The sensible thing would be to buy himself an outfit like theirs and wear it at weekends. But when he imagines dressing up in such clothes, clothes that seem to him not only alien to his character but Latin rather than English, he feels his resistance stiffening. He cannot do it: it would be like giving himself up to a charade, an act.
London is full of beautiful girls. They come from all over the world: as au pairs, as language students, simply as tourists. They wear their hair in wings over their cheekbones; their eyes are dark-shadowed; they have an air of suave mystery. The most beautiful are the tall, honey-skinned Swedes; but the Italians, almond-eyed and petite, have their own allure. Italian lovemaking, he imagines, will be sharp and hot, quite different from Swedish, which will be smiling and languorous. But will he ever get a chance to find out for himself? If he could ever pluck up the courage to speak to one of these beautiful foreigners, what would he say? Would it be a lie if he introduced himself as a mathematician rather than just a computer programmer? Would the attentions of a mathematician impress a girl from Europe, or would it be better to tell her that, despite his dull exterior, he is a poet?
He carries a book of poetry around with him in his pocket, sometimes Hölderlin, sometimes Rilke, sometimes Vallejo. In the trains he ostentatiously brings forth his book and absorbs himself in it. It is a test. Only an exceptional girl will appreciate what he is reading and recognize in him an exceptional spirit too. But none of the girls on the trains pay him any attention. That seems to be one of the first things girls learn when they arrive in England: to pay no attention to signals from men.
What we call beauty is simply a first intimation of terror, Rilke tells him. We prostrate ourselves before beauty to thank it for disdaining to destroy us. Would they destroy him if he ventured too close, these beautiful creatures from other worlds, these angels, or would they find him too negligible for that?
In a poetry magazine — Ambit perhaps, or Agenda — he finds an announcement for a weekly workshop run by the Poetry Society for the benefit of young, unpublished writers. He turns up at the advertised time and place wearing his black suit. The woman at the door inspects him suspiciously, demands his age. ‘Twenty-one,’ he says. It is a lie: he is twenty-two.
Sitting around in leather armchairs, his fellow poets eye him, nod distantly. They seem to know one another; he is the only newcomer. They are younger than he, teenagers in fact, except for a middle-aged man with a limp who is something in the Poetry Society. They take turns to read out their latest poems. The poem he himself reads ends with the words ‘the furious waves of my incontinence.’ The man with the limp deems his word choice unfortunate. To anyone who has worked in a hospital, he says, incontinence means urinary incontinence or worse.
He turns up again the next week, and after the session has coffee with a girl who has read out a poem about the death of a friend in a car accident, a good poem in its way, quiet, unpretentious. When she is not writing poetry, the girl informs him, she is a student at King’s College, London; she dresses with appropriate severity in dark skirt and black stockings. They arrange to meet again.
They meet at Leicester Square on a Saturday afternoon. They had half agreed to go to a film; but as poets they have a duty to life at its fullest, so they repair to her room off Gower Street instead, where she allows him to undress her. He marvels at the shapeliness of her naked body, the ivory whiteness of her skin. Are all Englishwomen as beautiful when their clothes are off, he wonders?
Naked they lie in each other’s arms, but there is no warmth between them; and warmth, it becomes clear, will not grow. At last the girl withdraws, folds her arms across her breasts, pushes his hands away, shakes her head mutely.
He could try to persuade her, induce her, seduce her; he might even succeed; but he lacks the spirit for it. She is not only a woman, after all, with a woman’s intuitions, but an artist too. What he is trying to draw her into is not the real thing — she must know that.
In silence they get dressed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. He shrugs. He is not cross. He does not blame her. He is not without intuitions of his own. The verdict she has delivered on him would be his verdict too.
After this episode he stops going to the Poetry Society. He has never felt welcome there anyway.
He has no further luck with English girls. There are English girls enough at IBM, secretaries and punch operators, and opportunities to chat to them. But from them he feels a certain resistance, as if they are not sure who he is, what his motives might be, what he is doing in their country. He watches them with other men. Other men flirt with them in a jolly, coaxing English way. They respond to being flirted with, he can see that: they open like flowers. But flirting is not something he has learned to do. He is not even sure he approves of it. And anyhow, he cannot let it become known among the IBM girls that he is a poet. They would giggle among themselves, they would spread the story all over the building.
His highest aspiration, higher than for an English girlfriend, higher even than for a Swede or an Italian, is to have a French girl. If he had a passionate affair with a French girl he would be touched and improved, he is sure, by the grace of the French language, the subtlety of French thought. But why should a French girl, any more than an English girl, deign to speak to him? And anyway, he has not so much as laid eyes on a French girl in London. The French have France, after all, the most beautiful country in the world. Why should they come to chilly England to look after the natives’ babies?
The French are the most civilized people in the world. All the writers he respects are steeped in French culture; most regard France as their spiritual home — France and, to an extent, Italy, though Italy seems to have fallen on hard times. Since the age of fifteen, when he sent off a postal order for five pounds ten shillings to the Pelman Institute and received in return a grammar book and a set of exercise sheets to be completed and returned to the Institute for marking, he has been trying to learn French. In his trunk, brought all the way from Cape Town, he has the five hundred cards on which he has written out a basic French vocabulary, one word per card, to carry around and memorize; through his mind runs a patter of French locutions — je viens de, I have just; il me faut, I must.
But his efforts have got him nowhere. He has no feel for French. Listening to French language records he cannot, most of the time, tell where one word ends and the next begins. Though he can read simple prose texts, he cannot in his inner ear hear what they sound like. The language resists him, excludes him; he cannot find a way in.
In theory he ought to find French easy. He knows Latin; for the pleasure of it he sometimes reads passages of Latin aloud — not the Latin of the Golden or the Silver Age but the Latin of the Vulgate, with its brash disregard for classical word order. He picks up Spanish without difficulty. He reads Cesar Vallejo in a dual-language text, reads Nicolas Guillén, reads Pablo Neruda. Spanish is full of barbaric-sounding words whose meaning he cannot even guess at, but that does not matter. At least every letter is pronounced, down to the double r.
The language for which he discovers a real feeling, however, is German. He tunes in to broadcasts from Cologne and, when they are not too tedious, from East Berlin as well, and for the most part understands them; he reads German poetry and follows it well enough. He approves of the way in which every syllable in German is given its due weight. With the ghost of Afrikaans still in his ears, he is at home in the syntax. In fact, he takes pleasure in the length of German sentences, in the complex pile-up of verbs at the end. There are times, reading German, when he forgets he is in a foreign language.