'Oh, of course. Say that, then. But he'd still want to come along, wouldn't he?'
'Not if I said I was going to see Nanny Rees afterwards.'
I waited. 'Would we really have to go and see Nanny Rees afterwards?'
'Do you mind?'
I thought fast. 'Not at all. But you said she lives in Famham, and, well, that's quite a-'
'No, Fulham.'
'Fulham? Oh, great, well let's do that then. She sounds marvellous, I'd love to meet her. Is she Welsh, or what?'
I went along to the Tate, I need hardly say, on the Saturday before, decked out like a walking stationery department, also with a pocket edition of the poet's work and the well-thumbed Thames and Hudson.
Half an hour of wandering round: I sneered at the militarist paintings on the ground floor and laughed at one or two of the Hogarths. Then it was down to work. I mapped out an approximate route and noted points of general interest. In the hope that he would acknowledge me on the day, I approached (practically on all fours) a winded attendant and talked to him about how much he hated Americans and children of all nationalities. I had a thorough look at the Blakes, marking them up in the Thames and Hudson, and generally got the feel of the place. I was a bit ashamed, actually, having not been along before then. Because I really quite liked Blake - and not just for the fucks he had got me, either.
Two hours later, over barley wines in a pub off the King's Road, I swotted up some quotes and drafted a few speeches. One on God Creating Adam, to be delivered as we were leaving, by the large windows at the southern end of the gallery; unless I missed my guess, albescent reflections of the sun playing on the river would flit eerily over my face as, voice hushed and brow creased, I spoke these words. I wrote:
There's so much sexual energy in the horizontal... movement of the painting. The faces of God and Adam [pause] - pained, yet distant. [Ask what she thinks and agree] Yes, it's almost as if Blake imagined the Creation as an inherently ... tragic act. [Laugh here, getting out of your depth] Quite sexy, though. Obviously quite an experience.
Then, in note form, I sketched out a short polemical piece on why I hadn't been to see (and apparently hadn't heard of) the Gray Illustrations.
suspicions justified - hopeless insipidity of the material -prim humour - no apocalypse
My face darkened, over-demure - reactionary platitudes - fuck all that
The pub started to fill up with blue-and-white-scarved soccer hooligans, who looked disconsolate, and uniformed senior citizens, who seemed giddy with precarious cheer. Finishing my barley, I read through what I had written. I looked round, coughed, and read it again. Nobody talked like that. Still, Rachel knew a fair amount about Blake, and it was a sort of last fling anyway. After this, I thought, I'll have to go Lawrence.
I patted my pockets for loose change. Enough for a taxi, or a double whisky plus the tube. Perhaps I should do neither, force down a pie or something. It was a funny thing. I had never been much of an eater, and was relieved now that Jenny had become too preoccupied or whatever she was to cook those marshy dinners for Norman and me (which I had always gobbled up in case Norm thought I was queer). But instead of being merely bland, food had begun to seem irrelevant, superfluous, wholly alien. Must be Rachel. I remembered a Dickens character, Guppy in Bleak House, telling Esther, for whom he had the hots, that 'the soul recoils from food at such a moment'. 'Such a moment': it bothered Guppy only when he was in a flap. It stayed in my body like a dull allergy. It occurred to me that I might be in love.
I chose the whisky, but that liquor pleasantly numbed my fear as I walked down on to the King's Road and along it to Sloane Square. Illuminated by bright shop windows, packs of Continental youths stood talking in loud voices, either among themselves or to heartbreakingly beautiful girls. They didn't mind me. Things got slightly sweatier when I changed trains at Notting Hill, a small riot being in progress on the eastbound Central Line platform. But I stuck close to a pair of fat old women, actually nipping into the seat between them on the train itself.
When I returned I got drunker with Norman. We talked for an hour and a half about girls. He didn't mention Jenny and I didn't mention Rachel.
Later, instead of going to sleep, I stared at the ceiling all night and got a lot of coughing done.
'If ever you think your prick smells bad,' mused Geoffrey, weighing a tube of glue in his hand, 'just get a load of this.' He held it up to my nose. 'And you needn't worry.'
I sniffed. A swimming-pool of cock-camembert. I wondered.
'When you say "bad" —'
'I mean bad,' he said, nodding.
Geoffrey was trying to stick a poster of a naked girl on to the south wall of his Belsize Park sitting-room. He continued:
'No, man, don't get too wanky with her. And cut out all this intellectual shit. Chicks don't want to be over-awed ... Thanks,' he said to his (new) witch-like girlfriend as she handed him a joint so ill-made that it resembled a baby's winkle. 'Just be yourself. If you make it, cool, if you don't, then no sweat because it wouldn't of worked anyway. Be yourself ... what's ... wrong with that?' He strained to adhere the top of the poster to the wall, and stood back, hands on hips.
'Crap,' I said (deducing that if he didn't care what he said in front of Sheila, I needn't). 'Who ever acts naturally with a girl? Do you think you do? How much of the time isn't it lovable vague Mandied Geoffrey, or big-cock groover Geoffrey, or just plain old honest-to-goodness Geoffrey, who doesn't put on any acts or play any games?"
He yawned. 'I don't know what you're talking about/ he said, and collapsed on to a pile of cushions, returning the joint to Sheila. As she puffed on it he kissed her neck and ears.
'Relax,' he murmured, to me rather than to Sheila. 'Flow with it, never try to change ... the course ... You can't alter...'
'Geoffrey,' 1 said. 'Have you been reading all that Chink crap again, that J-Shaing or—'
Geoffrey stuck out an amphetamine-verdured tongue and made covert gestures with his free hand. Sheila stood up, brushed herself down, and brought the joint over to me. I gently refused it.
'How're you feeling?' she asked. 'Bit better?'
'Yes, a bit better.'
'Like some more coffee?'
'Love some.'
Sunday, one o'clock. Two hours before I was to meet Rachel.
That morning, I awoke, bolt upright, at nine fifteen, with a bit of a hangover. I woke because Norman was 'doing the dustbins', a thing he did two mornings a week. This duty was, I imagined, also a pleasure; at the end of it Norman got to throw the two empty bins down the ten-foot drop outside my room. It made quite a lot of noise.
I waited for the second crash. It came, even louder than the first. Out of bed, across the room, I toppled into the armchair by the fire, which, naked, I lit, fourth match. With quivering fingertips I kneaded my forehead and scalp. When I had got them working again, I moved to the window and gingerly parted the curtains. Norman was standing above me, the two dustbin lids in outstretched arms. Cymbal-like, he clapped them together, and released them. I veered back into the room.
*
'... change the way you feel, but you can change the way you think.'
There was enough of a pause for me to say: 'Well, I'd better pull out.'
'Here,' Sheila said. She handed me a paperback. The Well-Tempered Spiral: An Ascent, by Professor Hamilton Macreadie. 'Read it,' she said. 'It's a very beautiful book.'
I flipped through. Four hundred pages of hippie sententious-ness. 'I will. Thank you.'
'Be sure you do.'
Geoffrey said that he would see me out. In the small vestibule, he took the book from my hand.
'Don't bother about that — I'll hide it.' He made a space between the telephone books on the floor. 'She's really into it seriously ... so—'
'Is that why you were trying to shut me up earlier?'
'Yeah, save hustles.'
'See ? You do it too. You go along with all that. What's the difference?'
Geoffrey
opened the front door. 'I only do what I have to do, like everybody else. But I don't say anything I don't mean. With me, it's not all part of some great... scene.'
'Scene?'
'You know - strategy, angle. You go out of your way to do it. I never even really think about it. Never thought about it till today.'
'Yes, but you've got Sheila. I haven't got Rachel, so I've got to work on it.'
'Yeah. Anyway, fuck it.'
'Yeah, fuck it. She's nice, that Sheila, though, despite all the -'
'Yeah. Ring me. See you.'
'Yeah. Bye.'
'G'luck.'
To stabilize myself I had trekked slowly through the morning routine. Duffle-coat and gyms; up the stairs; gruff hellos, make some coffee, jokes and nudes in the morning papers.
Then I took the coffee to my bathroom (which a few not very arduous days had made usable) and sat on the lavatory seat, leaning over every now and then in order to hawk into the basin. The point of the coffee was to camouflage any darker substances I might chance to cough up; similarly, I used red-tinted toothpaste to abolish signs of what might or might not be bleeding gums. But I didn't dare look at all that morning, flushing the whole lot down with an imperious blast of the hot tap. I caught my eye in the mirror. My face looked, at once, dreary and vicious. My hair hung on my head as if it were a cut-price toupee. My mouth was crinkled like a frozen potato-chip. Moreover, my chin seemed curiously mis-shapen, or off-centre. Suddenly my hand flew to my face. A Big Boy.
For five minutes I savaged it with filthy fingernails.
Then I rang Geoffrey.
'Lovely. Then I suppose it was ewe decided to go to The University?'
Rachel spoke for me. 'Yes. He could have gone to a university but he decided to wait another year and try for Oxford.'
'Just in case,' I put in, not the silk-hatted layabout I seemed.
'Very good,' said Nanny. 'And have ewe been studying hard, my lovely?' She leant forward and slapped Rachel on the thigh.
She, Nanny, wasn't too bad: a red-faced, fat but strong-looking woman of about sixty-five or seventy. A Taff all right.
I sat with Rachel on the sofa, facing the two-bar electric fire. Nanny was on the moist armchair to Rachel's right, her shiny old knees drinking up the heat. As she poured tea and turned animatedly from one of us to the other, Rachel's leg would brush mine. I had, therefore, a painful, half-buckled erection which, in the teenage manner, wouldn't go away. A cup of tea turned stone-cold on the throbbing saucer above my groin without me once daring to raise it to my lips. I wore a smile, one of decent approval of all before me.
The day was going well, particularly in view of the fact that Rachel's first words were:
'Hi. You've got an enormous spot on your chin.'
I laughed with her, in a way relieved that we weren't going to spend every second of the afternoon not mentioning it.
'I know all about it, thank you,' I said. And I did, too. That morning, man and spot had become one, indivisible. Now, it felt like a surgically implanted walnut. But Rachel didn't seem to mind, or was good at seeming not to. I would have minded.
I had read my notes so often that they had long lost any meaning they might once have had. So I tried some extempore stuff. Rachel did a good deal of the talking - by no means all of it nonsense. To save face, therefore, I ran through an edited version of the God Creating Adam speech, adapting it to the ghostly lighting effects of the lower gallery, rather than to the pallid flickers of the afternoon sun: with widened eyes and more oracular remoteness of voice. When I finished, Rachel looked up at me and spoke these words:
'See that little boy over by the stairs ? He's got his pyjamas on underneath his trousers.'
We stayed for two hours. On the way out I heart-rendingly bought Rachel a 3p postcard of Blake's Ghost of a Flea, offering it to her with boyish diffidence. She (quite rightly) kissed me on the cheek, just missing my spot.
Then she lost her thumb in the grinder at the factory,' Nanny was saying. 'She've got compensation of course, one hundred and forty-five pound. "Unsafe", they said it was. Pity, mind, because they can't employ her now. Lucky to've got the money, but... pity.' She beamed at us.
That's terrible,' said Rachel. 'She should've got hundreds —'
'No no,' said Nanny, shaking her head with pedantic calm. 'She got good money. I read in the Post only Friday, boy lost his right leg in the printing works down the Broadway. They said —'
I looked round the room. There was only the one door off it, and we had come in by that, so it was safe to assume that these four walls (or six: the bedsitter was L-shaped) bounded Nanny's existence - apart from sorties to some rancid bathroom, which would anyway have crap and catatonic Irishmen all over its floor. What happened when they got too aged and fucked-up to climb three flights of stairs every time their awful old bowels gave (surely most unreliable) signs of moving ? In the far corner was a sort of kitchenette unit: a sink, a one-ring electric plate, a tiny Fablon-decked table. There Dora Rees breakfasted on tap-moistened All-Bran, lunched on devilled tea-bags, dined on a mug of hot water into which she had cautiously dipped an Oxo cube. And the spread she had laid on for us. Two kinds of sandwiches, raisin cake, sliced ham, unlimited tea. I noticed that Nan wasn't eating, so, after a couple of sandwiches for politeness' sake, I laid off the food, claiming a heavy lunch whenever she pressed more on me: 'Have some more of next Wednesday's breakfast. Do try tomorrow's dinner.' The garrulous Rachel, however, ate as fast as she talked.
I began listening again. With Rachel in the lead, they were taking a roundabout stroll down memory lane, I supposed for my benefit. Rachel talked with volume and great freedom of association; Nanny Rees just stared at her besottedly, directing the odd appreciative glance at my big boy: every now and then she would say something like 'Yes, my beauty,' or 'And don't forget so-and-so, angel, he was —' before Rachel hectically resumed.
'That Sunday on the Heath when those boys from Camden Town wouldn't give me my hoop back and you chased them all the way down to the Vale of Health and one of them shouted —'
That sort of thing. I had to do a hell of a lot of laughing, and had also to maintain a stream of unbelieving Nos and You're kiddings, but I didn't mind. Rachel was looking so good; what did she think she was doing here with me?
'... I think we must be going, Nanny,' said Rachel, this announcement forming the coda of some oily tale about a pet frog Rachel used to have. It had crawled beneath one of the three wheels of a prowling cripple's car, apparently a hit-and-run cripple, too. I stood.
'Give my regards to your mother,' said Nanny, 'and to Mr Seth-Smith.'
'I will. And Mummy says she's going to try to come and see you soon.'
Tell her not to put herself out. Goodbye, Charles, lovely to've met ewe.'
'No, please don't get up,' I said. 'Goodbye, Miss Rees, thank you very much for the delicious tea. It was very nice meeting you, and I hope I see you again soon.'
I turned away, letting them complete a short but intense session of hugs, kisses and promises. Rachel joined me by the door and preceded me out. As I followed I looked back to give Nan a final wave, conceitedly indicating that I, in a mere two hours' acquaintance, had perhaps learned more about this sad indictment of our society than Rachel probably ever would. Nan didn't see me. She had brought her swollen red face back towards the fire, seeming to smile in a strange ripple-featured way. Rachel had her back to me, head bowed over open handbag in an attempt to light a cigarette, having not smoked while she was there. She was oddly stiff, or intent, or something. I took another glance inside. Nanny was still. Nanny rested her head on her left hand and brought her right hand up to her forehead so that the hands nearly touched, face very shiny in the glow from the fire. Perhaps it was sweat, or grease, or sebum - but, you never know, it might have been tears. I liked to think it was.
As I closed the door, Rachel turned in the semi-darkness, cigarette alight in her mouth, and led the way down the gaunt staircase to the hall. Th
e hall smelled of boiling cabbage -or, let's be accurate, it smelled as if someone had eaten six bushels of asparagus, washed them down with as many quarts of Guinness, and pissed over the walls, ceiling and floor.
My tentative plans. A walk along the Embankment, melodious insights on Nanny Rees. Or a showing of Bicycle Thieves at a local Classic, after which I would discourse tellingly on the theme of its all being very well for us. Or an unsmiling taxi-ride back to my place, where we'd churn the sheets in locomotive lust.
I didn't feel up to any of these. As we left the house, I said, 'Can we go and have a drink somewhere ?'
'Fine. Where? I can't stay too long. Got to be back at nine.'
The Queen's Elm. It's the other end of the Fulham Road. It'll be open by the time we get there.'
The sky was greying now, and the light shower earlier had brought no warmth to the air. Rachel fastened her coat tightly and did a Walt Disney shiver. I was informed by my viscera that now was the time to put an arm round her shoulders. I ignored them.
'God, it's freezing,' she said, as we walked up to the main road. 'Can we get a taxi ? I'll go halves.'
I felt reluctant to do this. Taxis now seemed vulgar, in bad taste. Puritan guilt after parting the soiled net curtains to Nanny's world? Although I couldn't refuse without seeming mean, I hated my blithe talk on the way about what a marvellous old girl old Nanny was, such resilience and warmth and, well, goodness. Mind you, I realized even at that moment how shaky were my claims to any social concern. Like most people, I feel ambiguous guilt for my inferiors, ambiguous envy for my superiors, and mandatory low-spirits about the system itself. Was this better than Rachel's obliviousness ? She didn't use the misery of others to cultivate her own smugness, true, but at least I didn't go about eating all their food.
'Shouldn't we have helped clear up?'
'Not on your life. She wouldn't of let us.'
Naturally, I paid for the taxi, even though Rachel made a few token rummages in her bag.