Vac (2 page)

T
HE MOON POURED
green radiance down on the church. A pensive nurse stood at the hospital window. Sue, from the party a year or eighteen months before, paused in the pub door. She confessed shyly:

Ram said:

Down the hill, winding through danger, past the glowing façade of the cinema. Sue’s chosen looked very Jewish that evening, her hair or wig in tight curls, large, thick-lipped face, splayed nose. She had arrived after the war, with a roughneck husband, from central Europe, washed out on the tide of hate. They brought with them ineradicable accents, he various clumsy, sometimes dubious, methods of earning a little more than labourers do, she a fading elegance and coarse candour. A meagre, blonde little girl with a running nose snuffled around them.

Sue had chosen ill. We poured up the hill in the traffic stream and Jane, curious and flattered, started interrogating the retreating girl. Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do? What do you do, what?

A year, eighteen months, before, we had first grazed her. She had been in the taxi with us. Or had arrived in another
taxi just behind us, A dark, lovely face; a thin girl escorted by a virile Cockney we had known for years. He read Spengler, earned fat pay envelopes at a composing machine, painted presumably sub-standard paintings. He asked:

I asked you later. You would never admit good of another female, not while she was within tempting range. At that particular party, imperfectly isolated in memory from many others, we saw them through gaps in the revelry. You and I were together then. I touched this girl, a furtive hug round the waist, electrified by your sharp, pained glance. She sat on a chair and raised her skirt in a sudden, mischievous gesture. I saw to her stocking tops and knew the sickening pang of desire. You and I were close then but strained already.

We reached Ram’s flat and tumbled in with our bottles. He made it dark. Jane lost interest in her unsolicited protégé and the trying little Indian shouldered the attack. In a clipped, high voice he complimented her:

He nodded, smiled, feeling for a method of annexing the girl. He liked a reserve stock.

Sue smiled vacantly. She gazed vacantly about. A hunted thing leaped and swerved behind her eyes.

I urged irritably again.

But it went on although becoming subdued. I lay back in a haze of wine, barely hearing the assaults, until from Ram and another man came the critical ones:

As she hurled her glass at the aloof Indian, Sue uttered a low scream. I sprang up and pushed her tormentor, tumbling
him backwards on to the bed. I registered his indignation as I turned to comfort Sue. From the depths of her convulsive distress kept arising the query:

She was still sobbing helplessly when I removed her. Ram assumed I was taking her home to caress her. I simply thought I was taking her home but it seemed we had to glide off down the highways, the bright strips winding out of town. I was a little touched by her faith and almost merged with the part I was playing: protector, spiritual comrade, he who
understands.
We shot out through the ghost of Hendon, a lonely, nocturnal bullet occupied by a hysterical girl and a self-
indulgent
man. We needed petrol.

I had sensed that she was schizophrenic, moving delicately between gulfs, capable of supporting the world in its more tranquil phases but never far from a tumble down the sharp shale and a slow struggle back. Now she was an out-patient.

We found petrol as the gauge threatened halt. It was shortly after Sue had extracted the last sniff from her despair. Then I encircled her shoulder with my arm as we wound through suburban lanes.

These are not my people. Who are my people? A few blue pills or an eighth of Scotch still get me to work. They hate the animals.

Ram’s hue had aggravated his offence. The country was filling up with aliens. Dark, strange beings. I waited for my own heredity to be censured but:

A thin, wandering girl in a shabby dress, she huddled against me as we nosed the eerie, empty highway. It lay bathed in imported radiance. She glanced listlessly both ways and snuggled closer to me. I kissed her cheek. A red car screamed out of London and vanished into mileage. I turned
left after it. Somewhere hunched generators span. The clock ticked and the earth rolled. I couldn’t spend all night carting a mad girl round the suburbs.

But I sensed that this was wrong. She mustn’t be betrayed twice in one evening. Would they admit her? Would her
‘adviser’
be there? Where was the place?

Finally we curved in towards the low cubes. Grass and concrete stiff in the livid glare and an appropriate touch of nightmare to greet us.

I had glimpsed a squat porter who observed and
disappeared
as our beams swung round the drive. I nosed into a slot in the row of cars under the institution’s windows. Smudged light through a transom reached the room
immediately
before us. Sue, now calm, gazed straight ahead,
anticipating
rescue. I opened my door and circled the car to her side. In the room ahead someone fumbled amidst vague shapes. As I opened Sue’s door, a piercing torch beam shot from the window into our eyes. My own composure was not totally immune to the impression of a demented hag with an evil ray. Sue simply gasped and collapsed against me. She was still heaving in terror as a bulky, bespectacled sister bore
reproachfully
down on us.

The doctors had left hours ago. No, of course the girl couldn’t be admitted. There was an indispensable procedure for admission. The porter lurked in the background to
reinforce
the other’s outrage.

The sister bent sceptical, bold eyes on the girl who, in a thin, uninflected voice, gave her psychiatrist’s name. During the brief, ensuing interrogation, Sue, glancing at the harsh woman as she answered, otherwise gazed steadily into
blankness.
She was restored and without hope. I begged the woman to receive the girl but she was adamant. For her, the unstable were merely the ordinary and this was no urgent case. The woman was competent. I sensed that behind the facade of
blunt questioning she had probed the girl’s state and found it tolerable.

I eased Sue back into the car. Folly. Why had we come? She was calm enough now. The sister leered faintly as I started the engine and backed out. An easy victory for her. These girls are viable. A little firmness. All this tearing about in the night.

And indeed Sue was verging on cheerfulness when we finally slid up to her door.

So that was a night out. Home from the champagne ball at dawn. The machines, at least, had danced. Our cities have become pavilions for jubilant machines through which
two-legged
mammals shuffle warily. Good-night—er—good-
morning,
Sue. Glad I could help a little. Thanks for that chaste peck. My wife? Actually we’re—kind of—separated.

But our cultured hill is too small to enforce durable
separation.
My sense of your presence, immanence, never wanted and, less reticent than deity, you repeatedly confirmed it by an Appearance. I spied you in the morning with John, on the ‘terrasse’ of the coffee bar. Odd to find John at this side of town. Excellent fellow. Best English breeding and yet entire family liquidated by German sanitation squads. Slightly swarthy—like a young English aristocrat back from Bermuda.

Loves us both, this man. Pronunciation impeccable but inflection subtly mentions Poland. The hordes of the abused. Never heard of any of them again. Fire on my right and
curiosity
on my left. Exposed in a novel way.

Nothing bizarre. Three old friends having coffee on a bright morning. Doesn’t matter if anyone sees us. Comfortable? It’s a comfortable room, of course. Of course, I knew you’d be all right. Everything kept candid.

Jaunty as ever.

Is it a good idea? New modes of calculation seem to be asserting themselves. Grin not quite effortless.

And after dinner? No, mustn’t weaken. Be snarling again in a week. Must see it through. A civilized trio in the most cultured part of Hampstead.

Aware of her differently. Mine. Not mine. Close. Not close. Gay. Hardly gay. The discs of the broken columns at Sunium. The cold, wet heather. The trains drumming through that ghastly night in the lay-by. Yogurt and brandy with George. Too much to shed. But I’ve been cunning. Lose nothing. Just a kind of holiday, a vacation.

A fat, grey faun, George darting over the site. The great crag shouldering the broken temple. George, the gas-man, stooped muttering over inscriptions older than monotheism. Then the time for
krasi.
Very demanding, wine, in hours. We loved Athens and it seemed to reciprocate.

Your eye shot sparkling challenge.

Our convention was candour. No shame. Damn it, I’d made that point often enough. You say you’re comfortable? What is behind your mad eyes? Your hair is on fire. There must be constituents of flesh and the world in your passion. No harm
in having dinner together. May you never find me ludicrous.

I stood in the old living room where I now slept. The five fish—four carp, three of them golden, and a sliver of tench—registered my monstrous presence by flipping to their corner for food. I sprinkled some into the corrupt water. Must change it or they’d die. My son was in Spain.

Those books are wrong. They are often contradictory. I think there are important aspects of our nature that do not receive due consideration in them. Socrates was a lethal swine. We are rushing through crazy rapids. London sprouts radiant towers. The world has laryngitis. Love is, of course, a word. When Esther was living with Jim, I found a plaster nude there. An oddly-bent girl.

Esther was embarrassed. The figure crouched oddly. Its anatomy was dubious. Jim would surely have examined it critically.

Jim would surely have studied it intently, alight with
interest.
But she said he had modelled it! Jim clammy with moist plaster?

He had tried various things. Codeine.

Nocturnal coffee.

He had come to depend on wine, a single glass, at dinner. Once or twice a week he might get drunk, his tall, corpse face
animated above the crowd. Genial, patrician zombie
extracting
absurdity from the impact of instinct on convention,
baring
black stumps at some fetching girl. Codeine, coffee, alcohol, in moderation, the legitimate eccentricities and excesses of a balanced mind.

I had continued to stare uneasily at the figurine as Esther hastened to the kitchen to make coffee. What was it saying? I had to be tamped into warped existence to keep Jim sane? Jim? The mind that effortlessly humbled mine, that I had never seen intimidated by another intelligence? Of course, Jim, we whispered that you were sterile, that your acute understanding would never be the matrix of achievement. I asked you once:

Your face puffed like a frog’s, your chest expanded in parody of all pompous ambition:

Good, you were sound, impregnable. In ecstatic flight, I raged at your logic and exact knowledge. And took comfort from just those things. Superior intelligence is a corrosive neighbour. Desmond, armoured by substantial achievement, in the acid murk of the Vesuvius Club, smarting from your benign contact: