Hangover Square (15 page)

They were round at Mickey’s playing poker – Mickey’s mother’s flat with its ground-floor dining-room looking out on the Square. There were Peter, Mickey, Netta, himself and the horrible, wise-cracking, self-consciously dour little Scotsman McCrae, a newcomer but insolently sure of himself.

As usual, he, George, was losing, and as usual doubling up to recover his losses, and as usual losing more. By about ten o’clock he gave in and said he would ‘watch’. Then they wanted to send him out to get sandwiches and bottles of beer. But at first he wouldn’t. He was secretly angry at losing: they had got all his money: and now they wanted to send him out like an errand boy. They had done this before: he always lost and he was always the errand boy, and they thought they could treat him how they liked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m going to play again in a moment. Let’s all go round if we want anything.’

There was a chorus of disapproval at this. ‘Oh – put a sock in
‘It.’ – ‘Be a pal.’ – ‘If you’re not playing why can’t you be useful?’ etc. But he stuck to his guns, and at last Netta spoke.

‘Please don’t be a fool, George,’ she said. ‘Do what you’re told and behave yourself. I’m thirsty.’

They all cheered applause at this, but he still stuck to his guns, and at last Mickey said he would go. There was then a lot more argument and finally, because Mickey had at least made a gesture, he gave in. He knew he was a fool and a weakling to do so, but they were too much for him. Together they were always too much for him.

Snubbed, isolated, yet obedient, he went round in the velvety night to the ‘Black Hart’, and with the deliberate intention of keeping them waiting at any rate he had two drinks on his own. Then he bought a pile of sandwiches and three quart bottles and went back.

When he reached the house there was another car besides Peter’s outside the door, and they were all leaving. Mickey’s cousin, a little moustached man much resembling Mickey, called Gerald (whom he had met once before) had arrived on the scene and they were all going off to drink somewhere else with him. He didn’t know where they were going, but he got a seat in the front with this Gerald, who was driving. They didn’t want the sandwiches or beer now, because Gerald had brought some whisky, which they were swilling from the top of a thermos flask.

He never knew where exactly they landed up, but it was somewhere in the suburbs – Chiswick or Acton or somewhere like that – in a smallish house in a long row of other houses. They made a lot of noise, so much so that an old woman shouted at them from a window, which caused a lot of hilarity and backchat. Then they were taken into a front room where there were sandwiches and lots to drink. Somebody had got married or won a sweepstake, or both, or something. Anyway, there was lots to drink, and that was why Gerald had brought them round. There were several strangers, and they were all soon screaming and yelling drunk. Somewhere in all this they got to playing hide-and-seek all over the darkened house, and then came the cupboard.

It was in a bedroom upstairs, and he was floundering about for a place to hide. He pulled the door open, and saw them there, Netta and Peter, clearly in the watery light from a lamp in the street outside. He kept his head – thank God – he kept his head.

‘Ah-ha – engaged I see,’ he said casually, jovially as though he had seen nothing of what was going on, as though they were strangers, and he closed the door on them at once, and floundered out of the room. His reaction had been as quick as lightning: they couldn’t have known he had seen anything. They must have thought that he thought they were another couple. That was his one consolation, then, as it was now – the one little thing that saved his pride.

When he got out of the room he found his way to the top of the house, and sat on the stairs in the pitch darkness. Netta and Peter! All the time, and he hadn’t known it! Netta and Peter! How they must have been hooting with laughter at him, from the beginning. He would never have believed it. So that was it. Well, it was all over now. He was through now. He sat on the stairs, stunned by the shock and anaesthetized by drink, and believed he was almost glad, because now he was through.

After a while the lights went on downstairs – the game was over, and the drunk was proceeding. He wanted to remain on the stairs, thinking it all over, but he decided he must put a face on it. Somehow, sometime, he would get his own back, so long as they never knew he knew. Later, somehow, when they least expected it, he would drop a remark casually showing he had known all the time, showing that he had been wise to them, showing that he didn’t care and never had cared. Not now –
later
– when he was somehow on
top
, when he had found another girl. He would have to find another girl – he would have to
pretend
to find one.

He went downstairs and got himself another drink. Peter was getting one at the same time, and he spoke to him, showing nothing on his face, giving away nothing in his voice. Netta was in the room, but he couldn’t look at her. She would find out if he looked at or spoke to her.

Soon everything went screaming mad – a woman fell into a
lamp-stand and was hurt, Mickey put the lamp-shade on his head, and a few moments afterwards staggered upstairs to be sick. He went up and helped Mickey out, and when they came down it was felt that the party was over.

In the car going back he again sat in front with Gerald, and Peter and Netta sat behind with an intoxicated boy of about twenty-one to whom they were giving a lift, and who sang most of the time – sang while Peter and Netta were silent – cupboard-silent. Every now and again he could see them in the reflector, Peter’s mouth crushed on hers and her knee raised in response and pleasure… Then they would join in the singing, and then they would be silent again… They thought they were fooling him: they didn’t realize there was the reflector. Or didn’t they care? Both, probably. They were drunk of course…

They dropped Netta off at her flat, and he and Peter got out at the station. He went to the coffee stall with Peter and ate sandwiches with him. Peter bought some sandwiches in a bag, and they said good night. Then, trembling with the cold of the night and his fear, he tracked Peter along the Earl’s Court Road and saw him go to Netta’s flat. Peter let himself in at the front door with the big key which Netta gave you when you went shopping for her.

He saw a light behind Netta’s curtains. So that was that. He wanted to hang about, but it was too cold. They were warm and comfy for the night, and he wasn’t going to hang about in the cold. They had left him out in the cold. The long, warm, spring evening had ended in deathly cold at two o’clock and he had to get to bed. He had his hangover to face in the morning.

Chapter Two

The odd thing was that that hangover was not as predicted. When he awoke and remembered, instead of groaning pain he had a funny feeling of calm, of release. He had a feeling only of having behaved well and wisely in drink for once. He had kept his head: he had not given himself or his dignity away: he had
established a perfect alibi. They knew nothing: he knew everything. In an odd, inverted way, he felt top dog.

But there was something else, too. There was a sense of release from Netta. By giving herself to Peter she had made herself something other than what she was before – something cheaper, more human, more bestial, less agonizingly inaccessible. Inaccessible to him, of course, but not inaccessible. Instead of being jealous of Peter, he was in a manner grateful to him: he had brought her down to the sordid level of Peter – and on that level she did not hurt so much. She wasn’t violets and primroses in an April rain any more: she was a woman in bed with a nasty man in Earl’s Court. Good for Peter.

Could this mood hold? Was he what they called ‘disgusted’, and had he a chance of getting out of love with her now?

To his surprise it had seemed for a little that there was a possibility of this. He went round and met them that morning, went and had drinks at the ‘Black Hart’, and amazed himself by his coolness. He looked at them both as he talked to them; he thought of what he now knew about them; and all he was aware of was the change in the quality of his feelings towards Netta. She was still lovely; he still wanted her: but now he didn’t want her in the same mad, adoring way. He wanted her only in the way that Peter (and the other men on whom she had no doubt bestowed her favours) wanted her. She was something to be had by men, and as such he could do without her. Or so he believed.

Indeed, after a few drinks that morning, his soul began to smile to itself. It smiled both at this change in his feelings and at the secret knowledge he had of the real facts. He was happier than he had been for months. He was cheerful, almost sparkling. He bought most of the drinks, rallied the sick and repentant Mickey, looked Netta in the eye, and challenged Peter at darts. ‘You’re in very good form this morning,’ Netta said. And this made him smile inwardly all the more, for it showed how completely he had succeeded in hiding his new knowledge from their sight. It was beyond even Netta’s shrewdness to know that he was cheerful because he had found out that she had slept with another man.

He believed, that cheerful morning, that he was through with this filthy gang, that before long he would be rising from this sad circle in hell in which he had been condemned to wander so long. And although, when the evening came, he was no longer cheerful, and had to try and quell the first sickening pangs of physical jealousy and outraged pride, he still contrived to believe that something good, not bad, had befallen, and a few drinks put him right and made him cheerful again.

Eerie days followed. He made a point of going round and drinking with them, of seeing them as much as ever – of behaving normally. Only in such a way could he preserve, for the time being, his secret and his pride. But he found, as he had hoped he would, that the longing as it was before, the old sense of having to hang dog-like on her doorstep, was beginning ever so faintly to fade. He would find himself not ringing her up for forty-eight hours or more, he would find himself staying up in Town all day, he would find himself going to the Kensington movie of an evening without consulting anybody, and walking back down the Earl’s Court Road and having a cup of tea at the coffee-stall and going to bed.

Then one day, more or less by accident, he got a copy of
David Copperfield
out of the Kensington public library. He had read it years and years ago, and he thought he might try it again. He took it as a good sign that he could even think of reading again, and the experiment was a huge success. He became absorbed in the long book, which almost robbed his life of its bleakness and loneliness in the warm sunny days which followed. The warmth of the weather and
David Copperfield
seemed to conspire together to give him peace of mind. He would sometimes go to bed at nine o’clock, before it was dark, and read
David Copperfield
.

Chapter Three

He began to feel better in himself, to think of taking a ‘holiday’, of going somewhere and getting some bathing and golf. He began to think of health and sobriety as a practical proposition. Among other things he noticed that his ‘dead’ moods had been less frequent recently, and he thought this might be because he was drinking less and not leading such a rackety life. He had had an awful bout of those moods round about and just after Christmas – in fact, they had really begun to scare the life out of him – but now, with the warm weather and
David Copperfield
, they seemed to be passing away.

There were some days when he thought about Netta scarcely at all, and some days when he thought about nothing else. That was all over, he told himself, but he had to go on seeing her and Peter to save his pride and dignity. And he didn’t know whether he was lying to himself, and just seeing her because he still couldn’t keep away from her.

Then one day, when Peter was away in Yorkshire, she phoned him up (
she
phoned
him
up!) and asked him to come round. She had had a threatening and semi-blackmailing letter from a small dressmaker, and she wanted him to help her. He went round and saw the woman and settled the matter out of his own pocket. That evening she gave him some drinks in her flat, and let it be seen that he might take her out to dinner if he cared. He took her out. She did not insist on Perrier’s and they went to a small, cheap place in Soho.

It had been fatal, of course. He had tried to think that it hadn’t been, that it hadn’t set him going again, but he knew by now that it had. Sitting opposite her in that little, quiet place, was like the old days – those three weeks just after he had first met her, when he had fondly imagined that she had no background, no drunken mob, no Peter behind her. She was wildly, wildly, lovely that night. He looked across the table at her, and she was violets and primroses again. He couldn’t help it. He just couldn’t be bothered about Peter and what he knew. Peter was away – a
thing of the past – or at any rate not of the immediate present – and Netta was Netta again.

Then there was one remark she had made which had set him going. He couldn’t remember the context, but he could remember the words exactly. ‘On the contrary, my dear Bone,’ she had said, you’re very much more presentable these days.’ That had set him going. He took it back to bed with him that night, and it haunted his nights and days. Was it possible that if he pulled himself together, if he smoked and drank less, he might still have a chance of getting her? If Peter had had her, why shouldn’t he? She was to be had, after all. Couldn’t he be a man, and pull himself together, and get her? Not that he really wanted her immediately in that way. He wanted to have her for ever, to love and marry her and live in the country. But if he could get her that way, that would be the first step, that would be something. Besides, if he could get her that way, he might fall out of love with her. Things happened like that.

He began to dream and scheme again, and that meant that he went back to drinking.