The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories Volume Two

Doctors, friends, herself – everyone who knew enough to say – pronounced: the warmth of a family, marriage if possible, comfort, other people. Never isolation, never loneliness, not the tall wind-battered room where the sky showed through two walls. But he refused common sense. ‘It’s no good skirting around what I am, I’ve got to crash right through it, and if I can’t, whose loss is it?’

Well, she did not think she was strong enough to crash right through what she most feared, even though she had been born healthy, her nerves under her own command.

‘Yes, but you have a choice, I haven’t, unless I want to become a little animal living in the fur of other people’s warmth.’

(So went the dialogue.)

But he had a choice too: there were a hundred ways in which they, the people whom she could now recognize from their eyes in a crowd, could hide themselves. Not everyone recognized them, she would say; how many people do we know (men and women, but more men than women) enclosed in marriages, which are for safety only, or attached to other people’s families, stealing (if you like) security? But theft means not giving back in exchange or kind, and these men and women, the solitary ones, do give back, otherwise they wouldn’t be so welcome, so needed – so there’s no need to talk about hanging on to the warmth of belly fur, like a baby kangaroo, it’s a question of taking one thing, and giving back another.

‘Yes, but I’m not going to pretend, I will not, it’s not what I am – I can’t and it’s your fault that I can’t.’

This meant that he had been the other, through her, just as she had, through him.

‘My dear, I don’t understand the emotions, except through my intelligence, normality never meant anything to me until I knew you. Now all right, I give in …’

This was sullen. With precisely the same note of sullenness she used to censor the words her healthy nerves supplied like love, happiness, myself, health. All right this sullenness meant: I’ll pay you your due, I have to, my intelligence tells me I must. I’ll even be you, but briefly, for so long as I can stand it.

Meanwhile they were – not talking – but exchanging information. She had seen X and Y and Z, been to this place, read that book.

He had read so-and-so, seen X and Y, spent a good deal of his time listening to music.

‘Do you want me to go away?’

‘No, stay.’

This very small gift made her happy; refusing to examine the emotion, she sat back, curled up her legs, let herself be comfortable. She smoked. He put on some jazz. He listened to it inert, his body not flowing into it, there was a light sweat on his big straining forehead. (This meant he had wanted her to stay not out of warmth, but for need of somebody there. She sat up straight again, pushed away the moment’s delight.) She saw his eyes were closed. His face, mouth tight in an impersonal determination to endure, looked asleep, or –

‘Bill,’ she said quickly, in appeal.

Without opening his eyes, he smiled, giving her sweetness, friendship, and the irony, without bitterness, due from one kind of creature to another.

‘It’s all right,’ he said.

The piano notes pattered like rain before a gust of wind that swept around the corner of the building. White breaths of cloud were blown across the thin blue air. The drum shook, hissed, steadily, like her blood pumping the beat, and a wild flute danced a sky sign in the rippling smoke of a jet climbing perpendicular from sill to ceiling. But what did he hear, see, feel, sitting eyes closed, palm hard on the armrest for support? The record stopped. He opened his eyes, they resolved themselves out of a knot of inward difficulty, and rested on the wall opposite him, while he put out his hand to stop the machine. Silence now.

He closed his eyes again. She discarded the cross talk in her flesh of music, wind, clouds, raindrops, patterning grass and earth, and tried to see – first the room, an insecure platform in height, tenacious against storm and rocking foundations; then a certain discordance of substance that belonged to his vision; then herself, as he saw her – at once she felt a weariness of the spirit, like a cool sarcastic wink from a third eye, seeing them both, two little people, him and herself, as she had seen the vegetable seller, the adolescents, the woman whose husband had rheumatism. Without charity she saw them, sitting there together in silence on either side of the tall room, and the eye seemed to expand till it filled the universe with disbelief and negation.

Now, she admitted the prohibited words love, joy (et cetera), and gave them leave to warm her, for not only could she not bear the world without them, she needed them to disperse her anger against him: Yes, yes, it’s all very well, but how could the play go on, how could it, if it wasn’t for me, the people like me? We create you in order that you may use us, and consume us; and with our willing connivance; but it doesn’t do to despise …

He said, not surprising her that he did, since their minds so often moved together: ‘You are more split than I am, do you know that?’

She thought: If I were not split, if one-half (if that is the division) were not able to move in your world, even if only for short periods, then I would not be sitting here, you would not want me.

He said: ‘I wasn’t criticizing. Not at all. Because you have the contact. What more do you want?’

‘Contact,’ she said, looking at the cold word.

‘Yes. Well, it’s everything.’

‘How can you sit there, insisting on the things you insist on, and say it’s everything?’

‘If that’s what you are, then be it.’

‘Just one thing or the other?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? It’s true that what I think contradicts what I feel, but …”

‘But?’

‘All right, it’s all meaningless, with my mind I know it, it’s an accident, it’s a freak, but all the same, everything gives me pleasure all the time. Why should it be a contradiction, why should it?’

‘You don’t see it as a contradiction?’

‘No.’

‘You’re living on the fat of your ancestors, the fat of their belief, that’s all.’

‘Possibly, but why should I care?’

‘A fly buzzing in the sun,’ he said. His smile was first wry and tender, then full of critical dislike. The criticism, the coldness of it, hurt her, and she felt tears rise. So today she could not stay long, because tears were not allowed, they were part of the other argument, or fight, a personal one, played out (or fought out), finished.

She was blinking her eyes dry, without touching them, so that he would not see she wanted to cry, when he said: ‘Suppose that I am the future?’

A long silence, and she thought: Possibly, possibly.

‘It seems to me that I am. Suppose the world fills more and more with people like me, then –’

‘The little flies will have to buzz louder.’

He laughed, short but genuine. She thought, I don’t care what you say, that laugh is stronger than anything. She sat in silence for the thousandth time, willing it to be stronger, feeling herself to be a centre of life, or warmth, with which she would fill this room.

He sat, smiling, but in an inert, heavy way, his limbs seeming, even from where she sat across the room, cold and confused. She went to him, squatted on her knees by his chair, lifted his hand off the black leather arm-piece, and felt it heavy with cold. It gave her hand a squeeze more polite than warm, and she gripped it firmly, willing life to move down her arm through her hand into his. Closing her eyes, she now made herself remember, with her flesh, what she had discarded (almost contemptuous) on the pavement – the pleasure from the touch of faded books, pleasure from the sight of ranked fruit and vegetables. Discoloured print, shut between limp damp cotton, small voices to be bought for sixpence or ninepence, became a pulse of muttering sound, a pulse of vitality, like the beating colours of oranges, lemons and cabbages, gold and green, a dazzle, a vibration in the eyes – she held her breath, willed, and made life move down into his hand. It lay warmer and more companionable in hers. After a while he opened his eyes and smiled at her: sadness came into the smile, then a grimness, and she kissed his cheek and went back to her place on the rough blanket. ‘Flies,’ she said.

He was not looking at her. She thought: Why do I do it? These girls who come through here for a night, or two nights, because he needs their generous naïveté, give him no less. I, or one of them, it makes no difference. ‘I’d like a drink,’ she said.

He hesitated, hating her drinking at all, but he poured her one, while she said silently (feeling adrift, without resources, and cold through every particle of herself): All right, but in the days when our two bodies together created warmth (flies, if you like, but I don’t feel it) I wouldn’t have asked for a drink. She was thinking: And suppose it is yours that is the intoxication and not mine? when he remarked: ‘Sometimes when I’ve been alone here a couple of days I wonder if I’m not tipsy on sheer …’ He laughed, in an intellectual pleasure at an order of ideas she was choosing not to see.

‘The delight of nihilism?’

‘Which of course you don’t feel, ever!’

She saw that this new aggressiveness, this thrust of power and criticism (he was now moving about the room, full of energy) was in fact her gift to him; and she said, suddenly bitter: ‘Flies don’t feel, they buzz.’

The bitterness, being the note of the exchange they could not allow themselves, made her finish her few drops of liquor, making a new warmth in her stomach where she had needed a spark of warmth.

He said: ‘For all that, it seems to me I’m nearer the truth than you are.’

The word truth did not explode into meaning: it sounded hard and self-defined, like a stone; she let it lie between them, setting against it the pulse that throbbed in the soft place by the ankle bone – her feet being stretched in front of her, so she could see them.

He said: ‘It seems to me that the disconnected like me must see more clearly than you people. Does that sound ridiculous to you? I’ve thought about it a great deal, and it seems to me you are satisfied with too little.’

She thought: I wish he would come over here, sit by me on this blanket, and put his arm around me – that’s all. That’s all and that’s all. She was very tired. Of course I’m tired – it’s all the buzzing I have to do …

Without warning, without even trying, she slipped into being him, his body, his mind. She looked at herself and thought: This little bundle of flesh, this creature who will respond and warm, lay its head on my shoulder, feel happiness – how unreal, how vulgar, and how meaningless!

She shook herself away from him, up and away from the settee. She went to the window.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Enjoying your view.’

The sky was clear, it was evening, and far below in the streets the lights had come on, making small yellow pools and gleams on pavements where the tiny movement of people seemed exciting and full of promise. Now he got himself out of his machine-like chair and came to stand by her. He did not touch her; but he would not have come at all if she had not been there. He supported himself with one big hand on the glass and looked out. She felt him take in a deep breath. She stood silent, feeling the life ebbing and coiling along the pavements and hoping he felt it. He let out his breath. She did not look at him. He took it in again. The hand trembled, then tensed, then set solid, a big, firmly made hand, with slightly freckled knuckles – its steadiness comforted her. It would be all right. Still without looking at his face, she kissed his cheek and turned away. He went back to his chair, she resumed her place on the blanket. The room was filling with dusk, the sky was greying, enormous, distant.

‘You should get curtains, at least.’

‘I should be tempted to keep them drawn all the time.’

‘Why not, then, why not?’ she insisted, feeling her eyes wet again. ‘All right, I won’t cry,’ she said reasonably.

‘Why not? If you feel like crying.’

She no longer wept. But once, and not so long ago, she had wept herself almost to pieces over him, her, their closeness which nevertheless the cold third, like a cruel king, refused to sanction. She noted that the pulse moving in her ankle had the desperate look of something fighting death; her foot in the dusk was a long way off; she felt divided, not in possession of herself. But she remained where she was, containing her fragmentation. And he held out his fist, steady, into the glimmer of grey light from the sky, watching it exactly as she looked at her own pulse, the stranger.

‘For God’s sake turn the light on,’ she said, giving in. He put out his hand, pressed down the switch, a harsh saving light filled the room.

He smiled. But he looked white again, and his forehead gleamed wet. Her heart ached for him, and for herself, who would now get up deliberately and go away from him. The ache was the hurt of exile, and she was choosing it. She sat smiling, chafing her two ankles with her hands, feeling the warmth of her breathing flesh. Their smiles met and exchanged, and now she said: ‘Right, it’s time to go.’

She kissed him again, he kissed her, and she went out, saying: ‘I’ll ring you.’

Always, when she left his door shut behind her, the black door which was exactly the same as all the others in the building except for the number, she felt in every particle of herself how loneliness hit him when she (or anybody) left.

The street she went out into was unfamiliar to her, she felt she did not know it. The hazy purple sky that encloses London at night was savage, bitter, and the impulse behind its shifting lights was a form of pain. The roughness of the pavement, which she knew to be warm, struck cold through the soles of her sandals, as if the shadows were black ice. The people passing were hostile, stupid animals from whom she wished to hide herself. But worse than this, there was a flat, black-and-white two-dimensional jagged look to things, and (it was this that made it terrifying) the scene she walked through was a projection of her own mind, there was no life in it that belonged there save what she could breathe into it. And she herself was dead and empty, a cardboard figure in a flat painted set of streets.

She thought: Why should it not all come to an end, why not? She saw again the potato face of Fred the vegetable seller whose interest in Ada’s husband’s illness was only because she was a customer at his stall; she looked at Ada whose ugly life (she was like a heave of dirty earth or some unnameable urban substance) showed in her face and movements like a visible record of thick physical living. The pathos of the adolescents did not move her, she felt disgust.

She walked on. The tall building, like a black tower, stood over her, kept pace with her. It was not possible to escape from it.

Her hand, swinging by her thigh, on its own life, suddenly lifted itself and took a leaf off a hedge. The leaf trembled: she saw it was her fingers which shook, with exhaustion. She stilled her fingers, and the leaf became a thin hard slippery object, like a coin. It was small, round, shining, a blackish-green. A faint pungent smell came to her nostrils. She understood it was the smell of the leaf which, as she lifted it to her nostrils, seemed to explode with a vivid odour into the senses of her brain so that she understood the essence of the leaf and through it the scene she stood in.

She stood fingering the leaf, while life came back. The pulses were beating again. A warmth came up through her soles. The sky’s purplish orange was for effect, for the sake of self-consciously exuberant theatricality, a gift to the people living under it. An elderly woman passed, mysterious and extraordinary in the half-light, and smiled at her. So. She was saved from deadness, she was herself again. She walked slowly on, well-being moving in her, making a silent greeting to the people passing her. Meanwhile the dark tower kept pace with her, she felt it rising somewhere just behind her right shoulder. It was immensely high, narrow, terrible, all in darkness save for a light flashing at its top where a man, held upright by the force of his will, sat alone staring at a cold sky in vertiginous movement.

She moved steadily on, on the rhythm of her own pleasantly coursing blood. With one hand, however, she secretly touched the base of the tower whose shadow would always follow her now, challenging her, until she dared to climb it. With the other hand she held fast to the leaf.

Notes for a Case History

Maureen Watson was born at 93 Nelson’s Way, N. I., in 1942. She did not remember the war, or rather, when people said ‘The War,’ she thought of Austerity: couponed curtains, traded clothes, the half-pound of butter swapped for the quarter of tea. (Maureen’s parents preferred tea to butter.) Further back, at the roots of her life, she felt a movement of fire and shadow, a leaping and a subsidence of light. She did not know whether this was a memory or a picture she had formed, perhaps from what her parents had told her of the night the bomb fell two streets from Nelson’s Way and they had all stood among piles of smoking rubble for a day and night, watching firemen hose the flames. This feeling was not only of danger, but of fatality, of being helpless before great impersonal forces; and was how she most deeply felt, saw, or thought an early childhood which the social viewer would describe perhaps like this:

Maureen Watson, conceived by chance on an unexpected granted-at-the-last-minute leave, at the height of the worst war in history, infant support of a mother only occasionally upheld (the chances of war deciding) by a husband she had met in a bomb shelter during an air raid: poor baby, born into a historical upheaval which destroyed forty million and might very well have destroyed her.

As for Maureen, her memories and the reminiscences of her parents made her dismiss the whole business as boring, and nothing to do with her.

It was at her seventh birthday party she first made this clear. She wore a mauve organdie frock with a pink sash, and her golden hair was in ringlets. One of the mothers said: ‘This is the first unrationed party dress my Shirley has had. It’s a shame, isn’t it?” And her own mother said: ‘Well of course these war children don’t know what they’ve missed.’ At which Maureen said: ‘I am not a war child.’ ‘What are you then, love?’ said her mother, fondly exchanging glances.

‘I’m Maureen,’ said Maureen.

‘And I’m Shirley,’ said Shirley, joining cause.

Shirley Banner was Maureen’s best friend. The Watsons and the Banners were better than the rest of the street. The Watsons lived in an end house, at higher weekly payments. The Banners had a sweets-paper-and-tobacco shop.

Maureen and Shirley remembered (or had they been told?) that once Nelson’s Way was a curved terrace of houses. Then the ground-floor level had broken into shops: a grocer’s, a laundry, a hardware, a baker, a dairy. It seemed as if every second family in the street ran a shop to supply certain defined needs of the other families. What other needs were there? Apparently none; for Maureen’s parents applied for permission to the Council, and the ground floor of their house became a second grocery shop, by way of broken-down walls, new shelves, a deepfreeze. Maureen remembered two small rooms, each with flowered curtains where deep shadows moved and flickered from the two small fires that burned back to back in the centre wall that divided them. These two rooms disappeared in clouds of dust from which sweet-smelling planks of wood stuck out. Strange but friendly men paid her compliments on her golden corkscrews and asked her for kisses, which they did not get. They gave her sips of sweet tea from their canteens (filled twice a day by her mother) and made her bracelets of the spiralling fringes of yellow wood. Then they disappeared. There was the new shop. Maureen’s Shop. Maureen went with her mother to the sign shop to arrange for these two words to be written in yellow paint on a blue ground.

Even without the name, Maureen would have known that the shop was connected with hopes for her future; and that her future was what her mother lived for.

She was pretty. She had always known it. Even where the shadows of fire and dark were, they had played over a pretty baby. ‘You were such a pretty baby, Maureen.’ And at the birthday parties: ‘Maureen’s growing really pretty, Mrs Watson.’ But all babies and little girls are pretty, she knew that well enough … no, it was something more. For Shirley was plump, dark – pretty. Yet their parents’ – or rather, their mothers’ – talk had made it clear from the start that Shirley was not in the same class as Maureen.

When Maureen was ten there was an episode of importance. The two mothers were in the room above Maureen’s Shop and they were brushing their little girls’ hair out. Shirley’s mother said: ‘Maureen could do really well for herself, Mrs Watson.’ And Mrs Watson nodded, but sighed deeply. The sigh annoyed Maureen, because it contradicted the absolute certainty that she felt (it had been bred into her) about her future. Also because it had to do with the boring era which she remembered, or thought she did, as a tiger-striped movement of fire. Chance: Mrs Watson’s sigh was like a prayer to the gods of Luck: it was the sigh of a small helpless thing being tossed about by big seas and gales. Maureen made a decision, there and then, that she had nothing in common with the little people who were prepared to be helpless and tossed about. For she was going to be quite different. She was already different. Not only The War but the shadows of war had long gone, except for talk in the newspapers which had nothing to do with her. The shops were full of everything. The Banners’ sweets-tobacco-paper shop had just been done up; and Maureen’s was short of nothing. Maureen and Shirley, two pretty little girls in smart mother-made dresses, were children of plenty, and knew it, because their parents kept saying (apparently they did not care how tedious they were): ‘These kids don’t lack for anything, do they? They don’t know what it can be like, do they?’ This, with the suggestion that they ought to be grateful for not lacking anything, always made the children sulky, and they went off to flirt their many-petticoated skirts where the neighbours could see them and pay them compliments.

Eleven years. Twelve years. Already Shirley had subsided into her role of pretty girl’s plainer girl friend, although of course she was not plain at all. Fair girl, dark girl, and Maureen by mysterious birthright was the ‘pretty one’, and there was no doubt in either of their minds which girl the boys would try first for a date. Yet this balance was by no means as unfair as it seemed. Maureen, parrying and jesting on street corners, at bus stops, knew she was doing battle for two, because the boys she discarded Shirley got: Shirley got far more boys than she would have done without Maureen who, for her part, needed – more, had to have – a foil. Her role demanded one.

They both left school at fifteen, Maureen to work in the shop. She was keeping her eyes open: her mother’s phrase. She wore a slim white overall, pinned her fair curls up, was neat and pretty in her movements. She smiled calmly when customers said: ‘My word, Mrs Watson, your Maureen’s turned out, hasn’t she?’

About that time there was a second moment of consciousness. Mrs Watson was finishing a new dress for Maureen, and the fitting was taking rather long. Maureen fidgeted and her mother said: ‘Well, it’s your capital, isn’t it? You’ve got to see that, love.’ And she added the deep unconscious sigh. Maureen said: ‘Well don’t go on about it, it’s not very nice, is it?’ And what she meant was, not that the idea was not very nice, but that she had gone beyond needing to be reminded about it; she was feeling the irritated embarrassment of a child when it is reminded to clean its teeth after this habit has become second nature. Mrs Watson saw and under-stood this, and sighed again; and this time it was the maternal sigh which means: Oh dear, you are growing up fast! ‘Oh Mum,’ said Maureen, ‘sometimes you just make me tired, you do really.’