Jerusalem the Golden (4 page)

And when they got back to the bar, Clara did indeed inscribe her name and address and Common Room telephone number upon a page of Clelia’s unbelievably occupied diary; they had no time to exchange further intimacies, as Sebastian Denham was there and waiting to drive his daughter home, and ready to be annoyed by the delay that she had caused him.

‘I haven’t got your number,’ said Clara, as she departed. ‘Oh, mine,’ said Clelia, ‘it’s in the book.’

And Clara, living as she did, in the floating insubstantial bed-sitter student world, had not so much as thought of the book. It seemed
very wonderful to her, that people could live in London, and live there long enough to have a number in the book.

And as she went home that night she knew that she was sure that Clelia would at some point ring her. She knew, moreover, that she had found something that she had been looking for, and that events would prove the significance of her discovery: she wondered only at the means of her recognition. The fact of it never ceased to astound her, and she would return over the ground constantly, searching for marks, for tracks and breaths and sighs and trodden grass and names and cloudy indications, because she could not forget that she had not recognized it at once, that it had required on her part some keenness of perception, some chancy courage, to see it: and she breathed perpetually an air of terror, a cold air of chance, an air in which she might for the whole of her life have missed it, marginally perhaps, but missed it and for ever.

Because there was nothing in Clara’s past that would seem to have fitted her for such recognitions: she was not bred to it. And when she reflected, as she frequently did, upon what she had been bred to, she was profoundly puzzled by her own origins. Her birth, as far as she could see, had been accidental; no careful well-intended deity could have selected for her her own home. But she did not like to admit the accidental, for if her birth was the effect of chance, so then was her escape; the same arbitrary law that had produced her might well have blinded her at the most crucial moments of her life, and left her forever desiring, forever missing, never achieving, an eternal misfit. She had seen people like this. She had no confidence that time would bring with it inevitable growth: she grew by will and by strain. As a child, she was always deeply affected by the story of the sower who sowed his seeds, and some fell by the wayside, and some on stony ground and some fell among the thorns, and some fell upon good ground and bore fruit. This story was a favourite of the headmistress of her primary school, so she heard it often at Morning Prayers, and long before she could see it as a parable, she already felt shock before its injustice. The random scattering of seeds, and, how much worse, of human souls, appalled her. As she grew older, she looked upon herself, tragically, defiantly, with all the hopelessness of fourteen years, as a plant trying to root itself upon the solid rock, without water, without earth, without shade: and then, when a little older yet, when conscious of some growth, she had to concede that she must have fallen happily upon some small dry sandy fissure, where a few grains of sand, a few drops of moisture, had been enough to support her trembling and tenacious life. Because she would live, she would survive.

It always amazed her to see that other people could live so comfortably upon such barren territory. Northam was to her the very image of unfertile ground, and yet other people lived there and stayed there when they had money in the bank and legs to walk away on. She hated her home town with such violence that when she returned each vacation from University, she would shake and tremble with an ashamed and feverish fear. She hated it, and she was afraid of it, because she doubted her power to escape; even after two years in London, she still thought that her brain might go or that her nerve might snap, and that she would be compelled to return, feebly, defeated, to her mother’s house. She was so constantly braced, her will so stiff from desire, that she could not sleep at nights; she feared that if she fell asleep she might lose her determination and her faith, might wake up alone in her narrow bed, in the small back bedroom, overlooking the small square garden, backing onto the next small square garden, where for so many years she had lain and dreamed her subversive dreams. She was frightened of this: and also she was frightened of her mother.

Her father was dead. He was killed on a pedestrian crossing when Clara was sixteen. Those who took an interest in Clara might have seen in his death the loss of an ally, because outwardly at least he appeared to be more intelligent than his wife; at least he did not scorn in public, as she did, all efforts of the mind, and all the aims of education. But in fact he had never been particularly sympathetic towards Clara, and paid but a feeble and superficial attention to her progress. He did not like children; he did not much like anything. He took slightly more interest in his two sons, Arthur and Alan, but not through any natural preference for them; it was simply that with them he knew better what questions should be asked. His work, which he pursued at the Town Hall, was never mentioned in the house, and as far as Clara could gather it was mathematical, highly respectable, and highly dull. When people asked Mrs Maugham where her daughter got her brains from, she would sniff and shrug her shoulders and say, as though disclaiming a vice or a disease, ‘Well, she certainly didn’t get them from me, she must have got them from
him
, I suppose’ – a remark which Clara took years to
place, in all its ambiguity, for the truth was that Mrs Maugham had done well at school, she had shone and prospered, and the evidence of her distant triumphs still lay around the house in the form of inscribed Sunday School prizes. But whatever talents she had once had, she had now turned ferociously against them, whereas her husband did still pay a curious self-willed homage to the intellectual virtues; he possessed an 1895 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
which he would, from time to time, read. He would also exhort his children to read it, and laid great stress upon the utility of information. His own father had been a skilled mechanic (a phrase which conveyed little to Clara) and as he himself had managed to purchase by his own labours a three-bedroomed semi-detached house in a pleasant suburban district, he might have been thought to have cause to feel fairly content with life. But he did not. He was perpetually in the grip of some obscure, niggling, unexplained bitterness, which led him to repudiate most of the overtures which Clara would from time to time make towards him; she made these attempts because she was less frightened of him than she was of her mother, and she did on one or two occasions – the purchase of a bicycle, permission to go to the cinema – manage to enlist his sympathies. But she could see that his heart was not in it. And truly, she could not blame him. She could hardly bear to think the thought, but it did seem to her that anyone who had lived for so many years with her mother could be excused for a certain lack of
joie de vivre
.

When he died, she felt no real grief. The only reality of the event had been her mother’s reaction, which was silent, grim, and grudging to the last; not a tear did she shed, and after the funeral, as she turned away from the graveside and started to walk slowly through the cemetery mud she set her mouth in that prophetic way, and straightened her thick body, and then, as she passed a gravestone announcing that death is but a separation, she opened her mouth and said, ‘Well, he’s gone, and I can’t say I’m sorry.’ And Clara, walking by her side and hearing these words, burst suddenly and at last into loud hysterical weeping, and as the tears flooded down her hot cheeks she knew that they were not for her father, but for the meanness and the lack of love, and for the fear that she would die in so
ugly a hole, and so unloved. Nobody comforted her, for weeping was not necessary, but it was on the other hand permissible, and when she got home the aunts and uncles were kind to her and offered her cups of tea. Even her brothers were kind, though embarrassed, and Clara, as she sat there picking endlessly at the fringe of the tablecloth, had a vision of some other world where violent emotion could be a thing of beauty, where even tears could be admitted and not ignored, where good taste in tomb stones consisted not in cheap restrained economy of design, fabric, and word, but of marble angels wildly grieving. Anything, anything would make death tolerable, she thought, anything that could admit something of the grand somewhere, and not this small cramped sitting room, this domestic duplicity, this pouring of cups of tea, these harshly unaltered faces. One tear would have sufficed her, one murmur of regret, but there was nothing; the family were not even in mourning, for they found the wearing of mourning a false and hypocritical extravagance. They would admit nothing; they sat there like stones, and their one aim was to sit there like stones, so that no one could tell if they cared or did not care, so that there should be no difference between caring and not caring.

The funeral itself had been a grotesque manifestation of Mrs Maugham’s opinions. She had refused to have her husband cremated, not because she had anything so fanciful as a religious objection to cremation, but because she quite erroneously considered cremation to be a new-fangled idea, and she objected to the new. She had been brought up as a chapel-goer, and two generations back her family had been staunch Wesleyans, but she herself had long since dropped any pretence to faith of any kind, and now considered all religious observation as ridiculous frivolity. However, she maintained the moral impetus of her early years, although she had quite cast off its derivations and turned her back upon its fraudulent source; the narrow fervours and disapprovals were there, but their objects had subtly altered over the years. So that the wearing of mourning, fifty years earlier a sign of virtue, had now in Mrs Maugham’s generation become a habit to be scorned and condemned; it was ostentatious and therefore it was insincere. And her dislike of the insincere ran so
deep that she would rather publicly disclaim all grief for her dead husband than be accused of insincerity. But it took a trained observer to follow her through the quicksands of her disapprobation; a false step on the part of one of the aunts, for instance, could have reversed her attitude, and led her into a eulogy of black, into a martyred position whence the garments of all the others were an insult to her lone and exclusive widowhood, into a position where she alone had the right to flout the weight of tradition. She was, as Clara had discovered at an early age, colossally inconsistent; and sometimes Clara thought that it might have been easier to live with a true religious fanatic, whose fads and fancies would be at least predictable and well-marshalled, with the backing of some kind of external authority, from which there could be some appeal.

As it was, it was impossible for even the most servile and well-meaning to avoid offence. For what Mrs Maugham thought one week to be wholly disgraceful, she was praising the next, and with no apparent consciousness of discrepancy. For instance, there was the question of the coffin. Clara could not count the times she had heard her mother declare that when she died she would be dead, and she wouldn’t care what happened to her body, and for all
she
cared they could put her out for the dustman to collect – sentiments which from the first had filled Clara with a vague alarm and horror, for they were clearly reasonable enough in their own way. And yet, when her husband died, the price and quality of the coffin became topics of obsessive interest, and the precise balance of economy and decency a subject for endless dissertation. Clara heard again and again of Mrs Hewitt, who buried her husband in an economy coffin of some inappropriately cheap and porous wood, and claimed a rebate from the insurance, and of the equally wicked and abandoned Mrs Duffy, who had squandered a fortune on black crêpe and gilt handles, through a sheer love of ostentation. In the end, Clara, exasperated beyond endurance, brought up once more the possibility of cremation (not daring to mention, even in her own mind, which had not quite forsaken filial tenderness, the possibility of the once-praised dust cart) and Mrs Maugham, square, immutable, said quite astonishingly for her, and invoking sanctions she had been deriding
for thirty years, that ashes must go to ashes and dust to dust. Clara forbore to point out that cremation did result, precisely, in ashes, because she took, expertly, her mother’s meaning, which was that cremation was an unnatural practice and that bodies ought to rot quietly at their own leisure. And moreover Clara had even seen in the phrase some dim, far-off flicker of comfort, because, harsh though it was, it was not without a consoling figurative literary beauty.

The world of the figurative was Clara’s world of refuge. The literal world which she inhabited was so plainly hostile that she seized with ardour upon any references to any other mode of being; she came across few direct ones, in that suburban and industrial spot, so she had to make do with the oblique. Even a turn of phrase could affect her, however worn and faded in its application, and one of her mother’s favourite sayings – ‘What can’t be cured must be endured’ – never failed to give her a certain thrill, partly because of the grim inevitability of the rhyme, and partly because it almost managed to lend a little spare dignity to her mother’s stoic outlook. Similarly, she would turn to the quotations from the Bible, which appeared on church notice boards, and on certain hoardings in the town centre, and which would declare, ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’, or ‘Straight is the Gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it’, or ‘Man shall not live by bread alone.’ These comforted her, not because she had any faith in their message, but because they were phrased with some beauty; they were made up of words that seemed to apply to some large and other world of other realities, and they bore witness, also, to the fact that somebody had thought it worth his while to put them up. Just as some would pay for intelligence, so would others pay for the spirit. Even if the messages were not true (and she had no hope that they might be true) at least somebody believed sufficiently in their truth to pay cash for them, to rent hoardings and to put up posters for them, and that in itself offered some kind of alternative: Christianity meant nothing to her, but she was glad that in despite of her mother’s defection, it existed.