The Black Book (16 page)

The human comedy! The divine drama of a blocked shithouse all entangled with Marney, the little brown hoofs, the bucket of green ice and the canary setting out like Columbus every ten minutes and ending like Sir Walter Raleigh. The adventure of the ship, like a wooden body, and the spiritual adventure in the tower. I am not trying to muddle you. It is only that I myself am muddled by these phenomena—the snow, and Marney's raw Spanish tulip, Eustace and the impotence of being earnest. If I look at him now he will be a little ashamed, remembering his laughter. In order not to let me see this, he will turn aside to the little mirror on the wall and examine the cavities in his teeth. From the lavatory a boiled pudding; from the hall where the coats hang like the girls' playground selves, waiting for the clock, a whiff, human, sweaty, polluted with cheap scent and rice powder; from Eustace a pert fart—just to show that the equilibrium of his sunny temperament is restored.

It is not what one thinks, I have discovered from the books I read, that is important; it is not even what one does. It is what one is, essentially. That is why there is such confusion when I set out in an attempt to begin this spiritual adventure, because the fine logical borders of my reality completely disappear when a word comes to seize them; I attempt to put myself in jail, as it were, in the padded cell of language, only to discover that the whole external façade is implicated in this process. There is the ego, plus a number of fantastic appendages, with personal pronouns attached to them. My desk, for example, behind the door; my spring, filling by bowels with mushy ice; my Eustace too, my Marney … It is a rapacious mechanism which attempts to swallow the world. In it there is no paradigm of irrelevances. Everything is included in this dragnet—as one might set a lobster pot one night and find a continent in it when the sun rises. The hotel breathing quietly in a snowstorm of electric light; the existence here in which there is neither faith, hope, nor charity; Lobo sitting like a disconsolate robin (a Peruvian robin) by the locked door, waiting for Miss Venable to open to him; or Eustace sifting his voiceless farts through his underclothes and hastily opening the window. (And then, to annihilate this confusion of realities, today there is a wind blowing up from the Levant. The morning came like a fog along a roll of developed film.… It is a little unreasonable.)

I am sitting at the desk when Ohm appears, agitated, sweating. He teaches economics. His slack black coat-tails mourn agitatedly behind his thin back. His moustache lies down wearily on his lip. His corncrake voice is deeper by two tones than normal. Imagine a small soiled penguin with a weak backbone and broken flippers. That is Ohm. For Godsake, he is saying, Eustace must do something. There is one of the girls howling her heart out and he cannot find out what is wrong with her. His violet eyes are full of tears. She does not seem in pain but she is.… Eustace puts on his glasses and asks, where is she? Outside the door? Have her sent in at once.

She is there all of a sudden, a rather fine-looking girl of about fourteen. Thick bronze pigtails, and her face trampled with weeping. All of a sudden she says, “I'm bleedin', sir.” A strange mixture of fear, shame, and puzzlement. Bleeding? The tears are running down her face again; she is giving out enormous male sniffs. Then, with her throat full of fog, she points at herself queerly and says, “I'm bleedin' down there, between my legs, sir.” And before we can say or do anything, she falls down as softly and expertly as an adagio in front of the desk, in a faint. The confusion is immediately precipitated like a Morris dance. Ohm beats his own coat-tails in a wild dash to the telephone and starts ringing up a doctor. Eustace and I pick her up and put her on a couch. Perhaps the poor girl stabbed herself with a pen nib or something. For a while we chafe her hands and Eustace calls the English mistress in, who lights trails of brown paper and holds them shakily under the girl's nose. There is whispering in the commerce room, and peeping at doors. The whole school is shaken to the roots. Then someone suggests examining her. “Yes, yes,” flutters Ohm like a ballet dancer. “She might be bleeding to death.” The English mistress declines the privilege out of modesty. She has no roof to her mouth, and also she is scared. Besides, she could never be able to explain coherently to anyone afterwards, supposing she did find out. Well, one of the older girls is called in, and we males retire. In ten minutes the English mistress comes out with a scarlet face, and runs to the lavatory to have a good weep. In the commerce room they are whispering: “What? Her period? What was all the row?” etc. etc. The doctor, when he arrives, gives us the news in stilted throaty medical terms. He is proud of knowing the terminology, it seems. The English mistress asks for the day off to get over her blushes. She will be bleeding next if she's not careful. “It wasn't
that
I was scared of,” says Eustace, contemptuously. “Silly little Winnie. Them girls get up to queer tricks sometimes. Ah well.” He is smiling now. Expelling his noiseless laughter out between his teeth with gusts of cigarette smoke. The temperature chart has fallen to subnormal following the anticlimax. Ohm stands there in his soiled penguins and gives a giggle of relief, then catches his boss's eye and becomes flint again—passive, soiled, immobile, and very shy. Suddenly remembering, Eustace sits up and says, “Mr. Ohm, sir.” The violet eyes sink to the ground as he stands there, waiting. “Do you notice a queer smell, sir, in here, sir?” The eyes flash up to Eustace, to me, flutter and wander out into the garden. He does not sniff or move a muscle. It is as if he were sniffing with his mind. “No,” he says harshly at last. “No, sir.”

This question of the boiled pudding steaming in its rags! Or Severn drifting down among the floating furniture in a birdcage across Venice. If it were in my choice I would reject a petrarchal coronation—on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers. (This is a spiritual adventure, not the memoirs of a plumber.) “Do it please,” says Eustace, “do it for me this once and I'll promise it's the last time.” Ohm has trotted away through the yard door, to his desk in the economics room. Inevitably someone must go into that little hole and prize open the cistern lid to make the plunger plunge. Eustace is sitting there leaning forward, with an anxious, preoccupied look—as if he can hear the shit slowly piling up. “Go on,” he wheedles softly, miserably.

In the end I take an improving book and retire to this little tank-like lavatory under the dusty staircase. The walls breathe a beautiful moisture. It is as cool as a butter dish. From the high window I am in direct communication with Madame About, with her irregular verbs. “
Cela passe toute croyance
” she announces suddenly in my ear, graciously. A question is asked. The sounds are all hollow and resonant. The gracious old woman with the ringed hands, and the aristocratic preoccupation in her eyes; the secrecy of things aromatic, leaves, ferns, under the snow-like silences. I imagine the candid profile upon the window, drenched in its own privacy. Everything is peace when the children enter her room. No rebellions, no hates, no hysterias. In the summer afternoons it is like a dream, time slowly flowing across the classroom, the blinds swinging and freckling the girls' arms and throats. Dust on the windows and the trams smothering by, shadows across the window, passing in cinematic briefness. On the dais she has cupped one hand in the other and is talking quietly to herself, tired to the point of sleep. She does not like helping me to read French verse; it disturbs her thoughts, disturbs this oil-on-water afternoon, and the coming and going of breath in her mouth. At four she will sigh and dismiss us with the benediction of relief; screw down her old black hat with long pins, slide her books into the leather satchel, and go, gathering up her skirts like a ballet dress. Down the dark staircase into the sunshine, along the hot pavement by the playing field where the trees crisp together.

In the lavatory I close my book, disturbed as I always am by the reflection of Madame About's inner privacy: the qualitative superiority of aristocracy, which brings out the tradesman in Eustace and quenches the children without a word. I am a little sentimental about her, thinking of the tall black queen treading the new grass of the playing fields, passing down Green Lane like a breath of tranquillity in her bulging patched shoes; the cherries dripping from her hat, saluting the hips and haws, and the new things which bud and stiffen along Ruskin Manor. Passing along the logical cricketers like a premonition of absolute death, shadowing their angel white with her black rustling clothes and silence. It is too real, the drama which she offers to this common, rather mean and shabby reality. Sometimes, sitting at the wooden desk, watching her face set stiffly in thought, I have the sensation of intruding on her, penetrating the façade of preoccupation which separates us. But this process is always taken up short. She is aware of the potential trespasser in me. When she catches me her face breaks into that perfect lazy smile, and I am ashamed of the obviousness of my interest. I am confused by the smile, the flower that opens upward from her throat.… Madame About like a black summer hypnosis dominating a form! What I am trying to get at is the almost dimensional quality of her difference from the others, as we might be a formula—the same class passing from room to room, teacher to teacher. The teacher a catalyst which changes us. I am thinking of Marney, and the subterranean hate which connects him with the pupils. Marney is a relic of the Middle Ages; there is the feeling that one day a chord will strike, a cable snap, a wheel turn—that the whole class will rise to its feet and stone him. Marney's face is always visible, eroded, weathered, lined with vanity, staring at us from a hundred cathedral gutters, from gothic buttresses, corbels; or running on hands and feet before the avenging stones of the mob. Often, sitting among the form, one can feel the temperature of emotion take a sudden deep curve up, at some small gesture of his, some vain remark; I can feel the hair tighten on the scalps of these thirty girls as they stare at him. At such times, if he dares to make a joke, the laughter is so harsh and bored that one winces instinctively. But he seems not to notice, turning on the gridiron of his own vanity. When they get him properly on the run the rage sets his face small and hard; his nose thins, eyes sink back into his forehead. He is like a bird. And this rouses the girls. They want to goad him to the end of emotion; they are flushed with rage and a kind of sexual happiness. They want him to burst into tears or foam. But the same class will pass into the French room, and sit as passive as cattle, faced with the complete stoical passivity of the old lady. Madame About, celebrating an eternal inner spring, though the heavens are falling; have fallen, I suppose one should write. I was not there on that August afternoon in which one of the many chronologies claimed her; yet I am there, watching the death mask smiling, with the flower in its throat. (“If this is imprecise it is because I myself am muddled.”) By the same method she is here, if I brood on it among the islands, the flutes, and berries: among the lambs leaping to the ceiling, little flossy bombs of spring. Among these hesitating pages, scribbled with emendations and images. If you must write there is no forgetfulness, and no memory. The only periodicity is in the time of poem. Very well, Madame About to waltz time, in a new scansion, with a cadenza of death in it. Or Marney as a dactylic elegy, punctuated by the brassy spondees of nose blowing. It is not difficult to explain. On the mantelpiece is a clock. The hands stand to a quarter past six, and it is striking twelve.
By these tokens I know that it is exactly ten past ten.

At last, the summer has shut down on us like handcuffs. There is hardly time to dream. Dust, brickdust, sawdust, soot. From the Parade the city is carved into misty nocturnes; the muslin girls are out, salt and baubled beauties, each hugging her dream—romance. The dream which has not come true. Even the trees chafe, as if eager to up roots and away. And I am entombed in the asphalt city, watching the summer as if from behind bars. On weekdays, as an inhabitant of this world, I am glad to escape from the hotel. At night, racing along the lanes homeward, I wonder whether this is not a solution to things: an eight-hour timepiece divided into illogical portions, telling me when to eat, work, sleep. It is not purely a question of food; I eat, yes. More than that, I have fourteen horses of my own consummated in bold steel to carry me wherever I want. Yet I am not happy. All the roads lead outward; the buses hum and dance along the roads, packed. Slim, the slanted, silk-stockinged legs batter past me in dust—pillion riders heading south. They are so certain of their summer, the eyes behind mica goggles, the man at the wheel, the stern driver.

Tarquin is away on holiday. He is going to find fulfilment these days, he tells me. It is the key word. Fulfilment! He lies in bed and thinks about it. “I think if I could be broken open somehow”, he broods, “it would be good for me.” We had a stag party not long since with a few of the bored local youths, Peters and Farnol, at which he became screeching drunk. Night, if you can imagine it—a hot summer night with the hotel mains all fused. We were sitting there, lighting old newspapers in the grate and drinking. “Sometimes I feel so damn stale inside. Full of stale air and microbes. I dream I am suffocating. I go into a room with an axe, and there I am lying on the bed like a plaster cast, full of dust. Honestly. I lift the axe, one two three … My head cracks open, rolls on the floor, I break in half; and the room is full of dust, the hotel, the street, everything thick with dust. Then I look at the plaster and
there is nothing inside
!” The little gingerbread gods of suburbia sitting there with a bored look and Tarquin canvassing for sympathies. If you say something really intelligent they will lift their glasses and drink absently, to avoid thinking about what you say. If you fart they will scream with laughter at your wit. Afterward, whirling down the scented country lanes in the car, Tarquin suddenly bellows: “Perhaps I need speed. More speed. I want to get the air in my lungs.” And begins to cry out, “
Faster, faster, faster,
” until Clare fills him to the gills with gin and puts the rug over him. Fulfilment!