The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches

  Innocents may imagine that Left and Right, Tories and Labour, would arrive separately, and even make exclusive groups, but no, they might arrive together and stand matily about with a look that said they felt out of bounds, off a leash: they could do as they liked, being unsupervised. There was a general effect of mix and movement, but there were more men than women, though there were some wives of diplomats, and a female journalist or two.

  The two times I was there ‘the country’ was in an uproar, it was an issue that caused Tory and Labour confrontations in the House, every newspaper headline emphasized left-right conflict, and some of the people there, but not regular guests, were watching the politicians in case some words of enlightenment were on offer. But politics was not what they talked about. No, they gossiped, all the talk was of how Bertie had said that, or Norman let fall this, and that she had announced-something or other. ‘He is going to see her, he told me, but Bernard …’

  Journalists stood about, trying to overhear, or to catch an eye which was usually not anxious to be caught, but one might observe how a journalist slowly edged nearer to a politician, with the concentration of a sheepdog, and a moment later the politician would be neatly cut out from the group, and held isolated as the two stood glass to glass. The politician might be bestowing a few words, or his body announced that he had been trapped, but in either case, he was the giver of favours.

  Then he was back in the group and a dozen glasses made a fraternal convocation, rising as they went to the mouths, descending between gulps, moving in gleaming circles or ellipses with the emphases of the talk, sometimes approaching each other, with an effect of intimacy, or indiscretion, or even clashing … ‘I’m so sorry’, ‘Sorry’… and, as the trays went past, globules of glass were replaced, and others taken in to this little separate dance which was like a commentary on the unheard conversation.

  Women politicians seldom came. There aren’t many in the House. One evening a slim dark woman entered in the kind of dress females choose to define not themselves but a function, a sober dark red: if it were made in white or blue it could be a nurse’s uniform, or a shop or airport supervisor’s. She seemed concerned to give the impression that she took up less space than she did. She did not appear to see the bunch of male politicians who stood in the centre of the room, but preserved an all-purpose smile, and circumvented the group until she reached a sofa where sat a young woman journalist whom she had expected-it was obvious-to see there. Perhaps they had even made an arrangement to meet. At once they began an exchange in low voices, and the journalist made some notes, but unobtrusively. When that was done, after perhaps ten minutes, the woman politician turned to look over the room, which seemed full of men. The woman journalist did the same. Both were wary, with a little look of humour.

  ‘They seem quite tame tonight,’ commented the representative of the Mentor-a right-wing paper, while she, in fact, was rather to the left, and known for her articles on women’s affairs.

  ‘They were pretty rowdy in the House earlier,’ said the politician, it’s all the late nights. They get over-excited. You can watch them getting more wrought up as the term goes on.’

  ‘I’m sure an early night wouldn’t do any of them any harm,’ said the journalist. ‘I was in the House last week, for the War Dependents Allowances Debate. They struck me as being really above themselves.’

  They discussed the ebullient males, boys will be boys, for some time, and then the female politician lowered her voice and talked about the difficulties of being a female politician, of whatever party. By now several women sat on the sofa and in chairs near it: a little nest of females.

  The male politicians were planning to crowd off together down the stairs, putting their glasses carelessly back on the trays held out to them, and giving a last assessing look around, in case they had missed some opportunity.

  One remarked, raising his voice to be heard, ‘I’m proud to be serving under her, I’d say that anywhere-but…’ and his circling glance was both roguish and aggressive, ‘she must watch her step.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said another, ‘if she steps out of line, don’t imagine we wouldn’t give her the push.’

  At the time these remarks seemed like the mere froth of male conviviality, but now they tend to isolate themselves in memory: this was her second term of office, and she was at the height of her success.

  The woman politician remarked, ‘I’ll give them a minute to get clear …’ and went on to tell how any woman Member of Parliament, entering the Chamber or leaving it, no matter how they effaced themselves, could expect sexual heckling of the kind you’d expect from-‘well, schoolboys’.

  ‘Louts on a street corner,’ suggested the journalist.

  ‘Groups of workmen on a site shouting sexual epithets after a pretty girl,’ said another woman.

  We all had our eyes on the men, now off down the stairs with shouts and cries of ‘See you again …’ ‘Must go …’ The Whip’ll have our heads …’

  ‘Every morning when I wake up,’ said the woman politician, I tell myself that I’ve got to take it, I’ve got to keep cool, because you have to smile, no matter what they throw at you. You might want to hit them, but if you don’t smile they go from bad to worse. It’s hard, sometimes.’ She spoke quietly but her smile did not come easily.

  She got up, went to the window overlooking the street, came back. ‘I’ll give them another minute, they’re waiting for taxis.

  That’s one of the things I admire her for. She doesn’t let it get to her. Well, it must get to her, but she never lets it show. She’s always been attractive, she’s always been a target… they are afraid of her now she’s boss but they’re so malicious about her behind her back-sometimes I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Well, I’m not as tough as she is, nothing like. Sometimes I know I show what I’m feeling … she never does. Never.’

  ‘At the Party Conference,’ said the journalist, ‘the chambermaids at the hotel told me they try never to be alone, they stick in pairs, because when they are drunk, anything goes.’

  ‘Yes, I am afraid it is all a bit like a Carry On film.’

  As the two women went out, another group of men came in, laughing, high on their success, their achievement.

  The women went quickly, quietly, past them, like shadows along the wall, and the men really did not seem to see them.

  The Pit

  A final sprig of flowering cherry among white lilac and yellow jonquils, in a fat white jug … she stuck this in judiciously, filling in a pattern that needed just so much attention. Shouting ‘Spring!’ the jug sat on a small table in the middle of the room.

  Spring sang in the plane trees that crammed two windows along one wall. The windows of the other wall showed a sprightly blue sky. The trees, full of young leaves, were reflected in the two round mirrors set to match the windows, like portholes in the white wall. Opposite the end wall with its square of blue sky she had hung a large seascape bought for a few pounds in a street market: in it blue sea, blue sky, white spray, white clouds eternally tumbled over each other. It had been painted with a fresh and probably youthful zest by someone called Samantha.

  You could think this a large room, extended into infinite variety by the weather outside, but it was small, and so was her bedroom next door. The flat comprised two adequate rooms, and here she had lived for a time.

  Having completed preparations for the visit from James, the man to whom she had been married for ten years, she did not sit down, but remained standing by the little table whose surface reflected the flowers. She was giving her room a slow, hooded, prowling look, an inspection not from her viewpoint, but from his. She could not remember his ever actually having criticized her arrangements, but going off with a woman whose taste in every way was the opposite to hers surely must be considered a criticism?

  She did not know why he was coming. Two years had passed since she had rung him about some message from Nancy, their daughter, about an urgent need for money. Before that, th
ey had met for lunch, in Manchester as it happened, where she was working and he visiting. In 1980, she thought that was. This encounter had been handled by both of them as if bullets might start flying around the restaurant at a single wrong word, and the strain of it had prevented another. Before that, meetings had always been for legal reasons and policed by solicitors, or because of the children.

  But when he had telephoned to say he wanted to meet her ‘just to talk’, what she had felt, unexpectedly, was delight, as if she were opening a present so well chosen she could feel the giver’s thoughts dwelling lovingly among her own, approving her choices.

  She perfectly understood the quality of this delight, its exact weight and texture, because of a smile that these days she sometimes felt arriving on her face together with thoughts of certain men. It was a rich, irresponsible, freebooter’s smile, and she knew that this smile must appear on their faces when they thought of her: a smile that had nothing to do with what society might be saying at any given time, or with morality, or with the wars between men and women.

  But the point was, he-her husband-had not been one of these men, for thoughts of him had been loaded with anxiety and self-doubt. Now she felt that he had been restored to her.

  She stood with one capable hand among the reflections of the flowers on the shining tabletop and smiled, not bothering to look in the mirror, for she knew that just as she, meeting him, would seek-anxiously but confidently-among the dry ruins for what she remembered of a quarter of a century ago, so he would seek in her what she had been. This is how former lovers meet, when ageing, as if suffused by that secret, irrepressible smile.

  Once upon a time, when young, walking along a pavement or into a room, they had never failed to see in the faces turned towards them the gratified look that comes from absolute lightness. They had been a match, a pair, flesh of an immediately recognizable category of flesh. Both good-looking, healthy, fitted to mate and beget, causing none of the secret unease that people feel when confronted by couples who can make you think only of the unhealthy or ugly offspring they are likely to produce. Sarah and James had given others pleasure that had in fact little to do with being young, handsome, healthy, and so on. No, it was because of their being flesh of one flesh. They had both been tall; she, slim, he, spare. Both were fair, he with shaggy Viking locks, she with long pale gleaming tresses. Both had very blue eyes, full of shrewd innocence. If there ever had been moments of disquiet in their early days, it was because of this: when they lay in each other’s arms and looked into that other face, what they saw was so similar to what they saw in mirrors.

  The woman he had married after her was large, black-haired, swarthy-a nice change, she had thought, in her bitter days. The children he and this gypsy had made between them were ‘one white and one black and two khaki’, as she had put it, full of shame. (Not literally ‘black’ of course: one was like her mother, brown and sleek and dark-eyed; one like James, pale and fair with eyes that shocked because of their blueness; and two indeterminate beings like neither.) Nice-looking children, but when these six people were all together no one need think of them as a family.

  When Sarah and James were together, with their two children, they were four of a kind, blue-eyed, blond Northern Europeans, so different from the majority of the world’s people that you had to think this was some kind of a rare and threatened race and you were being privileged to see perfect representatives of it. She had not seen things like this then, but later she did, confronted with Rose and the new family.

  The two children were now, of course, more than grown up. One was in Boston. This was Nancy with her husband and children. The son was on some island in the Pacific investigating the ways of fish. She did not often see either of them, or her grandchildren. She was pretty sure this was because of the divorce happening when it did, when they were ten and eleven. Protecting themselves, they had separated inwardly not only from their father, who had betrayed them for the new family, but from her, the innocent party. They had become cautious, sparing of affection, self-doubting, and critical. Of her. Unjust! But these days she never used, or thought, words like justice, or happiness.

  When her Viking husband had left her for the siren-voiced, histrionic, over-colourful Rose, she had-of course!-been devastated. Literally. She fell apart. Well, women did. She was for a time poisoned with bitterness, she could not believe that her husband, her friend, had so treated her. Oh no, it was not possible: she confronted him with the impossibility of it, the indignant innocence of her gaze demanding an explanation she could acknowledge. She drank too much. Then she stopped drinking. She coped well and sensibly with the two sensible and over-cautious children who, like her, protected a calloused place.

  But all that had gone away, seemed to belong to some other time, even some other woman.

  Now she felt herself connected, not with that vulnerable discarded woman, but with herself as a girl, before she had met him.

  Deliverance from weakness had not happened quickly. Five years after the divorce, at a party, he had stared at her, as if unable to believe what his eyes and senses told him, that this was-still-his wife, with whom he had lived for ten years. The tears spilled down his face, and he exclaimed, ‘But Sarah, what happened?’ At which she had been so angry she spat at him (astonishing herself as well as him-it was behaviour she associated with gypsy women, never her moderate self) and turned her back on him and left the party, weeping. But other women had told her that on unexpectedly meeting former husbands, these men would also exclaim, genuinely startled, ‘But what happened?’ As if their delinquency was something not only surprising to them, but not really their responsibility at all, rather the result of some ineluctable fate.

  For a while, she had raged over what she had then seen as the lying sentimentality of ‘But what happened?’ Had raged briefly, because one did not permit self-indulgence in useless emotion. And then had forgotten, it had all gone away, and when she thought of him, not often these days, what she saw was the blue innocence of that look of his, reflecting the candour and honesty that she had first loved in him, qualities she prized above all others.

  Now she lived in her two adequate rooms. In the same town as he did-but that was chance. Because of her work she had lived in Paris, New York, various towns in England, always moving, and good at moving. She never felt she lived in one place more than another. She was a personal secretary in a big oil firm.

  But her husband had left her for that other house where he had lived, not moving at all, with his new family. Not always contentedly, as she knew. But she did not now care about all that. He had made his bed, and she genuinely hoped it was a good one. She did not care, one way or the other. Not to care, that was the great, the unexpected, the miraculous deliverance. What a lot of nonsense it all was, the anguish, and the suffering, and the lying awake at nights weeping! What a waste of time.

  And now when she was free of him, James was coming to see her.

  His footsteps approached. Rapidly. Lightly He was taking two steps at a time up the stairs, then he knocked, and was in, standing just inside the door and looking at her.

  Knowing exactly how they must look to each other, they frowned with the effort of re-creating younger selves in what they were actually seeing. Their eyes met without difficulty, and did not disengage because of confusion, pain, guilt. Perhaps they had not really seen each other since the separation.

  What she was looking at was an elderly Viking, his shaggy locks, like hers, tarnished with silver. He was much burned by sun, wind, so there must have been a very recent walikng holiday somewhere. His handsome face was thin, all crags and ravines. He seemed to have dried out, as she seemed to herself to be dry and light, time dragging moisture out of her, like a sun.

  His acute gaze now left her, and rested on the flowers … a small table where she look her meals … a gas fire with a light armchair beside it … a shelf of books … the tumultuous blue and white seascape. Then he approached the blue square of the end window, w
ith his fast light high step that had been the first thing in him to delight her. It still did. At the window he looked downward into a scene of back gardens, birds, trees, fences loaded with creepers, children’s climbing frames, cats stretched out absorbing sunlight. Family life … He was scrutinizing it with a small dry smile she knew well. Then he stepped quickly to one window in the side wall, and then the other: the same view from both; a quiet street lined with parked cars, plane trees, an old woman sitting on a bench.

  This was the second floor. In summer the trees were like towns full of birds, and she stood there watching them. He turned about, and stood checked in his need to step off to somewhere else in this room. He was used to rooms where one might walk about, take a short stroll. But there was nowhere else. He was feeling confined.

  ‘I suppose you are wondering what I’m doing here?’ he said hastily, but then went red, because it sounded conventional, though she had not taken it like that.

  ‘Well, yes, I did wonder,’ she said agreeably, and sat herself down near the flowers. She at once became conscious of how she must look, posed near these flowers she had bought because of pleasure at his coming, and she moved quickly to the armchair near the gas fire. It was a chair that made one sit up straight. She sat there lightly and erectly, and looked at him. And sighed. She heard the sigh, and saw his quick conscious look when he heard it, and it was her turn to blush.

  He sat down near one of the windows and beyond him a plane tree shook with the visitations of birds. He looked as if he might leap to his feet and be off again. A hunted man, he frowned, and put his lean brown hand to his face, but then let it drop and sighed too, and sat back in his chair to face her.

  There isn’t a reason really,’ he announced. ‘It began to seem to me so wrong, that we didn’t even meet occasionally.’