Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 2

  Hilary Isn’t that nice? So nice. Hear that, Bron. I think that’s very … nice.

  Pause.

  Do you know what I’ve always wanted to do? Desert Island Discs.

  Duff Well, why not? Why not? I am a governor of the Corporation. One word. The Chairman a personal friend. Bowled over.

  Bron Elgar.

  Hilary Bron has never liked music.

  Bron I do like music. It’s the appreciation of it I don’t like.

  Duff And … what is it … one book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare.

  Hilary The Book of Common Prayer.

  Duff Yes! Yes! The last thing anybody would expect.

  Bron Of course.

  Duff I can’t wait. The castaway. The castaway (I do not say prodigal) returned. Riveting.

  Hilary Returned? (Pause.) I couldn’t record it here?

  Duff No. I think you’ll find it’s a studio job. Portland Place.

  Hilary Portland Place.

  Duff Tube to Oxford Circus.

  Hilary The other thought that’s been running through my head (you’ll laugh at me now) is, ‘Come on, Hilary, old boy. I know it’s a bit late in the day but why don’t you pull the old socks up and do what you’ve always wanted to do, deep down, namely, have a stab at Art.’

  Duff I don’t believe it. Veronica. I do not believe it. On the plane. Did I not say?

  Veronica Pa does pretty paintings.

  Duff We are talking of literature, Veronica, not therapy.

  Hilary Art. The ineffable. The role of redeemer. Become an order out of chaos merchant. Novels, poems. A play.

  Duff I could place your memoirs tomorrow.

  Hilary Telling it all has become so respectable. Dirt. Treachery. Murder. Boys. My dear, who cares?

  Duff Oh no. Boys are nothing nowadays. And memoirs make a mint.

  Hilary Always at the head of the charts. Always at No 1. American Express, Diners Club. Art trumps them all. It’s the other country. Betray anything for that. But not memoirs, quite.

  Duff No? Art is memory.

  Veronica Down, Proust!

  Hilary I can’t see yet how far from one’s life one has to stand to make it art. You know? At what angle. It’s not enough to tell the tale. One’s private predicament. One man running naked through Europe.

  Duff From a purely commercial point of view almost anything would have a ready sale. Except perhaps poetry. Poetry might be taken to indicate a certain weakening of the intellect.

  Hilary Yes. A faint message in morse indicating the ship is sinking. No. It wants to be something more substantial than that. My testament. An edifice standing four square against the winds of dogma. Light streaming from every window. A mansion to which all my life has simply been the drive.

  Veronica Or the garden path.

  Hilary Is that the way to redeem myself? What do you say, Bron?

  Bron Why not? It’s where it’s all supposed to make sense, isn’t it? Death, disappointment. The joyful serenity of Mozart. Wagner’s ineffable majesty. Art. I should stick to religion. At least that has no pretensions to immortality any more.

  Hilary My wife.

  Bron He’s not serious, you know. You don’t think he’s being serious? He doesn’t mean a word he says.

  Hilary In England we never entirely mean what we say, do we? Do I mean that? Not entirely. And logically it follows that when we say we don’t mean what we say, only then are we entirely serious.

  Veronica Except we’re not in England, darling.

  Duff I see England now in grammatical terms almost as a tense, a mood. The optative. Would that this were so. Would it were different. But, of course, that will change. It will be different.

  Hilary I am so out of it. Fourteen years. I am a stranger.

  Duff Precisely. So who better. You return from exile with a new perspective. So fruitful, exile. But then all writers are exiles here, are they not? Exiles in their own country. Which is where (dare one say it) our friend Solzhenitsyn made his mistake. I’m afraid they were in some sense right: he does want his head examining. Here he was. Grand. Isolated. Attended to. A man as majestic and romantic as Byron. A torch. Drawing all eyes (all eyes that mattered. All caring eyes). And he throws it away. Switzerland. Connecticut. He should have stayed put.

  Bron And gone to a camp?

  Duff My dear Bron. Which is better, five years in a camp or three pages in the Listener? Fool. I thought (we had a reception for him at Chatham House). Fool. And a tendency already to button-hole. Sad. A talent betrayed.

  Hilary He was never someone one came across. What you are saying … let us spell it out … he has gone into exile and betrayed his talent. I am to return from exile and fulfil mine. Is that it?

  Duff Absolutely.

  Hilary There is just one thing. I don’t have any.

  Duff What?

  Hilary Talent.

  Duff You are too modest.

  Hilary Literary talent. None.

  Duff You have a story to tell. You must tell it. My publishers have several very bright young people down from university. Tell it to one of them.

  Hilary Isn’t that cheating?

  Duff Cheating? To tell it to the tape recorder, and let the editor do the rest: my dear, what else is film? There are no categories. Form is in the melting pot. My publishers have brought out several vivid and successful books by an ex- housemaid. Has she talent? Content is what counts. Style can come later.

  Bron Don’t take away his style or there’ll be no content left.

  Hilary And where are they, your publishers?

  Duff Bedford Square.

  Hilary Bedford Square. Is that handy for Portland Place? I suppose it is. No, I don’t think so. Not really. Do you? Frankly Duff I don’t think I’m cut out for literature. I don’t know whatever made you think I was. The real artist confronts the world saying, ‘Why am I not immortal?’ ‘Why am I second-rate?’ is not the same question.

  Duff My dear, dear man. You can be second rate and still be first class. Carve it above the door of the Slade. The Foreign Office. Oxford. The Treasury. Any institution you care to name. Draw the curtains. Pull up a chair. This is the family. Comfort. Charm. Humour. None of them negligible. What makes life worth living? None of that with jagged dirty genius on the hearthrug. No. The good is better than the best, else what does society mean?

  Bron Dear Duff.

  Hilary Dear Duff. You are so kind. (Pause.)

  Veronica And when you bolted was it planned?

  Hilary Not a bit. All very much on spec. It was a Friday. I got back to the Foreign Office after lunch to find a note on my desk. It was in a brown, government envelope marked Urgent, underlined and with two exclamation marks. How dare the writer even of a brief note in dramatic circumstances be so confident of my amazement as to add an exclamation mark? And here were two of the buggers! It was a literary reference. Great Expectations, it read; then, in parentheses (and somewhat condescendingly), Dickens. Chapter 44. Wemmick’s Warning. And another bloody exclamation mark. My first thought was, ‘Who is this … person, this … well-wisher, this friend, who knows me so little as not to know how cross the medium of this message would make me? To say nothing of the punctuation.

  Duff I thought you liked crosswords.

  Hilary I do. Provided they are set properly. The easier the crossword, the sloppier the clue. This was a sloppy clue.

  Veronica Could you solve it?

  Hilary No. We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off. I prefer Trollope. So on that Friday afternoon I scoured Whitehall for a copy of Great Expectations finally running one to earth in the lending library at the Army and Navy Stores. Is that still there?

  Duff The Army and Navy? Oh yes.

  Hilary The lending library.

  Duff No.

  Hilary Is there no end to your lunacy? The lending library at the Army and Navy! Senseless.

  Veronica And what is Wemmick’s warning? br />
  Duff Do not go home. A note left for Pip at the gate of his lodgings and read by the light of the watchman’s lantern.

  Hilary Do not go home.

  Veronica That’s straightforward enough.

  Hilary On the contrary. It’s riddled with ambiguity. Home? Which home? I had three. Hookham, Newport Street or Cadogan Square. I always called Newport Street Newport Street, Cadogan Square Cadogan Square. The only place I had ever called home (because it was where Pa lived) was Hookham.

  Veronica So where did you go?

  Hilary Hookham.

  Bron I was sitting in the garden. I was reading a thriller. I had just come to an intriguing part when Hilary arrived. Within ten minutes we had left.

  Veronica And who was it tipped you off?

  Hilary It could have been anybody.

  Duff Anybody brought up on Forster. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’

  Veronica The old boy must have had nice friends. I’d plump for the old Union Jack any day.

  Hilary All that’s rubbish anyway.

  Duff Hilary.

  Hilary Nancy rubbish. You only have to substitute ‘my wife’ for ‘my friend’ to find it’s nothing like as noble. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my wife I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ Well … yes. I should hope so too. Wouldn’t most people? And put the other way round it’s sheer music hall. ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my wife I should betray my wife.’ ‘Your wife?’ ‘My wife.’ ‘Kindly leave the country.’ If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my children I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Guts? Or. If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying … my brother-in-law … No, you see Duff. Friend is what does it. My friend. That’s what brings in the cellos. My friend. Who is my friend? My friend is the memory of the youth half of them were gone on at school. My friend is True Love as it presents itself the one and only time in their stunted, little lives in the shape of some fourteen-year-old tart giving them the glad eye during the service of Nine Lessons and Carols. And then of course they did have a choice, if they had but known it. If only in the matter of a kiss in the long grass behind the sightscreens. A choice between country, which is to say school, headmaster, government, club and class; and fidelity, which is to say friendship, honour, compassion and all the other virtues which, if they were going to get anywhere at all in the world they were going to have to betray anyway.

  Bron They? You. Us.

  Hilary No. That is their game and I never played it.

  Bron But not wives. They never get a look in. Wives are part of the betrayal. Wives are part of the selling-out. Wives are settling for something. Do not go home. Do not settle down. ‘Leave for Cape Wrath tonight.’

  Veronica And your friend, whoever he was?

  Hilary Unknown and unthanked.

  Duff He certainly did you a good turn.

  Hilary Possibly. Possibly. After all we weren’t entirely welcome here either. Like the unlooked for arrival of a distant relative from Australia. Naturally they made the best of it. Kitted us out. Job. Flat. Not unpleasant. But a good turn would you say, Bron? Not entirely.

  Veronica So come back.

  Duff Let me come clean. There have been several occasions this last year (so different is the atmosphere nowadays) when one or two of us have been sitting around, powers that be in a mood of relaxation when quite independently your name has come up. And people have suddenly started scratching their heads and saying, ‘What are we going to do about old Hilary?’ You’ve been stuck here now for what, thirteen, fourteen years. Fourteen years in partibus infidelium, and the upshot is, some of us are now prepared co come out and say enough is enough. Now I can’t quite say, ‘Come home. All is forgiven.’ There are still one or two people who feel quite strongly. Time dwindles their number but the fact remains, there were deaths, disappearances. People … died. Some of them first class. And I think you will probably be made to stand in the corner for three or four years, five at the outside, which with remission means three, which with parole would probably be two and in one of these open places (I’m on the board of a couple), more hydros than houses of correction. Librarian pushing your trolley round. Rather fun, I would have thought. Then once that’s out of the way you can get a little place somewhere. Gloucestershire would be nice, handy for Bath. They’ve got a delightful festival now … and Bristol, the Old Vic, restaurants galore; England’s changed since your day, all sorts of places now where you can get a really first-class meal. And financially, of course, no more problems. Television, the Sundays, people falling over themselves. You could even write this book you were talking about. Set up your stall in the open market. I guarantee you’ll have plenty of customers. Granted some people are going to turn their backs, but we live in a pluralist society and what does that mean: it means somebody somewhere loves you. What do you say?

  Bron You’re wasting your time.

  Veronica Did you know?

  Bron No.

  Hilary She never asked.

  Bron Because I never dreamed. What had it to do with me? You think your husband is in central heating. You find out he is in refrigerators. A commercial traveller toting his cheap little case of samples round the suburbs. Little appointments. Rickmansworth. Ruislip. Dollis Hill.

  Hilary Not Dollis Hill. Never Dollis Hill. I give you Ruislip, Pinner. But not Dollis Hill.

  Bron What does it matter?

  Hilary My wife has no sense of place. To her one spot is very much like another. It matters to me. It was my rendezvous. The top of my week. My epiphany. But hardly a double life. About as double as yours is double, Duff. The inner life of personal relations. The outer life of anagrams and Ongar. I say Ongar. Ruislip. Meetings at line’s ending.

  Duff At the station?

  Hilary Thereabouts. I used to walk from the station. Always walked. I took my umbrella, strode out into the suburbs and really revelled in it. Priestley, Duff. Wells. A little man on the loose. Past the ideal homes and Green Line bus stops. Factory sportsfields lined with poplars. I was so happy. Is it still unloved, that landscape? I loved it. Boarding kennels, down-at-heel riding schools, damp bungalows in wizened orchards. The metropolis tailing off into these forlorn enterprises. And not inappropriate. Had my superiors been blessed with irony I might have thought the setting deliberately chosen to point up the folly of individual endeavour. As it was I grew fond of it. And just as well. Shacks, allotments, dead ground. So many places like that now. Here. Africa. Soon, already, Arabia. Well, it suits me. At home in one you can be at home in them all.

  Duff Forgive me, but am I fanciful if I begin to see your defection, say rather your odyssey in terms almost of a choice of setting? The heart of the country. The edge of the city. Two worlds. Past. Future. Not difficult to betray your country in so drab a setting for that setting has already betrayed the country you stood for: the house in the park, the church in the trees. No? Well. Possibly not.

  Hilary Is it a programme note that you want? Extracts from pertinent texts to point you in the right direction. Shots of the Depression, the upper classes at play. Injustice the impetus, the guilt of one’s breeding. Neat. Good intentioned. The best motives gone wrong. Would that find favour?

  Duff It’s not unfamiliar. The road many took. Though few went so far.

  Veronica I always knew you were a big Stalin fan.

  Hilary You seem anxious to nudge me into some sort of credo.

  Veronica Well what about this mess on the carpet, which we’ve had to live with for fifteen years? When you’ve lowered your pinstripes and carefully done your No. 2’s right in the middle of the hearth-rug one is entitled to some explanation. It would be nice to think this turd had an infrastructure.

  Hilary Talking of credos, do you know that in the latest recension of the creed one doesn’t say ‘I belie
ve in God’ but ‘We believe in God?’ I’ve never heard such vulgar nonsense. The Archbishop of Canterbury should be shot. We believe. How am I to know what anyone else believes? But does one have a choice between systems? This mode or that, an institutional best buy? When? At Cambridge? Or before that? The nursery perhaps. (My first taste of an institution that was on the decline.) I don’t count the family. I believe that’s now suffering from planning blight. Done out of devilment, would that meet with sympathy? To be on one’s own. Alone. If for no other reason than to be one’s own worst enemy.

  Veronica You were always that.

  Bron Only just.

  Hilary It’s quite hard to be absolutely alone. I never have. Though I have seen it. One particular afternoon I had been on one of my little jaunts, kept my appointment. Nothing unusual had occurred or was in the least likely to occur. It was a routine Thursday and I strolled back to the station across a piece of waste ground that I knew made a nice short cut. I must have seemed a slightly incongruous figure in my city clothes. I never dressed the part, even to the extent of an old raincoat. At which point I came over the brow of the hill and found myself facing a line of policemen, advancing slowly through the undergrowth, poking in ditches with long sticks, hunting for something. It appeared there was a child missing, believed dead. Clothes had been found; a shoe. It was a bad moment. I had no reason at all for being there. I was a senior official in the Foreign Office. What was I doing on a spring afternoon, with documents in my briefcase, crossing a common where a child had been murdered? As it was no one thought to ask me any questions at all. I looked too respectable. And indeed they already had a suspect waiting handcuffed in the police car. I joined in the search and was with them when they found the child about half an hour later, lying in a heap at the foot of a wall. I just got a glimpse of her legs, white, like mushrooms, before they threw a blanket over her. She had been dead a week. I saw the man as the police car drew away through lines of jeering housewives and people cycling home from work. Then they threw a blanket over him too. The handy blanket. And I have a feeling he was eventually hanged. Anyway it was in those days. I came back, replaced the documents, had my tea by the fire in the Foreign Office. I took in some parliamentary questions for the minister, had dinner at the Garrick and walked home across the park. And in a tiled room at Uxbridge Police Station there would have been that young man waiting. Alone in a cell. Alone in custody. Alone at large. A man without home or haven. That is what you have to do to be cast out. Murder children. Nothing else quite does the trick, because any other crime will always find you friends. Rape them, kill them and be caught.