Keep the Aspidistra Flying

  ‘Only metaphorically. My re-birthday, so to speak.’

  ‘I never had much education,’ said the taximan.

  ‘I was speaking in parables,’ said Gordon.

  ‘English is good enough for me,’ said the taximan.

  ‘It was the tongue of Shakespeare,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Literary gentleman, are you, sir, by any chance?’

  ‘Do I look as moth-eaten as all that?’

  ‘Not moth-eaten, sir. Only intellectual-like.’

  ‘You’re quite right. A poet.’

  ‘Poet! It takes all sorts to make a world, don’t it now?’ said the taximan.

  ‘And a bloody good world it is,’ said Gordon.

  His thoughts moved lyrically tonight. They had another gin and presently went back to the taxi all but arm in arm, after yet another gin. That made five gins Gordon had had this evening. There was an ethereal feeling in his veins; the gin seemed to be flowing there, mingled with his blood. He lay back in the corner of the seat, watching the great blazing sky-signs swim across the bluish dark. The evil red and blue of the Neon lights pleased him at this moment. How smoothly the taxi glided! More like a gondola than a car. It was having money that did that. Money greased the wheels. He thought of the evening ahead of him; good food, good wine, good talk—above all, no worrying about money. No damned niggling with sixpences and ‘We can’t afford this’ and ‘We can’t afford that!’ Rosemary and Ravelston would try to stop him being extravagant. But he would shut them up. He’d spend every penny he had if he felt like it. Ten whole quid to bust! At least, five quid. The thought of Julia passed flickeringly through his mind and disappeared again.

  He was quite sober when they got to Modigliani’s. The monstrous commissionaire, like a great glittering waxwork with the minimum of joints, stepped stiffly forward to open the taxi door. His grim eye looked askance at Gordon’s clothes. Not that you were expected to ‘dress’ at Modigliani’s. They were tremendously Bohemian at Modigliani’s, of course; but there are ways and ways of being Bohemian, and Gordon’s way was the wrong way. Gordon did not care. He bade the taximan an affectionate farewell, and tipped him half a crown over his fare, whereat the commissionaire’s eye looked a little less grim. At this moment Ravelston emerged from the doorway. The commissionaire knew Ravelston, of course. He lounged out on to the pavement, a tall distinguished figure, aristocratically shabby, his eye rather moody. He was worrying already about the money this dinner was going to cost Gordon.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Gordon!’

  ‘Hullo, Ravelston! Where’s Rosemary?’

  ‘Perhaps she’s waiting inside. I don’t know her by sight, you know. But I say, Gordon, look here! Before we go in, I just wanted——’

  ‘Ah, look, there she is!’

  She was coming towards them, swift and debonair. She threaded her way through the crowd with the air of some neat little destroyer gliding between large clumsy cargo-boats. And she was nicely dressed, as usual. The sub-shovel hat was cocked at its most provocative angle. Gordon’s heart stirred. There was a girl for you! He was proud that Ravelston should see her. She was very gay tonight. It was written all over her that she was not going to remind herself or Gordon of their last disastrous encounter. Perhaps she laughed and talked just a little too vivaciously as Gordon introduced them and they went inside. But Ravelston had taken a liking to her immediately. Indeed, everyone who met her did take a liking to Rosemary. The inside of the restaurant overawed Gordon for a moment. It was so horribly, artistically smart. Dark gate-leg tables, pewter candlesticks, pictures by modern French painters on the walls. One, a street scene, looked like a Utrillo. Gordon stiffened his shoulders. Damn it, what was there to be afraid of? The five-pound note was tucked away in its envelope in his pocket. It was Julia’s five pounds, of course; he wasn’t going to spend it. Still, its presence gave him moral support. It was a kind of talisman. They were making for the corner table—Ravelston’s favourite table—at the far end. Ravelston took Gordon by the arm and drew him a little back, out of Rosemary’s hearing.

  ‘Gordon, look here!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look here, you’re going to have dinner with me tonight.’

  ‘Bosh! This is on me.’

  ‘I do wish you would. I hate to see you spending all that money.’

  ‘We won’t talk about money tonight,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Fifty-fifty, then,’ pleaded Ravelston.

  ‘It’s on me,’ said Gordon firmly.

  Ravelston subsided. The fat, white-haired Italian waiter was bowing and smiling beside the corner table. But it was at Ravelston, not at Gordon, that he smiled. Gordon sat down with the feeling that he must assert himself quickly. He waved away the menu which the waiter had produced.

  ‘We must settle what we’re going to drink first,’ he said.

  ‘Beer for me,’ said Ravelston, with a sort of gloomy haste. ‘Beer’s the only drink I care about.’

  ‘Me too,’ echoed Rosemary.

  ‘Oh, rot! We’ve got to have some wine. What do you like, red or white? Give me the wine list,’ he said to the waiter.

  ‘Then let’s have a plain Bordeaux. Médoc or St Julien or something,’ said Ravelston.

  ‘I adore St Julien,’ said Rosemary, who thought she remembered that St Julien was always the cheapest wine on the list.

  Inwardly, Gordon damned their eyes. There you are, you see! They were in league against him already. They were trying to prevent him from spending his money. There was going to be that deadly, hateful atmosphere of ‘You can’t afford it’ hanging over everything. It made him all the more anxious to be extravagant. A moment ago he would have compromised on Burgundy. Now he decided that they must have something really expensive—something fizzy, something with a kick in it. Champagne? No, they’d never let him have champagne. Ah!

  ‘Have you got any Asti?’ he said to the waiter.

  The waiter suddenly beamed, thinking of his corkage. He had grasped now that Gordon and not Ravelston was the host. He answered in the peculiar mixture of French and English which he affected.

  ‘Asti, sir? Yes, sir. Very nice Asti! Asti Spumanti. Très fin! Très vif!’

  Ravelston’s worried eye sought Gordon’s across the table. You can’t afford it! his eye pleaded.

  ‘Is that one of those fizzy wines?’ said Rosemary.

  ‘Very fizzy, madame. Very lively wine. Très vif! Pop!’ His fat hands made a gesture, picturing cascades of foam.

  ‘Asti,’ said Gordon, before Rosemary could stop him.

  Ravelston looked miserable. He knew that the Asti would cost Gordon ten or fifteen shillings a bottle. Gordon pretended not to notice. He began talking about Stendhal—association with Duchesse de Sanseverina and her ‘force vin d’Asti’. Along came the Asti in a pail of ice—a mistake, that, as Ravelston could have told Gordon. Out came the cork. Pop! The wild wine foamed into the wide flat glasses. Mysteriously the atmosphere of the table changed. Something had happened to all three of them. Even before it was drunk the wine had worked its magic. Rosemary had lost her nervousness, Ravelston his worried preoccupation with the expense, Gordon his defiant resolve to be extravagant. They were eating anchovies and bread and butter, fried sole, roast pheasant with bread sauce and chipped potatoes; but principally they were drinking and talking. And how brilliantly they were talking—or so it seemed to them, anyway! They talked about the bloodiness of modern life and the bloodiness of modern books. What else is there to talk about nowadays? As usual (but, oh! how differently, now that there was money in his pocket and he didn’t really believe what he was saying) Gordon descanted on the deadness, the dreadfulness of the age we live in. French letters and machine-guns! Roland Butta and the Daily Mail! It was a bone-deep truth when he walked the streets with a couple of coppers in his pocket; but it was a joke at this moment. It was great fun—it is fun when you have good food and good wine inside you—to demonstrate that we live in a dead and rotting world. He was being witt
y at the expense of modern literature; they were all being witty. With the fine scorn of the unpublished Gordon knocked down reputation after reputation. Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Huxley, Lewis, Hemingway—each with a careless phrase or two was shovelled into the dustbin. What fun it all was, if only it could last! And of course, at this particular moment, Gordon believed that it could last. Of the first bottle of Asti, Gordon drank three glasses, Ravelston two, Rosemary one. Gordon became aware that a girl at the table opposite was watching him. A tall elegant girl with a shell-pink skin and wonderful, almond-shaped eyes. Rich, obviously; one of the moneyed intelligentsia. She thought him interesting—was wondering who he was. Gordon found himself manufacturing special witticisms for her benefit. And he was being witty, there was no doubt about that. That too was money. Money greasing the wheels—wheels of thought as well as wheels of taxis.

  But somehow the second bottle of Asti was not such a success as the first. To begin with there was uncomfortableness over its ordering. Gordon beckoned to the waiter.

  ‘Have you got another bottle of this?’

  The waiter beamed fatly. ‘Yes, sir! Mais certainement, monsieur!’

  Rosemary frowned and tapped Gordon’s foot under the table. ‘No, Gordon, no! You’re not to.’

  ‘Not to what?’

  ‘Order another bottle. We don’t want it.’

  ‘Oh, bosh! Get us another bottle, waiter.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Ravelston rubbed his nose. With eyes too guilty to meet Gordon’s he looked at his wine glass. ‘Look here, Gordon. Let me stand this bottle. I’d like to.’

  ‘Bosh!’ repeated Gordon.

  ‘Get half a bottle, then,’ said Rosemary.

  ‘A whole bottle, waiter,’ said Gordon.

  After that nothing was the same. They still talked, laughed, argued, but things were not the same. The elegant girl at the table opposite had ceased watching Gordon. Somehow, Gordon wasn’t being witty any longer. It is almost always a mistake to order a second bottle. It is like bathing for a second time on a summer day. However warm the day is, however much you have enjoyed your first bathe, you are always sorry for it if you go in a second time. The magic had departed from the wine. It seemed to foam and sparkle less, it was merely a clogging sourish liquid which you gulped down half in disgust and half in hopes of getting drunk the quicker. Gordon was now definitely though secretly drunk. One half of him was drunk and the other half sober. He was beginning to have that peculiar blurred feeling, as though your features had swollen and your fingers grown thicker, which you have in the second stage of drunkenness. But the sober half of him was still in command to outward appearance, anyway. The conversation grew more and more tedious. Gordon and Ravelston talked in the detached uncomfortable manner of people who have had a little scene and are not going to admit it. They talked about Shakespeare. The conversation tailed off into a long discussion about the meaning of Hamlet. It was very dull. Rosemary stifled a yawn. While Gordon’s sober half talked, his drunken half stood aside and listened. Drunken half was very angry. They’d spoiled his evening, damn them! with their arguing about that second bottle. All he wanted now was to be properly drunk and have done with it. Of the six glasses in the second bottle he drank four—for Rosemary refused more wine. But you couldn’t do much on this weak stuff. Drunken half clamoured for more drink, and more, and more. Beer by the quart and the bucket! A real good rousing drunk! And by God! he was going to have it later on. He thought of the five-pound note stowed away in his inner pocket. He still had that to blue, anyway.

  The musical clock that was concealed somewhere in Modigliani’s interior struck ten.

  ‘Shall we shove off?’ said Gordon.

  Ravelston’s eyes looked pleadingly, guiltily across the table. Let me share the bill! his eyes said. Gordon ignored him.

  ‘I vote we go to the Café Imperial,’ he said.

  The bill failed to sober him. A little over two quid for the dinner, thirty bob for the wine. He did not let the others see the bill, of course, but they saw him paying. He threw four pound notes onto the waiter’s salver and said casually, ‘Keep the change.’ That left him with about ten bob besides the fiver. Ravelston was helping Rosemary on with her coat; as she saw Gordon throw the notes to the waiter her lips parted in dismay. She had had no idea that the dinner was going to cost anything like four pounds. It horrified her to see him throwing money about like that. Ravelston looked gloomy and disapproving. Gordon damned their eyes again. Why did they have to keep on worrying? He could afford it, couldn’t he? He still had that fiver. But by God, it wouldn’t be his fault if he got home with a penny left!

  But outwardly he was quite sober, and much more subdued than he had been half an hour ago. ‘We’d better have a taxi to the Café Imperial,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, let’s walk!’ said Rosemary. ‘It’s only a step.’

  ‘No, we’ll have a taxi.’

  They got into the taxi and were driven away, Gordon sitting next to Rosemary. He had half a mind to put his arm round her, in spite of Ravelston’s presence. But at that moment a swirl of cold night air came in at the window and blew against Gordon’s forehead. It gave him a shock. It was like one of those moments in the night when suddenly from deep sleep you are broad awake and full of some dreadful realisation—as that you are doomed to die, for instance, or that your life is a failure. For perhaps a minute he was cold sober. He knew all about himself and the awful folly he was committing—knew that he had squandered five pounds on utter foolishness and was now going to squander the other five that belonged to Julia. He had a fleeting but terribly vivid vision of Julia, with her thin face and her greying hair, in the cold of her dismal bed-sitting room. Poor, good Julia! Julia who had been sacrificed to him all her life, from whom he had borrowed pound after pound after pound; and now he hadn’t even the decency to keep her fiver intact! He recoiled from the thought; he fled back into his drunkenness as into a refuge. Quick, quick, we’re getting sober! Booze, more booze! Recapture that first fine careless rapture! Outside, the multi-coloured window of an Italian grocery, still open, swam towards them. He tapped sharply on the glass. The taxi drew up. Gordon began to climb out across Rosemary’s knees.

  ‘Where are you going, Gordon?’

  ‘To recapture that first fine careless rapture,’ said Gordon, on the pavement.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s time we laid in some more booze. The pubs’ll be shutting in half an hour.’

  ‘No, Gordon, no! You’re not to get anything more to drink. You’ve had quite enough already.’

  ‘Wait!’

  He came out of the shop nursing a litre bottle of Chianti. The grocer had taken the cork out for him and put it in loosely again. The others had grasped now that he was drunk—that he must have been drinking before he met them. It made them both embarrassed. They went into the Café Imperial, but the chief thought in both their minds was to get Gordon away and to bed as quickly as possible. Rosemary whispered behind Gordon’s back, ‘Please don’t let him drink any more!’ Ravelston nodded gloomily. Gordon was marching ahead of them to a vacant table, not in the least troubled by the stares everyone was casting at the wine-bottle which he carried on his arm. They sat down and ordered coffee, and with some difficulty Ravelston restrained Gordon from ordering brandy as well. All of them were ill at ease. It was horrible in the great garish café, stuffily hot and deafeningly noisy with the jabber of several hundred voices, the clatter of plates and glasses and the intermittent squalling of the band. All three of them wanted to get away. Ravelston was still worrying about the expense, Rosemary was worried because Gordon was drunk, Gordon was restless and thirsty. He had wanted to come here, but he was no sooner here than he wanted to escape. Drunken half was clamouring for a bit of fun. And drunken half wasn’t going to be kept in check much longer. Beer, beer! cried drunken half. Gordon hated this stuffy place. He had visions of a pub taproom with great oozy barrels and quart pots topped with foam. He kept an eye on th
e clock. It was nearly half past ten and the pubs even in Westminster would shut at eleven. Mustn’t miss his beer! The bottle of wine was for afterwards, when the pubs were shut. Rosemary was sitting opposite him, talking to Ravelston, uncomfortably but with a sufficient pretence that she was enjoying herself and there was nothing the matter. They were still talking in a rather futile way about Shakespeare. Gordon hated Shakespeare. As he watched Rosemary talking there came over him a violent, perverse desire for her. She was leaning forward, her elbows on the table; he could see her small breasts clearly through her dress. It came to him with a kind of shock, a catch of the breath, which once again almost sobered him, that he had seen her naked. She was his girl! He could have her whenever he wanted her! And by God, he was going to have her tonight! Why not? It was a fitting end to the evening. They would find a place easily enough; there are plenty of hotels round Shaftesbury Avenue where they don’t ask questions if you can pay the bill. He still had his fiver. He felt for her foot under the table, meaning to imprint a delicate caress upon it, and only succeeded in treading on her toe. She drew her foot away from him.

  ‘Let’s get out of this,’ he said abruptly, and at once stood up.

  ‘Oh, let’s!’ said Rosemary with relief.

  They were in Regent Street again. Down on the left Piccadilly Circus blazed, a horrible pool of light. Rosemary’s eyes turned towards the bus stop opposite.

  ‘It’s half past ten,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I’ve got to be back by eleven.’

  ‘Oh, rot! Let’s look for a decent pub. I mustn’t miss my beer.’

  ‘Oh, no, Gordon! No more pubs tonight. I couldn’t drink any more. Nor ought you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Come this way.’

  He took her by the arm and began to lead her down towards the bottom of Regent Street, holding her rather tight as though afraid she would escape. For the moment he had forgotten about Ravelston. Ravelston followed, wondering whether he ought to leave them to themselves or whether he ought to stay and keep an eye on Gordon. Rosemary hung back, not liking the way Gordon was pulling at her arm.