Judith (6 page)

I thought – These worms in the tin can; are they not also the snakes in one's hair?

There was loud music. I thought – If I am to pick up Oliver it is no use standing still: he will have had enough of tasteful heroines chained to their rocks.

There was a black man on the dance floor who was a very good dancer. His hair was done up in snakes like that of a West Indian, yet he danced with the angular movements of arms and legs turned out of someone from the part of the world in which I had been brought up. So I went on to the dance floor and did this sort of dancing with him: I mean not with him, of course: you do not look, you do not touch: the point of this dancing is that you create networks of spaces between. After a time we had the dance floor almost to ourselves, while people watched. Afterwards we went to opposite sides of the dance floor still without having much looked at each other.

So it was easy to choose my place where to come to rest as if on fire.

I thought – I know that I have said I will not do this sort of thing again!

Oliver said ‘Where did you learn to dance like that?' I said ‘At Jogyakarta.' He said ‘Where's that?'

I thought – You mean, you are not impressed with girls who say things like – At Jogyakarta?

I said ‘In Java.'

When I looked at him he had his eyes half-closed and the toes of one foot pointing towards the ground. I thought – For God's sake, he thinks he is like a Degas dancer?

He said ‘I wonder if you would do me the most enormous favour?'

I said ‘What?'

He spoke with a slight foreign accent. He did not seem to have looked at me at all.

He said ‘Would you come with me to another party? I would be tremendously grateful if you could.'

I thought – This is clever!

I said ‘All right.'

He said ‘Thank you.'

When he did look at me he had strange enamel-like green eyes like those that were supposed to have once been painted on marble statues. I remembered Desmond saying – He has the reputation of being able to do anything he likes with horses.

He said ‘I'll wait for you here.'

I said ‘I'll come with you now.'

He said ‘This is extraordinarily good of you.'

I said ‘This is a terrible party.'

I thought – I am a little out of control: I suppose I have not been on a slope before where the conditions are likely to be so fast.

As we went out of the ballroom Oliver said ‘The party I will be taking you to will be even worse.' He laughed.

When he laughed his face lit up for a moment like a lot of candles coming on within a pumpkin.

In the street outside there was an enormous white car with a black chauffeur. When Oliver appeared the chauffeur got out and opened a door. We climbed in and sat side by side; the chauffeur settled a rug over our knees. I thought – We are in one of those black-and-white art movies of the 1950s, to do with damnation and death.

Oliver said ‘I should explain. My wife and my girlfriend
happen to have both left me on the same day. It is important for me that I should appear, but not appear on my own, at this party.'

I thought – You mean, you are saying you trust me enough to risk being honest?

He said ‘You may believe me when I say that there did not seem to be anyone at that party I could have done this better with than with you.'

I thought – You mean, you know enough to know this would work with me, being honest and knowing I will not think you are flattering me?

We drove along like two French actors going down into the underworld.

He said ‘You know my name?'

I said ‘Yes.'

He did not say – I do not know yours.

He said ‘I should explain about this car. It isn't mine. It belongs to someone called Louise de St Remy, to whose party we are going.'

I said ‘I see.'

He said ‘Do you know Louise?'

I said ‘No.'

He said ‘I will tell you a story about Louise and her chauffeur.'

There were some buttons on the arm-rest of his seat. He pushed one or two and windows went up and down and eventually the one between the back compartment of the car and the front.

Oliver said ‘Louise and her chauffeur were going over the Alps one day and Louise said – Stop the car I want to pee. Her chauffeur said – Yes madam the water is boiling.'

I said ‘Yes that's a very good story.'

I thought – This is the style? You say things in a matter-of-fact voice, and assume people will know what you are meaning?

We arrived at a large apartment block that overlooked the river. There were turrets and battlements and towers. We
went up in a lift. On the first floor there were about thirty people gathered in a room like a mausoleum. There were busts and vases on marble pillars: books like plaques locating ashes went up to the tops of walls. Men in dinner-jackets stood holding plates; women wearing evening dresses with thin straps going over their shoulders sat straight-backed on the arms or edges of sofas. There was a buffet at one end of the room presided over by a man in Mozart-opera livery: a waitress in a black dress with a white ruff came round with drinks on a tray. Everything was very quiet, and orderly. I thought – Well, nothing is supposed to go on in the holy of holies, is it?

The only other atmosphere I could remember like this was in a gambling casino I had once been to, where the enormously rich had succeeded in losing or winning thousands by doing absolutely nothing except slowing move their fingers every now and then like crabs.

I thought – These are the people whom Desmond talks about who run the world? who let themselves be used for the conspiracy theory of history because this is what other people require of them?

A woman in a dress the colour of a contraceptive diaphragm came up to talk to Oliver. Oliver introduced me: he had in fact learned my name. I thought – I have been an amateur in this; he is very professional.

I went to a window and looked out. Across the river there was the floodlit power station with its four tall chimneys: I thought – It is like a dead horse, its feet up in the air.

Then – Old gods and goddesses are preserved because they live in tombs which are quite airless?

Oliver went on talking to his hostess. They were like people in a painting plotting beneath the high blank wall of a Venetian building.

The man dressed like Figaro came up and offered me some food. Then a young man with dyed black hair and make-up stood by me and said ‘We were saying it was better when it had three.'

I said ‘Three what?'

He said ‘Chimneys.'

I said ‘Do you know Oliver's wife or his girlfriend?'

The man was eating with a fork from a plate; he shovelled food in like a croupier. After a time he moved away. I thought – You mean, you are not allowed to ask a direct question?

I tried to remember what I had heard about Oliver's wife. She was enormously rich; she was an American; she had previously been married to a German prince. Or this might have been his girlfriend?

Oliver came over to me. He said ‘All right, we can go now if you like.'

I said ‘I quite like it here.'

He said ‘Why?'

I said ‘I've never been anywhere like this before.'

Oliver was looking at me. I was looking out over the river. I thought – I have not got it wrong: you have to be honest?

He said ‘Will you come home with me?'

I said ‘No.' Then – ‘You know I can't!'

He said ‘Why not?'

I said ‘Because that's what everyone does with you!'

He lifted his head right up so that his neck seemed to stretch towards the ceiling. Then he smiled. I thought – Does his laughter ever come out: or does it just burn within his skull like the flames around witches?

He said ‘Do you know the story about D'Annunzio?'

I said ‘No.'

He said ‘D'Annunzio had the reputation of being able to go to bed with any woman he liked. Then one day some woman got the idea of being the first one ever to turn down D'Annunzio; so after that every woman wanted to be like her, and poor D'Annunzio couldn't get to bed with anyone at all.'

I said ‘Is that true?'

He said ‘It might be.'

I thought – Oliver is the only person who has made me feel inadequate?

He stood looking out of the window. I thought – But he has
been doing this sort of thing for so long, that it is impossible even for himself to tell whether or not he is acting.

It seemed I should say – Still, I can't go to bed with you!

He said ‘Take these.'

He had taken from his pocket a bunch of keys which he held out in front of him as if he were a water-diviner. We watched them: his hand was steady: the keys did not swing.

I said ‘What are they?'

He said ‘They're the keys of the new flat I've just moved into. I'd like someone to have a spare pair. I'm always losing my own.'

I thought – This is really very clever.

I said ‘All right.' I took the keys.

He said ‘And promise to ring me in the morning. Will you? The number is on the keys.'

I looked at the keys and there was a label with a telephone number and an address on it. I thought – But is it not odd to have an address on a bunch of keys?

I said ‘All right.'

He said ‘You have promised.'

I said ‘Yes.'

I thought – But if he does not know himself whether he is or is not acting, does this or does this not mean that he is in touch with something beyond this?

Now what about those spiral staircases going up or down: the windows one occasionally passes through when one waves and says – Coo-ee?

There are coincidences. But are the staircases going up (to something beyond) or down (towards rock bottom): or are both processes going on at the same time, so that when one sees another's face at a window this might mean – either this or that is up or down, so what is the difference?

I was driven back towards the hostel by the chauffeur in the car: Oliver had said he wanted to walk. I got out of the car at Victoria Station. I could not think of any story to invent if there were a scene on the steps of the hostel.

Upstairs I found that someone had been in my room; my drawers had been turned out; money had been taken. It was likely that this had been done either by, or with the knowledge of, Krishna; he was the only person except myself who had a key to the room. His revolutionary party was always short of money: Lenin, he had often explained to me, had encouraged the robbing of banks to obtain funds for his revolution.

So I went down to the basement and found him and his friends perched like conspirators or chickens against the walls and I thought this would be quite a good time to have a quarrel. At first he said he knew nothing about the money and then he said what good did I do with my money anyway? So we had a fight and I tore down some of the posters and I said that if he was a revolutionary why didn't he go out and fight; and so on. I said he and his friends were indistinguishable from very rich capitalists in that they sat around in a vacuum so that people were drawn in just by nothing happening.

I slept in my room on the top floor with the bits and pieces of my past life scattered about on the ground. I thought sooner or later Krishna would come up and we would make love; and then everything would be just the same as before; and I could not make out if I wanted this, or could not bear it, or both. I thought – Well this is some sort of despair, or giving up, isn't it? I sometimes imagined, when I talked to myself like this, that I was talking to the Professor. I felt as if I were still at the top of a long steep slope. I would have to move out of the hostel. I thought I might shout – Help! Here I come!

I had the bunch of keys under my pillow as if they were some life-line that had been thrown to me by Oliver.

Well, there are some coincidences that are more coincidental than others, aren't there?

By morning Krishna had not come to my room. I thought – That's that: and a mercy anyway.

I got out the bunch of keys.

There were one or two things that did not quite make sense about the previous evening. Oliver and I had stood by the
window overlooking the river; he had said ‘Promise to ring me in the morning!' The keys had a label with the address on it. Keys were a Freudian sex-symbol weren't they? They were also some symbol of death. Keys were to heaven or to hell: at the top and bottom of the staircase.

I thought – I know how Oliver would operate: he is like me.

Rock bottom is not always a metaphor; not at least when you hit it.

Had he not said that his wife and his girlfriend had both just left him?

I thought I should ring Oliver as soon as possible.

At first Krishna was in the entrance hall where the telephone was; then he went down to his room. Oliver's number was engaged. Then Krishna came up from his room.

I thought – Hurry: you must hurry.

You sometimes know what is happening don't you? even when you can't put it into language.

– There are the guns and the tanks in the streets outside the theatre –

I dressed and went out of the house and ran to a call-box. When Oliver's number was still engaged I asked the operator to check to see if there was anyone talking on the line. There was not. I thought – Hurry; it is proper to hurry. Then – Or is it just that for once I feel straightforwardly needed?

I went out of the call-box and looked for a taxi.

I had no money for a taxi. I thought – Either Oliver will pay, or if he does not, then there may well have been an excuse to have taken a taxi without any money.

I told the taxi-driver the address that was on the keys and the taxi went up to the West End. I thought – To heaven or hell, what is the difference? The building where Oliver had his flat was another large Victorian apartment block with turrets and battlements and towers. I felt as if I were a knight approaching where a sleeping beauty was lying. I asked the taxi-driver to wait. By the door there was a column of bells with numbers and names against them: there was no name against the number of Oliver's flat. I rang, then let myself in with one of
the keys. There was a rather grand hallway with a lift. Oliver's flat was on the top floor.