‘Sit down.’ They sat down again and Jenkin filled the two glasses. ‘I just like to know what’s happening.’
‘In Liberation Theology? In South America?’
‘On the planet.’
They were silent for a moment, Jenkin hunched up, pulling in his short legs, becoming almost egg-shaped, Gerard elongated, his legs outstretched, his arms hanging, his tie undone, his dark hair every way.
‘I hate God,’ said Gerard.
‘“He who alone is wise wants and does not want to be called Zeus.” Heraclitus wasn’t altogether a disaster, you know.’
Gerard laughed. He reflected how much, in the many years that had passed, he had defined himself by his difference from his friends, differences felt in that degree of detail which is obtained by continuous careful talking. In a way, their lives together had been quite like their childish hopes. Yet also he was increasingly conscious now of that loneliness of human beings to which Jenkin had referred.
‘If he does or doesn’t want something it implies he exists.’
‘You ought to write about Plotinus and St Augustine and what happened to Platonism.’
‘What indeed. Levquist said I was rotted by Christianity!’
‘You think you’re on a ladder going up, and you do go up.’
‘You think you’re on a road going on, and you do go on.’
‘We all do that, there’s no merit in it.’
‘You live in the present. I can never find the present.’
‘Sometimes I wish I could give up metaphors and just think.’
‘Think what?’
‘What a rogue and peasant slave I am.’
‘That’s a metaphor. I hate all that Christian praise and blame. And yet –’
‘You’re a puritan, Gerard. You blame yourself for the lack of some ideal terrible discipline!’
‘I remember you said that we’re all sunk in the illusions of egoism like in a big sticky cream cake!’
‘Yes, but I don’t mind too much. Why destroy the healthy ego? It does a job. You’re making me feel hungry. Will you stay for supper? Please do.’
‘No. I think there’s a human task. You think there are human fates. Maybe that way you learn more.’
‘Oh I don’t know. While you were talking I was picturing the Berlin Wall. It’s white.’
‘I know it’s white.’
‘It’s like what I think of evil. One must think of it. Perhaps all the time. In oneself too. Start from where one is.’
‘You always mix things up,’ said Gerard. ‘The Berlin Wall is not where you are. It’s true that we can’t imagine virtue much above our own level except as pure loss. But one must try to think about being good, not just shedding contrite tears and rogue and peasant slave stuff. That’s just self-gratification!’
‘You can’t by-pass where you are by an imaginary leap into the ideal!’
‘All right, but it’s better to have an ideal, rather than just trudging on and thinking how different we all are!’
‘You’re so self-reliant,’ said Jenkin. He said this casually because he was tired of this abstract talk which Gerard liked so, and because he wanted Gerard to stay to supper but was not sure there was anything in the larder above the macaroni cheese and fish cake level. One of the supermarkets might still be open. He’d have to go out and buy more wine anyway. Then he realised how much Gerard would resent being called self-reliant.
‘Self-reliant!’ Gerard rose again and picked up his overcoat off a chair.
Resigned, Jenkin also rose. ‘You won’t stay to supper?’
‘No, thanks. I’ll try to fix that committee meeting.’
‘What about Pat and Gideon?’
‘I won’t have them on the committee, I’ve told them it won’t do. They want to contribute anyway, I’ve told them they can’t. I’ve told Gull he mustn’t pay either now he’s unemployed. I suppose all this ought to be discussed. Oh hell.’
‘Pat and Gideon can’t be pro-Crimond.’
‘They aren’t. They just want a finger in the pie. Gideon finds it all amusing.’
‘He’s in London?’
‘Yes. He’s trying to buy a Klimt.’
‘I imagine you don’t want a taxi?’
‘No, I’ll walk. I love this fog. Goodbye.’
As the front door closed behind Gerard, Jenkin returned into the aloneness which he valued so much. He leaned against the door with a positive thrill of solitude. He had wanted Gerard to stay. He was now also glad that he had gone. Jenkin had once said, a remark which Gerard remembered, that he would never marry because that would prevent him from being alone at night. Now there was supper to think of, and what was on the radio (he had no television) and Gerard to think of, always an interesting subject. Then supper to be (quickly) prepared and (slowly) eaten. Jenkin believed one should attend carefully to food while eating it. There was the wine to be finished too. A radio talk (if short), some music (if classical and familiar). Then he might read some Spanish poetry and look at the map and think about his jaunt at Christmas.
He turned off the gas fire in the sitting room and carried the wine bottle and two glasses to the kitchen, returned for the green tumbler and the maple leaves and turned out the light. He put the green tumbler upon the tiled shelf above the sink which he kept clear for such purposes. As he put it down he said, ‘There you are!’ Jenkin felt happy; but there was a flaw in his happiness. He felt, he intuited, that his life was about to change in some way he could not yet determine. The thought of this veiled change was alarming, also exciting. Perhaps it was just, though this was much, a feeling that it was time to stop schoolmastering. Would he then be, like Gerard, wondering what to do with his thoughts? No, he could never be like Gerard or have, in that sense, thoughts. He was certainly not going over to God as Gerard had professed to fear. It was as if some large white blankness were opening before him, not a dead soiled white like the Berlin Wall, but a radiant live space like a white cloud, moist and warm. What would he be doing this time next year, he wondered. So it was as close as that, his new and different future? He had said nothing to anybody, not even to Gerard.
Jenkin spread some clean newspaper upon the wooden table and set out a plate, a knife and fork. He poured the remainder of the Beaujolais into his glass and sat down and sipped it. He thought about Gerard walking home alone through the foggy lamplit streets. Then he imagined himself walking alone. He too was a walker. Only while Gerard walked wrapped in the great dark cloak of his thoughts, Jenkin walked through a great collection or exhibition of little events or encounters. Trees, for instance, an immense variety of dogs whose gentle soft friendly eyes met his with intelligence, rubbish tips containing the amazing variety of things which people threw away, some of which Jenkin would take home and cherish, shop windows, cars, things in gutters, people’s clothes, people with sad or happy faces, houses with sad or happy faces, windows at dusk where through undrawn curtains one could watch people watching television. Sometimes, sitting at home, Jenkin imagined individual other people, people he had never met, these were always lonely people, a girl in a bed-sitter with her cat and her potted plant, an elderly man washing his shirt, a man in a turban walking along a dusty road, a man lost in the snow. Sometimes he dreamed about such people or was one himself. Once he thought so intensely about a tramp at a railway terminus that he actually set off late in the evening and walked to Paddington to see if the tramp was there. The tramp was not there, but a variety of other solitary persons were there, waiting for Jenkin.
Jenkin never imagined stories attached to these people. They were pictures of individuals whose fates were sketched in their faces, their clothes, their momentary ambience, and were in this respect like the real people he met in the street. His grasp of his few friends was in the same way intense and limited. He was intensely aware of the reality of Gerard, of Duncan, of Rose, of Graham Willward (a master at his school), of Marchment (a social worker, formerly an M P, who also knew Crimond); but he did not like to speculate abo
ut them beyond the formulation of hypotheses necessary for ordinary life. They were mysterious pictures which he often looked at, mysteries upon which he sometimes meditated. He had little social curiosity and was devoid of gossip, so some people found him dull. He was an only child who had loved his parents and believed in their religion and in their goodness. Later he painlessly shed his Christianity. He could not believe in a supernatural elsewhere or imagine the risen Lord except in anguish. He found equally alien the (as he saw it) quasi-mystical, pseudo-mystical, Platonic perfectionism which was Gerard’s substitute for religious belief. Yet he retained, perhaps after all from the examples so dear to him in childhood, a kind of absolutism, not about any special human task or pilgrimage, but just about jobs to be done among strangers. The simplicity of his life which seemed to some spectators an asceticism, to others naive and childish, or a pose, was for him part of his absolute; but was also, as he was well aware, a programme for happiness. Jenkin disliked muddles, cupidity, lying, exercises of power, the masses of ordinary sinning, because they involved states of mind which he found uncomfortable, such as envy, resentment, remorse or hate. ‘He’s so healthy,’ someone had said of Jenkin half scornfully, and Jenkin would have understood the element of criticism involved. He had become too much at ease, too much at home in his life. Gerard was not at home, made continually restless by a glimpsed ideal far far above him; yet at the same time the glimpse, as the clouds swirled about the summit, consoled him, even deceived him, as with a swoop of intellectual love he seemed to be beside it, up there in those pure and radiant regions, high above the thing he really was. This Jenkin saw in Gerard as the old religious illusion. Gerard was always talking about destroying his ego. Jenkin quite liked his, he needed it, he never worried too much, he hoped to do better, trusting to his general way of life to keep him ‘out of trouble’. I’m a slug, he sometimes thought. I move altogether if I move at all, I only stretch myself out a little, a very little.
It was not that Jenkin felt in general that he should set forth somewhere to serve the human race. He knew that by teaching languages and a bit of history to all sorts of boys he was performing an important service and probably doing what he was best at. Was it not simply self-indulgent romanticism, this idea of carrying his ‘simplicity’ a little further? He wanted a change. He was having a change, a sabbatical term. He was supposed to be studying something, writing something. Instead he was cherishing this restlessness. He wanted to get away. He wanted to get away to be with the people he often thought about. How far away, as far as Paddington, as far as a bed-sitting room in Kilburn? Farther than that. As far as Limehouse or Stepney or Walworth? Farther than that. Yet was not even that far a matter of romanticism, escapism, delusion, dereliction of duty, a dream of feeding on others’ misery and making of it a full self? He wanted, did he, to be right out on the frontiers of human suffering, out on the edge of things, to live there, for that to be his home? The heroes of our time are dissidents, protesters, people alone in cells, anonymous helpers, unknown truth-tellers. He knew he would not be one of these, but he wanted to be somehow near them. Nothing mattered much except easing pain, except individuals and their histories. But what did that mean for him, with his new secret dreams of setting off for South America or India? Even his Liberation Theology was romantic, consisting merely of a popular picture of Christ as the Saviour of the poor, of the left-behinds, of the disappeareds. Though sometimes he also thought, could not just that be theology after all, not the learned tinkering of demythologising bishops, but theology broken, smashed by the sudden realisable and realised horror of the world? This could be so even if his own thoughts of departure amounted to no more than the perusal of a holiday brochure, the merest fact that, somehow, he wanted to get away. He wanted, for instance, to get away from Gerard.
Needless to say there were no ordinary or obvious reasons why he should want to get away from Gerard. He had loved Gerard all his adult life. They had never been lovers. Jenkin’s sexual aspirations, usually unsuccessful and now in eclipse, were toward the other sex. But a great love involves the whole person and Jenkin’s attachment was perhaps in the true sense Platonic. Gerard was like a perfect older brother, a protector and a guide, an exemplar, a completely reliable, completely loving, resource, he had been, and had uniquely been, for Jenkin, pure gold. Perhaps these were precisely the reasons why he wanted to get up and run? To test himself in a Gerardless world. Reverently to remove something so perfect just because it was perfect. He was too cosy and settled in his little house with his little friendly things. It was required of him to be elsewhere, with other people, not friends, there could be no more friends, and no more things either. Of course going away, going right away, wouldn’t mean quarrelling with Gerard, but it would mean abandoning him, being so alien and far off that Gerard, if he figured at all, would become a mere tourist in his life. That break, that breaking, was somehow essential; and on quiet evenings when Jenkin was alone in his house, listening to the radio and going to bed early, what he intended could seem to him not only absurd but terrible, a kind of death, a pure loss: what Gerard said virtue looked like when you saw it from below. Well, it wasn’t virtue he was after either. His wish was something far more wilful.
When Gerard left Jenkin and began to walk from Shepherd’s Bush to Notting Hill through the fog, wrapped in the great dark cloak of his thoughts, he found himself remembering a story someone had told him about the method of fishing on some island in the South Seas. What the natives did was this. They let out from the beach an enormous round net stretching forward deep into the sea. At the appropriate time – Gerard could not recall how long the process took – the huge net was, with efforts demanding the co-operation of the whole village, winched in toward the shore. As the enormous bundle slowly approached the land and began to be visible above the surface, the net was found to contain a mass of huge fish and what the narrator (who immediately gave up swimming) called ‘sea monsters’. The creatures, as they found themselves confined and being removed from their element, began a ferocious and fantastic threshing about, a maelstrom of terror and force, a flailing of great tails, a flashing of great eyes and jaws. They also began to attack each other, making the sea red with their blood. When Gerard told the story later to Jenkin he spontaneously used it as an image of the unconscious mind. Later he wondered why the comparison had seemed apt. Surely his unconscious was full of quiet peaceful fish? Jenkin was more concerned about the poor dying creatures and reiterated his frequent notion, never acted upon, that he ought to become a vegetarian. Gerard was not sure why he remembered this now. Talk with Jenkin always sent waves of force through Gerard’s mind, usually beneficent and pleasant ones. Today however the vibrations had made him uneasy as if, though everything seemed as usual, the wavelength had changed. He thought, something’s wrong with Jenkin, or perhaps something’s wrong with me. He could not make out, reflecting, whether the uneasiness was really about Jenkin or about Crimond. Perhaps the flailing monsters were monsters of jealousy. Gerard was much given to jealousy, a sin with which he struggled and which he meticulously concealed.
‘The rainy Pleiads wester, Orion plunges prone, the stroke of midnight ceases, and I lie down alone. The rainy Pleiads wester, and seek beyond the sea, the head that I shall dream of, and ’twill not dream of me.’ This poem of A. E. Housman, a rendering of some Greek thing, was often, during these days, repeated to himself by Gulliver Ashe as a kind of liturgy, not exactly a prayer. It brought him some comfort. Not that it had, for him, any precise meaning or application. He was not, at that time, dreaming of any particular head, beyond the sea or not. He was certainly lying down alone, but he had been doing this for some time and was used to it. The little desolation of the poem had for him some larger and more cosmic ring. Gulliver was unemployed. It had taken him some time to realise this as a condition, and one likely to endure.
Gerard, who had got Tamar a job, had also got one for Gulliver, but Gulliver had almost immediately lost it. Gerard had been ??
?very nice about it’, and had twice asked Gulliver to come and see him, but Gull now avoided Gerard. Being, sort of, ashamed was, he was beginning to see, one of the signs of the condition. Gulliver’s job, which lasted four weeks, was with some grand printers and designers who specialised in art books, where Gulliver was to be a ‘research assistant’. Later he suspected this job had simply been invented to oblige Gerard. Gull was virtually the office boy, then was required to muck in for an absent porter and carry books. The porter did not return, Gulliver, fed up with carrying books, demanded some research. Someone was rude to him and he walked out.
Gulliver had ‘done’ English at a London college and emerged with a good degree and a lot of embryonic talents. He had been a successful student actor and considered a stage career. He also wanted to be a writer, to edit a left-wing periodical, to go into left-wing politics. He got himself into an acting school where he decided he would really like to be a director or stage designer. He left because someone offered him some book reviewing, and he wanted to start a novel. The book reviews went well, he finished the novel, but could not find a publisher. He applied for and gained a job in the BBC as a trainee producer in radio. He wanted to transfer to television but was not able to. His second novel had also failed to be published. Gulliver attributed its failure to lack of time, and left the BBC to live on his savings and devote himself to writing. He published some short stories, one of which was made into a television play. He tried to get back into the BBC and failed, but got a job in a theatre workshop. He did a little acting and a little stage managing and even acquired an Equity card, but nothing lasted. He became a drama critic on a literary periodical. In this way years passed and Gulliver was now over thirty. So far he had enjoyed his adventures, sure he could always ‘turn his hand to something’. Now things began quietly to get worse. He failed to gain a coveted editorship, the periodical could no longer afford him, the theatre workshop had ceased to exist. There was less money around, there were economies everywhere. He wrote a few more stories but no one published them. He had not the spirit to try another novel. At the time of the midsummer dance he had been unemployed for several months.