PENGUIN BOOKS
Hangover Square
Patrick Hamilton was one of the most gifted and admired writers of his generation. Born in Hassocks, Sussex, in 1904, he and his parents moved a short while later to Hove, where he spent his early years. He published his first novel, Monday Morning, in 1925 and within a few years had established a wide readership for himself. Despite personal setbacks and an increasing problem with drink, he was able to write some of his best work. His plays include the thrillers Rope (1929), on which Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope was based, and Gas Light (1939), also successfully adapted for the screen (1939), and a historical drama, The Duke in Darkness (1943). Among his novels are Craven House (1926); The Midnight Bell (1929), The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and ThePlains of Cement (1934) which form a trilogy entitled Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935); Hangover Square (1941); and The Slaves of Solitude (1947). The Gorse Trilogy is made up of The West Pier, MrSampson and Mr Gorse and Unknown Assailant, which were first published during the 1950s. J. B. Priestley described Patrick Hamilton as ‘uniquely individual… He is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil.’ Patrick Hamilton died in 1962.
A story of darkest Earl’s Court
with an Introduction by J. B. Priestley
The First Part – CHRISTMAS TRAVEL
The Second Part – PHONING
The Third Part – PERRIER’S
The Fourth Part – JOHN LITTLEJOHN
The Fifth Part – PETER
The Sixth Part – BRIGHTON
The Seventh Part – END OF SUMMER
The Eighth Part – MR BONE
The Ninth Part – ‘FLU
The Tenth Part – BRIGHTON
The Last Part – MAIDENHEAD
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by Constable 1941
Published in Penguin Books 1956
Reprinted with an Introduction 1974
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2001
15
Copyright 1941 by Patrick Hamilton
Introduction copyright© J. B. Priestley, 1972
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-14-195640-4
NOTE
The quotations from Roget’s Thesaurus are made by permission of Messrs Longmans, Green & Co., to whom the author and publishers make grateful acknowledgement.
SCHIZOPHRENIA: …a cleavage of the mental functions, associated with assumption by the affected person of a second personality.
Black’s Medical Dictionary
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It is now half a lifetime ago that I wrote an Introduction to Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. (This was a genuine trilogy of London novels, which had been published separately but were then brought out in one volume.) And now here I am, back again. But everything is different. Then, in 1935, Patrick Hamilton (b. 1904) was still a young novelist of immense promise. Now I have to remember that he died ten years ago, and that there must be a whole generation of readers who know nothing about him and his fiction, who have never opened his Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude. It is just possible that some of them may have heard of his two successful plays, Rope and Gaslight, but while these are not without theatrical merit – on any level Hamilton was a good craftsman – they are not in the same original and memorable class as novels like Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude, which indeed are among the minor masterpieces of English fiction.
The first was written in his later thirties; the second in his earlier forties, being published in 1947. Three more novels were to come, between 1951 and 1955: The West Tier, Mr Stimpsonand Mr Gorse, and Unknown Assailant, three independent stories but linked together because they all describe the mean villainies of one Ernest Ralph Gorse. This was a bad idea anyhow, and Hamilton no longer had the creative energy to bamboozle us into believing it was a good idea. There was a reason for this rapid decline from his best work to his worst. He spent too many of his later years in an alcoholic haze, no longer a social drinker but an unhappy man who needed whisky as a car needs petrol. There may have been some inherited tendency here, but I feel strongly that an increasing desire to blur reality arose from the depths of a profoundly disturbed unconscious. We have to accept this, I believe, fully to understand the man and his work, both the wonderful best of it and the forgivable worst of it. Otherwise I would never have referred to his later alcoholism, for I prefer to remember him as the delightful young writer I first knew well over forty years ago.
Even in 1935, six years before he gave us Hangover Square, I could write in my Introduction: ‘Here is a drama, The London Pub, presented by a tragic comedian, for that, I think, is no bad description of this author. The comedian cannot be missed; and now and again he returns to an early fault and is too determinedly facetious, too lavish with what we might refer to as his Komic Kapitals. But his humour is real, and has a fine Dickensian thrust and flourish. Behind the run is a deepening sense of tragedy…’ Here we can find the clue, the pattern, the secret. Patrick Hamilton began as a very young novelist, barely in his twenties. And there is a sense in which he stayed very young, even though he reached maturity as an artist. The essential self behind the novelist, expressed by him, never came out of that youth, never really matured at all. Patrick Hamilton became one of the most widely admired novelists of his generation; he earned and spent a great deal of money; and in ordinary terms he left his youth behind for many years of middle-age. But while knowing all this – and indeed a lot more than this – I cannot help seeing him from first to last as a gifted youth, living in some boarding-house and breaking out of his solitude every night to sit in a pub, keeping very sharp eyes and ears hard to work. Even the absurd little snobberies of his later life, noted without malice by his brother Bruce, seem to me those of a rather ingenuous youth. Again, though he tried living in many different places (always in England), he never appears to have really settled down anywhere, never became a member of a community, but was always, so to speak, the restless and sceptical outsider, still the gifted but lonely youth.
It is this that gives his fiction its unusual setting, its peculiar characters, its unique style, tone, flavour. He is above all the novelist of the homeless. Instead of a specific society, which most novelists require, he takes us into a kind of No-Man’s-Land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet. (And no English novelist of my time has had a better ear for the complacent platitudes, the banalities, the sheer idiocy of pub talk, than Hamilton.) But his characteristic humour, always at its height retaining a certain zest that is itself youthful, still leaves us aware of what is lurking in the shadowy background. This is a suspicion of the society from which his chief characters are exiled. It is a deep feeling that there are no real homes for his homeless people to discover. It is a growing despair that dreads the way our world is going. (To ease this, during the Second War and for some time afterwards, he turned to Marxism and Soviet Russia, but not with any great conviction and passion – ingenuously youthful again – as any of us who heard him on these subjects can testify.) What was intensely felt here was not the result of political-economic opinion. It was an instinctive abhorrence of our modem urban life that may have disturbed him quite early, perhaps from boyhood. Though he used a wartime background for his Slaves of Solitude, it is significant that in the three Gorse novels that followed he had to return to the nineteen-twenties and thirties: he could no longer cope with the post-war world. It is also significant that the most forceful piece of writing in Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse is the last thing in it, a sardonic vision of an England covered with cars, as if it had been successfully invaded by a host of giant beetles, receiving every attention.
While he matured as a novelist – and both Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude reveal formidable skill – that inner Patrick Hamilton, the lonely youth of the boarding-houses and pubs, remained to brood over the scene. So he is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil. His George Harvey Bone, condemned to live in Hangover Square, is a triumph of compassionate creation. His is an idle and stupid existence, always threatened by schizophrenia, and he is a double murderer before finally committing suicide. Yet it seems to me impossible to deny him our sympathy. His adored Netta, on whom he wastes so much time, attention, deeply-felt longing, is not only a selfish and callous little bitch, but, along with her closer friend, Peter, seems to represent some principle of evil. And all this group, forever aimlessly drifting and pub-crawling, somehow suggest the London of 1939, and far better than most novels of the period, though they may be more broadly-based. We live so closely with the hopelessly infatuated Bone that we can never forget him.
Much the same can be said of a very different character, Miss Roach, with whom we live so closely in The Slaves of Solitude. She is another of Hamilton’s memorable innocents, and the kind of rather vague spinster who would never attract our attention. But by the time she leaves the boarding-house at Thames Lockdon and returns to London, then we have shared with her so many little adventures, as strange to her as episodes in the Arabian Nights, we are among her closest friends. (It is the lack of this growing point of sympathy in so many recent clever novels that makes us shrug them away.) And we have also become acquainted, in typical Hamilton fashion, with Mr Thwaites, at once a comic character and a menacing monster, the sinister Vicki Kugelmann, and the American who is as generous but as unpredictable as an Oriental despot. It is all happening in wartime, with the war itself never forced into the scene but kept growling in the distance; the whole thing being presented with wonderful skill.
It is possible that this new generation of readers, who do not know their Patrick Hamilton, may at first be bewildered or rather bored by his very individual humour, depending as much of it does on emphasizing – by a free use of quotation marks and capital letters – the catch-phrases and banalities of an older and vanishing generation. But I feel sure that a great many younger readers will be caught and held by Patrick Hamilton’s intensely personal vision of life, his enduring sense of homelessness, of the loneliness and solitude so many young men have known, his feeling for the innocence always menaced by stupidity and wickedness, the compassion behind his apparently sardonic detachment The world that he secretly regarded with horror, in the dark outside the lighted saloon bars, is not better than it was when he was writing these novels, it is if anything – worse. So I feel there must be thousands of youngish readers who will not only appreciate his unique talent but will also welcome him as a friend and a brother. And on my part I must add that, returning to these novels after many years, I find his stature has increased. He is no great major novelist, taking all society in his grasp, and he never pretended to be. But among the uniquely individual minor novelists of our age, he is a master.
J. B. PRIESTLEY
CHRISTMAS TRAVEL
Why so pale and wan, fond lover,
Prythee, why so pale?
Will, if looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prythee, why so pale?
Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
Prythee, why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing do’t?
Prythee, why so mute?
SIR J. SUCKLING
Click!… Here it was again! He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again… Click!…
Or would the word ‘snap’ or ‘crack’ describe it better?
It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise. It was the sound which a noise makes when it abruptly ceases: it had a temporarily deafening effect. It was as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead. And yet he was not physically deaf: it was merely that in this physical way alone could he think of what had happened in his head.
It was as though a shutter had fallen. It had fallen noiselessly, but the thing had been so quick that he could only think of it as a crack or a snap. It had come over his brain as a sudden film, induced by a foreign body, might come over the eye. He felt that if only he could ‘blink’ his brain it would at once be dispelled. A film. Yes, it was like the other sort of ‘film, too – a ‘talkie’. It was as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed. The figures on the screen continued to move, to behave more or less logically; but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world. Life, in fact, which had been for him a moment ago a ‘talkie’, had all at once become a silent film. And there was no music.
He was not frightened, because by now he was used to it. This had been happening for the last year, the last two years – in fact he could trace it back as far as his early boyhood. Then it had been nothing so sharply defined, but how well he could remember what he called his ‘dead’ moods, in which he could do nothing ordinarily, think of nothing ordinarily, could not attend to his lessons, could not play, could not even listen to his rowdy companions. They used to rag him for it until it at last became an accepted thing. ‘Old Bone’ was said to be in one of his ‘dotty’ moods. Mr Thorne used to be sarcastic. ‘Or is this one of your – ah – delightfully convenient periods of amnesia, my dear Bone?’ But even Mr Thorne came to accept it. ‘Extraordinary boy,’ he once heard Mr Thome say (not knowing that he was overheard), ‘I really believe it’s perfectly genuine.’ And often, instead of making him look a fool in front of the class, he would stop, give him a curious, sympathetic look, and, telling him to sit down, would without any ironic comment ask the next boy to do what he had failed to do.
‘Dead’ moods – yes, all his life he had had ‘dead’ moods, but in those days he had slowly slipped into and out of them – they had not been so frequent, so sudden, so dead, so completely dividing him from his other life. They did not arrive with this extraordinary ‘snap’ – that had only been happening in the last year or so. At first he had been somewhat disturbed about it; had thought at moments of consulting a doctor even. But he had never done so, and now he knew he never would. He was well enough; the thing did not seriously inconvenience him; and there were too many other things to worry about – my God, there were too many other things to worry about!
And now he was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton, on Christmas afternoon, and the thing had happened again. He had had Christmas dinner with his aunt, and he had gone out, as he had told her, to ‘walk it off’. He wore a light raincoat. He was thirty-four, and had a tall, strong, beefy, ungainly figure. He had a fresh, red complexion and a small moustache. His eyes were big and blue and sad and slightly bloodshot with beer and smoke. He looked as though he had been to an inferior public school and would be pleased to sell you a second-hand car. Just as certain people look unmistakably ‘horsey’, bear the stamp of Newmarket, he bore the stamp of Great Portland Street. He made you think of road houses, and there are thousands of his sort frequenting the saloon bars of public-houses all over England. His full mouth was weak, however, rather than cruel. His name was George Harvey Bone.
It was, actually, only in the few moments following the sudden transition – the breaking down of the sound-track, the change from the talkie to the silent film – that he now’ ever thought about, or indeed was conscious of – this extraordinary change which took place in his mind. Soon enough he was watching the silent film – the silent film without music – as though there had never been any talkie – as though what he saw had always been like this.
A silent film without music – he could have found no better way of describing the weird world in which he now moved. He looked at passing objects and people, but they had no colour, vivacity, meaning – he was mentally deaf to them. They moved like automatons, without motive, without volition of their own. He could hear what they said, he could understand their words, he could answer them, even; but he did this automatically, without having to think of what they had said or what he was saying in return. Therefore, though they spoke it was as though they had hot spoken, as though they had moved their lips but remained silent. They had no valid existence; they were not creatures experiencing pleasure or pain. There was, in fact, no sensation, no pleasure or pain at all in this world: there was only himself – his dreary, numbed, dead self.
There was no sensation, but there was something to be done. Emphatically, most emphatically there was something to be done. So soon as he had recovered from the surprise – but nowadays it was hardly a surprise – of that snap in his head, that break in the sound-track, that sudden burst into a new, silent world – so soon as he had recovered from this he was aware that something had to be done. He could not think what it was at first, but this did not worry him. He could never think of it at first, but it would come: if he didn’t nag at it, but relaxed mentally, it would come.
For two or three minutes he walked along in a dream, barely conscious of anything. The motion of his body caused his raincoat to make a small thundering noise: his big sports shoes creaked and rustled on the grass of the cliff-top. On his left, down below, lay the vast grey sweep of the Wash under the sombre sky of Christmas afternoon: on his right the scrappy villas in the unfinished muddy roads. A few couples were about, cold, despairing, bowed down by the hopeless emptiness and misery of the season and time of day. He passed a shelter, around which some children were running, firing toy pistols at each other. Then he remembered, without any difficulty, what it was he had to do: he had to kill Netta Longdon.
He was going to kill her, and then he was going to Maidenhead, where he would be happy.
It was a relief to him to have remembered, for now he could think it all out. He liked thinking it out: the opportunity to do so was like lighting up a pipe, something to get at, to get his teeth into.
Why must he kill Netta? Because things had been going on too long, and he must get to Maidenhead and be peaceful and contented again. And why Maidenhead? Because he had been happy there with his sister, Ellen. They had had a splendid fortnight, and she had died a year or so later. He would go on the river again, and be at peace. He liked the High Street, too. He would not drink any more – or only an occasional beer. But first of all he had to kill Netta.
This Netta business had been going on too long. When was he going to kill her? Soon – this year certainly. At once would be best – as soon as he got back to London – he was going back tomorrow, Boxing Day. But these things had to be planned: he had so many plans: too many. The thing was so incredibly, absurdly easy. That was why it was so difficult to choose the right plan. You had only to hit her over the head when she was not looking. You had only to ask her to turn her back to you because you had a surprise for her, and then strike her down. You had only to invite her to a window, to ask her to look down at something, and then thrown her out. You had only to put a scarf playfully round her neck, and fondle it admiringly, and then strangle her. You had only to surprise her in her bath, lift up her legs and hold her head down. All so easy: all so silent. Only there would be meddling from the police – ‘questions asked’ – that had to be remembered: he wasn’t going to have any questioning or meddling. But then of course the police couldn’t find him in Maidenhead, or if they did they couldn’t touch him there. No, there was no difficulty anywhere: it was a ‘cinch’, as they said: but it had got to be planned, and he must do the planning now. It had all been going on too long.
When was it to be then? Tomorrow – Boxing Day – as soon as he saw her again. If he could get her alone – why not? No – there was something wrong with that. What was it? What on earth was it?… Oh yes – of course – the ten pounds. His aunt had given him ten pounds. She had given him a cheque this morning as a Christmas present. He must wait till he had spent the ten pounds – get the benefit of the ten pounds – before killing Netta. Obviously. What about the New Year, then – January the first? That seemed a good idea – starting the New Year – 1939. The New Year – the turn of the year – that meant spring before long. Then it would be warmer, Maidenhead would be warmer. He didn’t want to have to go to Maidenhead in the cold. He wanted to go on the river. Then he must wait for the Spring. It was too cold to kill Netta yet. That sounded silly, but it was a fact.
Or was all this shilly-shallying on his part? Was he putting it off again? He was always putting it off. In some mysterious way it seemed to go right out of his head, and it had all been going on too long. Perhaps he ought to take himself in hand, and kill her while it was cold. Perhaps he ought not even to wait until he had had the benefit of his ten pounds. He had put it off such a long while now, and if he went on like this would it ever get done?
By now he had reached the edge of the Town Golf Course and he turned round and retraced his steps. A light wind struck him in the face and roared in his ears, and he looked at the feeble sun, in the nacreous sky, declining behind the bleak little winter resort of an aunt who had come up to scratch. Strange aunts, strange Hunstantons! – how did they stand it? He had had three days of it, and he’d have a fit if he didn’t get back tomorrow. And yet Aunt Mary was a good sort, trying to do her duty by him as his nearest of kin, trying to be ‘modern’, a ‘sport’ as she called it, pretending that she liked ‘cocktails’ though she was nearly seventy. My God – ‘cocktails!’ – if she only knew! But she was a good sort. She would be cheerful at tea, and then when she saw he didn’t want to talk she would leave him alone and let him sit in his chair and read The Bar 20 Rides Again, by Clarence Mulford. But of course he wouldn’t be reading – he would be thinking of Netta and how and when he was going to kill her.
The Christmas Day children were still playing with their Christmas Day toy pistols around the Christmas Day shelter. The wet grass glowed in the diffused afternoon light. The little pier, completely deserted, jutted out into the sea, its silhouette shaking against the grey waves, as though it trembled with cold but intended to stay where it was to demonstrate some principle. On his left he passed the Boys’ School, and then the row of boarding-houses, one after another, with their mad names; on his right the putting course and tennis courts. But no boys, and no boarders, and no putters, and no tennis players in the seaside town of his aunt on Christmas Day.
He turned left, and went upwards and away from the sea – the Wash in which King John had lost his jewels – towards the street which contained the semi-detached villa in which tea, with Christmas cake and cold turkey (in front of an electric fire at eight o’clock), awaited him.
Click!…
Hullo, hullo – here we are! – here we are again!
He was on Hunstanton station and it had happened again. Click, snap, pop – whatever you like – and it all came flooding back!
The sound-track had been resumed with a sudden switch; the grim, dreary, mysterious silent film had vanished utterly away, and all things were bright, clear, vivacious, sane, colourful and logical around him, as he carried his bag, at three o’clock on Boxing Day, along the platform of the little seaside terminus.
It had happened at the barrier, as he offered his ticket to be clipped by the man. You might have thought that the click of the man’s implement as he punctured the ticket had been the click inside his head, but actually it had happened a fraction of a second later – a fraction of a fraction of a second, for the man still held his ticket, and he was still looking into the man’s grey eyes, when he heard the shutter go up in his head, and everything came flooding back.
It was like bursting up into fresh air after swimming gravely for a long time in silent, green depths: the first thing of which he was aware was the terrific sustained hissing noise coming from the engine which was to take him back to London. While he yet looked into the man’s eyes he was aware of this noise. He knew, too, perfectly well, that this noise had been going on ever since he had entered the station, while he was buying his ticket, while he was dragging his bag to the barrier. But it was only now, now that his brain had clicked back again, that he heard it. And with it every other sort of noise which had been going on before – the rolling of a station trolley, the clanking of milk-cans, the slamming of compartment doors – was heard by him for the first time. And all this in the brief moment while he still looked into the eyes of the man who had punctured his ticket. Perhaps, because of his surprise at what had happened, he had looked into the eyes of the man too long. Perhaps the man had only caught his eye, had only looked at him because he had subconsciously wondered why this passenger was not getting a ‘move on’. However that might be, he had only betrayed himself for a fraction of a second, and now he was walking up the platform.
What a noise that engine made! And yet it exhilarated him. He always had these few moments of exhilaration after his brain had ‘blinked’ and he found himself hearing and understanding sounds and sights once again. After that first tremendous rush of noise and comprehension – exactly like the roar of clarification which would accompany the snatching away, from a man’s two ears, of two oily blobs of cotton wool which he had worn for twenty-four hours – he took a simple elated pleasure in hearing and looking at everything he passed.
Then there was the pleasure of knowing exactly what he was doing. He knew where he was, and he knew what he was doing. It was Boxing Day, and he was taking the train back to London. He had spent the Christmas holiday with his aunt who had given him ten pounds. This was a station – Hunstanton station – where he had arrived. Only it had been night when he arrived. Now he was catching the 3.4 in the afternoon. He must find a third-class compartment. Other people were going back to London, too. The engine was letting out steam, as engines will, as engines presumably have to before they start. That was a porter, whose business it was to carry luggage, and who collected a tip for doing so. There was the sea. This was a seaside town on the east coast. It was all right: it was all clear in his head again.
What, then, had been happening in his head a few moments before – and in the long hours before that? What?… Well, never mind now. There was plenty of time to think about that when he had found a compartment. He must find an empty one so that he could be by himself. If he had any luck, he might be alone all the way to London – there oughtn’t to be many people travelling on Boxing Day.
He walked up to the far end of the train, and selected an empty compartment. As he turned the handle of this, the hissing of the engine abruptly stopped. The station seemed to reel at the impact of the sudden hush, and then, a moment later, began to carry on its activities again in a more subdued, in an almost furtive way. That, he realized, was exactly like what happened in his head – his head, that was to say, when it went the other way, the nasty way, the bad, dead way. It had just gone the right way, and he was back in life again.
He put his suit-case on the rack, clicked it open, and stood on the seat to see if he had packed his yellow-covered The Bar 20 Rides Again. He had. It was on the top. It was wonderful how he did things when he didn’t know what he was doing. (Or did he, at the time, in some way know what he was doing? Presumably he did.) Anyway, here was his Bar 20. He clicked the bag shut again, sat down, pulled his overcoat over his legs, put the book on his lap, and looked out of the window.
He was back in life again. It was good to be back in life. And yet how quiet and dismal it was in this part of the world. The trolley was still being rolled about the platform at the barrier end of the station: two porters were shouting to-each other in the distance; another porter came along trying all the doors, reaching and climactically trying his own handle, and fading away again in a series of receding jabs: he could hear two people talking to each other through the wooden walls of the train, two compartments away; and if he listened he could hear, through the open window, the rhythmic purring of the mud-coloured sea, which he could see from here a hundred yards or so beyond the concrete front which was so near the station as to seem to be almost part of it. Not a soul on the front. Cold and quiet. And the sea purred gently. Dismal, dismal, dismal.
He listened to the gentle purring of the sea, and waited for the train to start, his red face and beer-shot eyes assuming an expression of innocent vacancy and misery.
The train shuddered once or twice, and slid slowly out towards Heacham.
He put his feet up on the seat opposite, adjusted his body comfortably against the window, and looked idly at his shoes. Something in the sight of the pattern of the brogue on the brown leather all at once gave him a miserable feeling – a little clutch at his heart followed by an ache. For a brief moment he was at a loss to account for this pain: then he realized what it was and all his misery was upon him again. Netta! Netta!…
He had forgotten!… For a whole five minutes – while he had walked up that platform and found a compartment, and taken his book from the suitcase, and looked out of the window while he waited for the train to start – he had been somehow tricked into not thinking about Netta! A record, certainly!… And he had been reminded of her by the sight of his own shoes. It was because the brogue on his own brown shoes was exactly the same as the brogue on the new brown shoes she had begun wearing a week or so ago. He had noticed the similarity when they were sitting in the ‘Black Hart’ having gins-and-tonic that morning after that awful blind when Mickey had passed out in the taxi. A nice state of affairs, when you’re so in love with a girl that the sight of your own shoes tears your heart open! Such was the awful associative power of physical love. He took his feet down, because he knew he could no longer catch a glimpse of his own shoes without incurring the risk of being pained.
Five minutes’ respite, breathing space – well, that was something – getting on! But wait a moment – what about his ‘dead’ period? Did he think about Netta in his ‘dead’ moods? Or did that strange shutter which fell, that film which came over his brain, somehow cut him off from Netta, from the pre-occupation of his days and nights? Perhaps it did – perhaps it was a sort of anaesthetic which Nature had contrived to prevent him going dotty through thinking about Netta. But then if he had not been thinking about Netta, what had he been thinking about? And that reminded him. He had asked himself just that question as he walked up the platform, and he had promised himself to seek an answer to it.
Well, then, what had he been thinking about – what went on in his head when the shutter was down? What? What?…
It was no good. He had no idea. Not the vaguest idea. This was awful. He must try and think. He really must try and think. But what was the use of thinking? He never could remember, so why should he remember now?
When did it start, anyway? How long had he been ‘under’? It had been a long time this time, he was certain of that. It went right back into yesterday. What could he remember of yesterday – Christmas Day? He could remember lunch – ‘Christmas Dinner’ as it was called – with his aunt. He could remember that clearly. He could remember the ultra-clean tablecloth, the unfamiliar wine-glasses, the turkey, and the mince-pies. Then he could remember having coffee afterwards. And then he said he would go and ‘walk it off’ and his aunt went up to her bedroom to sleep. He could remember putting on his raincoat in the hall. He could remember going down towards the sea, and then walking along the cliff towards the Golf Course… Ah! There you were! That was it. It must have happened while he was walking along the cliff. Yes. He was sure of it. He could see himself. He could almost hear it happening in his head, as he walked along the cliff and looked out towards the sea. Snap. But what then? What?… Nothing. A blank. Absolutely nothing. Nothing until he suddenly ‘woke up’, about ten minutes ago on Hunstanton station – ‘woke up’ to find himself looking into the eyes of the man who was clipping his ticket, and hearing the fearful hissing noise of that engine.
Good God – he had been ‘out’ for twenty-four hours! – from about three o’clock on Christmas afternoon to three o’clock on Boxing Day. This was awful. Something ought to be done about it. He ought to go and see a doctor or something.
What was he thinking about all that time – what was he doing? That was the point – what was he doing? It was terrifying – not to know what you thought or did for twenty-four hours. A day out of your life! He could be terrified now, he could let himself be terrified – but the thing had been happening so often recently that it had lost its terrors, and he had too many other worries. He had Netta to worry about. That was one thing about Netta – you couldn’t worry about much else.
But, really, it was awful – he ought to do something about it. Imagine it – wandering about like an automaton, a dead person, another person, a person who wasn’t you, for twenty-four hours at a stretch! And when you woke up not the minutest inkling of what the other person had been thinking or doing. You might have done anything. You might, for all you knew, have got madly drunk. You might have had a fight, and got into trouble. You might have made friends or enemies you knew nothing about. You might have got off with a girl, and arranged to meet her. You might, in some mad lark, have stolen something from a shop. You might have committed assault. You might have done something dreadful in public. You might, for all you knew, be a criminal maniac. You might have murdered your aunt!
On the other hand it was pretty obvious that you were not a criminal maniac – and that you had not had a fight, or done anything dreadful in public, or murdered your aunt. For if you had people would have stopped you, and you would not be sitting comfortably in a third-class carriage on your way back to London. And that went for all the other times in the near and distant past – all the ‘dead’ moods you had had ever since they had begun. You had never been arrested so far, you had never shown any signs of having been in a fight, and none of your relations and friends had been murdered!
Your friends and relations, in fact (though they certainly recognized and sometimes chaffed you for your ‘dead’ or ‘dumb’ moods), had never accused you of doing anything in the slightest way abnormal: nor had anyone whom you didn’t know ever claimed to know you.
It was, indeed, abundantly clear from all the evidence that when the shutter was down he behaved like a perfectly reasonable, if somewhat taciturn, human being. How else could he have got to the station? How else could he have packed his bag – and put The Bar 20 Rides Again on top so that he could take it out to read in the train? How could he have bought his ticket – known where he was going? No – there was nothing to worry about. He had thought out all this before, and he had always known there was nothing to worry about.
It just was that he wished to God he could remember what he had been doing and what he had been thinking.
The train, rattling in gentle unison with his thoughts as it slid over the surface of the cold, flat, Boxing-Day bungalow-land of this portion of the coast, began to slow down, and then stopped at its first stop, Heacham.
There was a gloomy pause. Then the handle of his door was rudely and ruthlessly seized, and a cold woman, seeming to bring with her all the pain and bleakness of the Norfolk winter outside, violated his centrally-heated thought-closet.
She was apparently of the servant class, and as soon as she had entered she lowered the window and began talking volubly to a friend on the platform, who had come to see her off. This woman on the platform wore no hat, he noticed, in spite of the cold; but instead of that she wore a hair-net over her hair. He looked at this hair-net with dull misery in his heart. Even after the train had started, and the woman had vanished, he retained a picture of the hair-net, and wondered why it made him miserable, why he hated the woman for wearing it, why he obscurely felt she had been giving him cause for resentment.
Net… It dawned on him. Of course, that was it. Net. Which equalled Netta… He had been quite right; the woman had been hurting him: she had been trying, all the time as she talked to her friend, to remind him of Netta.
Oh dear – these horrible off-hand strangers, who knew nothing of Netta, who would care nothing about Netta even if they did, but who yet had the power to remind him of Netta, and obscurely torture him by wearing hair-nets!…
Netta. Nets. Netta. A perfectly commonplace name. In fact, if it did not happen to belong to her, and if he did not happen to adore her, a dull, if not rather stupid and revolting name. Entirely unromantic – spinsterish, mean – like Ethel, or Minnie. But because it was hers look what had gone and happened to it! He could not utter it, whisper it, think of it without intoxication, without dizziness, without anguish. It was incredibly, inconceivably lovely – as incredibly and inconceivably lovely as herself. It was unthinkable that she could have been called anything else. It was loaded, overloaded with voluptuous yet subtle intimations of her personality. Netta. The tangled net of her hair – the dark net – the brunette. The net in which he was caught – netted. Nettles. The wicked poison-nettles from which had been brewed the potion which was in his blood. Stinging nettles. She stung and wounded him with words from her red mouth. Nets. Fishing-nets. Mermaid’s nets. Bewitchment. Syrens – the unearthly beauty of the sea. Nets. Nest. To nestle. To nestle against her. Rest. Breast. In her net. Netta. You could go on like that for ever – all the way back to London.
But if you weren’t in love with her – what then? Net profit? 2s. 6d. Net? Nestlé’s Milk Chocolate? Presumably. But in that case, of course, you wouldn’t think about it at all. It was only because you were crazy about her you went on like this. So crazy that your heart sank when you saw your own shoes, or looked at a woman wearing a hair-net on Heacham station.
Crazy. Perhaps he was really crazy – dotty. With these awful ‘dead’ moods of his – twenty-four-hour slices of life concerning which he remembered nothing – you could hardly call him normal. But he had been into all that and decided there was nothing to worry about. No. He was sane enough. If you didn’t count the ‘dead’ moods, he was sane enough. In fact he was probably too sane, too normal. If only he was a little more erratic, if only he had a little fire, a little originality or audacity, it might have been a different story. A different story with Netta and all along the line.
He was, of course, completely without ambition. He wasn’t like Netta. He didn’t want to hang about film people and theatre people and try to make a lot of money easily. He didn’t want anything, except Netta. She, of course, would hoot with laughter if she knew what he really wanted. He wanted a cottage in the country – yes, a good old cottage in the country – and he wanted Netta as his wife. No children. Just Netta – and to live with her happily and quietly ever afterwards. He would love her, physically love her, even when she was old. He was certain of that, though sophistication condemned the idea as absurd. She was, to him, so utterly different from any other girl that the thought of tiring of her physically was unimaginable.
And how she would jeer at him if she knew this was what he wanted – how they would all jeer at him. ‘I believe poor old George,’ he could hear Peter saying, ‘wants you to go down into the country and be a milk-maid or something.’ And yet he wouldn’t mind betting that half the men who were, or had been, in love with Netta wanted very little else – the trouble was they wouldn’t admit it.
But they could hide it successfully – which was what, apparently, he couldn’t do. Maybe that was because they didn’t feel it as deeply, want it as badly, as he did. He couldn’t hide it. He had no illusions about himself: he knew exactly what she and all that Earl’s Court gang thought of him. They saw him as a poor, dumb, adoring, obvious, cow-like appendage to Netta – ever-present or ever-turning up. And then there were his ‘dead’ moods, which were a popular joke – a ‘scream’. Dead-from-the-neck-upwards – that was him. Somebody you could really dismiss with easy conviction as an awful fool – a b.f. It was like that at school from Mr Thome onwards: it was like that now.
And yet he wasn’t such a fool, either. They thought him silly, but he had his own thoughts, and maybe he thought them silly too. They wouldn’t think of that, of course: it wouldn’t cross their minds. But he had his thoughts all the same. He saw much more than they thought he saw. They would get the shock of their lives if they knew how he could see through them at times – how transparent they were, for all their saloon-bar nonchalance and sophistication.
He could see through them, and, of course, he hated them. He even hated Netta too – he had known that for a long time. He hated Netta, perhaps, most of all. The fact that he was crazy about her physically, that he worshipped the ground she trod on and the air she breathed, that he could think of nothing else in the world all day long, had nothing to do with the underlying stream of scorn he bore towards her as a character. You might say he wasn’t really ‘in love’ with her: he was ‘in hate’ with her. It was the same thing – just looking at his obsession from the other side. He was netted in hate just as he was netted in love. Netta: Netta: Netta!… God – how he loved her!
He hated himself, too. He didn’t pretend to be any better. He hated himself for the life he led – the life in common with them. Drunken, lazy, impecunious, neurotic, arrogant, pub-crawling cheap lot of swine – that was what they all were. Including him and Netta. She was an awful little drunk, though she had a marvellous head. She never got up till half-past twelve: just chain-smoked in bed till it was time to drop over and into the nearest pub (only she had to have a man to take her over, because she didn’t want to be taken for a prostitute). And she was the daughter of a clergyman in Somerset. Now deceased!
When you met in the morning all you talked about was last night – how ‘blind’ you were, how ‘blind’ Mickey was, my God, you bet he had a hangover. (‘Taking a little stroll round Hangover Square’ – that was Mickey’s crack.) So-and-so might have been ‘comparatively sober’, etc., etc. And when you had had a lot more to drink you felt fine again, and went crashing round to lunch upstairs at the ‘Black Hart’ (the table by the fire) where you ragged the pale waiter and called attention to yourselves. (Of course the trades people and commercial gents stared at Netta because she was so lovely and striking.)
He hated it and was sick of it. How long had it been going on? Over a year now – he had known Netta over a year. And when would it ever stop? Never, of course. So long as Netta willed it, so long as she chose to live the life she was living now, never. In the early days he still thought of getting a job in spite of her, still hoped that something would turn up, that he would somehow get his life straight again. But he had given up all hope of that now. He wouldn’t look at a job – he couldn’t look at one. In that matter he was atrophied. What! – get a job and not be on the spot in the mornings to take her over for her drinks? Get a job and leave her to Mickey and Peter all the day!
And yet he wasn’t such a fool even here. He wasn’t utterly improvident like they were. He had still got a bit of his mother’s money left. He had got three hundred pounds in War Loan and seventy-eight pounds twelve and threepence above that in current account. That wasn’t much, when it was all you had against starvation, but if he could five down to four pounds a week (and he somehow did manage, or nearly manage, to do this in spite of everything) it would keep you going a long while. Keep you going until all this Netta business somehow ended, if it ever somehow did – keep you going till you somehow got a job again, if you ever somehow did. He was never going to touch that three hundred pounds if he could help it, and he was going to go on living down to four pounds a week. Two pounds a week for living, two pounds for drinks and smokes and Netta. (And ten pounds extra now, to spend all on smokes and drinks and Netta!)
They, of course, would yell at this providence of his – regard it as meanly cautious, middle-class, poor-spirited, all part of his general ‘dumbness’. It was one of their greatest boasts, one of their major affectations, that they were always broke, always ‘touching’ people – that you would go out and spend your last twelve shillings on a bottle of gin rather than get in groceries.