Cain’s Book (20 page)

When I had taken a shower I left the hotel again and made my way on foot into Soho where I dined at a small French restaurant. Walking down Charing Cross Road afterwards I experienced a pleasant
glow from the wine I had drunk. At Leicester Square I hesitated. I wondered whether after all I should have contacted someone. What to do now? For the moment I didn’t feel like drinking any
more and it was still relatively early. I was vaguely regretting having come to London instead of going directly to Le Havre. If I had done so I would already have been aboard. The ship had
probably docked by this time at Southampton. But what the hell, what did it matter? A man should be able to waste time without being seized with anxiety.

The rain was falling steadily, making the streets glisten. A taxi raising little streams of water at its wheels turned the corner in front of me and moved towards the bright lights at the busy
part of the square. I hesitated a moment longer and then followed after it. – See a film, might as well. There was nothing else to do.

I entered the cinema and went straight to the cloakroom. The girl took my raincoat and hung it on a peg. The cloth of her uniform was shiny; big buttocks of a red mare. She returned unsmiling
with the coat check. I walked over the pearl-grey carpet towards the three crimson usherettes who stood with chromium-plated flashlights before the swing doors of the auditorium, big, tight-skirted
girls with golden buttons and neat pageboy caps. Two brunettes, one blonde. The smaller of the brunettes tore my ticket in half and guided me down the aisle with her flashlight. I passed in front
of seven pairs of knees to my seat. A man with glasses and thin pale hair sat on my left. The girl on my right glanced at me and then back at the screen as I sat down. She was about twenty-two. On
the screen were depicted some Asians and a flame-thrower and some burning corpses, grilled guerrillas, five hundred of them according to the commentator, being flushed from their nest. I glanced
beyond the girl. The old woman at the far side of her was obviously not with her. She was putting a sweet into her mouth. When I glanced back across the profile of the girl to the screen a stick of
bombs seemed to slip from the gaping belly of a bomber and the camera tilted downward towards the eruption. Smoke and amorphousness. The commentator said that according to the latest
communiqué the mopping up phase of the battle was over and a big push could be expected soon. The news ended with a close-up of HM the Queen in the uniform of Colonel of the Coldstream
Guards. A cartoon in Technicolour came onto the screen. It was as though a weight were suddenly lifted from the audience. The girl beside me moved her leg. In the faint glimmer of coloured light
her naked ankles were very pale. As the colours within the beam shifted the paleness was tinted with green and the skin seemed to move. The alcohol had made me feel warm and outgoing, and I
experienced a vague lust. It was pleasant to imagine her amazing white arse and the very soft skin of the insides of her thighs. She would speak over-correctly as many English girls do, at least
until I got my fingers between her legs, and then she would be hotter than hell, as many English girls become when they are groped, and possibly clumsy, probably, and I remembered Charlie’s
observing in retrospect how much cleaner all French women were about the cunt than English women (girls), Anglo-Saxon women generally, how a French woman’s vitals would be sweet to the taste,
while with those of an Englishwoman one risked being confronted with a holy sepulchre, a repository for relics, as in an altar, forged somewhere in the gas-inhabited foundry of the girl’s
unconscious, under centuries of propriety, if I took his meaning. Not that he wished to make a value judgement. Not him. Tastes differed. Look at Henri Quatre of France, who advised his mistresses
three weeks beforehand to omit their ablutions. The cat on the screen had just received the lower part of a window on the back of its neck and was seeing stars. The mighty mouse was stepping
backwards with his hands on his hips into a trap which was sibilantly reflected in one of the stars the cat with one evil eye saw. A charming housewife, entering the room as though she expected it
to delight her, saw the plight of the mouse and saved him in the nick of time. Having done so she espied the suffering cat. She tapped her high-heeled toe and moved menacingly towards him where he
was staggering about, recovering, and with the rolling pin she happened to be carrying near her pretty apron she struck the cat a ninety-degree blow on top of the skull, causing him to fold up like
a concertina, and, as like a spring he opened, she belted him one on the kidneys and sent him through a splintering window and by the neck into a neat crotch of branches in a tree. The narrator
left us there in the daze of the starry-eyed cat. As the silk drapes moved majestically across the massive screen a multicoloured Wurlitzer rose like a whale from the sea, and the organist, rising
with it in white tie and tails, drew from it a few spectacular bars of Rachmaninoff before falling into the enthusiastic melody of ‘I Want to Be Happy’
²⁹
... When he had run through that he took a bow and announced that he wanted the audience to accompany him with the words. This promised to be very painful indeed. I remembered
it was the practice for it to go on for about ten minutes with the words of the songs and the beats projected on the screen and I looked quickly at the girl at my side. No visible discomfort. She
appeared to be interested in the distant stalls in all directions. I debated for a moment whether or not to offer her my opera glasses and decided against it. See the film, go to bed. I would have
a couple of drinks at the hotel and go to sleep easily. I didn’t really want her. A cunt was a cunt, and she could be little more for me in the short time at my disposal. I began to repress
all movements which might have elicited a response on her part. Not now. Not again. Early in the morning I was leaving London for Southampton and New York. And although from the moment I had
arrived at Victoria I had been overcome by a sense of isolation, from time to time almost nauseous in intensity, and though it was to kill time I had entered the cinema, I couldn’t at that
moment face getting to know another human being, or rather, not getting to know another human being... at best it had been like the perfect correlation of Leibniz’s clocks.
³⁰
Stopped by my own exaggeration I sat through the main feature and left immediately after it. Walking back to the hotel I was accosted by a woman as I turned into a
side street. I apologized and as I moved away she offered to lower her price; she asked me what I could afford. I couldn’t think of anything to say and walked on in the rain back to the
hotel.

Through the swing doors and into the vast reception hall. It was like a burnt-out world; in the stale atmosphere the hanging smells of cigarette smoke, ash, the lingering scents of women and
men, all pale and in its dimmed brightness empty, a Romanesque cathedral with a fitted carpet, lined near the street with model display windows of dressmakers, perfumeries and haberdashers, all
dimly and discreetly lit at that hour which was the very witching hour of night. A few night porters stood about, a liftman, the night clerk behind his desk talking to a full-bodied young woman in
a black dress, heavily made up in the manner of managerial assistants in large, commercial hotels. Everyone seemed to be talking in whispers as though a funeral cortège were about to descend
the main stairway. I crossed the hall to the lounge where drinks were served after hours to residents only. That is one of the privileges of being a registered guest in a London hotel. A number of
provincial businessmen were still scattered about the lounge, talking with intense gesticulations over late drinks. The apple-green basket chairs were shabby at that hour and the lounge smells were
similar to those in the hall. A vague pantry smell emanated from the green-baize-covered swing door through which the waitresses came and went. One of them, a tired powdered woman of about sixty
with a blue wen
³¹
on her cheek and wearing a faded black dress, served me. Afterwards, she stood at a short distance with her empty tray, her old face
twisted in concentration as with the fixed and hypocritically innocent smirk of the eavesdropper she overheard the conversation between three commercial travellers from the north. It occurred to me
that they, unlike me, were in London for a reason, and I began to think of the voyage.

I had travelled so often and in so many directions that I was bored at the mere thought of it. Moreover, this particular voyage had a more than usually sinister aspect; not only was I unable to
produce for myself a convincing reason for going to the United States, I was tolerably certain there wasn’t one; no reason, that is, other than the fact that neither could I find one for
remaining in Paris, nor for going anywhere else. On previous voyages I had at least gone through the motions of satisfying myself that I should go here or there, even if the journey were for its
own sake like a trip to Spain for the bullfights; but in this instance I had no means of knowing what my experience would be. And as a man was not a piece of litmus paper to register this or that
property of the objective world – even as litmus paper was finally expended with too much immersion – I was sceptical of the value of going to another new place and facing an entirely
new set of objective conditions. I would notice them effectively or I wouldn’t. If I did, I might widen my experience without deepening it. In travel, as in all things, there is a law of
diminishing returns. And if I didn’t, my experience might be drastically short.

During the last year in Paris I had drifted away from my former acquaintances. I could no longer share a common purpose with them. I had spent most of that year in a small room in Montparnasse,
going from it to play pinball or to distract myself with a woman. This room had three sides and one large studio window which looked out over the projecting roof of basement studios onto a high
grey wall which cut off all view of the sky and of the summer sun. It was like living in the box in the kitchen in Glasgow when I was a child. I spent more and more time in the room. I can remember
lying on my back on the bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of Beckett, and saying aloud for my own edification: “Why go out when you have a bed and a floor and a sink and a window and a
table and a chair and many other things here in this very room? After all, you’re not a collector...”

It was in that room I had begun to write
Cain’s Book
, the notes for which took up a disproportionate amount of space in my only suitcase, and which I was carrying to America with
me.

“Another drink, sir?” The waitress was speaking to me. The commercial travellers were getting up from their table.

“Yes please.”

“That was Scotch and water, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

At a certain age, looking back over the past, I began to wonder how much, except in a purely negative way when they presented themselves as limits, objective conditions really affected me.
Certainly, for as long as I could remember, I had been selective of what was external to me, and not merely, I think, in the sense that all perception is selective; sometimes, and unconsciously, I
had excluded “facts” with which every one of my immediate acquaintance was familiar, facts which I should consciously have judged to be vital to my own well-being if I had been aware of
them. For example, in the two instances in which I had lived with women in a full-hearted way, it was a friend who drew my attention to the fact that my wife had deserted me six months ago. I
remembered saying: “No, you’re wrong, man. She’s coming back,” and then suddenly realizing that she wasn’t, couldn’t come back, because in a dimly conscious way
I had been organizing my life to exclude her, from the moment she had left me. And yet I was not quite wrong, because what was left out of the present situation as described by my friend was my own
will, which, it startled me to see, he left quite out of account. And then I realized that in presenting myself as up till that time unconscious of my wife’s desertion of me I had all the
time demanded of him that he should ignore my will, which he saw very well, as something external to him, and fairly predictable. My momentary annoyance that he should think of me as predictable he
perhaps excused in me as my friend, at the same time excusing himself, no doubt, for excusing me who he knew stood in no dire need of excuse, since nothing is predictable which is not
externalized.

Sitting there in the deserted lounge reminded me of the smoke room in downtown Glasgow where my father used to sit and while away the long hours of the afternoon. I thought that my father would
be alone now, that he would have turned on the light in his room... it was nearly midnight... and would be alone. The last time I had seen him was at the funeral of my uncle who, running after a
tramcar, was suddenly on his knees, arms akimbo as his heart burst.

The coffin had brass fittings and smelt of varnish. It was supported by scrubbed deal wood trestles in the middle of the parlour, and it dominated the room as an altar
dominates a small church, the wine curtains pillars, and over it all was the smell of flowers and death and varnish – like the smell of pine cones – which set the mourners at a distance
from the dead man far more utterly than his mere dying had. The smell pervaded the whole house, met one at the door, and as the mourners arrived in their white collars and black ties, shaking their
hands, talking in hushed tones, nodding to others distantly known, it had descended on them, crystallizing their emotion, and drawn them inexorably towards the room given over to death.

I watched from a distance as the coffin was lowered into the grave, tilting, from silk cords, and then, following the example of the others, I threw some sod on the lid of the coffin, a flat
hollow sound from distended fingers, rain on canvas, a chuckle of despair. Afterwards, the mourners moved back into groups and the clergyman led a prayer; a small man with a bald head who had
donned his trappings at the graveside, and when, without music, he broke nervously with his small voice into the 121st Psalm and the mourners took it up, their voices ineffectually suspended like a
wind-thinned pennant between earth and sky, I glanced directly at my father and for a moment we seemed to understand one another. My father dropped his eyes first, involuntarily, and I looked
beyond the mourners across the green slope where the grey and white gravestones, sunk in the sod at all angles, jutted upwards like broken teeth.