The Furnished Room (13 page)

The sounds of loudspeakers replaced that of the radios. An open-air meeting was being held at the end of the street. People drifted towards the meeting, a fat woman in bedroom slippers, a wiry little man with tattooed arms, and a group of young men who swaggered and shoved one another.

On the portable platform the speaker was advocating that the Negroes should be cleared out of Notting Hill. “… they take our houses. ...” The overcrowded population cheered.

Technicians, sitting on the roof of the loudspeaker van, looked bored and swapped cigarettes. Beckett looked round the crowd, and soon discerned his acquaintance Reg Wainwright. Wainwright, with his grey, crew-cut hair, powerful build, and tartan shirt, would have stood out in any crowd. Beckett elbowed his way towards him, and asked: ‘Are your communist friends going to break up this meeting?'

‘No. The best policy with these colour-bar meetings is to ignore them, not to give them the publicity they want.' Wainwright knocked out his pipe on the sole of his shoe. ‘They won't get far with this audience, anyway. This is a working-class area, and the workers aren't anti-coloured. The white workers and the coloured workers will unite against the capitalists; they won't fight each other.'

“… importing cheap coloured labour threatens white workers ...” Cheers and whistles.

Beckett said: ‘So much for your workers. They're not angels, you know, not a special race. They're just human beings like everybody else. These meetings don't succeed on rational points alone. Overcrowding and the undercutting of wages are rational points, but the main force is the hatred waiting to be unleashed in all of us. Hatred can be summoned up with appalling ease, and directed against West Indians or Jews or Catholics or any other minority group you care to name. Hatred gets more following than the housing problem.'

‘Then education must change matters,' Wainwright said. He added, with the incomprehending agony of a lover of humanity: ‘I cannot understand it.'

At that moment, the crowd parted to let three West Indians through. The three men were brave to walk through the ranks of barely muzzled hostility. They did not cringe or look afraid. They had the easy, insolent West Indian hip swagger, and one of them ate fish and chips from a newspaper packet which he held under his chin. Their dark, deer eyes ranged over the heads of their hunters.

A ripple, like a snarl, broke out in the ranks of the whites. It only needed someone to make the first move and the three men would have been mobbed. But the English are frightened of making the first move. It was only when the Spades had got clear of the crowd that somebody shouted after them: ‘Bloody niggers!' There was a murmur of general assent.

Then the crowd returned its attention to the platform. Wainwright repeated: ‘I cannot understand it.' Beckett realized that he himself, like the others, had tensed like a dog ready to spring. Like the others, he had shared in the mob hatred at the cool effrontery of the West Indians. He said: ‘I can. I can understand it. I regret it, and theoretically I'm opposed to prejudice and race hatred. But in practice I understand it.'

‘You amaze me. You, a civilized, intelligent man….'

Beckett interrupted: ‘There's a man over there who seems to be waving to you, Reg.'

‘Where? Oh yes, I know him. He's a party member, a good type. He probably wants me to go across to the pub with him. Do you feel like going over for a quick one?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Oh, come on. A very quick one.'

‘Some other time.' Beckett did not want to listen to the two communists talking their code.

‘Well, let's make that some other time definite. It's a long time since I've seen you. Come round one evening, why don't you? You know my address in Camden Town.'

‘All right.'

‘Well, do that.'

‘All right.'

He watched Wainwright shoulder his way towards the pub and the communist friend trotting to keep pace. Wainwright was a good man, whose physical strength and mental ardour had seemed to increase with his years. Wainwright, despite his lack of literary talent, slogged away to produce, every ten months or so, another novel portraying folk at the factory bench or works floor. He had also written a historical novel which had achieved some success as the dust jacket portrayed a girl in low-necked historical costume.

Beckett returned his attention to the meeting. He thought: Yes, it's the irrational the speaker appeals to. Not the rational. Not to the desire for better houses or higher wages, but to the dormant wild beast in men. The beast which can be so easily awoken. Recently, he had read an account of a Nazi concentration camp. The article had factually stated the number of Jews who had been gassed. Incidents had been mentioned, including the endeavours of mothers to push their children out of the gas chamber at the last moment before the doors shut. On one occasion, a new detachment of prisoners had arrived at an ill-timed moment, and had been greeted by the sight of corpses being shovelled on to the pyre. The new prisoners had panicked, women among them had screamed, and as a result the Nazi guard had immediately shot down the whole detachment.

Beckett's immediate reaction had been a burst of sadistic joy. He knew that if, at that precise moment, he had seen a woman prisoner with her arms yearning for a lost child, he would have kicked her in the face. The shooting of the new detachment had pleased his sense of order. They were damn' nuisances, screaming and panicking like that. Shooting them was the only orderly thing to do. He loathed the prisoners for their ugliness, their suffering, and their lack of pride. The photographs of these degraded sufferers, squatting behind their barbed wire, had revolted him so much that he had thought it a pity that the whole lot hadn't been gassed. He had preferred the photographs of the Nazi guards, who had at least looked clean and self-respecting. The prisoners, with their insistent, shameless misery, were as nauseating as Christ's bleeding heart in the picture.

The next moment he had been overcome by shame at his thoughts. He was not at all anti-Semitic. Many of his acquaintances were Jews and it had never occurred to him to differentiate. He was in fact opposed to anti-Semitism and to all racial prejudice. The article, however, had fired the violence in him, and when people were taken at the peak of violence they were capable of atrocities.

It was as if he harboured a wild beast, and surely, he thought, he was not peculiar in this. The guards at concentration camps were ordinary men from all walks of life, not a separate race of monsters. However much humanity protested its horror and nausea at these atrocities, there was no escaping the fact that sadism lay dormant in ordinary men. The wild beast thus harboured was a gorilla.

Others contained a different beast, a lean and lonely wolf. Once, walking in the woods near his parents' home, he had seen a respectable, middle-aged man spying through the bushes at a courting couple. The man had been tense with excitement, and had panted. On another occasion, on a Tube platform, Beckett had noticed that one of the posters bore a pencilled scrawl: ‘I want to play with your fanny.' The few passengers on the platform had been neat and stiffly dressed, and it had occurred to him that they were all a pretence, and that the only reach for truth was in those crude, semi-literate words scrawled on the poster.

Then there were the vast sales of the Sunday papers dealing in sex and violence, which were read for vicarious thrills.

Surely most of the public, which included the man in the wood, the writer on the Tube poster, and the readers of the Sunday papers, had normal sexual outlets. They were not deprived of normal sex; but they wanted something different.

He thought, that's the trouble with a man like Wainwright. He blames human institutions, instead of human nature.

He considered the animal in himself. In congested streets, he daydreamed of mowing down the slowmoving crowds with a machine gun. If he saw a fat woman waddling across a zebra, or an old man tottering off the kerb, he longed to be a maniac killer driver. When he passed the children's playground in Kensington Gardens he tried to see the knickers of the little girls who stood on the swings. If others could read his thoughts like tickertape across his forehead he would be a social outcast. Yet in actuality his behaviour was decent enough. He was not a sadist or a satyr.

The crowds broke into fresh cheering. Next to Beckett, a housewife, with neck flushed and eyes bright with excitement, screamed: ‘That's right, we don't want half-caste kids….'

A photographer's bulb flashed. The group of Teds in front of him started to horse about. “There you are, Len, front-page photo of you and me...' The Teds had spent the previous part of the meeting discussing a TV programme.

When the meeting was over, and the crowd dispersed, Beckett noticed a solitary West Indian standing on the pavement. He approached the man, offered him a cigarette, and remarked: ‘It's hard on you, this sort of thing.'

The man shrugged. ‘Oh well.'

‘D'you work round here?'

‘Yes, on the Underground. I'm a ticket-collector.'

Becket was shy, and uncertain what to say next. He felt a bit of a fool, but all the same wanted to show his friendship. He exchanged a few more remarks with the man, then said: ‘Oh well, I must be off. Glad to have met you.'

The site of the meeting was now a wasteland, littered with propaganda leaflets and cigarette packets. A troupe of children, white and coloured, ran across it playing catch.

In Camden Town the heat swarmed like a plague of flies over the dirty buildings. The fumes of the traffic made the High Street smell like a garage. Beckett decided to stroll through the park before calling on Wainwright. After a while he lay down on the grass, pillowing his head on his clasped hands. He watched the pink flamingo clouds.

Somebody called his name. He looked up, and saw Georgia standing a few yards away. She was smiling, with one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. He was not pleased to see her. He had kissed her at the party because he had been drunk and she had been the nearest female. Now he felt awkward, because he had treated her badly.

However, he stood up and tried to look enthusiastic. ‘Well, hello, Georgia.'

‘Hello... Joe.' She said his name in a special way, as if they shared a secret. Her eyes, smiling into his, were provocative.

He said: ‘Do you live near here?'

‘Yes, quite near. Do you?'

‘No.'

She said: ‘Isn't it a lovely day?'

‘A bit hot.'

‘Yes.' She smiled at him again, fiddling with her bead necklace.

He said: ‘Were you going anywhere particular?'

‘Just for a stroll.”

‘Oh. Would you like a cold drink or something at the open-air café?'

‘What a nice idea.'

They walked together under the shadow of the trees. She was wearing a floral cotton dress, with white shoes and handbag. Her auburn hair caught the glint of the sun.

Outside the café they drank lemonade with a cool, cheap-scent taste from waxed cups. Georgia smiled lazily round at the people and the umbrella-shaded tables. ‘I'm so glad I saw you. I live in Camden Town, you know, and I often come to the park and doze in a deck chair.'

She was holding a book. Beckett asked: ‘What are you reading?'

‘Oh, a novel from the book club I belong to. They send you a book a month.' She handed him the detective story. ‘I never read newspapers; they're too depressing. Rebellions and H-bombs and crimes and things. Do you know what happened in my street recently? I bet they'll put that in the papers. This poor old shopkeeper, who was very nice — I used to get my groceries there — was killed and the till was robbed. And do you know how much the killers got out of the till?'

‘No?'

‘Four-and-threepence-halfpenny. Or was it three-and-fourpence-halfpenny? Anyway, it was practically nothing. Isn't it terrible that the poor old man was killed just for that?'

‘Who did it? Did they find out?'

‘Oh, some Teds, of course,' Georgia said.

‘This is an age of non-belief. General scepticism always produces the sort of blasé youth who sneers at all institutions and beliefs, and who is contemptuous of morality to the extent of having no values. For someone without beliefs or values, for someone who is a spiritual bankrupt, crime is merely an experience. He'll cosh a shopkeeper more for the experience than for the trivial contents of the till. And if you ask him why he did it, he'll say something like: “Why not? Just because I felt like doing it. Wanted some money for a cinema ticket.”'

‘What do you mean by the age of non-belief? What doesn't the age believe in?'

‘Religion, which is the only thing that can give meaning to life. The collapse of an absolute value leads to the collapse of relative values. When God collapses, so does honour, honesty, patriotism, and the like. I'm not saying that it's altogether bad that such things should go. Rabid patriotism for instance does a lot of harm, and causes muddled thinking. But on the other hand, such things do give an inner logic to a man's life. They give him some sort of central touchstone. Without them, he can just drift in a signless world where no action is good or bad. Life without meaning is life without morality. Hence the great increase in the sort of crime which stems from a momentary whim, as opposed to the old-fashioned crime where a man stole because he was starving.'

Georgia gazed at him admiringly: ‘You are clever, Joe.'

Beckett could not help feeling flattered by her admiration. He was excited by his clarity of mind, his thoughts. He sat tensely on the edge of his chair, like an eager student expounding his ideas. ‘To a man without beliefs, any action may be preferable to his present state of inertia.'