‘There must be something you want, though, that your old man can’t provide.’
‘Tell me what you want,’ she said, ‘and then perhaps it will remind me of what I could want. Maybe I’ve been too happy to want much.’
‘Or too unhappy,’ I said, mixing her up, often the best way of getting the truth out of people. Since I wasn’t in love with her, or even falling for her, I could try this kind of trick.
‘I’m not neurotic,’ she said defiantly, ‘if that’s what you mean. My father’s started going to a psychiatrist, but I never will.’
I nearly slipped off the seat at the idea of the great Claud Moggerhanger spilling his past every Tuesday and Thursday on a headshrinker’s couch. In fact, when the humorous point had gone, it actually disturbed me to think of it. ‘What does he go there for?’
She took the cigarette I offered. ‘Maybe to relax, to pass the time. He’s nowhere near barmy, believe me. But he likes to keep up to date with the fads. All the Moggerhangers do.’
‘Even you?’
‘You just tell me what you want out of life,’ she said, ‘and then I’ll tell you.’
‘I don’t want to have to wonder what I want,’ I said, doing my best. ‘I want to live so that I never have to stop to ask myself what my ambition is or what I’m going to do. That’s what everybody does. They want this job or that house or a car. They want to become a foreman, a director, or a manager. They have hopes of owning this or that, or they set their target on marrying a certain woman who it looks impossible for them to get. And when they have all these things they’ll want something else, and when there’s nothing else for them to want, or their spirit is so broken that they can’t want or strive for anything in any case, they have a convenient accident and die, or just die. To want is the Devil’s own trick. To live without wanting is God’s blessing — though I don’t believe in God or the Devil. Yet it was a black day in my life when I switched from not wanting to wanting, and I don’t know when it happened. Probably before I was born, when I was still in my mother, or during the few minutes before my first feed. But I still only swing between the two like a skinned monkey looking for its skin. One minute I want, and the next minute I’m full of innocence. It’s all mixed up mostly, because often when I want so that I’m ready to die getting it, that’s when everything is hopeless and there’s not a chance of me getting it. When I’m in the agreeable mood of not wanting, all I want to do is to stay alive. In the wanting frame of mind I’m so much full of want that I don’t know what I want, or if I do it’s so many things that I don’t know what to try for first, and so end up not trying for any of them. So I get blown around like a straw, and in the meantime live more or less all right by doing as little work as possible.’
‘It doesn’t seem to me that you’re telling me the truth.’
I laughed. ‘It doesn’t seem so to me, either. But I’m trying, though. You tell me what truth is, and I’ll give you an everlasting lollipop. I won’t know what I want till I’ve got it, and that’s the truth, but it frightens me. It means I’ve got no control over my life, and though I’ve no right to have any because I’m so lazy, the fact gnaws at my craw nevertheless. What I often want is to have a few thousand pounds every year so that I could buy a small house and live there without worrying or doing any work.’
‘That’s not much,’ she said. ‘You could easily get that.’
‘Could I?’ I was encouraged.
‘It doesn’t seem too much to me. I’m surprised you want so little.’
This flummoxed me, and for a while I didn’t know how to go on. We got to Chillon, and didn’t go to the castle but sat at a café and went on talking while we held hands. First we were outside, but then a great thunderstorm burst over the lake, and we went in, to get more cream cakes and coffee down us. The sky was pink, and a flash of lightning split it like a pomegranate. Then it turned suddenly metal-blue, and a ripple of far-off thunder exploded into a great noise, shaking the floor under my feet.
‘The greatest torment in life,’ I said, ‘is not to know what you want out of it, but I don’t know what I want out of it because I don’t know what it can give me. That’s what education is for, I suppose. It doesn’t teach you much, I’m sure, but it tells you what you can get, or expect. And the fact is that I don’t want any career or job that can be offered to me. Apart from the fact that I’m not fit or qualified to get anything that might appeal to me, I don’t trust any of them to do me any good. It’s not that that sort of thing isn’t for the likes of me, so much as that I’m not for the likes of them. The fact is that nothing I could do is of any value to people, though even if it were I still wouldn’t do it. I don’t want to be used, and I don’t want to use, so you can see how difficult it is for me to tell you what I want out of life. I can easily tell you what I don’t want. Maybe I won’t always feel like this, but I certainly can’t tell at the moment. A long-term policy isn’t my cup of tea. All I’d like right now is for us to be back in my room at the hotel, so that we can be alone together.’
She showed her milk-white teeth in a laugh, which made a great contrast to her dark ringlets. ‘You’re just greedy,’ she said. ‘If you don’t know what you want out of life you just end up grabbing all the small things, and getting nothing big and worthwhile.’
‘That’s a good philosophical point,’ I said. ‘But if you live well until you’re ninety, then go out with a hallelujah on your lips, what bigger thing do you want than that? The best life is one that doesn’t give you time to think. My life is already ruined by talking like this. Yours will be too if you aren’t careful. We’re birds of a feather, in a way, and after so much thinking we ought to enjoy it and not bother too much with what we want out of life. So let’s get away from this view of walls and water and go back to my room at the hotel.’
‘I know I shouldn’t,’ she said, to my surprise, putting her arm through my arm, and squeezing it so that I got the warmth of her body, ‘but I feel like that as well.’
We walked back towards the bus, and I felt like a hero, as if all I lacked was a pipe in my mouth, and I was back at the age of fifteen, a firestone dip to centuries ago. If every year seemed like a hundred I really would live for ever. I was embarrassed at the tiddlywink leaping around inside my trousers, but the golden coat hit it safely till it quietened down a bit. We necked a few kisses in the bus, but the honest Swiss stared, so we left off and sat, almost glumly, not able to say much, now that we had committed ourselves.
It started to rain, and I wondered if she wanted to back down, but she didn’t. Nobody said anything at the desk when I asked for the key and we went up to my room, not like in deep-blue puritanical old England, or so I had heard. As soon as we got inside and I’d seen to the lock we gobbled all over each other under the roof and the rain, to the tune of the wet pigeons warbling outside. It was afternoon and almost evening, and our naked bodies skimmed about like a couple of snakes, and I swamped her before even getting in. We didn’t seem to mind which end was which, and Polly Moggerhanger did as much gobbling as I did, which I wasn’t used to at all up to then. Not only I knew what I wanted (in this, at any rate) but she did too, and I hadn’t met such an even match before. It was the sort of lovemaking that pulled my backbone out of place, seemed to heave my spine off centre. Yesterday’s colossal expenditure of energy had put me in the way of showing Polly what was what, because I felt as if I’d been worn down to a pole so that not much of my body was left to feed off me. It had only itself to look after, and so could give all its attention to the present requirements, a perpendicular mangonel stiffening my attacks so that at some moments she was both delighted and frightened.