down out of sight and reached forward with dignity to press the starter again. This time the engine started and I hooked the car into gear and shot away. However, I had not gone far before the unreliable car started to crumble around me and soon I found myself running and dragging the wreckage along. I noticed that Phil and his wife were still drifting beside me. I asked them to remove the wreckage of the car and explained that if I didn’t reach a doctor soon I would dissolve away. They nodded
sympathetically
but did nothing. I explained again, more urgently. They continued to nod and smile at my predicament. I suddenly realized that they only spoke French and I racked my brains for the correct translation of my appeal. I couldn’t think of a single word of French and I shouted at them in desperation:

I crouched at the roadside as the tumbrils went by. It was a dusty, primitive road crossing a huge, gravelly plain of scrub. The tumbrils were long black boxes on rubber-tyred wheels. They were obviously electronic. They rolled past, an endless line of them, slowly and silently. Inside them the electronic
scanners that controlled the death rays probed the barren landscape. Why hadn’t they picked me up? It was dull in the red rays of the huge, diseased sun. I rose slowly to my feet. The tumbrils continued to roll past. I turned and walked steadily towards the ridge. If I could get behind the ridge I might be safe from the rays. I tried to walk slowly and remain calm. I was approaching the ridge. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ghastly procession continuing into the far
distance.
I was nearly at the ridge. Just a few more steps. But I could stand the suspense no longer. I began to sprint towards the monstrous sun. I gave a long shriek as a thousand lethal rays pierced me from behind. Then I lay still in the dust knowing that I was dead.

It was a warm and pleasant day and I had been strolling towards my favourite park which was under the old-fashioned tower of a huge hotel. I was reminded of Paris, wherever I looked, but I knew it was really some other city. I don’t know why I paused to chat with a street sweeper, who was wielding a novel kind of electronic broom, but I felt in a very friendly mood. He explained what he was doing:

And, of course, frequent nightmares about nuclear war. The ones I have in this category are usually rather vague
pictorially.
But some years ago Jim told me about one of his nuclear nightmares which achieved a peculiar intensity of both visual and allegorical horror.

War had broken out and the air was full of winged human mutants. The economy of the dream, however, was ingenious. These flying victims of thermonuclear weapons were
themselves
the hydrogen bombers.

D
EAR ESSENCE OF
Freud, Marx, Einstein, Darwin
infused
into me by the ineluctable process of cultural
assimilation
, enable me, though familiar with the intolerable ambiguity of my own consciousness, to perform one single act from unmixed motives.

V
IOLENCE
?

They say ours is a violent age. True, we are tugged violently about by violent machines. Jungle villages are sprayed with flame. But the faces of Londoners are not marked by casual violence. The burly violence of squalor is rare. Ours is the subtle violence of needle to vein, of bleak retort to crumbling mind. Ours is metaphysical violence: the knowledge of stored canisters primed with Armageddon.

I met Steve on the porch. Behind us, in the phantom
corridor
of the sodium lights, swept the traffic. Dingy hedges
enclosed
a grimy plot of uncurbed weeds. I said:

His eyes glinted in the gloom, glinted in support of a smile that contained reserves of appraisal. He exclaimed:

He brandished the gleam of his half-bald head. He looked limp and yet ready to spring. He pressed the bell-button again.

A young woman lay face down on the divan. Two naked, rosy little girls played on the shabby carpet. Steve and I entered the dilapidated room. A grey-haired man, of taut and humorous countenance, heaved on the collapsed sofa. He responded, with a snort of recognition, to Steve’s entry:

Steve lunged about the room like a beast testing a corral and then slumped into a chair. The grey-haired man asked:

Thin Rachel, combing fine hair, pale rose slip alone veiling her upper body, entered briskly. She scolded the children and blew a murmur of greeting at Steve and me. The young
woman on the bed shook herself round to confront Rachel, her skirt now rising to her stocking-tops. The elder little girl coquettishly proffered me a broken bus.

The mischievous quality of Steve’s smile rendered suspect his denial.

The grey-haired man launched himself unsteadily from the sofa. He lurched over to Steve and sat down near him. He placed on the corner of the table between them a packet made of folded newspaper. The young woman sat fully upright on the bed’s edge. Bored, she tugged the pleats of her tight dress outwards from the knee. Rachel, combing monotonously, asked her:

A pertly-smiling young man entered, glanced about and moved to Rachel. He murmured, still smiling, in her ear. She stopped combing and gazed at him. She exclaimed:

The young man murmured again. Rachel shrugged and resumed combing.

So he was Rachel’s latest. Happy he. He looked like an alert delivery boy but something in his stance told of mind. I had abandoned the attempt on Rachel almost a year before, discouraged by her admission that she didn’t fancy me. This admission had been made in front of one of her girl-friends to whom Rachel had elaborated:

I had certainly produced no such vivid effect.

I stared at a stuffed drake in a glass case. Next to it were
volumes of radical politics. I glanced down at Steve who was just completing, with shaky skill, the rolling of a big, conical cigarette. I watched him light it and suck in a charge of the hallucinogen, cannabis Indica. Then he handed the joint to the grey-haired man. When my turn came, I declined. I could drive competently on a half-bottle of whisky but was unnerved by a few puffs of marijuana. The grey-haired man passed the cigarette on to the delivery boy and then complained urgently but humorously to Steve:

Rachel, still combing, left the room. Soon the sound of the bath filling stopped. I heard a faint splash. Rachel was now nude under hot water.

An old, humane priest goes to the confessional. He hears confession. Sins of the flesh. He barely listens. He has
encountered
, over a span of forty years, every subtlety of
perversion
, every ingenuity of indulgence. He has himself
virtually
outgrown temptations of the body. His attitude is one of steady compassion. He hears a hushed, humiliated voice offer its latest puny lapse. He urges recourse to prayer and
prescribes
penance. The penitent meekly departs. The priest
murmurs
a few devout words and also leaves the confessional.

Later that day, he strolls in the church grounds. He breathes in the pungency of a rural summer day. He looks up at the elms surging towards the sun. He looks down at tall grasses smothering the tombstones. He sees a thistle and then a
mayfly
crawling round its mauve tuft. The soul aspires towards the light but its wings are clogged with sin. The world deposits a tarry layer of sin on the naked purity of the new-born soul. The priest recalls the wretched voices choking out deeds of
vice. The mercy of God is commensurate with human
wickedness.
And yet—shall all be saved? Sad voices itemizing their services to the dark rival.

The priest more senses than feels a tiny stir on the back of his hand. As he lowers his glance to the glossy red dome of the ladybird a strange notion comes to him. The voices, the voices of shame, the voices that justify his ascetic life and which only the vested authority of his apostolic church can
re-harmonize
with God’s programme for the world—what are the voices, still in guilt-hushed tones, now saying?

Father, I walked in the street. Father, I ate my dinner. Father, I have to confess, I slept again last night.

The priest’s glance follows mechanically the trek of the bright insect down his third finger but within him a faint tremor starts and alerts his old body. He smiles uncertainly. He directs his memory to a recent confession. Faint but true there comes to him the remorseful voice of a girl admitting that she has again yielded to the importunity of the sailor, her lover. Yes, now the distinction is clear once more. Such are the items that disqualify a soul from admission to the
Kingdom
. But then, as the priest turns over his hand to permit his tiny guest the dignity of an upright exploration of his palm, the humility sloughs from the girl’s voice and it rings with pride: Father, I washed my hair last night. Father, I went to my work in the factory. Father, I made love to Ralph in Owen’s meadow.

The priest gazes fixedly ahead of him and then commits an act of fatal violence. Forgetful of his delicate visitor he
suddenly
clenches his fist. Unconscious of the dab of orange
wreckage
on his palm, an expression of bewilderment dawning on his wrinkled, benign face the priest gazes up at the white blaze above him and a voice thunders: Father, I shone today.
Another
booms: Father, I grew and shook in the wind. And as he turns his head slowly about with such a wondering gaze that a spectator might have thought he was viewing the tangible world for the first time, a great chorus of voices sings in his
ears: Father, I put forth flowers. Father, I hummed in the air. Father, I nosed through the earth. Father, I did as I am in the world!

*

Rachel, head tugged to one side by the traction of her comb, walked out of the room. The sound of the bath running stopped. There was a faint splash. Rachel was now nude in bright water.

Well I knew a few things about some of them but the
filaments
of knowledge scarcely bound me to the group. I
recognized
Jean when she arrived. She had once been a writer’s girl friend. I remembered her, six years ago, chafing in the garish den of the Vesuvius Club; a strong, haughty girl gazing with alternate fascination and contempt at the grimy-shirted human furniture of the Club for Refugees from a Productive Society. Now she strode in with Vic, whom I had seen—whom I had seen, dark, tall, thin and as crisply intellectual in
appearance
as in speech.

I saw Steve at last slip the grey-haired man a narcotic pill. Promptly swallowed. Now he was—friend of—who knew—whom Jim had known—

Their louche and lurid lives unfurled in Rachel’s slum living room, swirling over the exquisite baby health of her
illegitimate
daughters. I had realized that the delivery boy was not a delivery boy. This became clearer when he described a deed of arson but the wit and fluency of his description still failed to suggest that he was anything as special as an Oxford
double-first
. He told Vic how he had lurked, pressed behind a door, while police beat through the flames towards him, how across gardens and walls and night-emptied streets he had galloped away from the indignant constables and the flaming house he had ignited.

The grey-haired man now governed the extravagant school but it was his predecessor—yes that was whom Jim had known—who had been the pattern of misrule. Distracted pupils,
coming to him for advice from dormitories shared by both sexes, might be offered the suggestion:

I felt old amongst adventurers. I felt old and I heaved
myself
to the window to inspect my bourgeois car. It jutted
conspicuously
from the kerb. No other parked cars obstructed the flow of the fast traffic. Better move it.

Around Brittany we had driven in this car. The other car had died on the motorway with a stranger at the wheel. This was a better car. It was old but noble and it had borne us smoothly round Brittany.

You were so thin.

It was always your first today. And a couple of minutes after finishing it you would light your second today and a couple of minutes later your third and—

You were so thin.

Then you developed bronchitis. You stood in the shop, coughing and flushed, surrounded by patterned fabrics,
staring
at the glass door. I barged in and your face lit up. I still mattered to you.

Cough syrup! An irresponsible practitioner who hadn’t bothered to sound you. But I was too busy having nightmare fun to bother. It was only after Lily said that she was worried that I took you to another doctor. The conscientious Pole examined you and sent you to bed for a fortnight. Every six hours you swallowed a black and red capsule charged with a grey-green powder that slew germs. I had money in the bank from a merchandizing publisher. And when, still thin and weak but purged of pathogenic bacilli, you stood up I escorted you to my smooth car and carried you to Brittany.

As we were bucking down a South Breton road, nudged by
squalls so fierce it was hard to keep even that heavy car on a straight course, I heard your cough of wry laughter.

Six huitres? Oui, monsieur. Fruits de la mer. Coquilles. Crustaces. I could at least feed you up. You could at least go back fit to the orphanage. Une douzaine d’huitres? Et apres? Un Chateaubriand. Bien cuit ou—bon, et comme boisson? We had more money to spend on this trip than ever before. We stayed in decent hotels. Six belons? Oui, monsieur. Apres vous pouvez choisir entre—dining in moderately good
restaurants
we observed the new French around us: bland,
prosperous
, dull. Bereft now of the vitality which once made Paris the world’s capital for citizens of the spirit, the new French retained only gastronomic discrimination. In small towns, the new industrialists sat planning development schemes over their impressive meals. I said:

Oh God! Don’t say that! Orphan! You’re not an orphan. You’re my—my—you’re—

We hurtled between scrubby fields. I said:

It took five or six miles to pass the Peugeot, speedometer registering over ninety, and another five or six miles to
dislodge
its image from the rear-view mirror. We came to Carnac.

Amber sands. A golden winter eve.

The fringe of summer villas and hotels was boarded up. Except for workmen on the mole, we had the reach of soft sands to ourselves. Would we? I think. Two or five years ago, we would have retreated down the lane of sand and swum in the stinging sea. Not because younger and hardier but more together.

We smoked a cigarette on the sea-wall and then:

Back through Carnac Plage, lapped with pines, in the red beat of the failing sun. Pleasure villas. Ephemeral people who use them as compared to the ones who raised these stones of pain. Yes pain of yearning, pain of an aspiration so dim as to fade in the shadow of a reed, pain of a vision so insubstantial as to vanish at each blink of leathery eyelids, pain of an infinitely remote apprehension of dominion: a homeless beggar’s risible conviction that he is really Caesar.

A red car lurched ahead of us into the field of the menhirs. Two quiet, photographic Germans climbed out and wandered obligingly to a distant corner. Blessed winter touring. Spared the blasphemy of this awesome place shrilling with
coachloads
of chatterers.