Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Lodge
Dedication
Title Page
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Copyright
Ginger, You’re Barmy
The British Museum is Falling Down
Out of the Shelter
Changing Places
How Far Can You Go?
Small World
Nice Work
Paradise News
Therapy
Home Truths
Thinks …
Author, Author
Deaf Sentence
A Man of Parts
Language of Fiction
The Novelist at the Crossroads
The Modes of Modern Writing
Working with Structuralism
After Bakhtin
Write On
The Art of Fiction
The Practice of Writing
Consciousness and the Novel
The Year of Henry James
Lives in Writing
Quite a Good Time to Be Born
The Writing Game
Home Truths
Secret Thoughts
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Epub ISBN: 9781473524095
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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © David Lodge 1960
David Lodge has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This edition published in Vintage in 2016
First published in MacGibbon & Kee 1960
Published with an introduction in Penguin Books 1993
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781784702694
FOR MY PARENTS
THE CEILING OF Mr Maurice Berkley’s office next to the projection room was cracked and peeling. Every square inch of the Palladium cinema, Brickley, except the foyer, desperately required redecoration; but Mr Berkley remarked this particular area of decay because he was staring at the ceiling from his couch, where he was wont to relax for half an hour before changing into his dinner-suit. Why he persisted in the empty ritual of changing his clothes at a quarter past six every evening, he found difficult to explain. It certainly didn’t impress the customers, as they sloped furtively across the foyer, out of the anonymity of the pavements, into the anonymity of the auditorium. Nevertheless he swung his feet to the floor and reached out for his dinner-suit. As he slicked down his scanty hair, and tugged his bow-tie deftly into shape, he decided that he changed clothes for his own sake. Like the dress uniform of some historic regiment buried in the khaki uniformity of a modern army, it was a defiant, hopeless gesture to a drab, uninterested world. Hopeless, because nothing could recall the days of glory, when the Palladium had been the Brickley Empire—the grandest music-hall south of the River, and first stop on the suburban circuit for the big names of the West End. All that remained of that era were the faded, curling photographs of once-famous artistes, who grinned vacantly from the walls above their scribbled messages of inadequate goodwill: ‘To Maurice, with love, from an old trouper’ … ‘All the best in life—Maudie Jameson’ … ‘To Maurice, with many happy memories, and best wishes for the future—Joe Blakey’ … Was this, then, the future to which they had consigned him?
He skirted the desk on which lay the still imbalanced ice-cream accounts, and softly closed the door on the accusing columns of figures.
From the head of the circle staircase he looked down at the bare, cheerless expanse of the foyer. In the old days it would have been a bright, babbling crush of people, and he himself would have been threading the crowd, greeting an old friend, politely refusing a request for complimentary tickets, directing the Press to their seats … Sighing, Mr Berkley began to descend the stairs. Saddened, he had watched music-hall die of TV, entertainment tax and the contempt of the young; shamefaced, he had witnessed the failure of sleazy nude shows, with titles of laboured suggestiveness, to win back the customers; stunned, he had stood by while his theatre was knocked down to a cinema-owner. He had been faced with two depressing alternatives: the undignified status of cinema-manager; or unemployment. Being a realistic man, Mr Berkley had chosen the former. But the salt had gone out of his life.
Now he stood uneasily beside the box-office, trying to catch the eyes of his customers, if only to smile at them. But they avoided his glance, as if he were some kind of policeman. Morosely they queued for their tickets, joylessly they took them to the ticket-girl, and swiftly they were swallowed up by the booming darkness beyond the swing-doors. Against their cheap frocks and sports coats, his dinner-suit conveyed an impression of unnecessary and eccentric self-display. He exchanged a few words with the girl in the box-office (but what did she know of boxes?).
‘How’s business Miss Gray?’
‘Oh, just about as usual Mr Berkley.’
Which meant just about as bad as usual. Not only had Mr Berkley endured the indignity of managing a picture-palace instead of a theatre: there was the further humiliation that the Palladium had never been a success as a cinema. The conversion had been effected at the very moment when cinema receipts had begun to slump after the post-war boom. The new owner had made a bad speculation, and tended to channel his irritation on to Mr Berkley. If the owner decided to cut his losses and sell out, where would Mr Berkley be? The news that the Rialto in Bayditch was to be converted into a warehouse, lay heavy, an undigested lump of worry, in Mr Berkley’s memory. Well, let it lie there. He positively would not be a warehouse manager.
He eyed with distaste the interior of the foyer, where ill-advised attempts had been made to impose a veneer of ‘contemporary’ on the rich, old, Edwardian décor which, even at its shabbiest, imparted a feeling of comfort and opulence, a sense of insulation from the everyday world, which Mr Berkley always insisted was an essential part of the experience of going to a theatre. But then he was no longer manager of a theatre.
Restlessly he paced over to Bill, the aged commissionaire, like himself a veteran of an earlier and better era.
‘Not like the old days, is it Mr Berkley sir?’ said Bill, greeting his employer’s obsession fondly, as if it were a cat. The man’s sycophancy nettled Mr Berkley unreasonably, and he turned away with a muttered ‘No’. He retraced his steps to his office, steeling himself to grapple with the ice-cream accounts. As he mounted the stairs he intoned to himself a cinema-manager’s catechism:
Q. What does the margin of profit or loss depend on?
A. Ice-cream.
Q. What therefore, does my livelihood depend on?
A. Ice-cream.
Q. What therefore, is the source of all happiness?
A. Ice-cream …
When the Palladium was made into a warehouse, he prophesied bitterly, it would probably be used to store ice-cream.
Mr Mallory always liked to drop from the bus while it was still moving. He did so now, with practised aplomb, and sauntered after it as it braked to a halt. On the running-board his wife lurched as the movement was snatched from under her feet, and catapulted crossly on to the pavement.
‘Oh no, don’t help anyone,’ she remarked, as he hurried forward, too late. He swallowed the apology that had risen to his lips.
‘Come on, the programme will have started,’ he merely said.
Not that he was anxious to get to the cinema. He hated hurrying his leisure. The week’s work was behind him; idleness lay ahead—if he didn’t lift his eyes too high. Tomorrow was Sunday. There was one precept of Christianity he would always conscientiously observe: keeping the Sabbath holy by abstaining from servile work. In that particular respect at least he had always been, unconsciously, a Christian; so he had realized when Father Kipling had explained to him the doctrine of Baptism of Desire. Perversely, this was the one commandment his wife, who had been largely responsible for his conversion, insisted on breaking regularly.
To his mind, even a mere bus-ride to a cinema, on a Saturday evening, should be free from the hustle and bustle of everyday travel. On Monday morning, of course, he would be gripped again by the same frenzy as possessed everyone on the Southern railway in the rush-hour. He would claw and push and run with the herd. But a journey to a pleasant, idle destination should be undertaken without this vulgar fuss and hurry, with leisured ease, oblivious to the crude demands of time, the ultimate entertainment being postponed and savoured in anticipation. It was bound to be a disappointment anyway.
If he were alone, for two pins he would not go to the cinema at all, but just stand at this busy junction, observing the passing show, sharing the relief of a city relaxing its strained, tired nerves at the end of a working week. One of the chief occupations of his youth had been to stand at a street-corner with some pals, just looking and talking … he brushed aside the recollection, which honesty forced upon him, that as a young man he had lacked the means to do anything else. Now he could do something else, now he had money in his pocket, the democratic entertainment of street-corner lounging seemed like an unattainable luxury. There was something at once soothing and invigorating in the atmosphere of Saturday night, which he wanted time to absorb. The traffic was moving more quietly now, with more grace and control than during the day; gear changes were sweeter, acceleration less fierce. And the people seemed to take the evening like a reviving drink; one could sense a week-end cheerfulness in the air. From a radio shop late to close, a negro’s voice carried to the street:
Everybody loves Saturday niiight,
Everybody loves Saturday niiight,
Everybody,
Everybody,
Everybody,
Everybody,
Everybody loves Saturday night.
There was always a certain amount of truth in these popular songs.
He paused to buy an evening paper from the nimble-fingered newsvendor, who drew it with a flourish, like a sword, from the sheaf under his arm. Mr Mallory scanned the football results which occupied most of the front page, and noted philosophically that he had failed to win a pools dividend. A waste of time and money, Bett called it, but she didn’t understand that he cheerfully paid out 3s. 6d. a week, not with any real expectation of receiving £75,000 in return, but simply to add a little interest and excitement to life.
He raised his eyes from the paper and took in the scene with a benevolent regard. He felt no contempt for the flashily dressed youths who sauntered by, nudging and butting each other; and only gratitude for the pretty, gaily-dressed young girls, eddying past in giggling, self-conscious groups. He could pick out in the throng a few late shop-girls prinking home in high heels, their neat little bottoms tightly sheathed in narrow skirts, expensive hair-do’s bobbing; once home—homes so much more soiled than their clothes—the sheath would be exchanged for something wide and rustling; a comb through the glossy perm, a flower at the throat, a squirt of deodorant, a fresh layer of powder, a quick renovation of faded lipstick—and they would be ready, smiling, and indefatigable for the palais or whatever else. Who could blame them if they didn’t get up and go to church next morning? Only people who had enough time on their hands to compose letters to the Catholic papers about ‘pagan’ England.
‘Well then, come on, if you’re going to,’ said his wife.
Really Tom was getting so strange these days, this irritating, absent-minded sort of smile on his face, as if he could only concentrate on the thing before his eyes and was rather pleased with it—a habit which somehow seemed to put all the responsibility and worry on her shoulders. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for staring after young girls, there was no harm in it she knew, and she should be past the age of jealousy. She had put on so much weight in the last few years it was too late to do anything about it now. ‘What do you expect after eight children?’ she had blurted out one day when Tom was teasing her, and then wished she hadn’t. She disliked showing Tom her real feelings. It placed her at a disadvantage. But she didn’t give herself away so obviously as he did, staring after those bold girls, with more money than sense, tight skirts that were almost indecent, well the way they walked anyhow. She recalled, but without affection, the days of her own youth, of her wretched financial dependence on her parents, and the Irish village where to walk through the streets on a summer’s day with bare forearms was the act of an abandoned hussy.
She slipped a hand under her coat, and felt the small lump under her left breast. Impatiently she pulled it out again. It was becoming a nervous habit. Yet she couldn’t suppress the absurd hope that one day she would put her hand there and the lump would have disappeared. She wouldn’t go to a doctor. She had never been to a doctor in her life, except for the babies, and then she had hated the things they did to you. Besides, she knew enough—too much—about lumps from other women …
‘Take us in, Mister?’
Four grimy, wizened urchins, with an appallingly young infant in tow, involved themselves strategically with Mr Mallory’s legs, and peered searchingly up at him. Before he could reply, his wife had taken command of the situation:
‘Be off with you, you little spalpeens, and take that child home. He’s no age to be on the streets with the likes of you.’
The Irish always came welling up in Bett at times like this. Himself she customarily addressed in the flat, laconic accents of South London.
They passed into the foyer of the Palladium.
‘How the mothers can let them, I just don’t know,’ she continued. Mr Mallory contented himself with a vague murmur of agreement, and joined the brief queue for tickets.
He noted gloomily that prices had gone up again, and resigned himself to paying extra. Bett got a headache if they sat too near the screen. As they made their way to the swing doors with Stalls glimmering over the top, Mr Mallory said: ‘I thought Patrick and Patricia were going to this programme.’
‘Didn’t I tell you at tea, only of course you don’t listen. They went together, earlier. I don’t want them to be up late.’
‘Hmm. I didn’t think Patricia would be seen dead with her brother.’
‘She wanted to see the film, and I wouldn’t let her go on her own,’ stated his wife simply. Mr Mallory felt a twinge of sympathy for his daughter.
‘And Clare and Mark?’
‘I don’t know where she’s going tonight.’
The girl tore their tickets in half, and they passed through the swing doors and curtains into the hot darkness of the cinema. Once again Mr Mallory thought how easy it would be to buy the cheapest tickets, and show the usherette inside the torn portions of dearer ones which you had saved from a previous occasion. Or did they change the colours every now and then? He would never have the courage to try the experiment anyway. He hung back as he heard his wife wrangling with the usherette.
‘Are you sure there are none in the middle? What about those two? Tom!’ She wheeled round.
‘Anywhere will do, dear,’ he said mildly. Someone hissed ‘Sssh!’ and Mr Mallory manœuvred his protesting wife into the nearest vacant seats.
The Palladium. That was it. Mrs Skinner who polished the candlesticks had been quite definite that it was the Palladium.
Father Martin Kipling, parish priest of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Brickley, tried to ignore the little flutter of excitement inside him as he paced evenly towards the temple of Mammon towering above the busy pavements. Somehow one couldn’t help calling a picture-palace a temple of Mammon even if one was entering it to see an edifying film like Song of Bernadette—it tried so hard to look like one. Its ugly, florid architecture was even now bathed in a neon flush of hell-fire. It was not one of those modernistic slabs of ferro-concrete, but apparently a converted theatre, probably Edwardian, and had an air of ill-disguised dilapidation which intensified its baleful aspect. Over the entrance an enormous, crudely coloured representation of what might have tempted St Anthony in his less discriminating moments leered from a couch. Father Kipling lowered his eyes swiftly. Why was she there? She had nothing to do with Bernadette.
It was not surprising that he felt a twinge of guilt as he approached the shrine of materialistic paganism, a fear that his dog-collar might cause scandal to an onlooker unaware of the purity of his purpose. He felt an absurd urge to button-hole the nearest man and explain earnestly: ‘You know, I haven’t been inside a picture-palace since before I was ordained. Of course I’m allowed to go. Being secular you know. They leave it to my discretion. But I don’t think it quite becoming for a … But this time, you see, it’s a film I particularly want to see, Bernadette you know. All the Catholic newspapers particularly recommended it, I remember. Everyone seems to have seen it, even Canon Birley. So I thought I would take the opportunity. But I wouldn’t like anyone to think I made a practice …
With a slight shrug of irritation, he dismissed these nagging anxieties from his mind, and applied himself to mastering the unfamiliar ritual of entering the cinema. Song of Bernadette—a poster (albeit a rather small one) caught his eye. Well that was all right. And this was the Palladium. The omnibus conductor had very kindly pointed it out to him, and the name was unmistakably emblazoned all over the building’s façade. Palladium. Strange that for all its strident modernity the place should bear a classical name. But he was frequently struck by the same phenonemon in the names of various sordid products such as cosmetics and permanent-wave solutions. What impact the manufacturers expected to make on classical dons and theological students, to whom a knowledge of Latin and Greek was now virtually limited, he couldn’t imagine. Palladium, a defence or protection, from the Greek Palladion, the statue of Pallas, on whom the safety of Troy was fabled to depend. How many of the thousands who patronized the place knew the derivation of its name? But perhaps it was not such an inept appellation after all. There was something slightly craven and defensive, something suggestive of a retreat, in the way people were converging on the cinema.
‘Take us in, Mister?’
The question startled him.
‘I beg your pardon?’ he said politely, and peered down through his spectacles at the group of rough dirty children who surrounded him.
‘G’orn, Guv, take’s in.’
Father Kipling smiled uncertainly, and decided on an I’m-in-the-same-boat-as-you-fellows approach.
‘Well, really, you know, I don’t think I can afford it.’ Things had come to a pretty pass when children begged unashamedly on the streets for money to indulge in luxuries such as the cinema. He began to feel quite indignant.
The ring-leader scrutinized him as if he could scarcely credit the evidence of his ears. He glanced meaningfully at his companions, and began to explain.
‘We don’t want you to pay for us, Mister. We just want you to take us in.’
‘Jus’ say we’re with yer,’ backed up another.
‘’Ere’s the money, Guv.’ A grimy, shrivelled paw held up some silver coins.
‘But why?’ asked Father Kipling, bewildered.
The leader took a deep breath.
‘Well yer see, Mister, it’s an “A” and you can’t get into an “A” …’
Father Kipling listened carefully to the explanation. At the end of it he said:
‘Then really, you’re not allowed to see this film unless accompanied by a parent or guardian?’
‘That’s right, Mister.’
‘Well then, I’m afraid I can’t help you, because I’m certainly not your parent, and I can’t honestly say I’m your guardian. Can I now?’ He smiled nervously at the chief urchin, who turned away in disgust, and formed up his entourage to petition another cinema-goer. Father Kipling stared after them for a moment, then hurriedly made good his escape.
Inside the foyer he was faced with a difficult decision: the choice of seat. The prices all seemed excessively high, and he was conscious of a certain moral obligation to go in the cheapest. On the other hand, this was a rare, if not unique occasion, and as he had few enough treats, he was perhaps entitled to indulge himself to the extent of a comfortable seat. He couldn’t choose the middle price, because there were four. As he hesitated he caught the eye of the commissionaire staring at him, and he hastily purchased a ticket for the second most expensive seat.
For the next few minutes he seemed to be in the grips of a nightmare. When the young woman at the swing door had rudely snatched the ticket from his hand, and just as rudely thrust a severed portion of it back again, he was propelled into a pit of almost total darkness and stifling heat. A torch was shone on his ticket, and a listless voice intoned:
‘Over to your left.’
In the far recesses of the place another torch flickered like a distant lighthouse, and he set out towards it. When he couldn’t see it he stopped; then it would flicker impatiently again, and he would set off once more. Beneath his feet he crunched what appeared to be seashells; he gasped in an atmosphere reeking of tobacco and human perspiration. Dominating all, the screen boomed and shifted. At last he reached the young woman with the torch. But his ordeal was not over. She indicated a seat in the middle of a full row. The gesture was treacherously familiar. Horror of horrors! He had genuflected! The usherette stared. Blushing furiously he forced his way into the row, stumbled, panicked, threshed, kicked his way to the empty seat, leaving a trail of execration and protest in his wake. He wanted to die, to melt away. Never again would he come to the cinema. Never again.
Hands thrust deep into the pockets of his beltless, once-belted, black, sharp-shouldered raincoat, Harry moved alone, on noiseless crêpe-soled shoes, threading his way through the crowd, never breaking his step, twisting his shoulders to avoid the contamination of their brightness, happiness, stupidity. You could read in his face that Harry was different from them; he didn’t wear flash clothes and take cheap little tarts to the pictures, not Harry. He wore black, all black, except for the white, soft-collared shirt, and he took his pleasures alone. Any girl could tell at once that she’d get no change out of Harry; she’d tell from the pale, taut face, and the hands thrust deep in the black pockets, that Harry was one who walked alone, one to be feared and respected. He wasn’t interested in any of these little tarts dressed up to kill. He preferred to wait until he could have class.
‘Take us in, Mister.’
Poker-faced, terrible in his black suit and raincoat, he sliced through them, a big, aloof fish through a shoal of sprats, ignoring their insolence.
‘Oooer!’ called a mocking voice from behind. ‘Oo’s ’e think ’e is—Robert Mitchum?’
Fury burned inside him. Ignorant little bastards, didn’t know who they were talking to, how near danger was. But his face showed no flush or twitch of anger. He had perfected the disguise of his feelings, preferring to ignore, for the time being, the insults and the indifference of the ignorant sods around him. One day he would show them all. Meanwhile he treasured up the insults and the indifference, feeding his store of hatred, which one day he would dash like vitriol in the face of an appalled world.
Reluctantly he queued for a ticket; resentfully he removed one hand from his pocket and put two coins on the metal ledge.
‘Two and nine and ten Woodbines,’ he said curtly.
‘Didn’t nobody teach you to say please?’ inquired the girl.
He cauterized her with a savage glare, palmed his cigarettes and twisted aside. Her turn would come too, that poxy blonde, when she lay tied naked to a table, and he slowly swung a red-hot poker in front of her eyes, bulging with terror:
‘No don’t … I’ll do anything … anything … I’ll give you a good time …’
He cut her short with a cold smile.
‘I don’t have to ask your permission for that, baby. Besides, I always had a weakness for pokerwork. …’
Inside the usherette indicated a seat in the middle of the central block. He ignored her gesture, and with hands still deep in his pockets, slumped into a seat against the cinema’s wall.
Doreen, the usherette, shrugged her shoulder-straps, and, erect in her Second Skin corselet, her tummy gently perspiring through the new Miracle Fabric, her breasts held lovingly aloft in the ‘A’ cups of her Treasure Chest bra, turned the indifference of her smoothly sheathed back upon the indifferent Harry, and walked, as gracefully as was possible against the incline, up the aisle. Queer lot she was getting that evening, what with that fussy woman and the clergyman and now this bloke who preferred to sit right at the side, where everybody on the screen looked long and thin like in the Hall of Mirrors at Southend.
With calculated gallantry Mark Underwood assisted Clare Mallory off the bus. He wasn’t naturally polite, but the pleasure she derived from such tokens was so ridiculously out of proportion to the effort required that it would have been both churlish and impolitic not to gratify her. As they walked towards the cinema she slipped an arm through his. There were times when he liked this demure gesture a lot, but this evening he found it difficult to suppress the desire to shake off her hand. He fumbled for his handkerchief, making this the pretext for disengaging his arm. Clare waited patiently until he had finished, then put her arm through his again. He didn’t want to be touched. But he didn’t want her not to be there. He wanted to worry her, to inflict his depression on her.
Masochistically he probed for the root of his discontent. Oh yes. The story. Of course he should never have sent it to those people. ‘We sell your story and keep 15 per cent of the payment. If we don’t think it will sell, we will tell you why and suggest how you can improve it.’ It had been the last sentence that had really hooked him. The polite inscrutability of rejection slips was driving him mad; perhaps the London Institution of Fiction would explain the mystery. But the pseudo-academic name should have warned him that behind its façade was just another quack peddling literary cure-all pills.
Dear Mr Underwood,
My Chief Reader was so impressed by your story A BIT MUCH, that he passed it to me for my special attention—something which, I am sure you will appreciate, I am not able to give to every work which passes through this organization. I enjoyed reading it, for it shows unmistakable talent, but I do not think you are quite ready to publish yet, though you are very near it. To be quite candid, your story lacks dynamism of characterization, slickness in dialogue, and a scientifically constructed plot.
What I would recommend is that you enrol in one of our Advanced Students’ Correspondence Courses, which I myself specially designed for promising young writers like yourself. If you prefer, you can submit your story for a Detailed Criticism for one guinea, or a Complete Scientific Analysis and Rewrite for three guineas. In any case, I have enclosed a copy of the illustrated booklet Fiction: a Science not an Art which gives details of all the courses and professional advice open to you. I hope to hear from you soon.
Wishing you a steady flow of editors’ cheques, I am,
Yours sincerely,
SIMON ST PAUL
Principal L.I.F.
The recollection of the neatly-typed words on the too-opulent note-paper made him want to spew. When he got home he would pencil ‘BALLS’ in crude, heavy characters across the letter and post it back. Or else annotate that bloody booklet with deflating quotations from Virginia Woolf and Henry James. On the whole he rather thought he would do the former: it would require less effort, and the immediate impact would be greater, especially if Simon’s sycophantic secretary opened the letter. (He was bound to have a sycophantic secretary; she was probably his mistress too.)
Still, he could not help feeling that the only adequate retort would be to get the story published, and there seemed no chance of that. His mood had not been improved by reading in that evening’s paper a review of a play by some seventeen-year-old barrow-boy, which had been successfully presented at a West End theatre the night before, and which as far as he could judge, had said most of the things he himself had been pondering for the last two years.
‘Never mind!’ he exclaimed abruptly. ‘To the pictures! To the pictures! To the warm embrace of Mother Cinema. Where peanut shells are spread before your feet, and the ice-cream cometh!’
This sort of deranged poetic declamation never failed to amuse Clare.
‘Well, at least you’ve said something,’ she remarked, ‘even if I didn’t understand a word of it.’
She smiled, but the smile hid a certain anxiety. She was a little tired of falling back on the amused, uncomprehending, common-sense, womanly response to his behaviour. Sometimes she knew he was not talking pure nonsense, and wished she could appreciate the jokes and allusions. In fact it was a mystery how he could tolerate anyone so hopelessly uninformed as herself. ‘You must educate me,’ she had said to him once. ‘I’m not absolutely stupid you know; it’s just that you’re not encouraged to read very widely in a convent.’ But he had just said ‘I don’t want you educated. I’ve got educated girls round me all day, and they give me a pain in the … neck.’ ‘But I want me educated,’ she had complained; but he had only laughed and hugged her with his arm. And that had been nice, she remembered bashfully.
Also it had been nice to know that he didn’t care for the girls at his college. He seemed strangely reluctant to take her anywhere where they might encounter his college friends, but she had a very clear idea of the girls, with their urchin-cuts and trousers and feline spectacles—all of which features seemed much more likely to appeal to Mark than her own puzzled and timid experiments with her appearance.
He returned her smile, thinking how sweet it was, and how its sweetness, its slight suggestion of patient suffering pluckily disguised, might become rather cloying in time, an annoyingly insistent claim upon the emotions, like a dog’s eyes. Nevertheless, as he turned to look at her, he felt a wave of affection for the delightful picture she presented: the clumsily applied lipstick of the wrong colour; the superb clarity of complexion (why did so many nuns have faces like polished marble); the too-long skirt; the blouse, bought on a wild impulse, its plunging neckline abbreviated, on a modest afterthought, by a brooch representing Our Lady of Lourdes, with arms extended as if to tug the offending garment together; the short, tent-like coat that made her look pregnant, and in fact disguised a firm, well-fleshed and almost flawless torso. Clare was a treasure, and only he had the map. It pleased him that she should resemble a child who had blundered into a big store and amused herself by ‘dressing-up’, because it guarded the secret so much the more effectively.
‘You look very fetching this evening,’ he said.
‘Do you really think so, or are you only saying that?’
‘No, honestly.’
‘Well, that’s nice then, I never know whether you regard me as a girl or as a huge joke.’
He chuckled, rocking somewhat from the accuracy of her stroke.
‘Won’t we be late?’ Clare asked.
‘The later we are the better. The second feature’s only some second-rate crime film.’
They passed a shop which called itself Modern Menswear.
‘Do they?’ inquired Mark. ‘So much?’
‘Do who what?’
He pointed.
‘Do modern men swear?’ It seemed awfully feeble. Clare laughed merrily, shaking her head.
‘You are a fool, Mark.’
In the window of the shop the suits stood stoically, crowded shoulder to shoulder like men in a rush-hour tube. Gaudy shirts thrust out their chests, and detruncated trousers crossed their elegant legs. A multitude of banners and posters exclaimed hysterically ‘Giant Sale!’ ‘Total Clearance!’ ‘Premisses [sic] to be Demolished’ ‘Unrepeatable Offers’ ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’ Though the shop was closed, and he knew that there would be nothing he would want to buy anyway, Mark stopped and ran a critical eye over the merchandise.
‘Not a bad tie, that, for the price,’ he remarked, indicating a black silk tie with a discreet lightning pattern. ‘Club tie for the Schoole of Night.’
‘I’ll buy it for you,’ said Clare.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, moving on to the next shop. It sold lingerie.
‘Tell me,’ he said, pointing to a suspender belt. ‘Tell me, do you wear that over or under your pants?’
Clare felt her stomach knot, and blood rush to her face so violently she could scarcely see.
‘I think you’re … not very nice,’ she said, and began to walk on.
Without hurrying obviously, he managed to catch her up.
‘I need the information, you see, for a story I’m writing,’ he explained casually.
‘Then it must be a vulgar story.’
Mark was about to object that it depended on what you meant by vulgar, when he reflected that the statement was probably valid whatever you meant by it, so he merely replied, ‘Very possibly.’
As they walked on in silence it occurred to him that there was room for a London Institute of Pornography, of which he might be the prosperous Principal.
Dear Author,
I have read your novel Undress Rehearsal with interest and appreciation; but to be quite candid, your understanding of the technicalities of feminine underwear is woefully inadequate, and your seduction/page ratio is well below the required average. May I recommend that you take our correspondence course ‘The Mechanics of Masturbatory Literature’ which I myself designed for ambitious pornographers like yourself?
‘It’s under,’ said Clare suddenly. She blushed deeply. He smiled.
‘Thank you Clare. I just wanted to know.’ He chalked up another minor tactical success in the siege of her innocence. It was just as well, he reflected, that Clare did not know how he had first found the answer to his question.
Clare was glad she had managed to say it, and hadn’t let him be cross with her. Nevertheless he was a bit queer, or ‘rude’ as they used to say as children. She supposed it was because he was a writer and had to know things. It was nice anyway to think that she could help him with the writing.
‘Take us in, Mister?’
Mark looked down at the group of urchins skipping backwards before him.
‘Do you solemnly promise to sit in the corner of the cinema farthest from us when we get inside?’
‘Yer, we always do, Mister. Trust us,’ said the leader, winking cheekily at Clare.
‘Where’s your money?’
‘But, Mark, you’re not going to take them in?’ said Clare.
‘Why not?’ he said, taking the warm silver coins and counting them. ‘You’ll have to go in the two-and-nines,’ he added.
‘But suppose their parents are looking for them?’
‘My dear girl, this is how their parents get rid of them. And don’t tell me the film’s unsuitable. Most of these kids have home-lives that would give the censor fits.’
The kids were looking crestfallen, and the infant, sensing the general depression, began to whine.
‘Woi we got to go in the two-an’-nines, Mister? We ain’t got the money.’
‘Well, I can hardly say I’m looking after you if you go in different seats from me, can I? And I personally intend to go in the two-and-nines. However, I suppose I can scrape together the extra. Come on.’
And in they went, with Mark putting on a little act for the benefit of the commissionaire, calling out, ‘Come along, Jimmy, don’t leave Bobby behind, Joe,’ and Clare’s heart thumping, but filled with a sudden surge of affection for Mark.
From his seat on the top deck of a traffic-locked bus, Damien O’Brien watched the charade with tight-lipped disapproval. That fellow Underwood was doing his best to degrade Clare, and she was almost co-operating. He could not understand how a girl who had once intended to be a nun could keep company with a person so obviously worldly and unprincipled.
A man, breathing heavily, slumped down beside him. Damien glanced at the frayed, greasy cuffs of the man’s raincoat, and wrinkled his nostrils as the pungent odour of beer reached him. He wriggled into the corner of his seat as the bus lurched forward and removed from his vision the scandalous advertisement of some half-naked film actress, spread across the entrance to the cinema. It was time some organization of Catholic action organized a protest against such advertisements. He might bring it up at that evening’s meeting … The thought recalled him to the beads he was fingering in his pocket. He passed on to the Third Joyful Mystery of the rosary: the Birth of Our Lord. The image of the crib in the seminary chapel at Christmas flashed upon his mind. What a moving and eternally significant group! Our Lady gazing tenderly at the Child, while St Joseph stood, proud and watchful, at the door of the stable. The Holy Family. God had decided that he, Damien, should not become a priest. The vow of chastity was no longer an obligation, and although he had toyed with the idea of a private vow of celibacy, he had rejected it as being liable to cause misunderstanding. No, it was the ideal of the Holy Family that allured him, the ideal which no priest could realize. And Clare Mallory was the obvious, providential partner for such a work. The moment he had heard that she had left a convent after being a novice for two years had been like a moment of prophetic revelation. She was his cousin, it was true, but twice removed. What could be more fitting than that they should join forces, and overcome their spiritual setbacks by realizing an ideal comparable to a successful religious vocation? Her great kindness in finding him more suitable accommodation than he had first obtained on crossing to England, had encouraged his hopes, which he had only very discreetly hinted at, knowing from personal experience how sensitively one required to be treated on returning to the world from the cloistered calm of the seminary. And then Underwood had arrived on the scene, like the Serpent into the Garden, deceiving everyone with his so-called charm, and insinuating his disturbing influence between Clare and himself.