After the Rain (10 page)

My behaviour changed. I found myself alternating between moods of sullenness and moods when I would be impossibly placatory with Sonya, for I could no longer take our day-to-day life together for granted. Even Arthur noticed how strangely I was behaving. I think he believed that I might be “cracking up”, because he kept finding extra tasks for me, so that my mind might be occupied.

Coming one afternoon from polishing the galley stove for the third time in four days, I found that Muriel was watching me. She sat on deck in my usual place near Gertrude and Banner, and, when she saw that I had noticed her, she smiled a thin smile and glanced in the direction of the ladder which led down into the hold. Sonya and Tony would be practising, doing their exercises, doing—what might they be doing together in the hold? I paused by the top of the ladder, listened, and could hear no sound of voices. Why were they so silent? But it was better, I thought, it was
better for them to be silent. Let Tony be in my place, let him do—and let her…. Let them both do the action, but let me keep the words. Let Sonya not say to anyone else the special loving words we used with each other, let her not cry out, let her not…. But perhaps these words were as automatic a part of the act as orgasm itself. Like chocolate from a slot machine, out they came when you pressed the right handle.

Muriel was still watching me. The expression on her face was of undisguised relish. I found that, for all the assumed casualness of my pausing there, I was tense and shivering in the heat. I composed my voice, and said to Muriel, “I’ll just go down and see how they’re getting on.”

I was careful to make a great noise as I descended the ladder. “Hullo,” Tony said, “You come to watch?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s not much to see.”

I sat down. The air was hot and close. “Go on. Give me a demonstration,” I said.

“I’m not trying to lift anything heavy, y’see. Not got the strength for it nowadays really, and they say you mustn’t overstrain. I just do press-ups and that.”

“You could do those on deck where it’s cooler.”

“Suppose so. But we’re used to it down here, aren’t we, Sonn?”

“Are you?” I said to Sonya.

Tony said, “Go on, Sonn. You show him some of your stuff. Squats and stuff.”

“Pliés.” Sonya was embarrassed, and, I could see,
angry, though without yet quite knowing why. She said, “I can’t do them before——”

“Strangers?”

“Anyone. I don’t like practising in public. It makes me shy. Anyway, there’s nothing to see.”

The two of them stood there awkwardly, gazing at me. Something was wrong. I had interrupted; I was indeed a stranger. I had brought the musky stench of the tigers with me into the hold, and the atmosphere had become oppressive.

“We’re finished anyway,” Sonya said. “It’s too hot down here to do much,” and the two of them climbed back up the ladder to the desk, and left me sitting there alone.

*

Gertrude said, “I’ll tell you something. I was not a great actress. Good, but not great. Perhaps I was too intelligent.”

As tar breaks out in bubbles upon the roads during hot weather, our secret thoughts began to come out of us as we lay there in the sun. “I began to have doubts, you see,” Gertrude said.

“
You
did?”

“Yes. Isn’t that strange? Not very often at first. Just sometimes at night. Perhaps if people didn’t sleep alone … but I never married; nobody lasted long enough with me. Sir Charles Cochran once told me I was too intense for life—born for the theatre, not for life, he said. But then, he had to be polite because he was turning me down for a job.”

“What doubts?” I said.

“Whether it was all worth while.”

“Casting couch and that?”

“Not that so much. Surprisingly little of that goes on, though people like to think so. One finds it more on the variety stage, with agents of the shadier sort, and sometimes the
smallest
parts … or ASM’s…. But really, my dear, people are far more ready to offer than directors are to accept. There is so much competition, and so little talent. Boys from the Midlands who’ve been playing at being artistic all their lives, and don’t want to go into the family business. And the girls—once they used to visit the sick, but nowadays it’s the stage—something to do with the need for self-
expression
, but why the public should suffer it, I never could tell. And all those silly
irresponsible
people one found; I suppose it’s because professionals have a reputation for irresponsibility that so many irresponsible people think they ought to enter the profession. But it won’t do. My dear, there always used to be such a fuss because eighty per cent of us were unemployed, but they never considered how many of us were unemployable.”

“But your doubts.”

“They grew deeper. First of all, I doubted the value of the theatre as I knew it.”

“As we all knew it,” I said.

Banner said, “I never knew it. Except for the amateurs, of course. We used to write away to the British Drama League for one-act plays with an
all-female
cast.”

“Most of us were discontented with the theatre,” Gertrude said. “There were articles about that every Sunday. Once television came along, you could hardly get the public to go to anything if there wasn’t a cash prize in it somewhere. Then there were the costs, and rents going up and all that, and people worked it out that you had to run for a year or you weren’t making a profit, or something; I could never understand it. I played Antigone in the West End when I was
twenty-four
. Six years ago, I went back to the same theatre, but this time I was playing the mother-in-law in a kitchen comedy. I was so full of life when I was young. I had written”Gertrude Harrison. Actress“in pencil on the wall by my dressing-table, and it was still there when I went back, so I crossed out the “Actress”…. During our second year in that play, people came by charabanc from Widnes to see us. They never did that for Antigone.”

“But Goodness!” I said. “If that was all that bothered you——”

“No, of course not. Those who loved the theatre only did so more strongly when there was less of it. The Third Programme revived my Antigone, and there was the Highbrow Theatre Club. Do you remember?—it gave you a kind of joint membership of the Arts, the Royal Court, the Mermaid, and the Comedy, and there was some kind of income tax deduction if you bought more than ten tickets in a year. Whenever we lost one theatre, another smaller one took its place, like the Shakespeare group in Southwark who converted an
old stables into an Elizabethan playhouse after the Old Vic had been taken over by the Secondary Schools Association.”

“I remember,” I said. “Publishers used to advertise in the programmes, and
Encounter
was on sale in the foyers. Still, it all helped to keep the theatre alive.”

“My dear, that was the trouble; I kept wondering why. Don’t you see?—my doubts weren’t concerned with what was happening to the theatre, but with the nature of the theatrical experience itself. It was my religion; it always had been. Beauty, art, all the highest things—they really took the place of God for me. I believed so strongly in them, until I began to lie awake at night, wondering what was high and what was low, and whether one was any better than the other, and whether I just used ‘high’ and ‘low’ without thinking, and whether everybody else did the same. And then I began to think about theatrical values—You know that thrill up the spine one used to get whenever one was in the presence of what we called ‘real theatre’?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I discovered it could be
self-induced
. And I began to wonder whether the whole thing wasn’t just a
daydream
we had made up for ourselves to prove we were people of greater sensibility. The whole thing.
Everything
that had given meaning to my life. Everything I was trying to teach my pupils. Of course, I didn’t give in without a struggle. I read all I could about aesthetics. I went back to my Jung and my Plato—books I’d been given, you know, when I was younger (for I’d been a
great success among academic people, and always
preferred
them to the businessmen)…. They were books I hadn’t opened much, but I went through them all … Myths … Ritual … The nature of tragedy … Catharsis … I could come away from a performance of
Lear
feeling noble and uplifted, I knew, but I also found I could get the same feeling from benzedrine.”

“But surely,” Banner said, “it is not only a matter of experience. One learns from great plays, does one not?”

“What?” I said.

“About the nature of life.”

I said, “I should have thought you’d learn more about the nature of life from one week as a social worker than from ten years of steady theatre-going. Isn’t that so, Gertrude?”

Banner interrupted. “But Gertrude, how could you teach if you felt like this?” he said.

“I didn’t have doubts all the time, you know. When I did, I would go to bed until I felt better. Doubts are only intermittent; otherwise they would be certainties. Oh, I would forget for a while, and go on in the old way, and it would be quite genuine. I didn’t pretend. Did you think I was pretending when we had our readings, or I recited to you?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“What I have felt at the moment, I have always felt completely. I used to think that a virtue; it is a very essential quality for us in the profession; I would always tell my pupils so.” Gertrude sighed. “But during the last few days, as my doubts have been coming back,
they have forced me to look at the whole of my life, all the moments added together, and they amount to so very little.” We were all silent for a while. “It’s very strange,” Gertrude said, “Arthur told me…. He sees these things so differently. He told me there would be a place—that I should look upon it not as an end in itself, but as a skill…. He said that what I have been doing all my life is not wrong—because, you know, when my doubts were on me, I thought it was very wrong…. It is a matter of proportion, he said.”

“Of control.”

“What?”

“Of control,” Banner said. “It is all a matter of control; Arthur has assured me of that. Now we are to start again, he says. Things had got out of hand. That is why I was able to do no good. I had my own doubts, you know. I think all of us do.”

“You too? But if you never had a vocation in the first place, why were you bothered by doubts?” I said.

“Not of a religious nature. Of a practical nature. Christianity was not important to me, as you know. Perhaps it should have been, but you either have that sort of faith, or you haven’t. The faith I had was that I could help people, and the doubts I had were that my help wasn’t doing any good. It was all so complex. One tried to work on simple premises. Justice and injustice … it wasn’t as easy as that. For instance, I discovered—I was bound to when so many of my parishioners were in and out of prison—that the police often
invent
evidence. That made me very angry at first.”

“Are you sure of this?”

“Quite sure. After all, it’s fairly well known among the legal people, and cases got into the papers from time to time, you know, and sometimes an unfortunate policeman would be sent to prison himself.”

“Unfortunate!”

“Yes. Because one sees their point of view as well. The police do not look upon the safeguards of the law as we do, you see, but as restrictions to be circumvented. Very often they
know
that some unhappy man has committed a crime, and they would feel—well, foolish if he were to escape conviction by some technicalities of the evidence. Of course they begin with an
advantage
. Most juries and all magistrates attach much more weight to the evidence of a police officer than they do to that of an ordinary witness. Juries very seldom realize, you see, that the police are interested parties, and that it is a point of pride to the police to get a
conviction
. I was very angry when I first discovered this, because the police are only human, and they do make mistakes. When they have come to a conclusion, they do not easily reverse it, so that there are cases when they have decided that someone is guilty when he is in fact quite innocent, and, in pinning the crime on him, the police commit an injustice. I found that very difficult to stomach, until it was pointed out to me that the
alternative
to this procedure would allow so many criminals to escape that the civilized society I valued would itself be imperilled. After a while I accepted this view, but it was not an easy one to explain to those who had
themselves
suffered under the system—I could accept it logically, if you like, that it was sometimes necessary for the police to place dust from the scene of a robbery in the trouser turn-ups of the spare suit of the man whom they believed to have committed it, but I could not accept it emotionally. Eventually I became very mixed up in my mind.”

Gertrude said, “But your work? This one thing was not enough to make you doubt the whole value of that?”

“No, but there were similar complications about so many things. Youth Clubs. They were such a good work. We needed them to keep young people off the streets, and to bring friends to lonely people. But in order to attract the youngsters into coming, and
staying
, I had to use what methods I could. I found that in one case all I had done was to create the nucleus of a gang; they wrecked the Club, and I had to disband it. Then on the advice of a colleague, I went in for evening classes and scenes from Shakespeare, but that didn’t take, so we fell back on table tennis. Then there were the undesirables. I could not be present the whole time; they would not have liked that. You would say I should have got rid of the undesirables, but they were the people who most needed help…. There were so many things. Nothing I did turned out simply well, and more and more I came to doubt whether I myself knew what was best. That is where a vocation might have helped me; at least I could have worked to rule. Finally came the deepest doubt of all. I began to doubt my own motives. It was something I overheard—a man talking
about me in anger. He said I was bossy, and, you know, I realized that he was right. All my social purpose—just bossiness and wanting to tell people what to do. Like Gertrude, I had to go on. That was my job, and I was in the middle of too many things. I had to live in the moment, and hope that I was right. But the doubts would always be waiting for me when I was tired or things were turning out badly.”