Rotting Hill (27 page)

    The quality was still dream-like and introspective, certainly, only Mark felt confident that this time she was not going to turn into a wealthy aunt.

    “Your labours at the Ministry have greyed you Mark a little,” Ida said at once (no doubt reading his thoughts and diverting attention from her face to his). “Otherwise much the same.”

    “Yes, I have altered, but
you
my dear Ida are
just
the same—and if there is art, its causes are not found.”

    She shook her ’twenties curls with a nervous and defensive mirth. “A little vanishing cream, combined with an empty mind, is quite enough,” she laughed. So he and the woman he had always been in love with—and had not married any other because she was always there in his imagination—eyed one another benignly. He exposed his haunted vacuum, and she automatically entered and warmed it to the temperature of paradise.

    They were a party heated by the suns of the past: they were three people in the nineteen-twenties who entered the Ivy Restaurant. The restaurant personnel, stolidly Italian, were cold and hard in nineteen-forty-nine. Mark, Ida, and Charles talked of old ’twenties books and dishes and jokes, their politics were only those that may be found in a Gilbert and Sullivan Opera where everyone present is a little liber
al
or a little conservat
ive
—except for a moment in the small entrance lobby. An authentically proletarian youth, attempting to look dramatic and sinister, was heard to ask the doorman-vestiaire, “Is Mr. Zilliacus here yet?” Charles said “I hope not” to the ceiling, but the comment was intercepted by the doorman-vestiaire, who looked curiously at Charles and Charles returned his gaze.

    Ideology, otherwise, was wiped off this trio who had that
clean
sensation the non-political have. Mark had actually put the question to himself. Why had he not married Charles’s sister? He supposed it was Charles. It would have been too like homosexuality, which was an absurd sensation. She had not married, herself, until nearly thirty, and in a couple of years that marriage was terminated by the death of her husband in the hunting-field. He had been no horseman, poor chap. She insisted on his learning to ride in a Bayswater riding-school, however, and she whisked him off to week-end hunts with a stockbroker outfit in East Anglia. Since his death she had divided her time between Tadicombe Priory and Withers Norton, the other parklet which had materialized on her wedding-day and which she had so far been able to retain.

    Three theatre queues outside had an Italian minstrel in attendance; with a most piercing pathos locked up in his sinuses the high notes of heart-throb of a gutter-Pagliacci penetrated the lunch-time roar of the ever-full Ivy, and provided a musical sugarstick background as the three old friends rolled again in memory in the Swiss snows at Wengen—or drifted talking very youngly along “The High” on their way to Blackwell’s to buy Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers.
And Mark reflected as they talked that one never knew, one
might
some day (if one did not come to the point with Ida) get married at this late date and to the wrong woman. Horrifying thought! He had a premonition of the form the wrongness would take.

    But the cocktails and the Sylvaner were taking effect. What happened arrived with great suddenness. At one moment they were blissfully gay as they revisited the landscapes of their youth—as if by common consent refusing to admit anything to their consciousness later than 1929 (that as a rather dangerous limit). Next moment almost, it seemed, they were all three glaring at one another. Ida—an Ida at least twenty years older—was denouncing the Socialist Government: she had asked why he, Mark, had not immediately handed in his resignation after the “vermin” speech of “that filthy little man Bevan, who ought to be horse-whipped!” “Ida!” Mark had protested, half-rising. But “why not!” had shouted Charles, half-rising, too, “is he not the lowest and dirtiest…” “I am not going to listen to this nonsense!” Mark protested still more strongly. “If Ida is drunk, that is one thing. You, Charles, should have a stronger head! I see you should take water even with your wine!”

    The change of climate, however, had been so abrupt and so absolute, and Mark prior to that had been so completely transported into the neutral fairyland of the past, that—though he attempted to silence public abuse of a powerful Minister, and of one personally admired by him as well—he was for a short time dull and bewildered, groping his way about between two worlds.

    But the
Navy League
side of Ida, aroused with so alarming a suddenness, tore on into battle, her face distorted with partisan rage. “They have cut down the reserve of officers!” spat those lips so recently models of a charmed aloofness. “The last R.N.V.R. cadets are now in training. There are to be no more. Who are to replace officer casualties? The lower deck I suppose! Only half the Fleet is in commission. Fine fighting units are rotting in port—soon we shall have the navy of a South American republic. We could be defeated in battle by Brazil!”

    Her eyes flashed as, in indignant fancy, she saw the flagship of the Home Fleet cock up its stern, explode, and sink, the victim of a Brazilian torpedo.

    “Ida, do stop talking such dreadful nonsense,” Mark expostulated.

    “She is not talking nonsense but very good sense,” Charles objected. “Ida has her facts from a pretty reliable source. Admiral Darrell is a neighbour of hers at Withers Norton.”

    “Wars are decided in the air—surface craft are militarily obsolete,” Mark said with cross indifference. “Darrell is gaga anyway.”

    “Say what you like,” Ida broke in again. “England is defenceless. The gang of ex-dock labourers, asiatics, and corporation lawyers who push us around from Whitehall are traitors. They should be hanged from the yard-arm!” She pointed fiercely out of the window at a convenient lamp-post.

    At a neighbouring table a man who had been reading put down his paper and signalled angrily the
maître d’hôtel.
He was recognized by Mark as a socialist member of parliament. He was complaining about them to the
maître d’hôtel,
who studied Mark with attention but apparent lack of interest.

    Ida by no means desisted—she became personal.

    “You, who are of our class, deliberately helping that rabble to enslave England! It does not make sense. Can’t you make an equally good living in some more honest way?”

    “By engaging in a bit of black-marketing?” he enquired dryly.

    “Yes, Mark, yes! That would be a damn sight straighter than what you are doing.”

    “I’m sorry, Ida, but you see I am a socialist.”

    “So you say!” Charles smiled with good-natured scepticism.

    Mark closed his eyes to shut out Charles’s smile. He felt very foolish and his choler was unabated. To the spring-time regions where the great sex issues are normally decided he had returned—the greatly retarded mating was in process of consummation when his love transformed herself with nightmare suddenness into a Tory soap-boxer. He had consented to play Romeo, and Juliet, at the critical moment, had acquired the mask of Col. Blimp, haranguing him from the moonlit balcony. An irrational resentment towards the brother and sister he was sitting with possessed him. He was in no mood to see in it an illustration of Time’s tigerish leaping. He had been
tricked,
was what he really felt, by Charles and Ida; they had made a regular fool of him. This was a matter of feelings only, though, for he did not suspect a
plot.

    Mark looked across the table coldly at the vindictive female mask. A woman he had a few minutes before theoretically united himself with! He understood that it would be impossible for her to behave otherwise: that even from 1939 to now was a great time-leap for her—from a life of petty pomp to one of straightened anxiety—dismissal of gardener, disposal of a horse or horses, acuteness of the dress problem, and a prospect, as she saw it, should this election go the wrong way, tantamount to
murder.
Murder just as truly by Cripps as would have been murder by Crippen. What was the difference between a man who killed you with taxes or one who killed you with a revolver bullet or a dose of arsenic? None: except that the
taxer
takes longer over it—and is not tried for homicide!

    A long silence was broken by Charles’s laugh.

    “Three old friends,” he croaked, “who stopped to look
forward
at the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Future—and they all three are turned to salt!”

    Charles was unable, however, to turn them back into flesh and blood; and when not long afterwards these three old friends left the restaurant all three knew that they would never lunch together again, that they were friends no longer. Charles, singly, would have been able to postpone, for some time at least, this break. But Ida had been decisive. The Brazilian Navy had sent to the bottom the good ship Friendship, built in the palmy days of pre-World War I.

    Charles had taken his bag away about five—both were a little stiff at the last. That evening a loneliness attacked Mark in quite new places, even interfering, he found, with housework. He had had no time to make any arrangements for the evening, so there he was cleaning up after Charles, and afraid to sit down—for he had already tried to read and found he could not. The expulsion of Ida from her place in his imagination was responsible. These were the final pangs of Mark’s rebirth into a novel age, as well as the death-throes of Ida’s image. But he did not identify his pangs: he did not analyse. He went to his desk, took out a piece of notepaper and wrote “My dear Wendy”. Wendy Richardson was a good party-woman, with a pretty face. He asked her if she thought Time was a tiger or a pussy-cat. He had been thinking a lot about Time lately, he told her. He thought himself it was a pussy-cat that had grown overnight into a tiger. Anyway, would she go with him to see the French film “Time the Tiger”. “It is,” he concluded, “a film with a kick in it. Excuse the Americanism.”

    3 March, 1950.

    MY DEAR MARK,

    Your “Pick the winning side” argument is only effective if the side you support is at the moment winning. With a majority of merely seven in the House of Commons you have to find a new argument, don’t you? What is it?

     CHARLES.

    DEAR CHARLES,

     Like most Tories you seem to forget that the Election was won by the Socialist Party. You will yet be disagreeably surprised by what can be done with a majority of seven. But you seem to mistake me for a recruiting-sergeant. If I were one, however, I should not be interested in you as a recruit. I should tell you to go and join some other army. Meanwhile I suggest you find some other correspondent.

    MARK.

    The business of the stories and sketches of which this book is composed is, first, the life of the Hill, of Rotting Hill. You must always supply, in your imagination, the jaded bustle of this key locality, the lumbering torrent of trucks and taxis and buses, the parasites, parade before the bored D.P.s staring out of the café windows of our overcrowded polyglot hill. Next is the big background of the city, which swells around the hill. Beyond that is the island of which the city is the capital: after that the rest of the earth—full of sub-machine-guns and atomic bombs, the grasping Yankee and the treacherous Israelite, the Russian Bear and the French Frog: an earth covered with Iron Curtains and other nightmarish features. To write of the Hill, the city must hang there like a backcloth in a play, with its theatres, cathedrals, palaces and Parliament.

    The Hill is covered with houses, as is everything else as far as the pigeon’s eye can reach, as it stands in our roof-gutter digesting our bad bread-crumbs, except for Hyde Park and the adjacent Gardens. In a sense there is no hill, for a hill you cannot see is not there. You must not think of it as prominent like the hill of Montmartre. Certainly on the west and south it is a long drop down from it, and you know it is a hill if you approach it from those directions. Even another steep little hill is stuck on top of Rotting Hill, but even that has no vista. For that its height is insufficient. So submerged in bricks and mortar, stucco and stone, is our Hill, that it would be better to say that it was once a hill, where sheep grazed, above the marshes of the Thames.

    London is as unplanned as a bush landscape, having multiplied itself like things in nature do. No Baron Haussmann came to its help, or was ever wanted apparently by the English, to arrest the suburban and sub-human, welter, to compose a city. The Circus, that is London’s Etoile, Piccadilly, is pathetically eloquent of something that just is not there.

    It is the social mutations that are my subject; first upon our Hill, but equally as the potent dissolvents affect the ten millions-odd persons in London and the forty millions-odd otherwise on the island—that big coal-mine on which they are marooned, encompassed by the Atlantic and other waters: trading for food, machinery and whisky, tweed suits, and coal when the miners will work: heedless breeders, as the food grows scarcer, as though fifty millions was not thirty too many upon any sort of island.

    The shops of Rotting Hill are still well enough stocked, there are provisions for the rentier spending his capital and for persons with good jobs. There is less food than there was two or three years ago, and two years hence there will be much less. The sidewalks are obstructed by hobbling women crippled by living in unheated winter rooms, and perhaps because of draughty undergrounds if they were driven there by the air-war, or surface shelters—war-rot got in their joints. For these the shops have much less food. England is busy (or its old politicians are) killing off its middle-class dowagers and superfluous women—it has doomed them to privation, England that is old itself and a little mad; and it looks with a fish-cold eye upon its pensioned workers, men and women. So to move with reasonable expedition along the narrow pavements of Rotting Hill is impossible, because of the overplus of invalids of both sexes, but mostly women.