‘Bingo?’ I said wonderingly to Penny.
‘Use your eyes, chum. Sodding wrestling.’
I wanted to tell her that she must be joking, but could not devise any non-fashionable way of suggesting this, so muttered to myself, not for the first or last time that evening. Our progress slowed, and I looked to see whether Roy would have us red-carpeted through or insist on our democratically standing in line for tickets. I rather predicted the former, since a programme of wrestling, however distinguished and exclusive, would surely not be thought momentous enough to need symbolical atonement in advance. A Tube-bus-and-or-foot journey to Covent Garden and seats in the middle of the grand tier for the first night of a new Otello, followed by a champagne supper at the Savoy Grill – that was more the usual scale. However, I was wrong: we shuffled up to the box office two by two. The two I was in consisted of a sulky Penny and me. At the moment when Roy pulled out his wallet, Sylvia announced that she would go no further.
‘Load of old cruhp,’ she said, pushing her fists into the pockets of the knee-length buttonless waistcoat she wore. ‘Mums and dads stuff. A real hitch.’
This plainly disconcerted Roy. Just as plainly, what disconcerted him about it was far less the prospect of argument, change of plan, etc., than his having guessed so wrong about what Sylvia would like to do, in itself such a substantial proportion of her total outlook upon the world. Bearing just then, for some reason, an unfairly close resemblance to an overgrown Claudette Colbert or Jean Arthur in male rig, but with hair let down for the night, he told Sylvia it was great fun and a real gas and things like that, but did it badly. I chipped in on his side, realizing too late that I would have done far better to denounce the sport as immoral, vulgar, new-fangled, never like it was last time. Instead of simply walking away, Sylvia expanded her objections. Those in the queue behind us grew restive; I shared their feelings. A stout woman in a hat like a yellow fez called to us, not very provocatively, to get on or get out of the road. Sylvia took her hands out of her pockets and turned round quickly, her narrow eyes narrowed.
‘Shut up, you,’ she said through her teeth. ‘Just shut up.’
She was asked who she thought she was talking to, who she thought she was, how she dared, and other knotty questions while Roy blathered disconnectedly.
‘Let’s go, for Christ’s sake,’ said Penny, ‘or we’ll have a sodding pitched battle. That stuff in there’s all balls, anyway. I’ve seen them do it on television. Arm-locks and back-hammers and body-slams and the rest of it, with that maple-leafer bloke explaining. The whole thing’s rigged beforehand, everybody knows that. Bloody childish. Come on, let’s get out. I’m hungry.’
Having shut the yellow-fezzed woman up just by telling her to shut up, a marvel of economy, Sylvia turned back to us in time to catch Penny’s last few remarks.
‘Okay, okay, okay,’ she said, sounding on the verge of impatience, but smiling slightly, ‘if it means that much to you. But I tell you I’m going to walk out the moment I feel like it.’
The hall carried traces, in bits of plaster moulding, a fretted frieze along the top of one wall and fragmentary, smudged-gilt electroliers nobody had bothered to rip out, of a previous history as variety theatre or archaic picture palace. It was three-quarters full of a sociologist’s amalgam of ages, races and classes, with only the elder landed aristocracy perhaps under-represented. We took our seats at the ringside, Penny on my right, Sylvia on my left, Roy on her left. The first bout was announced as an international middleweight contest between a man from Swindon with a German name and a man from Bolton with a Polish name. I found it quite skilful, in that blows sounding like a sack of cement hit with a cricket bat, backhand chops at the windpipe that travelled a full semicircle before making contact, belly-first drops from head height on to an out-thrust knee – all these and more would see the sufferer on his feet, groggy but game, at the count of nine. In between, there was much paraded chivalry, instant desistance from atrocity in response to the bell, handshakes.
‘Couple of blue-eyes,’ said Roy at the end of the fourth round.
When neither girl stirred, I asked him what that meant.
‘Good sports. Fair play,’ he said vindictively. ‘To get the crowd impatient for the dirty stuff that’s coming.’
The girls snorted as one, glanced at each other and then away. I wondered where Roy had done his research, and half recollected a magazine article some Sundays previously. The bout continued. Eventually, German or Pole picked up Pole or German, held him extended across his shoulders, whirled round with him a number of times, laid him quite gently on the floor and knelt on him. The bell rang. A man in evening-dress, who had done a lot of talking at the outset, climbed into the ring with a hand-microphone and announced, with the slow pomp of a returning officer declaring the result of a constituency election, that, by an aeroplane-spin followed by a shoulder-press, somebody had gained the single fall necessary to decide the winner. There was moderate cheering, in which Roy joined with a judicious air, as when applauding a fellow-violinist accurate and agile enough, but deficient in warmth of tone. I joined in too, for appearance’ sake, then fell to seeing if I could hum (to myself) the openings of all the movements of all the Beethoven string quartets in order before life moved on again.
I was just embarking on the scherzo of the Harp Quartet (op. 74) when what one would have to fight hard against calling an expectant hush descended on the hall. It was broken by yet another variety of wordless yelling coming from one corner. A moment later, accompanied by a rattling of chains and a mixture of growls and shouts, a rather tall and very broad figure was manhandled to the ringside by a knot of men in white T-shirts and cotton trousers, one of them with what looked like a pitchfork at the ready. This concourse was followed by a comparatively ordinary person, platinum-haired and wearing a silver cloak covered in sequins. Each principal climbed into the ring, the one after a lot more growling and chain-rattling and several flourishes of the pitchfork, the other quite readily. The MC appeared too with his microphone. He said, in part, and after declaring that famous scientists were unable to come to an agreement as to this strange creature, and between outbursts of largely ironical booing, and approximately,
‘In-nuh the red-duh cornah, at eighteen-nuh stoh-oon-nuh five-vuh pounds . . . the Thing-nguh . . . from-muh Borneo-oo-uh!’
Amid more booing, the Thing’s shackles were removed and, with spread arms and legs, he jumped up and down for a time in an unassuming way, but very high in the air. He wore a stylized loin-cloth, or breech-clout, and was certainly as hairy a man as I had ever seen, though the shaggy curtain that hid most of his face looked to me as if it also hid a largely bald pate. I had heard no less than Penny, or anyone else, about the dramaturgic tendency of professional wrestling, and had enjoyed the chains and pitchfork along with the rest of the audience, and yet somehow was pretty thoroughly glad not to be pitted against the Thing. There was a neglectful air about him, a suggestion that he might spontaneously decide to emend, or forget altogether, crucial passages in his assigned role. He was much heavier than his opponent, now named as the Knight of St George and acknowledging cheers from what I took to be the blue corner; still, with his cape discarded he appeared muscular enough.
The bell clanged, the Thing gibbered, shambled over to the Knight and, with the side of his forearm, dealt him a buffet that made him not only start to fall down at once, but get the act of falling over and done with a good deal faster than I would have thought possible. This was followed up, no less promptly, with a head-foremost descent on to the prostrate one’s stomach from a hand-stand position. The Knight gave a cry of pain and outrage, which the Thing cut short by stamping on his windpipe. This move was evidently felt to be unseemly, and after it had been repeated a dozen or so times to mounting protests from the audience, the referee took a double handful of the Thing’s back hair and pulled, using a raised knee for added leverage. The Thing turned about with disquieting speed, but the referee had had to endure
nothing worse than roars and a few of the yard-high jumps when the Knight, now recovered, came at his opponent from the rear, felled him with a kick behind the knee that would have made a tyrannosaurus lurch, and started doing something complicated and awful to his arm. But it seemed no time at all before the Thing hit the Knight very hard on the head with his head and then dropped him on his head.
So it went for the rest of the round and the next two or three: the Thing giving a good deal worse than he got and being generally unsportsmanlike, the referee intervening more rarely and tardily than, on the whole, I felt he should, though vigorously enough once roused to action. During this phase, Roy kept glancing sideways to see how the rest of us were taking it, Sylvia fidgeted grumpily but also seemed watchful, I sat there being glad I was no longer in the Dug-out and not yet in what fearful other environment lay in store, and Penny was immobile and expressionless. Then came the point when the Knight, whose retention of his left leg struck me as miraculous after what it had suffered over the previous few minutes, brought the Thing’s head low with a chop to the back of the neck and drove his right knee up into the creature’s chin with more force than either had used so far. The Thing left the ground and landed some feet away on the back of his head and one shoulder. The onlookers cheered with patent sincerity, but quietened down in seconds when the Thing, having taken a count of nine, got to his feet and advanced on his adversary without roars or jumps, with (to my eye) every sign of real, as opposed to manufactured, menace. I told myself that the fellow was a more accomplished mime than I had thought. Penny stirred in her seat, so that her shoulder touched my upper-arm.
After a very quick grab, the Thing had the Knight’s head in the crook of his left arm and was working on his face with his right hand, elbow rising and falling in the motion of an impatient man using a screwdriver. Loud, prolonged screams came from the Knight; they sounded genuine, but of course they would have had to. I could not see what was going on. The Thing kept turning his man so as to hide his doings from the referee, who ineffectually circled and recircled the rotating pair. The Knight started screaming at a new pitch of realism. The crowd’s boos and yells had lost all irony. Upon me there crept a strong and hideous sensation I had experienced to a minor degree once before, at a bullfight in Majorca, my first and last: a blend of physical fear, or dread, and a voluptuous, almost dizzy excitement: I wanted this to stop and to go on. I felt Penny’s thigh press against mine and her long, cold hand grip mine in a grasp I knew was one of fear untainted by any excitement.
‘It’s all right,’ I shouted to her. ‘Just acting. They’re putting it on.’
This view of events became harder to sustain when the Thing forestalled the referee’s intervention by picking him up in one hand and throwing him violently on to the corner-post, and when the two seconds and a third man who might have been a wrestler in mufti jumped into the ring and began trying to break up the fight. One of the seconds hit the Thing repeatedly with a wooden stool he had brought with him. All round the hall, people were on their feet shouting in protest, and Sylvia at my left side was on hers shouting to the Thing to gouge the bastard’s eyes out, which was when I saw that Roy had after all not entirely miscalculated in deciding to bring his party here. Gouging the Knight’s eyes out was just what the Thing, apparently unscathed by the stool and all other efforts, seemed to be getting to work on, with both his outsize hands over the upper part of his opponent’s face, though, among the half-dozen shifting bodies, it was still hard to make out what was going on. The excited half of my reactions had vanished; I caught hold of Penny’s arm and squeezed it. Then, momentarily but unmistakably, I saw through the crisscross of arms and hands and trunks that the Thing’s thumbs were not where I had feared they would be, but resting against the Knight’s cheekbones. I said loudly into Penny’s ear,
‘It’s all right. I just saw. He’s not going for his eyes. He’s only pretending to. It’s all right.’
She turned towards me a face that had lost its colour, an excessively rare condition among the healthy. Her mouth was open and turned down at the corners, and her eyes were unfocused. I pulled her to her feet at exactly the moment at which a woman in the row behind hit Sylvia in the small of the back with the head of her umbrella, but I did not wait to see what would ensue. Instead, I kept hold of Penny’s hand and, being bigger and heavier than anybody I encountered, quite easily shouldered a way for us both through the knots of bawling men and women that now occupied much of the aisles.
In the hallway, we found perhaps a dozen other people in varying states of distress. A middle-aged attendant greeted us with an upward nod.
‘Fantastic,’ he said morosely and amicably. ‘Gets ’em every time. He does this once a month regular, and every time half of ’em think it’s real. Half of ’em. All of ’em. Fantastic. Best actor I ever seen, that Thing chap. Beats me he isn’t in Shakespeare. Eh? I mean he’d pull in ten times more at Stratford-upon-Avon than what he gets here. Ernie Adams. Comes from just up the road here, you know.’
Roy arrived a minute later accompanied by Sylvia, who objected with some violence to the idea of leaving, but quite soon after it must have become clear to her how clear it was to Roy and me that her prime reason for wanting to stay was Penny’s anxiety to go, she dropped these objections, following for once, I thought, a rather old way of seeing things in preference to any of the new ones at her disposal. I got back into the car between the two girls, aware of hunger, thirst, incipient weariness of mind and body, renewed general wonderment at the way Roy was running his life, barely perceptible self-contempt for having fallen victim to the Thing’s histrionic talents, and Penny’s shape beside me, which seemed at the moment to be more three-dimensional than most human shapes I could recall off-hand.
‘What happened back there?’ I asked when we were in motion.
‘They got a sort of tourniquet on the hairy shag’s wimpipe,’ said Roy, ‘and then disqualified him.’
‘Really. I meant about the woman with the umbrella too.’
‘I clobbered her,’ said Sylvia.
Roy gave a laugh, not one of his rich ones, conveying roughly that girls would be girls, but leaving it uncertain whether he referred to Sylvia’s readiness to exaggerate or to hit people. After a pause, Penny asked carelessly,
‘Was the other chap all right?’
‘Of course he was all right.’ Sylvia, leaning forward so as to see Penny properly, spoke in the solicitous tone she had used on me earlier. ‘Why shouldn’t he have been all right?’
‘He sounded as though, you know.’
‘Darling, it was all an uhct. Surely you could see thuht? You said yourself when we went in. You mustn’t let yourself get so drawn about everything. It’s all different, you see? Let it go on . . .’
The three of us let Sylvia go on while the car hurried south, mainly along side streets. A creditable time after deciding I could stand no more of her on her chosen theme, or on any fresh one, I braved the risk of a second lecture about my having to have done everything before and asked Roy where we were going now.
‘Club I belong to.’
‘Not Craggs’s?’
‘Oh, Socialist Gestapo! Do you think I’m off my head?’ Receiving no reply, he went on, ‘One of those places where there’s music and people dance if they want to. You needn’t. We eat there too.’
‘Oh, good. You mean pop racket.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be Stockhausen, would it?’
‘A discotheque, in fact.’
Sylvia laughed with incredulous awe, as if I had mentioned Vauxhall Gardens or a bear pit. Roy explained more kindly that it was always called a club now, and added, to forestall any fear of social mortification on my part, that there were much flashier joints than the one we were bound for.
I thought this might well be true when, somewhere north of the Fulham Road, Sylvia and I descended a staircase lined with green electric bulbs that fizzed and flickered or emitted no light at all. Roy, adopting his riot-squ
ad manner, had taken Penny ahead and told me to follow in one minute – not less. During that minute, Sylvia had suggested that I loosen up and quit worrying, and I had promised to try.
At the foot of the stairs, we went through glass doors into a cubicle where there was nothing obvious to do except hand over money and be given tickets and change, which Roy was doing, or stand about, which Penny and a small dark man were doing. This man came up and kissed Sylvia warmly.
‘Hallo,’ he said, leaving a perceptible gap where her name might have fitted. ‘Good evening, sir. It’s nice to have you with us tonight.’
I was at a loss for an answer, but Roy made marshalling gestures and took us through further glass doors into another cubicle. Here there was a wider choice of activities: going out to one of the lavatories, or passing outdoor clothing over a counter, or standing about. Across much of the far wall there stretched an immense wardrobe with mirror doors and with, by the sound of it, a great many people crammed inside. One of two or three additional small dark men who had taken the standing-about option accepted Roy’s tickets and opened the wardrobe. As I heard immediately and saw by degrees, it was not a wardrobe, but a large room or complex of rooms with a quantity of conversation therein that, spread out equally, would have been about right for a fair-sized town on a mid-week evening. Roy led the way into it all. My impressions included a semicircular bar off to one side, somebody’s navel with a lot of bare skin surrounding it, a stage at the far end with velvet-clad persons moving about on it, two long-haired albinos holding hands on a black-leather sofa, a great many feet I mostly avoided treading on and tripping up over, dark-blue electric bulbs in better repair than the illumination on the staircase and diversified with flashing red and white lights, a dirty middle-aged man in a sort of tracksuit playing a fruit-machine, and what turned out to be a restaurant slightly shielded by glass screens. On arrival here, I felt the apparently bottomless plunge in my well-being start to decelerate, a moment before a fresh dose of wordless yelling, of such impact as to suggest to me momentarily that anything of the kind was altogether new in my experience, broke out from the direction of the stage. Various mechanical noises, chiefly metallic, were being made too. I was sorry for having too hastily rejected those musical works which consist of a stated period of silence under concert conditions. First Bruckner, I thought. Now John Cage. Who next? Nielsen? Busoni? Buxtehude? Yes, listening hard to the works of any or each would almost certainly prove less onerous than having a tooth drilled down to the gum without anaesthetic.