The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals

Elizabeth Smart

The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

Paperback previously published by Panther Books 1980 and Paladin 1991

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd in association with Polytantric Press 1978

Copyright © the literary estate of Elizabeth Smart

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover photograph © Charles Hewitt / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Author photograph © Georgina Barker

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008155742

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008155759

Version: 2015-07-10

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Part One: After the War

This Is the Scene

Part Two: Signed on for the Duration

Part Three: Working

Part Four: Bearing

Part Five: The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals

Part Six: Kinship Is Established

Paving-Stones Play the Part of the Water Snakes in the Ancient Mariner

Sometimes Pity Seeps in Even for the Self-Pitying

A Publican’s Wife Tells Her Story

Part Seven: Lament of a Maker

Part Eight: Caught Up With the People and the Dangers They Have Passed

A Bad Night in Soho

At Grips With a Boss

At Grips With a Vicar

At Grips With a Psychologist

Part Nine: The Story of Our Life

Part Ten: Fear of Failing

A Strange Dream

A Forgotten Canadian Calls

Part Eleven: On, on

Trying to Write, Trying to Survive

Part Twelve: Pacification

Acknowledgments

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART ONE

After the War

THIS IS THE SCENE

Wandering in the wastes of Kensington, the mean mad faces pass like derelict paper bags. The neat ruins of the war lie like a boring scar, whose history is all of the repetitive future, and all that memory can retain.

It is the autumnal equinox that blows out the pleats of my old tweed skirt. The moon races behind the tall and interminable wilderness of Onslow Gardens. All that was held in by courage and the ardour of people’s prayer to be good is loose now, and makes a lunatic and evil ghost to lurk in the trodden Squares.

There is no gas; there is no fuel; there is very little food. Also, there is still the demand for our pity for the poorer, the colder, the hungrier.

Cats are the freest beings, for very few people bear them any resentment. The foolish dogs waddle and trot about, unaware of how indelicately they expose the regrets and longings of their owners. The cheap sparrows peck about in the dust.

This is the scene for the drama which we are now too tired to perform. Christ how tired we are. Every article in the great cold room of the landlady’s flat has a different floral design. There are only remnants left over from her previous lives. She is making a fresh start in a rehabilitated house, which was only slightly damaged by blast, and now is made into flats. But really she is unable to make a fresh start, and her tired heart spends its holiday from the queues moping about her daughter who is in Leeds, waiting for her second baby to be born and her husband to be demobbed. The appearance of my landlady’s hope is only reflex action.

Women with strained faces are slapping their babies for relief.

The time of repentance is come. Soon even the most obtuse will be able to observe the wickedness of war. Repentance – but also reparation. We will REPAY. It is guilt that blows icily around corners with the autumnal equinox. The predatory suspicion is dogging us that we cannot, can never, escape the consequences of our orgies. When the door slams during the cinema we realize that there is no retreat. We are meek when bus-girls admonish us, because we are aware of how wrong we have been. But our mildness and our inconspicuous behaviour and our passive resignation will not deceive the Furies. They are adamant, oncoming, and, I fear, we fear, we know, will be overpowering.

For we are not massed for victory, and our subjective passions have not made a large image of righteous indignation to be our mirage and our guide. O Führer of self-love and self-hate, whose false moustaches fooled us into thinking he was not us: where is your twin enemy with the terrible banner of peace?

But even this invocation sounds too highfalutin for the times – out of place. I am, after all, just a woman in a fish queue, with her bit of wrapping paper, waiting for her turn. I wouldn’t budge an inch out of line for faith, for hope, or for glory. History is in the fishmonger’s hands, and I will be grateful for the stale allotment he allows.

Rising rapidly up the steps of the moving bus, I will not be too proud to mind if my landlady, my boss, or my lover, see the great hole in the heel of my stocking. Vanity has become a burden, and I think desire has failed too. On Bruton Street I saw a lady glancing sideways at the lingerie, with only a mild daydream about what would happen to her if it were hers; not, as it used to be, with the greed that begets action.

I meet kindness, sometimes, but very soft and autumnal it glimmers out in gratitude for an invocation of memory: of a child smiling, of a woman joking, for instance.

And hourly, yes, at every timeless hour, redundant and obsolete, the witches increase in Kensington, as one more woman becomes too weary to go on; too weary to dispel the glaze that has settled over her eyes. They crawl into their holes, where the gas no longer functions.

And winter is coming on.

PART TWO

Signed on for the Duration

This is the scene outside, and it seems to synchronize with the scene within, for it is not at all what a five-year-old child would have seen, chasing his ball in a still-green Kensington Gardens; or what an old man would muse on, sitting in his club, having weathered both kinds of war, and forgotten them all.

But these two categories are outside the story, merely the cosy covers of the book.

What is to happen now?

Out of this weary landscape, girding your strengths around you, you are to step through a couple of decades with your children on your back, singing a song to keep them optimistic, and looking to left and right. For the right and not for the left.

Left right, Left right.

Are you a friend to me, sergeant-major con-science, strictly insisting on keeping in step with the true, the true, the true that you once knew, and not the invented possibilities that reeled in front of your reeling mind when the lightning lit up everything?

You expected a bill, and a bill is what you get. This is the bill. Now pay it.

Left right. Right turn. March into this meadow, heaving your heavy rucksack full of the future, and see what the present brings.

I am friendless, covered in mud, cowardly, weak, untrained. But signed up for the duration.

You brought it upon yourself. You have only yourself to blame.

True. True. Perfectly true. Too late to desert. Too late to heave off your crippling kit and head for the hills. The problem now is how to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb. Just keeping them functioning.

In what direction?

Just avoiding the bogs, snipers, snares, enemy propaganda. Taking cover in skirmishes. Using techniques of camouflage. Lying low when the tanks roll out of the woods, squashing all before them.

A couple of decades will see you out of this bondage. A couple of decades will bring honourable discharge.

PART THREE

Working

As I sat by my office window, I observed the generations, who are, after all, only the consequences of someone else’s desires, moving with fatuous smiles into traps.

I saw sad fathers and mothers moving patiently aside in buses.

And I saw myself spending my days punching holes in telegrams because of the consequences of my own desires.

I saw myself now ignominiously far from the bellowing Jungfreud with which I once leapt into the arms of circumstance.

And why should I file office books instead of putting my child to bed?

This question arose as I sat by my first office window.

Round and round like a frantic squirrel in a cage I chased it looking for a loophole. I found none. The exits were all blocked. Facts must be your friends, I said.

Panting, bewildered, I looked out to see the other prisoners, generations and generations, moving in a long queue through their unvarying days.

This cliff, I thought, this office block, would certainly suit a suicide.

After work, I dance in smoky nightclubs, swooning to jazzy versions of Liebestraum. What if next morning I look from my office window and say, ‘Shall I leap over the edge?’

The long fall is appalling.

Besides, I am afraid of death now, since he sits beside me at dinner parties.

‘How do you do, dear one,’ I say, wanting above all to be brave, dandified, unobtrusive; to smile like the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing his intestines: saying, ‘It’s nothing! It’s nothing! I don’t feel a thing! Pay no attention! Please continue our conversation!’

But I vomit at the side when I notice his decomposing face. Especially in dreams. All feeling shall cease like the grinders and I shall be cold, cold, and everyone will examine my private papers.

Besides, what is the end of the story?

Boring and gory by turns, painful, repetitive, the story goes on, leads where?

Curiosity, ignorance, humility, pride, lead one to take the next step, and the next, and the next.

Only the prisoner understands the meaning of freedom. What if he speaks with embarrassing passion? What if sometimes his bias is bitter? Little by little such great flapping words come flying home to roost.

Yesterday from my office window I saw a crippled girl negotiating her way across the street, her shoulders squarely braced. At each jerky movement her hair flew back like an annunciatory angel, and I saw she was the only dancer on the street.

All right. We begin. We take our hypothesis: Everyone must work; nobody must loaf. ‘Pull your own weight,’ my mother repeats. And Henry Vaughan, that dear beauteous jewel, says: ‘Keep clean, bear fruit, and wait.’

This seems to cover housework, childbirth, sainthood.

But money must come into it.

One man I saw, though, if I may bring in a feudal loophole before we examine the working proposition, who strung exquisite beads together. He lived in a tenement and was called Goofy Al. A certain Lady Elixir walked by there one day to take some Robert Greig seedcake to a dying charlady, but didn’t know of his existence. Otherwise she would certainly have arranged, by a little more whoring and a little less charring, to have eased the lot of a master craftsman.

And since, then, Lady Elixir’s seedcake might have kept poor Al alive, when a public vote would not have; and charity from a less picturesque hand might have warped his mighty spirit, I am reluctant, until we know more, to see the future so drearily laid out like an allotment garden, with each to his patch of work.

It was to work that the serpent hissed them out of Eden.

Adam delved and Eve span.

In their sorrow they brought forth children.

But in Adam’s absence, Eve has much to do.

Too much? We’ll see.

It was up those tenement steps where the children sat, waiting for things to happen, and the stale curtains blew out so intimately above the tired geraniums, that I heard a young girl ask: ‘Mother, what is happening to my breasts? Two little knobs have appeared.’

Far away, long ago, the first rumbling intimations of the cruel sexual bargain to come.

Once, at my window, looking for relevancies, I saw a church through ferny leaves of a tree, and a five-pointed star embellishing a rooftop venthole.

Faintly I heard the congregation singing. The white sang flat. The black sounded like an orgy. I thought this last might lead somewhere.

Might lead the daughters to the sacred grove?

Maybe.

God likes a good frolic.

But enough. All this is leading us, with unsuitable sighs, to the bird’s-eye view, the aftermaths of love and adolescence – that pair we deride when we are impotent and consequently jealous. That’s for later.

There are long years to slog through first.

‘The spectacle of a young woman so obsessed with her own emotions revolts me.’

Is it possible in the midst of the battle to view the war with a larger perspective?

We’ll see.

After being knocked out on the battlefield (of love? of passion? – never mind now), I lay a long time like Lazarus waiting for Jesus to come and tell me to get up. He may have come. Or he may not. Or he may have come and I have moved to another address. Or maybe he kissed me in a spot where too much local anaesthetic lingered. Anyway, there has been no resurrection.

It is not as if I hung upon a cross saying, ‘Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?’; for none of my wounds, if any exist, are bleeding. I sit at a desk in an office, making out shopping lists, adding up my bills.

When Jericho fell, weeping was permitted, and in Babylon it was fashionable to make a memorable moan by the retreating waters. But here you must go to your office, looking sprightly, with a sparkle even if synthetic in your eye. For who dares to stand up and say ‘We are weary! O Christ but we are weary!’

I must keep my eye on the object, which is: the annihilation of love, so that love may be suffered; or, rather, the cessation of feeling, so that suffering may be borne, and love, possibly, reborn in a new form.

In the meantime I smell spring flowers, but fail to cry out luscious gratitude like Whitman. If I say, ‘My love lies three thousand miles away’, that is merely to say, ‘It is so many miles from Clapham Junction to London.’ If he were here he would be no nearer. If he took me in his arms I should say ‘Two bones meet.’

That’s a burnt-out comet.

Even though I know, among the other statistics, that the rousable senses lie volcanic underneath, it is not this May that the flowers will sprout on me.

But we are getting away from the object, again, always into this obsessional fog. (I am the obsessional type. Which type are you? If you are the butterfly type you will never forgive my intensity.)

Has anyone ever been this way before? There are no signs.

An obsessional fog, even if it is made of a flock of holy ghosts, is not the sort of thing we can put before the members of Parliament. The domestic details, yes, if suitably arranged, but not the mad moment, not the electric revelations that cause the soul to seize up.

Is it a certain shyness on their part that makes them unable to take in these trembling statistics, too fleshy too flighty too messy for debating floors? Could they be leaving out some crucial bits? They could be. But that’s the way they are. Facts must be your friends.

At the corner of the roof, two sparrows make love just outside their nest. The male cleans his beak and looks abroad after each bout. The female, though, quivers and continues to chirp a low note, looking round in fearful expectation for the next act. She is fearful in case there will be no next act, and the future suddenly cease.

PART FOUR

Bearing

I am in England, where I longed to be.

I escaped by a hair’s breadth the torpedo that seemed at the time to be a friendly if banal ender of my story. When the alarm sounded, I waited, with my daughter strapped into my lifebelt, full of relief, a kind of wicked joy, that I should be offered such an effortless way out of my pain.

But that was not to be.

Abandoning love as a comfortable kind of completion, a double or nothing; forgetting the nights O the red nights under Brooklyn Bridge; memory must memorize only a way to live or go mad; and forget the rest.

To dare to be born.

To bear love.

Notice how nature makes therapeutically blurred all visions until one has served her purpose. Notice how pregnant women move in a slow stately way as if they were moving in deliberation to the Last Judgment sure of their good marks. They may desire to be avenging and decisive like tigers, but the waters that hang in the womb, cocooning the embryo, cast their influence on their taken-over body too.

Useless to invoke God then. He stands awkwardly aside like a husband at a birth, and nature like a red-cheeked midwife flounces flamboyantly round.

Will you let this rough woman have command, God? Will you leave me to her mercy as she puts dust-sheets over my eyes and folds my mind away? He will. He does.

I try to remember how, when birth comes, the dams will break, and God will assume His majesty and roll in pain like an avenger over my drenched soul, and love and blood flow back into the world.

All this will be, I suppose. But I remember a hole in my body through which the four winds blew cruelly. I remember a vulnerability against which a spring leaf made a too-serious attack. O God I remember your appraising finger going over my ruined but conscious frame.

Waiting for a birth I hear the bells ringing boringly. Church bells, hospital bells, ship’s bells. They tell me that boredom is a helpful retreat for the aged. They tell me that the endless repetitions of life and death are soothing, rhyming lullabies, patterns in the jibbering void. They say peace has sometimes been obtained. Pacification is possible. Flesh can be sweet.

But peace and erotics are far far from those parts that now strain like Hercules in labours almost more than they can bear. They are at work! THIS IS WORK! Serious, gigantic, absolute. All other occupations seem flibbertigibbet by comparison with the act of birth. Love and all its flimsy fancies are rolled under this mighty event, rolling all before it: crushed like straw conceits. Even the love of God is steam-rolled aside, as the job that must be done is done.

Thus, in the twentieth century, is born a son of man, while above the agony shrill women request time off to go for a cup of tea. Slapdash he is thrown among the muddle, while harassed apprentices jostle the bloody pans.

But celebrate! Celebrate! Celebrate!

It is not too much to bear a womb.

PART FIVE

The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals

Out in the garden it is May, but the sun keeps going in, and I have been frustrated too many times to be able to withstand its uncertainty. The lilacs and the fields of buttercups and the birds’ eggs in the hedges are mere statistics, like the inventory of a house whose inmates have no meaning or connection, a catalogue of the world, without passion or caprice.

Who can I talk to? Who can I be angry with?

At night, the pressure of my captivity, and my helplessness, make my brain reel, so that I feel dizzy and faint. Rats and rabbits die of indecision when an experiment forces them two ways. Why shouldn’t I die from the insolubility of my problems and the untenability of my position?

Nevertheless, on this lovely afternoon, what is left of my youth rushes up like a geyser, as I sit in the sun, combing the lice out of my hair. For it is difficult to stop expecting (What my heart first waking whispered the world was), even though I am a woman of 31½, with lice in her hair and a faithless lover.

(I remember those long summer evenings you told me about when the holiday music made you nostalgic and restless to go to America and find your bride. Those wastes of Sundays, stretching through the suburban streets, where nothing could ever happen. Mother, may I go now? May I take my ticket and begin? The holidaymakers return from the country with amorous remembrances, because the fields were full of flowers. But the tin music of the organ-grinder reminds them of something late, too late, in beginning.

The days are going by. Nothing has happened. I am too old now to wear a floppy beribboned hat and innocuous sandals. I can no longer carry off the precocious gesture I learnt so well as a child. Why has no one leaned down out of a waterfall and covered me with blood and bliss?)

I cannot bear the lilac tree now. Even while I look it goes brown. Before I have taken the path across the field it will never be summer again.

After I had given birth to my first child, I felt time and space come whorling back into the empty space where it had lain. And Einsteinian demons came rushing to attack me with the terrible nature of the naked truth. But now I sit in country kitchens, discussing the minor discomforts of childbirth, and the domestic details of love.