In the great city, so three-dimensional, so rooted in its soil, drawing colour from such depths, only the city was real. Those of us who came to it lost some of our solidity; we were trapped into fixed, flat postures. And, in this growing dissociation between ourselves and the city in which we walked, scores of separate meetings, not linked even by ourselves, who became nothing more than perceivers: everyone reduced, reciprocally, to a succession of such meetings, so that first experience and then the personality divided bewilderingly into compartments. Each person concealed his own darkness. Lieni; the English student in his scarf; Duminicu, forever in my imagination sitting in vest and pants on the semen-stained magenta spread of his narrow bed, spearing ham from a tin and, moustache working above weak mouth, speaking between and through mouthfuls of his imminent escape; and myself. Little twinges of panic too, already. Not the panic of being lost or lonely; the panic of ceasing to feel myself as a whole person. The threat of other people’s lives, the remembered private landscapes, the relationships, the order which was not mine. I had longed for largeness. How, in the city, could largeness come to me? How could I fashion order out of all these unrelated adventures and encounters, myself never the same, never even the thread on which these things were hung? They came endlessly out of the darkness, and they couldn’t be placed or fixed. And always at the end of the evening the book-shaped room, the tall window, myself sitting towards the light or towards the mirror.
The signs were all there. The crash was coming, but I could see this only when the crash had come and when the search for order had been abandoned for something more immediate and more reassuring. And the need for reassurance was constant. I began, as the saying is, to frequent prostitutes. Instinct alone didn’t suggest this; I was also influenced by what I had read. I became an addict of what these women offered, which was less and more than pleasure: the quick stimulation of fear, followed by its immediate dissipation. But it was a grotesque business, not the least grotesque part of which was the vocabulary. Personal service; correction; domination; thirty shillings dressed, two guineas undressed. The first occasion was a failure; it was an occasion of unrelieved fear. I remember a very warm ante-room with a gas fire, a wallpaper of flowered, country cottage pattern, and an elderly cigarette-smoking maid in an upholstered armchair reading the evening paper by the light of a dim ceiling lamp. In the room beyond there was the manageable talk of money and something extra for the maid; then the humiliation. After some time the body threw me off, rearranging its stiff, evil-smelling hair. But the cruelty and cheating were, as I discovered later, exceptional; I never experienced them again. The occasions that followed are a blur: of encounters less with individual bodies than with anonymous flesh. Each occasion pressed me deeper down into emptiness, that prolonged sensation of shock with which I was every minute of every day trying to come to terms. Still the cummerbund, though, still the well-brushed hair: in those days my only act of heroism.
I write as though Lieni is in some way to blame. This is not my intention. Lieni might even have saved me. I was not with her when the crash came. I had left the boarding-house, and the move had been a climax to disturbance. The house had been sold to the Countess and we had all, Lieni as well, been given notice. So we scattered. I made no attempt to look up Lieni. Presently I had my own private fight; I didn’t think I could face her. I saw her, from a taxi, twelve years later. It was in that same area, on a Sunday afternoon, sunny, the street littered with paper. She was in a party of macintoshed Maltese, perhaps the very men I knew: small, pale, worried, with bodies and faces that carried the signs of childhood deprivation. Her own style had changed little. Her heels were still very high, her lipstick still a little too bright on her wide mouth: not the smart London girl, but a full-bodied woman who could be recognized at a glance as an immigrant, Maltese, Italian, Cypriot.
Six months after I moved I saw both the Countess and the boarding-house mentioned in the News of the World. The house had been turned into a brothel. I cried out to Mrs Mural, my landlady, when I read the item, delighted to recognize an address with which I had been connected. It was the Murals’ paper and it was the sort of item they relished. But they did not care for the connection. The Murals were on their postwar rise; they were breeders of boy scouts; they grew more grave as they grew more acquisitive. Mr Mural once had a suit made to measure by a firm with many branches; for a full week the card advising him that his suit was ready lay on the letter tray in the hall. He was a scrupulous bill-maker. The bill which followed a minor illness, during which they had had to feed me, began: Telephone call to Doctor 3d. I paid without comment. Folding my cheque, not putting it away, he became genial; he told me that once, during the war, he had seen the Emperor Haile Selassie. ‘Standing by himself on Swindon station.’ Poor Emperor! Mrs Mural nourished her family with care, and my ration card was not without its uses towards this end. Some little portion fell to me, it is true. My breakfast, with its little pat of rationed butter and its little dish of rationed sugar, was brought up to me in procession every morning: Mrs Mural, her daughters, aged five and seven, and the dog.
One morning the elder girl hung back in my room. She had something to say. She said: ‘Shall I show you my rude drawings?’ I was interested. She showed me the drawings: a child’s view of unclothed dolls. I was greatly moved. She said: ‘Do you like my rude drawings?’ ‘I like your drawings, Yvonne.’ ‘I will show you some more tomorrow. Would you like to keep these?’ ‘I’d rather you kept them, Yvonne.’ ‘No, you can have these. I can always do some more for myself.’ I became the patron of her assiduous art; so at any rate she represented me when the story came out. You couldn’t blame the Murals then for wishing, as the saying now is, to keep Britain white.
From room to room I moved, from district to district, going ever farther out of the heart of the city. Those houses I That impression of temporary, fragile redness, of habitations set superficially on trampled fields! Those shops! Those newsagents! Quickly each area was exhausted. I remember the total tedium of a summer Sunday — once, in my imagination, a photograph of a girl had been taken on such a day: the purest anthropomorphic sentimentality — during this day I drew the backs of all the houses I could see from my window. I was restless. I travelled to the provinces, taking trains for no reason except that of movement. I travelled to the Continent. I used my savings. Everything of note or beauty reminded me of my own disturbance, spoiling both the moment and the object. My world was being corrupted! I didn’t wish to see. But the restlessness remained. It took me to innumerable tainted rooms with drawn curtains and bedspreads suggesting other warm bodies. And once, more quickening of self-disgust than any other thing, I had a sight of the prostitute’s supper, peasant food, on a bare table in a back room.
With Lieni and Mr Shylock’s boarding-house one type of order had gone for good. And when order goes it goes. I was not marked. No celestial camera tracked my movements. I abolished landscapes from my mind. Provence on a sunny morning, the Wagon-Lit coffee cup steadied by a heavy tablespoon; the brown plateau of Northern Spain in a snowstorm; an awakening clank-and-jerk in the Alps and outside, inches from my window, a world of simple black and white. I abolished all landscapes to which I could not attach myself and longed only for those I had known. I thought of escape, and it was escape to what I had so recently sought to escape from.