I stand by the window, waiting for the rain to stop. It takes longer than I expected. There is a moment when the sky seems partially to darken again and the deluge makes a temporary come-back. But after a while — I’m not paying attention, and it’s as if I awake to the fact rather than observe it — a weak, lemony light floods the court and there is a sudden assertion of routine, incidental noise: footsteps, drips, birdsong.
I go to the bathroom. I need to have a prodigious pee. Tea, followed by sherry, and all this rain — and only now does my erection yield to my bladder. I feel as if I am emptying out my being. I feel as if I am pissing out my soul. The sun shines on the tiles. On one of the glass shelves is Gabriella’s unclaimed perfume. On another is an old bottle of pills that a doctor gave me to “help” after Ruth died. Doctors must be short-sighted people.
I take it down, shake it to see how many pills are left. (Apparently, not enough.)
Then I go back into my sitting-room, and with the aid of what’s left in the sherry bottle, swallow the lot.
22
It’s not the end of the world. It is. Life goes on. It doesn’t.
Why seems it so particular with thee?
When the first Aldermaston marchers set out in the late 1950s on their pilgrimage of protest, what were Ruth and I doing? We were sharing our new-found love-nest (having slipped the clutches of despotic landladies), a top-floor flat at number twenty-seven, Mayflower Road, Camden. And she was enamoured of the stage, and I was enamoured of poetry, and we were both enamoured of each other. Too happy, too busy being happy, to worry about the Bomb.
But what sort of a plea, what sort of an excuse, is happiness? Perhaps it’s the only plea. Why march with banners of protest unless to save a world in which happiness can exist? It is a rare and endangered enough creature, after all, happiness, worthy of special protection. True, among the denizens of this world it has no privileged place (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all …?”). But who, sitting on the Grand Jury of Extinction, would not suffer the eclipse of a thousand drab species (such is nature’s way) but wish to spare the birds of paradise?
And what are these things: the theatre, poetry? Bubbles, toys. It doesn’t take a bomb to shatter them. They only tell us what is in our hearts. They are only mirrors for our lost, discredited souls.
O Mayflower Road! O garrets under the stars! O vie Bohème! O Mimi! O Rodolfo!
How many taxi rides? How many shillings on the meter? How many journeys, all too quick, through the emptied streets, through the small, shy hours of love, before we even dared to speak the magic words? Perhaps love is more than the sum of two people. Perhaps love is a third thing, mysteriously bestowed, precious and fragile, like some rare, warm egg. We wished and feared to hasten it. We took it into our care like diligent trustees, waiting our charge’s coming of age.
The time would come when, by much discreet investigation and counting of pennies, our homeward journeys would take us to a shared address. When the vexed geography of our lives would contract into the ecstatic geography of a shared bed (to be exact, a mattress on the floor). The time would come — O Mayflower Road! O my America, my new-found-land! — when behind the drawn curtains of number twenty-seven, which otherwise gave on to a sea of slates and chimney-pots with, beyond, the fairy-tale pinnacles of St. Pancras Station, Ruth would perform for me what she called her snake-charmer’s dance, a sort of dance that Mr Silvester would never have allowed his good girls at the Blue Moon Club to perform. Not that my snake needed charming — it stood up, rigid and ready as a tent pole beneath the sheets.…
But meanwhile it is still 1957. When the official language of love was still the language of engagement rings and kisses at front doors, when university-registered landladies exercised their censorious regimes, and sex and sin were still conveniently alliterative synonyms. The taxi would drop her first at Pickford Street — our good-night clinches behind the cabbie’s back would be swift and muddled — then take me on to Winterton Road, where in my solitary bed I would think of Ruth in her solitary bed, thinking of me in mine.
And I didn’t know I loved her till I’d dreamt of her. I didn’t know it was the real thing until an illusion had signalled it. Until she’d stepped out of her real existence into this other existence of which only I knew …
I still remember that dream: its simple but panic-ridden formula, its tides of anguish and relief. How there was this train to catch. How we were going on this long, momentous journey (oh yes, I know — the symbolism of trains). How we had arranged to meet at the station, a big London terminus. And how, despite careful planning, everything — London Transport, my own flustered brain, the perils of the street, a bulging suitcase — conspired to stop me arriving on time. A taxi broke down. There were crowds that wouldn’t part. I was late, irrevocably late. The train would be gone and so would she.
But as I crossed the station concourse, there she was, waiting, waving, by the barrier. And there, still, was the train. It was all right, you see: she had spoken to the driver (she had spoken to the driver!). Didn’t I know this was a special train: it couldn’t possibly leave without us?
We fell into an embrace, an intimate and swooning embrace, there and then on the crowded concourse. And when I woke up, the embrace, the whole dream, still clung to me, I still existed within it, as in some warm envelope. What’s more, I was convinced that she must know she had been in my dream — that she too must have had a dream, a parallel dream, in which she had waited for me at the station, stricken by the fear (but she had this obliging engine driver) that I might never turn up.
So I never dared tell her — never in thirty years — for fear of breaking some beautiful, tacit conspiracy: “I had this dream …”
But the dream gave me the courage (that very day) to say the words I had not uttered before. You see, it was I who said them first, though she echoed them soon afterwards, as if to prove my (our) dream had been mutual. And all that afternoon, of course (they are truly magic words), was like a dream. A dream.
Where did this happen? It happened in, of all places, the Reptile House of the London Zoo in Regent’s Park. Where do you go, what do you do, on a cool, grey Sunday afternoon in August, when the pubs have closed and everywhere else is shut? We clanked through turnstiles. We drifted into the sheltering darkness of this home for exiled toads and vipers. It was not the first time, I suppose, that lovers had availed themselves of its dim-lit sanctuary. And there, under the unimpressed gaze of comatose pythons, disgruntled alligators and forlorn tortoises, we whispered into each other’s ears the words that my (our) dream had endorsed, and nuzzled and pressed against each other and behaved as the human species will behave under such circumstances as ours. And, of course, now the words had been spoken, there was no denying that further question, asked by our bodies if not our lips (hadn’t our souls already eloped — by special train?): When? Where? How?
How strange the contrast between the dazzle, the display of the Blue Moon Club and these furtive but intrepid creatures, plotting with reptilian stealth their happiness. Love makes of its initiates bold undercover agents in the hostile territory of mundanity and propriety. We resolved, that same afternoon, that nothing less was our due than a whole night in each other’s arms. Which meant, given the rigours of our situation, the expedient of some cheap hotel. I was to make the arrangements. Next Sunday. Could we afford it? We’d have to. Could we wait that long? Just about. We walked over Primrose Hill. Sweet Primrose Hill. A primrose sun, hiding behind grey, watery clouds. We parted, to go our separate ways in Camden, my flat feet floating on air.…