Murphy (8 page)

Suk’s theme of Murphy’s heaven went everywhere with that poorly starred native. He had committed it to memory, he chanted it privately as he went along. Many times he had taken it out to destroy it, lest he fell into the hands of the enemy. But his memory was so treacherous that he did not dare. He observed its precepts to the best of his ability. The dash of lemon was not absent from his apparel. He remained constantly on his guard against the various threats to his Hyleg and whole person generally. He suffered much with his feet, and his neck was not altogether free of pain. This filled him with satisfaction. It confirmed the diagram and reduced by just so much the danger of Bright’s disease, Grave’s disease, strangury and fits.

But there remained certain provisions that he could not implement. He had not the right gem to ensure success, indeed he had no gem of any kind. He trembled at the thought of how this want lengthened the odds against him. The lucky number did not coincide with a Sunday for a full year to come, not until Sunday, October 4th, 1936, could the maximum chance of success attend any new venture of Murphy’s. This also was a perpetual worry, as he felt sure that long before then his own little prophecy, based on the one system outside that of the heavenly bodies in which he had the least confidence, his own, would have been fulfilled.

In the matter of a career Murphy could not help feeling that his stars had been guilty of some redundance, and that once go-between had been ordained further specification was
superfluous
. For what was all working for a living but a procuring and a pimping for the money-bags, one’s lecherous tyrants the money-bags, so that they might breed. 

There seems to be a certain disharmony between the only two canons in which Murphy can feel the least confidence. So much the worse for him, no doubt.

Celia said that if he did not find work at once she would have to go back to hers. Murphy knew what that meant. No more music.

This phrase is chosen with care, lest the filthy censors should lack an occasion to commit their filthy synecdoche.

Goaded by the thought of losing Celia even were it only by night (for she had promised not to ‘leave’ him any more), Murphy applied at a chandlery in Gray’s Inn Road for the position of smart boy, fingering his lemon bow nervously. This was the first time he had actually presented himself as candidate for a definite post. Up till then he had been content to expose himself vaguely in aloof able-bodied postures on the fringes of the better-attended slave-markets, or to drag from pillar to post among the agencies, a dog’s life without a dog’s prerogative.

The chandlers all came galloping out to see the smart boy.

‘’E ain’t smart,’ said the chandler, ‘not by a long chork ’e ain’t.’

‘Nor ’e ain’t a boy,’ said the chandler’s semi-private convenience, ‘not to my mind ’e ain’t.’

‘’E don’t look rightly human to me,’ said the chandlers’ eldest waste product, ‘not rightly.’

Murphy was too familiar with this attitude of derision tinged with loathing to make the further blunder of trying to abate it. Sometimes it was expressed more urbanely, sometimes less. Its forms were as various as the grades of the chandler mentality, its content was one: ‘Thou surd!’

He looked for somewhere to sit down. There was nowhere. There had once been a small public garden south of the Royal Free Hospital, but now part of it lay buried under one of those malignant proliferations of urban tissue known as service flats and the rest was reserved for the bacteria.

At this moment Murphy would willingly have waived his expectation of Antepurgatory for five minutes in his chair, 
renounced the lee of Belacqua’s rock and his embryonal repose, looking down at dawn across the reeds to the trembling of the austral sea and the sun obliquing to the north as it rose, immune from expiation until he should have dreamed it all through again, with the downright dreaming of an infant, from the spermarium to the crematorium. He thought so highly of this post-mortem situation, its advantages were present in such detail to his mind, that he actually hoped he might live to be old. Then he would have a long time lying there dreaming, watching the dayspring run through its zodiac, before the toil up hill to Paradise. The gradient was outrageous, one in less than one. God grant no godly chandler would shorten his time with a good prayer.

This was his Belacqua fantasy and perhaps the most highly systematised of the whole collection. It belonged to those that lay just beyond the frontiers of suffering, it was the first landscape of freedom.

He leaned weakly against the railings of the Royal Free Hospital, multiplying his vows to erase this vision of Zion’s antipodes for ever from his repertory if only he were immediately wafted to his rocking-chair and allowed to rock for five minutes. To sit down was no longer enough, he must insist now on lying down. Any old clod of the well-known English turf would do, on which he might lie down, cease to take notice and enter the
landscapes
where there were no chandlers and no exclusive residential cancers, but only himself improved out of all knowledge.

The nearest place he could think of was Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The atmosphere there was foul, a miasma of laws. Those of the cozeners, crossbiting and conycatching and sacking and figging; and those of the cozened, pillory and gallows. But there was grass and there were plane trees.

After a few steps in the direction of this lap that was better than none, Murphy leaned again against the railings. It was clear that he had as much chance of walking to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in his present condition as he had of walking to the Cockpit, and very much less incentive. He must sit down before he could 
lie down. Walk before you run, sit down before you lie down. He thought for a second of splashing the fourpence he allowed himself to be allowed for his lunch on a conveyance back to Brewery Road. But then Celia would think he was quitting on the strength of her promise not to leave him, even though she had to return to her work. The only solution was to take his lunch at once, more than an hour before he was due to salivate.

Murphy’s fourpenny lunch was a ritual vitiated by no base thoughts of nutrition. He advanced along the railings by easy stages until he came to a branch of the caterers he wanted. The sensation of the seat of a chair coming together with his
drooping
posteriors at last was so delicious that he rose at once and repeated the sit, lingeringly and with intense concentration. Murphy did not so often meet with these tendernesses that he could afford to treat them casually. The second sit, however, was a great disappointment.

The waitress stood before, with an air of such abstraction that he did not feel entitled to regard himself as an element in her situation. At last, seeing that she did not move, he said:

‘Bring me,’ in the voice of an usher resolved to order the chef’s special selection for a school outing. He paused after this preparatory signal to let the fore-period develop, that first of the three moments of reaction in which, according to the Külpe school, the major torments of response are undergone. Then he applied the stimulus proper.

‘A cup of tea and a packet of assorted biscuits.’ Twopence the tea, twopence the biscuits, a perfectly balanced meal.

As though suddenly aware of the great magical ability, or it might have been the surgical quality, the waitress murmured, before the eddies of the main-period drifted her away: ‘Vera to you, dear.’ This was not a caress.

Murphy had some faith in the Külpe school. Marbe and Bühler might be deceived, even Watt was only human, but how could Ach be wrong?

Vera concluded, as she thought, her performance in much better style than she had begun. It was hard to believe, as she set 
down the tray, that it was the same slavey. She actually made out the bill there and then on her own initiative.

Murphy pushed the tray away, tilted back his chair and considered his lunch with reverence and satisfaction. With reverence, because as an adherent (on and off) of the extreme theophanism of William of Champeaux he could not but feel humble before such sacrifices to his small but implacable appetite, nor omit the silent grace: On this part of himself that I am about to indigest may the Lord have mercy. With
satisfaction
, because the supreme moment in his degradations had come, the moment when, unaided and alone, he defrauded a vested interest. The sum involved was small, something between a penny and twopence (on the retail valuation). But then he had only fourpence worth of confidence to play with. His attitude simply was, that if a swindle of from twenty-five to fifty per cent of the outlay, and effected while you wait, was not a case of the large returns and quick turnover indicated by Suk, then there was a serious flaw somewhere in his theory of sharp practice. But no matter how the transaction were judged from the economic point of view, nothing could detract from its merit as a little triumph of tactics in the face of the most fearful odds. Only compare the belligerents. On the one hand a colossal league of plutomanic caterers, highly endowed with the ruthless cunning of the sane, having at their disposal all the most deadly weapons of the postwar recovery; on the other, a seedy solipsist and fourpence.

The seedy solipsist then, having said his silent grace and savoured his infamy in advance, drew up his chair briskly to the table, seized the cup of tea and half emptied it at one gulp. No sooner had this gone to the right place than he began to splutter, eructate and complain, as though he had been duped into swallowing a saturated solution of powdered glass. In this way he attracted to himself the attention not only of every customer in the saloon but actually of the waitress Vera, who came running to get a good view of the accident, as she supposed. Murphy continued for a little to make sounds as of a 
flushing-box taxed beyond its powers and then said, in an egg and scorpion voice:

‘I ask for China and you give me Indian.’

Though disappointed that it was nothing more interesting, Vera made no bones about making good her mistake. She was a willing little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.

With the fresh cup of tea Murphy adopted quite a new
technique
. He drank not more than a third of it and then waited till Vera happened to be passing.

‘I am most fearfully sorry,’ he said, ‘Vera, to give you all this trouble, but do you think it would be possible to have this filled with hot?’

Vera showing signs of bridling, Murphy uttered winningly the sesame.

‘I know I am a great nuisance, but they have been too generous with the cowjuice.’

Generous and cowjuice were the keywords here. No waitress could hold out against their mingled overtones of gratitude and mammary organs. And Vera was essentially a waitress.

That is the end of how Murphy defrauded a vested interest every day for his lunch, to the honourable extent of paying for one cup of tea and consuming 1.83 cups approximately.

Try it sometime, gentle skimmer.

He was now feeling so much better that he conceived the bold project of reserving the biscuits for later in the afternoon. He would finish the tea, then have as much free milk and sugar as he could lay his hands on, then walk carefully to the Cockpit and there eat the biscuits. Someone in Oxford Street might offer him a position of the highest trust. He settled down to plan how exactly he would get from where he was to Tottenham Court Road, what cutting reply he would make to the magnate and in 
what order he would eat the biscuits when the time came. He had proceeded no further than the British Museum and was recruiting himself in the Archaic Room before the Harpy Tomb, when a sharp surface thrust against his nose caused him to open his eyes. This proved to be a visiting-card which was at once withdrawn so that he might read:

This creature does not merit any particular description. The merest pawn in the game between Murphy and his stars, he makes his little move, engages an issue and is swept from the board. Further use may conceivably be found for Austin Ticklepenny in a child’s halma or a book-reviewer’s snakes and ladders, but his chess days are over. There is no return game between a man and his stars.

‘When I failed to gain your attention,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘by means of what the divine son of Ariston calls the vocal stream issuing from the soul through the lips, I took the liberty as you notice.’

Murphy drained his cup and made to rise. But Ticklepenny trapped his legs under the table and said:

‘Fear not, I have ceased to sing.’

Murphy had such an enormous contempt for rape that he found it no trouble to go quite limp at the first sign of its application. He did so now.

‘Yes,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘
nulla linea sine die
. Would I be here if I were not on the water-tumbril? I would not.’

He worked up to such a pitch his gambadoes under the table that Murphy’s memory began to vibrate.

‘Didn’t I have the dishonour once in Dublin,’ he said. ‘Can it have been at the Gate?’

‘
Romiet
,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘
and Juleo
. ‘Take him and cut him out in little stars …’ Wotanope!’

Murphy dimly remembered an opportune apothecary. 

‘I was snout drunk,’ said Ticklepenny. ‘You were dead drunk.’

Now the sad truth was that Murphy never touched it. This was bound to come out sooner or later.

‘Unless you want me to call a policewoman,’ said Murphy, ‘cease your clumsy genustuprations.’

Woman was the keyword here.

‘My liver dried up,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘so I had to hang up my lyre.’

‘And let yourself go fundamentally,’ said Murphy.

‘Messrs. Melpomene, Calliope, Erato and Thalia,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘in that order, woo me in vain since my change of life.’