Earthly Powers (11 page)

       There were not many on the Hastings train, and I had a compartment to myself. I was travelling back to my youth via Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells, Frant, Stonegate, Etchingham, Robertsbridge, via defecting Val and two boys I had myself betrayed, the young man met on a station platform who had given me a look to which I had responded and about which I had been mistaken and who had shouted aloud and made me scurry off scarlet and trembling. I was travelling back to the origin of it all, my back turned for the moment (for I preferred perversely to sit facing the engine) to a future I did not care to think about.

       I had been seduced at the age of fourteen in, of all places, the city where Father Callaghan's cousin was to be hanged. Not at the Thomas More Memorial School, where there were ravening priests enough and an Irish headmaster who did his share of cautious fumbling, but in a fair city which regularly exported its sexual perverts to London and Paris. We were all there in Ireland that June of my fourteenth birthday, Mother, Father, little Hortense and growing Tom, myself in a school blazer and flannel trousers and a blue cap with a TMMS badge in yellow stitching. For the evening I had a stiff grown-up-style suit that was becoming short in the leg. We stayed in the Dolphin Hotel. My father was taking his annual holiday early because he could find no locum tenens for July or August; also Tom had had severe bronchitis and had been recommended a quiet couple of weeks by the sea. My father had once enjoyed a stay in Kingstown, now called Dun Laoghaire, and my mother was curious to see an English-speaking Catholic capital. She had also read Les Voyages de Gulliver and been moved by the brief account of Swift's life prefixed to the edition she had. We stayed some days, as I remember, in Wicklow and then in Dublin before moving north to Balbriggan.

       I was tired of poor still-coughing Tom and my noisy drawer-wetting little sister. My parents proposed a trip to the Phoenix Park; I elected to stay in the hotel, though the weather was gorgeous, and read an old bound Boy's Own Paper I had picked up for twopence on a bookstall. So I sat in the lounge of the Dolphin, sucked lemon toffee, read. I was alone there. From the bar came hearty noise, Dublin being a bibulous town. And then there was a man sitting quietly beside me. He was in early middle age (thirty-seven, as I was to discover later), bearded, wearing curious clothes that, again later, I found out were homespun. He had a rather pleasant smell of peat and peppermint overlaid with Irish whiskey (I knew even then the difference between Irish and scotch) and he seemed desirous of talking.

       He said, "Reading, I see. But would you not consider it to be very trashy stuff?" For he could see it was the Boy's Own Paper.

       "I like it. The stories are exciting."

       "Yes, inculcating the imperial virtues, games and discipline and cold baths in a cold dawn. And all but the British very comic, comic niggers and froggies and even micks and paddies. Amn't I right?"

       "Well, yes." I couldn't help smiling. What he said was a plausible, if biassed, summary of the ethos of the B. O. P.

       "But you're young, of course, and out for excitement and not much concerned with the world as it truly is. How old would you be?"

       "Nearly fourteen. Fourteen a week from today."

       "A fine age to be, my boy, and the world before you. And there will be changes in your life, you will see." He had a pleasant soft voice with blurred consonants. "It will be a different world from what the trash you are reading bids you believe is the fixed and unchanging one. But never mind, never mind. In youth is pleasure." He searched in his pockets for something, perhaps a pipe or snuffbpx, and came up with a drawing of a pig lined like a map with frontiers and named regions—hock, ham, saddle and so on. "The Pig's Paper they call the journal I edit, not at all like the one you're reading. Our friend Sus scroja, Ireland's friend, the gintleman that pays the rent. I'm in damnable need of a wash and brush-up," he then said. "Are you staying in the hotel? A room of your own? Who's with you?" I told him of the Phoenix Park outing. "A bathroom up there, is there? I don't know the upper regions. I should be grateful if you'd show me the way."

       So I took him upstairs and, to cut a long story short, he came into my room to borrow my comb for his beard, and said, all glowing from his wash, "Now there's just time to show you a bit of Irish wrestling from the County Meath, for I'm due soon at the offices of the Homestead. Now this we do stripped, as we may well do on a warm day like today. So strip then and I'll show you some of the holds." One of the holds involved what I was to learn later was called fellation, a term not found in the B. O. P. nor, for that matter, in any dictionary of the time. There seemed to be no Irish name for it, though this pigman used the word blathach for what was stimulated to burst and flow. He gave me a shilling for myself before leaving and said, "Now you may resume reading your imperialistic trash, though I'll wager it will seem less exciting after today." And, smiling kindly, he went.

       Jim Joyce devoted a whole big novel to the Dublin day on which I was seduced. I have never been able to take this book seriously, as I told him myself in Paris. All the inner broodings and exterior acts of the work seem so innocent. I remember none of the public events described or reported—the viceregal cavalcade (though I seem to recall a distant military band shrilling and thudding), the charity bazaar fireworks, news about the sinking of the General Slocum in the East River and Throwaway winning the Ascot Gold Cup at very long odds, nor the evening rain nor the heaventree of stars appearing later hung with humid nightblue fruit. My mother that evening stayed in with the younger children; my father took me to see an excessively dull melodrama called Leah.

       I said to Joyce in a bar in Paris in 1924: "Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library."

       "I wouldn't want to call you a liar," Joyce said, his eyes as cloudy as the ghastly cocktail he had before him (absinthe with kümmel in lieu of water), "but I'd always thought Russell more likely to commit sodomy with a pig than a boy. Ach, the world is full of surprises."

       I liked Jim Joyce but not his demented experiments with language. He threw away the chance of becoming a great novelist in the great tradition of Stendhal. He was always trying to make literature a substitute for religion. But we met in an area of nostalgie. His common-law wife Nora was a strong-minded and strong-jawed woman who would not put up for long with his nonsense. I took him back drunk one day, and Nora was waiting for him like thunder. As soon as the door shut I could hear the hitting begin.

CHAPTER 14

I walked from Battle station to my father's combined surgery and residence on the High Street, a stone's throw from the abbey. A railway porter going off duty walked two hundred yards behind me, singing, to the tune of "Pretty Redwing": "Oh the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin, His boots are cracking For want of blacking, And his little baggy trousers they'll want mending Before they send him To the Dardanelles."

       I arrived. There was a holly wreath encircling the door-knocker. I knocked and was benignly pricked. Then I heard my sister Hortense running, calling, "It's him, I know it's him." And then I was encircled by arms and the odours of home.

       The smells of that time, the smell of that time. I have always cherished the smells of places and eras. Singapore—hot dishrags and cat piss. Moscow builder's size and the unflushed stools of the smokers of cheap cigars. Dublin roasting coffee which turns out to be roasting barley. The whole of 1916 had a mingled smell of unaired rooms, unwashed socks, bloody khaki, musty mufti, the rotting armpits of women's dresses, margarine, cheap gaspers made of floorsweepings, floors swept with the aid of damp tea leaves. It was a very an-American smell, one might say. The smell of my father's house, however, mingled the neutral surgical and the Anglo-French domestic. As I entered I met the ghost of a gigot for dinner, well-garlicked, and caramel, and hovering over the distracted faint fumes of cocaine and nitrous oxide. The two worlds met in the aroma of oil of cloves. And then there was my mother, the familiar odour of a red wine on her breath (like the priest bending with the host at the altar rail) and the delicate envelope of eau de cologne.

       "What a surprise, what a lovely surprise," said Hortense, who adored me. "You said you wouldn't be coming till the twenty-first."

       "I got Mother's letter this afternoon. And then I thought: Why not now? There was nothing to keep me in London." My eyes pricked.

       "Lonely, a lonely place," said my mother with her deep voice. And my father, in his alpaca house jacket, watch chain flashing on his growing paunch, smiled from a kind of shy distance. We were now in the parlour, where a fire of pearwood explained another delicious odour I had not been able to place. Hortense, home from school, had festooned the room with paper chains. Holly and mistletoe and ivy. A Christmas tree in the corner with little dangerous candles not yet to be lighted.

       "Belated happy birthday," I said to Hortense. I took the parcel out of my bag.

       "A book, I can tell," she said, but without rancour. "Always a book."

       "I'm only rich in books," I said. "Review copies at that. But it's the thought that counts, so they tell me." Hortense's present was a new edition of The Diary of a Nobody. We needed laughter in those days, but we had to go to the Victorians for it. Oh, there was W. W. Jacobs, there was P. G. Wodehouse, but their humour was thin with a touch of the defensive about it, an apology for purveying the stuff of escape.

       "You must be starved," my father said. I shook my head, I could not trust myself to speak. "Perhaps you could give him a cut off the cold gigot," he said to my mother. I shook my head vigorously. My mother appraised me with solemn brown eyes. Being a woman, she saw more than my father saw. I wish I could see her clearly now, but all I can see is an elongated fashion plate of the time—the long brown dress low-waisted, unfrivolous in deference to a period that badly needed true frivolity, not the gruesome insouciance of the politicians and the General Staff, the pearls that had belonged to her Aunt Charlotte, the soft brown greying hair up-piled.

       She said, "I think you are not very happy there. You seem to me thin and tired. You do not have to be in London in order to write. You were happier working on the Hastings newspaper. At least you were home each night and also well fed."

       "It's a question of being close to the literary life," I said. It was, of course, untrue. It was a question of, a matter of, it was.

       "We're very proud and so on," my father said, shaking his head, "but it's not a profession. We've been talking about it, your mother and I."

       "Oh come, Dad," I said, "you can't take a university degree or a licentiate and set up as a writer with a brass plate, but it's as honourable a profession as drawing teeth."

       "How are your teeth, by the way?"

       "Splendid," I said, showing them. "Mother," I said, turning to her graceful solemnity, "you'd not denigrate Flaubert and Balzac and Hugo? I want to be like them."

       "I do not read novels," she said. "I read yours, naturally, but that is different. That first one of yours. Mrs Hanson took it from the circulating library and was rude to me about it. Of course, because I am French she thinks I have brought you up to be immoral."

       "Sister Agnes," said Hortense, in her clear young candid voice, "said it was very artificial and was obviously by a very young man. She said it was not believable."

       "Sister Agnes is," I said, "a very shrewd critic."

       "Oh she is, she's always criticising."

       "You look extenué, Kenneth," my mother said. "I will make cocoa for all of us, and then we shall go to bed. Your room is always ready for you but I will put in a hot water bottle. There is all tomorrow for talking."

       "And the next day and the next," said Hortense. "Oh, it's lovely to have you home." Hortense, her hair in what was to be called by Yeats honey-coloured ramparts at her ear, promised great beauty. She had a slight venerean strabismus and a strong straight French nose. Then she said, "Heimat. A lovely word." There was a brief breath of embarrassment from my parents.

       My mother said, "If you would not speak German in the house, Hortense, I should be much happier."

       "Now you're getting like the other parents," said Hortense. "Sister Gertrude says that to blame the German language for the war is like blaming German sausage. Anyway, there are still three of us doing German. And we're reading a book by Hermann Hesse, and he's a pacifist in Switzerland or somewhere. Is that wrong?"

       "Henry James stopped taking walks with his dachshund," I said. "And even the royal family had to change its name. It's all very stupid."

       "If you were French—" began my mother.

       "I'm half French."

       "That reminds me," said my father. "Talking of Mr James, I mean. There's something that was sent over from Rye for you." He put on his nipnose glasses and went out.

       My mother said, "Cocoa. And a hot bottle." And went out too. Hortense smiled at me with a girl's radiance. The madness of it all was that if there was any girl to whom I could feel attracted it was Hortense. My capacity for love was hedged in by all the thundering edicts of Moses.

       "You promise fair," I said ridiculously. "I mean, don't let them make you all burly and beefy and land-army. Hockey and so on." She blushed. "Sorry," I said.

       She said, blushing deeper—it was as if the blush already there for one cause might as well be used for another—"Do you have affairs in London?"

       "I get on with my work," I said. "Such as it is. I can't afford affairs. I mean, affairs begin with dinner and wine and candlelight and continue in commodious apartments. I live in one room and sleep in the smell of gas-ring cookery."