As Near as I Can Get (11 page)

‘Come on,' I urged, taking her arm and attempting, an attempt which foundered on her massive solidity and my relative feebleness, to budge her physically, ‘we're
blocking
the entrance.'

‘This isn't my line,' she answered, gazing moodily down the steps as if they led to a new job with long hours.

‘Of course it isn't. It's mine. You're coming home with me.'

‘Oh am I?' she asked, but, as if all she had really required was clarification, she now started moving again.

No sooner had we established ourselves in the train, however, than she suddenly looked at me coldly and jeered:

‘I'm not coming home with you!'

And she continued this same propitiatory ritual right to the porch and front door of the house in Duck Street into which I only ultimately succeeded in introducing her after a final session of storming and wrangling on the step.

Sloppy, vulgar and sensual, Mary remained with me for the next six weeks, until, in fact, Aunt Ruth's money ran out and, under pressure of the renewed stringent need for economy and upon resumption of an ill-paid job (washing up in a restaurant), I had to get cheaper accommodation.

Once while she was standing at the mirror fiddling with some boat-shaped ear-rings that Nadia Grunwald had given her and I was sitting at the window watching a roll of cloud squirting from the rear of a glinting point of metal drilling, in noiseless and barely visible majesty, through the high atmosphere, and thinking of Hellenized Asia, she
remarked
:

‘Here you know when I met you—that night I came here?'

And then confessed that her display of reluctance had been not merely disingenuous but downright dishonest for she had been evicted from her own room for non-payment of rent that very day and had gone to the ‘George' with the intention of finding accommodation of some sort for one or more nights and thus avoiding the disagreeable
contingency
, which apparently was sometimes forced upon her, of having to return to the family home in one of the working-class suburbs south of the river. Her reluctance to do this stemmed less, it seemed, from fear of the severity than from anticipatory embarrassment at the leniency of her probable reception for her father was a bus driver, a lay preacher and a rigorously (and, I got the impression, genuinely) good man, whose uncomplaining acceptance of his daughter's waywardness was a much greater burden to her than any amount of natural abuse would have been.

‘Mmmmm,' she half-groaned, half purred when, on that first evening, after I had finally shut the door to my room firmly behind her, with immediate resumption of her earlier docility, she nestled into my arms. I hadn't turned on the light but a fine, full moon tinged the room with pearl, ‘darling——'

Her strong, soft arms tightened around me and her hands wandered, in sleepy exploration, down my back and buttocks. Docile and langorous, Mary exactly fulfilled in her erotic conduct the popular impression of what girls with her heavy, ripe figure, round, pretty face and blonde hair are like. True the removal of her clothes, with just sufficient assistance from her to maintain the excitement and yet prevent protracted fumbling, revealed breasts rather too ripe and pendulous even for a Big Blonde but the same nudity mysteriously strengthened her features so that, when I knelt beside the bed, touching, with trembling fingers, her flanks and belly, Mary seemed even more desirable than before.

For a moment, after I had undressed and as I approached my rangy body to her full one, a sudden humiliating awareness of the contrast came over me, but then a current
of warm invitation flowed once more from her arms, and this sweet warmth engulfing me as, with delicate grasp, she guided my p—— into her slippery and yet palpable c——, I found the simple spasm of creation
shuddering
through me almost at once. Mary gave a faint sigh, as if at the confirmation of gloomy anticipation, and tightened her legs around my back, determined not to give up without a struggle and her struggle was, it appeared, to some extent successful for she seemed, a few minutes later, when she
released
me, to have attained at least partial satisfaction. For the next hour or so, as I lay steeped in delicious sleep, I was periodically aware of being convulsively hugged but after that we both slept until well into the morning.

In fact, it was only on that first occasion that I ‘came too soon' with Mary. After that, we rapidly achieved the most satisfactory sexual harmony I have ever known with anyone.

Duck Street—in the morning. How bright in the bright sunlight seemed the room, the cherry-red pattern on the pleasant wallpaper, my few books on the table, the cheerful Arab rugs on the floor, the wide, stately windows and the high, beamed ceiling. It was a huge room. I suddenly appreciated its patrician expanse for the first time. It was a vast room, big enough for tennis, for the battle of
Agincourt
, for the resettlement of a whole dam-displaced tribe.

‘The kitchen,' I said, gently shaking one of Mary's ample breasts, a little distressed by what daylight revealed of the ravages to her make-up which, the night before, had not been removed from her face, ‘is next door. I trust you can cook, woman.'

While Mary, a mediocre, even utterly incompetent, cook, it turned out, ‘damned' and clattered in the kitchenette (the dear little kitchen), I experimented with the recurrence of a slight pain I had sometimes detected before, in what I took to be the region of the kidneys, and sternly slashed at fronds of panic burgeoning from half-remembered and doubtless faulty information concerning ‘fatty
degeneration
' and ‘granular yellow (or black?) kidney'.

I stood at the window, hand pressed to my hip and then suddenly escaped these hypochondriacal fears as a sharp memory flashed into my mind. There were, as I remember, no children in the leafy street at that moment to supply a stimulus but I suddenly thought of three children and, even more vividly, of the immense leather ball with which, on that first, indeed only, holiday by the sea, they had played. This wonderful lump, almost too heavy for us to shift
individually,
had been the chief focus and delight of that holiday and I saw Edna and Mary dutifully heaving it, in obedience to some scheme of my own, towards a depression in the sand while I, probably emulating a foreman or overseer I had observed, waved my arms and urged them to greater exertions.

We had all been playing happily together. How strange! And now the memory widened, disclosing spatial and temporal extension, up the beach to the low bungalow we had rented where father had been reading the paper and disclaiming any enthusiasm for salt water and down wondrous streets to the pail and shovel shop and backwards and forwards through golden days. All that had gone, until this very minute. I felt convinced that, until the memory had burst fresh and full of colour into my head, I had never once thought of that long, dulcet holiday in—but the name of the town escapes me.

And suddenly I thought of Stoney Cohen and realized that his participation in the later part of the discussion the
evening
before had been quite different from that of Jock and Ned Collins. At the time I had merely listened as the latter two had developed their differing interpretations of the recent history of Europe, Jock from a passionately emotional Left-wing, but no longer uncompromisingly Marxist, point of view and Ned revealing, it now seemed to me, in spite of the ease with which he charted
alignments
, in spite of the penetration with which he exposed motives and sources of interest, in spite of the impressive clarity with which whole epochs and regions were informed
by his shrewd intelligence with historical meaning,
essentially
the mind of the nihilist for which in the last resort the vicissitudes are no more than vicissitudes, the patterns no more than rearrangements of permanently-existing and unaltering ingredients and the ultimate values nowhere transcending those of the mind analysing them. During the inevitable consideration of Germany's rôle in the Europe and world of the twentieth century, Stoney had contributed a number of sensible and plausible-sounding suggestions, but it suddenly seemed to me that these had expressed not merely the ordinary contributions of an informed mind to an interesting discussion, but the passionate cries of a combatant. Everything that Stoney had said had tended to make Germany less accessible to the intellect, bigger, stranger, more universal, more unfathomable and now, of course, I suddenly realized, or realized its relevance to the context, that Stoney was a Jew. The insular, impartial clarity no less than the vicarious commitment of the other two were closed to him. For how could their ‘Germany' be the same ‘Germany' as that of someone whose race had fought a stubborn, millenia-long battle for cultural cohesion only to encounter, in the dawn of the Age of Analysis, its most implacable foe?

In spite of the profound abhorrence, perhaps even defensive disbelief, of the other two, before the Gothic horror of the 3rd Reich, the subject remained for them, like Hiroshima, like the Inquisition, like all the other facets of that core of fury in man which may require a thousand or a hundred-thousand more circuits of the raging sun to cool completely into a core of intelligence, one for objective discussion while for Stoney, surely, it could hardly be accessible other than in mythical terms, the clash of shadowy culture giants over the world. And yet there had been, to the eye, just three men talking in a crowded pub. How is the past fed into us? How does it adapt itself, with such cunning camouflage, to the present?

‘Do you like it sort of crispy?' called Mary from the
kitchen, before emerging, wreathed in thin tendrils of smoke, with some wafers of ruined bacon.

A year or so later (possibly more for my memory locates the moment in an autumnal city and yet this autumnal quality itself is ambiguous, deriving from my occupation at that time, a fearful office job which I was only able to stick for a few months, melancholy, abhorrent tones but from other autumn memories, bright bar-rooms beckoning out of the mild fog and a girl pattering beside me, cheer and nostalgia), I entered at about half past eight the saloon bar of a rotten little pub, my local at the time, called ‘The Brave Fool'.

While I tried, over a pint of bitter, to shed the
afterimage
of another desert day and cleanse from my ears the clatter of office machines and the dreadful, lifeless, genteel talk that goes on in offices, the irritating name of the establishment began, as it had before, to stimulate
unwelcome
cerebration.
I
was ‘The Brave Fool'—brave and
foolhardy
, indeed, to venture into the place. Some corruption—of what? The Bear Full? A real or legendary Brave Fool? Who cared?

I felt lonely, having disciplined myself for some weeks to stay at home, in my bleak, furnished room, in the evening and work. And then the books I was reading, Stendhal and Flaubert in translation, by the immediacy and vividness with which they evoked a near but vanished culture increased my sense of loss and insignificance in my own. Where? Who? Who were they? Who was that, that negro across the road, standing vacant and watchful on the street corner? And who were they, in the gliding, chauffeur-driven sedans, studying the evening paper as they were conveyed from ministries and board-rooms to suburban mansions? Did they think they were in control? Did they think they dominated the Niagara of events crashing through our century?

I looked at the bottles, not the huge array, found in West End pubs, of multi-coloured intoxicants from many lands,
but the staple, upturned whisky and gin and rum. Two uncouth lads, slouched at a table, were flipping a coin back and forth and guffawing hoarsely when one failed to catch it. A shabby old man, with a compressed, toothless head, was sucking a pipe and occasionally glancing critically at the two. The barman was feeding a dog.

Of course they were in control! In all lands, the men in the chauffeur-driven cars, the influential men, the highly-paid men, the self-confident men. My vision of a moment before of the twentieth century as a single city street along which we were all careering madly and blindly, members of governing councils and verminous beggars alike, now seemed like wishful thinking and I saw the nameless millions of the earth, including myself, without money, reputation or influence, as the mere ground-swell across which the winds and tides and gravitational pulls of power created the living climate. Ciphers, anonymous scuttling masses——

‘Actually, you were right,' remarked Charley Nelmes coldly.

Characteristically he refrained from looking at me but leaned languidly on the counter and signalled the barman. He had materialized without my noticing it. My mind instantly connected him with the district. I felt sure he didn't live there. It was a crumbly half-negro and half-white district and I felt that snow-white Nelmes had come to get a paid girl. Probably he would have withdrawn on seeing me except for then possibly incurring the great ignominy of my half-turning and noticing a furtive retreat.

‘You remember?' he now favoured me with an icy smile. ‘You insisted——'

And he reminded me of some trivial, flushed drinking argument about the name of a film, and belatedly admitted my accuracy.

‘What are you doing here?' I asked him.

In reply to which, and in apparent refutation of my theory, he calmly handed me a tract.

‘What? What do you mean?' I asked, rejecting the notion that Nelmes might actually have been distributing naïve Christian literature on the streets.

‘You've been pottering about, haven't you?' asked Nelmes, throwing back his head to emphasize his glacial profile. ‘Haven't you?'

‘What's this thing?' I asked, getting angry.

‘Is that what you've been doing?'

He glanced briefly at me and gave a little superior snort of laughter.

‘What are these—tracts?' I asked.