As Near as I Can Get (21 page)

‘Or else—queue up for a gallery—if you want to.'

‘Life is ours, Helen. Why should we sacrifice our youth to their stupidity?'

‘The handkerchief, Iago!'

‘Nay, he hath but a little beard.'

‘Zounds!'

‘Everything's gonna be orlright now, honey. Shucks if it aint.'

And we did ultimately consummate our relationship, in the bare, little room at Mike Rea's, above the canal, that I was, over the years, to know so well. Mike, a lean, ill-shaven, urban Satan, turned up opposite me one
lunchtime
in Lyons with casual references to ‘Dizzy' (Desmond Thorpe, the poet, whose work I genuinely despised but whose reputation I could not but respect) and ‘Foxey' (Jack Fox, the ‘dynamist' painter) with whom he was, I was clearly meant to infer, on drinking terms, and the passing information that he had a room to let.

So, with the help of Rea, posing as a cousin with an urgent message calling me home, I parted from Mrs Coates, promising to visit her, which I never did, and, as I marched off up the unlovely street, feeling a sudden, surprising pang of emotion, and moved into the cubicle above the street, market on the Southampton Road. At least, Rea's rather larger cubicle overlooked the street market while my pigeonhole at the rear had a warehouse, a factory with its loading bay and a gleam of black canal for scenic diversion. And up the sounding, uncarpeted stairs, in nervous haste lest she be subjected to, as I then still fondly imagined it to be, Mike Rea's imposing personality, I bustled Louise a week or two later.

She must have visited me there four or five times in all. On the very first, we went to bed together, but she retained all her clothes but her skirt. Nevertheless, it was very sweet (marred only by slight alarm lest Rea, as I had discovered
he was prone to, might appear grinning at the keyless door) to lie locked in each other's arms, warmed, in the ill-heated room, by the warmth of each other's bodies and gazing, with helpless, unappeasable yearning, into each other's eyes.

On the second occasion, I propped a chair under the door-handle which thwarted Rea, who, that time, did actually attempt an entry, and once more we lay together only this time it was necessary for Louise suddenly, in strange, shrill panic, to cry, ‘No! No, don't!'. And it was on her third visit that, both of us from the moment we entered the room, tense and glum at what was to happen, and already nostalgic for the simple, innocent warmth of our previous two sessions, that, with gasps, struggles, tears and, moreover, as I discovered a quarter of an hour or so later when we arose, with physiology's tribute of a dark stain of blood, Louise became my mistress.

Pale and pensive she was when I kissed her good-bye at the underground station that evening, and so profoundly did the mood of that joyless congress act upon me, breeding a sort of troubled tenderness, that, unable to wait a whole week before seeing her again, I took a long bus ride out to Copse End, the suburb where she lived, and met her highly-strung, rather vampirish-looking mother and grey, quelled father. I had understood that they knew about me but it turned out subsequently, a moment of farcical humiliation, the recollection of which would instantly sober me if I had, by some random social convulsion, been elevated to greatness, that they had never even suspected my existence until I had turned up sheepishly at the door. As far as they knew, Louise was still going out on Saturday nights with Valerie, whose convenient dose of flu on the evening of our first meeting, and subsequent discretion, made the whole thing possible.

I wonder which it is, their depth or their superficiality, which makes them vanish so completely? It is far easier to remember the sensation of, say, seeing a film which
moved one, than of actually reviving, re-living, recapturing the feeling of being in love. And yet, at the time, it seems so completely absorbing, so conclusive, so all-embracing that all other circumstances dwindle to triviality. And the same is true of losing the person one loves. Compared to this disaster (and young people do, occasionally, quite often—you read it in the papers—confirm the power of it with deliberately crashed cars, lethal doses of drugs or gas), compared to the numb anguish of being left by the one you love, few other misfortunes touch even a chord of feeling. So it was after I got that wretched little note from Louise ‘… perhaps as much my fault—mistake—better if we never meet again….' I don't know if I was
authentically
suicidal but there seemed to be nothing more in life. It was simple Hell for weeks. And why did she do it? I still don't know. Parental pressure? That ludicrous
business
with her family—but she came back twice after that—twice more we lay together—anyway that note arrived—I tried to keep it from Rea but he found out quickly enough. I think I managed, grinning wanly, to ward off most of his coarse teasing.

But where do they go to, those terrific emotions of youth? One can't really recapture either the bliss or the pain. And it must either be because they are so genuinely terrible that the punished mind builds up a good, stout block (I think deep Doctor Sigmund would wear that) or else
because
they are so superficial, mere flexing of emotional muscles for the long, hard pull ahead, that there is nothing for memory to grasp.

Anyway, when I think back, it is not to the miserable days that followed, lonely meals, Rea's stupid (he dwindled rapidly, did Rea), grinning face, utter and unbreachable loneliness, nor yet to the ecstatic few Saturdays that preceded them. No, I see Louise and I permanently ensconced in a queue on a misty night, waiting to be transported to Marseilles, or Oslo or the Alexandria of the Ptolemies,
holding
hands, while the neon glows and the traffic hisses over
the muck-glistening road and the cultured young people around us murmur judiciously.

‘It's well worth seeing.'

‘Awfully good in——'

‘No, I missed that one.'

‘Don't blame you, Maggie——'

‘Good night, sweet prince——'

‘Farewell, my Louise.'

‘Zounds!'

As for the Cambridge—strange, as I write the word a
soundless
but distinct little jazz band blares suddenly in my brain and, although I have long since abandoned that harsh,
insistent
rhythm for the subtler cadences of Bach and Vivaldi, which, for some years now, have been my chief escape route from the twentieth century, a lingering thrill at clarinet and drum stirs me. The Cambridge Club, and if one sought a perfect antithesis to the cloistered calm of those quads and backs and elms and other serene things, which I have only read about, of the eponymous university, it is hard to imagine a better one than the smoky bedlam of that jive cellar, was a place I knew well. I had formerly jived a bit with Selma Rushington, but had found it disagreeably mechanical and had, moreover, never been able to rid
myself
of self-consciousness. Probably I would never have jived again if, that Saturday….

I heard the roar of mighty engines over Shaftesbury Avenue. I had been halted for a moment by an antisocial taxi driver nudging his vehicle towards the as yet
unchanged
traffic lights and was waiting to cross over to the ‘Starling'. As the reverberations of the winking sky cruiser (I had glanced up to see the wing-lights of the great
aircraft
sail past) subsided, I heard another sound, the beat of
a jazz band, muffled by walls, intermittent in the steady drone of the traffic, but somewhere near. With sudden attention, although I had passed similar clubs dozens of times without the least positive response to the tortured strains issuing from them, I listened and then, instead of crossing the now-navigable street, I turned back and followed the sounds. They were emanating from some exhaust fans set low down in the wall and, peering through these, I saw, indistinctly, gyrating couples and smoky points of yellow light, candle flames.

Well, I found my way down, first along a narrow corridor beside a corset shop and then down steep, ramshackle wooden steps, into the Cambridge Club. Naturally the doorman, responsive to that weird jumble of regulations with which the spirit of Cromwell still ineffectually strives to dominate a carnal and Godless society, inspected me coldly but, before he had even had time to growl ‘members only', a smoky figure emerged into the entrance with a glad exclamation.

‘Hello, Alan!'

‘Hello.'

Wondering a trifle uneasily where I had previously encountered the slight, even weedy, goatee-bearded youth who was now enthusiastically signing me in, I noted with pleasure that the stemmed glasses on the tables were apparently filled with wine and not with that limp, sweet transatlantic beverage that is, strangely, so often found adequate for fuelling the exertions of jiving.

Pete Corrigan (why did we call her ‘Pete'? Could her real name have been Petunia or Petula or something
outlandish
of that sort? Can't remember). Caught my eye at once. Ronny, my new (but apparently only apparently so) friend jittered excitedly at my elbow. His risible beard, larynx, elbow seemed to perform little auxilliary vibrations to the dominant enthusiastic tremble of his whole body.

‘I didn't expect to see you. I am glad to see you. I've been a member here for three weeks. That's Pete Corrigan.
The fact is, I'm not very good at jiving. Can I get you a glass of wine? Do you like this place? It's very good, isn't it?'

I make no attempt at the phonetics, at simulating the diphthong ‘ui' Ronny substituted for our long vowel ‘oo' in the basic adjective of approval, but the youth revealed, with his every word, at least a childhood spent North of the Tweed. As fleeting, tantalizing, less as regards the urgency of the quest than the necessity for command of the past, memories of the occasion when I had, as a dim
conviction
assured me that I had, met Ronny in the past, flared and died, I watched Pete Corrigan. She was very serious about her jiving and if her face hadn't been so childishly pretty and her slim, full-breasted figure, generously displayed by her plain but effective costume of tight black trousers and green silk shirt, so stirring, she would have looked rather absurd, spinning and rocking with an air of austere concentration. Instead, more simply but becomingly dressed and a better dancer than most, and with her scholarly devotion to the beat, she was plainly the queen of the floor.

‘She's very “guid”, isn't she? Have you seen Stan lately?'

So that was it! Stan—ah yes, that clamorous evening in the Rainbow. The little beard, on the heels of his now
identifiable
enthusiastic and harebrained ejaculations, had kept popping out from behind Stan while I had been exploring a new continent, Leslie Weedon whom I had never really talked to before.

‘Here's your wine. You're a painter, aren't you, Alan?'

Something in Ronny's humble earnestness, his yearning for discipleship, made me strive for a witty, and perhaps even cutting, reply, but none came to me and I contented myself with murmuring, somewhat distantly, ‘No'.

‘Didn't Stan say——? Oh no, perhaps that was——'

In spite of finding Ronny rather ridiculous, I felt a slight alarm lest his obvious hero worship of me should now prove to have been the result of a misapprehension, and,
uncomfortably
sensing the ignobility of my motive, I quickly said:

‘I'm a poet.'

‘Oh aye? No, I was thinking of Paul—something—Williams, I think. Do you know him? He's a very well-known painter. Where are you going?'

‘Dance.'

Impelled by mixed motives, irritation at what struck me as Ronny's naïve tactlessness, bolstered by a knowledge that Williams, a modestly celebrated painter of blotchy canvases, did slightly resemble me, and also by a genuine desire, which had been steadily mounting, to have a spin on the floor, I threaded my way across to where Pete Corrigan, holding her wine-glass to her chin but, with an expression of brooding attention, not sipping it, was waiting for the music to start again.

‘Can I have the next one?'

Her eyes flickered over my face for a moment and then, looking back at the band with no change of expression, she nodded slightly.

‘Yes.'

During the remainder of that intensely-satisfying (so it seemed) evening, I recall indulging in all sorts of complacent little reflections. For instance, the way I handled Pete Corrigan. With amused tolerance, crediting him, doubtless to increase my own relative stature, with many worthy if prosaic qualities, I contrasted the suppositional way poor old Ronny would have floundered with this lovely and self-possessed young thing. Would he, as I had done, have sensed, after a single jocular attempt at conversation, some remark about the drummer's evident enthusiasm for bottled guinness when, traditionally, he should have been smoking marijuana, received with an again expressionless nod and murmured ‘yes', that Pete's strength in the matter of self-expression was definitely not verbal? As I stood beside her, waiting for the last gulp of percussive Guinness to go down, easy and relaxed, I imagined poor Ronny rushing ingenuously on from breathless exclamation to
exclamation
until Pete edged silently away. If it wouldn't have conflicted with the expression of worldly amusement I had adopted as appropriate, I would have grinned happily at the notion of Ronny, as I had done, adapting himself
effortlessly
to the situation.

At the first rattle of the trap-drums, or rather when the clarinet, a moment later, announced the theme, I turned to Pete, took her right hand lightly in mine and was soon twirling, releasing and improvising with the effortless authority of a veteran. Of course, it wasn't exhibition dancing. I hadn't jived for years and had never had the occasion, as I would have lacked the will, to devote any great energy to perfecting variations, but it was—I feel sure of that—good dancing. For that whole evening my ear
remained
married to the rhythm and my feet, and agile body too, to my ear in an unprecedented way. And why I was able to dance really fluently for those few febrile hours, and I have debated the positive influence of Pete and the negative one of Ronny without feeling any conviction that these really explained it, I still can't imagine. But I did. Pete noticed it. Cunningly, I interpreted, correctly I am sure, as approval, even admiration, the slight flicker of a glance she favoured me with as, with precision timing,
concluding
a long throw that had sent us swirling away from each other, our fingers met lightly but securely again and I swung her back into the elastic cushion of my curved arm. I caught sight, with a particular flush of pleasure, of Ronny's gaping face fixed upon us.

‘She's a very good dancer, isn't she?' asked Ronny when I rejoined him and, as I nodded casual agreement, I did not miss the flattering implication that my own prowess entitled me to pass judgement on Pete's.

Then—that chap, gaunt, patrician—he must have been the only visitor above, say, thirty-five in that athletic cellar. His own virtually patriarchal status, as the contrast seemed to confer upon him, although he was actually, perhaps, in his late fifties, was revealed in the silky sheath
of white hair on his head, his slight, bent form of medium height and the rich cross-graining of delicate wrinkles about his eyes and mouth. I had not noticed him earlier but now, as I graciously accepted Ronny's offering of a new glass of wine, I was aware of him hovering near. Several times he glanced quizzically full into my face only to bury the promise again in an introspective smile. Finally, I trapped one of his glances with a direct, but affable ‘What?'

‘Remarkably—mm—remarkably pretty girl.'

His voice was silvery and exact, and had perhaps been finally honed, after the tutors in the private school-room, by the dons of the other, tranquil Cambridge. He edged closer, his nervously mobile neck sending his thin, refined face on a little dance of its own, as the couples began
dancing
again, as Ronny's anatomical bumps continued to dance and as the drum-sticks in the drummer's hands danced across the hollow drums.

‘She is, isn't she?'

‘You know her well?'

‘I've only just met her.'

The arrows of his amiable inspection shot to various parts of the room.

‘The anomaly of a hereditary legislative body—eh?'

‘What?'

‘You'd better dance with her again.'

‘She is dancing.'

‘The House of Lords? Eh? Do you think it should be reformed? I do.'

For the next hour, between dances with Pete, I found myself intermittently in the company of the white-haired man. I was a little disconcerted, since I had assumed that, like me, it was his first visit, when he greeted my partner, who had accompanied me back to where he and Ronny were standing, with an affable ‘Hello, Pete, my dear—you're jiving beautifully this evening' and also when various youths, clearly regulars, threw a cheerful ‘Hey, Ricky,' at him when passing.

My second dance with Pete was another complacent event. After Ricky had indicated to me that, without there having been a break in the music, Pete was no longer
dancing
, I had glanced across at her to encounter immediately the invitation of interrogatively raised eyebrows. Excusing myself, I had moved condescendingly over to her and we had had another exhilarating session.

Of course, there was a belated reaction to the series of little triumphs and self-congratulations in which I wallowed that evening. About a week later, as I was waiting, on a pearly morning, in the cold, naked street, for a bus, I felt that I had been an utter ass and that everyone must have been gurgling with furtive amusement at my smug capers. But actually I don't think I was as bad as that, a little bumptious perhaps, but not offensive.

Anyway, we had another dance and returned together to Ronny and Ricky and drank more wine. Suddenly there was an uproar. A number of hoarse, cockney voices rang out, but not, it seemed to me, on the tense key of genuine violence but more on a crudely-bantering, rather cheerful note. We glanced over to a table in a dim corner at which four or five youths had risen and were gesturing cryptically at each other. One of them abruptly broke away,
clutching
his smart suède jacket in demonstrative way and, turning back to the others, who were cheering loudly, exclaimed:

‘You silly c—— you didn't have to——'

‘You told me to!' insisted another, grinning. ‘Didn't he tell me to?'

‘I didn't tell you to——'

I gathered that they had been performing some trick with a glass of wine which had spilled on the indignant one's jacket. There was now a rather heated exchange of insults with the injured youth striving, I felt, not so much to obtain an apology as so far to impose his grievance on the others as to compel them to stop laughing at him. And finally he succeeded, but only at the cost of making the
whole incident graver than it need have been and being himself escorted firmly out by the doorman.

‘What was all that about?' asked a deep, mellifluous voice at my elbow and I turned to see the haggard,
interested
face of Leslie Weedon.

I briefly explained to him the little I had seen of the disturbance and when he had grasped that it had been, intrinsically, neither very impressive nor very entertaining, he gazed at me with a broad, teasing smile and said:

‘I didn't know that you jived?'

‘I don't—very often. Come to that, I thought you were a square too.'

‘Well,' Weedon drew himself up, a mangled twist of
discoloured
paper (he rolled his own thin, deformed and reeking little cigarettes) between his lips, and gazed sadly, reflectively about the room. That ‘well' of his, a perpetual guarantee of moderation and admission of a possible
alternative
, was the most characteristic and endearing conversational feature of this amoral, clever, humane man.