Judith Read online

  Or this is what I understood the Professor to say.

  I felt also – He is talking to me? He will know, won’t he, that his words are not falling on stony ground?

  After the lecture there was an opportunity for people to come up and talk to the Professor: we assembled in a room where coffee and white wine and sandwiches were provided. People queued up for their turn to have their word; he sat in the corner with a special supply of whisky. He seemed both authoritative and yet almost in despair; as if he were benevolent, and yet possibly on the point of screaming like one of those paintings of people trapped in a glass case.

  In the queue I rehearsed the opening lines of what I intended to say – What I am going to ask you might seem to have nothing to do with what you were saying: what I am going to ask you might seem to have nothing to do with what you were saying – but then, when my time came and I was in front of the Professor – he had such small amused bright eyes! – everything went out of my head; it was as if all the lights had come on in a theatre.

  I said ‘You know what you were saying about the experiments that you choose affecting what you call reality –’

  He said ‘Yes –’

  I said ‘Then could you not choose your experiments, in order to affect reality?’

  He seemed to be thinking of something quite different for a time. He was looking over my shoulder.

  He said ‘You mean control it –’

  I said ‘Yes –’

  He said ‘You mean like an actress –’

  I thought – You mean, you were once in love with an actress?

  He said ‘You can do that for a time, and then you will stop; or else you will destroy yourself.’

  I thought – He is seeing through me to the person he was once in love with?

  Then he put out a hand and touched me on the forehead.

  He said ‘Of course you can fix things, and you will succeed for a time: you have to do this, in fact, in order to stay alive. But if you’re clever enough for this, then you’ll know that it isn’t reality. Reality is something beyond yourself: if it’s not, what’s the point? But it’s where all meaning lives, and where all joy lives, and where all love lives: and don’t you forget it.’

  I said ‘Right.’

  He took his finger away from my forehead. Then he said ‘You may have to hit some kind of rock bottom.’

  I thought – You mean, before I begin?

  Then – But how will I know?

  He raised the hand with which he had touched my forehead and he held his fingers pointed and then he opened and shut them once or twice as if they were the mouth of a bird. Then he said ‘Coo-ee!’

  It was this of which I was reminded in the bathroom of the Ritz Hotel. It seemed that I might now lift my hand up and wave to the Professor and say – Coo-ee!

  I thought – But you don’t mean, do you, that this is anywhere like rock bottom?

  So it became established that Desmond and I were lovers: he would occasionally stay up in London for the night; he at last got a room in the flat of a friend where we sometimes went in the afternoons. But now this was done, what on earth was it that we were doing?

  We had each been useful to the other as an idea: what was there when we looked at each other as persons?

  Desmond, for instance, would hardly like to think he might be on some journey towards rock bottom.

  The Professor’s words did not seem difficult: when you think you control things, you do not move beyond what began as an idea.

  Desmond and I would sit in cafés and pubs: we were like people in an advertisement: we were advertising – what? – that this was what people do who have become established as lovers? Then people who saw us could say – Ah yes, they are lovers: they are sitting in cafés and pubs!

  Desmond kept up his more masculine role: he indulged in badinage: he would criticise my clothes. He would say – What, the sales are on at Oxfam?

  He was apt to use slogans about making love – One for the road: Chalk it up: Back to the drawing-board. We were like people taking our clothes off at the side of an athletics track; preparing our starting-blocks and fingers.

  I thought – Making love is like a life-belt thrown to people who might drown: it hits them on the head; if they sink, is it to rock bottom?

  I usually went back to the Indian boy, Krishna, at night. Desmond never asked me about this. I thought – This is the sign that we have both of us got what we wanted?

  I did have to make up some story to Krishna: I said that Desmond was my uncle from whom I hoped to borrow money. This was a story he would respect: I do not know if he believed it. I did think from time to time – At least I respect him for requiring a story.

  What I was doing, of course (oh we know all this! what do we do about what we know?), was that in being with both Desmond and Krishna I was splitting one side of myself from another. This is obvious: we do it for protection: had not the Professor said – You may have to, to stay alive? But he had also said – You have to give up. And you are saved, are you, by going to rock bottom?

  The room in which Krishna lived in the basement of the hotel or hostel had a lot of political posters on the wall. I had met him with the Young Trotskyites. His particular revolution was to do with the part of South India from which he came; he was part of a religious and racial minority that was being persecuted. He and his friends were demanding independence as if this were something that could be given to them like money. In the evenings a group of them would crowd into his room: they would perch on the floor, against the walls; listen to speeches beneath the noise of a record-player and the sweet smell of dope. Political people, I suppose, like to sit up late at night with a lot of noise and exhaustion going on and then after a time there can be the impression of enormous events elsewhere.

  Krishna got carried away when making love. I thought – But what is the difference between a trick of the guts, and a trick of the mind?

  Desmond would turn up in a pub at lunchtime with his sheaf of newspapers under his arm. He would say – Oh what shall we give to old Dirty Lenin today? a junkie wife? parrot’s disease? a pregnant daughter?

  I wish I could bring Desmond to life: he seemed to try to disarm himself by being awful. But what has been called ‘bringing to life’ is usually to do with characters who are deathly.

  I do not feel that I need to try to bring Krishna so much to life: but then he does not play this sort of part in the story.

  I thought – If I could find someone who at the same time was dark and passionate and elegant and daft, then could I stop behaving like one of those poor deprived gorgons with snakes in their hair?

  There was an evening when the Die Flamme people gave a party –

  Oh I was getting tired of this, yes! I was becoming somewhat ill at the time. I will be trying to talk of this later.

  There was an evening when the Die Flamme people gave a party and all the Medusas and flatworms (as you, Bert, once called them) were there – coelanterates, whose mouths are the same as their anuses. That is, there was assembled in an enormous ballroom the élite of the London literary world – and not only of the literary world, because the Die Flamme style had splashed over into the fashionable, and to possess an invitation to this party had become a matter of snob prestige. Guests were crammed into the auditorium of a huge theatre that had been turned into a ballroom: there were about a thousand of us wriggling like fish-bait in a tin. One of the forms my sickness had begun to take at this time was to have visions, almost physical, of human beings trapped in mud: they were struggling to get out; they had no hope; everyone was trying to climb up on, and was only pushing down, everybody else. There were these hundreds of people crammed into the ballroom like worms: why did they want to be here? was God, after all, a fisherman in thigh-length boots like a woman? But what would be his catch? Did he every now and then take someone out of the can and put them on a hook: to dangle them in order to attract – what? that which the Professor had called reality, ro
und some corner? It did not seem, in fact, that many of the people at the Die Flamme party were trying to get out of whatever it was they were in; they were climbing up on each other’s heads, or shoulders, just to stay where they were; to keep others under.

  The Die Flamme people themselves were in a box on the ground-floor level: they bobbed backwards and forwards nodding and laughing. They were like royalty. I thought – What terrible contempt there is to do with royalty! both that people should want to look on them like this, and that they should allow it.

  There was a sculptor in Düsseldorf – do you remember? who used to make hundreds of plastic sheep and sell them to rich industrialists who piled them into attics; it was some comfort to industrialists to have the sheep there: perhaps they themselves could then more easily go on opening and shutting their mouths and bobbing backwards and forwards downstairs. I suppose the social world has always run on some sort of contempt. Where does a worm go, if one gets out of it?

  I was not with Desmond at the Die Flamme party because his wife was there: she was a short plump woman like a pigeon. About her presence, of course, I had been cool, witty, understanding. But at the same time I had happened to quarrel with Desmond: there are these coincidences, are there not, at least in the unconscious.

  What I had quarrelled with Desmond about was the vendetta that the Die Flamme people were pursuing against the politician they called Dirty Lenin. One of Dirty Lenin’s children, at boarding-school, had attempted suicide. Of course there was no direct connection between this event and Die Flamme’s vendetta. But, indeed, yes, there are coincidences.

  Desmond had puffed and blown his cheeks out.

  I had thought – Hurry, hurry, there must be some slide down soon towards the bottom of this slope!

  There was one man who was going to be at the Die Flamme party of whom I had heard and whom I wanted to meet: I was still, I suppose, shameless about this. But what else is there to do, even if you see it, until you get out, except to keep yourself up on other people’s shoulders? This man at the party I shall call Oliver: this was what the Die Flamme people called him: they had once run a strip cartoon about him in which he was called Oliver Screw. This was a take-off of Oliver Twist – the joke being that Oliver Twist was someone who asked for more: what Oliver Screw asked for more of was not porridge but women. The real-life Oliver had been a stage-designer; he was now a painter; he had become enormously successful by painting female nudes. These were done in a bony, unerotic, skinnily life-like style; they usually had wrinkles and hairs and they sat or lay with their legs apart and there were bits of everything showing. It had become fashionable for rich women to have their portraits painted by Oliver; their industrialist husbands liked to hang them in their dining-rooms, I suppose, as suitable shepherdesses for their plastic sheep upstairs. Oliver became rich; and also some sort of guru to these people. I imagined him like Rasputin, holding his fingers out to adoring ladies who licked them clean.

  He had for a time, in fact, been a good painter: he had been compared with Goya, and Bacon, and so on. Then recently, I understood, he had stopped painting. It was a time, I suppose, when many artists were asking themselves what they were doing.

  He was one of the very few people whom the Die Flamme people seemed in awe of. They had tried to mock him with their strip cartoon: but this had been, Desmond admitted, like trying to get at Mephistopheles by depicting him as a successful devil.

  I had said to Desmond – What’s he like?

  Desmond had said – He’s the sort of shit people go round the bend for.

  Oliver turned up at the Die Flamme party with a small bearded man with dark glasses and a gold-topped cane who was said to own pop-stars in Hollywood. Oliver was a thick-set broad-shouldered man with tight dark wiry hair and the cut-out face of an actor. He looked Greek, or Turkish.

  I thought – These worms in the tin can; are they not also the snakes in one’s hair?

  There was loud music. I thought – If I am to pick up Oliver it is no use standing still: he will have had enough of tasteful heroines chained to their rocks.

  There was a black man on the dance floor who was a very good dancer. His hair was done up in snakes like that of a West Indian, yet he danced with the angular movements of arms and legs turned out of someone from the part of the world in which I had been brought up. So I went on to the dance floor and did this sort of dancing with him: I mean not with him, of course: you do not look, you do not touch: the point of this dancing is that you create networks of spaces between. After a time we had the dance floor almost to ourselves, while people watched. Afterwards we went to opposite sides of the dance floor still without having much looked at each other.

  So it was easy to choose my place where to come to rest as if on fire.

  I thought – I know that I have said I will not do this sort of thing again!

  Oliver said ‘Where did you learn to dance like that?’ I said ‘At Jogyakarta.’ He said ‘Where’s that?’

  I thought – You mean, you are not impressed with girls who say things like – At Jogyakarta?

  I said ‘In Java.’

  When I looked at him he had his eyes half-closed and the toes of one foot pointing towards the ground. I thought – For God’s sake, he thinks he is like a Degas dancer?

  He said ‘I wonder if you would do me the most enormous favour?’

  I said ‘What?’

  He spoke with a slight foreign accent. He did not seem to have looked at me at all.

  He said ‘Would you come with me to another party? I would be tremendously grateful if you could.’

  I thought – This is clever!

  I said ‘All right.’

  He said ‘Thank you.’

  When he did look at me he had strange enamel-like green eyes like those that were supposed to have once been painted on marble statues. I remembered Desmond saying – He has the reputation of being able to do anything he likes with horses.

  He said ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

  I said ‘I’ll come with you now.’

  He said ‘This is extraordinarily good of you.’

  I said ‘This is a terrible party.’

  I thought – I am a little out of control: I suppose I have not been on a slope before where the conditions are likely to be so fast.

  As we went out of the ballroom Oliver said ‘The party I will be taking you to will be even worse.’ He laughed.

  When he laughed his face lit up for a moment like a lot of candles coming on within a pumpkin.

  In the street outside there was an enormous white car with a black chauffeur. When Oliver appeared the chauffeur got out and opened a door. We climbed in and sat side by side; the chauffeur settled a rug over our knees. I thought – We are in one of those black-and-white art movies of the 1950s, to do with damnation and death.

  Oliver said ‘I should explain. My wife and my girlfriend happen to have both left me on the same day. It is important for me that I should appear, but not appear on my own, at this party.’

  I thought – You mean, you are saying you trust me enough to risk being honest?

  He said ‘You may believe me when I say that there did not seem to be anyone at that party I could have done this better with than with you.’

  I thought – You mean, you know enough to know this would work with me, being honest and knowing I will not think you are flattering me?

  We drove along like two French actors going down into the underworld.

  He said ‘You know my name?’

  I said ‘Yes.’

  He did not say – I do not know yours.

  He said ‘I should explain about this car. It isn’t mine. It belongs to someone called Louise de St Remy, to whose party we are going.’

  I said ‘I see.’

  He said ‘Do you know Louise?’

  I said ‘No.’

  He said ‘I will tell you a story about Louise and her chauffeur.’

  There were some buttons on the arm-rest of his
seat. He pushed one or two and windows went up and down and eventually the one between the back compartment of the car and the front.

  Oliver said ‘Louise and her chauffeur were going over the Alps one day and Louise said – Stop the car I want to pee. Her chauffeur said – Yes madam the water is boiling.’

  I said ‘Yes that’s a very good story.’

  I thought – This is the style? You say things in a matter-of-fact voice, and assume people will know what you are meaning?

  We arrived at a large apartment block that overlooked the river. There were turrets and battlements and towers. We went up in a lift. On the first floor there were about thirty people gathered in a room like a mausoleum. There were busts and vases on marble pillars: books like plaques locating ashes went up to the tops of walls. Men in dinner-jackets stood holding plates; women wearing evening dresses with thin straps going over their shoulders sat straight-backed on the arms or edges of sofas. There was a buffet at one end of the room presided over by a man in Mozart-opera livery: a waitress in a black dress with a white ruff came round with drinks on a tray. Everything was very quiet, and orderly. I thought – Well, nothing is supposed to go on in the holy of holies, is it?