There was a queue outside a theatre, so I followed it in and paid thirty bob for a seat. When the National Anthem played I didn’t stand up, because I would have felt stupid if I had. But the rest of the herd were on their feet, and a voice behind said that I should show respect, so I called out, still on my arse, that if I did get up it would only be to push his patriotic face in. I didn’t hear anything more, and the lights went down.
A man came on the stage and went rampaging through somebody’s living-room, shouting how rotten the world was. His wife came in, and he shouted at her till she couldn’t do anything else but burst into tears. He was well dressed and well fed, and didn’t look as if he had much to complain about, but when his wife’s brother came in and told him to pack it in, he went for him as well, bawling until he too sat on the settee with his head in his hands feeling like the biggest rotter in the world and not knowing what to do about it. The hero didn’t tell him, but just went on raving, and when the brother’s girlfriend came in he shouted at her till she went into hysterics and he had to throw water over her from the tap, still raging as he did it. When an older woman hove in who seemed to be his mother, he started on her, so that the scene looked like a cross between a looney-bin and somebody’s living-room where the television set had broken down. Then the mad bastard started shaking his fist at the audience, calling us some wonderfully colourful phrases. At this I got up and pushed along the row so that people threatened me for making such a noise, but with as much disturbance as I could muster, I went out into daylight. That’s what you get from joining a queue, I thought, though strangely enough I felt better than I had before I went in.
I walked to Finchley Road and met Bridgitte coming up the steps towards Smog’s school. She was dressed more like her old au pair self in a set of black slacks and a mauve jumper. Her face was thin and pale, unlike her normally white and buttery Dutch skin, and she was dark under the eyes as if she’d been through a rough and sleepless time since we’d last met. She smiled and held out her hand.
‘Why didn’t you phone?’ I said, accusingly.
‘Oh, I did, but a man answered and told me you were out of the town.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘I went up to the estate, to see Mother. She’s had a stroke, and it don’t seem she can last much longer. If she does pop off I’ll come into half a million, though she threatened to leave it to a dogs’ home when I was there, speaking only from the right side of her mouth. Anyway, that’s unimportant. How are you?’
‘I don’t know. My husband went away yesterday, to Glasgow for a week, to a sort of conference. At least, that’s what he said, so don’t laugh. But it’s true because I saw all the letters he received about it.’
A heavy weight hit me in the shoulder, and when I spun round another one caught me in the gut. It was Smog’s satchel, packed with books that taught him how to read and write. I hoped it would be soon, then forgave him: ‘If you were two inches taller, I’d blow your block off. Don’t do it when you are older or you’ll get what for.’
Bridgitte clouted him on the back of the head and sent one school cap skimming under a car. He was about to dive for it, under the bonnet of another, but I pulled him by the arm and saved his life. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘watch it.’
‘I couldn’t care less.’
‘Well I could.’ I picked the cap up and put it where it belonged. ‘Let’s go and stuff ourselves with cake and tea, shall we, Smog?’
‘We’ll go back to the house,’ said Bridgitte. ‘I can’t face one of those awful English cafés where you get nothing but thick tea and fatty cakes.’ The bus landed us somewhere on the rim of Hampstead, then we walked along a few quiet roads to the new Anderson home. The front of it looked like a British Railways airliner stranded on a hillside, and we climbed a flight of concrete steps to get to it.
She showed me into a long living-room with windows from floor to ceiling, one side looking over a lawn. Smog threw off his coat and sat on the floor trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle that Bridgitte had three-quarters done, but he lost patience, broke it up, and started to read one of his school books. Bridgitte pressed a bell and a swarthy middle-aged woman came in and said: What you want?’
‘Make us some tea, please, Adelida.’
‘You had it already,’ Adelida said, ‘before you went to the school.’
‘I want some more, for three, Goddamn it.’
Adelida went off, grumbling.
‘A rough life,’ I said.
‘Impossible.’ She got up. ‘I’ll have to see to it myself,’ and went out, so that I fell to helping Smog with a page of his reading. His chaotic over-energized mind seemed to have grasped on to learning as something to steady himself by, for he read and wrote as well as I had on leaving school at fifteen. When tea was finished he asked me to play draughts, but after a couple of games he beat me at it, so I stopped thinking he was only a kid and played better, but even so it ended in stalemate. ‘Do you play chest?’ he asked.
‘Chess,’ I told him. ‘No, I don’t. I’ll learn, though, and next time I come we’ll have a game.’
‘You’re fairly ignorant.’
‘I’ll get better,’ I said, ‘and catch you up one day.’
‘But you’re old already, and that’s difficult for you.’
‘Who does all this to him?’ I asked Bridgitte.
‘His father,’ she said. ‘And his mother before that. He’s not as bright as he seems.’
‘I am,’ Smog said. ‘I’m top of my class at school.’
‘Anyway,’ I said to him, ‘you shouldn’t boast, or you’ll turn into a monster.’
He jumped on my knee. ‘Really? Then I can frighten everybody.’
‘You do already,’ I said.
The idea of another Swiss trip was burning me, because I hoped to see Polly on it. I knew this to be a crackpot fantasy, which could have nothing to do with Bridgitte sitting on my knee in the living-room after Smog-the-limb-of-Satan had been put to bed. Life was overflowing, for while Bridgitte was loving me I was fixed with all my wants on Polly who was God knew where. I pressed back her kisses absent-mindedly, yet firm enough for her not to suspect anything or leave off loving me. Maybe she felt I was a little distant but this made her try harder, almost smothering me, so that I was shamed into making some semblance of matching her, until this brought us blow by blow on to the carpet and rolling around at the bottom of passion’s pit. When she pulled at my tie, I parted the buttons of her blouse to get her breasts close to me, for at the moment, that was the only part of her I seemed to want, and when she tried to get my shoelaces undone I eased the zip of her skirt and drew it off. Her blonde hair was down and swathed all over me, yet still I only saw the features of Polly who even in the extremes of her sexual throe kept that faint tilt of irony on the left upper lip. Our rolling drew us slowly towards the stairs, and halfway up I opened her legs wide and licked her there till she came, her head falling backwards. I was a thousand miles from her, my bowels as cold as underground moss, so there seemed nothing I could not do to her, and with me in this frosty and distant mood, she became wilder than I’d ever seen her.
It seemed, impossible that she wouldn’t begin to suspect we weren’t as close as she thought we were, but when we got into the bedroom and I was put to it at last to strip down to my feathers, she took my diffidence to heart in such a way that it appeared only to prove an undying love, a tribute to her that no one had ever paid before. So at last, as I felt all this, I began to rise, at the moment when I thought I’d never be able to, not that night at least, and not with her. I slid in like a dream, and kept at it with her under me till she blew the walls of herself on to me, then I changed her on to her back and packed in every inch so that she grasped the pillows to try and take even more, yet at the same time escape it. The more exquisite and ferocious it got, the plainer did I see Polly and know she was the one I wanted to be with, and when every part of me finally turned into a fountain it was only in an effort to put out these sprouting flames because I was crying out Polly’s name, seeing no one else, and knowing I was in nobody but her. I bit my lips, and my inside heart cried out. There was no stopping the tears, and my cheeks were wet. She noticed this, and kissed them, talking to me in a crazy mixture of Dutch and English, and I was forced to begin returning her words, and her kisses.