The Black Book (5 page)

My estate, to descend to the level of Pepys, is in a neat and satisfying condition. A lifelong sympathy with Communism has never prevented me from investing safely, hoarding thriftily, and living as finely economic as possible. This means my tastes are sybaritic. On bread I have never wasted a penny, but an occasional wine of quality finds its way into the trap-doored basement I call my cellar. The books I own are impeccable—the fine bindings lie along the wall in the firelight, snoozing softly in richness. Unlike most men, I read what I buy. The table I keep is frugal but choice. The board does not groan, but then neither does the guest, ha ha. Taste and style in all things, I say to myself with rapture, taste and style! Neat but not gaudy, fine but unadorned! All of which makes these nostalgic moods so incomprehensible, so damned unreasonable; for have I not chosen the life of reason and moderation as my proper field?

Chamberlain is in the habit of saying: “Of course, my dear, your system is bound to break down sooner or later. Or else the system will stand and
you
will break down inside it. I'm all for tightrope acts, and fakirs, and trolleys full of pins, provided they entertain. You do not. You are walking a tightrope with no safety net under it, and it bores. Gregory Stylites, come down from your perch and have a slice of ham.” All this, however imprecise, is vaguely disquieting, sitting here over the fire, with a calf-bound Pascal and a glass of dry ochrous sherry on the table. Such a comforting system after all! So safe, so cast-iron in construction! Such a clever device, when all's said and done. But then, if one does not fit a system? That is the question. I am reminded of the little formula which he tacks on the end of his customary good night, whenever he calls: “Well, good night,” he says insolently. “Grand show you put on.” There is a quality in all this which ruins my façade; I am less sure of myself: I wince in a quaint schoolboy nervousness. Not that I show the least sign of it, I flatter myself. No. My control is perfect, my poise almost geological in its fixity. I “carry” my skullcap with distinction none the less, for I am as proud as Lucifer. But is it a little boorish of him to pretend that my modish charms do not touch him at all. I like his wife better. True, she takes her cue from him and tries to find me amusing, but she can scent that little Prussian core of pride in me. She is a little awed, in spite of herself, at those qualities which my skullcap is intended to suggest. Shall I bore you with a discursion on the intuition of women? It is a subject I know nothing whatsoever about. But that should not disqualify me from writing about it. Here is paper, seven pages covered, here is ink, and here is that isolation which breeds many fantastic notions in my pen. If you are afflicted by my tediousness, take heart. This might have been a novel instead of anything so pleasantly anonymous as a diary.

Talking of loneliness, since we must talk tonight, or suffer the silence to become unbearable: Tarquin is also a sufferer from this malady, this geometrical insanity of day followed by night followed by day, etc. But his study of himself is so strenuous that he is in a much worse condition. Tarquin is already behind the screens, attended by the one fatal nurse of the ego. His researches have been rapidly making a wreck of him. Complex, inhibition, fetish, trauma—the whole
merde-ridden
terminology of the new psychology hangs from his lower lip, like a cigarette in the mouth of a chain smoker. “One must explore oneself, don't you think? One must try and reduce one's life to some sort of order, don't you think? What do you think of Catholicism, Gregory? Sometimes I get such a feeling of devotion—it's like being in love, sort of raped by contemplation. Does Lobo know anything? I must ask him. I used to faint at one time, and have dreams or visions, what would you call them? Trauma, it seems like according to the books. Real fits, like epilepsy, what do you say? Eh?” And so on. The terminologies of theology and psychology running neck and neck, each outdoing the other in vagueness. Duns Scotus and Freud. Adler and Augustine.

“I suppose one really ought to read the best books,” he says hopelessly. “One must cultivate one's garden like who was it said? One's taste and all that. But that damned Iliad, Gregory, honestly I can't get on with it. And pictures, too. Christ, I
look
at them, but it doesn't mean more than what's there. I don't
feel
them.”

Every now and then he has a syphilis scare, and off he trots to the hospital to have a blood test. The vagueness of the Wassermann torments him. One can never be certain, can one? Standing naked beside his bed he whacks away at his reflexes with a rubber truncheon; closes his eyes and finds that, standing with his feet together, he does not fall. Or he will pace up and down the floor, pausing to examine the microphotographs of spirochetes which hang over his cottage piano. Why is his chest spotty? Why is he always so run down? Is it lack of calcium or what?

Everthing is plausible here, because nothing is real. Forgive me. The barriers of the explored world, the divisions, the corridors, the memories—they sweep down on us in a catharsis of misery, riving us. I am like a child left alone in these corridors, these avenues of sleeping doors among the statuary, with no friends but an audience of yawning boots. I am being honest with you for once, I, Death Gregory, the monkey on the stick. If I were to prick out my history for you, as Lobo his plans on the mature parchment, would you be able to comprehend for an instant the significance of the act? I doubt it. In the field of history we all share the irrelevance of painted things. I have only this portion of time in which to suffer.

The realms of history, then! The fact magical, the fancy wonderful, the fact treasonable. All filtered, limited, through the wretched instruments of the self. The seventy million I's whose focus embraces these phenomena and records them on the plate of the mind. The singularity of the world would be inspiriting if one did not feel there was a catch in it. When I was nine the haggard female guardian in whose care I had been left exclaimed: “Horses sweat, Herbert.
Gentlemen
perspire. Don't say that nasty word any more.” I shall never forget the phrase; it will remain with me until I die—along with that other useless and ineradicable lumber—the proverbs, practices, and precepts of a dead life in a dead land. It is, after all, the one permanent thing, the one unchanging milestone on the climb. It is I who change; constant, like a landmark of the locality, the lumber remains. Like a lake seen from different altitudes during a journey, its position never varying: only its aspect altering in relation to my own place on the landscape. I think that what we are to be is decided for us in the first few years of life; what we gain afterwards in the way of reason, adjustment, etc., is superficial: a veneer, which only aggravates our disorders. Perish the wise, the seekers after reason. I am that I am. The treasonable self remains. I am not more astonished now by the knowledge that gentlemen can, if they want, have wings, than I was by that pithy social formula; or, for example, that red blood runs in fishes. I shall never be more amazed.

Not even the phenomenon of Grace disturbed my life as much as that glimpse of the social mysteries. Horses sweat, but Grace perspires; very delicately on the smooth flesh, on the thin flanks, under the tiny undernourished breasts. The blue-veined phthisic fingers are moist and languorous. But why the present tense? For Grace is no more; no more the street girl who sat, hugging her knees, and staring at the empty wallpaper. Shall we write of her in the gnomic aorist? Shall we invest her with an epitaph? She would understand it. She understood nothing. She seemed not to hear. You could speak to her, sing to her, dance before her, and the distances she contemplated were not diminished by one inch.

“Come, Grace, you bitch,” one said. “Show a sign of life. Come now, give us a smile.”

Like an elaborate circus performer a smile wandered into the oval, disconsolate face. A great feat of concentration required to move the muscles of the face correctly in smiling. Her teeth were small and pure, with little gaps between them—an arrangement that suggested congenital syphilis. Her creator reserved red blood for fishes and journalists. In Grace's veins flowed mercury, the purest distillation of icy metals.

Her skin was transparent almost, and pale. One felt that if one took a piece between finger and thumb, and ripped downward, say from knee to ankle, the whole epidermis would come away wetly, effortlessly, like sodden brown paper, cleaving the flesh and bone open. On her back as she sat on our inadequate bed, I have traced many a curious forefinger among the soft grooves and lucent vertebrae—colourless nuts—protruding under their transparent covering. The white blood never warms (tense again!), never filled her with delicious shudders and ticklings. She might have been dead flesh, dead meat to the world of the male. Passion only interested her in its most ardent conclusions, and then such an incandescence shone in her face, such veins moved in concentration on her temples, such a leaping tropic flame drove her fingernails to a billet in her accomplice's flesh, that one was reassured. She was alive, after all, deep down: at the temperature which melts metals; the boiling point at the earth's centre where the beds of ore clang together, and the hot magma liquefies iron and rock. She was alive behind this elaborate mien of detachment.

Gracie was bought, without any bargaining, for the promise of a cup of coffee. I remember it was a night when the snow was driving up past the big Catholic church so thickly that it blinded one. The road was buried. She was shivering inside the thin clothes, the inadequate covering of baubles and lipstick which decorated her small person. The snow hung in a glittering collar to the astrakhan lining of her coat. Wisps of black hair froze to her cheek. From her nose hung a drop of snot which she sniffed back whenever she could remember to do so. She had no handkerchief.

Inside the hall door she stood passive, like an animal, while I wiped her face, her coat collar, her grubby clothes. Then I drove her, passive and dull, downstairs to my room, guiding her with taps from my cane. In the harsh electric light she stood again, graven, and stared feebly at this row of books, this littered desk. Then, speaking of her own accord for the first time, she said, “In 'ere, mister?” A small, hard voice, running along the outer edges of sanity. I switched on the fire and commanded her to approach it. Slowly she did so.

Regarding her in silence, I was alarmed by the colour her face had taken. It was that of a three-day corpse. Under the skin a faint bluish tinge which reminded me of the shadows in snow.

“What's your name?”

She had a habit of regarding one for an age before answering, as if determining whether the truth would or would not be a suitable weapon for the occasion. Her eyes dilated and she gave a sigh, remote, concerning nothing but her private problems.

“Gracie.”

Snow dripped from the brim of her shabby coat. The tentacle of hair on her cheek had thawed and hung down beside her nose. She was wet through and dirty.

“You'd better take off those wet things at once. There's a dressing gown in there. I'll get you some coffee.”

When I returned she was sitting naked before the electric fire, with her knees drawn up to her chin. Her flesh was puckered with cold. “Some brandy first,” one said with heartiness, becoming the medical man all at once, handing her a goblet. Pondering, she drank the draught at a gulp, and then turned, her eyes dilating warmly, a sudden blush covering her forehead. For a second she seemed about to speak, and then some interior preoccupation drew a single line of worry across her forehead. With little unemotional starts she began to cough up patches of her lung, quite dumbly, like some sort of animal. One got her a clean handkerchief from the drawer and stood looking down at the averted head, a little astonished and disgusted by the perfect repose of the face even in sickness.

“Well, this is a business. You've t.b.”

She played the trick of staring up with the expressionless black circles in her eyes, like a blind cat. Then she looked away, numb and patient.

“And Grace, you're filthy. You must have a bath.”

Her feet were dirty, her fingernails, her ears. Passively she allowed herself to be scraped and scrubbed with the loofah; dried, curried, chafed, and sprinkled with nice astringent eau de Cologne. She took no notice, but practised this peculiar evasion, which one found so exciting. Afterward in my parrot dressing gown she cocked her little finger at me over the coffee cup. In that tinny voice she gave me a few particulars about herself. She was eighteen and lived at home. Out of work. She was interested in Gary Cooper. But all this was a kind of elaboration of her inner evasion. By giving her a dressing gown and a cup of coffee one had merely brought upon oneself the few social tricks she knew how to perform. She was not interested, merely polite. For services rendered she returned the payment of this lifted little finger and a vague awakening over a cup of suburban coffee. One was afraid that at any moment she would become urbanely ladylike, and revive the Nelson touch which one finds so painful in the ladies of Anerley and Penge. (Preserve us from the ostrich.)

“Tell me”, one said, by a fluke, “about your family. Where they live and how and everything.”

This interested her. It almost made her face wake up; her gestures became alive and instinctive. Only her eyes could not wholly achieve the change—narrowing, widening, the rim of the blackness. Really, to look at her was as senseless as looking into the shutter of a camera.

Her family, she said, lived in a villa in Croydon. Father had a job at the gasworks. He was a card. Her four brothers were all working. They were cards, too. Her two sisters were on the telephone exchange. They were real cards. Mother was a little queer in the head, and she, Gracie, was the youngest. Mother was a treat, the things she said! Laugh? They fairly killed themselves at her in the parlour. You see, she didn't know what she was saying, like. A bit soppy in the top story. Made them yell, the things she came out with, specially when she was a little squiffy. Laugh? They howled. If you could only write them in a book, it would be wonderful.