The Furnished Room (22 page)

‘Let Mother do it.…' She stretched out her hand to touch his hair.

‘Do leave me alone.'

‘All right, dear. But you can look so nice when you take the trouble. It isn't a sign of genius to go round looking like a tramp, you know. It's quite possible to be intelligent
and
tidy.'

After the meal he escorted her to the Tube station. She was going to Acton, to Aunt Anne's. She suggested that he should come, too, but he invented an excuse.

Walking back alone, he felt depressed. It was always like that with his mother. Their remarks to each other, innocent on the surface, were really calculated to irritate in a subtle way. However much they tried, they could not resist the urge to irritate each other.

She judged him by standards which he did not acknowledge. Such things as jobs, important in her view, were merely incidentals in his. At best, a job he was doing seemed absurd; at worst, an immoral waste of time. Work was merely an annoying action to be got through with as little attention and energy wasted on it as possible in order to obtain sufficient money for cigarettes, rent and, food. He could never take a job seriously, it was merely so much time detracted from the important business of living.

Their different sets of values made communication between his mother and himself as impossible as if they spoke different languages. She had been a good mother, devoting her life to love and sacrifice for him. It was probably this which made him selfish in his dealings with her.

His thoughts wandered to his parents' bedroom at home. It was really his mother's room, reflecting her taste. His father had no taste and never noticed his surroundings. On the mantelpiece was a crucifix with her rosary twined round it, a picture of the Virgin Mary, a bottle of Lourdes water, and a blue-glass swan. These same things had always been there for as long as he could remember. They had been part of his childhood. He remembered once, at the age of two or three, rising early and creeping into his mother's bed. The curtains had been closed and the light which filtered through had been coloured pink by the cloth. This pretty, rose-tinted light had been his first association with his mother. The tinted light had established for him her femininity. Just as his father had first been established as a god-like being who had two eggs for his breakfast, while his mother and Granny Dolan had only one.

His mother had wanted him to be a priest. She had often said that she was living for the day on which she would first receive Communion from his hands. It had been a lasting blow to her when he had rejected, not only the priesthood, but the faith which was her whole life.

Beckett thought: Sorry, Mum, sorry.

In his room, he noticed one of her gloves lying on the bed. He stared at it unwillingly. It was a nuisance. He did not know whether to post it to her, which would mean the trouble of writing a letter and buying a large envelope, or whether to assume that she would buy a new pair, in which case he could throw it away. That presented a new problem. Did one callously throw away one's mother's glove?

For the moment he put it in the wardrobe. Then he stood with depression weighing heavily on him, wondering what on earth to do with the remainder of the evening.

Without money Beckett could no longer buy pets' pieces, and there were no more shillings for the gas meter. The dairy discontinued his milk because he had not paid the bill. For three days he lived on Camp Coffee Essence without sugar or milk, made with hot water from the bathroom geyser.

On the third day he lay on the bed and stared at the pattern of blue-and-orange flowers on the wallpaper. He thought, as usual, of Dyce, for like a man with stomach-ache he could think of nothing else. Now that he was penniless, he felt the attraction of the money reward which Dyce had offered.

It seemed to him that most people had two choices. They either worked and earned money, or did not work and were penniless. It was, in fact, a choice between two evils, of starvation on one hand and a life wasted in performing boring tasks on the other. He thought angrily: Why the hell should I do either? Life is short. Why should it be spent unpleasantly?

He had no money, no food, no hope. He did not want to work. He did not want to do anything. He forced himself to go out for a walk. In the streets, his dead senses revived a little. The trees along the pavements and the neon ODEON sign gave one of those moments of sharp pleasure in being alive.

When he returned the room was twilit. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a baby's skull on the bed. He felt a shock of horror. When he turned to look he saw that it was not a baby's skull, but the fold of a shirt which he had tossed on the bed.

An acquaintance, casually met in Ledbury Road, gave him a tube of Thyrodine pills. Soon Beckett wrote in his notebook:

The official use of Thyrodine is for slimming. It acts by burning up the body's stored energy, thus reducing the need for food. However, the amount of energy released by T. is greater than the amount ordinarily released. This surplus energy goes to the brain, increasing mental activity and producing insomnia. Therefore, T. is often used by such people as students before an exam, and down-and-outs who can afford neither food nor a place to sleep.

He somehow got hold of small sums of money with which to buy cigarettes and occasional food, and took Thyrodine daily. At first the pills made him feel fine. His brain was active, turning out ideas like a works' conveyor belt on overtime. When he read, his mind was too active for the mere assimilation of words. It raced off at a tangent of criticism and ideas suggested by the text. He abandoned reading and, instead, filled his notebook with writings on various subjects from medieval history to the psychology of crime. He worked out chess problems on the portable set which he always carried in the pocket of his suedette zipper jacket.

The only adverse effect of the pills was that all sense-impressions seemed slightly offbeat, as if a gravitational pull had been lessened, thereby altering the relationship of objects to him and to each other.

After a week on Thyrodine the headaches began. A knife-pain shot through his brain. At nights he could not sleep, his mind was a dynamo which would not cease despite his physical exhaustion. His exhausted body seemed to be falling away from his relentlessly churning mind. He lay awake, unable to stop thinking, until the thin, acid light of morning brought the rattle of milk crates and the chorus of bird-song.

He compared the ideas represented by the various people he knew. Wainwright was the social man, with his leaflets, and his meetings like undergraduate rags. He loved and had faith in ordinary people. His energies were extroverted and concerned with material things.

Father Dominic was the political man. He despised the ordinary people, whom he considered fit only to be pressed into a semblance of order according to the blueprint devised by the few superior intelligences. Gash was the religious man, shutting his senses to the material world in order to concentrate on the God within him.

Beckett closed his eyes and saw the three as a triangle imposed on the surface of his brain. The three points of the triangle were variously served by the faithful masses who believed speeches and sermons; by men like Father Hogan with his peasant faith; by his own mother who cheerfully sacrificed her life for her erroneous belief in an after-life. They were rejected by the faithless, by Dyce and Ilsa who knew life to be meaningless and who retaliated by getting as many kicks out of it as possible while it lasted.

All three wanted Beckett's allegiance, but although he sympathized with all, he had faith in none. Yet he would have been happy to give allegiance. His was a serious nature which needed a meaning in life.

The thought of Dyce always returned, hitting him like a sick thud in the stomach. When he managed to get a few hours' sleep he dreamed of guns which either did not go off or which fired, instead of bullets, puff balls of smoke that exploded in slow motion.

He woke suddenly to the feeling of terror. He did not know which way round the room was. He could see shapes, but could not recognize them because they were out of context.

Gradually, he became orientated. The objects fitted together into the recognizable pattern of the room. That shape was the edge of the curtain, the other was the wardrobe with his suitcase and a fringed lampshade on top.

He got out of bed and switched on the light. The sudden brightness was like waking to illness. There was some water in the kettle, and he poured it into the toothglass. His mouth was swollen and at first he could not feel the rim of the glass against his lips. Then there was the toothpaste taste of the water, and coldness going down into his stomach.

He realized that he was going to be sick. He grabbed his raincoat and groped down the unlit stairs. In the lavatory, high tide beat in his giddy head. The sick scorched up into his mouth and nostrils. He vomited into the lavatory-pan round which his lover's arms were clasped.

Waves of heat broke out in sweat. His stomach went on heaving when there was nothing left to bring up: In between the heaves, he whimpered: ‘Oh God,Oh God...'

Afterwards he sprawled on the floor, his forehead pressed against the base of the lavatory pedestal. The air had a rushing sound, like a radio tuned to a closed station. The room was a magnified heart, expanding and contracting. Its pulsations throbbed in the white pedestal, the walls, the sports page on the floor.

In the morning the Irishman stood in Beckett's room. He was muscular as a labourer. He had a glass of Guinness in one hand and a shaving brush in the other. He did not believe in work either. ‘Consider the lilies of the field,' he roared in quotation from his battered New Testament. Then he advised that if Beckett was ill he should see a doctor.

Beckett, with ill body tough as whipcord, leaped out of bed and declared that he had no intention of seeing a doctor, and that occasional attacks of sickness did not bother him.

In fact Beckett was one of the people who feel very fit when they are ill. He always felt well when he was hangover-ill, as he was in the ensuing days of Thyrodine and little food. His body was planed away to its essential core of toughness. His senses were sharpened and his nerves exposed. There was a sort of relaxation and peace that resulted from exhaustion.

He went for long walks. In the streets, he was more aware of people than before, because he wanted something from them: food and money. The faces were all an adventure, as ships are an adventure to a pirate.

Often he walked in Kensington Gardens, liking the feathery sunlight on the grass. In his mouth and nostrils was a flavour like soda-water that belonged to sickness. Sometimes he went to Speakers' Corner where he engaged in arguments with strangers. Sometimes he went to Brompton Oratory because he liked the Victorian cherubs that ornamented the candelabra. Sometimes he went to Park Lane because it was an expensive area.

Once he looked through an office window and saw a man at a desk engaged in filing some papers. The sight of the man's nine-to-five servitude made Beckett exhilarate in his own freedom. He was ill and penniless, but he was free. He tramped by night as well as by day. One evening he saw Ilsa in the street. She was wearing her teenager rig of jeans and a check shirt. Her hair was in a skimpy pony-tail, as she had done it at art school. It looked attractive with her ill, adult face. It accentuated her sharp cheekbones and the greyish shadows under her eyes. She was laughing outside an espresso-bar with a gang of arty teenagers. He saw her give one of the boys a sharp punch in the arm, then skip out of range. Her laughter was strident and taunting.

Beckett crossed the road to avoid her. He did not want to talk to her, or to her new man, or to her rowdy friends.

Sometimes he spent the night in Covent Garden, which smelled like an orchard. There was an all-night café for the market workers, with yellow-topped tables with bottles of O.K. Sauce on them, and thick crockery. He sat in a corner, grim and unspeaking like a secret agent. Once a drunk lurched in, with a Christ message of love for all humanity. The message was frustrated by the drunk's inability to express it coherently.

Beckett the tramp wandered down dustbin night streets, stole milk and a loaf from a crate outside a café, and saw the dawn break over London. He walked with solitude round his shoulders like a cloak.

When he returned to his room, he laid his hard body between the sheets stained with loneliness, and lay sleepless through the sunny morning as though his eyes had no lids.

He received a letter from his father, written on Civil Service notepaper in office ink. His father, like him, seldom wrote letters.

The letter said that his mother had leukemia although she did not know it, and had only a few months to live.

Beckett read the letter again. He waited for it to produce an effect on him, waited to feel. But he felt nothing. It was like watching to see which way a cat jumped and then finding that it did not jump at all.

He thought that his mother should be told that she was dying. He deplored the conspiracy of well-meant lies that insulted the strength, dignity, and intelligence of the dying. The faith of a Catholic should be respected; she should be told in order that she could prepare herself for death within the Church. Often, doctors opposed calling the priest to give Extreme Unction because the sacrament amounted to telling the patient that he or she was dying. Beckett disliked this practice of shielding the patient instead of honouring religious beliefs.

Then he realized that, as usual, he was riding an intellectual issue, abstracting an argument from a human situation.

A wasp zigzagged round the room with spiteful drone. It buzzed against the window, its wings visible only as speed. Beckett spent some time stalking it, and finally swatted it dead with a Penguin book.