Judith (3 page)

I did not think Desmond would be able to make any positive move on his own: the weight of the
Die Flamme
people would
be like inertia. And Englishmen, it seemed to me then, had not only lost, as it were, their sense of smell but had got out of the way of picking up women even for the sake of prestige in the pecking order. They seemed to fear (also perhaps to desire?) the chance of getting chopped up like Holofernes.

Well, what might Judith do in this interesting situation?

My friend and I sometimes played darts in pubs. He would hold his dart in front of his mouth with his little finger crooked as if he were sipping tea. I liked playing darts because I could ruminate about how one day, if I practised painstakingly enough, I might be able to step up and almost without looking get all three darts one on top of another in the bull's-eye – as Zen Buddhists say can happen if one practises correctly for years and years for instance at archery.

There was a dart-board in another compartment of the pub. I remembered a scene in a novel I had once read in which a girl throws a dart right over the partition of a pub. I thought – I will be like Artemis with Orion: if I throw a dart carefully enough, I will get it over the partition and lodged in the woodwork somewhere near Desmond. Then I can go round and – how supplicatingly! (one knee in front of the other) – ask forgiveness for such lack of control. But, in fact, I could not quite remember what had happened between Artemis and Orion; she had killed him, had she not? But there have to be risks, don't there, in any change of the
status quo.

My friend and I went into the next compartment to play darts. After a time I threw a dart so that it landed in the woodwork not far from Desmond's ear. Oh one does, yes, feel ashamed of these things; there are many things of this time that I shall be telling you of which I am ashamed. I felt, I think, as one is supposed to feel as I followed the dart into the other part of the pub – Dear God, I might have hit him! I promise I will never do this sort of thing again! I stood in front of Desmond and said ‘I'm so terribly, terribly sorry.' The point is very nearly to mean it; perhaps not quite. Desmond was acting as if the dart had in fact pierced his ear; he was holding his head stiffly against the woodwork. He said ‘Will someone kindly tell
me exactly what has occurred?' The man with the granny specs said ‘The missile I think has pierced your left ear.' The woman with hair like epaulets said ‘Is that the ear that you wanted to have pierced?' People laughed; rocked backwards and forwards. I leaned across Desmond to get the dart out of the woodwork. I thought – There will be that smell of cloth, of dust, of energy – like that of a dancer. The man with short legs said ‘Please may I have my ear pierced?' Everyone laughed again. I stood in front of Desmond with my hands clasped in front of me: I thought – I do not want to be too openly pornographic. I said ‘What can I do to make up; can I offer you dinner?'

Desmond said ‘I'll give you dinner.'

I said ‘No, I've got to do something to make up.'

There was not much more to be done. I waited while Desmond went through the motions of finishing his business with the
Die Flamme
people. I did not have trouble with my darts-playing friend. Each of us I suppose by now wanted to be rid of the other: there are virtues, as well as boredom, in being distanced from the style of old passions. Also there was satisfaction for my friend I think in his handing me on to someone higher up, as it were, in the pecking order: some of the glamour of the
Die Flamme
people might even rub off on him.

It had not been like this where I had been brought up: there was always the chance, if you were a girl in a doorway, of a killer with a knife being round some corner.

Desmond said ‘Shall we go?'

I said ‘Yes.' Then – ‘Where?'

He said ‘You have to choose!'

There was something here that I had noticed when I first came to London – the games-playing that went on in the business of choosing restaurants. It was men, of course, who were still nominally supposed to choose: but they seemed to have lost confidence in this, and women seemed often to be ensuring that this should be so – complaining of the table, of the music, picking at the food; ordering strange salads that
could not be provided. But women, of course, still wanted it to be men who made the choice. Now I found myself in the position of the chooser. I thought – You close your eyes, do you: and after years and years, as with Zen archery, you get somewhere near the bull's-eye?

Desmond was the first man I had met who seemed to admit this predicament. He said ‘How marvellous not to be expected to decide about restaurants!'

Desmond was this tall, good-looking Englishman. He wore a cap and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. I thought – He is like someone coming back from being with horses, or from the First World War.

But still – What on earth do you do about restaurants? No wonder men go off to things like race meetings and wars!

I thought I might say – I have been told of a good one just round this corner –

‘Here!'

‘Wow! Are you sure?' ‘Yes.'

‘It looks a bit expensive!'

But then when we were inside, and had been sat down in armchairs, and menus had been placed in front of us like musical scores, and I had thought – Dear God, what should women do: of course it is easy to mock men's pretensions – Desmond put his hand on my arm and said ‘Look here, I'm paying.'

I said ‘No you're not.'

He said ‘Yes I am.'

I said ‘Well, we'll go fifty-fifty.'

I thought – This is right? What I admire is people wanting to get the best of both worlds?

Of course, I wanted to admire Desmond.

During dinner Desmond talked: he talked about the state of the country, the state of the world. He talked sometimes looking at me and then, when I looked at him, looking away: he talked as if he were a circus tamer warding off a tiger with a stick. He talked about politics: he said politics were either
sinister or a farce: power was exercised by mad freaks crouched over gambling tables: the conspiracy theory of history both was and was not true – there really were conspirators who ran the world, some conglomeration of capitalist millionaires and communist élites, and yet all this was still a game; things went their own way in fact by chance. I got the impression that he was saying all this because this was his particular game; he happened to like these words: he liked them perhaps because they were incongruous with his rather respectable appearance; the question about whether or not they were true did not mean much to him. I suppose he was a child of his time in this lack of regard for what might be true: what was necessary was to make an impact: he could not easily see the impact, in the society in which he found himself, of what was true.

All this, of course, might have been something to do with me. We were in this restaurant with mirrors and cut glass and flowers. Sometimes he stretched a hand across the table and laid it on my arm; then he would withdraw it, as if he had advanced too far into no man's land. This was a style he had picked up from his ancestors I suppose: you do not over-commit yourself with women; you keep open your lines of retreat; you protect your flanks; is not that what you say? I do not know how to write about Desmond. Of course it is terrible when, in war, soldiers die.

I said ‘Do you live in London?'

He said ‘Not exactly.'

I said ‘Where do you live?'

He blew his cheeks out and frowned. I thought – These are his signals for a tactical retreat? One of the ideas I had picked up from Miss Julie from Hong Kong was although there is this theory that all men at all times are longing to go to bed with women (Miss Julie would say – There they are with their insides hanging out, poor dears!) in fact what they want to do is more to make a song and dance about it but in the end not go to bed; to pass out perhaps like Holofernes; to go home and if necessary have what Miss Julie called a quiet pull. (– They have
to do something with those insides, poor dears!) Miss Julie's idea was that men nowadays did not much want to go to bed with women because they felt themselves vulnerable to women's criticism of their performances there (just as I suppose they felt themselves vulnerable in the matter of choice of restaurants); but it was useful to both sides to keep up the pretence about men's insatiable desires, because thus men could retain some pride and women their liking for complaint.

The way out of this predicament, Miss Julie suggested, was what it always had been before the curse of romantic puritanism came along, which was that men and women should go to bed together for money: with money you knew where you were; there was no question of anyone expecting anything different from what was offered and what was paid for. Here men and women achieved some functioning equality.

Desmond said ‘You live in London?'

I said ‘Yes.'

‘Can we go somewhere?'

‘If you like.'

He said ‘But not tonight. I'm afraid I've got to get home.'

He explained that he had a wife and child somewhere on the outskirts of London. As he told me this he drew heavy lines on the tablecloth with his fork. I thought I might say – We could go to my place. But this was not strictly true, and I did not think there would be any point in challenging Desmond's defenceworks.

He said ‘But we will one day, won't we?'

I said ‘Of course.'

I had not worked out, then, much about the
Die Flamme
people; but it had seemed from their magazine that much of their cruelty, their arrogance, might be to do with some system of defenceworks. They were most of them, I learned later, somewhat religiously puritanical about sex: they exposed and lacerated others, not risking being exposed and lacerated themselves.

Miss Julie once said – But of course men want to be taken over! to be sent to bed and tucked up like naughty babies!

Looking across the table at Desmond I thought – You mean, it might be easier for you if I ordered you to come home and –

Miss Julie had said – Don't get involved in that, my dear; they'll be so pleased, they'll never forgive you!

Desmond was like one of those heroic blond beasts: did they not in the end want to get themselves torn to pieces?

He said ‘In about a fortnight?'

I said ‘All right.'

I thought – But the world might have come to an end in a fortnight!

Do you think I might always have had some sort of wish to destroy Desmond? Do women have such a rage against men?

So Desmond and I took to having dinner two or three times a week, and afterwards he would catch the last train home to wherever it was in Buckinghamshire. Of course in some sense we became lovers: I would go with him to the station and we would say good-bye as if we were in one of those 1940s films; how can you have all that heaving about in taxis, on station platforms, unless you are being kept apart like people in a 1940s film? If there is no war, then at least you have to be trying to be faithful to a wife and a child in Buckinghamshire. But then – perhaps Desmond and I really were a bit in love. I liked being taken round by him: I liked being on show with the
Die Flamme
people. Perhaps Desmond liked showing me off as his girl. Is there not always something narcissistic about being in love?

From time to time he would say ‘I really am going to fix up a room one day in London!'

I have this need to try to understand Desmond. I think it is not so much a rage that women have against men, as a guilt about feeling that in many areas men have been made redundant.

Desmond was one of the bright not-quite-so-young writers on
Die Flamme
magazine; his job was to take stories from gossip or newspapers and to spin elaborate fantasies from
them. The point was deliberately that readers should not quite know what was a fantasy and what was not; in this style any wild story might purvey some thrill – it might be true, and if it were not, then indeed where was the reader's sense of humour! I do not know how Desmond had started on this job; he had wanted to be a writer; but there was a part of him that seemed always to be saying – But don't you see that life is venomous! And so
Die Flamme
magazine became a home for him; because there was something very practically, and powerfully, successful about its venom. Several people who worked for
Die Flamme
magazine called themselves Christians (Desmond was a Catholic) but it seemed to me they were more like Manichaeans – if you think the world is irredeemably evil then you have no responsibility for it; you can do what you like; you have some licence simply to amuse and to be amused.

Or perhaps it was just that the
Die Flamme
people had been to English public schools; and their contacts with their own and other people's bodies had been often to do with cruelty.

Desmond would sometimes bring in to the pubs or restaurants where we met a bundle of newspaper cuttings which had been gathered for him by a secretary; he would read out items in funny voices and then would put the papers on the table and would draw lines round paragraphs with a red pencil as if he were marking out bombing areas for an attack.

There was one story being run by
Die Flamme
at this time which was about a left-wing politician whom they called Dirty Lenin. Dirty Lenin had at one time been caught (or had he? but this uncertainty was the point) doing something in the City with what are called bonds; there had been an activity called washing bonds, which was improper. So when the
Die Flamme
people made this public, they called the bond-washer Dirty Lenin: do you see? Do you? Another of the points of this stuff is that a reader may feel himself in the know; one of an élite. For this, of course, it does not matter whether or not a story is true.

When questioned, Desmond would puff his cheeks out and reach for his pipe. He would say – Well he's an arrogant sod anyway.