All kinds of surprises awaited me. When I came bounding and barking into the flat, holding two presents for Ursula in my mouth, my tail thumping on the carpet, who should I encounter but fucking Gregory (who the fuck is he?), sitting with Ursula in her room. But — down, boy, down, and it was such a piquant joke on the past to have her making covert, placating gestures at me. I offered, greatheartedly and at once, to take them both out to the expensive French place in Dawn Street (I got a birthday bonus from work, too. £25. Happy birthday, Terry). After we had dispersed to change I fawningly offered Ursula her presents — a cashmere jersey and some scent — which she accepted with grave delight, placing a quick kiss on my forehead. Dinner made me feel secure, even pampered, a prince for a day — Greg silently gluttonous (much inspired, no doubt, by the shimmering prospect of not paying for what he ate and drank), Ursula calm and attentive, as I guided the meal along.
‘I suppose this is our joint birthday party,’ I said at one point.
‘Yes,’ Gregory agreed, ‘I suppose it is.’
We walked home three-abreast, Ursula between her brothers. To my grateful relief, Greg gloomily proposed going to bed straightaway, so Ursula and I walked in single file down the passage (Good night, Good night, Good night) and wordlessly, unsmilingly, we set about our motions of storage and ablution, like people who had lived together all their lives. I walked out of the bathroom, dressing-gowned, and moved past her bed with hardly a backward glance. I lay there, waiting, a last cigarette my taper. She came (with a quick tiptoe through the darkness, the soft kittenish spring landing her knees-first by my pillow, the nervous burrowing slither). And so did I.
(ii) There are many more secrets I
must tell you — GREGORY
August is the month when we both have our birthdays — the shattering, Nostradaman coincidence that so excited my father. Do you know, by the way, what the twinkly old twerp is up to now? According to Mama, he is landscaping a useless field in some corner of our estate, at colossal expense, with ha-has, mirages, the lot. Mama and I are formulating long-overdue plans to have him put away, yes put away, before he pauperizes us all.
This proximity of our birthdays was always, naturally, the cause of much gruelling pain for Terence and even of some rather poignant embarrassment for me. Thirty or forty friends usually seemed about right for my parties, and since most of my friends were delivered to Rivers Court by their parents, and since most of my friends’ parents were my parents’ friends, why, the house was more or less thrown open and a carnival, holiday air blessed the entire estate — the tap-tap of marquees being erected on the lawns, every passageway junction zigzagging with precipitate, grim-faced servants, the good cottagers (folding their caps in their hands like newspapers) getting their low-octane punch at the side door, the vast driveway rimmed by fat silent cars like rhinoceros at a river-bed, the cacophonous clatter of the hired steel band, the fruity zoot of kazoos, whistles and streamers, that flowery throng of high summer. Poor old Terence! I believe it was at my suggestion that we once put through the disastrous scheme of combining the two celebrations. Picture, if you will, the contrasting piles of presents in the drawing-room — T.’s humble rubble of half-a-dozen family tokens next to my fabulous, piratical haul. Imagine, if you can, the wincing introductions — ‘And this is little Terence (the boy we’ve adopted), whose birthday it also is today, well, not today exactly — it’s just that …’ And contemplate, if you must, the split-screen spectacle of the chosen son, metaphorically aloft on the shoulders of the crowd, in a blizzard of confetti and love, and the nauseous, cowering, hot-faced interloper who was always hiding, always hiding. Thereafter we reverted to the standard arrangement, my mythic mardi gras being preceded by a small, domestic tea-and-crackers affair in which the servants were bribed to play a prominent part. (Terence attended the village school, and had no doubt formed some sort of preference for a selection of his colleagues there. But we couldn’t have the spore of, say, the local street-cleaners, rat-killers, shit-shovellers, and so on, up to the Manor Hall. Now could we?) Ursula and I suffered the mandatory low spirits which such an inequality would tend to enforce, yet frankly we were far too absorbed in one another for Terence’s miseries to be truly ours. You see, those years entirely belonged to Ursula and me — Ursula, whose growing body I knew as well as I knew the shape of my own teeth — and the huff-and-puff of Terence’s doomed and squalid life, with all its humiliation and hate, seemed an infinitely postponable thing, merely an image of the frenzied greed, stupidity and filth which suddenly beleaguers us now.
I wonder what will happen this year (last birthday I went to the Court, but I’m far too tied up these days) … I expect I shall take a couple of dozen friends out for a slap-up dinner at Privates’, that new place in Chelsea. Then, too, Torka will no doubt throw some extravagant party round one. There’ll be the usual salvo of presents and telegrams, and that large cheque from Mama. Wonder what Terence will do for his … Nothing, is the most appealing possibility, though perhaps he’s hoping not to become a tramp until the day after! (I don’t imagine you realize that Terence pees in the washbasin? Well, he does. On several occasions recently I have found the porcelain stained — at loin height — by a slug’s trail of yellow. It’s only a hypothesis at the moment, but one that will shortly, I am confident, turn out to be susceptible of proof.)
Now — say quickly: What do you think of me? What do you think of me, Gregory, Gregory Riding, the being I am? Let’s hear it — haughty, vain, florid, contemptuous, lordly, superficial, corrupt, conceited, queer — and insensitive, above all insensitive (look how he gives himself away). Actually I’m extremely self-aware. You fool, do you think I don’t know all that, all that? You fool, I know it, I know it all, you fool.
Listen.
Yesterday a sad and irretrievable thing started to happen to me.
I rose at nine. It was sunny. I had a cup of tea and a square of toast. I walked to the underground station in Queensway. The lift was taking one of its frequent days off; I descended the endless steel staircase, my hair scattered by dirty winds from the earth’s core. At once the metal train rushed from its hole, an ugly beast sprung from a trap. I entered the half-full carriage and stood, as usual, in one of the door-bays. Everything was as it always is, the suspended hand-holds wiggling at the car’s every lurch, the sodium lights fading and strengthening again with a blink, the powerful whine of the undercurrent, the muck on the floors, the heat, the passengers sitting stupidly face to face. Then it started to happen. As the train surged with a whoosh out of Lancaster Gate, as the tunnel walls went black and the lights fluttered, then (like the thud of air from a nearby explosion, like the excuse me of a sick memory, like the sizzle of mixing chemicals) I felt it, felt it in an instant, felt as if I’d been mad for years, as mad as a mad old sheep in a drizzling field under sodden skies. No, don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me, no. I got out at the next stop. I climbed to the colourful surface and stood scratching my hair in the mad motion sculpture of Marble Arch, the traffic going on and on, the clouds scudding away above my head.
What happened to me down there? Something did. Physically it was real enough all right — cold sweat, shortness of breath as if my heart were fighting to get out, a bodily tremor too deep to reveal itself in shaking or in shouting either. I saw at once that, like a prentice bicyclist or a first-time-flung equestrian, I would have to go straight back, back into the underground, the nethers, the underside, and I turned, repurchased a ticket, and stood like a doll on the descending staircase as the hammers pounded louder and the dark air swirled and my body (the sweat, the tremor, the heart) again picked up its rhythms. It took every neutrino of my resolve not to turn and race back up the moving steel treadmill like a crazed hamster. And to go on, deeper into all that? — no, no, not a chance. I walked swiftly from the down to the up staircase and with huge strides raced out into the light.
I tried again that evening. The same. A nightmare succession of slow, smelly, packed, j
erking buses ferried me home by seven-thirty. Ursula and Terence were having one of their sickly little evenings together downstairs, and I couldn’t face them anyway. I lay on my bed until about eleven, then braved the bathroom. Terence, looking sly and reptilian in an absurd new shirt, sat crouched at his desk over a fathom of whisky. We never know how to greet each other these days. Good night. Hello. See you tomorrow. Ursula was in bed, knitting, and I paused for a rare chat — yes, she was fine, and had no trouble filling the days. Alone among the steel and glass of the bathroom, I found myself toying once more with the idea of instructing Ursula to visit me later in my bed. But no — that would be just as frightening in its way. I went upstairs again and took a strong pill, and another, and let them all fight it out like blind tribes inside my head. Somewhere in a room near by, in one of the forsaken tenements along the street, a demented foreigner bawled on hysterically into the night. What was it he kept screaming? … Shut the doors — shut the doors — shut the doors … At one point I sleepwalked to the open window and looked out. The doors of the black ambulance that had come for him were certainly open; but even when someone closed the doors after him he went on shrieking mechanically, Shut the doors — shut the doors … Which doors could he have meant, I wondered as I returned to my bed. It might as well have been morning by the time I wound down into sleep, the pillow grey and wet, the dawn grey and soiled behind my curtains.
I tried again this morning. The same. As soon as the brutal lift doors cracked shut I knew that there was absolutely no chance, not the puniest most blighted hair of hope. I walked quite solemnly up the great steel staircase. I took a cab this morning. But I can’t afford it. I must adapt my life.
Who is there to talk to? I rang Torka from the gallery — rude Keith answered and was impossibly offensive when I asked him to make Torka call me back. I rang Mama from a telephone-box at lunchtime — but she was preoccupied and vague and too far away. Skimmer and Kane — they’re idiots really, just upper-class yobs (you never did meet them, did you?); they wouldn’t understand anything like this. God, sometimes you turn round to test the rope-holds of your life and realize how tenuous they are. Now I’ve got this new thing in my life called panic. It was only a word to me until yesterday. What do I want with panic? Why can’t panic go and pick on somebody else?
After a confused talk with Ursula, I returned home by surface mail, edged along the queueing city with all the others in the sluggish reshuffle of evening. Ursula — and Terence, if you please — were waiting up in my room, both looking pathetically dependent on me to transform their day, to relieve their series of tired little compacts below-stairs. I had intended to take Ursula out to dinner, and now felt too drained to prevent Terence from joining us; when I decided on the French place in Dawn Street and Ursula ran off to get ready, I made no real effort to stop him tagging along. We walked there zestlessly. The restaurant was crowded and far too dark (practically requiring usherettes to guide the diners to their tables). Once I had secured an aperitif and decided on my meal I abstractedly relinquished the job of ordering it to Terence; this he stutteringly did, with much gauche deference to the waiters (and how badly he pronounced the names of the French wines). I let them both chatter through dinner, and then, after two large Benedictines, forced Terence to pay, by way of recompense for giving him an evening out. But it afforded me no genuine pleasure, even when I saw that huge tab whisked away, smothered with Service’s fivers. We walked home three-abreast (T. on the outside, one foot in the gutter, dodging trees); it was suggested we have some ‘coffee’ together, a scheme I briskly quashed. They scuttled off to their beds downstairs, to the calm cycles of their calm lives, while I, with the help of some pills and that liquor, searched for the letter A in the random alphabet of sleep.
What happened to me down there?
Everything has changed. That was all it took. A whole layer of protective casing has been ripped off my life. Nothing looks the way it used to look. Familiar objects now writhe with their own furtive being (I think they do things behind my back). When my eyes pass over the trogs, the yobs, the animals in the street — people who were hardly there at all before — I get sucked in by them helplessly and see the hell they are too. I take nothing for granted any more: the tiniest action or thought is broken down into a million contingencies. I have come out. I am one of you now. Where did I catch all this?
There are many more secrets I must tell you. But go easy on me. It’s my birthday. Let’s take things one at a time. (I know. I caught it from him.)
9: September
(i) This is one of the ways you get them
at your mercy — TERRY
There is now something leprous and inexorable about my nights. Things have progressed with steady certainty, with the slow cohering logic of a genre novel, or a chess combination, or a family game. Already I know how it will end — things will suddenly get much worse for two of us and never get better again — but I cannot break out. I don’t want to break out. I will go on until it happens. That seems to be the only thing I can do.
I went out with a blind girl for a while, you know — that’s right, totally, congenitally blind: she even sported dark glasses and a white stick, which used to look like a floating chalk mark or a trail of smoke in the streets at night, an irrelevant thing when we were all blind too. Plenty of attractions, then, for the concerned, duffle-coated student, with his plastic bag of books and his experimental ginger beard (I soon aimed that). She was small, Jewish and slender; she had dazzling black hair, a large tragic nose, damp-sand complexion and wide lips almost as brown as her skin; she was regretfully agreed by all to be pretty. Think, also, of the poignancy of that brave but hesitant figure, strolling relaxed and cheerful with her friends between lectures, yet an uncertain sleepwalker when you glimpsed her alone in the town, her tread trying to be firm, her expression changing with scary rapidity as she moved down unknown paths. Consider, in addition, the fact that (a) she was a girl, and (b) she couldn’t see what I looked like, and you begin to appreciate the full potency of her spell.
She was tremendously easy to negotiate. I merely helped her across the road one day in town, asked her where she was going, and announced my intention to accompany her. There’s nothing they can do about it, you see: that’s the point of them. I was as nice as I possibly could be to her for a very long time. In due course she started almost going to bed with me (yes, she was one of the girls I wrote to when nobody would go anywhere near going to bed with me. She is a married woman now, or dead, or tonto in a home. Can’t quite remember if she ever replied). I knew it was going to turn nasty the moment her blindness became something I could use: and, sure enough, one evening, in her room, when she removed the freckly hand that was shimmering flat-palmed up her thigh and placed it primly back on my lap, I raised my hand again and waggled two fat splayed fingers underneath her nose. Suddenly the door was open. I took to hovering behind the sofa on which she sat, peering without relish into the slanting triangle of her shirt; I used to return on all fours from putting on a record, staring the while up her skirt (they don’t know how to sit right, these blind girls); I would make faces at her constantly, finding particular enjoyment in belying my words with my facial expression, so that, say, everyday cordialities would be synchronized with gazes of rapt ardour, tender endearments chaperoned by contortions of sneering hate, etc. Finally, as we lay naked in her bed one evening (that was okay. But she was into non-penetration), I produced, with some effort, the sound-effects of a crying-jag, piteously honing that she could not really love me, that I would die if I did not possess her, and suchlike mendacities. In the end she complied, shedding more tears than I ever shed that night. We didn’t see each other again. The point was, you understand, that she knew I was faking, but couldn’t say she knew. Because that would have been much too frightening, wouldn’t it?
This is one of the ways you get them at your mercy.
Shudder shudder.
‘What else did you do?’ I ask, arresting w
ith a twitch of my haunches the downward trend of Ursula’s hand.
‘Mm?’
She has just slid into bed with me for the eighteenth night running and seems by now quite blasée about the routine, showing a tendency, indeed, to get down to her task with what I take to be insulting dispatch (not that my cock gives a shit one way or the other. It does just like I tell it these days).
‘You and him. What else did you do?’ Stiffly I place an arm round her shoulders, raising the timbre of my voice to make things sound friendly.
‘Well, yes,’ she muses to my armpit (I don’t know how she can bear me during these revolting interludes), ‘as a matter of fact there were other things we did.’
‘… Oh yes? Like what?’
She wriggles slightly. ‘Can’t say them.’
‘Do it then,’ I hear myself tell her, in the impervious monotone I have developed for such requests: ‘Do it.’
Again with a non-committal grunt, as of some dead-end toiler asked to switch from one equally meaningless chore to another, my foster-sister shinnied down the bed. There was no contact between her skin and mine until I felt the firm, distinct clamp of her lips.
‘Was that all right?’ I asked in awed disbelief when she resurfaced.
‘I think I’ll get used to it,’ said Ursula, crinkling her her nose in distaste.
Hardly perfect, is it?
After each one of these nightly acts — after Ursula’s self-satisfied ‘There’, uttered in the tone of the truly experienced virgin — my immediate and prevailing instinct has been one of grateful, yearning reciprocation. On the first night I slithered down the bed like a fool, and only after a humiliating struggle — Ursula half-slithering down the bed with me — did I blinkingly re-emerge. Clearly, that wasn’t the idea. For the next few nights I reached out for the body in the bed beside me with a kind of ecstatic circumspection, as if it were a friend’s baby or a critical nuclear pile, only for my fingers to find it dead, dead, a frozen log on a gusty night. Once she jerked away with crude abruptness, and I snarled silently in the darkness. For a moment there, I was back where I was before. I haven’t tried since. But I’m going to try again soon. I’ve been thinking what’s best to do.