Vac (4 page)

B
IRTH IS A
technical event in the diffusion of life, death a staging post in the movement of thought. Most of the people I write about are not whole. Their lives are broken or desperate. I do not think it is chance that sickens my friends. There is a gravity of the damned. The motor-roads of this island are lined with the contented and the contented are dull.

Craig Miller is not whole.

The president of the United States issued an ultimatum. He said to the leader of the Russians.

This was the direct confrontation that we had all feared for years. The slow Russian tramps wallowed on towards the island of Cuba.

Many years ago Craig Miller won the gold medal at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He came from Liverpool. His father lived in a hut and pushed a hand-cart through the streets, brawling in answer to racial jeers. Golden light from the synagogue candles flowed over the black bowlers of the grave devout. Liverpool, in Craig’s mouth, lurched two
thousand
miles across Europe and merged with Odessa or some Polish, ghetto-bearing town.

On tour in Scotland, Craig attached to himself a Scottish girl and, in spite of his fidelity and devotion to the ideal of family life, planted, in addition to a child in her womb, an ulcer in her stomach as the years went by. He had received many fine notices but never parts worthy of his gifts. Years before
we started to live thirty feet above his head we had been
impressed
by his representation of a decadent Arab boy in a mediocre play. But he was ‘difficult’ and so lesser performers were awarded better parts.

Craig charged squinting up Parson’s Avenue. Professional pride of physique sent him out to exercise but it was
resentment
that made his pace grim as he pounded in shorts across Hampstead Heath or thrashed down numerous lengths of the indoor pool. Probably a few centuries back a Tartar of the steppes had warmed Craig’s stock in the wrinkled pouch
between
his saddle-bowed legs. Caucasian Russians and Jews may have participated in the relay that later transmitted the seed but the nomadic East continued to smoulder in his
features
and, to his sardonic disgust, when he stormed off to the television studios it was often to play a sinister Oriental.

Returned from the ironic triumph of blunting his exquisite talent to the pitch of childish caricature, he practised Lear and Peer Gynt at home. But such sterile exercises only nourished his desperation.

Craig’s past seemed melancholy. It included such austere components as a hulk laden with the military mad, a room clammy with his own blood and a wife aghast, and a
grotesque,
pansy brother haunting his professional life with satiric reminders of its emotional superficiality and erotic ambiguity.

To have escaped all trace of paranoia would, given his just sense of his own prowess, have required greater stability than
he possessed. In fact, he attributed his less able brother’s
superior
commercial success in the theatre to:

Above Craig, below us, raged the domestic life of a young journalist on the first floor. Its less obtrusive elements were sudden, piercing parties or endless nocturnal jazz. Its more brilliant coups were thuds and moans, voices high in
recrimination
or amatory abandon, house-shaking blows as the
journalist,
or his haggard blonde wife (accomplice?), having again locked themselves out, attempted to batter down their own front door with the stone base of an urn. He beat her. Craig intervened once, when the tumult became imperative, to stop him methodically pounding his kneeling and possibly expiring wife’s head with a small club. This vigorous neighbour also established the adventurous tradition of falling, or being pushed, from his window. Surviving relatively unscathed the first time, on the second his bloody, broken form provided the family at basement level with a dramatic moment when they finally responded to his feeble tapping and peeped through the curtains.

During the Cuba crisis I carried that tough, bone-handled dagger of yours. I thought if we were partially flayed by a remote thermonuclear explosion I might be able to despatch us quickly with it. That was the dagger the little crook warned me, with his diabolical grin, might wind up between my ribs. You brought me a dagger, butter and cigars. He correctly noted the passion in your wild eyes but was insensitive to the tenderness of the love that fuelled it. I would have preferred, as the missilemen eyed their winking panels, and the Russian ships heaved towards the turbulent island, a pistol, but was unwilling to make melodramatic, and probably futile, attempts to acquire one. Still I carried the dagger and hated physical separation from you and the baby.

Poor Craig! How could he study? Suppose they had given
him Lear or some long, glum part from Ibsen, how could he have learned his lines? He had only to sit down to master: ‘There are ninety-eight points at which slight pressure will kill—’ for naked children to tumble screaming into the garden below. Leaping to his sturdy feet, he charged to the sunny window and, extruding his leonine head five feet above the splashing throng, urged:

In the momentary hush which was all such exhortations secured him, he would pick up the moronic script again just as grating bed springs, responsive to the exertions of the blonde wife and her latest lover, and punctuated by shrill, orgastic cries, rocked the ceiling over his head.

How could he live? His demands were few but apparently unattainable. He was an actor, a sensitive artist and he was already paying more rent than he could afford. Surely
elementary
amenities should be attainable? His wife, knotted round her ulcer, watched tensely as he stormed up and down the flat. In her memory were the fruits of earlier conflict, a ghastly red room containing a white, drained Craig. True that gore had been wrung from him by family jealousies but great distress might tilt him desperately again. Craig pounded up the stairs. The journalist and his wife, an intimate sneer on their double face, minced down. As they jostled past him they hissed at the incredulous actor:

Under Meg’s selfless pain Craig raved to the telephone. The landlord would hear, the police. Why must he feud merely to live? He paid enough. Didn’t they know, downstairs, that every leaf stirring outside made a roar in his living room, and then they discharged their whole enormous brood to riot in the garden? Craig flung away to the swimming baths and, while he was gone, a genial chap in a bowler raped his daughter on the heath. This he accepted with fatalistic calm
and the little girl seemed to revel in the adventure. She giggled:

Craig smiled resignedly. He invited me to collaborate with him on a play about a solitary man in a white room who hears the sound of human coupling through the walls. He invited us to eat duck.

When we weren’t eating duck with Craig, how did we live?

During those periods when we had a car we circled London. It took you several years to master drinking. Grinding home from Soho in a taxi I chucked handkerchiefs, a chiffon scarf, a pair of old woollen gloves and my own woollen scarf out of the window. Traffic noise muffled from the driver the sound of your upheavals. I watched him cautiously as I trapped most of another purple stream of vomit in a glove. Aware that your gastric revolts often lasted for hours I didn’t want him to turn us out of the vehicle.

Several nights we stole flowers. One night I put a wreath of lime in my hair and talked to you and a man, with gravity, on licensed premises. We were aware of the terrible and
irredeemable
urgency of the moment. How could ‘now’ express our love? We knew that only death could prune the irrelevant from our union, and our torrential vitality extinguished the possibility of suicide.

You bled in Paris. You were bleeding when we left Victoria. You were so lovely I choked. How can a man practise
medicine
for thirty years and fail to recognize spontaneous
abortion?
That was our first trip abroad when Maurice accepted my startling novel. You loved the cafes, the croissants, the street life. But the haemorrhage got worse and, reluctant to curb a moment of our holiday, you still couldn’t entirely stifle the cramp with codeine.

I lay luxuriating in corrupt emotion. You were on the other side of Paris, in a fragment of England. The Latin Quarter rattled around me. I repeated your name in ecstatic
incantation.
Suppose you died? My throat cracked as the first of a
cataract of voluptuous sobs broke loose. The blight of an artist is that he not only lives but must always observe himself living.

The great, fertile land of France. From the British Hospital I conveyed you by train to Chartres and a clapboard room. After a ludicrously brief convalescence in Chartres, we were driven by van to Orleans. The van had a corrugated body. French roads were humming with corrugated vans. Orleans was broken and seedy but we found a good four-course meal. The van taking us to Orleans crossed a plain of sky. I searched for bed-bugs at the head end of the mattress. The van to Orleans had only a seat for the driver and I reproached
myself
bitterly. You had come from uterine steel to a van full of oily tools. You were pale, squatting amongst the tools. I loved you so. Was technological genius rampant in the great land of France?

We found smoky wine, were rocked into nausea through the Alps, met a black priest in Lyons:

And how did we live? In each other’s longing. If you died in the night, or jeered at me, I would be shaken from the
hideous
dream by great, wracking sobs. Groping blindly, lost, and then slowly gulping precarious relief, I would huddle into the warm hollow of your arms, trying to press you into impossible immortality. You were there, my heart and darling, but you would not, could not, be there for ever. Cruel the wastes, cruel time and the earth that could secrete a thing of flame and tenderness and would ineluctably murder it. In those moments, in the paroxysm of love, time and our life together seemed to be draining perceptibly from the universe. The room quivered at the instability of human fusion and the parting of death
seemed a desirable escape from the inevitability of final
parting.

Less convulsive, but beyond expression too, were those moments, perhaps after much gaiety, when one of us would break down under the burden of joy. From a smile or a laugh your chin would suddenly tremble, your face furrow up like a child’s and you would fall into my arms.

Or, inexplicably in the midst of a tranquil phase, the pang would strike me and, laying aside book or knife and fork, I would rise numbly, move to your side, kneel down and
wordlessly
lay my head in your lap. As you stroked my neck and cheek, you would murmur:

Ten years—more—a current of rapture. Not one moment of those years but is a trophy.

Then how did we live?

Nietzsche deprived us of God and Freud of human integrity. If you died in my dreams it could only be—because I killed you there.

It was not a very large duck. We descended two flights to consume this bird. Craig seemed excited by the idea of eating duck. When isolating us preferentially from the malevolent rabble who otherwise polluted the house, he had enthused:

Craig seemed mildly surprised at the quantity of tomato juice and vodka we consumed before the duck. He soon
stopped
asking:

And just poured it. The duck arrived cushioned in sweet, tender peas. It was flanked by roasted potatoes. Craig showed us a painting he had recently acquired. It depicted a shed. Craig explained that it was an excellent painting for an actor.

Craig sang coster songs and Jewish songs. He played a record of himself singing an old Russian song. Competitively I recited imperfect versions of modern poems. Since we were both unsuccessful artists (I reserved a silent claim for the
innate
superiority of the creator to the exponent) we discussed at some length the manifest ignorance and corruption of the authorities in our respective fields and sighed a good deal at the ludicrous disproportion between merit and reward.

W
E LEFT THE
Yorkshire moors and curved South-East.

The moors had been mad with pheasants. Gloomy clouds massed behind the reservoir. Gloom annexed a horizon of moorland. Other people are discontinuous.

Trudging up the vale from the hotel, we came to ranked guns. The desperate whirr of displaced pheasants ended in a barrage of gunshots and a plummeting bird. The same
sportsmen
met evenings in the bar.

Each morning we trudged off into the past. The stream and lane became a ditch and path and we tramped up into the great air of the moor.

It was our last holiday, our last attempt to re-seal all the punctures in our life. Then why was that barmaid there? She looked as if she might, if you met her beneath the rose-trellis in the crisp of the night, and if you murmured:

She looked as if she might—

Other people are discontinuous but inexorable. I want to explain something. You
are
me. That is the crux of marriage. You are not discontinuous like the others. Each time we quarrel, it is someone quarrelling with himself.

We walked on a ridge above a river. In that rotting
farm-house
a cowman and his wife passed forty tranquil years. He reared beasts and healthy children.

Purple raindrops jewelled the air.

At night, in the bar, the sophisticated barmaid teased her kind:

Her erotic challenge irradiated the corridor bar. The
handsome
sons of local money strove to equal her provocative candour. You and I were Bohemian oddities.

A turkey strutted across the lawn. I crunched swiftly to the boot of our hired Vauxhall for your make-up box. The vale was delirious with health and peace.

Purple raindrops jewelled the air.

We slid down a steep grassy slope towards a reservoir. Small boys, hardy and courteous, drifted past us. They paused to draw crude maps. Questioning disclosed that they were on an educational mission to probe the headwaters of the furthest lake, beneath its tomb of clouds in the dangerous and boiling distance. We crossed the dam. The broad water breathed latent power. High on the shelved slope, huddled in an earthy hollow from the keen wind, we munched eggs and pasties.

We left the pheasants to the heath and the guns and
hummed
down into a valley of tranquil order. We rushed through English air to the sea. I asked:

We haven’t seen him for years. He only lives a few miles off our road. Fuck it, we can’t live in total isolation! Hideous, shameful resentment began to constrict my lungs.

In the tiny bar of a cottage pub an ancient woman brought us beer. Its bright amber intensified the shabbiness of the posters on the wall. A quaint train steamed across a yellow England. A buck swaggered towards a bleached sea. He cast an admiring eye on a tempting damsel stretched on the sand. They both wore the bathing dress of the thirties. They’d both be elderly now! God time! Its voracity.

A mile or so beyond the pub I stopped the car and screamed at you. Crude huts dotted the sea flats. Fear for the integrity of my larynx halted me when my voice collapsed in a squeak of hate. You glanced sideways at me with chaste, tremulous dignity.

You once said, and when had it ever lacked truth? You brought me nothing but love and joy and tenderness and in requital I screamed abuse at you. You said:

The thin road shot through sea wastes. Clumps of dingy weed sprouted from cindered tracts. My dear—oh my dear!

I eased the little car down a tight strip of road. On one side dunes and on the other a broad marsh. We stopped at the lighthouse point. Squalid dogs snarled towards us and we were both afraid. Part? Not live together? In—conceivable—

The dogs promptly turned tail and trotted away to the single terrace of sordid houses. And we both laughed. A rueful glance completed the reconciliation. We were together again, but not totally restored. It had happened before, so often, the spurt of fury and then the long, silent incubation of our need for each other until one of us mustered the giddy daring to admit it. It had happened too often before for us to pretend that the new rapprochement was likely to be durable. There would be a next time—and a next and—God, it must never degenerate into permanent grumbling, into acceptance of, and even dependence on, a state of muted and unbroken
resentment.
Sooner part than that! Inconceivable!

We stood on the dunes and watched coasting ships. I thought: England is modalities of sky. They talk of Greek light and Italian light but these merely illuminate life on the earth. In England we live in the sky.

Soon we motored away from the beach to visit Brian and Barbara. Barbara was politely distressed by our unannounced visit. She had a tableful of art historians coming to dinner and barely enough grub already. Still she’d do her best. She served a fish pie. Each art historian felt bitter about living in the provinces. They strove to cap each other’s sophisticated tales of the capital.

Brian sat at the head of the table, harassed by Barbara’s peremptory commands.

But I admired my old friend. He now knew a great deal about what men have ever done to modify hard substances and surfaces. He governed an art gallery. I mentioned the water abbey we had visited on the moors. In the eighteenth century, he told us, the spectacular ruins had formed part of a nobleman’s estate. To heighten their romantic appeal the landowner had dressed up one of his servants as a monk and made him wander about amongst the largely-intact buildings. A powerful community of masturbation and economic God decayed into the props of a servile actor. Brian explained all this in clear, fumbling words lit occasionally by a happy phrase.

Then coffee and bright chat in the living room. I said that the computers were coming. You didn’t say much. Data was never your domain. I used to wonder how someone who could discern a quality in a gesture and dance through all the
labyrinths
of feeling could inhabit a world unstructured by fact. You sat studying the human reality while we deployed
battalions
of information. You sat, shy and radiant, amongst a
congress
of pedants.

And the morning set us spinning towards the smoke again.

I suggested, not very hopefully, and you indignantly
insisted
that it had been very bad indeed.

You denounced Barbara. She had found contentment in their snug suburbia because a few of the neighbouring
housewives
were graduates. Half England is humming into London today. We should go to the theatre more often. That bloke’s mad. If we could only lead slightly more open lives. Not only sex. Swing past that lorry. Cut in—that Jag’s too far out—made it! Sex too of course. Sex. No time for sex in China. Half a mile of clear road. Get up to seventy. Darling, we’re
going
home to the smoke again. I love it when you and the baby wait for me in the window, singing that little song. I love it when we all have tea in bed in the morning. Damn, lights! Darling, we’re going home together again. Back to our life.

I squeezed your hand as we waited for the lights to change and you glanced round and smiled wryly.