DORIS LESSING

The Temptation of Jack Orkney

Collected Stories Volume Two

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Preface

Our Friend Judith

Each Other

Homage for Isaac Babel

Outside the Ministry

Dialogue

Notes for a Case History

Out of the Fountain

An Unposted Love Letter

A Year in Regent’s Park

Mrs Fortescue

Side Benefits of an Honourable Profession

An Old Woman and Her Cat

Lions, Leaves, Roses …

Report on the Threatened City

Not a Very Nice Story

The Other Garden

The Italian Sweater

The Temptation of Jack Orkney

The Thoughts of a Near-Human

Bibliographical Note

By the Same Author

About the Author

Read On

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

The Fifth Child

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

‘Our Friend Judith’, together with ‘Each Other’ and ‘A Man and Two Women’, (the last two from To Room Nineteen, Collected Stories Volume One) went to make a French film, A Man and Two Women, with the beautiful Valerie Stroh. This film got itself noticed at film festivals.

‘Our Friend Judith’ was based on an original and independent woman I knew, who lived as I describe. Such women are often almost unnoticed, and like it that way. Their views on their lives and times are often startling.

‘Each Other’ is about incest. More than once I have known a brother and sister who were lovers for years. It is no accident that this relationship is illegal, and frowned on, for, clearly, it can be so powerful that any subsequent loves seem thin and empty. If incest were permitted then ordinary loves and marriages might come to an end. This is not my personal experience, I must quickly add.

‘Homage for Isaac Babel’ was inspired by a young girl’s attempts to be literary and grown-up, but she only achieved the directness and economy she had been told to admire in Isaac Babel when she was in love, and then only in a literary postscript at the end of a consciously literary letter. The story is also about what some people feel to be the innocence of Britain, due to its sheltered and uninvaded experience, compared with the terrible knowledge of peoples exposed to the raw impacts of war.

‘Outside the Ministry’ I think is one of my better stories, with implications far beyond the small events described. Africans tend to like it – that is both, black and white Africans, and often write to me about it.

‘Dialogue’ is about mental illness, the experience that an ordinary sane person may have when with someone not sane, or struggling to stay sane. To spend time with such an afflicted one is to have all one’s assumptions about sanity, normality, life itself, challenged so uncomfortably that the questions may never go away.

‘Notes for a Case History’, like ‘England versus England’ (in Volume One) is another tale that seems to be liked more outside Britain than in it. Both are about the class system that afflicts this country.

‘Out of the Fountain’ was first published in a British Airways flight magazine. I like writing stories for newspapers and magazines, for it was in these, when the great mass-circulation newspapers were born, last century, that short stories of the kind we know were first born – Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekov, for instance, to my mind still the greatest of the short story writers. This tale makes use of that happy process when a sequence of events, or a person, appears in the talk of one person, and then in another’s, perhaps years later and in a different context. You realise you are the witness of an unfolding drama, and decide to wait patiently for the next instalment … this process, rather differently used, and extended into dreams and dreaming, is the basis of ‘Two Potters’ in Volume One. The immediate provocation for ‘Out of the Fountain’ was hearing how flower children, all the offspring of well-off parents, burned piles of dollars in Central Park, New York, to express their abhorrence of filthy lucre.

An Unposted Love Letter’ says something about the disciplines that go into writing, or into any artistic creation.

‘A Year in Regent’s Park’, and ‘Lions, Leaves and Roses’, and ‘The Other Garden’ were written because I lived for some months near that most charming of London parks. Every morning I got up early, to walk beside the lakes before people came and while ducks and geese were still in possession of lawns and shrubberies they clearly thought of as theirs, seeing humans as mere daytime usurpers of birds’ rightful territory. These three tales, or sketches, or impressions, I hope convey something of the pleasures of London parks. I no longer live near Regent’s Park. It is no longer ‘my’ park. At least, only in these three pieces.

‘Report on the Threatened City’ is a story that attracts letters from readers. I was thinking of San Francisco when I wrote, whose inhabitants always have an earthquake somewhere at the back of their minds, but they would not dream of moving away. I wouldn’t either, for it is surely one of the most beautiful of the world’s cities. This tale is sometimes classed as space fiction, or even as science fiction, but I see it as the starkest realism, for it is about our way of opening our hearts and minds to near and immediate dangers, but ignoring equally threatening long-term disasters. It appeared first in Playboy magazine, which in those days printed serious stories.

‘Not a Very Nice Story’ is another letter-attractor. This is because its ‘message’ can be taken to advocate immorality, and people either approve or disapprove. (I don’t like ‘messages’ in literature.) It certainly is about that side of our natures which has never heard of right and wrong. Once upon a time homage was paid to this anarchic area when they had days, once a year, when all morality and restraints were cancelled under a Lord of Misrule. Certain office parties carry on the tradition.

‘The Temptation of Jack Orkney’ is – like ‘The Habit of Loving’, and ‘To Room Nineteen’, and ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’ (the last three are from Volume One) – a story with hidden depths. Often this happens without a writer knowing how she or he has tapped a deeper vein. The new way of education, which is often to omit any teaching of history, may mean that some young thing may enquire about the title, and then you have to spell out the irony, that Jack Orkney sees God (and the other hidden dimensions of life) as a temptation to compromise with the integrities of his stern atheism, whereas for many centuries, not to say millennia, temptations were to do with the flesh, and the lack of belief in God. A nice little version of the whirligig of time, this one. You may try saying to such a youngster, ‘Go to a picture gallery and see how the saints were tormented by visions of food and sex and happy disbelief.’ But they look at you, these infinitely indulged ones, with amazement, for it has never occurred to them to do without anything in the way of fleshly delights, unless it is for fear of AIDS, or because they are slimming.

‘An Old Woman and Her Cat’ has been a good deal reprinted.

‘Mrs Fortescue’ came into being because I once lived in a building that had two professional whores in it, who had lived there for many years.

‘Side Benefits of an Honourable Profession’ was written with relish, after certain experiences in show business.

Doris Lessing, 1994

Our Friend Judith

I stopped inviting Judith to meet people when a Canadian woman remarked, with the satisfied fervour of one who has at last pinned a label on a rare specimen: ‘She is, of course, one of your typical English spinsters.’

This was a few weeks after an American sociologist, having elicited from Judith the facts that she was fortyish, unmarried, and living alone, had inquired of me: ‘I suppose she has given up?’ ‘Given up what?’ I asked; and the subsequent discussion was unrewarding.

Judith did not easily come to parties. She would come after pressure, not so much – one felt – to do one a favour, but in order to correct what she believed to be a defect in her character. ‘I really ought to enjoy meeting new people more than I do,’ she said once. We reverted to an earlier pattern of our friendship: odd evenings together, an occasional visit to the cinema, or she would telephone to say: ‘I’m on my way past you to the British Museum. Would you care for a cup of coffee with me? I have twenty minutes to spare.’

It is characteristic of Judith that the word spinster, used of her, provoked fascinated speculation about other people. There are my aunts, for instance: aged seventy-odd, both unmarried, one an ex-missionary from China, one a retired matron of a famous London hospital. These two old ladies live together under the shadow of the cathedral in a country town. They devote much time to the Church, to good causes, to letter writing with friends all over the world, to the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of relatives. It would be a mistake, however, on entering a house in which nothing has been moved for fifty years, to diagnose a condition of fossilized late-Victorian integrity. They read every book reviewed in the Observer or The Times, so that I recently got a letter from Aunt Rose inquiring whether I did not think that the author of On the Road was not – perhaps? – exaggerating his difficulties. They know a good deal about music, and write letters of encouragement to young composers they feel are being neglected – ‘You must understand that anything new and original takes time to be understood.’ Well-informed and critical Tories, they are as likely to dispatch telegrams of protest to the Home Secretary as letters of support. These ladies, my aunts Emily and Rose, are surely what is meant by the phrase English spinster. And yet, once the connection has been pointed out, there is no doubt that Judith and they are spiritual cousins, if not sisters. Therefore it follows that one’s pitying admiration for women who have supported manless and uncomforted lives needs a certain modification?

One will, of course, never know; and I feel now that it is entirely my fault that I shall never know. I had been Judith’s friend for upwards of five years before the incident occurred which I involuntarily thought of – stupidly enough – as ‘the first time Judith’s mask slipped’.

A mutual friend, Betty, had been given a cast-off Dior dress. She was too short for it. Also she said: ‘It’s not a dress for a married woman with three children and a talent for cooking. I don’t know why not, but it isn’t.’ Judith was the right build. Therefore one evening the three of us met by appointment in Judith’s bedroom, with the dress. Neither Betty nor I were surprised at the renewed discovery that Judith was beautiful. We had both too often caught each other, and ourselves, in moments of envy when Judith’s calm and severe face, her undemonstratively perfect body, succeeded in making everyone else in a room or a street look cheap.

Judith is tall, small-breasted, slender. Her light brown hair is parted in the centre and cut straight around her neck. A high straight forehead, straight nose, a full grave mouth are setting for her eyes, which are green, large and prominent. Her lids are very white, fringed with gold, and moulded close over the eyeball, so that in profile she has the look of a staring gilded mask. The dress was of dark green glistening stuff, cut straight, with a sort of loose tunic. It opened simply at the throat. Init Judith could of course evoke nothing but classical images. Diana, perhaps, back from the hunt, in a relaxed moment? A rather intellectual wood nymph who had opted for an afternoon in the British Museum reading room? Something like that. Neither Betty nor I said a word, since Judith was examining herself in a long mirror, and must know she looked magnificent.

Slowly she drew off the dress and laid it aside. Slowly she put on the old cord skirt and woollen blouse she had taken off. She must have surprised a resigned glance between us, for she then remarked, with the smallest of mocking smiles: ‘One surely ought to stay in character, wouldn’t you say?’ She added, reading the words out of some invisible book, written not by her, since it was a very vulgar book, but perhaps by one of us: ‘It does everything for me, I must admit.’

‘After seeing you in it,’ Betty cried out, defying her, ‘I can’t bear for anyone else to have it. I shall simply put it away.’ Judith shrugged, rather irritated. In the shapeless skirt and blouse, and without makeup, she stood smiling at us, a woman at whom forty-nine out of fifty people would not look twice.

A second revelatory incident occurred soon after. Betty telephoned me to say that Judith had a kitten. Did I know that Judith adored cats? ‘No, but of course she would,’ I said.

Betty lived in the same street as Judith and saw more of her than I did. I was kept posted about the growth and habits of the cat and its effect on Judith’s life. She remarked for instance that she felt it was good for her to have a tie and some responsibility. But no sooner was the cat out of kittenhood than all the neighbours complained. It was a tomcat, ungelded, and making every night hideous. Finally the landlord said that either the cat or Judith must go, unless she was prepared to have the cat ‘fixed’. Judith wore herself out trying to find some person, anywhere in Britain, who would be prepared to take the cat. This person would, however, have to sign a written statement not to have the cat ‘fixed’. When Judith took the cat to the vet to be killed, Betty told me she cried for twenty-four hours.

‘She didn’t think of compromising? After all, perhaps the cat might have preferred to live, if given the choice?’

‘Is it likely I’d have the nerve to say anything so sloppy to Judith? It’s the nature of a male cat to rampage lustfully about, and therefore it would be morally wrong for Judith to have the cat fixed, simply to suit her own convenience.’

‘She said that?’

‘She wouldn’t have to say it, surely?’

A third incident was when she allowed a visiting young American, living in Paris, the friend of a friend and scarcely known to her, to use her flat while she visited her parents over Christmas. The young man and his friends lived it up for ten days of alcohol and sex and marijuana, and when Judith came back it took a week to get the place clean again and the furniture mended. She telephoned twice to Paris. The first time to say that he was a disgusting young thug and if he knew what was good for him he would keep out of her way in the future; the second time to apologize for losing her temper. ‘I had a choice either to let someone use my flat, or to leave it empty. But having chosen that you should have it, it was clearly an unwarrantable infringement of your liberty to make any conditions at all. I do most sincerely ask your pardon.’ The moral aspects of the matter having been made clear, she was irritated rather than not to receive letters of apology from him – fulsome, embarrassed, but above all, baffled.

It was the note of curiosity in the letters – he even suggested coming over to get to know her better – that irritated her most. ‘What do you suppose he means?’ she said to me. ‘He lived in my flat for ten days. One would have thought that should be enough, wouldn’t you?’

The facts about Judith, then, are all in the open, unconcealed, and plain to anyone who cares to study them; or, as it became plain she feels, to anyone with the intelligence to interpret them.

She has lived for the last twenty years in a small two-roomed flat high over a busy West London street. The flat is shabby and badly heated. The furniture is old, was never anything but ugly, is now frankly rickety and fraying. She has an income of £200 a year from a dead uncle. She lives on this and what she earns from her poetry and from lecturing on poetry to night classes and extramural university classes.

She does not smoke or drink, and eats very little, from preference, not self-discipline.

She studied poetry and biology at Oxford, with distinction.

She is a Castlewell. That is, she is a member of one of the academic upper-middle-class families, which have been producing for centuries a steady supply of brilliant but sound men and women who are the backbone of the arts and sciences in Britain. She is on cool terms with her family who respect her and leave her alone.

She goes on long walking tours, by herself, in such places as Exmoor or West Scotland.

Every three or four years she publishes a volume of poems.

The walls of her flat are completely lined with books. They are scientific, classical and historical; there is a great deal of poetry and some drama. There is not one novel. When Judith says: ‘Of course I don’t read novels,’ this does not mean that novels have no place, or a small place, in literature; or that people should not read novels; but that it must be obvious she can’t be expected to read novels.

I had been visiting her flat for years before I noticed two long shelves of books, under a window, each shelf filled with the works of a single writer. The two writers are not, to put it at the mildest, the kind one would associate with Judith. They are mild, reminiscent, vague and whimsical. Typical English belles-lettres, in fact, and by definition abhorrent to her. Not one of the books in the two shelves has been read; some of the pages are still uncut. Yet each book is inscribed or dedicated to her: gratefully, admiringly, sentimentally and, more than once, amorously, in short, it is open to anyone who cares to examine these two shelves, and to work out dates, to conclude that Judith from the age of fifteen to twenty-five had been the beloved young companion of one elderly literary gentleman, and from twenty-five to thirty-five the inspiration of another.

During all that time she had produced her own poetry, and the sort of poetry, it is quite safe to deduce, not at all likely to be admired by her two admirers. Her poems are always cool and intellectual; that is their form, which is contradicted or supported by a gravely sensuous texture. They are poems to read often; one has to, to understand them.

I did not ask Judith a direct question about these two eminent but rather fusty lovers. Not because she would not have answered, or because she would have found the question impertinent, but because such questions are clearly unnecessary. Having those two shelves of books where they are, and books she could not conceivably care for, for their own sake, is publicly giving credit where credit is due. I can imagine her thinking the thing over, and deciding it was only fair, or perhaps honest, to place the books there; and this despite the fact that she would not care at all for the same attention to be paid to her. There is something almost contemptuous in it. For she certainly despises people who feel they need attention.

For instance, more than once a new emerging wave of ‘modern’ young poets have discovered her as the only ‘modern’ poet among their despised and well-credited elders. This is because, since she began writing at fifteen, her poems have been full of scientific, mechanical and chemical imagery. This is how she thinks, or feels.

More than once has a young poet hastened to her flat, to claim her as an ally, only to find her totally and by instinct unmoved by words like modern, new, contemporary. He has been outraged and wounded by her principle, so deeply rooted as to be unconscious, and to need no expression but a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, that publicity seeking or to want critical attention is despicable. It goes without saying that there is perhaps one critic in the world she has any time for. He has sulked off, leaving her on her shelf, which she takes it for granted is her proper place, to be read by an appreciative minority.

Meanwhile she gives her lectures, walks alone through London, writes her poems, and is seen sometimes at a concert or a play with a middle-aged professor of Greek who has a wife and two children.

Betty and I speculated about this professor, with such remarks as: Surely she must sometimes be lonely? Hasn’t she ever wanted to marry? What about that awful moment when one comes in from somewhere at night to an empty flat?

It happened recently that Betty’s husband was on a business trip, her children visiting, and she was unable to stand the empty house. She asked Judith for a refuge until her home filled again.

Afterwards Betty rang me up to report:

‘Four of the five nights Professor Adams came in about ten or so.’

‘Was Judith embarrassed?’

‘Would you expect her to be?’

‘Well, if not embarrassed, at least conscious there was a situation?’

‘No, not at all. But I must say I don’t think he’s good enough for her. He can’t possibly understand her. He calls her Judy.’

‘Good God.’

Yes. But I was wondering. Suppose the other two called her Judy – little Judy – imagine it! Isn’t it awful? But it does rather throw a light on Judith?’

‘It’s rather touching.’

‘I suppose it’s touching. But I was embarrassed – oh not because of the situation. Because of how she was, with him. “Judy, is there another cup of tea in that pot?” And she, rather daughterly and demure, pouring him one.’

‘Well yes, I can see how you felt.’

‘Three of the nights he went to her bedroom with her – very casual about it, because she was being. But he was not in there in the mornings. So I asked her. You know how it is when you ask her a question. As if you’ve been having long conversations on that very subject for years and years, and she is merely continuing where you left off last. So when she says something surprising, one feels such a fool to be surprised?’

‘Yes. And then?’

‘I asked her if she was sorry not to have children. She said yes, but one couldn’t have everything.’

‘One can’t have everything, she said?’

‘Quite clearly feeling she has nearly everything. She said she thought it was a pity, because she would have brought up children very well.”

‘When you come to think of it, she would, too.’

‘I asked about marriage, but she said on the whole the role of a mistress suited her better.’

‘She used the word mistress?’

‘You must admit it’s the accurate word.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And then she said that while she liked intimacy and sex and everything, she enjoyed waking up in the morning alone and her own person.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Of course. But now she’s bothered because the professor would like to marry her. Or he feels he ought. At least, he’s getting all guilty and obsessive about it. She says she doesn’t see the point of divorce, and anyway, surely it would be very hard on his poor old wife after all these years particularly after bringing up two children so satisfactorily. She talks about his wife as if she’s a kind of nice old charwoman, and it wouldn’t be fair to sack her, you know. Anyway. What with one thing and another, Judith’s going off to Italy soon in order to collect herself.’

‘But how’s she going to pay for it?’

‘Luckily the Third Programme’s commissioning her to do some arty programmes. They offered her a choice of The Cid – El Thid, you know – and the Borgias. Well the Borghese, then. And Judith settled for the Borgias.’

‘The Borgias,’ I said. ‘Judith?’

‘Yes, quite. I said that too, in that tone of voice. She saw my point. She says the epic is right up her street, whereas the Renaissance has never been on her wavelength. Obviously it couldn’t be, all the magnificence and cruelty and dirt. But of course chivalry and a high moral code and all those idiotically noble goings-on are right on her wavelength.’

‘Is the money the same?’

‘Yes. But is it likely Judith would let money decide? No, she said that one should always choose something new, that isn’t up one’s street. Well, because it’s better for her character, and so on, to get herself unsettled by the Renaissance. She didn’t say that, of course.’

‘Of course not.’

Judith went to Florence; and for some months postcards informed us tersely of her doings. Then Betty decided she must go by herself for a holiday. She had been appalled by the discovery that if her husband was away for a night she couldn’t sleep; and when he went to Australia for three weeks, she stopped living until he came back. She had discussed this with him, and he had agreed that, if she really felt the situation to be serious, he would dispatch her by air, to Italy, in order to recover her self-respect. As she put it.

I got this letter from her: ‘It’s no use, I’m coming home. I might have known. Better face it, once you’re really married you’re not fit for man nor beast. And if you remember what I used to be like! Well! I moped around Milan. I sunbathed in Venice, then I thought my tan was surely worth something, so I was on the point of starting an affair with another lonely soul, but I lost heart, and went to Florence to see Judith. She wasn’t there. She’d gone to the Italian Riviera. I had nothing better to do, so I followed her. When I saw the place I wanted to laugh, it’s so much not Judith, you know, all those palms and umbrellas and gaiety at all costs and ever such an ornamental blue sea. Judith is in an enormous stone room up on the hillside above the sea, with grape vines all over the place. You should see her, she’s got beautiful. It seems for the last fifteen years she’s being going to Soho every Saturday morning to buy food at an Italian shop. I must have looked surprised, because she explained she liked Soho. I suppose because all that dreary vice and nudes and prostitutes and everything prove how right she is to be as she is? She told the people in the shop she was going to Italy, and the signora said, what a coincidence, she was going back to Italy too, and she did hope an old friend like Miss Castlewell would visit her there. Judith said to me: “I felt lacking, when she used the word friend. Our relations have always been formal. Can you understand it?” she said to me. “For fifteen years,” I said to her. She said: “I think I must feel it’s a kind of imposition, don’t you know, expecting people to feel friendship for one.” Well. I said: “You ought to understand it, because you’re like that yourself.” “Am I?” she said. “Well, think about it,” I said. But I could see she didn’t want to think about it. Anyway, she’s here, and I’ve spent a week with her. The widow Maria Rineiri inherited her mother’s house, so she came home, from Soho. On the ground floor is a tatty little rosticceria patronized by the neighbours. They are all working people. This isn’t tourist country, up on the hill. The widow lives above the shop with her little boy, a nasty little brat of about ten. Say what you like, the English are the only people who know how to bring up children, I don’t care if that’s insular. Judith’s room is at the back, with a balcony. Underneath her room is the barber’s shop, and the barber is Luigi Rineiri, the widow’s younger brother. Yes, I was keeping him until the last. He is about forty, tall dark handsome, a great bull, but rather a sweet fatherly bull. He has cut Judith’s hair and made it lighter. Now it looks like a sort of gold helmet. Judith is all brown. The widow Rineiri has made her a white dress and a green dress. They fit, for a change. When Judith walks down the street to the lower town, all the Italian males take one look at the golden girl and melt in their own oil like ice cream. Judith takes all this in her stride. She sort of acknowledges the homage. Then she strolls into the sea and vanishes into the foam. She swims five miles every day. Naturally. I haven’t asked Judith whether she has collected herself, because you can see she hasn’t. The widow Rineiri is match-making. When I noticed this I wanted to laugh, but luckily I didn’t because Judith asked me, really wanting to know: “Can you see me married to an Italian barber?” (Not being snobbish, but stating the position, so to speak.) “Well, yes,” I said, “you’re the only woman I know who I can see married to an Italian barber. “Because it wouldn’t matter who she married, she’d always be her own person. “At any rate, for a time,” I said. At which she said, asperously: “You can use phrases like for a time in England but not in Italy.” Did you ever see England, at least London, as the home of licence, liberty and free love? No, neither did I, but of course she’s right. Married to Luigi it would be the family, the neighbours, the church and the bambini. All the same she’s thinking about it, believe it or not. Here she’s quite different, all relaxed and free. She’s melting in the attention she gets. The widow mothers her and makes her coffee all the time, and listens to a lot of good advice about how to bring up that nasty brat of hers. Unluckily she doesn’t take it. Luigi is crazy for her. At mealtimes she goes to the trattoria in the upper square and all the workmen treat her like a goddess. Well, a film star then. I said to her, you’re mad to come home. For one thing her rent is ten bob a week, and you eat pasta and drink red wine till you bust for about one and sixpence. No, she said, it would be nothing but self-indulgence to stay. Why? I said. She said, she’s got nothing to stay for. (Ho ho.) And besides, she’s done her research on the Borghese, though so far she can’t see her way to an honest presentation of the facts. What made these people tick? she wants to know. And so she’s only staying because of the cat. I forgot to mention the cat. This is a town of cats. The Italians here love their cats. I wanted to feed a stray cat at the table, but the waiter said no; and after lunch, all the waiters came with trays crammed with leftover food and stray cats came from everywhere to eat. And at dark when the tourists go in to feed and the beach is empty – you know how empty and forlorn a beach is at dusk? – well, cats appear from everywhere. The beach seems to move, then you see it’s cats. They go stalking along the thin inch of grey water at the edge of the sea, shaking their paws crossly at each step, snatching at the dead little fish, and throwing them with their mouths up on to the dry sand. Then they scamper after them. You’ve never seen such a snarling and fighting. At dawn when the fishing boats come in to the empty beach, the cats are there in dozens. The fishermen throw them bits of fish. The cats snarl and fight over it. Judith gets up early and goes down to watch. Sometimes Luigi goes too, being tolerant. Because what he really likes is to join the evening promenade with Judith on his arm around and around the square of the upper town. Showing her off. Can you see Judith? But she does it. Being tolerant. But she smiles and enjoys the attention she gets, there’s no doubt of it.

‘She has a cat in her room. It’s a kitten really, but it’s pregnant. Judith says she can’t leave until the kittens are born. The cat is too young to have kittens. Imagine Judith. She sits on her bed in that great stone room, with her bare feet on the stone floor and watches the cat, and tries to work out why a healthy uninhibited Italian cat always fed on the best from the rosticceria should be neurotic. Because it is. When it sees Judith watching it gets nervous and starts licking at the roots of its tail. But Judith goes on watching, and says about Italy that the reason why the English love the Italians is because the Italians make the English feel superior. They have no discipline. And that’s a despicable reason for one nation to love another. Then she talks about Luigi and says he has no sense of guilt, but a sense of sin; whereas she has no sense of sin but she has guilt. I haven’t asked her if this has been an insuperable barrier, because judging from how she looks, it hasn’t. She says she would rather have a sense of sin, because sin can be atoned for, and if she understood sin, perhaps she would be more at home with the Renaissance. Luigi is very healthy, she says, and not neurotic. He is a Catholic of course. He doesn’t mind that she’s an atheist. His mother has explained to him that the English are all pagans, but good people at heart. I suppose he thinks a few smart sessions with the local priest would set Judith on the right path for good and all. Meanwhile the cat walks nervously around the room, stopping to lick, and when it can’t stand Judith watching it another second, it rolls over on the floor, with its paws tucked up, and rolls up its eyes, and Judith scratches its lumpy pregnant stomach and tells it to relax. It makes me nervous to see her, it’s not like her, I don’t know why. Then Luigi shouts up from the barber’s shop, then he comes up and stands at the door laughing, and Judith laughs, and the widow says: Children, enjoy yourselves. And off they go, walking down to the town eating ice cream. The cat follows them. It won’t let Judith out of its sight, like a dog. When she swims miles out to sea, the cat hides under a beach hut until she comes back. Then she carries it back up the hill, because that nasty little boy chases it. Well. I’m coming home tomorrow thank God, to my dear old Billy, I was mad ever to leave him. There is something about Judith and Italy that has upset me, I don’t know what. The point is, what on earth can Judith and Luigi talk about? Nothing. How can they? And of course it doesn’t matter. So I turn out to be a prude as well. See you next week.’

It was my turn for a dose of the sun, so I didn’t see Betty. On my way back from Rome I stopped off in Judith’s resort and walked up through narrow streets to the upper town, where, in the square with the vine-covered trattoria at the corner, was a house with ROSTICCERIA written in black paint on a cracked wooden board over a low door. There was a door curtain of red beads, and flies settled on the beads. I opened the beads with my hands and looked into a small dark room with a stone counter. Loops of salami hung from metal hooks. A glass bell covered some plates of cooked meats. There were flies on the salami and on the glass bell. A few tins on the wooden shelves, a couple of pale loaves, some wine casks and an open case of sticky pale green grapes covered with fruit flies seemed to be the only stock. A single wooden table wit two chairs stood in a corner, and two workmen sat there, eating lumps of sausage and bread. Through another bead curtain at the back came a short, smoothly fat, slender-limbed woman with greying hair. I asked for Miss Castlewell, and her face changed. She said in an offended, offhand way: ‘Miss Castlewell left last week.’ She took a white cloth from under the counter, and flicked at the flies on the glass bell. ‘I’m a friend of hers,’ I said, and she said: ‘Si,’ and put her hands palm down on the counter and looked at me, expressionless. The workmen got up, gulped down the last of their wine, nodded and went. She ciao’d them; and looked back at me. Then, since I didn’t go, she called: ‘Luigi!’ A shout came from the back room, there was a rattle of beads, and in came first a wiry sharp-faced boy, and then Luigi. He was tall, heavy-shouldered, and his black rough hair was like a cap, pulled low over his brows. He looked good-natured, but at the moment uneasy. His sister said something, and he stood beside her, an ally, and confirmed: ‘Miss Castlewell went away.’ I was on the point of giving up, when through the bead curtain that screened off a dazzling light eased a thin tabby cat. It was ugly and it walked uncomfortably, with its back quarters bunched up. The child suddenly let out a ‘Ssssss’ through his teeth, and the cat froze. Luigi said something sharp to the child, and something encouraging to the cat, which sat down, looked straight in front of it, then began frantically licking at its flanks. ‘Miss Castlewell was offended with us,’ said Mrs Rineiri suddenly, and with dignity. ‘She left early one morning. We did not expect her to go.’ I said: ‘Perhaps she had to go home and finish some work.’

Mrs Rinieri shrugged, then sighed. Then she exchanged a hard look with her brother. Clearly the subject had been discussed, and closed forever.

I’ve known Judith a long time,’ I said, trying to find the right note. ‘She’s a remarkable woman. She’s a poet.’ But there was no response to this at all. Meanwhile the child, with a fixed bared-teeth grin, was staring at the cat, narrowing his eyes. Suddenly he let out another ‘Ssssssss’ and added a short high yelp. The cat shot backwards, hit the wall, tried desperately to claw its way up the wall, came to its senses and again sat down and began its urgent, undirected licking at its fur. This time Luigi cuffed the child, who yelped in earnest, and then ran out into the street past the cat. Now that the way was clear the cat shot across the floor, up to the counter, and bounded past Luigi’s shoulder and straight through the bead curtain into the barber’s shop, where it landed with a thud.

‘Judith was sorry when she left us,’ said Mrs Rineiri uncertainly. ‘She was crying.’

‘I’m sure she was.’

And so,’ said Mrs Rineiri, with finality, laying her hands down again, and looking past me at the bead curtains. That was the end. Luigi nodded brusquely at me, and went into the back. I said goodbye to Mrs Rinieri and walked back to the lower town. In the square I saw the child, sitting on the running board of a lorry parked outside the trattoria, drawing in the dust with his bare toes, and directing in front of him a blank, unhappy stare.

I had to go through Florence, so I went to the address Judith had been at. No, Miss Castlewell had not been back. Her papers and books were still there. Would I take them back with me to England? I made a great parcel and brought them back to England.

I telephoned Judith and she said she had already written for the papers to be sent, but it was kind of me to bring them. There had seemed to be no point, she said, in returning to Florence.

‘Shall I bring them over?’

‘I would be very grateful, of course.’

Judith’s flat was chilly, and she wore a bunchy sage-green woollen dress. Her hair was still a soft gold helmet, but she looked pale and rather pinched. She stood with her back to a single bar of electric fire – lit because I demanded it – with her legs apart and her arms folded. She contemplated me.

I went to the Rineiris’ house.’

‘Oh. Did you?’

‘They seemed to miss you.’

She said nothing.

I saw the cat too.’

‘Oh. Oh, I suppose you and Betty discussed it?’ This was with a small unfriendly smile.

‘Well, Judith, you must see we were likely to?’

She gave this her consideration and said: ‘I don’t understand why people discuss other people. Oh – I’m not criticizing you. But I don’t see why you are so interested. I don’t understand human behaviour and I’m not particularly interested.’

‘I think you should write to the Rineiris.’

‘I wrote and thanked them, of course.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘You and Betty have worked it out?’

‘Yes, we talked about it. We thought we should talk to you, so you should write to the Rineiris.’

‘Why?’

‘For one thing, they are both very fond of you.’

‘Fond,’ she said smiling.

‘Judith, I’ve never in my life felt such an atmosphere of being let down.’

Judith considered this. ‘When something happens that shows one there is really a complete gulf in understanding, what is there to say?’

‘It could scarcely have been a complete gulf in understanding. I suppose you are going to say we are being interfering?’

Judith showed distaste. ‘That is a very stupid word. And it’s a stupid idea. No one can interfere with me if I don’t let them. No, it’s that I don’t understand people. I don’t understand why you or Betty should care. Or why the Rineiris should, for that matter,’ she added with the small tight smile.

‘Judith!’

‘If you’ve behaved stupidly, there’s no point in going on. You put an end to it.’

‘What happened? Was it the cat?’

Yes, I suppose so. But it’s not important.’ She looked at me, saw my ironical face, and said: ‘The cat was too young to have kittens. That is all there was to it.’

‘Have it your way. But that is obviously not all there is to it.’

‘What upset me is that I don’t understand at all why I was so upset then.’

‘What happened? Or don’t you want to talk about it?’

‘I don’t give a damn whether I talk about it or not. You really do say the most extraordinary things, you and Betty. If you want to know, I’ll tell you. What does it matter?’

I would like to know, of course.’

‘Of course!’ she said. ‘In your place I wouldn’t care. Well, I think the essence of the thing was that I must have had the wrong attitude to that cat. Cats are supposed to be independent. They are supposed to go off by themselves to have their kittens. This one didn’t. It was climbing up on to my bed all one night and crying for attention. I don’t like cats on my bed. In the morning I saw she was in pain. I stayed with her all that day. Then Luigi – he’s the brother, you know.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did Betty mention him? Luigi came up to say it was time I went for a swim. He said the cat should look after itself. I blame myself very much. That’s what happens when you submerge yourself in somebody else.’

Her look at me was now defiant; and her body showed both defensiveness and aggression. ‘Yes. It’s true. I’ve always been afraid of it. And in the last few weeks I’ve behaved badly. It’s because I let it happen.’

‘Well, go on.’

‘I left the cat and swam. It was late, so it was only for a few minutes. When I came out of the sea the cat had followed me and had had a kitten on the beach. That little beast Michele – the son, you know? – well, he always teased the poor thing, and now he had frightened her off the kitten. It was dead, though. He held it up by the tail and waved it at me as I came out of the sea. I told him to bury it. He scooped two inches of sand away and pushed the kitten in – on the beach, where people are all day. So I buried it properly. He had run off. He was chasing the poor cat. She was terrified and running up the town. I ran too. I caught Michele and I was so angry I hit him. I don’t believe in hitting children. I’ve been feeling beastly about it ever since.’

‘You were angry.’

‘It’s no excuse. I would never have believed myself capable of hitting a child. I hit him very hard. He went off crying. The poor cat had got under a big lorry parked in the square. Then she screamed. And then a most remarkable thing happened. She screamed just once, and all at once cats just materialized. One minute there was just one cat, lying under a lorry, and the next, dozens of cats. They sat in a big circle around the lorry, all quite still, and watched my poor cat.’

‘Rather moving,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘There is no evidence one way or the other,” I said in inverted commas, ‘that the cats were there out of concern for a friend in trouble.’

‘No,’ she said energetically. ‘There isn’t. It might have been curiosity. Or anything. How do we know? However, I crawled under the lorry. There were two paws sticking out of the cat’s back end. The kitten was the wrong way round. It was stuck. I held the cat down with one hand and pulled the kitten out with the other.’ She held out her long white hands. They were still covered with fading scars and scratches. ‘She bit and yelled, but the kitten was alive. She left the kitten and crawled across the square into the house. Then all the cats got up and walked away. It was the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen. They vanished again. One minute they were all there, and then they had vanished. I went after the cat, with the kitten. Poor little thing, it was covered with dust -being wet, don’t you know. The cat was on my bed. There was another kitten coming, but it got stuck too. So when she screamed and screamed I just pulled it out. The kittens began to suck. One kitten was very big. It was a nice fat black kitten. It must have hurt her. But she suddenly bit out – snapped, don’t you know, like a reflex action, at the back of the kitten’s head. It died, just like that. Extraordinary, isn’t it?’ she said, blinking hard, her lips quivering. She was its mother, but she killed it. Then she ran off the bed and went downstairs into the shop under the counter. I called Luigi. You know, he’s Mrs Rineiri’s brother.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘He said she was too young, and she was badly frightened and very hurt. He took the alive kitten to her but she got up and walked away. She didn’t want it. Then Luigi told me not to look. But I followed him. He held the kitten by the tail and he banged it against the wall twice. Then he dropped it into the rubbish heap. He moved aside some rubbish with his toe, and put the kitten there and pushed rubbish over it. Then Luigi said the cat should be destroyed. He said she was badly hurt and it would always hurt her to have kittens.’

‘He hasn’t destroyed her. She’s still alive. But it looks to me as if he were right.’

‘Yes, I expect he was.’

What upset you – that he killed the kitten?’

Oh no, I expect the cat would if he hadn’t. But that isn’t the point, is it?’

‘What is the point?’

‘I don’t think I really know.” She had been speaking breathlessly, and fast. Now she said slowly: ‘It’s not a question of right or wrong, is it? Why should it be? It’s a question of what one is. That night Luigi wanted to go promenading with me. For him, that was that. Something had to be done, and he’d done it. But I felt ill. He was very nice to me. He’s a very good person,’ she said, defiantly.

‘Yes, he looks it.’

‘That night I couldn’t sleep. I was blaming myself. I should never have left the cat to go swimming. Well, and then I decided to leave the next day. And I did. And that’s all. The whole thing was a mistake, from start to finish.’

‘Going to Italy at all?’

‘Oh, to go for a holiday would have been all right.’

‘You’ve done all that work for nothing. You mean you aren’t going to make use of all that research?’

‘No. It was a mistake.’

‘Why don’t you leave it a few weeks and see how things are then?’

‘Why?’

‘You might feel differently about it.’

‘What an extraordinary thing to say. Why should I? Oh, you mean, time passing, healing wounds – that sort of thing? What an extraordinary idea. It’s always seemed to me an extraordinary idea. No, right from the beginning I’ve felt ill at ease with the whole business, not myself at all.’

‘Rather irrationally, I should have said.’

Judith considered this, very seriously. She frowned while she thought it over. Then she said: ‘But if one cannot rely on what one feels, what can one rely on?’

‘On what one thinks, I should have expected you to say.’

‘Should you? Why? Really, you people are all very strange. I don’t understand you.’ She turned off the electric fire, and her face closed up. She smiled, friendly and distant, and said: ‘I don’t really see any point at all in discussing it.’

Each Other

‘I suppose your brother’s coming again?’

‘He might.’

He kept his back bravely turned while he adjusted tie, collar, and jerked his jaw this way and that to check his shave. Then, with all pretexts used, he remained rigid, his hand on his tie knot, looking into the mirror past his left cheek at the body of his wife, which was disposed prettily on the bed, weight on its right elbow, its two white forearms engaged in the movements obligatory for filing one’s nails. He let his hand drop and demanded: ‘What do you mean, he might?’ She did not answer, but held up a studied hand to inspect five pink arrows. She was a thin, very thin, dark girl of about eighteen. Her pose, her way of inspecting her nails, her pink-striped nightshirt which showed long, thin, white legs – all her magazine attitudes were an attempt to hide an anxiety as deep as his; for her breathing, like his, was loud and shallow.

He was not taken in. The lonely fever in her black eyes, the muscles showing rodlike in the flesh of her upper arm, made him feel how much she wanted him to go; and he thought, sharp because of the sharpness of his need for her: There’s something unhealthy about her, yes … The word caused him guilt. He accepted it, and allowed his mind, which was over-alert, trying to pin down the cause of his misery, to add: Yes, not clean, dirty. But this fresh criticism surprised him, and he remembered her obsessive care of her flesh, hair, nails and the long hours spent in the bath. Yes, dirty, his rising aversion insisted.

Armed by it, he was able to turn, slowly, to look at her direct, instead of through the cold glass. He was a solid, well-set-up, brushed, washed young man who had stood several inches shorter than she at the wedding a month ago; but with confidence in the manhood which had mastered her freakish adolescence. He now kept on her the pressure of a blue stare both appealing (of which he was not aware) and aggressive – which he meant as a warning. Meanwhile he controlled a revulsion which he knew would vanish if she merely lifted her arms towards him.

‘What do you mean, he might?’ he said again.

After some moments of not-answering, she said, languid, turning her thin hand this way and that: ‘I said, he might.’

This dialogue echoed, for both of them, not only from five minutes before; but from other mornings, when it had been as often as not unspoken. They were on the edge of disaster. But the young husband was late. He looked at his watch, a gesture which said, but unconvincingly, bravado merely: I go out to work while you lie there … Then he about-turned, and went to the door, slowing on his way to it. Stopped. Said: ‘Well in that case I shan’t be back to supper.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, languid. She now lay flat on her back, and waved both hands in front of her eyes to dry nail varnish which, however, was three days old.

He said loudly: ‘Freda! I mean it. I’m not going to …’ He looked both trapped and defiant; but intended to do everything, obviously, to maintain his self-respect, his masculinity, in the face of – but what? Her slow smile across at him was something (unlike everything else she had done since waking that morning) she was quite unaware of. She surely could not be aware of the sheer brutality of her slow, considering, contemptuous smile? For it had invitation in it; and it was this, the unconscious triumph there, that caused him to pale, to begin a stammering: ‘Fre-Fre-Fred-Freda …’ but give up, and leave the room. Abruptly though quietly, considering the force of the horror.

She lay still, listening to his footsteps go down, and the front door closing. Then, without hurrying, she lifted her long thin white legs that ended in ten small pink shields, over the edge of the bed, and stood on them by the window, to watch her husband’s well-brushed head jerking away along the pavement. This was a suburb of London, and he had to get to the City, where he was a clerk-with-prospects: and most of the other people down there were on their way to work. She watched him and them, until at the corner he turned, his face lengthened with anxiety. She indolently waved, without smiling. He stared back as if at a memory of nightmare; so she shrugged and removed herself from the window, and did not see his frantically too-late wave and smile.

She now stood, frowning, in front of the long glass in the new wardrobe: a very tall girl, stooped by her height, all elbows and knees, and even more ridiculous because of the short nightshirt. She stripped this off over her head, taking assurance in a side-glance from full-swinging breasts and a rounded waist; then slipped on a white négligé that had frills all down it and around the neck, from which her head emerged, poised. She now looked much better, like a model, in fact. She brushed her short gleaming black hair, stared at length into the deep anxious eyes, and got back into bed.

Soon she tensed, hearing the front door open, softly; and close, softly again. She listened, as the unseen person also listened and watched; for this was a two-roomed flatlet, converted in a semidetached house. The landlady lived in the flatlet below this one on the ground floor; and the young husband had taken to asking her, casually, every evening, or listening, casually, to easily given information, about the comings and goings in the house and the movements of his wife. But the steps came steadily up towards her, the door opened, very gently, and she looked up, her face bursting into flower as in came a very tall, lank, dark young man. He sat on the bed beside his sister, took her thin hand in his thin hand, kissed it, bit it lovingly, then bent to kiss her on the lips. Their mouths held while two pairs of deep black eyes held each other. Then she shut her eyes, took his lower lip between her teeth, and slid her tongue along it. He began to undress before she let him go; and she asked, without any of the pertness she used for her husband: ‘Are you in a hurry this morning?’

‘Got to get over to a job in Exeter Street.’

An electrician, he was not tied to desk or office.

He slid naked into bed beside his sister, murmuring: ‘Olive Oyl.’

Her long body was pressed against his in a fervour of gratitude for the love name, for it had never received absolution from her husband as it did from this man; and she returned, in as loving a murmur: ‘Popeye.’ Again the two pairs of eyes stared into each other at an inch or so’s distance. His, though deep in bony sockets like hers, were prominent there, the eyeballs rounded under thin, already crinkling, bruised-looking flesh. Hers, however, were delicately outlined by clear white skin, and he kissed the perfected copies of his own ugly eyes, and said, as she pressed towards him: ‘Now, now, Olive Oyl, don’t be in such a hurry, you’ll spoil it.’

‘No, we won’t.’

‘Wait, I tell you.’

‘All right then …’

The two bodies, deeply breathing, remained still a long while. Her hand, on the small of his back, made a soft, circular pressing motion, bringing him inwards. He had his two hands on her hipbones, holding her still. But she succeeded, and they joined, and he said again: ‘Wait now. Lie still.’ They lay absolutely still, eyes closed.

After a while he asked suddenly: ‘Well, did he last night?’

‘Yes.’

His teeth bared against her forehead and he said: ‘I suppose you made him.’

‘Why made him?’

‘You’re a pig.’

‘All right then, how about Alice?’

‘Oh her. Well, she screamed and said: “Stop. Stop.”’

‘Who’s a pig, then?’

She wriggled circularly, and he held her hips still, tenderly murmuring: ‘No, no, no, no.’

Stillness again. In the small bright bedroom, with the suburban sunlight outside, new green curtains blew in, flicking the too-large, too-new furniture, while the long white bodies remained still, mouth to mouth, eyes closed, united by deep soft breaths.

But his breathing deepened; his nails dug into the bones of her hips, he slid his mouth free and said: ‘How about Charlie, then?’

‘He made me scream, too,’ she murmured, licking his throat, eyes closed. This time it was she who held his loins steady, saying: ‘No, no, no, you’ll spoil it’

They lay together, still. A long silence, a long quiet. Then the fluttering curtains roused her, her foot tensed, and she rubbed it delicately up and down his leg. He said, angry: ‘Why did you spoil it then? It was just beginning.’

‘It’s much better afterwards if it’s really difficult.’ She slid and pressed her internal muscles to make it more difficult, grinning at him in challenge, and he put his hands around her throat in a half-mocking, half-serious pressure to stop her, simultaneously moving in and out of her with exactly the same emulous, taunting but solicitous need she was showing – to see how far they both could go. In a moment they were pulling each other’s hair, biting, sinking fingers between thin bones, and then, just before the explosion, they pulled apart at the same moment, and lay separate, trembling.

‘We only just made it,’ he said, fond, uxorious, stroking her hair.

‘Yes. Careful now, Fred.’

They slid together again.

‘Now it will be just perfect,’ she said, content, mouth against his throat.

The two bodies, quivering with strain, lay together, jerking involuntarily from time to time. But slowly they quietened. Their breathing, jagged at first, smoothed. They breathed together. They had become one person, abandoned against and in each other, silent and gone.

A long time, a long time, a long …

A car went past below in the usually silent street, very loud, and the young man opened his eyes and looked into the relaxed gentle face of his sister.

‘Freda.’

‘Ohhh.’

‘Yes, I’ve got to go, it must be nearly dinnertime.’

‘Wait a minute.’

‘No, or we’ll get excited again, we’ll spoil everything.’

They separated gently, but the movements both used, the two hands gentle on each other’s hips, easing their bodies apart, were more like a fitting together. Separate, they lay still, smiling at each other, touching each other’s face with fingertips, licking each other’s eyelids with small cat licks.

‘It gets better and better.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you go this time?’

‘You know.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘You know. Where you were.’

‘Yes. Tell me.’

‘Can’t.’

‘I know. Tell me.”

‘With you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Are we one person, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

Silence again. Again he roused himself.

‘Where are you working this afternoon?’

‘I told you. It’s a baker’s shop in Exeter Street.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘I’m taking Alice to the pictures.’

She bit her lips, punishing them and him, then sunk her nails into his shoulder.

‘Well my darling, I just make her, that’s all, I make her come, she wouldn’t understand anything better.’

He sat up, began dressing. In a moment he was a tall sober youth in a dark blue sweater. He slicked down his hair with the young husband’s hairbrushes, as if he lived here, while she lay naked, watching.

He turned and smiled, affectionate and possessive, like a husband. There was something in her face, a lost desperation, that made his harden. He crouched beside her, scowling, baring his teeth, gently fitting his thumb on her windpipe, looking straight into her dark eye. She breathed hoarsely, and coughed. He let his thumb drop.

‘What’s that for, Fred?’

‘You swear you don’t do that with Charlie?’

‘How could I?’

‘What do you mean? You could show him.’

‘But why? Why do you think I want to? Fred!’

The two pairs of deep eyes, in bruised flesh, looked lonely with uncertainty into each other.

‘How should I know what you want?’

‘You’re stupid,’ she said suddenly, with a small maternal smile.

He dropped his head, with a breath like a groan, on to her breasts, and she stroked his head gently, looking over it at the wall, blinking tears out of her eyes. She said: ‘He’s not coming home to supper tonight, he’s angry.’

‘Is he?’

‘He keeps talking about you. He asked today if you were coming.’

‘Why, does he guess?’ He jerked his head up off the soft support of her bosom, and stared, his face bitter, into hers. ‘Why? You haven’t been stupid now, have you?’

‘No, but Fred … but after you’ve been with me I suppose I’m different …’

‘Oh Christ!’ He jumped up, desperate, beginning movements of flight, anger, hate, escape – checking each one. ‘What do you want, then? You want me to make you come, then? Well, that’s easy enough, isn’t it, if that’s all you want. All right then, lie down and I’ll do it, and I’ll make you come till you cry, if that’s all …’ He was about to strip off his clothes; but she shot up from the bed, first hastily draping herself in her white frills, out of an instinct to protect what they had. She stood by him, as tall as he, holding his arms down by his sides. ‘Fred, Fred, Fred, darling, my sweetheart, don’t spoil it, don’t spoil it now when …’

‘When what?’

She met his fierce look with courage, saying steadily: ‘Well, what do you expect, Fred? He’s not stupid, is he? I’m not a … he makes love to me, well, he is my husband, isn’t he? And … well, what about you and Alice, you do the same, it’s normal, isn’t it? Perhaps if you and I didn’t have Charlie and Alice for coming, we wouldn’t be able to do it our way, have you thought of that?’

‘Have I thought of that! Well, what do you think?’

‘Well, it’s normal, isn’t it?’

‘Normal,’ he said, with horror, gazing into her loving face for reassurance against the word. ‘Normal, is it? Well, if you’re going to use words like that …’ Tears ran down his face, and she kissed them away in a passion of protective love.

‘Well, why did you say I must marry him? I didn’t want to, you said I should.’

‘I didn’t think it would spoil us.’

‘But it hasn’t, has it, Fred? Nothing could be like us. How could it? You know that from Alice, don’t you, Fred?’ Now she was anxiously seeking for his reassurance. They stared at each other, then their eyes closed, and they laid their cheeks together and wept, holding down each other’s amorous hands, for fear that what they were might be cheapened by her husband, his girl.

He said: ‘What were you beginning to say?’

‘When?’

‘Just now. You said, don’t spoil it now when.’

‘I get scared.’

‘Why?’

‘Suppose I get pregnant? Well, one day I must, it’s only fair, he wants kids. Suppose he leaves me – he gets in the mood to leave me, like today. Well, he feels something … it stands to reason. It doesn’t matter how much I try with him, you know he feels it … Fred?’

‘What?’

‘There isn’t a law against it, is there?’

‘Against what?’

‘I mean a brother and sister can share a place, no one would say anything.’

He stiffened away from her: ‘You’re crazy.’

‘Why am I? Why, Fred?’

‘You’re just not thinking, that’s all.’

‘What are we going to do, then?’

He didn’t answer and she sighed, letting her head lie on his shoulder beside his head, so that he felt her open eyes and their wet lashes on his neck.

‘We can’t do anything but go on like this, you’ve got to see that.’

Then I’ve got to be nice to him, otherwise he’s going to leave me, and I don’t blame him.’

She wept silently; and he held her, silent.

‘It’s so hard – I just wait for when you come, Fred, and I have to pretend all the time.’

They stood silent, their tears drying, their hands linked. Slowly they quieted, in love and in pity, in the same way that they quieted in their long silences when the hungers of the flesh were held by love on the edge of fruition so long that they burned out and up and away into a flame of identity.

At last they kissed, brother-and-sister kisses, gentle and warm.

‘You’re going to be late, Fred. You’ll get the sack.’

‘I can always get another job.’

‘I can always get another husband …’

‘Olive Oyl … but you look really good in that white naygleejay.’

‘Yes, I’m just the type that’s no good naked, I need clothes.’

‘That’s right – I must go.’

‘Coming tomorrow?’

‘Yes. About ten?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep him happy, then. Ta-ta.’

‘Look after yourself- look after yourself, my darling, look after yourself…’

Homage for Isaac Babel

The day I had promised to take Catherine down to visit my young friend Philip at his school in the country, we were to leave at eleven, but she arrived at nine. Her blue dress was new, and so were her fashionable shoes. Her hair had just been done. She looked more than ever like a pink and gold Renoir girl who expects everything from life.

Catherine lives in a white house overlooking the sweeping brown tides of the river. She helped me clean up my flat with a devotion which said that she felt small flats were altogether more romantic than large houses. We drank tea, and talked mainly about Philip, who, being fifteen, has pure stern tastes in everything from food to music. Catherine looked at the books lying around his room, and asked if she might borrow the stories of Isaac Babel to read on the train. Catherine is thirteen. I suggested she might find them difficult, but she said: ‘Philip reads them, doesn’t he?’

During the journey I read newspapers and watched her pretty frowning face as she turned the pages of Babel, for she was determined to let nothing get between her and her ambition to be worthy of Philip.

At the school, which is charming, civilized, and expensive, the two children walked together across green fields, and I followed, seeing how the sun gilded their bright friendly heads turned towards each other as they talked. In Catherine’s left hand she carried the stories of Isaac Babel.

After lunch we went to the pictures. Philip allowed it to be seen that he thought going to the pictures just for the fun of it was not worthy of intelligent people, but he made the concession, for our sakes. For his sake we chose the more serious of the two films that were showing in the little town. It was about a good priest who helped criminals in New York. His goodness, however, was not enough to prevent one of them from being sent to the gas chamber; and Philip and I waited with Catherine in the dark until she had stopped crying and could face the light of a golden evening.

At the entrance of the cinema the doorman was lying in wait for anyone who had red eyes. Grasping Catherine by her suffering arm, he said bitterly: ‘Yes, why are you crying? He had to be punished for his crime, didn’t he?’ Catherine stared at him, incredulous. Philip rescued her by saying with disdain: ‘Some people don’t know right from wrong even when it’s demonstrated to them.’ The doorman turned his attention to the next red-eyed emerger from the dark; and we went on together to the station, the children silent because of the cruelty of the world.

Finally Catherine said, her eyes wet again: ‘I think it’s all absolutely beastly, and I can’t bear to think about it.’ And Philip said: ‘But we’ve got to think about it, don’t you see, because if we don’t it’ll just go on and on, don’t you see?’

In the train going back to London I sat beside Catherine. She had the stories open in front of her, but she said: ‘Philip’s awfully lucky. I wish I went to that school. Did you notice that girl who said hullo to him in the garden? They must be great friends. I wish my mother would let me have a dress like that, it’s not fair.’

‘I thought it was too old for her.’

‘Oh did you?’

Soon she bent her head again over the book, but almost at once lifted it to say: ‘Is he a very famous writer?’

‘He’s a marvellous writer, brilliant, one of the very best.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, for one thing, he’s so simple. Look how few words he uses, and how strong his stories are.’

‘I see. Do you know him? Does he live in London?’

‘Oh no, he’s dead.’

‘Oh. They why did you – I thought he was alive, the way you talked.’

‘I’m sorry, I suppose I wasn’t thinking of him as dead.’

‘When did he die?’

‘He was murdered. About twenty years ago, I suppose.’

‘Twenty years.’ Her hands began the movement of pushing the book over to me, but then relaxed. ‘I’ll be fourteen in November,’ she stated, sounding threatened, while her eyes challenged me.

I found it hard to express my need to apologize, but before I could speak, she said, patiently attentive again: ‘You said he was murdered?’

‘Yes.’

‘I expect the person who murdered him felt sorry when he discovered he had murdered a famous writer.’

‘Yes, I expect so.’

‘Was he old when he was murdered?’

‘No, quite young really.’

‘Well, that was bad luck, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, I suppose it was bad luck.’

‘Which do you think is the very best story here? I mean, in your honest opinion, the very very best one.’

I chose the story about killing the goose. She read it slowly, while I sat waiting, wishing to take it from her, wishing to protect this charming little person from Isaac Babel.

When she had finished she said: ‘Well, some of it I don’t understand. He’s got a funny way of looking at things. Why should a man’s legs in boots look like girls?’ She finally pushed the book over at me, and said: ‘I think it’s all morbid.’

‘But you have to understand the kind of life he had. First, he was a Jew in Russia. That was bad enough. Then his experience was all revolution and civil war and …’

But I could see these words bouncing off the clear glass of her fiercely denying gaze; and I said: ‘Look, Catherine, why don’t you try again when you’re older? Perhaps you’ll like him better then?’

She said gratefully: ‘Yes, perhaps that would be best. After all, Philip is two years older than me, isn’t he?’

A week later I got a letter from Catherine.

Thank you very much for being kind enough to take me to visit Philip at his school. It was the most lovely day in my whole life. I am extremely grateful to you for taking me. I have been thinking about the Hoodlum Priest. That was a film which demonstrated to me beyond any shadow of doubt that Capital Punishment is a Wicked Thing, and I shall never forget what I learned that afternoon, and the lessons of it will be with me all my life. I have been meditating about what you said about Isaac Babel, the famed Russian short story writer, and I now see that the conscious simplicity of his style is what makes him, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the great writer that he is, and now in my school compositions I am endeavouring to emulate him so as to learn a conscious simplicity which is the only basis for a really brilliant writing style. Love, Catherine. P.S. Has Philip said anything about my party? I wrote but he hasn’t answered. Please find out if he is coming or if he just forgot to answer my letter. I hope he comes, because sometimes I feel I shall die if he doesn’t. P.P.S. Please don’t tell him I said anything, because I should die if he knew. Love, Catherine.

Outside the Ministry

As Big Ben struck ten, a young man arrived outside the portals of the Ministry, and looked sternly up and down the street. He brought his wrist up to eye level and frowned at it, the very picture of a man kept waiting, a man who had expected no less. His arm dropped, elbow flexed stiff, hand at mid-thigh level, palm downwards, fingers splayed. There the hand made a light movement, balanced from the wrist, as if sketching an arpeggio, or saying goodbye to the pavement – or greeting it? An elegant little gesture, full of charm, given out of an abundant sense of style to the watching world. Now he changed his stance, and became a man kept waiting, but maintaining his dignity. He was well dressed in a dark suit which, with a white shirt and a small grey silk bow tie that seemed positively to wish to fly away altogether, because of the energy imparted to it by his person, made a conventional enough pattern of colour – dark grey, light grey, white. But his black glossy skin, setting of his soberness, made him sparkle, a dandy – he might just as well have been wearing a rainbow.

Before he could frown up and down the street again, another young African crossed the road to join him. They greeted each other, laying their palms together, then shaking hands; but there was a conscious restraint in this which the first seemed to relish, out of his innate sense of drama, but made the second uneasy.

‘Good morning, Mr Chikwe.’

‘Mr Mafente! Good morning!’

Mr Mafente was a large smooth young man, well dressed too, but his clothes on him were conventional European clothes, remained suit, striped shirt, tie; and his gestures had none of the in-built, delighting self-parody of the other man’s. He was suave, he was dignified, he was calm; and this in spite of a situation which Mr Chikwe’s attitude (magisterial, accusing) said clearly was fraught with the possibilities of evil.

Yet these two had known each other for many years; had worked side by side, as the political situation shifted, in various phases of the Nationalist movement; had served prison sentences together; had only recently become enemies. They now (Mr Chikwe dropped the accusation from his manner for this purpose) exchanged news from home, gossip, information. Then Mr Chikwe marked the end of the truce by a change of pose, and said, soft and threatening: ‘And where is your great leader? Surely he is very late?’

‘Five minutes only,’ said the other smiling.

‘Surely when at last we have achieved this great honour, an interview with Her Majesty’s Minister, the least we can expect is punctuality from the great man?’

‘I agree, but it is more likely that Her Majesty’s Minister will at the last moment be too occupied to see us, as has happened before.’

The faces of both men blazed with shared anger for a moment: Mr Chikwe even showed a snarl of white teeth.

They recovered themselves together and Mr Mafente said: ‘And where is your leader? Surely what applies to mine applies to yours also?’

‘Perhaps the reasons for their being late are different? Mine is finishing his breakfast just over the road there and yours is – I hear that the night before last your Mr Devuli was observed very drunk in the home of our hospitable Mrs James?’

‘Possibly, I was not there.’

‘I hear that the night before that he passed out in the hotel before some unsympathetic journalists and had to be excused.’

‘It is possible, I was not there.’

Mr Chikwe kept the full force of his frowning stare on Mr Mafente’s bland face as he said softly: ‘Mr Mafente!’

‘Mr Chikwe?’

‘Is it not a shame and a disgrace that your movement, which, though it is not mine, nevertheless represents several thousand people (not millions, I am afraid, as your publicity men claim) – is it not a pity that this movement is led by a man who is never sober?’

Mr Mafente smiled, applauding this short speech which had been delivered with a grace and an attack wasted, surely, on a pavement full of London office workers and some fat pigeons. He then observed, merely: ‘Yet it is Mr Devuli who is recognized by Her Britannic Majesty’s Minister?’

Mr Chikwe frowned.

‘And it is Mr Devuli who is recognized by those honourable British philanthropic movements – the Anti-Imperialist Society, the Movement for Pan-African Freedom, and Freedom for British Colonies?’

Here Mr Chikwe bowed, slightly, acknowledging the truth of what he said, but suggesting at the same time its irrelevance.

‘I hear, for instance,’ went on Mr Mafente, ‘that the Honourable Member of Parliament for Sutton North-West refused to have your leader on his platform on the grounds that he was a dangerous agitator with left-wing persuasions?’

Here both men exchanged a delighted irrepressible smile – that smile due to political absurdity. (It is not too much to say that it is for the sake of this smile that a good many people stay in politics.) Mr Chikwe even lifted a shining face to the grey sky, shut his eyes, and while offering his smile to the wet heavens lifted both shoulders in a shrug of scorn.

Then he lowered his eyes, his body sprang into a shape of accusation and he said: ‘Yet you have to agree with me, Mr Mafente – it is unfortunate that such a man as Mr Devuli should be so widely accepted as a national representative, while the virtues of Mr Kwenzi go unacknowledged.’

‘We all know the virtues of Mr Kwenzi,’ said Mr Mafente, and his accent on the word we, accompanied by a deliberately cool glance into the eyes of his old friend, made Mr Chikwe stand silent a moment, thinking. Then he said softly, testing it: ‘Yes, yes, yes. And – well, Mr Mafente?’

Mr Mafente looked into Mr Chikwe’s face, with intent, while he continued the other conversation: ‘Nevertheless, Mr Chikwe, the situation is as I’ve said.’

Mr Chikwe, responding to the look, not the words, came closer and said: ‘Yet situations do not have to remain unchanged?’ They looked deeply into each other’s face as Mr Mafente inquired, almost mechanically: ‘Is that a threat, perhaps?’

‘It is a political observation … Mr Mafente?’

Mr Chikwe?’

‘This particular situation could be changed very easily.’

‘Is that so?’

‘You know it is so.’

The two men were standing with their faces a few inches from each other, frowning with the concentration necessary for the swift mental balancing of a dozen factors: so absorbed were they, that clerks and typists glanced uneasily at them, and then, not wishing to be made uneasy, looked away again.

But here they felt approaching a third, and Mr Mafente repeated quickly: ‘Is that a threat, perhaps?’ in a loud voice, and both young men turned to greet Devuli, a man ten or more years older than they, large, authoritative, impressive. Yet even at this early hour he had a look of dissipation, for his eyes were red and wandering, and he stood upright only with difficulty.

Mr Mafente now fell back a step to take his place half a pace behind his leader’s right elbow; and Mr Chikwe faced them both, unsmiling.

Good morning to you, Mr Chikwe,’ said Mr Devuli.

Good morning to you, Mr Devuli. Mr Kwenzi is just finishing his breakfast, and will join us in good time. Mr Kwenzi was working all through the night on the proposals for the new constitution.’

As Mr Devuli did not answer this challenge, but stood, vague, almost swaying, his red eyes blinking at the passers-by, Mr Mafente said for him: ‘We all admire the conscientiousness of Mr Kwenzi.’ The we was definitely emphasized, the two young men exchanged a look like a nod, while Mr Mafente tactfully held out his right forearm to receive the hand of Mr Devuli. After a moment the leader steadied himself, and said in a threatening way that managed also to sound like a grumble: ‘I, too, know all the implications of the proposed constitution, Mr Chikwe.’

‘I am surprised to hear it, Mr Devuli, for Mr Kwenzi, who has been locked up in his hotel room for the last week, studying it, says that seven men working for seventy-seven years couldn’t make sense of the constitution proposed by Her Majesty’s Honourable Minister.’

Now they all three laughed together, relishing absurdity, until Mr Chikwe reimposed a frown and said: ‘And since these proposals are so complicated, and since Mr Kwenzi understands them as well as any man with mere human powers could, it is our contention that it is Mr Kwenzi who should speak for our people before the Minister.’

Mr Devuli held himself upright with five fingers splayed out on the forearm of his lieutenant. His red eyes moved sombrely over the ugly façade of the Ministry, over the faces of passing people, then, with an effort, came to rest on the face of Mr Chikwe. ‘But I am the leader, I am the leader acknowledged by all, and therefore I shall speak for our country.’

‘You are not feeling well, Mr Devuli?’

‘No, I am not feeling well, Mr Chikwe.’

‘It would perhaps be better to have a man in full possession of himself speaking for our people to the Minister?’ (Mr Devuli remained silent, preserving a fixed smile of general benevolence.) ‘Unless, of course, you expect to feel more in command of yourself by the time of – he brought his wrist smartly up to his eyes, frowned, dropped his wrist – ‘ten-thirty a.m., which hour is nearly upon us?’

‘No, Mr Chikwe, I do not expect to feel better by then. Did you not know, I have severe stomach trouble?’

‘You have stomach trouble, Mr Devuli?’

‘You did not hear of the attempt made upon my life when I was lying helpless with malaria in the Lady Wilberforce Hospital in Nkalolele?’

‘Really, Mr Devuli, is that so?’

Yes, it is so, Mr Chikwe. Some person bribed by my enemies introduced poison into my food while I was lying helpless in hospital. I nearly died that time, and my stomach is still unrecovered.’

I am extremely sorry to hear it.’

‘I hope that you are. For it is a terrible thing that political rivalry can lower men to such methods.’

Mr Chikwe stood slightly turned away, apparently delighting in the flight of some pigeons. He smiled, and inquired: ‘Perhaps not so much political rivalry as the sincerest patriotism, Mr Devuli? It is possible that some misguided people thought the country would be better off without you.’

‘It must be a matter of opinion, Mr Chikwe.’

The three men stood silent: Mr Devuli supported himself unobtrusively on Mr Mafente’s arm; Mr Mafente stood waiting; Mr Chikwe smiled at pigeons.

‘Mr Devuli?’

‘Mr Chikwe?’

‘You are of course aware that if you agree to the Minister’s proposals for this constitution civil war may follow?’

‘My agreement to this constitution is because I wish to avert bloodshed.’

‘Yet when it was announced that you intended to agree, serious rioting started in twelve different places in our unfortunate country.’

‘Misguided people – misguided by your party, Mr Chikwe.’

‘I remember, not twelve months ago, that when you were accused by the newspapers of inciting to riot, your reply was that the people had minds of their own. But of course that was when you refused to consider the constitution.’

‘The situation has changed, perhaps?’

The strain of this dialogue was telling on Mr Devuli: there were great beads of crystal sweat falling off his broad face, and he mopped it with the hand not steadying him, while he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

‘It is your attitude that has changed, Mr Devuli. You stood for one man, one vote. Then overnight you became a supporter of the weighted vote. That cannot be described as a situation changing, but as a political leader changing – selling out.’ Mr Chikwe whipped about like an adder and spat these two last words at the befogged man.

Mr Mafente, seeing that his leader stood silent, blinking, remarked quietly for him: ‘Mr Devuli is not accustomed to replying to vulgar abuse, he prefers to remain silent.’ The two young men’s eyes consulted; and Mr Chikwe said, his face not four inches from Mr Devuli’s: ‘It is not the first time a leader of our people has taken the pay of the whites and has been disowned by our people.’

Mr Devuli looked to his lieutenant, who said: ‘Yet it is Mr Devuli who has been summoned by the Minister, and you should be careful, Mr Chikwe – as a barrister you should know the law: a difference of political opinion is one thing, slander is another.’

‘As, for instance, an accusation of poisoning?’

Here they all turned, a fourth figure had joined them. Mr Kwenzi, a tall, rather stooped, remote man, stood a few paces off, smiling. Mr Chikwe took his place a foot behind him, and there were two couples, facing each other.

‘Good morning, Mr Devuli.’

‘Good morning, Mr Kwenzi.’

‘It must be nearly time for us to go in to the Minister,’ said Mr Kwenzi.

‘I do not think that Mr Devuli is in any condition to represent us to the Minister,’ said Mr Chikwe, hot and threatening. Mr Kwenzi nodded. He had rather small direct eyes, deeply inset under his brows, which gave him an earnest focussed gaze which he was now directing at the sweat-beaded brow of his rival.

Mr Devuli blurted, his voice rising: ‘And who is responsible? Who? The whole world knows of the saintly Mr Kwenzi, the hardworking Mr Kwenzi, but who is responsible for my state of health?’

Mr Chikwe cut in: ‘No one is responsible for your state of health but yourself, Mr Devuli. If you drink two bottles of hard liquor a day, then you can expect your health to suffer for it.’

‘The present health of Mr Devuli,’ said Mr Mafente, since his chief was silent, biting his lips, his eyes red with tears as well as with liquor, ‘is due to the poison which nearly killed him some weeks ago in the Lady Wilberforce Hospital in Nkalolele.’

‘I am sorry to hear that,’ said Mr Kwenzi mildly. ‘I trust the worst is over?’

Mr Devuli was beside himself, his face knitting with emotion, sweat drops starting everywhere, his eyes roving, his fists clenching and unclenching.

‘I hope,’ said Mr Kwenzi, ‘that you are not suggesting I or my party had anything to do with it?’

‘Suggest!’ said Mr Devuli. ‘Suggest? What shall I tell the Minister? That my political opponents are not ashamed to poison a helpless man in hospital? Shall I tell them that I have to have my food tasted, like an Eastern potentate? No, I cannot tell him such things – I am helpless there too, for he would say – black savages, stooping to poison, what else can you expect?’

‘I doubt whether he would say that,’ remarked Mr Kwenzi. ‘His own ancestors considered poison an acceptable political weapon, and not so very long ago either.’

But Mr Devuli was not listening. His chest was heaving, and he sobbed out loud. Mr Mafente let his ignored forearm drop by his side, and stood away a couple of paces, gazing sombrely at his leader. After this sorrowful inspection, which Mr Kwenzi and Mr Chikwe did nothing to shorten, he looked long at Mr Chikwe, and then at Mr Kwenzi. During this three-sided silent conversation, Mr Devuli, like a dethroned king in Shakespeare, stood to one side, his chest heaving, tears flowing, his head bent to receive the rods and lashes of betrayal.

Mr Chikwe at last remarked: ‘Perhaps you should tell the Minister that you have ordered a bulletproof vest like an American gangster? It would impress him no doubt with your standing among our people?’ Mr Devuli sobbed again, and Mr Chikwe continued: ‘Not that I do not agree with you – the vest is advisable, yes. The food tasters are not enough. I have heard our young hotheads talking among themselves and you would be wise to take every possible precaution.’

Mr Kwenzi, frowning, now raised his hand to check his lieutenant: ‘I think you are going too far, Mr Chikwe, there is surely no need …’

At which Mr Devuli let out a great groan of bitter laughter, uncrowned king reeling under the wet London sky, and said: ‘Listen to the good man, he knows nothing, no – he remains upright while his seconds do his dirty work, listen to the saint!’

Swaying, he looked for Mr Mafente’s forearm, but it was not there. He stood by himself, facing three men.

Mr Kwenzi said: ‘It is a very simple matter, my friends. Who is going to speak for our people to the Minister? That is all we have to decide now. I must tell you that I have made a very detailed study of the proposed constitution and I am quite sure that no honest leader of our people could accept it. Mr Devuli, I am sure you must agree with me – it is a very complicated set of proposals, and it is more than possible there may be implications you have overlooked?’

Mr Devuli laughed bitterly: ‘Yes, it is possible.’

‘Then we are agreed?’

Mr Devuli was silent.

‘I think we are all agreed,’ said Mr Chikwe, smiling, looking at Mr Mafente who after a moment gave a small nod, and then turned to face his leader’s look of bitter accusation.

‘It is nearly half past ten,’ said Mr Chikwe. ‘In a few minutes we must present ourselves to Her Majesty’s Minister.’

The two lieutenants, one threatening, one sorrowful, looked at Mr Devuli, who still hesitated, grieving, on the pavement’s edge. Mr Kwenzi remained aloof, smiling gently.

Mr Kwenzi at last said: ‘After all, Mr Devuli, you will certainly be elected, certainly we can expect that, and with your long experience the country will need you as Minister. A minister’s salary, even for our poor country, will be enough to recompense you for your generous agreement to stand down now.’

Mr Devuli laughed – bitter, resentful, scornful.

He walked away.

Mr Mafente said: ‘But Mr Devuli, Mr Devuli, where are you going?’

Mr Devuli threw back over his shoulder: ‘Mr Kwenzi will speak to the Minister.’

Mr Mafente nodded at the other two, and ran after his former leader, grabbed his arm, turned him around. ‘Mr Devuli, you must come in with us, it is quite essential to preserve a united front before the Minister.’

‘I bow to superior force, gentlemen,’ said Mr Devuli, with a short sarcastic bow, which, however, he was forced to curtail: his stagger was checked by Mr Mafente’s tactful arm.

‘Shall we go in?’ said Mr Chikwe.

Without looking again at Mr Devuli, Mr Kwenzi walked aloofly into the Ministry, followed by Mr Devuli, whose left hand lay on Mr Mafente’s arm. Mr Chikwe came last, smiling, springing off the balls of his feet, watching Mr Devuli.

‘And it is just half past ten,’ he observed, as a flunkey came forward to intercept them. ‘Half past ten to the second. I think I can hear Big Ben itself. Punctuality, as we all know, gentlemen, is the cornerstone of that efficiency without which it is impossible to govern a modern state. Is it not so, Mr Kwenzi? Is it not so, Mr Mafente? Is it not so, Mr Devuli?’

Dialogue

The building she was headed for, no matter how long she delayed among the shops, stalls, older houses on the pavements, stood narrow and glass-eyed, six or eight storeys higher than this small shallow litter of buildings which would probably be pulled down soon, as uneconomical. The new building, economical, whose base occupied the space, on a corner lot, of three small houses, two laundries and a grocer’s, held the lives of 160 people at forty families of four each, one family to a flat. Inside this building was an atmosphere both secretive and impersonal, for each time the lift stopped, there were four identical black doors, in the same positions exactly as the four doors on the nine other floors, and each door insisted on privacy.

But meanwhile she was standing on a corner watching an old woman in a print dress buy potatoes off a stall. The man selling vegetables said: ‘And how’s the rheumatism today, Ada?’ and Ada replied (so it was not her rheumatism): ‘Not so bad, Fred, but it’s got him flat on his back, all the same.’ Fred said: ‘It attacks my old woman between the shoulders if she doesn’t watch out.’ They went on talking about the rheumatism as if it were a wild beast that sunk claws and teeth into their bodies but which could be coaxed or bribed with heat or bits of the right food, until at last she could positively see it, a jaguar-like animal crouched to spring behind the brussels sprouts. Opposite was a music shop which flooded the whole street with selections from opera, but the street wasn’t listening. Just outside the shop a couple of youngsters in jerseys and jeans, both with thin vulnerable necks and untidy shocks of hair, one dark, one fair, were in earnest conversation.

A bus nosed to a standstill; half a dozen people got off; a man passed and said: ‘What’s the joke?’ He winked, and she realized she had been smiling.

Well-being, created because of the small familiar busyness of the street, filled her. Which was of course why she had spent so long, an hour now, loitering around the foot of the tall building. This irrepressible good nature of the flesh, felt in the movement of her blood like a greeting to pavements, people, a thin drift of cloud across pale blue sky, she checked, or rather tested, by a deliberate use of the other vision on the scene: the man behind the neat arrangements of coloured vegetables had a stupid face, he looked brutal; the future of the adolescents holding their position outside the music-shop door against the current of pressing people could only too easily be guessed at by the sharply aggressive yet forlorn postures of shoulders and loins; Ada, whichever way you looked at her, was hideous, repulsive, with her loose yellowing flesh and her sour-sweat smell. Etc, etc. Oh yes, et cetera, on these lines, indefinitely, if she chose to look. Squalid, ugly, pathetic … And what of it? insisted her blood, for even now she was smiling, while she kept the other vision sharp as knowledge. She could feel the smile on her face. Because of it, people going past would offer jokes, comments, stop to talk, invite her for drinks of coffee, flirt, tell her the stories of their lives. She was forty this year, and her serenity was a fairly recent achievement. Wrong word: it had not been tried for; but it seemed as if years of pretty violent emotions, one way or another, had jelled or shaken into a joy which welled up from inside her independent of the temporary reactions – pain, disappointment, loss – for it was stronger than they. Well, would it continue? Why should it? It might very well vanish again, without explanation, as it had come. Possibly this was a room in her life, she had walked into it, found it furnished with joy and well-being, and would walk through and out again into another room, still unknown and unimagined. She had certainly never imagined this one, which was a gift from Nature? Chance? Excess? … A bookshop had a tray of dingy books outside it, and she rested her hand on their limp backs and loved them. Instantly she looked at the word love, which her palm, feeling delight at the contact, had chosen, and said to herself: Now it’s enough, it’s time for me to go in.

She looked at the vegetable stall, and entered the building, holding the colours of growth firm in her heart (word at once censored, though that was where she felt it). The lift was a brown cubicle brightly lit and glistening, and it went up fast. Instead of combating the sink and sway of her stomach, she submitted to nausea; and arrived at the top landing giddy; and because of this willed discoordination of her nerves the enclosed cream-and-black glossiness of the little space attacked her with claustrophobia. She rang quickly at door 39. Bill stood aside as she went in, receiving her kiss on his cheekbone, which felt damp against her lips. He immediately closed the door behind her so that he could lean on it, using the handle for a support. Still queasy from the lift, she achieved, and immediately, a moment’s oneness with him who stood giddily by the door.

But she was herself again (herself examined and discarded) at once; and while he still supported himself by the door, she went to sit in her usual place on a long benchlike settee that had a red blanket over it. The flat had two rooms, one very small and always darkened by permanently drawn midnight blue curtains, so that the narrow bed with the books stacked up the wall beside it was a suffocating shadow emphasized by a small yellow glow from the bed lamp. This bedroom would have caused her to feel (he spent most of his time in it) at first panic of claustrophobia, and then a necessity to break out or let in light, open the walls to the sky. How long would her amiability of the blood survive in that? Not long, she thought, but she would never know, since nothing would make her try the experiment. As for him, this second room in which they both sat in their usual positions, she watchful on the red blanket, he in his expensive chair which looked surgical, being all black leather and chromium and tilting all ways with his weight, was the room that challenged him, because of its openness – he needed the enclosed dark of the bedroom. It was large, high, had airy white walls, a clear black carpet, the dark red settee, his machine-like chair, more books. But one wall was virtually all window: it was window from knee height to ceiling, and the squalors of this part of London showed as if from an aeroplane, the flat was so high, or seemed so, because what was beneath was so uniformly low. Here, around this room (in which, if she were alone, her spirits always spread into delight) winds clutched and shook and tore. To stand at those windows, staring straight back at sky, at wind, at cloud, at sun, was to her a release. To him, a terror. Therefore she had not gone at once to the windows; it would have destroyed the moment of equality over their shared giddiness – hers from the lift, his from illness. Though not-going had another danger, that he might know why she had refrained from enjoying what he knew she enjoyed, and think her too careful of him?

He was turned away from the light. Now, perhaps conscious that she was looking at him, he swivelled the chair so he could face the sky. No, this was not one of his good days, though at first she had thought his paleness was due to his dark blue sweater, whose tight high neck isolated and presented his head. It was a big head, made bigger because of the close-cut reddish hair that fitted the back of the skull like fur, exposing a large pale brow, strong cheekbones, chin, a face where every feature strove to dominate, where large calm green eyes just held the balance with a mouth designed, apparently, only to express the varieties of torment. A single glance from a stranger (or from herself before she had known better) would have earned him: big, strong, healthy, confident man. Now, however, she knew the signs, could, after glancing around a room, say: Yes, you and you and you … Because of the times she had been him, achieved his being. But they, looking at her, would never claim her as one of them, because being him in split seconds and intervals had not marked her, could not, her nerves were too firmly grounded in normality. (Normality?) But she was another creature from them, another species, almost. To be envied? She thought so. But if she did not think them enviable, why had she come here, why did she always come? Why had she deliberately left behind the happiness (word defiantly held on to, despite them) she felt in the streets? Was it that she believed the pain in this room was more real than the happiness? Because of the courage behind it? She might herself not be able to endure the small dark-curtained room which would force her most secret terrors; but she respected this man who lived on the exposed platform swaying in the clouds (which is how his nerves felt it) – and from choice?

Doctors, friends, herself – everyone who knew enough to say – pronounced: the warmth of a family, marriage if possible, comfort, other people. Never isolation, never loneliness, not the tall wind-battered room where the sky showed through two walls. But he refused common sense. ‘It’s no good skirting around what I am, I’ve got to crash right through it, and if I can’t, whose loss is it?’

Well, she did not think she was strong enough to crash right through what she most feared, even though she had been born healthy, her nerves under her own command.

‘Yes, but you have a choice, I haven’t, unless I want to become a little animal living in the fur of other people’s warmth.’

(So went the dialogue.)

But he had a choice too: there were a hundred ways in which they, the people whom she could now recognize from their eyes in a crowd, could hide themselves. Not everyone recognized them, she would say; how many people do we know (men and women, but more men than women) enclosed in marriages, which are for safety only, or attached to other people’s families, stealing (if you like) security? But theft means not giving back in exchange or kind, and these men and women, the solitary ones, do give back, otherwise they wouldn’t be so welcome, so needed – so there’s no need to talk about hanging on to the warmth of belly fur, like a baby kangaroo, it’s a question of taking one thing, and giving back another.

‘Yes, but I’m not going to pretend, I will not, it’s not what I am – I can’t and it’s your fault that I can’t.’

This meant that he had been the other, through her, just as she had, through him.

‘My dear, I don’t understand the emotions, except through my intelligence, normality never meant anything to me until I knew you. Now all right, I give in …’

This was sullen. With precisely the same note of sullenness she used to censor the words her healthy nerves supplied like love, happiness, myself, health. All right this sullenness meant: I’ll pay you your due, I have to, my intelligence tells me I must. I’ll even be you, but briefly, for so long as I can stand it.

Meanwhile they were – not talking – but exchanging information. She had seen X and Y and Z, been to this place, read that book.

He had read so-and-so, seen X and Y, spent a good deal of his time listening to music.

‘Do you want me to go away?’

‘No, stay.’

This very small gift made her happy; refusing to examine the emotion, she sat back, curled up her legs, let herself be comfortable. She smoked. He put on some jazz. He listened to it inert, his body not flowing into it, there was a light sweat on his big straining forehead. (This meant he had wanted her to stay not out of warmth, but for need of somebody there. She sat up straight again, pushed away the moment’s delight.) She saw his eyes were closed. His face, mouth tight in an impersonal determination to endure, looked asleep, or –

‘Bill,’ she said quickly, in appeal.

Without opening his eyes, he smiled, giving her sweetness, friendship, and the irony, without bitterness, due from one kind of creature to another.

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

The piano notes pattered like rain before a gust of wind that swept around the corner of the building. White breaths of cloud were blown across the thin blue air. The drum shook, hissed, steadily, like her blood pumping the beat, and a wild flute danced a sky sign in the rippling smoke of a jet climbing perpendicular from sill to ceiling. But what did he hear, see, feel, sitting eyes closed, palm hard on the armrest for support? The record stopped. He opened his eyes, they resolved themselves out of a knot of inward difficulty, and rested on the wall opposite him, while he put out his hand to stop the machine. Silence now.

He closed his eyes again. She discarded the cross talk in her flesh of music, wind, clouds, raindrops, patterning grass and earth, and tried to see – first the room, an insecure platform in height, tenacious against storm and rocking foundations; then a certain discordance of substance that belonged to his vision; then herself, as he saw her – at once she felt a weariness of the spirit, like a cool sarcastic wink from a third eye, seeing them both, two little people, him and herself, as she had seen the vegetable seller, the adolescents, the woman whose husband had rheumatism. Without charity she saw them, sitting there together in silence on either side of the tall room, and the eye seemed to expand till it filled the universe with disbelief and negation.

Now, she admitted the prohibited words love, joy (et cetera), and gave them leave to warm her, for not only could she not bear the world without them, she needed them to disperse her anger against him: Yes, yes, it’s all very well, but how could the play go on, how could it, if it wasn’t for me, the people like me? We create you in order that you may use us, and consume us; and with our willing connivance; but it doesn’t do to despise …

He said, not surprising her that he did, since their minds so often moved together: ‘You are more split than I am, do you know that?’

She thought: If I were not split, if one-half (if that is the division) were not able to move in your world, even if only for short periods, then I would not be sitting here, you would not want me.

He said: ‘I wasn’t criticizing. Not at all. Because you have the contact. What more do you want?’

‘Contact,’ she said, looking at the cold word.

‘Yes. Well, it’s everything.’

‘How can you sit there, insisting on the things you insist on, and say it’s everything?’

‘If that’s what you are, then be it.’

‘Just one thing or the other?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? It’s true that what I think contradicts what I feel, but …”

‘But?’

‘All right, it’s all meaningless, with my mind I know it, it’s an accident, it’s a freak, but all the same, everything gives me pleasure all the time. Why should it be a contradiction, why should it?’

‘You don’t see it as a contradiction?’

‘No.’

‘You’re living on the fat of your ancestors, the fat of their belief, that’s all.’

‘Possibly, but why should I care?’

‘A fly buzzing in the sun,’ he said. His smile was first wry and tender, then full of critical dislike. The criticism, the coldness of it, hurt her, and she felt tears rise. So today she could not stay long, because tears were not allowed, they were part of the other argument, or fight, a personal one, played out (or fought out), finished.

She was blinking her eyes dry, without touching them, so that he would not see she wanted to cry, when he said: ‘Suppose that I am the future?’

A long silence, and she thought: Possibly, possibly.

‘It seems to me that I am. Suppose the world fills more and more with people like me, then –’

‘The little flies will have to buzz louder.’

He laughed, short but genuine. She thought, I don’t care what you say, that laugh is stronger than anything. She sat in silence for the thousandth time, willing it to be stronger, feeling herself to be a centre of life, or warmth, with which she would fill this room.

He sat, smiling, but in an inert, heavy way, his limbs seeming, even from where she sat across the room, cold and confused. She went to him, squatted on her knees by his chair, lifted his hand off the black leather arm-piece, and felt it heavy with cold. It gave her hand a squeeze more polite than warm, and she gripped it firmly, willing life to move down her arm through her hand into his. Closing her eyes, she now made herself remember, with her flesh, what she had discarded (almost contemptuous) on the pavement – the pleasure from the touch of faded books, pleasure from the sight of ranked fruit and vegetables. Discoloured print, shut between limp damp cotton, small voices to be bought for sixpence or ninepence, became a pulse of muttering sound, a pulse of vitality, like the beating colours of oranges, lemons and cabbages, gold and green, a dazzle, a vibration in the eyes – she held her breath, willed, and made life move down into his hand. It lay warmer and more companionable in hers. After a while he opened his eyes and smiled at her: sadness came into the smile, then a grimness, and she kissed his cheek and went back to her place on the rough blanket. ‘Flies,’ she said.

He was not looking at her. She thought: Why do I do it? These girls who come through here for a night, or two nights, because he needs their generous naïveté, give him no less. I, or one of them, it makes no difference. ‘I’d like a drink,’ she said.

He hesitated, hating her drinking at all, but he poured her one, while she said silently (feeling adrift, without resources, and cold through every particle of herself): All right, but in the days when our two bodies together created warmth (flies, if you like, but I don’t feel it) I wouldn’t have asked for a drink. She was thinking: And suppose it is yours that is the intoxication and not mine? when he remarked: ‘Sometimes when I’ve been alone here a couple of days I wonder if I’m not tipsy on sheer …’ He laughed, in an intellectual pleasure at an order of ideas she was choosing not to see.

‘The delight of nihilism?’

‘Which of course you don’t feel, ever!’

She saw that this new aggressiveness, this thrust of power and criticism (he was now moving about the room, full of energy) was in fact her gift to him; and she said, suddenly bitter: ‘Flies don’t feel, they buzz.’

The bitterness, being the note of the exchange they could not allow themselves, made her finish her few drops of liquor, making a new warmth in her stomach where she had needed a spark of warmth.

He said: ‘For all that, it seems to me I’m nearer the truth than you are.’

The word truth did not explode into meaning: it sounded hard and self-defined, like a stone; she let it lie between them, setting against it the pulse that throbbed in the soft place by the ankle bone – her feet being stretched in front of her, so she could see them.

He said: ‘It seems to me that the disconnected like me must see more clearly than you people. Does that sound ridiculous to you? I’ve thought about it a great deal, and it seems to me you are satisfied with too little.’

She thought: I wish he would come over here, sit by me on this blanket, and put his arm around me – that’s all. That’s all and that’s all. She was very tired. Of course I’m tired – it’s all the buzzing I have to do …

Without warning, without even trying, she slipped into being him, his body, his mind. She looked at herself and thought: This little bundle of flesh, this creature who will respond and warm, lay its head on my shoulder, feel happiness – how unreal, how vulgar, and how meaningless!

She shook herself away from him, up and away from the settee. She went to the window.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Enjoying your view.’

The sky was clear, it was evening, and far below in the streets the lights had come on, making small yellow pools and gleams on pavements where the tiny movement of people seemed exciting and full of promise. Now he got himself out of his machine-like chair and came to stand by her. He did not touch her; but he would not have come at all if she had not been there. He supported himself with one big hand on the glass and looked out. She felt him take in a deep breath. She stood silent, feeling the life ebbing and coiling along the pavements and hoping he felt it. He let out his breath. She did not look at him. He took it in again. The hand trembled, then tensed, then set solid, a big, firmly made hand, with slightly freckled knuckles – its steadiness comforted her. It would be all right. Still without looking at his face, she kissed his cheek and turned away. He went back to his chair, she resumed her place on the blanket. The room was filling with dusk, the sky was greying, enormous, distant.

‘You should get curtains, at least.’

‘I should be tempted to keep them drawn all the time.’

‘Why not, then, why not?’ she insisted, feeling her eyes wet again. ‘All right, I won’t cry,’ she said reasonably.

‘Why not? If you feel like crying.’

She no longer wept. But once, and not so long ago, she had wept herself almost to pieces over him, her, their closeness which nevertheless the cold third, like a cruel king, refused to sanction. She noted that the pulse moving in her ankle had the desperate look of something fighting death; her foot in the dusk was a long way off; she felt divided, not in possession of herself. But she remained where she was, containing her fragmentation. And he held out his fist, steady, into the glimmer of grey light from the sky, watching it exactly as she looked at her own pulse, the stranger.

‘For God’s sake turn the light on,’ she said, giving in. He put out his hand, pressed down the switch, a harsh saving light filled the room.

He smiled. But he looked white again, and his forehead gleamed wet. Her heart ached for him, and for herself, who would now get up deliberately and go away from him. The ache was the hurt of exile, and she was choosing it. She sat smiling, chafing her two ankles with her hands, feeling the warmth of her breathing flesh. Their smiles met and exchanged, and now she said: ‘Right, it’s time to go.’

She kissed him again, he kissed her, and she went out, saying: ‘I’ll ring you.’

Always, when she left his door shut behind her, the black door which was exactly the same as all the others in the building except for the number, she felt in every particle of herself how loneliness hit him when she (or anybody) left.

The street she went out into was unfamiliar to her, she felt she did not know it. The hazy purple sky that encloses London at night was savage, bitter, and the impulse behind its shifting lights was a form of pain. The roughness of the pavement, which she knew to be warm, struck cold through the soles of her sandals, as if the shadows were black ice. The people passing were hostile, stupid animals from whom she wished to hide herself. But worse than this, there was a flat, black-and-white two-dimensional jagged look to things, and (it was this that made it terrifying) the scene she walked through was a projection of her own mind, there was no life in it that belonged there save what she could breathe into it. And she herself was dead and empty, a cardboard figure in a flat painted set of streets.

She thought: Why should it not all come to an end, why not? She saw again the potato face of Fred the vegetable seller whose interest in Ada’s husband’s illness was only because she was a customer at his stall; she looked at Ada whose ugly life (she was like a heave of dirty earth or some unnameable urban substance) showed in her face and movements like a visible record of thick physical living. The pathos of the adolescents did not move her, she felt disgust.

She walked on. The tall building, like a black tower, stood over her, kept pace with her. It was not possible to escape from it.

Her hand, swinging by her thigh, on its own life, suddenly lifted itself and took a leaf off a hedge. The leaf trembled: she saw it was her fingers which shook, with exhaustion. She stilled her fingers, and the leaf became a thin hard slippery object, like a coin. It was small, round, shining, a blackish-green. A faint pungent smell came to her nostrils. She understood it was the smell of the leaf which, as she lifted it to her nostrils, seemed to explode with a vivid odour into the senses of her brain so that she understood the essence of the leaf and through it the scene she stood in.

She stood fingering the leaf, while life came back. The pulses were beating again. A warmth came up through her soles. The sky’s purplish orange was for effect, for the sake of self-consciously exuberant theatricality, a gift to the people living under it. An elderly woman passed, mysterious and extraordinary in the half-light, and smiled at her. So. She was saved from deadness, she was herself again. She walked slowly on, well-being moving in her, making a silent greeting to the people passing her. Meanwhile the dark tower kept pace with her, she felt it rising somewhere just behind her right shoulder. It was immensely high, narrow, terrible, all in darkness save for a light flashing at its top where a man, held upright by the force of his will, sat alone staring at a cold sky in vertiginous movement.

She moved steadily on, on the rhythm of her own pleasantly coursing blood. With one hand, however, she secretly touched the base of the tower whose shadow would always follow her now, challenging her, until she dared to climb it. With the other hand she held fast to the leaf.

Notes for a Case History

Maureen Watson was born at 93 Nelson’s Way, N. I., in 1942. She did not remember the war, or rather, when people said ‘The War,’ she thought of Austerity: couponed curtains, traded clothes, the half-pound of butter swapped for the quarter of tea. (Maureen’s parents preferred tea to butter.) Further back, at the roots of her life, she felt a movement of fire and shadow, a leaping and a subsidence of light. She did not know whether this was a memory or a picture she had formed, perhaps from what her parents had told her of the night the bomb fell two streets from Nelson’s Way and they had all stood among piles of smoking rubble for a day and night, watching firemen hose the flames. This feeling was not only of danger, but of fatality, of being helpless before great impersonal forces; and was how she most deeply felt, saw, or thought an early childhood which the social viewer would describe perhaps like this:

Maureen Watson, conceived by chance on an unexpected granted-at-the-last-minute leave, at the height of the worst war in history, infant support of a mother only occasionally upheld (the chances of war deciding) by a husband she had met in a bomb shelter during an air raid: poor baby, born into a historical upheaval which destroyed forty million and might very well have destroyed her.

As for Maureen, her memories and the reminiscences of her parents made her dismiss the whole business as boring, and nothing to do with her.

It was at her seventh birthday party she first made this clear. She wore a mauve organdie frock with a pink sash, and her golden hair was in ringlets. One of the mothers said: ‘This is the first unrationed party dress my Shirley has had. It’s a shame, isn’t it?” And her own mother said: ‘Well of course these war children don’t know what they’ve missed.’ At which Maureen said: ‘I am not a war child.’ ‘What are you then, love?’ said her mother, fondly exchanging glances.

‘I’m Maureen,’ said Maureen.

‘And I’m Shirley,’ said Shirley, joining cause.

Shirley Banner was Maureen’s best friend. The Watsons and the Banners were better than the rest of the street. The Watsons lived in an end house, at higher weekly payments. The Banners had a sweets-paper-and-tobacco shop.

Maureen and Shirley remembered (or had they been told?) that once Nelson’s Way was a curved terrace of houses. Then the ground-floor level had broken into shops: a grocer’s, a laundry, a hardware, a baker, a dairy. It seemed as if every second family in the street ran a shop to supply certain defined needs of the other families. What other needs were there? Apparently none; for Maureen’s parents applied for permission to the Council, and the ground floor of their house became a second grocery shop, by way of broken-down walls, new shelves, a deepfreeze. Maureen remembered two small rooms, each with flowered curtains where deep shadows moved and flickered from the two small fires that burned back to back in the centre wall that divided them. These two rooms disappeared in clouds of dust from which sweet-smelling planks of wood stuck out. Strange but friendly men paid her compliments on her golden corkscrews and asked her for kisses, which they did not get. They gave her sips of sweet tea from their canteens (filled twice a day by her mother) and made her bracelets of the spiralling fringes of yellow wood. Then they disappeared. There was the new shop. Maureen’s Shop. Maureen went with her mother to the sign shop to arrange for these two words to be written in yellow paint on a blue ground.

Even without the name, Maureen would have known that the shop was connected with hopes for her future; and that her future was what her mother lived for.

She was pretty. She had always known it. Even where the shadows of fire and dark were, they had played over a pretty baby. ‘You were such a pretty baby, Maureen.’ And at the birthday parties: ‘Maureen’s growing really pretty, Mrs Watson.’ But all babies and little girls are pretty, she knew that well enough … no, it was something more. For Shirley was plump, dark – pretty. Yet their parents’ – or rather, their mothers’ – talk had made it clear from the start that Shirley was not in the same class as Maureen.

When Maureen was ten there was an episode of importance. The two mothers were in the room above Maureen’s Shop and they were brushing their little girls’ hair out. Shirley’s mother said: ‘Maureen could do really well for herself, Mrs Watson.’ And Mrs Watson nodded, but sighed deeply. The sigh annoyed Maureen, because it contradicted the absolute certainty that she felt (it had been bred into her) about her future. Also because it had to do with the boring era which she remembered, or thought she did, as a tiger-striped movement of fire. Chance: Mrs Watson’s sigh was like a prayer to the gods of Luck: it was the sigh of a small helpless thing being tossed about by big seas and gales. Maureen made a decision, there and then, that she had nothing in common with the little people who were prepared to be helpless and tossed about. For she was going to be quite different. She was already different. Not only The War but the shadows of war had long gone, except for talk in the newspapers which had nothing to do with her. The shops were full of everything. The Banners’ sweets-tobacco-paper shop had just been done up; and Maureen’s was short of nothing. Maureen and Shirley, two pretty little girls in smart mother-made dresses, were children of plenty, and knew it, because their parents kept saying (apparently they did not care how tedious they were): ‘These kids don’t lack for anything, do they? They don’t know what it can be like, do they?’ This, with the suggestion that they ought to be grateful for not lacking anything, always made the children sulky, and they went off to flirt their many-petticoated skirts where the neighbours could see them and pay them compliments.

Eleven years. Twelve years. Already Shirley had subsided into her role of pretty girl’s plainer girl friend, although of course she was not plain at all. Fair girl, dark girl, and Maureen by mysterious birthright was the ‘pretty one’, and there was no doubt in either of their minds which girl the boys would try first for a date. Yet this balance was by no means as unfair as it seemed. Maureen, parrying and jesting on street corners, at bus stops, knew she was doing battle for two, because the boys she discarded Shirley got: Shirley got far more boys than she would have done without Maureen who, for her part, needed – more, had to have – a foil. Her role demanded one.

They both left school at fifteen, Maureen to work in the shop. She was keeping her eyes open: her mother’s phrase. She wore a slim white overall, pinned her fair curls up, was neat and pretty in her movements. She smiled calmly when customers said: ‘My word, Mrs Watson, your Maureen’s turned out, hasn’t she?’

About that time there was a second moment of consciousness. Mrs Watson was finishing a new dress for Maureen, and the fitting was taking rather long. Maureen fidgeted and her mother said: ‘Well, it’s your capital, isn’t it? You’ve got to see that, love.’ And she added the deep unconscious sigh. Maureen said: ‘Well don’t go on about it, it’s not very nice, is it?’ And what she meant was, not that the idea was not very nice, but that she had gone beyond needing to be reminded about it; she was feeling the irritated embarrassment of a child when it is reminded to clean its teeth after this habit has become second nature. Mrs Watson saw and under-stood this, and sighed again; and this time it was the maternal sigh which means: Oh dear, you are growing up fast! ‘Oh Mum,’ said Maureen, ‘sometimes you just make me tired, you do really.’

Sixteen. She was managing her capital perfectly. Her assets were a slight delicate prettiness, and a dress sense that must have been a gift from God, or more probably because she had been reading the fashion magazines since practically before consciousness. Shirley had put in six months of beehive hair, pouting scarlet lips, and an air of sullen disdain; but Maureen’s sense of herself was much finer. She modelled herself on film stars, but with an understanding of how far she could go – of what was allowable to Maureen. So the experience of being Bardot, Monroe, or whoever it was, refined her: she took from it an essence, which was learning to be a vehicle for other people’s fantasies. So while Shirley had been a dozen stars, but really been them, in violent temporary transmogrifications, from which she emerged (often enough with a laugh) Shirley – plump, good-natured, and herself- Maureen remained herself through every role, but creating her appearance, like an alter ego, to meet the expression in people’s eyes.

Round about sixteen, another incident: prophetic. Mrs Watson had a cousin who worked in the dress trade, and this man, unthought-of for many years, was met at a wedding. He commented on Maureen, a vision in white gauze. Mrs Watson worked secretly on this slender material for some weeks; then wrote to him: Could Maureen be a model? He had only remote connections with the world of expensive clothes and girls, but he dropped into the shop with frankly personal aims. Maureen in a white wrapper was still pretty, very; but her remote air told this shrewd man that she would certainly not go out with him. She was saving herself; he knew the air of self-esteem very well from other exemplars. Such girls do not go out with middle-aged cousins, except as a favour or to get something. However, he told Mrs Watson that Maureen was definitely model material, but that she would have to do something about her voice. (He meant her accent of course; and so Mrs Watson understood him.) He left addresses and advice, and Mrs Watson was in a state of quivering ambition. She said so to Maureen: ‘This is your chance, girl. Take it.’ What Maureen heard was; ‘This is my chance.’

Maureen, nothing if not alert for her Big Chance, for which her whole life had prepared her, accepted her mother’s gift of a hundred pounds (she did not thank her, no thanks were due) and actually wrote to the school where she would be taught voice training.

Then she fell into sullen withdrawal, which she understood so little that a week had gone by before she said she must be sick – or something. She was rude to her mother: very rare, this. Her father chided her for it: even rarer. But he spoke in such a way that Maureen understood for the first time that this drive, this push, this family effort to gain her a glamorous future, came from her mother, her father was not implicated. For him, she was a pretty-enough girl, spoiled by a silly woman.

Maureen slowly understood she was not sick, she was growing up. For one thing: if she changed her ‘voice’ so as to be good enough to mix with new people, she would no longer be part of this street, she would no longer be Our Maureen. What would she be then? Her mother knew: she would marry a duke and be whisked off to Hollywood. Maureen examined her mother’s ideas for her and shrank with humiliation. She was above all no fool, but she had been very foolish. For one thing: when she used her eyes, with the scales of illusion off them, she saw that the million streets of London blossomed with girls as pretty as she. What, then, had fed the illusion in herself and in other people? What accounted for the special tone, the special looks that always greeted her? Why, nothing more than that she, Maureen, because of her mother’s will behind her, had carried herself from childhood as something special, apart, destined for a great future.

Meanwhile (as she clearly saw) she was in 93 Nelson’s Way, serving behind the counter of Maureen’s Shop. (She now wondered what the neighbours had thought – before they got used to it – about her mother’s fondness so terribly displayed.) She was dependent on nothing less than that a duke or a film producer would walk in to buy a quarter of tea and some sliced bread.

Maureen sulked. So her father said. So her mother complained. Maureen was – thinking? Yes. But more, a wrong had been done her, she knew it, and the sulking was more of a protective silence while she grew a scab over a wound.

She emerged demanding that the hundred pounds should be spent on sending her to secretarial school. Her parents complained that she could have learned how to be a secretary for nothing if she had stayed on at school another year. She said: ‘Yes, but you didn’t have the sense to make me, did you? What did you think – I was going to sell butter like you all my life?’ Unfair, on the face of it; but deeply fair, in view of what they had done to her. In their different ways they knew it. (Mr Watson knew in his heart, for instance, that he should never have allowed his wife to call the shop ‘Maureen’s’.) Maureen went, then, to secretarial school for a year. Shirley went with her: she had been selling cosmetics in the local branch of a big chain store. To raise the hundred pounds was difficult for Shirley’s parents: the shop had done badly, had been bought by a big firm; her father was an assistant in it. For that matter, it wasn’t all that easy for the Watsons: the hundred pounds was the result of small savings and pinchings over years.

This was the first time Maureen had thought of the word capital in connection with money, rather than her own natural assets: it was comparatively easy for the Watsons to raise money, because they had capital: the Banners had no capital. (Mrs Watson said the Banners had had bad luck.) Maureen strengthened her will; and as a result the two families behaved even more as if the girls would have different futures – or, to put it another way, that while the two sums of a hundred pounds were the same, the Watsons could be expected to earn more on theirs than the Banners.

This was reflected directly in the two girls’ discussions about boys. Shirley would say: ‘I’m more easy going than you.’

Maureen would reply: ‘I only let them go so far.’

Their first decisions on this almighty subject had taken place years before, when they were thirteen. Even then Shirley went further (‘let them go further’) than Maureen. It was put down, between them, to Shirley’s warmer temperament – charitably; for both knew it was because of Maureen’s higher value in the market.

At the secretarial school they met boys they had not met before. Previously boys had been from the street or the neighbourhood, known from birth, and for this reason not often gone out with – that would have been boring (serious, with possibilities of marriage). Or boys picked up after dances or at the pictures. But now there were new boys met day after day in the school. Shirley went out with one for weeks, thought of getting engaged, changed her mind, went out with another. Maureen went out with a dozen, chosen carefully. She knew what she was doing – and scolded Shirley for being so soft. ‘You’re just stupid, Shirl – I mean, you’ve got to get on. Why don’t you do like me?’

What Maureen did was to allow herself to be courted, until she agreed at last, as a favour, to be taken out. First, lunch – a word she began to use now. She would agree to go out to lunch two or three times with one boy, while she was taken out to supper (dinner) by another. The dinner partner, having been rewarded by a closed-mouth kiss for eight, ten, twelve nights, got angry or sulky or reproachful, according to his nature. He dropped her, and the lunch partner was promoted to dinner partner.

Maureen ate free for the year of her training. It wasn’t that she planned it like this; but when she heard other girls say they paid their way or liked to be independent, it seemed to Maureen wrong-headed. To pay for herself would be to let herself be undervalued: even the idea of it made her nervous and sulky.

At the end of the training Maureen got a job in a big architect’s office. She was a junior typist. She stuck out for a professional office because the whole point of the training was to enable her to meet a better class of people. Of course she had already learned not to use the phrase, and when her mother did snubbed her with: ‘I don’t know what you mean, better class, but it’s not much point my going into that hardware stuck upstairs in an office by myself if I can get a job where there’s some life about.’

Shirley went into a draper’s shop where there was one other typist (female) and five male assistants.

In Maureen’s place there were six architects, out most of the time, or invisible in large offices visited only by the real secretaries; a lower stratum of young men in training, designers, draughtsmen, managers, etc., and a pool of typists.

The young men were mostly of her own class. For some months she ate and was entertained at their expense; and at each week’s end there was a solemn ceremony, the high point of the week, certainly the most exciting moment in it, when she divided her wage. It was seven pounds (rising to ten in three years) and she allocated two pounds for clothes, four for the post office, and one pound for the week’s odd expenses.

At the end of a year she understood two things. That she had saved something like two hundred pounds. That there was not a young man in the office who would take her out again. They regarded her, according to their natures, with resentment or with admiration for her cool management of them. But there was nothing doing there – so they all knew.

Maureen thought this over. If she were not taken out to meals and entertainment, she must pay for herself and save no money, or she must never go out at all. If she was going to be taken out, then she must give something in return. What she gave was an open mouth, and freedom to the waist. She calculated that because of her prettiness she could give much less than other girls.

She was using her capital with even more intelligence than before. A good part of her time – all not spent in the office or being taken out – went in front of her looking glass, or with the better-class fashion magazines. She studied them with formidable concentration. By now she knew she could have gone anywhere in these islands, except for her voice. Whereas, months before, she had sulked in a sort of fright at the idea of cutting herself off from her street and the neighbours, now she softened and shaped her voice, listening to the clients and the senior architects in the office. She knew her voice had changed when Shirley said: ‘You’re talking nice, Maureen, much nicer than me.’

There was a boy in the office who teased her about it. His name was Tony Head. He was in training to be an accountant for the firm, and was very much from her own background. After having taken her out twice to lunch, he had never asked her again. She knew why: he had told her. ‘Can’t afford you, Maureen,’ he said. He earned not much more than she did. He was nineteen, ambitious, serious, and she liked him.

Then she was nineteen. Shirley was engaged to one of the assistants in her shop, and would be married next Christmas.

Maureen took forty pounds out of her savings and went on a tour to Italy. It was her first time out of England. She hated it: not Italy, but the fact that half the sixty people on the tour were girls, like herself, looking for a good time, and the other half elderly couples. In Rome, Pisa, Florence, Venice, the Italians mooned over Maureen, courted her with melting eyes, while she walked past them, distant as a starlet. They probably thought she was one. The courier, a sharp young man, took Maureen out to supper one night after he had finished his duties, and made it clear that her mouth, even if opened, and her breasts, were not enough. Maureen smiled at him sweetly through the rest of the trip. No one paid for her odd coffees, ices and drinks. On the last night of the trip, in a panic because the forty-pound investment had yielded so little, she went out with an Italian boy who spoke seven words of English. She thought him crude, and left him after an hour.

But she had learned a good deal for her forty pounds. Quietly, in her lunch hour, she went off to the National Gallery and to the Tate. There she looked, critical and respectful, at pictures, memorizing their subjects, or main colours, learning names. When invited out, she asked to be taken to ‘foreign’ films, and when she got back home wrote down the names of the director and the stars. She looked at the book page of the Express (she made her parents buy it instead of the Mirror) and sometimes bought a recommended book, if it was a best seller.

Twenty. Shirley was married and had a baby. Maureen saw little of her – both girls felt they had a new world of knowledge the other couldn’t appreciate.

Maureen was earning ten pounds a week, and saved six.

There came to the office, as an apprentice architect, Stanley Hunt, from grammar school and technical college. Tallish, well-dressed, fair, with a small moustache. They took each other’s measure, knowing they were the same kind. It was some weeks before he asked her out. She knew, by putting herself in his place, that he was looking for a wife with a little money or a house of her own, if he couldn’t get a lady. (She smiled when she heard him using this word about one of the clients.) He tried to know clients socially, to be accepted by them as they accepted the senior architects. All this Maureen watched, her cool little face saying nothing.

One day, after he had invited a Miss Plast (Chelsea, well-off, investing money in houses) to coffee, and had been turned down, he asked Maureen to join him in a sandwich lunch. Maureen thanked him delightfully, but said she already had an engagement. She went off to the National Gallery, sat on the steps, froze off wolves and pickups, and ate a sandwich by herself.

A week later, invited to lunch by Stanley, she suggested the Trattoria Siciliana which was more expensive, as she knew quite well, than he had expected. But this meal was a success. He was impressed with her, though he knew (how could he not, when his was similar?) her background.

She was careful to be engaged for two weeks. Then she agreed to go to the pictures – ‘a foreign film, if you don’t mind, I think the American films are just boring.’ She did not offer to pay, but remarked casually that she had nearly six hundred pounds in the post office. ‘I’m thinking of buying a little business, some time. A dress shop. I’ve got a cousin in the trade.’

Stanley agreed that ‘with your taste’ it would be a sure thing.

Maureen no longer went to the Palais, or similar places (though she certainly did not conceal from Stanley that she had ‘once’), but she loved to dance. Twice they went to the West End together and danced at a Club which was ‘a nice place’. They danced well together. On the second occasion she offered to pay her share, for the first time in her life. He refused, as she had known he would, but she could see he liked her for offering: more, was relieved; in the office they said she was mean, and he must have heard them. On that night, taken home lingeringly, she opened her mouth for him and let his hands go down to her thighs. She felt a sharp sexuality which made her congratulate herself that she had never, like Shirley, gone ‘half-way’ before. Well of course, girls were going to get married to just anybody if they let themselves be all worked up every time they were taken out!

But Stanley was not at all caught. He was too cool a customer, as she was. He was still looking for something better.

He would be an architect in a couple of years; he would be in a profession; he was putting down money for a house; he was good-looking, attractive to women, and with these assets he ought to do better than marry Maureen. Maureen agreed with him.

But meanwhile he took her out. She was careful often to be engaged elsewhere. She was careful always to be worth taking somewhere expensive. When he took her home, while she did not go so far as ‘nearly the whole way’, she went ‘everything but’; and she was glad she did not like him better, because otherwise she would have been lost. She knew quite well she did not really like him, although her mind was clouded by her response to his hands, his moustache, his clothes and his new car.

She knew, because meanwhile a relationship she understood very well, and regretted, had grown up with Tony. He, watching this duel between the well-matched pair, would grin and drop remarks at which Maureen coloured and turned coldly away. He often asked her out – but only for a ‘Dutch treat’ – expecting her to refuse. ‘How’s your savings account, Maureen? I can’t save, you girls get it all spent on you.’ Tony took out a good many girls: Maureen kept a count of them. She hated him; yet she liked him, and knew she did. She relied on him above all for the grinning, honest understanding of her: he did not approve of her, but perhaps (she felt in her heart) he was right? During this period she several times burst into tears when alone, without apparent reason; afterwards she felt that life had no flavour. Her future was narrowing down to Stanley; and at these times she viewed it through Tony Head’s eyes.

One night the firm had a party for the senior members of the staff. Stanley was senior, Maureen and Tony were not. Maureen knew that Stanley had previously asked another girl to go, and when he asked herself, was uncertain whether she could make it until the very last moment: particularly as his inviting her, a junior, meant that he was trying out on the senior members the idea of Maureen as a wife. But she acquitted herself very well. First, she was the best-looking woman in the room by far, and the best-dressed. Everyone looked at her and commented: they were used to her as a pretty typist; but tonight she was using all her will to make them look at her, to make her face and body reflect what they admired. She made no mistakes. When the party was over Stanley and two of the younger architects suggested they drive out to London airport for breakfast, and they did. The two other girls were middle-class. Maureen kept silent for the most part, smiling serenely. She had been to Italy, she remarked, when a plane rose to go to Italy. Yes, she had liked it, though she thought the Italians were too noisy; what she had enjoyed best was the Sistine Chapel and a boat trip on the Adriatic. She hadn’t cared for Venice much, it was beautiful, but the canals smelled, and there were far too many people; perhaps it would be better to go in winter? She said all this, having a right to it, and it came off. As she spoke she remembered Tony, who had once met her on her way to the National Gallery. ‘Getting yourself an education, Maureen? That’s right, it’ll pay off well, that will.’

She knew, thinking it all over afterwards, that the evening had been important for her with Stanley. Because of this, she did not go out with him for a week, she said she was busy talking to her cousin about the possibilities of a dress shop. She sat in her room thinking about Stanley, and when thoughts of Tony came into her mind, irritatedly pushed them away. If she could succeed with Stanley, why not with someone better? The two architects from that evening had eyed her all the following week: they did not, however, ask her out. She then found that both were engaged to marry the girls they had been with. It was bad luck: she was sure that otherwise they would have asked her out. How to meet more like them? Well, that was the trouble – the drive to the airport was a bit of a fluke; it was the first time she had actually met the seniors socially.

Meanwhile Stanley showed an impatience in his courtship – and for the first time. As for her, she was getting on for twenty-one, and all the girls she had grown up with were married and had their first or even their second babies.

She went out with Stanley to a dinner in the West End at an Italian restaurant. Afterwards they were both very passionate. Maureen, afterwards, was furious with herself: some borderline had been crossed (she supposed she still could be called a virgin?) and now decisions would have to be made.

Stanley was in love with her. She was in love with Stanley. A week later he proposed to her. It was done with a violent moaning intensity that she knew was due to his conflicts over marrying her. She was not good enough. He was not good enough. They were second-best for each other. They writhed and moaned and bit in the car, and agreed to marry. Her eight hundred pounds would make it easier to buy the house in a good suburb. He would formally meet her parents next Sunday.

‘So you’re engaged to Stanley Hunt?’ said Tony.

‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’

‘Caught him – good for you!’

‘He’s caught me, more like it!’

‘Have it your way.’

She was red and angry. He was serious.

‘Come and have a bite?’ he said. She went.

It was a small restaurant, full of office workers eating on luncheon vouchers. She ate fried plaice (’No chips, please’) and he ate steak-and-kidney pudding. He joked, watched her, watched her intently, said finally: ‘Can’t you do better than than?’ He meant, and she knew it, better in the sense she would use herself, in her heart: he meant nice. Like himself. But did that mean that Tony thought she was nice? Unlike Stanley? She did not think she was, she was moved to tears (concealed) that he did. ‘What’s wrong with him then?’ she demanded, casual. ‘What’s wrong with you? You need your head examined.’ He said it seriously, and they exchanged a long look. The two of them sat looking goodbye at each other: the extremely pretty girl at whom everyone in the room kept glancing and remarking on, and the good-looking, dark, rather fat young accountant who was brusque and solemn with disappointment in her. With love for her? Very likely.

She went home silent, thinking of Tony. When she thought of him she needed to cry. She also needed to hurt him.

But she told her parents she was engaged to Stanley, who would be an architect. They would have their own house, in (they thought) Hemel Hempstead. He owned a car. He was coming to tea on Sunday. Her mother forgot the dukes and the film producers before the announcement ended: her father listened judiciously, then congratulated her. He had been going to a football match on Sunday, but agreed, after persuasion, that this was a good-enough reason to stay home.

Her mother then began discussing, with deference to Maureen’s superior knowledge, how to manage next Sunday to best advantage. For four days she went on about it. But she was talking to herself. Her husband listened, said nothing. And Maureen listened, critically, like her father. Mrs Watson began clamouring for a definite opinion on what sort of cake to serve on Sunday. But Maureen had no opinion. She sat, quiet, looking at her mother, a largish ageing woman, her ex-fair hair dyed yellow, her flesh guttering. She was like an excited child, and it was not attractive. Stupid, stupid, stupid – that’s all you are, thought Maureen.

As for Maureen, if anyone had made the comparison, she was ‘sulking’ as she had before over being a model and having to be drilled out of her ‘voice’. She said nothing but: ‘It’ll be all right, Mum, don’t get so worked up.’ Which was true, because Stanley knew what to expect: he knew why he had not been invited to meet her parents until properly hooked. He would have done the same in her place. He was doing the same: she was going to meet his parents the week after. What Mrs Watson, Mr Watson, wore on Sunday; whether sandwiches or cake were served; whether there were fresh or artificial flowers – none of it matterd. The Watsons were part of the bargain: what he was paying in return for publicly owning the most covetable woman anywhere they were likely to be; and for the right to sleep with her after the public display.

Meanwhile Maureen said not a word. She sat on her bed looking at nothing in particular. Once or twice she examined her face in the mirror, and even put cream on it. And she cut out a dress, but put it aside.

On Sunday Mrs Watson laid tea for four, using her own judgment since Maureen was too deeply in love (so she told everyone) to notice such trifles. At four Stanley was expected, and at 3.55 Maureen descended to the living room. She wore: a faded pink dress from three summers before; her mother’s cretonne overall used for housework; and a piece of cloth tied round her hair that might very well have been a duster. At any rate, it was a faded grey. She had put on a pair of her mother’s old shoes. She could not be called plain; but she looked like her own faded elder sister, dressed for a hard day’s spring cleaning.

Her father, knowledgeable, said nothing: he lowered the paper, examined her, let out a short laugh, and lifted it again. Mrs Watson, understanding at last that this was a real crisis, burst into tears. Stanley arrived before Mrs Watson could stop herself crying. He nearly said to Mrs Watson: ‘I didn’t know Maureen had an older sister.’ Maureen sat listless at one end of the table; Mr Watson sat grinning at the other, and Mrs Watson sniffed and wiped her eyes between the two.

Maureen said: ‘Hello, Stanley, meet my father and mother.’ He shook their hands and stared at her. She did not meet his eyes: rather, the surface of her blue gaze met the furious, incredulous, hurt pounce of his glares at her. Maureen poured tea, offered him sandwiches and cake, and made conversation about the weather, and the prices of food, and the dangers of giving even good customers credit in the shop. He sat there, a well-set-up young man, with his brushed hair, his brushed moustache, his checked brown cloth jacket, and a face flaming with anger and affront. He said nothing, but Maureen talked on, her voice trailing and cool. At five o’clock, Mrs Watson again burst into tears, her whole body shaking, and Stanley brusquely left.

Mr Watson said: ‘Well, why did you lead him on, then?’ and turned on the television. Mrs Watson went to lie down. Maureen, in her own room, took off the various items of her disguise, and returned them to her mother’s room. ‘Don’t cry, Mum. What are you carrying on like that for? What’s the matter?’ Then she dressed extremely carefully in a new white linen suit, brown shoes, beige blouse. She did her hair and her face, and sat looking at herself. The last two hours (or week) hit her, and her stomach hurt so that she doubled up. She cried; but the tears smeared her makeup, and she stopped herself with the side of a fist against her mouth.

It now seemed to her that for the last week she had simply not been Maureen; she had been someone else. What had she done it for? Why? Then she knew it was for Tony: during all that ridiculous scene at the tea table, she had imagined Tony looking on, grinning, but understanding her.

She now wiped her face quite clear of tears, and went quietly out of the house so as not to disturb her father and mother. There was a telephone booth at the corner. She stepped calm and aloof along the street, her mouth held (as it always was) in an almost smile. Bert from the grocer’s shop said: ‘Hey, Maureen, that’s a smasher. Who’s it for?’ And she gave him the smile and the toss of her head that went with the street and said: ‘You, Bert, it’s all for you.’ She went to the telephone booth thinking of Tony. She felt as if he already knew what had happened. She would say: ‘Let’s go and dance, Tony.’ He would say: ‘Where shall I meet you?’ She dialled his number, and it rang and it rang. She stood holding the receiver, waiting. About ten minutes – more. Slowly she replaced it. He had let her down. He had been telling her, in words and without, to be something, to stay something, and now he did not care, he had let her down.

Maureen quietened herself and telephoned Stanley.

All right then, if that’s how you want it, she said to Tony.

Stanley answered, and she said amiably: ‘Hello.’

Silence. She could hear him breathing, fast. She could see his affronted face.

‘Well, aren’t you going to say anything?’ She tried to make this casual, but she could hear the fear in her voice. Oh yes, she could lose him and probably had. To hide the fear she said: ‘Can’t you take a joke, Stanley?’ and laughed.

‘A joke!’

She laughed. Not bad, it sounded all right.

‘I thought you’d gone off your nut, clean off your rocker …’He was breathing in and out, a rasping noise. She was reminded of his hot breathing down her neck and her arms. Her own breath quickened, even while she thought: I don’t like him, I really don’t like him at all … and she said softly: ‘Oh Stan, I was having a bit of a giggle, that’s all.’

Silence. Now, this was the crucial moment.

‘Oh Stan, can’t you see – I thought it was all just boring, that’s all it was.’ She laughed again.

He said: ‘Nice for your parents, I don’t think.’

‘Oh they don’t mind – they laughed after you’d left, though first they were cross.’ She added hastily, afraid he might think they were laughing at him: ‘They’re used to me, that’s all it is.’

Another long silence. With all her willpower she insisted that he should soften. But he said nothing, merely breathed in and out, into the receiver.

‘Stanley, it was only a joke, you aren’t really angry, are you, Stanley?’ The tears sounded in her voice now, and she judged it better that they should.

He said, after hesitation: ‘Well, Maureen, I just didn’t like it, I don’t like that kind of thing, that’s all.’ She allowed herself to go on crying, and after a while he said, forgiving her in a voice that was condescending and irritated: ‘Well, all right, all right, there’s no point in crying, is there?’

He was annoyed with himself for giving in, she knew that, because she would have been. He had given her up, thrown her over, during the last couple of hours: he was pleased, really, that something from outside had forced him to give her up. Now he could be free for the something better that would turn up – someone who would not strike terror into him by an extraordinary performance like this afternoon’s.

‘Let’s go off to the pictures, Stan …’

Even now, he hesitated. Then he said, quick and reluctant: ‘I’ll meet you at Leicester Square, outside the Odeon, at seven o’clock.’ He put down the receiver.

Usually he came to pick her up in the car from the corner of the street.

She stood smiling, the tears running down her face. She knew she was crying because of the loss of Tony, who had let her down. She walked back to her house to make up again, thinking that she was in Stanley’s power now: there was no balance between them, the advantage was all his.

Out of the Fountain

I could begin, There was once a man called Ephraim who lived in … but for me this story begins with a fog. Fog in Paris delayed a flight to London by a couple of hours, and so a group of travellers sat around a table drinking coffee and entertaining each other.

A woman from Texas joked that a week before she had thrown coins into the fountain in Rome for luck – and had been dogged by minor ill-fortune ever since. A Canadian said he had spent far too much money on a holiday and at the same fountain three days ago had been tempted to lift coins out with a magnet when no one was looking. Someone said that in a Berlin theatre last night there had been a scene where a girl flung money all about the stage in a magnificently scornful gesture. Which led us on to the large number of plays and novels there are where money is trampled on, burned, flung about or otherwise ritually scorned; which is odd, since such gestures never take place in life. Not at all, said a matron from New York – she had seen with her own eyes some Flower Children burning money on a side-walk to show their contempt for it; but for her part what it showed was that they must have rich parents. (This dates the story, or at least the fog.)

All the same, considering the role money plays in all our lives, it is odd how often authors cause characters to insult dollar bills, roubles, pound notes. Which enables audience, readers, to go home, or to shut the book, feeling cleansed of the stuff? Above it?

Whereas we are told that in less surly days sultans on feast days flung gold coins into crowds happy to scramble for it; that kings caused showers of gold to descend on loved ministers; and that if jewles fell in showers from the sky no one would dream of asking suspicious questions.

The nearest any one of us could remember to this kingly stuff was a certain newspaper mogul in London who would reward a promising young journalist for an article which he (the mogul) liked, with an envelope stuffed full of five pound notes sent around by special messenger – but this kind of thing is only too open to unkind interpretation; and the amount of ill-feeling aroused in the bosoms of fellow journalists, and the terror in that of the recipient for fear the thing might be talked about, is probably why we stage such scenes as it were in reverse, and why, on the edge of a magic fountain, we slide in a single coin, like a love letter into an envelope during an affair which one’s better sense entirely deplores. Sympathetic magic – but a small magic, a mini-magic, a most furtive summoning of the Gods of Gold. And, if a hand rose from the fountain to throw us coins and jewels, it is more than likely that, schooled as we are by recent literature, we’d sneer and throw them back in its teeth – so to speak.

And now a man who had not spoken at all said that he knew of a case where jewels had been flung into the dust of a public square in Italy. No one had thrown them back. He took from his pocket a wallet, and from the wallet a fold of paper such as jewellers use, and on the paper lay a single spark or gleam of light. It was a slice of milk-and-rainbow opal. Yes, he said, he had been there. He had picked up the fragment and kept it. It wasn’t valuable, of course. He would tell us the story if he thought there was time, but for some reason it was a tale so precious to him that he didn’t want to bungle it through having to hurry. Here there was another swirl of silkily gleaming fog beyond the glass of the restaurant wall, and another announcement of unavoidable delay.

So he told the story. One day someone will introduce me to a young man called Nikki (perhaps, or what you will) who was born during the Second World War in Italy. His father was a hero, and his mother now the wife of the Ambassador to … Or perhaps in a bus, or at a dinner party, there will be a girl who has a pearl hanging around her neck on a chain, and when asked about it she will say: Imagine, my mother was given this pearl by a man who was practically a stranger, and when she gave it to me she said … Something like that will happen: and then this story will have a different beginning, not a fog at all …

There was a man called Ephraim who lived in Johannesburg. His father was to do with diamonds, as had been his father. The family were immigrants. This is still true of all people from Johannesburg, a city a century old. Ephraim was a middle son, not brilliant or stupid, not good or bad. He was nothing in particular. His brothers became diamond merchants, but Ephraim was not cut out for anything immediately obvious, and so at last he was apprenticed to an uncle to learn the trade of diamond-cutting.

To cut a diamond perfectly is an act like a samurai’s sword-thrust, or a master archer’s centred arrow. When an important diamond is shaped a man may spend a week, or even weeks, studying it, accumulating powers of attention, memory, intuition, till he has reached that moment when he finally knows that a tap, no more, at just that point of tension in the stone will split it exactly so.

While Ephraim learned to do this, he lived at home in a Johannesburg suburb; and his brothers and sister married and had families. He was the son who took his time about getting married, and about whom the family first joked, saying that he was choosy; and then they remained silent when others talked of him with that edge on their voices, irritated, a little malicious, even frightened, which is caused by those men and women who refuse to fulfil the ordinary purposes of nature. The kind ones said he was a good son, working nicely under his uncle Ben, and living respectably at home, and on Sunday nights playing poker with bachelor friends. He was twenty-five, then thirty, thirty-five, forty. His parents became old and died, and he lived alone in the family house. People stopped noticing him. Nothing was expected of him.

Then a senior person became ill, and Ephraim was asked to fly in his stead to Alexandria for a special job. A certain rich merchant of Alexandria had purchased an uncut diamond as a present for his daughter, who was to be married shortly. He wished only the best for the diamond. Ephraim, revealed by this happening as one of the world’s master diamond-cutters, flew to Egypt, spent some days in communion with the stone in a quiet room in the merchant’s house, and then caused it to fall apart into three lovely pieces. These were for a ring and earrings.

Now he should have flown home again; but the merchant asked him to dinner. An odd chance that – unusual. Not many people got inside that rich closed world. But perhaps the merchant had become infected by the week of rising tension while Ephraim became one with the diamond in a quiet room.

At dinner Ephraim met the girl for whom the jewels were destined.

And now – but what can be said about the fortnight that followed? Certainly not that Ephraim, the little artisan from Johannesburg, fell in love with Mihrène, daughter of a modern merchant prince. Nothing so simple. And that the affair had about it a quality out of the ordinary was shown by the reaction of the merchant himself, Mihrène’s conventional papa.

Conventional, commonplace, banal – these are the words for the members of the set, or class, to which Mihrène Kantannis belonged. In all the cities about the Mediterranean they live in a scattered community, very rich, but tastefully so, following international fashions, approving Paris when they should and London when they should, making trips to New York or Rome, summering on whichever shore they have chosen, by a kind of group instinct, to be the right one for the year, and sharing comfortably tolerant opinions. They were people, are people, with nothing remarkable about them but their wealth, and the enchanting Mihrène, whom Ephraim first saw in a mist of white embroidered muslin standing by a fountain, was a girl neither more pretty nor more gifted than, let’s say, a dozen that evening in Alexandria, a thousand or so in Egypt, hundreds of thousands in the countries round about, all of which produce so plentifully her particular type – her beautiful type: small-boned, black-haired, black-eyed, apricot-skinned, lithe.

She had lived for twenty years in this atmosphere of well-chosen luxury; loved and bickered with her mother and her sisters; respected her papa; and was intending to marry Paulo, a young man from South America with whom she would continue to live exactly the same kind of life, only in Buenos Aires.

For her it was an ordinary evening, a family dinner at which a friend of Papa’s was present. She did not know about the diamonds; they were to be a surprise. She was wearing last year’s dress and a choker of false pearls: that season it was smart to wear ‘costume’ pearls, and to leave one’s real pearls in a box on one’s dressing-table.

Ephraim, son of jewellers, saw the false pearls around that neck and suffered.

Why, though? Johannesburg is full of pretty girls. But he had not travelled much, and Johannesburg, rough, built on gold, as it were breathing by the power of gold, a city waxing and waning with the fortunes of gold (as befits this story), may be exciting, violent, vibrant, but it has no mystery, nothing for the imagination, no invisible dimensions. Whereas Alexandria … This house, for instance, with its discreetly blank outer walls that might conceal anything, crime, or the hidden court of an exiled king, held inner gardens and fountains, and Mihrène, dressed appropriately in moonwhite and who … well, perhaps she wasn’t entirely at her best that evening. There were those who said she had an ugly laugh. Sometimes the family joked that it was lucky she would never have to earn a living. At one point during dinner, perhaps feeling that she ought to contribute to the entertainment, she told a rather flat and slightly bitchy story about a friend. She was certainly bored, yawned once or twice, and did not try too hard to hide the yawns. The diamond-cutter from Johannesburg gazed at her, forgot to eat, and asked twice why she wore false pearls in a voice rough with complaint. He was gauche, she decided – and forgot him.

He did not return home, but wired for money. He had never spent any, and so had a great deal available for the single perfect pearl which he spent days looking for, and which he found at last in a back room in Cairo, where he sat bargaining over coffee cups for some days with an old Persian dealer who knew as much about gems as he did, and who would not trade in anything but the best.

With this jewel he arrived at the house of Mihrène’s father, and when he was seated in a room opening on to an inner court where jasmine clothed a wall, and lily pads a pool, he asked permission to give the pearl to the young girl.

It had been strange that Papa had invited this tradesman to dinner. It was strange that now Papa did not get angry. He was shrewd: it was his life to be shrewd. There was no nuance of commercial implication in a glance, a tone of voice, a turn of phrase, that he was not certain to assess rightly. Opposite this fabulously rich man into whose house only the rich came as guests, sat a little diamond-cutter who proposed to give his daughter a small fortune in the shape of a pearl, and who wanted nothing in return for it.

They drank coffee, and then they drank whisky, and they talked of the world’s jewels and of the forthcoming wedding, until for the second time Ephraim was asked to dinner.

At dinner Mihrène sat opposite the elderly gentleman (he was forty-five or so) who was Papa’s business friend, and was ordinarily polite: then slightly more polite, because of a look from Papa. The party was Mihrène, her father, her fiancé Paulo, and Ephraim. The mother and sisters were visiting elsewhere. Nothing happened during the meal. The young couple were rather inattentive to the older pair. At the end, Ephraim took a screw of paper from his pocket, and emptied from it a single perfect pearl that had a gleam like the flesh of a rose, or of a twenty-year-old girl. This pearl he offered to Mihrène, with the remark that she oughtn’t to wear false pearls. Again it was harshly inflected; a complaint, or a reproach for imperfect perfection.

The pearl lay on white damask in candlelight. Into the light above the pearl was thrust the face of Ephraim, whose features she could reconstruct from the last time she had seen him a couple of weeks before only with the greatest of difficulty.

It was, of course, an extraordinary moment. But not dramatic -no, it lacked that high apex of decisiveness as when Ephraim tapped a diamond, or an archer lets loose his bow. Mihrène looked at her father for an explanation. So, of course, did her fiancé. Her father did not look confused, or embarrassed, so much as that he wore the air of somebody standing on one side because here is a situation which he has never professed himself competent to judge. And Mihrène had probably never before in her life been left free to make a decision.

She picked up the pearl from the damask, and let it lie in her palm. She, her fiancé and her father, looked at the pearl whose value they were all well equipped to assess, and Ephraim looked sternly at the girl. Then she lifted long, feathery black lashes and looked at him – in inquiry? An appeal to be let off? His eyes were judging, disappointed; they said what his words had said: Why are you content with the second-rate?

Preposterous …

Impossible …

Finally Mihrène gave the slightest shrug of shoulders, tonight covered in pink organza, and said to Ephraim, ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’

They rose from the table. The four drank coffee on the terrace over which rose a wildly evocative Alexandrian moon, two nights away from the full, a moon quite unlike any that might shine over strident Johannesburg. Mihrène let the pearl lie on her palm and reflect moonrays, while from time to time her black eyes engaged with Ephraim’s – but what colour his were had never been, would never be, of interest to anyone – and, there was no doubt of it, he was like someone warning, or reminding, or even threatening.

Next day he went back to Johannesburg, and on Mihrène’s dressing-table lay a small silver box in which was a single perfect pearl.

She was to marry in three weeks.

Immediately the incident became in the family: ‘That crazy little Jew who fell for Mihrène …’ Her acceptance of the pearl was talked of as an act of delicacy on her part, of kindness. ‘Mihrène was so kind to the poor old thing …’ Thus they smoothed over what had happened, made acceptable an incident which could have no place in their life, their thinking. But they knew, of course, and most particularly did Mihrène know, that something else had happened.

When she refused to marry Paulo, quite prettily and nicely, Papa and Mamma Kantannis made ritual remarks about her folly, her ingratitude, and so forth, but in engagements like these no hearts are expected to be broken, for the marriages are like the arranged marriages of dynasties. If she did not marry Paulo, she would marry someone like him – and she was very young.

They remarked that she had not been herself since the affair of the pearl. Papa said to himself that he would see to it no more fly-by-nights arrived at his dinner-table. They arranged for Mihrène a visit to cousins in Istanbul.

Meanwhile in Johannesburg a diamond-cutter worked at his trade, cutting diamonds for engagement rings, dress rings, tie pins, necklaces, bracelets. He imagined a flat bowl of crystal, which glittered like diamonds, in which were massed roses. But the roses were all white, shades of white. He saw roses which were cold marble white, white verging on coffee colour, greenish white like the wings of certain butterflies, white that blushed, a creamy white, white that was nearly beige, white that was almost yellow. He imagined a hundred shades of white in rose shapes. These he pressed together, filled a crystal dish with them and gave them to -Mihrène? It is possible that already he scarcely thought of her. He imagined how he would collect stones in shades of white, and create a perfect jewel, bracelet, necklet, or crescent for the hair, and present this jewel to – Mihrène? Does it matter whom it was for? He bought opals, like mist held behind glass on which lights moved and faded, like milk where fire lay buried, like the congealed breath of a girl on a frosty night. He bought pearls, each one separately, each one perfect. He bought fragments of mother-of-pearl. He bought moonstones like clouded diamonds. He even bought lumps of glass that someone had shaped to reflect light perfectly. He bought white jade and crystals and collected chips of diamond to make the suppressed fires in pearl and opal flash out in reply to their glittering frost. These jewels he had in folded flat paper, and they were kept first in a small cigarette box, and then were transferred to a larger box that had been for throat lozenges, and then to an even larger box that had held cigars. He played with these gems, dreamed over them, arranged them in his mind in a thousand ways. Sometimes he remembered an exquisite girl dressed in moonmist: the memory was becoming more and more like a sentimental postcard or an old-fashioned calendar.

In Istanbul Mihrène married, without her family’s approval, a young Italian engineer whom normally she would never have met. Her uncle was engaged in reconstructing a certain yacht; the engineer was in the uncle’s office to discuss the reconstruction when Mihrène came in. It was she who made the first move: it would have to be. He was twenty-seven, with nothing but his salary, and no particular prospects. His name was Carlos. He was political. That is, precisely, he was a revolutionary, a conspirator. Politics did not enter the world of Mihrène. Or rather, it could be said that such families are politics, politics in their aspect of wealth, but this becomes evident only when deals are made that are so vast that they have international cachet, and repute, like the alliances or rifts between countries.

Carlos called Mihrène ‘a white goose’ when she tried to impress him with her seriousness. He called her ‘a little rich bitch’. He made a favour of taking her to meetings where desperately serious young men and women discussed the forthcoming war – the year was 1939- It was an affair absolutely within the traditions of such romances: her family were bound to think she was throwing herself away; he and his friends on the whole considered that it was he who was conferring the benefits.

To give herself courage in her determination to be worthy of this young hero, she would open a tiny silver box where a pearl lay on silk, and say to herself: He thought I was worth something …

She married her Carlos in the week Paulo married a girl from a French dynasty. Mihrène went to Rome and lived in a small villa without servants, and with nothing to fall back on but the memory of a nondescript elderly man who had sat opposite her throughout two long, dull dinners and who had given her a pearl as if he were giving her a lesson. She thought that in all her life no one else had ever demanded anything of her, ever asked anything, ever taken her seriously.

The war began. In Buenos Aires the bride who had taken her place lived in luxury. Mihrène, a poor housewife, saw her husband who was a conspirator against the fascist Mussolini become a conscript in Mussolini’s armies, then saw him go away to fight, while she waited for the birth of her first child.

The war swallowed her. When she was heard of again, her hero was dead, and her first child was dead, and her second, conceived on Carlos’s final leave, was due to be born in a couple of months. She was in a small town in the centre of Italy with no resources at all but her pride: she had sworn she would not earn the approval of her parents on any terms but her own. The family she had married into had suffered badly: she had a room in the house of an aunt.

The Germans were retreating through Italy: after them chased the victorious armies of the Allies … but that sounds like an official war history.

To try again: over a peninsula that was shattered, ruinous, starved by war, two armies of men foreign to the natives of the place were in movement; one in retreat up towards the body of Europe, the other following it. There were places where these opposing bodies were geographically so intermingled that only uniforms distinguished them. Both armies were warm, well clothed, well fed, supplied with alcohol and cigarettes. The native inhabitants had no heat, no warm clothes, little food, no cigarettes. They had, however, a great deal of alcohol.

In one army was a man called Ephraim who, being elderly, was not a combatant, but part of the machinery which supplied it with food and goods. He was a sergeant, and as unremarkable in the army as he was in civilian life. For the four years he had been a soldier, for the most part in North Africa, he had pursued a private interest, or obsession, which was, when he arrived anywhere at all, to seek out the people and places that could add yet another fragment of iridescent or gleaming substance to the mass which he carried around in a flat tin in his pack.

The men he served with found him and his preoccupation mildly humorous. He was not disliked or liked enough to make a target for that concentration of unease caused by people who alarm others. They did not laugh at him, or call him madman. Perhaps he was more like that dog who is a regiment’s pet. Once he mislaid his tin of loot and a couple of men went into a moderate danger to get it back: sometimes a comrade would bring him a bit of something or other picked up in a bazaar – amber, an amulet, a jade. He advised them how to make bargains; he went on expeditions with them to buy stones for wives and girls back home.

He was in Italy that week when – everything disintegrated. Anyone who has been in, or near, war (which means, by now, everyone, or at least everyone in Europe and Asia) knows that time – a week, days, sometimes hours – when everything falls apart, when all forms of order dissolve, including those which mark the difference between enemy and enemy.

During this time old scores of all kinds are settled. It is when unpopular officers get killed by ‘accident’. It is when a man who has an antipathy for another will kill him, or beat him up. A man who wants a woman will rape her, if she is around, or rape another in her stead if she is not. Women get raped; and those who want to be will make sure they are where the raping is. A woman who hates another will harm her. In short, it is a time of anarchy, of looting, of arson and destruction for destruction’s sake. There are those who believe that this time out of ordinary order is the reason for war, its hidden justification, its purpose and law, another pattern behind the one we see. Afterwards there are no records of what has happened. There is no one to keep records: everyone is engaged in participating, or in protecting himself.

Ephraim was in a small town near Florence when his war reached that phase. There was a certain corporal, also from Johannesburg, who always had a glitter in his look when they talked of Ephraim’s tin of jewels. On an evening when every human being in the place was hunter or hunted, manoeuvred for advantage, or followed scents of gain, this man, in civilian life a store-keeper, looked across a room at Ephraim and grinned. Ephraim knew what to expect. Everyone knew what to expect – at such moments much older knowledges come to the surface together with old instincts. Ephraim quietly left a schoolroom for that week converted into a mess, and went out into the early dark of streets emptied by fear, where walls still shook and dust fell in clouds because of near gunfire. But it was also very quiet. Terror’s cold nausea silences, places invisible hands across mouths … The occasional person hurrying through those streets kept his eyes in front, and his mouth tight. Two such people meeting did not look at each other except for a moment when their eyes violently encountered in a hard clash of inquiry. Behind every shutter or pane or door people stood, or sat or crouched waiting for the time out of order to end, and guns and sharp instruments stood near their hands.

Through these streets went Ephraim. The Corporal had not seen him go, but by now would certainly have found the scent. At any moment he would catch up with Ephraim who carried in his hand a flat tin, and who as he walked looked into holes in walls and in pavements, peered into a church half filled with rubble, investigated torn earth where bomb fragments had fallen and even looked up into the branches of trees as he passed and at the plants growing at doorways. Finally, as he passed a fountain clogged with debris, he knelt for a moment and slid his tin down into the mud. He walked away, fast, not looking back to see if he had been seen, and around the corner of the church he met Corporal Van der Merwe. As Ephraim came up to his enemy he held out empty hands and stood still. The Corporal was a big man and twenty years younger. Van der Merwe gave him a frowning look, indicative of his powers of shrewd assessment, rather like Mihrène’s father’s look when he heard how this nonentity proposed to give his daughter a valuable pearl for no reason at all, and when Ephraim saw it, he at once raised his hands above his head like a prisoner surrendering, while Van der Merwe frisked him. There was a moment when Ephraim might very well have been killed: it hung in the balance. But down the street a rabble of soldiers were looting pictures and valuables from another church, and Van der Merwe, his attention caught by them, simply watched Ephraim walk away, and then ran off himself to join the looters.

By the time that season of anarchy had finished, Ephraim was a couple of hundred miles north. Six months later, in a town ten miles from the one where he had nearly been murdered by a man once again his military subordinate (but that incident had disappeared, had become buried in the foreign texture of another time, or dimension), Ephraim asked for an evening’s leave and travelled as he could to V——, where he imagined, perhaps, that he would walk through deserted streets to a rubble-filled fountain and beside the fountain would kneel, and slide his hand into dirty water to retrieve his treasure.

But the square was full of people, and though this was not a time when a café served more than a cup of bad coffee or water flavoured with chemicals, the two cafés had people in them who were half starved but already inhabiting the forms of ordinary life. They served, of course, unlimited quantities of cheap wine. Everyone was drunken, or tipsy. In a wine country, when there is no food, wine becomes a kind of food, craved like food. Ephraim walked past the fountain and saw that the water was filthy, too dirty to let anyone see what was in it, or whether it had been cleared of rubble, and, with the rubble, his treasure.

He sat on the pavement under a torn awning, by a cracked wood table, and ordered coffee. He was the only soldier there; or at least, the only uniform. The main tide of soldiery was washing back and forth to one side of this little town. Uniforms meant barter, meant food, clothing, cigarettes. In a moment half a dozen little boys were at his elbow offering him girls. Women of all ages were sauntering past or making themselves visible, or trying to catch his eye, since the female population of the town were for the most part in that condition for which in our debased time we have the shorthand term: being prepared to sell themselves for a cigarette. Old women, old men, cripples, all kinds of persons, stretched in front of him hands displaying various more or less useless objects – lighters, watches, old buckles or bottles or brooches – hoping to get chocolate or food in return. Ephraim sat on, sad with himself because he had not brought eggs or tinned stuff or chocolate. He had not thought of it. He sat while hungry people with sharp faces that glittered with a winy fever pressed about him and the bodies of a dozen or so women arranged themselves in this or that pose for his inspection. He felt sick. He was almost ready to go away and forget his tin full of gems. Then a tired-looking woman in a much-washed print dress lifted high in front because of pregnancy came to sit at his table. He thought she was there to sell herself, and hardly looked at her, unable to bear it that a pregnant woman was brought to such a pass.

She said: ‘Don’t you remember me?’

And now he searched her face, and she searched his. He looked for Mihrène; and she tried to see in him what it was that changed her life, to find what it was that pearl embodied which she carried with her in a bit of cloth sewn into her slip.

They sat trying to exchange news; but these two people had so little in common they could not even say: And how is so and so? What has happened to him, or to her?

The hungry inhabitants of the town withdrew a little way, because this soldier had become a person, a man who was a friend of Mihrène, who was their friend.

The two were there for a couple of hours. They were on the whole more embarrassed than anything. It was clear to both by now that whatever events had taken place between them, momentous or not (they were not equipped to say), these events were in some realm or on a level where their daylight selves were strangers. It was certainly not the point that she, the unforgettable girl of Alexandria, had become a rather drab young woman waiting to give birth in a war-shattered town; not the point that for her he had carried with him for four years of war a treasury of gems, some precious, some mildly valuable, some worthless, bits of substance with one thing in common: their value related to some other good which had had, arbitrarily and for a short time, the name Mihrène.

It had become intolerable to sit there, over coffee made of burned grain, while all around great hungry eyes focussed on him, the soldier, who had come so cruelly to their starving town with empty hands. He had soon to leave. He had reached this town on the backboards of a peasant’s cart, there being no other transport; and if he did not get another lift of the same kind, he would have to walk ten miles before midnight.

Over the square was rising a famished watery moon, unlike the moons of his own city, unlike the wild moons of Egypt. At last he simply got up and walked to the edge of the evil-smelling fountain. He kneeled down on its edge, plunged in his hand, encountered all sorts of slimy things, probably dead rats or cats or even bits of dead people, and after some groping, felt the familiar shape of his tin. He pulled it out, wiped it dry on some old newspaper that had blown there, went back to the table, sat down, opened the tin. Pearls are fed on light and air. Opals don’t like being shut away from light which makes their depths come alive. But no water had got in, and he emptied the glittering, gleaming heap on to the cracked wood of the table top.

All round pressed the hungry people who looked at the gems and thought of food.

She took from her breast a bit of cloth and untwisted her pearl. She held it out to him.

‘I never sold it,’ she said.

And now he looked at her – sternly, as he had done before.

She said, in the pretty English of those who have learned it from governesses: ‘I have sometimes needed food, I’ve been hungry, you know! I’ve had no servants …’

He looked at her. Oh, how she knew that look, how she had studied it in memory! Irritation, annoyance, grief. All these, but above all disappointment. And more than these, a warning, or reminder. It said, she felt: Silly white goose! Rich little bitch! Poor little nothing! Why do you always get it wrong? Why are you stupid? What is a pearl compared with what it stands for? If you are hungry and need money, sell it, of course!

She sat in that sudden stillness that says a person is fighting not to weep. Her beautiful eyes brimmed. Then she said stubbornly: ‘I’ll never sell it. Never!’

As for him he was muttering: I should have brought food. I was a dummkopf. What’s the use of these things …

But in the hungry eyes around him he read that they were thinking how even in times of famine there are always men and women who have food hidden away to be bought by gold or jewels.

‘Take them,’ he said to the children, to the women, to the old people.

They did not understand him, did not believe him.

He said again: ‘Go on. Take them!’

No one moved. Then he stood up and began flinging into the air pearls, opals, moonstones, gems of all kinds, to fall as they would. For a few moments there was a mad scene of people bobbing and scrambling, and the square emptied as people raced back to the corners they lived in with what they had picked up out of the dust. It was not yet time for the myth to start, the story of how a soldier had walked into the town, and inexplicably pulled treasure out of the fountain which he flung into the air like a king or a sultan – treasure that was ambiguous and fertile like a king’s, since one man might pick up the glitter of a diamond that later turned out to be worthless glass, and another be left with a smallish pearl that had nevertheless been so carefully chosen it was worth months of food, or even a house or small farm.

‘I must go,’ said Ephraim to his companion.

She inclined her head in farewell, as to an acquaintance re-encountered. She watched a greying, dumpy man walk away past a fountain, past a church, then out of sight.

Later that night she took out the pearl and held it in her hand. If she sold it, she would remain comfortably independent of her own family. Here, in the circle of the family of her dead husband, she would marry again, another engineer or civil servant: she would be worth marrying, even as a widow with a child. Of course if she returned to her own family, she would also remarry, as a rich young widow with a small child from that dreadful war, luckily now over.

Such thoughts went through her head: at last she thought that it didn’t make any difference what she did. Whatever function Ephraim’s intervention had performed in her life was over when she refused to marry Paulo, had married Carlos, had come to Italy and given birth to two children, one dead from an unimportant children’s disease that had been fatal only because of the quality of war-food, war-warmth. She had been wrenched out of her pattern, had been stamped, or claimed, by the pearl – by something else. Nothing she could do now would put her back where she had been. It did not matter whether she stayed in Italy or returned to the circles she had been born in.

As for Ephraim, he went back to Johannesburg when the war finished, and continued to cut diamonds and to play poker on Sunday nights.

This story ended more or less with the calling of the flight number. As we went to the tarmac where illuminated wisps of fog still lingered, the lady from Texas asked the man who had told the story if perhaps he was Ephraim?

‘No,’ said Dr Rosen, a man of sixty or so from Johannesburg, a brisk, well-dressed man with nothing much to notice about him – like most of the world’s citizens.

No, he was most emphatically not Ephraim.

Then how did he know all this? Perhaps he was there?

Yes, he was there. But if he was to tell us how he came to be a hundred miles from where he should have been, in that chaotic, horrible week – it was horrible, horrible! – and in civvies, then that story would be even longer than the one he had already told us.

Couldn’t he tell us why he was there?

Perhaps he was after that tin of Ephraim’s too! We could think so if we liked. It would be excusable of us to think so. There was a fortune in that tin, and everyone in the regiment knew it.

He was a friend of Ephraim’s then? He knew Ephraim?

Yes, he could say that. He had known Ephraim for, let’s see, nearly fifty years. Yes, he thought he could say he was Ephraim’s friend.

In the aircraft Dr Rosen sat reading, with nothing more to tell us.

But one day I’ll meet a young man called Nikki, or Raffaele; or a girl wearing a single pearl around her neck on a gold chain or perhaps a middle-aged woman who says she thinks pearls are unlucky, she would never touch them herself: a man once gave her younger sister a pearl and it ruined her entire life. Something like that will happen, and this story will have a different shape.

An Unposted Love Letter

Yes, I saw the look your wife’s face put on when I said, ‘I have so many husbands, I don’t need a husband.’ She did not exchange a look with you, but that was because she did not need to – later when you got home she said, ‘What an affected thing to say!’ and you replied, ‘Don’t forget she is an actress.’ You said this meaning exactly what I would mean if I had said it, I’m certain of that. And perhaps she heard it like that. I do hope so because I know what you are and if your wife does not hear what you say then this is a smallness on your part that I don’t forgive you. If I can live alone, and out of fastidiousness, then you must have a wife as good as you are. My husbands, the men who set light to my soul (yes, I know how your wife would smile if I used that phrase), are worthy of you … I know that I am giving myself away now, confessing how much that look on your wife’s face hurt. Didn’t she know that even then I was playing my part? Oh no, after all, I don’t forgive you your wife, no I don’t.

If I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many lovers,’ then of course everyone at the dinner-table would have laughed in just such a way: it would have been the rather banal ‘outrageousness’ expected of me. An ageing star, the fading beauty … ‘I have so many lovers’ – pathetic, and brave too. Yes, that remark would have been too apt, too smooth, right for just any ‘beautiful but fading’ actress. But not right for me, because after all, I am not just any actress, I am Victoria Carrington, and I know exactly what is due to me and from me. I know what is fitting (not for me, that is not important) but for what I stand for. Do you imagine I couldn’t have said it differently – like this, for instance: ‘I am an artist and therefore androgynous.’ Or: ‘I have created inside myself Man who plays opposite to my Woman.’ Or: ‘I have objectified in myself the male components of my soul and it is from this source that I create.’ Oh, I’m not stupid, not ignorant, I know the different dialects of our time and even how to use them. But imagine if I had said any of these things last night! It would have been a false note, you would all have been uncomfortable, irritated, and afterwards you would have said: ‘Actresses shouldn’t try to be intelligent.’ (Not you, the others.) Probably they don’t believe it, not really, that an actress must be stupid, but their sense of discrepancy, or discordance, would have expressed itself in such a way. Whereas their silence when I said, ‘I don’t need a husband, I have so many husbands,’ was right, for it was the remark right for me – it was more than ‘affected’, or ‘outrageous’ – it was making a claim that they had to recognize.

That word ‘affected’, have you ever really thought why it is applied to actresses? (You have of course, I’m no foreign country to you, I felt that, but it gives me pleasure to talk to you like this.) The other afternoon I went to see Irma Painter in her new play, and afterwards I went back to congratulate her (for she had heard, of course, that I was in the auditorium and would have felt insulted if I hadn’t gone – I’m different, I hate it when people feel obliged to come back). We were sitting in her dressing-room and I was looking at her face as she wiped the make-up off. We are about the same age, and we have both been acting since the year——I recognized her face as mine, we have the same face, and I understood that it is the face of every real actress. No, it is not ‘mask-like’, my face, her face. Rather, it is that our basic face is so worn down to its essentials because of its permanent readiness to take other guises, become other people, it is almost like something hung up on the wall of a dressing-room ready to take down and use. Our face is – it has a scrubbed, honest, bare look, like a deal table, or a wooden floor. It has modesty, a humility, our face, as time wears on, wearing out of her, out of me, our ‘personality’, our ‘individuality’.

I looked at her face (we are called rivals, we are both called ‘great’ actresses) and I suddenly wanted to pay homage to it, since I knew what that scoured plain look cost her – what it costs me, who have played a thousand beautiful women, to keep my features sober and decent under the painted shell of my make-up, ready for other souls to use.

At a party, all dressed up, when I’m a ‘person’, then I try to disguise the essential plainness and anonymity of my features by holding together the ‘beauty’ I am known for, creating it out of my own and other people’s memories. Of course it is almost gone now, nearly all gone the sharp, sweet, poignant face that so many men loved (not knowing it was not me, it was only what was given to me to consume slowly for the scrubbed face I must use for work). While I sat last night opposite you and your wife, she so pretty and human, her prettiness no mask, but expressing every shade of what she felt, and you being yourself only, I was conscious of how I looked. I could see my very white flesh that is guttering down away from its ‘beauty’; I could see my smile that even now has moments of its ‘piercing sweetness’; I could see my eyes, ‘dewy and shadowed’, even now … but I also knew that everyone there, even if they were not aware of it, was conscious of that hard, honest, workaday face that lies ready for use under this ruin, and it is the discrepancy between that working face and the ‘personality’ of the famous actress that makes everything I do and say affected, that makes it inevitable and right that I should say, ‘I don’t want a husband, I have so many husbands.’ And I tell you, if I had said nothing, not one word, the whole evening, the result would have been the same: ‘How affected she is, but of course she is an actress.’

Yet it was the exact truth, what I said: I no longer have lovers, I have husbands, and that has been true ever since …

That is why I am writing this letter to you; this letter is a sort of homage, giving you your due in my life. Or perhaps, simply, I cannot tonight stand the loneliness of my role (my role in life).

When I was a girl it seemed that every man I met, or even heard of, or whose picture I saw in the paper, was my lover. I took him as my lover, because it was my right. He may never have heard of me, he might have thought me hideous (and I wasn’t very attractive as a girl – my kind of looks, striking, white-fleshed, red-haired, needed maturity, as a girl I was a milk-faced, scarlet-haired creature whose features were all at odds with each other, I was pretty only when made up for the stage) … he may have found me positively repulsive, but I took him. Yes, at that time I had lovers in imagination, but none in reality. No man in the flesh could be as good as what I could invent, no real lips, hands, could affect me as those that I created, like God. And this remained true when I married my first husband, and then my second, for I loved neither of them, and I didn’t know what the word meant for years. Until, to be precise, I was thirty-two and got very ill that year. No one knew why, or how, but I knew it was because I did not get a big part I wanted badly. So I got ill from disappointment, but now I see how right it was I didn’t get the part. I was too old – if I had played her, the charming ingenuous girl (which is how I saw myself then, God forgive me), I would have had to play her for three or four years, because the play ran for ever, and I would have been too vain to stop. And then what? I would have been nearly forty, too old for charming girls, and then, like so many actresses who have not burned the charming girl out of themselves, cauterized that wound with a pain like styptic, I would have found myself playing smaller and smaller parts, and then I would have become a ‘character’ actress, and then …

Instead, I lay very ill, not wanting to get better, ill with frustration, I thought, but really with the weight of years I did not know how to consume, how to include in how I saw myself, and then I fell in love with my doctor, inevitable I see now, but then a miracle, for that was the first time, and the reason I said the word ‘love’ to myself, just as if I had not been married twice, and had a score of men in my imagination, was because I could not manipulate him, for the first time a man remained himself, I could not make him move as I wanted, and I did not know his lips and hands. No, I had to wait for him to decide, to move, and when he did become my lover I was like a young girl, awkward, I could only wait for his actions to spring mine.

He loved me, certainly, but not as I loved him, and in due course he left me. I wished I could die, but it was then I understood, with gratitude, what had happened – I played, for the first time, a woman, as distinct from that fatal creature ‘a charming girl’, as distinct from ‘the heroine’ – and I and everyone else knew that I had moved into a new dimension of myself, I was born again, and only I knew it was out of love for that man, my first husband (so I called him, though everyone else saw him as my doctor with whom I rather amusingly had had an affair).

For he was my first husband. He changed me and my whole life. After him, in my frenzy of lonely unhappiness, I believed I could return to what I had been before he had married me, and I would take men to bed (in reality now, just as I had, before, in imagination), but it was no longer possible, it did not work, for I had been possessed by a man, the Man had created in me himself, had left himself in me, and so I could never again use a man, possess one, manipulate him, make him do what I wanted.

For a long time it was as if I was dead, empty, sterile. (That is, I was, my work was at its peak.) I had no lovers, in fact or in imagination, and it was like being a nun or a virgin.

Strange it was, that at the age of thirty-five it was then for the first time I felt a virgin, chaste, untouched. I was absolutely alone. The men who wanted me, courted me, it was as if they moved and smiled and stretched out their hands through a glass wall which was my absolute inviolability. Was this how I should have felt when I was a girl? Yes, I believe that’s it – that at thirty-five I was a girl for the first time. Surely this is how ordinary ‘normal’ girls feel? – they carry a circle of chastity around with them through which the one man, the hero, must break? But it was not so with me, I was never a chaste girl, not until I had known what it was to remain still, waiting for the man to set me in motion in answer to him.

A longer time went by, and I began to feel I would soon be an old woman. I was without love, and I would not be a good artist, not really, the touch of the man who loved me was fading off me, had faded, there was something lacking in my work, it was beginning to be mechanical.

And so I resigned myself. I could no longer choose a man; and no man chose me. So I said, ‘Very well then, there is nothing to be done.’ Above all, I understand the relation between myself and life, I understand the logic of what I am, must be, I know there is nothing to be done about the shape of fate: my truth is that I have been loved once, and now that is the end, and I must let myself sink towards a certain dryness, a coldness of intelligence – yes, you will soon develop into an upright, red-headed, very intelligent lady (though, of course, affected!) whose green eyes flash the sober fires of humorous comprehension. All the rest is over for you, now accept it and be done and do as well as you can the work you are given.

And then one night …

What? All that happened outwardly was that I sat opposite a man at a dinner party in a restaurant, and we talked and laughed as people do who meet each other casually at a dinner-table. But afterwards I went home with my soul on fire. I was on fire, being consumed … And what a miracle it was to me, being able to say, not: That is an attractive man, I want him, I shall have him, but: My house is on fire, that was the man, yes, it was he again, there he was, he has set light to my soul.

I simply let myself suffer for him, knowing he was worth it because I suffered – it had come to this, my soul had become its own gauge, its own measure of what was good: I knew what he was because of how my work was afterwards.

I knew him better than his wife did, or could (she was there too, a nice woman in such beautiful pearls) – I know him better than he does himself. I sat opposite him all evening. What was there to notice? An aging actress, pretty still, beautifully dressed (that winter I had a beautiful violet suit with mink cuffs) sitting opposite a charming man – handsome, intelligent and so on. One can use these adjectives of half the men one meets. But somewhere in him, in his being, something matched something in me, he had come into me, he had set me in motion. I remember looking down the table at his wife and thinking: Yes, my dear, but your husband is also my husband, for he walked into me and made himself at home in me, and because of him I shall act again from the depths of myself, I am sure of it, and I’m sure it will be the best work I can do. Though I won’t know until tomorrow night, on the stage.

For instance, there was one night when I stood on the stage and stretched up my slender white arms to the audience and (that is how they saw it, what I saw were two white-caked, raddled-with-cold arms that were, moreover, rather flabby) and I knew that I was, that night, nothing but an amateur. I stood there on the stage, as a woman holding out my pretty arms, it was Victoria Carrington saying: Look how poignantly I hold out my arms, don’t you long to have them around you, my slender white arms, look how beautiful, how enticing Victoria is! And then, in my dressing-room afterwards I was ashamed, it was years since I had stood on the stage with nothing between me, the woman, and the audience – not since I was a green girl had I acted so – why, then, tonight?

I thought, and I understood. The afternoon before a man (a producer from America, but that doesn’t matter) had come to see me in my dressing-room and after he left I thought: Yes, there it is again, I know that sensation, that means he has set the forces in motion and so I can expect my work to show it … It showed it, with a vengeance! Well, and so that taught me to discriminate, I learned I must be careful, must allow no second-rate man to come near me. And so put up barriers, strengthened around me the circle of cold, of impersonality, that should always lie between me and people, between me and the auditorium; I made a cool, bare space no man could enter, could break across, unless his power, his magic, was very strong, the true complement to mine.

Very seldom now do I feel my self alight, on fire, touched awake, created again by – what?

I live alone now. No, you would never be able to imagine how. For I knew when I saw you this evening that you exist, you are, only in relation to other people, you are always giving out to your work, your wife, friends, children, your wife has the face of a woman who gives, who is confident that what she gives will be received. Yes, I understand all that, I know how it would be living with you, I know you.

After we had all separated, and I had watched you drive off with your wife, I came home and … no, it would be no use telling you, after all. (Or anyone, except, perhaps, my colleague and rival Irma Painter!) But what if I said to you – but no, there are certain disciplines which no one can understand but those who use them.

So I will translate into your language, I’ll translate the truth so that it has the affected, almost embarrassing exaggerated ring that goes with the actress Victoria Carrington, and I’ll tell you how when I came home after meeting you my whole body was wrenched with anguish, and I lay on the floor sweating and shaking as if I had bad malaria, it was like knives of deprivation going through me, for, meeting you, it was being reminded again what it would be like to be with a man, really with him, so that the rhythm of every day, every night, carried us both like the waves of a sea.

Everything I am most proud of seemed nothing at all – what I have worked to achieve, what I have achieved, even the very core of what I am, the inner sensitive balance that exists like a sort of self-invented super instrument, or a fantastically receptive and cherished animal – this creation of myself, which every day becomes more involved, sensitive, and delicate, seemed absurd, paltry, spinsterish, a shameful excuse for cowardice. And my life, which so contents me because of its balance, its order, its steadily growing fastidiousness, seemed eccentrically solitary. Every particle of my being screamed out, wanting, needing – I was like an addict deprived of his drug.

I picked myself off the floor, I bathed myself, I looked after myself like an invalid or like a – yes, like a pregnant woman. These extraordinary fertilizations happen so seldom now that I cherish them, waste nothing of them, and I both long for and dread them. Every time it is like being killed, like being torn open while I am forced to remember what it is I voluntarily do without.

Every time it happens I swear I can never let it happen again, the pain is too terrible. What a flower, what a fire, what a miracle it would be if, instead of smiling (the ‘sweetly piercing’ smile of my dying beauty), instead of accepting, submitting, I should turn to you and say …

But I shall not, and so something very rare (something much more beautiful than your wife could ever give you, or any of the day-to-day wives could imagine) will never come into being.

Instead … I sit and consume my pain, I sit and hold it, I sit and clench my teeth and …

It is dark, it is very early in the morning, the light in my room is a transparent grey, like the ghost of water or of air, there are no lights in the windows I see from my own. I sit on my bed, and watch the shadows of the tree moving on the brick wall of the garden, and I contain pain and …

Oh my dear one, my dear one, I am a tent under which you lie, I am the sky across which you fly like a bird, I am …

My soul is a room, a great room, a hall – it is empty, waiting. Sometimes a fly buzzes across it, bringing summer mornings in another continent, sometimes a child laughs in it, and it is like the generations chiming together, child, youth, and old woman as one being. Sometimes you walk into it and I shut my eyes because of the sweet recognition in me of what you are, I feel what you are as if I stood near a tree and put my hand on its breathing trunk.

I am a pool of water in which fantastic creatures move, in which you play, a young boy, your brown skin glistening, and the water moves over your limbs like hands, my hands, that will never touch you, my hands that tomorrow night, in a pool of listening silence, will stretch up towards the thousand people in the auditorium, creating love for them from the consumed pain of my denial.

I am a room in which an old man sits, smiling, as he has smiled for fifty centuries, you, whose bearded loins created me.

I am a world into which you breathed life, have smiled life, have made me. I am, with you, what creates, every moment, a thousand animalcules, the creatures of our dispensation, and every one we have both touched with our hands and let go into space like free birds.

I am a great space that enlarges, that grows, that spreads with the steady lightening of the human soul, and in the space, squatting in the corner, is a thing, an object, a dark, slow, coiled, amorphous heaviness, embodied sleep, a cold stupid sleep, a heaviness like the dark in a stale room – this thing stirs in its sleep where it squats in my soul, and I put all my muscles, all my force, into defeating it. For this was what I was born for, this is what I am, to fight embodied sleep, putting around it a confining girdle of light, of intelligence, so that it cannot spread its slow stain of ugliness over the trees, over the stars, over you.

It is as if, since you turned towards me and smiled, letting light go through me again, it is as if a King had taken a Queen’s hand and set her on his throne: a King and his Queen, hand in hand on top of my mountain sit smiling at ease in their country.

The morning is coming on the brick wall, the shadow of the tree has gone, and I think of how today I will walk out on to the stage, surrounded by the cool circle of my chastity, the circle of my discipline, and how I will raise my face (the flower face of my girlhood) and how I will raise my arms from which will flow the warmth you have given me.

And so, my dear one, turn now to your wife, and take her head on to your shoulder, and both sleep sweetly in the sleep of your love. I release you to go to your joys without me. I leave you to your love. I leave you to your life.

A Year in Regent’s Park

Last year was out of ordinary from the start – just like every other year. What start, January? But January is a mid-month, in the middle of cold, snow, dark. Above all, dark. In January nothing starts but the new calendar, which says that the down-swing of our part of the earth towards the long light of summer has already begun, is already stimulating the plants, changing their responses. I would make the beginning back in autumn, when I ‘found myself possessor’ – I put it like that because someone else is now in possession – of a wild, very long, narrow garden, between mellow brick walls. There was an old pear tree in the middle, and at its end a small wood of recently sprung trees, sycamores, an elder, an ash. This treasure of space was twenty minutes’ strolling time from Marble Arch, on a canal. The garden had to be prepared for planting. By luck I found a boy, up from the country to try his fortune in London, who hated all work in the world but digging. He chose to live in half a room which he curtained with blankets, carpeted with newpapers, then matting, and wall-papered with his poems and pictures. He was, of course, in the old romantic tradition of the adventurous young, challenging a big city, but he saw himself and the world as newly hatched, let’s say a year before, when he became twenty and discovered that he was free and probably a hippy. He lived on baked beans and friendship, and when he needed money, dug people’s gardens. Together we stripped off the top layer of this potential garden, which was all builder’s rubble, cans, bottles, broken glass. Under this was London clay. It is a substance you hear enough about; indeed, London’s history seems made of it. But when you actually come on tons of the stuff, yards deep, heavy, wet, impervious, without a worm or a root in it, it is so airless and unused, you wonder how London ever came to be all gardens and woodland. I could not believe my gardening book, which said that clay is perfect potential soil for plants. I, friends, and the boy from the country, made shapes of the stuff, and thought it was a pity none of us was a sculptor – but that wasn’t going to turn the clay into working earth. At last, we marked out flowerbeds, and turned over the clay in large clods, the weeds and grass still on them. The place looked like a ploughed field before the cultivators move in. But even before the first frosts, the soil between the flinty-sided miniature boulders was showing the beginning of a marriage between rotting grass and clay fragments. It had rained. It was raining. As London does, it rained. Going out to inspect the clods, each so heavy I could only pick one up at a time, I found they had softened their harsh contours somewhat, but I couldn’t break them by flinging them down or bashing them with a spade. They looked eternal. Steps led up from the under-earth – the flat was a basement flat – and standing at eye-level to the garden, it all looked like a First World War film: trenches full of water, wet mats of the year’s leaf, enormous clods, rotting weeds, bare trunks and dripping branches. All, everything, wet, bare, raw.

That was December. Around Christmas, after several heavy frosts, I went up to see how things went on, kicked one of the clods – and it crumbled. The boy from the country who, being not a farming boy but a country-town boy, and who therefore had not believed the book either, saying the garden needed a bulldozer, came on my telephone call, and about an hour of the lightest work with a hoe transformed the heaving scene into neat areas of tilth mixed with dead grass. Not really dead, of course, but ready to come to life with the spring. But now we had faith in the book, and we turned the roots upwards to be killed by the frost. This happened. Each piece of stalk or root filled with wet, and then swelled as it froze, and burst like water-mains in severe cold. Long before spring the earth lay broken and tamed, all the really hard work done, not by the spade, or the hoe, or even by the worms, but by the frost. The thing is, I knew Africa, or a part of it, and there you can never forget the power of sun, wind, rain. But in gentler England you do forget, as if the north-slanting sun must have less power than a sun overhead, as if nature itself is less drastic in her working. You can forget it, that is, until you see what a handful of weeks of weather can do to smash a seventy-by-twenty-foot bit of wilderness into conformity.

It rained in January, and in February it did not stop. If I set one foot off the top of the steps that came up from the flat, I sank in clay to my ankles. The light was strained through cold coud, but it was strong enough to drag the snowdrops up into it. I walked in Regent’s Park along paths framed with black glistening twigs which were swelling, ready to burst: the shape of spring, next year’s promise, is exposed from the moment the leaves fall. The park was all grey water, sodden grass, black trees, and the water-fowl had to contend for crumbs and crusts with the gulls that had come inland from a stormy sea. In March it rained, and was dull. Usually by March more than snowdrops and crocuses are showing from snow or mud; and already the paths are loaded with people staking claims in the spring. But it was a bad month. My new garden was calling forth derisory remarks from friends who were not gardeners and who did not know what a month’s warmth can do for water-filled trenches, bare walls, sodden earth. April wasn’t doing anything like what the poet meant when he said, ‘Oh, to be in England’ – certainly he would have returned at once to his beloved Italy. April was not the beginning of spring, but the continuation of winter. It was wet, wet, wet, and cold, and it all went on the same day after day. And in the park, where I walked daily, only the lengthening evenings talked of spring, for in spite of crocuses everywhere, the buds seemed frozen on the bushes and trees. It would never end. I don’t know how they bear it in northern countries, like Sweden or Russia. It is like being shut inside a caul of ice, when the winter lengthens itself so.

And it was so wet. If you took one step off the paths you squelched. No air, you knew, could possibly remain in that sponge. There was so much water everywhere, tons of it hanging in the air over our heads, tons falling every day, lakes underfoot.

Suddenly there were some days of summer. No, not spring. Last year was without spring. In no other country that I know is it possible for things to change so fast. And when one state holds, then the one just past seems impossible. In the garden, from which baths of steam flew up to join the by now summer-like clouds, bluebells, hyacinths, crocuses and narcissi had sprung up, and if you turned the earth, the worms were energetically at work. Weeks of growth were being concentrated into each day; nature did overtime to catch up; and if things had gone on like that, we would have been precipitated straight into full summer, with fruit blossom and spring flowers flying past as in a speeded up film but no, suddenly, we were in a cold drought. And it went on for weeks. A cold sunless drought, a dry cold, with sometimes a cold, withdrawn sun. In the garden the water sank back fast in the newly turned, loose earth, and you could walk easily over the clay. The pear tree hung on the edge of blossom, but did not flower. The trees at the bottom of the garden had a look of green about them, but it was like the smear of moss on soil soaked and soaked again. When I turned a spade of earth, the worms were sluggish. The birds, dodging plentiful cats, snapped off each new blade of grass as it appeared, and slashed the crocuses with their beaks. In the park, the black boughs had frills of leaf on them, but walking along the shores you could see the ducks and the geese sitting on their eggs on leafless islands. The waters were still tenanted by adult birds, who converged towards their providers on the lakes’ edges, and climbed up on the banks with their coloured beaks open, hissing and demanding. Soon, off the little islands would tumble nestfuls of baby birds, who would learn from the parents to follow the stiffly moving shapes along the banks with their expectations for bread. But not yet. And the blossoms were not yet. Everything was in check in that no-spring of last year when first it rained without sun, and then held a chilly drought for weeks. Yet we knew that spring must have arrived, must be here. Slowly the chestnut avenue unfurled shrill green from each stiff twig’s end. The catkins were dangling on branches inhibited from bursting into leaf. The roses had been pruned almost to the earth, but very late. The fine hairlines of the willow branches trailing into the water had become yellow-green instead of wintry yellow-grey. And everywhere, on hawthorn and cherry, on plum and currant and white-beam and apple, the buds of that year’s flowering stood arrested among leaf buds. The park’s gardeners bent heavily-sweatered over flowerbeds that had a cold dusty look, and the grass wore thin and showed the soil, as often happens in late summer after drought, but not often so early in the year. The evenings had already nearly reached their midsummer length – for just as spring stands outlined in black buds on empty branches in November, so the lengthening evenings of April, May, then June, spread summer light everwhere when the earth is still gripped with cold, and you are clutching at summer before it has begun, marking Midsummer Day as a turn towards the dark of winter before the winter has been warmed from the soil. The earth is tilted forward, dipped completely into light, light that urges on blossom, leaf, grass, light which is more powerful for growth even than warmth. The avenues are filled with strolling people until nine and after; the theatre is open; the swings in the children’s playgrounds are never still. England’s myriads of expert gardeners visit the rose gardens to match those paragons with the inhabitants of their own gardens – but last year found that the cold was still holding the roses, tightening their veins and arteries, and giving the long reddening shoots the pinched look of a person short of blood. And it all went on and on, the dry cold, just as, earlier, the wet winter had extended itself, and the park seemed like a sponge that could never dry.

And then, the year having swallowed spring whole, the sun and rain came together and all at once, the whole park burst into flower, as did the pear tree in my garden, and the laburnum over the wall.

In each year, there is always a week which is the essence of spring, all violent growth, bloom and scent, just as there is one week which is quintessential autumn, the air full of flying tinted leaves.

But last year, trees whose flowering is usually separated by their different natures flowered at the same time; the cherries, currants, hawthorns, lilacs and damask roses were out with bluebells, tulips, stocks, and there were so many different kinds of blossom that it seemed as if there must be hundreds of species of flowering tree instead of a couple of dozen. We walked over new grass under trees crammed with pink, with ivory, with greenish-white flower; we walked beside lakes where crowds of ducklings and goslings swam beside their parents, minute balls like thistledown tossing violently with every wind-ripple, threatened by the oars of rowing boats launched into the waters by the spring. It was all spring and all summer at the same time, with flying, rolling, showering clouds, and lovers lay everywhere over the grass, rummaging and ravishing, while the squirrels leaped about like kittens after cotton reels, up and down the trunks of the chestnut trees that had belatedly achieved their proper summer shape, pyramidal green with pink and white candles. The squirrels were as fat as house-cats, fed full from the litter baskets, and their friends’ offerings. From all the streets around the park, and from much further afield, came people with bread, biscuits, cake, each with a look of private, smiling pleasure. One woman who had, not the usual few bread-slices or stale cake, but a carrier-bag full of food, confided to me as she stood surrounded by hundreds of pigeons, sparrows, geese, ducks, swans, thrushes, that her children had recently grown up and left home and her husband and herself were sparse eaters. Yet years of cooking for uncritically ravenous teenagers and their friends had got her used to providing and catering. She had found herself ordering much more food than an elderly couple could ever eat; she suppressed urges to create new and wonderful dishes. But she had found the solution. Each time the need gripped her to give a dinner party for twelve, or an informal party for fifty, she filled a bag and took a bus to Regent’s Park where, on the edges of the bird-decorated waters, she went on until her supplies ran out and her need to feed others was done. The birds, having swum or flown along the banks beside her until they were sure she had no more food, turned their attention to the next likely provisioner, or floated and bobbed and circled to the admiration of humans who all around the shores were bound to be exclaiming: ‘Oh, if only I could be a duck on a hot day like this, right in all that cool water!’ – while these same waterfowl might quite reasonably be expected to be muttering: ‘If only I could be a human, with naked skin for the wind to blow on and the water to touch, and not a bird encased in feathers in such a way, that nothing but my poor feet can ever feel the air or water …’At any rate, these birds certainly have a fine sense of themselves, their function, their place. Accustomed to seeing them on the water, or tucked into neat shapes drowsing on the grass around the verges, I imagined that that was where they always stayed. But not so, as I discovered one very early morning when I got up at five to have – or so I imagined – the park to myself. There were five or six people already there, strolling about, talking, or at least acknowledging each other, in the camaraderie of those who feel themselves to be out of the ordinary. Meanwhile, the geese and the ducks were all over the grass, and under the trees, where in the day they are never seen. Mother ducks and geese, each surrounded by their blobs of coloured down, were introducing these offspring to the land world, as distinct from the watery world they inhabited when the park was busy. Greylag geese stood under the Japanese plums. Black swans were under the hawthorns. A squirrel came to investigate a duckling that was disconsolately alone under an arch of climbing rose. It was not six in the morning, but it seemed as if things had been busy for hours – as probably they had, now the nights were so short, and hardly dark at all from a bird’s point of view, who probably can’t tell the difference between dusk, dawn, or the shimmering dark of a summer’s midnight. While people still slept, or were crawling out of bed, there was the liveliest of intimate occasions in the park, which the birds and animals had more or less to themselves.

The park changed as the gardeners arrived and the people walked through on their way to offices. The water-birds decided to resume their correct places on the lakes – there is no other way to describe the way they do it, the mother birds calling their broods to them, and returning along the paths to the water’s edge to leave the grass and paths and trees for humans. Again the waters were loaded with ducks and geese plain and coloured, dignified or as glossily extravagant as the dramatically painted and varnished wooden ducks from toy-shops. It is exactly in the same way that the front of a theatre full of stage managers, assistants, prompters, directors, empties for a performance as the public come in. There was the land part of the park, with the usual sparrows and pigeons, and there the lakes so crowded it semed there could not be room for one more bird – yet all the eggs were still not hatched on the islands which now were filled with green, so that the patiently sitting birds could no longer be seen through the binoculars of London’s bird-watchers. And every day, while the earlier-hatched broods became gawky and lumpish attempts after the elegant finish of their parents, freshly hatched birds scattered over the water.

On an arm of the lake where a bridge crossed over, a water-hen was sitting in full view of everybody. The water is very shallow there. A couple of yards from shore, the water-hens had made a nest in the water of piled dead sticks. But not all the sticks were dead. One had rooted and was in leaf, a little green flag above the black-and-white shape of the coot who sat a few feet from the bridge. There she crouched, looking at the people who looked at her. All day and half the night, when the park was open to the public, they stopped to observe her. They did more than look. On the twiggy mattress that extended all around her, were bits of food thrown by admirers. But these offerings caused the poor coots much trouble, because particularly the sparrows, sometimes thrushes and blackbirds, even ducks and other non-related water-hens, came to poke about in the twigs for food. The coot – male or female, it seemed they took it in turns to sit – had to keep rising in a hissing clatter of annoyance, to frighten them off. Or the mate who was swimming about, to fetch morsels of food for the sitting bird, came fussing up to warn off trespassers, but still the sparrows kept darting in to grab what they could, and fly off. Even the big swans came circling, so that the little coots looked like miniatures beside the white giants. Much worse than bread was thrown. All the lake under and around the bridge became laden with cans, bits of paper and plastic, and this debris lay bobbing or sagging on water which already, after only a few days of powerful new summer, was beginning to smell. Now the summer was really here, and the park crowded, grass and paths were always littered, and the water smelled worse every day. Particularly where the coots were. That sitting of coot eggs must have been the most public in coot history. Yet they had chosen the site, built the nest. And they went on with their work of warming the eggs, till it was done. Admirers loitered on the bridge through the last days, to shield the birds from possible vandals and to prevent cans being aimed at the birds themselves, and also to catch, if possible, the moment when a coot chick took to the water. I am sure there were those who did see this, for the attention was assiduous. I missed it, but one hot afternoon when the bridge was more than usually crowded, I saw a minute dark-coloured chick floating near the nest, with a parent energetically foraging near it for bits of food. The sitting bird lifted itself off the twig mattress to stretch her muscles in a great yawn of wing, and there was a glimpse of white under her: an unhatched egg, and some shell. There was another chick there too, disinclined to join its sibling on the water. The swimming parent fetched slimy morsels for the one on the nest. He, or she, took the fragments and pushed them into the chick’s gape. The swimming chick was crammed by the swimming parent. It looked as if the swimming bird was trying to make the waterborne chick venture farther from the nest. It kept heading off, in the energetic purposeful way of coots, and swinging around to see if the little chick had followed. But the chick had scrambled back to the nest, and disappeared under the sitting bird. The swimming bird went off quite a distance, and got on to the bank by itself. On the bridge was a threesome, a tall pretty girl with a young man on either side. They had been watching the coots. She said: ‘Oh, I know, he’s gone off to see his mistress, and she is going to have to feed her babies herself.’ ‘How do you know?’ asked one young man. The other laughed, very irritated. He walked off. The girl followed him, looking anxious. The young man who had said ‘How do you know?’ followed them both, hurrying.

All afternoon, the birds took turns on the nest, one swimming and fetching food for the other, and from time to time a chick climbed down off the great logs of the timber platform he had been hatched on, and bobbed and rocked on the waves. Meanwhile, all the surface of the lake around the nest was full of every kind of swimming bird, adult, half-grown, and just hatched. In such a throng, that one minute coot chick was an item, precious only to the guardian parents.

Coots are strict-looking, tailored, black-and-white birds among the fanciful ducks, the black swans with their red sealing-wax bills. They have a look of modest purpose, of duty, of restraint. And then one comes up out of the water to join birds crowding for thrown bread, and the exposed feet are a shock, being large, whitey-green, scaly, reptilian, as if they had belonged to half-bird, half-lizard ancestors, and have descended unaltered down the chains of evolution while the birds modified above water into the handy, tidy water-hen shape – a land shape, it is easy to think. Yet the coot is more water-bird than any duck or goose. If you stand feeding a crowd of birds, and there are gulls there, they will swoop in and past, having caught bits of bread from the air as if these were leaping fish – the gulls will get everything, if you aren’t taking care of the others. A tall goose will stand delicately taking pieces from your fingers, like a well-mannered person, then turn to slash savagely another competing goose with its beak: after the gulls, these geese provide for themselves best. The ducks, apparently clumsy and waddling, are quick to snatch bits when the geese miss. But to try and feed the coots – for which, sentimentally, I have a fancy – is harder than to feed shyer deer in a zoo when the big ones have decided they are going to get what is going. First, the water-hens have to get up on the bank on those clumsy water-feet. And then their movements are slower than the other birds’; the coots are poking about after the bits when the others have swallowed them and are already crowding in for more. Yet, in the water, there is nothing quicker and neater.

That long public sitting succeeded, at last, in adding only one coot chick to the park’s population. One afternoon there were two parents and two chicks, busy with each other and their nest among the crowds of birds; next afternoon there were two coots and one bobbing dark fluffball.

But the nest was there, with bits of bread still stuck in the twigs. And there it stayed all summer, and all autumn, and although the green fell off, or was pecked off the sentinel twig, nest and twig are there now, in winter – so perhaps in the coming spring the same or another pair of coots will bring up another family, in spite of the staring ill-mannered people and their ill-judged offerings, and their cans and their plastic and their smell. But the twig platform will certainly have to be refurnished, for as soon as the coot family had left it, it was found most convenient by the other fowl to sit on, and play around; and the twig that had rooted and stood up was a good perch for water-venturing sparrows. There never were so many sparrows as last year: you could mark the season’s increase in population by the contrast between the young birds’ tight shape and shiny fresh-painted look, and their duller shabbier parents. Where did they all hatch? Apart from those of the water-birds, and a shallow fibre nest that was exposed, when autumn came and stripped the chestnut avenue, woven on twigs not much higher above the path than a tall man’s head, so that the sitting bird in its completely concealing clump of leaves must have been inches above the walking people – apart from these, I saw no nests save one on the ground, among bluebells and geraniums and clumps of hosta. The bird was sleekly brown, and watching me, not over-anxiously, as I watched her from the path a yard or so away. She sat with her warm eggs pressed to her spread claws by her breast, and saw possible enemies pass and repass all day, for the days it took her to get the chick out into the light. Yet, like the coot, she had chosen that exposed place to sit, near a path, just behind the Open Air Theatre. Perhaps, like the foxes that are coming in from the country which hunts and poisons and traps them, to the suburbs, where they live off town refuse, some birds are coming to terms with us, our noise, and our mess, in ways we don’t yet see? Perhaps they even like us? And not only people – a few yards from the sitting brown bird was a place where somebody was putting out food for stray cats. There were saucers of old and new food, and milk, and water, bits of sandwich and biscuit, under the damask roses all the summer, and the cats came to this food, and did not attack the sitting bird – who, perhaps, used this food when the cats were not there? It is possible that she put up with the amplified voices and music from the theatre because of its restaurant, not more than a few seconds’ flight away, just the right distance for a quick crumb-gathering before the eggs had time to chill. There must have been many other nests in that thick little wood where the theatre is, and many birds calling that patch of the park theirs. Certainly, each year’s production of A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, good, bad or indifferent, offers marvellous moments that are not in the stage directions, when an owl hoots for Oberon, or swallows swoop over Titania’s and Bottom’s head, or, while a moon stands up over the trees, making the stage seem small and insignificant, starlings loop and swirl past on their last flight before roosting. And all the time, while plays are being rehearsed and acted, the birds are building, sitting, feeding their young, and the fact that they choose this, the noisiest part of the park, surely says something about the way they view us. Or don’t see us, don’t regard us at all, except in association with food scraps? There’s nothing odder than what is ignored, not seen, not noticed. Perhaps those coots chose that spot, the most public there is, because the water is the right depth there, and nothing else mattered; and they were not aware of their audience on the bridge except as a noisy frieze which emitted lumps of food and other objects.

The park holds dozens of self-contained dramas, human and animal, in the space of an eye-sweep. On a Sunday afternoon, in July, when the drought had held and held, and the bushes under the tree-cover were wilting because what showers had fallen were not heavy enough to penetrate the thick leaf-layers, the park was full, and coachloads of people from everywhere were visiting the zoo. There were queues at the zoo gates hundreds of yards long, and inside the zoo it was like a fair. There is a path down the west side of the zoo. It is tree-shaded. A bank rises sharply to the fields used for football and cricket. Being summer, and Sunday, it was cricket time, and four separate games were in progress, each with its circle of reserve players, friends, wives, children, and casual watchers. This world, the world of Sunday cricket, was absolutely self-absorbed, and each game ignored the other three. On the slopes under the trees were lovers, twined two by two. At the end where the Mappin Terraces are, four young people lay asleep. They were tourists, and looked German, or perhaps Scandinavian. They all four had long hair. The two girls had long dresses, the young men fringed leather. They owned four rucksacks and four guitars. Most likely they had been up talking, singing and dancing all night, or perhaps had not the money to pay for a night’s sleep. Now they slept in each other’s arms all day without moving. Quite possibly they never knew that cricket was being devotedly played so close, and that while they slept the zoo filled and emptied again. From the slope where they were you can see nicely into the children’s zoo, and across to the elephants’ house. You can see, too, the goats and bears of the terraces. Some people who had given up the effort of getting into the zoo sat on the slopes near the four sleepers, talking a lot, not trying to be quiet, and they watched the elephants showing off, poor beasts, in return for their little house and the trench-enclosed space they have to live in. A woman arrived with a plastic bag and sat on a bench, with her back to the lovers and the sleeping young people, and fed sparrows and pigeons, frowning with the concentration of the effort needed to let the poor sparrows (who were so small) get as much food as the (unfairly) large pigeons. And a little girl in the children’s zoo clutched at a donkey no higher than she was, and cried out: ‘It’s getting wet, oh the donkey’s getting wet!’ True enough, here came a small sample of the long-awaited rain. Not much. A brief sparkling drench. No one stopped doing anything. The cricketers played on. The woman frowned and fussed over the unfairness of nature. The lovers loved. The four sleeping young people did not so much as turn over, but a passing youth tiptoed up and covered the guitars with the girls’ long skirts. And the little girl wept because of the poor donkey who was getting wet and apparently liking it, for it was kicking and hee-hawing. Where was her mamma? Where, her papa? She was alone with her donkey and her grief. And the rain pelted down and stopped, having done no good and no harm to anything. It was weeks before some real rain arrived and saved the brown scuffing grass; weeks before that moment of high summer which was nothing to do with the gardener’s calendar, or even the length of the days, shortening fast again, again the same number of hours as in the long-forgotten no-spring. But it is a moment whose quality is over-lushness, heaviness, fullness, plenty. All the trees are crammed and blowzy with leaf. They sag and loll and drag. The willows trail too long in the water, and then they look as if someone has gone around each one in a boat with shears, chopping the fronds to just such a length, like human hair trimmed around with a pudding-basin. The ducks and geese who have been delicately, languidly, nibbling bits of leaf, and floating in and out through the trailing green curtains, now tread water and strive upwards on their wings to nip off bits of leaf. Perhaps it is the birds who have eaten the low branches away to an exact height all around? There are so many of them now, the chicks all having grown up, that everywhere you look are herds of geese, flocks of ducks, the big swans, water-hens. Surely the park can’t possibly sustain so many? What will happen to them all? Will they be allotted to other less bird-populated parks, each bird conditioned from chickhood to regard every human being in sight as a moving bread-fountain? Meanwhile, the rowing boats and the sailing boats have to manoeuvre through crowds of waterfowl, the sparrows are in flocks, the roses teem and mass, everything is at the full of its provision, its lushness. The hub of the park now is not the chestnut avenue, and the so English herbaceous border, but the long Italianate walk that has the fountain and the tall poplars at one end, the formal black-and-gold gates at the other, and roses lining it all the way. A summer avenue, asking for deep blue skies and heat, just as the chestnut avenue, and the hawthorns, the plums, cherries and currants, are for spring, or for autumn.

The summer gardeners all seem to be youngsters working with bare torsos, or bare feet. They cool off by standing in the fountain’s spray as the wind switches it about. ‘They say’ that the hippies have decided this work, summer gardening, is good for them, us, society. One evening I heard these sentiments offered to one gardening girl by another:

‘There aren’t any hang-ups here, you can do your own thing, but you’ve got to pull your weight, that’s fair enough.’

There is a different relationship between these summer amateur gardeners and the park’s visitors, and between the visitors and the familiar older gardeners, these last being more proprietary. I remember an exchange with one, several springs ago, on an occasion when it had snowed, the sun had come out, and friends had rung to say that the crocuses were particularly fine. Out I went to the park and found that the new crocuses, white, purple, gold, stood everywhere in the snow. Each patch had been finely netted with black cotton to stop the birds eating them. I was bending over to see how the netting was done – a tricky and irritating job, surely? – when I saw a uniformed gardener had emerged from his watchman’s hut and was standing over me.

‘And what may you be doing?’

‘I am looking at your crocuses.’

‘They are not my crocuses. They are public property.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘And I am paid to watch them.’

‘You mean to tell me that you are standing in that unheated wooden hut in all this cold and snow just to guard the crocuses?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Isn’t this cotton any use, then?’

‘Cotton is effective against bird thieves. I am not saying anything about human thieves.’

‘But I wasn’t going to eat your crocuses!’

‘I am only doing my job.’

‘Your job is to be a crocus-watcher?’

Yes, madam, and it always has been and my father before me. When I was a little lad I knew the work I wanted to do and I’ve done it ever since.’

Not thus the youngsters, much less suspicious characters, understanding quite well how respectable citizens may envy them their jobs.

There was this incident when the geraniums had flowered once, and needed to be picked over to induce a second flowering. There were banks of them, covered with dead flowers. I myself had resisted the temptation to nip over the railings and dead-head the lot: another had not resisted. With a look of defiant guilt, an elderly man was crouching in the geraniums, hard at work. Leaning on his spade, watching him, was a summer gardener, a long-haired, barefooted, naked-chested youth.

‘What’s he doing that for?’ said he to me.

‘He can’t stand that there won’t be a second flowering,’ I said. ‘I can understand it. I’ve just dead-headed all mine in my own garden.’

‘All I’ve got room for is herbs in a pot.’

The elderly man, seeing us watching him, talking about him, probably about to report his crime, looked guiltier than ever. But he furiously continued his work, a man of principle defying society for duty.

On a single impulse, I and the gardener parted and went in different directions; we were not able to bear causing him such transports of moral determination.

But, of course, he was quite in the right: when all the other banks of geraniums were brown and flowerless, the bank he had picked over was as brilliant as in spring.

By now it had rained, and had rained well, and just as it was hard to remember the long cold wet of the early year in the cold drought, and the cold drought in the dry heat, now the long dryness had vanished out of memory, for it was a real English summer, all fitfully showery, fitfully cool and hot. Yet it was autumn; the over-fullness of everything said it must be. A strong breeze sent leaves spinning down, and the smell of the stagnant parts of the lakes was truly horrible, making you wonder about the philosophy of the park-keepers – it was against their principles to clear away the smelly rubbish? They couldn’t afford a man in a boat once a week to take it away? Or they had faith in the power of nature to heal everything?

In my garden, last year’s wasteland – so very soon to be left behind – the roses, the thyme, geranium, clematis, were all strongly flowering, and butterflies crowded over lemon balm and hyssop. The pear tree was full of small tasteless pears. The tree was too old. It could produce masses of blossom, but couldn’t carry the work through to good fruit. At every movement of the air, down thumped the pears. All the little boys from the Council flats came jumping over the walls to snatch up the pears, which they needed to throw at each other, not to eat. When invited to come in and pick them, great sullenness and resentment resulted, because the point was to raid the big rich gardens along the canal, into which hundreds of gardenless people looked down from the flats, to raid them, dart away with the spoils, and then raid again, coming in under the noses of furious householders.

One afternoon I was in a bus beside the park, and the wind was strong, and all the air was full of flying leaves. This was the moment, the week of real autumn. Rushing at once to the park, I just caught it. Everything was yellow, gold, brown, orange, heaps of treasure lay tidily packed ready to be burned, the wind crammed the air with the coloured leafage. It was cooling – the Northern hemisphere, I mean, not the park, which of course had been hot, cold and in between ever since the year had started running true to form, some time in July. The leaves were blown into the lakes, and sank to make streams of bubbles in which the birds dived and played. All around the coots’ battered nest lay a starry patterning of plane leaves in green and gold. You could see how, if this were wilderness, land would form here in this shallow place, in a season or two; how this arm of the lake would become swamp, and then, in a dry season, new earth, and the water would retreat. All the smelly backwaters were being covered over with thick soft layers of leaf; the plastic, the tins, the papers vanishing, as, no doubt, the park-keepers had counted on happening when autumn came.

I walked from one end of the park to the other, then back and around and across, the squirrels racing and chasing, and the birds swimming along the banks beside me in case this shape might be a food-giving shape, and this food shape might have decided to distribute largess around the next bend and was being mean now because of future plenty. There were many fewer birds. The great families bred that year off the islands had gone, and the population was normal again, couples and individuals sedately self-sufficient.

Only a week later, that perfection of autumn was over, and stripped boughs were showing the shape of next spring. Yet, visiting Sweden, where snow had come early and lay everywhere, then leaving it to fly home again, was flying from winter into autumn, a journey back in time in one afternoon. The aircraft did not land when it should have done, owing to some hitch or other, and, luckily for us, had to go about in a wide sweep over London. I had not before flown so low, with no cloud to hide the city. It was all woodland and lakes and parks and gardens, and a highly coloured autumn still, with loads of russet and gold on the trees. All the ugly bits of London you imagine nothing could disguise were concealed by this habit of tree and garden.

In the park, though, from the ground, the trees looked very tall, very bare, and wet. The lakes were grey and solid. When the birds came fast across to see if there was food, they left arrow shapes on the water spreading slowly, and absolutely regular, till they dissolved into the shores: there were no boats out now, for these had been drawn up and lay overturned in rows along the banks, waiting for spring.

And the dark had come down.

The park in winter is very different from high, crammed, noisy summer. A long damp path in early twilight … it is not much more than three in the afternoon. Two gentlemen in trim dark suits and tidy, slightly bald heads, little frills of hair on their collars – a reminiscence of the eighteenth century or a claim on contemporary fashion, who knows? – two civil servants from the offices in the Nash terraces walk quietly by, their hands behind their back, beside the water. They talk in voices so low you think it must be official secrets that they have come out to discuss in privacy.

The beds are dug and turned. New stacks of leaf are made every day as the old ones burn, scenting the air with guilt, not pleasure, for now you have to remember pollution. But the roses are all there still, blobs of colour on tall stems. All the stages of the year are visible at once, for each plant has on it brightly tinted hips, then dead roses, which are brown dust rose-shaped, then the roses themselves, though each has frost-burn crimping the outer petals. Hips, dead roses, fresh blooms – and masses of buds, doomed never to come to flower, for the frosts will get them if the pruner doesn’t: Pink Parfait and Ginger Rogers, Summer Holiday and Joseph’s Coat, are shortly to be slashed into anonymity.

For it will be the dead of the year very soon now, soon it will be the shortest day.

I sit on a bench in the avenue where in summer the poplars and fountain make Italy on a blue day, but now browny-grey clouds are driving hard across from the north-east. Crowds of sparrows materialize as I arrive, all hungry expectation, but I’ve been forgetful, I haven’t so much as a biscuit. They sit on the bench, my shoe, the bench’s back, rather hunched, the wind tugging their feathers out of shape. The seagulls are in too, so the sea must be rough today, or perhaps there is an oil slick.

Up against the sunset, today a dramatic one, gold, red and packed dark clouds, birds slowly rotate, like jagged debris after a whirlwind. They look like rooks, but that’s not possible, they must be more gulls. But it is nice to imagine them rooks, just as, on the walk home, the plane trees, all bent one way by the wind, seem, with their dappled trunks, like deer ready to spring together towards the northern gates.

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