Read The Habit of Art: A Play Online
Authors: Alan Bennett
The Habit of Art: A Play (3 page)
May, a middle-aged woman, has come on in outdoor coat and shopping bag.
Boyle picks up a mouldy soup bowl and shows it to May. She picks up a cloth.
May
Dishcloth?
Boyle
His vest…
Boyle takes the vest, puts it by the sink and retrieves a pair of trousers that are plainly smelly.
May
Canon Claude’s were the same.
Boyle
Canon Claude was eighty-five.
May
(
referring to soup bowl
) I’ll rinse that out.
Boyle
I wouldn’t. Where do you think he pees?
She smells the basin as Boyle puts the trousers in the bedroom.
May
The dirty bugger.
Boyle
What I’d like to know is where does he wash his hands after he has washed his hands.
Not that he makes a secret of it.
They were all in Common Room last week after Founder’s Dinner, sitting down to their port and Madeira, walnuts and whatnot. There’s the silver out and the candles and the wine’s going round and the chocolates. At which point our friend turns to the Waynflete Professor of Moral Philosophy and asks him if he pees in the basin. And when he says he doesn’t he says, ‘I don’t believe you.’ This is the Waynflete Professor of Moral Philosophy. ‘I don’t believe you.’ He says, ‘Well, I pee in the basin. Everybody does.’ One night – because it’s happened several times – one night it’s the Vice Chancellor he’s asking where he does his wee-wees.
And he’s got another topic in the same department. Toilet paper.
May
Toilet paper?
Boyle
He’s got it into his head that nobody should use more than one piece of toilet paper.
May
What for? He must be nicely off. One sheet of toilet paper. What must his underpants be like?
Boyle
Mrs Ridsdale. There may not be underpants.
A knock.
Boyle doesn’t answer.
Another knock and then the door cautiously opens.
Stuart
Hello?
It’s a young man, who comes in tentatively smiling.
Mr –
(
He looks at a piece of paper.
) Mr Auden? (
Which he pronounces Owden.
)
Boyle
Auden. Why?
Stuart
I’m supposed to be here at ten past. On the dot.
Boyle
So you’re early.
Stuart
Well, I’m not late. Is it you?
Boyle
Do I look like an ex-Professor of Poetry?
Fitz
You do, actually. That’s just what you do look like.
Kay
Fitz.
Stuart
So he’s not here?
Boyle
Apparently not.
Stuart
I’ll wait then. (
He sits down.
)
Boyle
You can’t wait here. We’re just going.
May
Are you an undergraduate?
Stuart
No.
Boyle
You could be anybody. He has books. Papers. And there’s a typewriter somewhere.
May
He can’t just leave you, not with a typewriter. What are you, then?
Stuart
Me? I’m freelance.
Boyle
My advice to you would be to go away. Try later. Sit on a seat somewhere.
May
There are seats in the Meadows. I often sit there.
Stuart
If he comes can you tell him I’ve been?
May
There are more seats in Broad Walk. Then there’s the Botanic Gardens. Nice seats there.
Boyle
We can’t tell him. We’re going in a minute.
May
Or Corpus. You could sit in Corpus. Some lovely seats in Corpus.
Stuart is baffled, but goes.
He looked a nice enough boy.
Boyle
Yes. They often do. I’ve seen him before. Two or three times. Round Gloucester Green.
May
Waiting for a bus?
Boyle
Waiting for something.
May
At five o’clock in the afternoon?
Boyle
What has time got to do with it?
May
But Mr Auden’s been Professor of Poetry.
Boyle
He’s been professor of putting his knob in people’s gobs for longer than that.
May
You’re a man of the world, Mr Boyle.
They are going.
Boyle
In this college? You have to be.
Carpenter
When Auden left his New York apartment for the last time someone in his building was practising ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’ on the saxophone. An omen, one might think, but not really; as the Brewhouse is not home and never will be. It’s a room that has never made it into literature and one on which its celebrated tenant never wasted any words. Still, poets give voice to the inarticulate universe so it should not seem strange if in the absence of the poet his furniture should take this opportunity to compare notes.
Kay
Only Stephen hasn’t worked out quite how to do this yet. It’s usually Penny and Brian, so bear with us.
Fitz
No chance, author, of my coming in on ‘it’s a room that has never made it into literature’?
Author
And cutting the rest, you mean. Why?
Fitz
Do we need the talking furniture? I know I’m old-fashioned, but why does the furniture talk?
Author
This is a poet. The world talks and everything in it.
Fitz
Yes, I can see the idea. And I love the idea. But the bed talking, for instance. It’s barmy.
ASM
(
brightly
) I know, there could be video!
Which is not well received.
Kay
Yes, thank you. Anyway, preciouses, this is what we’re doing at the moment. Tom, darling.
Flourish at the piano.
The Furniture is played by Stage Management, standing in for Penny and Brian.
Mirror
I am a mirror where his squalid reflection
He, shaving, subjects to indifferent inspection.
Morning by morning I see that face,
Dustily return its gaze.
Clint-divided, crumpled, crazed
Like the limestone he elsewhere praised.
The razor’s journey like a polar trek
Over crevice and chasm and bleeding neck.
Painfully scraping the soapy blizzard,
That shaking hand on his withered gizzard.
Chair
I am a mirror where his squalid reflection
He, shaving, subjects to indifferent inspection.
Morning by morning I see that face,
Dustily return its gaze.
Clint-divided, crumpled, crazed
Like the limestone he elsewhere praised.
The razor’s journey like a polar trek
Over crevice and chasm and bleeding neck.
Painfully scraping the soapy blizzard,
That shaking hand on his withered gizzard.
Bed
I am the bed that he does not share.
Does anything happen, it happens elsewhere.
A creature of habit, he sleeps on his right,
The one time he doesn’t he dies in the night.
But mine are not the sheets of that distinction.
Here is not the place of his extinction.
Auden
(
off
) Come up.
Door
He comes, he comes, we’ve had our lease.
This inanimate colloquy must now cease.
Clock
Not yet, you fools with your fatuous rhyme,
I rule here. I am the time.
Metre, rhythm, scansion, verse.
His life is ruled by verse’s curse.
All
Time. Time. Time.
Auden, in slippers and carrying a plastic bag, comes in, leaving the door open. He picks up the telephone.
Auden
It’s Mr Auden. Should anyone call for me send them straight through. (
He calls out.
) Come up.
He then goes to the washbasin, pees. A young man comes in.
Did we speak on the phone? Stuart?
Carpenter
Humphrey.
Fitz
Were the slippers round-the-clock?
Author
They were. He had corns.
Fitz
It’s not important.
Do I mime the martinis?
ASM rushes on with props.
ASM
Sorry.
Kay
(
to Fitz
) I know, I know.
ASM
Will you want any of the trimmings?
Fitz
Like what?
ASM
Cocktail cherry. Umbrellas?
Author
(
anguished
) NO.
Fitz
The author says no.
ASM
I thought that was the purpose of martinis.
Auden
I’ve been to a funeral, though nobody warned me that in Oxford the crematorium is practically in High Wycombe. I thought I’d take a bus, only when I gave him my travel card the conductor said I couldn’t use it here. I said, why? He said because this wasn’t New York. I don’t remember bus conductors being such pedants. I’d only mounted the conveyance out of a mistaken sense of economy. I shan’t want the massage.
Carpenter is mystified.
Whoever I spoke to on the phone said there was massage. I don’t want it.
Carpenter
I don’t do it.
Auden
What do you do? The funeral service was unspeakable. Barbarous. Whatever happened to ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’? Instead of which there was a lot of twaddle about the deceased having just gone next door.
Auden has been making martinis during this. He now puts two brimming martinis on the table.
(
As he takes one of the martinis.
) Will you want that one?
Carpenter
What is it?
Auden
Martini.
Carpenter
Is it going begging?
Auden
By no means. It’s what you would call ‘spoken for’.
Carpenter
By whom?
Auden
Guess. How much will I be paying you?
Carpenter
Me?
Auden
You sound well-educated.
Carpenter
I suppose.
Auden
And also middle class. As a young man I used to think the lower classes were not fully persons and ought to go to bed when asked.
Carpenter
What did they think?
Auden
I never enquired.
A clock begins to strike the half-hour.
Auden
Here we go. Take off your trousers.
Carpenter
What for?
Auden
What do you think? Come along, it’s half past.
Carpenter
What am I being asked to do?
Auden
You aren’t being asked to do anything. You’re being paid. This is a transaction. I am going to suck you off.
Carpenter
But I’m with the BBC.
Auden
Really? Well, that can’t be helped. Ideally I would have preferred someone who was more a son of the soil, but it takes all sorts. In New York one of the rent boys worked at the Pierpont Morgan Library.
Carpenter
I am not a rent boy. I was at Keble.
Auden
I see. Not a rent boy. Pity. I should have known. The proprietor of the agency – ‘pimp’ would I suppose be the spade-calling word – described you on the phone as ‘chunky’. He sounded Australian. That is often the case with what might be called the ancillary caring services…dental hygiene, physiotherapy, the minding of old people, the massaging of middle-aged men…These not undistasteful tasks seem to come more naturally to those from Down Under.
Well, at least you haven’t brought any of your poetry to read…have you?
Carpenter
It can wait. Of course. (
Taking out his tape recorder.
) I understand now about the drinks, and the time. As you wrote in
City without Walls
:
‘So obsessive a ritualist
a pleasant surprise
makes him cross.
Without a watch
he would never know when
to feel hungry or horny.’
Auden
(
cutting him off
) Yes, quite.
Carpenter has taken out a small tape recorder and put it on the table. Auden regards it with distaste.
Carpenter
Mr Auden, how do you feel to be back in Oxford? Is it like coming home?
Auden
The college has been very kind. I have everything I need, but home? No. Still, I feel safer here than in New York. Just before I left the phone rang and a voice said, ‘We are going to castrate you and then kill you.’
Carpenter
So what did you do?
Auden
I said, ‘I think you have the wrong number,’ and put the phone down.
Carpenter
You’ve probably been asked this before. Why…
Auden
…did we go to America in 1939?
We went to America because England was too cosy. It was family. And though I like my family I don’t want to live with them all the time.
Carpenter
But one does want to be with them when they’re in trouble.
Auden
The thirties were over; now it was war and I didn’t want to be the Laureate of Winston Churchill. Besides, nothing I ever wrote in the thirties saved one Jew from extinction or shortened the war by five seconds.