The Centre of the Green (15 page)

The shower was over within fifteen minutes, but the sky did not clear, and the grass was wet. There was no point in staying any longer. The day had gone wrong. Charles, who had planned to spend it in the sun, and go to a movie in the evening, now had to use the movie to fill his afternoon. It was an English movie, of the kind which has stars and starlets in it, instead of actors and actresses; there were bosoms and blondes and a bursting dam. The second feature consisted of three television playlets about Scotland Yard strung together, and had been made in England by an American company with a largely Canadian cast. There was also a newsreel in which the Queen Mother returned from one Dominion, Princess Margaret visited another, the Duke of
Edinburgh
wore academic dress, Prince Charles and Princess Anne played with a corgi, and the Americans launched a new atomic missile at Cape Canaveral.

Charles left the cinema at seven thirty. He went to a coffee bar, sat alone at the counter, and ate a “
Continental
Sandwich”, in which only one slice of bread was used instead of two, and on it were arranged a thin piece of ham, half a gherkin, a segment of tomato, some wilted lettuce, and parsley that smelled of fish; it cost two shillings and sixpence. He ate it quickly, drank a glass of milk, and walked home. Alone in his room, he read a book until eleven o’clock, then made himself a cup of tea, and went to bed. So much for Saturday.

*

So much for Saturday. At the cottage, it was a
difficult
, fiddling sort of day. Mrs. Baker did not bother to cook any lunch, since there was nobody but herself to eat it, and for much of the morning she had nothing to do. Thereafter it seemed pointless to take her usual afternoon nap; she was not in the least tired. Her routine was broken, and the day emptied of its usual trivial occupations.

Of course she could have watched television during the afternoon, but she did not wish to become one of these addicts you read about. She never allowed herself to switch on until six o’clock for the News. The afternoon was spent restlessly. It was not the day for dusting, but she dusted the drawing-room. She put on a wide hat, and took a basket, and pulled what weeds she could find from the borders. She made a pot of tea, and drank one cup of it. “Never more than one cigarette” a day was her rule; she usually smoked it after supper, when she could really enjoy it. But this afternoon she had one cigarette with her tea, and several afterwards, until at five-thirty she switched on the television set, and watched the last half hour of a children’s programme.

Later on, as dusk settled over the countryside and the room grew grey, Mrs. Baker made more tea and cut
herself
some bread and butter, which she ate from a tray where she sat watching television. She sat on silently in the darkened room, with the only light coming from the bright flickering screen in the corner, and the voices, the images, seemed to flow easily into one another, asking nothing from her, meaning nothing to her, just the grey light and the faraway unimportant noises soothing and relaxing her nerves.

Only one thing was missing. For some time it worried her, as she cast about in her mind to identify it. She was used to it; it was a necessary accompaniment to the light and the voices. It took her a long time before she realized that what she missed was the steady, dependable irritation of her husband’s clearing his throat,
hrrmm! hrrmm! hrrmm! hrrmm!
as distracting and habitual as a cricket in the wall.

*

It is nothing much. It is no more than a shadow in the mind, but it can spread. You lie in bed, gazing at the
window, and you do not want to get up, and you do want to stay where you are. You can see the blank wall of the area, and the railings above it, and on the pavement
beyond
the railings a pair of trousered legs and the bottom of a raincoat. The legs go by. You hear cars passing, and the clop and rattle of the milkman’s horse and cart. You cannot see the sky, but the railings are wet, and the pavement is wet, and the light is dull, so you know what sort of day it is outside.

You lie there, and your watch tells you that the time is five to ten, and there is no more than a faint shadow in your mind. There are plenty of things to do if you set yourself to think of them. There is coffee to make and drink, the Sunday papers to read, a beer at the local, lunch somewhere, listening to the speakers in Hyde Park, a cinema again in the evening. And as you construct this list in your mind, after each item a small voice asks, “And then?”

It is no more than a shadow. Soon it will be gone, like the morning taste in your mouth. You get up. Each movement seems to be made in a vacuum, dead and complete in itself. There is no reason for one movement to lead into another, because there is no reason why you should be doing anything at all, except that the act of doing it eats a little time.

Charles took his
Sunday Times
,
Observer
, and
News of the World
from the pile on the hall table. Today’s milk had not yet arrived, and yesterday’s had already gone sour in the humid air. Charles brought his coffee from the kitchen to the front room, and drank it black while he worked through the papers.

It took an hour and a half. The
Sunday Times
was serializing the autobiography of the only British general who had not published one already; this week’s
instalment
was headed “Memories of New Delhi”, and
Charles did not read it.
The Observer
carried a long
challenging
article, with pictures of some Matabele, called “Spotlight on West Africa”; Charles remembered that there had been a spotlight on East Africa last week, and a note in italic type at the bottom of the page told him that spotlights on South, North and Central Africa would follow. The dramatic critic of the
Sunday Times
was
writing
about a new play in Paris, and the dramatic critic of the
Observer
about a new play in New York. The
Sunday Times
film critic began her column, “I have now seen this Japanese film five times, and am beginning to find it heavy going,” and the
Observer’s
film critic had been to Studio One to see a film about a small child and a dog; she wrote that if only there were more films about small children and dogs, the industry wouldn’t be in such a bad way. In
The News of the World
, Charles found a news item about an insurance agent, who drove his Humber Hawk between Pinner and Pall Mall wearing nothing but a plastic mac, his shoes and socks, and the cut-off bottoms of a pair of grey worsted trousers sewn to the plastic mac. His nakedness had been noticed by a garage attendant, and he had been arrested by the police. Questioned in court, the man had replied, “We all have our little peculiarities. This is mine.”

Charles had read the papers. He lit a cigarette. “And now?” said the voice, “And now?” He washed up, made the bed, and tidied his basement flat. “And now?” He took a book, and walked between showers to the local for a drink. The little tables outside were deserted, for all the seats were damp. Instead, the Sunday customers of the local were packed into its three bars; the air reeked of damp raincoats and expensive scent. Most of the young men who went there for a drink on Sunday mornings, wore Daks trousers, hacking-jackets, white shirts, and silk squares knotted at the throat. Their wives and
girlfriends
laughed either a lot or not at all, and said “off” instead of “off”; many of them wore tight tartan trousers, and pullovers belonging to the young men. On a sunny Sunday, the local was a pleasant place for Charles to idle away an hour. There would be somewhere to sit down, perhaps the scent of lilac, cold lager to drink, and everyone decently dispersed at the little tables. But now, when all the young men and women were crowded together, and most of them were shouting, and Pimms and pink gins passed hazardously from hand to hand, Charles found it almost unendurable. Trapped half-way between the entrance and the bar, he had to control an impulse to fight his way out again. A voice said, “And then mummy died, so of course we moved in right away.”
All these people!
“Goes like a bird, old man,” somebody else said, “like a bird.” He didn’t want to be with these people; he shouldn’t have come. You can’t be part of a group, unless you’re one of the group. He would do better to drift around the streets for a while, and then have lunch. “And then?”

He walked slowly, looking at the houses, examining shop windows, reading some of the postcard
advertisements
on the boards outside newsagents shops—
“Doris is back at the usual address, and will always be glad to welcome old friends.” “Attractive, eighteen-year-old photographic model
….
” “Bed-sit. Suit two. No coloureds.”
Should he bother to have lunch at all? He was not hungry, but it would be something to do.
What am I going to do today? How am I going to get through it?
But he must see things in proportion. There was no reason for hysteria. The day would pass. Sundays had come and gone before—why, there was one every week! “The well-stocked mind is never bored,” he thought. No? Scraps of academic cant came floating into his mind; “accuracy of taste”, “the appreciation of true ideas”. To Dr. Leavis, he supposed,
boredom was never a problem; he simply read D. H. Lawrence all over again.

He was passing a restaurant; there were white linen tablecloths and the smell of boiled vegetables. He went in, and sat at an unoccupied table. Why had he done that? Would it not have been more sensible to search for company? No, for it was more boring to make
conversation
than to read. He looked up, and caught the glance of the girl at the next table. She was too white, he thought; it was either her complexion, or the powder she used. White, with blonde hair, untidily confined by a
tortoiseshell
band. She had a small spot at the corner of her mouth. Her black suit had not been properly brushed. When she saw that Charles was looking at her, she lowered her own gaze, and picked at the tablecloth with a fork. Charles opened his book, and began to read. After some
time
, the waitress brought his order of warmed-up roast beef, with a small strip of Yorkshire pudding, baked potatoes and boiled greens. Charles continued to read as he ate, holding the page flat with the edge of his side-plate. When after finishing his second course of rhubarb tart and custard, he looked around again, the girl had gone.

It was time for Speakers’ Corner. He walked through Kensington Gardens, where small boys played football on the grass, dogs romped, a few kites flapped high in the air, and boats were sailed on the Round Pond. He went on into Hyde Park, past the long row of benches, equally spaced, and each with its solitary occupant. At Speakers’ Corner, the crowds were already gathering. The
Salvation
Army were singing, “
Wide, wide as the ocean, High as the Heavens above, Deep, deep as the deepest sea, Is my Saviour’s Love
.” The easiest way to heckle singers is to sing oneself, so one raucous band of idlers had struck into, “Knees Up, Mother Brown”, and another younger band sang,
“
Nay
-robi!
Nay
-robi!” in a nasal whine, copied to poor effect from Tommy Steele. Beneath the trees, a shabby bearded man spoke of the Second Coming, and a pink undergraduate was incoherently reasonable about the Necessity of Belief. “I mean, I wouldn’t be coming here if
I
didn’t believe,” he said. “I mean, you must see that God is at least likely.” American tourists, who had read about this before they came, moved from group to group taking photographs; the men wore snap-brim hats and lightweight jackets, and their women were in sleeveless dresses in bright colours, low-heeled shoes, and big leather bags hanging by a strap over one shoulder. Even on this grey day, the Americans wore sun-glasses. The bare arms of the women were slightly goose-pimpled.

At Speakers’ Corner, the speakers take their stand in a rough arc along the asphalt where the paths meet at the Marble Arch corner of Hyde Park. The religious speakers are at the Park Lane end of this arc, the politicians at the opposite end, and the Irish and coloured people in the middle; often there is an overflow meeting on the grass to the south, and this is usually held by some
individualist
who does not fit into any of these compartments. Every speaker has his own loyal corps of followers, and to these the drifters (who outnumber them) attach
themselves
for a while, before breaking away to sample someone else. The Irish and the coloured speakers have the largest corps, because on any Sunday afternoon in London, a great many Irish and West Indians are likely to be single, poor, and with nothing better to do.
Consequently
, the largest crowds are in the centre, for it is one of the natural laws of Speakers’ Corner that the drifters are most attracted to those speakers whom they cannot easily hear, and to the corps of followers and the normal run of drifters are added those unhappy men who do not want to hear the speakers at all, but simply to
stand in a crowd, with their hands clasped behind them in the hope that some young person will brush against those hands and stay there.

Charles drifted from group to group, and the time passed slowly. It seemed to him that the same things were said week after week. The same middle-aged woman with the same sallow face and eyes like a frightened hare pushed her way from group to group, interrupting the speakers and trying to carry part of each group away with her. The same shabby man in a trench-coat called out to the same Nigerians, “Why don’t you Wogs go back where you came from?” and the same foul-mouthed housewife chimed in with, “You f——ers! Sleeping ten to a room! It ought to be stopped!” The same rationalist heckled the Catholic; the same Catholic heckled the atheist. The same policemen in uniform walked by; the same American servicemen in tight trousers chewed gum; the same Guardsmen in coarse khaki cloth loitered by the same benches. It was all the same. If the weather were rainy or cold, the crowds were smaller; in winter they were more warmly dressed. But always the same words were said, the same things done. To participate was to be one of the damned, repeating over and over again the same meaningless pattern of behaviour.