As Near as I Can Get (20 page)

‘No—at least——'

‘I'm not renting this room only for money, young man, I don't mind telling you that. There's never been a room in this house rented before. Jack's dead now. Well then, what are you?'

She had thought that I was a student? Why? I don't look especially studious, I don't think, if not specially ignorant. Surely the tall, thin young man, clad
anonymously
in his ‘demob' suit, whom she chose to accost that day, might have been a young clerk, or apprentice labourer or any other perfectly unintellectual member of the public. And yet—I feel equally convinced that if I had been, say, an impoverished farmer's son from Galway hoping for a job on steel erection, Mrs Coates would have strode past without a word. Some almost chemical sympathy made her glance, pause and finally speak and the person she addressed was not the miserable young non-entity but the aspirant poet. She was drawn to cultural things, things belonging to a world that a woman whose parents (all this, of course, I learned subsequently by degrees) had been not merely working class but
lumpenproletariat
from the dock slums, who had left school at twelve to snip aprons in a factory, who had married at seventeen a (rather timid, apparently, and sexually sterile but otherwise unremarkable)
working-class
man, had no natural access to.

‘I've just come out of the army,' I muttered, jealously unwilling to disclose anything of my real hopes or aspirations. ‘I'm going to get a job.'

‘Are you?' she gazed at me for another long moment, ‘and you like the room?'

So I lay that night in the comfortable bed brooding uncomfortably on the compact I had inexpertly tried to avoid but which we had apparently finally concluded: I was to pay nothing until I found a job and then what I could afford. Yes, but I had only intended to stay a few nights. Gloomily I examined the disparity between the romantic garret and gay life of my intentions and the Victoria and Mrs Coates that had mysteriously engulfed me.

How long was I with Mrs Coates? Nearly a year—no—May to December, I think it was, when I first met Mike Rea, say nine months. I got a job, through the labour exchange, as a filing clerk and the rent which Mrs Coates
finally established was so low as to be almost nominal. I hated the job but, for some months, it seems to me, I became reconciled to my life, getting to know (‘becoming part of' was how I regarded it) London, doing some of my own work and going to the cinema and theatre. I even
congratulated
myself on the excellence and cheapness of my quarters and the hope of garrets and gaiety faded from my mind.

It was when the idea of taking Louise back to my room, ostensibly and even genuinely for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat, but essentially, of course, in the hope of some more rewarding physical contact than a good-bye kiss at the booking-office of an underground station, first occurred to me that I suddenly and keenly recovered my first
misgivings
. What on earth was I doing with Mrs Coates?

It was drizzling. I was waiting for Louise. I paced
smoking
up and down under the canopy of the entrance to the underground station, wondering where we would queue that evening. I had kissed Louise twice and been out with her perhaps four or five times. She was only allowed out by what I assumed must be rather old-fashioned parents once a week. Suddenly the idea of taking her home with me, almost intercepted by the opposing one, so swiftly did a certainty of the impossibility of this in a house run by Mrs Coates overtake it, passed through my mind. And then a wave of indignation winged after the former two. Why not? Who was Mrs Coates—? I gazed at the free people walking in the street and a distinct thrill of dismay went through me. But—how had it happened? How had I, the most ardent seeker after an independent, full life, become a bullied adolescent? Now wait—was I bullied? Would she object? I could recollect nothing in any exchange we had ever had relevant to Mrs Coates's views on sexual morality and yet I felt as sure as that she would frown upon anyone spitting on her carpet that a girl could not, other than surreptitiously, be introduced into my room. Well, couldn't it be done surreptitiously? But, at this, I
became
appalled at my pusillanimity. I had slipped, without realizing it, into some monstrous relationship with the woman. It wasn't that she dominated me exactly but that—Good God!—there we were, sharing that house, like—like anything, husband and wife, mother and son! Why hadn't I seen it? How had I managed, all these months, to imagine that I was just a lodger paying rent? And how could I get out of it? It suddenly seemed blindingly clear to me that I could no more simply give Mrs Coates a week's notice than I could offer Louise a pound to go to bed with me (as, miserably, I had done, for the first time, with a skinny, inert street girl a few months before).

We had had long talks, Mrs Coates and I, by then. I had told her everything. I knew all about her. She marshalled me in the matter of the right things to eat, keeping clothes in tolerable shape, going to the pictures. I had even read poems (none of my own) and explained them, or, at least, my own feelings about them, to her. Yes, and—horror! I had told her about Louise. Imperceptibly, she'd become, if not a mother, at the very least
in
loco
parentis
to me. And yet, by mutually practised devices, the nominal rent, her strangely continuing to address me as ‘Mr Peebles' and my never having urged ‘Alan' upon her, I had been able to maintain the consoling fiction, indispensable to the cherished feeling of independence, that I merely rented a room in her house.

There was, at Messrs. Permans, where I worked, a fairly-spacious storeroom in which were kept old files, documents, ledgers, bundles of ancient trade-journals and so forth. Because my legitimate duties fairly regularly necessitated my entering this chamber, I had been given a key to it. It was this key, or rather what it made possible, that enabled me to find my job even grimly bearable. Because of it, I spent almost as much time searching for crumbly old account books and such like, which I might then plausibly convey to this sanctuary, as I did in the prescribed execution of
my duties. Once inside, of course, I would dump the papers anywhere, light a cigarette and, parking myself on the radiator by the narrow window, gaze out at London, smoke and daydream. On one dreadful occasion, I recall, my thoughts were playing electrically around what, stooping behind her to replace a file, I had, a little while before, heard Mavis immodestly whisper to one of the other typists: ‘I couldn't move—he had his hand up my dress'. So evocative did I find this remark (particularly as my eyes had sometimes rested appreciatively on Mavis's full, tightly-sheathed figure, if less enthusiastically on her long, thickly powdered face and dyed red hair) that, prudence vanquished by a sudden disreputable desire for privacy, I had locked the door from the inside. A moment later, to my intense dismay, the door rattled and the perishing accountant's voice said, ‘Didn't Peebles go in there?' and then, after a mumbled reply from a third party, added, ‘Run and get the chief clerk's key. I haven't got mine.'

For an anguished two or three minutes I hovered by the door, trying to weigh the alternative merits of either marching boldly out with some casual explanation, which I was totally unable to devise, for the accountant if he should still be in the vicinity or else pretending to busy
myself
rooting amongst the old files and greeting the others, when they entered, with ‘well-feigned' innocence and the unconvincing explanation, if pressed, that I had inserted the key on the inside purely to keep track of it, but how had it got turned?—‘must have done it without thinking, I suppose'. Finally when, more to terminate the suspense than from conviction that it was the wiser course, I gently opened the door, the corridor proved to be mercifully empty, and, hastily and furtively locking the door again from the outside, I stole across to the ‘Gents'. From there, humming softly, I emerged a moment or two later, in ocular demonstration for the accountant, now returned, of the reason for my delay.

After that, of course, I never locked myself in again (
indeed
,
for perhaps a week, so intimidated had I been, I really did visit the place only for legitimate purposes), but contented myself with using the storeroom as an indispensable avenue of escape from the office. The window was not the least of its attractions. From its seventh floor altitude, one could see a fair stretch of central London, in the middle distance Big Ben and Nelson's Column and further away the gaunt chimneys of one of the immense power stations. I remember that sometimes London seemed motionless and austere, mere architecture, and at other times I had a sense of the thriving life of the city, full of the potential for adventure, a theatre of human activity.

It was in this storeroom that, after my sudden discomfiture about Mrs Coates while waiting for Louise that evening, I brooded further about the matter. I tried to decide on a course of action. It was clear that I would have to move. There was no point in having exchanged the narrow provincialism of the village for its equivalent in Victoria. I remember that, as I sat there, smoking, waves of indignation at the enormity of the situation kept flooding over me. Here I was, an independent wage-earning adult, with the loftiest aspirations, who couldn't even take his girl back to his room. All the generosity, wisdom, strength (which now, oh yes, through the rectifying lens of time, I can appreciate and evaluate) of that fine woman, who had selflessly befriended a scruffy, arrogant youth, seemed like unbearable patronage and prying. Well, I would simply have to explain to her, as I should have done months ago, that I had never intended to stay more than a few days in the first place, that our outlooks and temperaments were too different for my tenancy to continue any longer and that, in addition, there were private and personal reasons why it would be better for me to go.

In fact, of course, I did nothing of the sort. She'd have made—far stronger personality than mine she had, and probably more character than I can ever aspire to—short work of any such pronouncement, and a glum, if
unadmitted
,
awareness of this doubtless prevented me from ever uttering it. What I actually did was to allow my increasing self-consciousness about the situation to emerge in little hints and provocative remarks, in strange, after our initial genial relationship, reticences and affectations. I remember one evening, having, as in former days, accepted a cup of tea in her living-room, aggressively, and not very relevantly (since she had been telling me her views on America—highly critical), proclaiming my belief in free love and going on to deride ‘stupid, narrow …' (I almost said, while
retaining
enough decency to colour inwardly at the enormity of the potential slip, ‘stupid, slum…') ‘morality'. Naturally, I had not the courage to inform her that my advocacy was not unrelated to aspiration but she doubtless knew exactly what I had in mind.

‘I certainly don't believe in the “sanctity of marriage”,' I recall having sneered.

‘It seems natural, doesn't it?'

‘No! It doesn't! Bears and seals don't get married.'

‘You've got to think of the girl, haven't you?'

‘Not at all—why?'

‘Well—take my sister Louise, for example——'

I remember that this coincidence in nomenclature
somewhat
overawed me and I listened, with grudging respect, to another of Mrs Coates's plain (unmistakeably valid at its own honest, if not very subtle or Freudian, level) and well-told tales. She always had experience to support her and effortlessly humble my abstract and doctrinaire
pronouncements.
How could one protest, with slogans, against something that had been lived, slowly and painfully, in the world of men? Her sister Louise had run off with a sailor to, I think, Chatham and had been left with a baby. She wouldn't have it adopted and, according to Mrs Coates, no one had wanted to take on the responsibility of the child and there was Louise, after all these years, a cook in a hostel for sailors, and the child had died when it was seven.

But I fancy it is only in retrospect that Mrs Coates looms so large at this period of my life. At the time, I was obsessed with my Louise. She was pretty, with light-brown hair, a firm, rounded chin and the silken complexion of healthy young girls, pretty, but not, I suppose, quite the Trojan wrecker she seemed to me then. And as for conversation—funny how often, when neither has anything to say, one requests access to the other's thoughts. We seemed to be forever saying ‘what are you thinking about?' as a desperate alternative to standing silently in the queue. Occasionally, indeed, I did venture some modestly ambitious remark, perhaps on a film or play, but the ominous mindlessness of her replies (which never, since, of course, the object of adolescent love is above criticism, led to the slightest doubt of her perfection) made me generally prefer fervent silence. And really, although clothed in romantic mythology, and consequently interpreted by the participants as reverence for the total being of the other, first love is virtually immune to any authentic attributes of personality. It expresses the first, purest, sweetest flush of physical desire. I didn't really want to talk to Louise, even about films and plays, but to hug her and kiss her and explore her fresh young body. And this, what with Mrs Coates, was damned difficult to organize.

‘What are we going to do this evening?'

‘I don't know. We could go to a film—if you really want to——'

‘Don't you?'

‘Yes, I suppose so. Or else——'

‘Or else what?'

Or else, I had intended to say, encouraged by a long session on the last occasion we had met, in the doorway of a dark, bicycle shop, during which Louise had abandoned herself to quite adventurous caresses, or else we could go to a hotel. There were such hotels, I was sure. They occurred in novels. Hotels where one could register with a false name for a few hours and then—giddy with desire at the prospect
I had still been unable to make the daring suggestion. What if she were offended? What if she left me for good?