Cards of Identity (29 page)

‘You mean, decide to be just a man or a woman after all?’

‘I am not sure about that. It’s the most difficult role of all nowadays. Once you start being the girl-man father of five, with girl-man boyfriends on the side and so on; or a man-girl mother with lady-friends-well, I know it’s
done,
but it’s a dog’s life, believe me. One small marriage, yes, simply to keep the conventions, if you are ambitious. But don’t overdo it.’

‘Tell me frankly,’ I said. ‘What would you do in my position?’

‘Will you,’ he asked, after a little thought, ‘think me impossibly dowdy and old fashioned if I suggest that your first decision should be anatomical?’

He must have seen from my face that I was astounded, so he continued quickly:
‘First
decision, I said. Whatever you may choose to
do,
you should really start out with – well, how can I put it? – a clear picture of the basic potentialities. Your trouble up to now, as I see it, is that you have been suffering from a grave handicap but have not yet decided on which side of the fence it is, so to speak. In short, are you a deviated woman or an inverted man?’

‘I never thought of such a thing,’ I answered.

‘I could probably tell you in a minute,’ he said, with a twinkle.

‘But I hardly know you.’

He smiled, and said: ‘It was I who popped you into bed.’

My mouth fell open. I looked down at my silk pyjamas and cried: ‘You mean, you know already?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ he answered gently.

I lay for a moment without speaking. Then, setting my teeth and drawing a strong breath, I turned to him and said: ‘Tell me.’

‘Can you face it?’ he asked earnestly.

‘Yes, yes!’ I cried, beating the sofa with my fists. ‘Only, tell me.’

‘Very well,’ he said, taking my hand in a firm grip. ‘You are a …’

Alas! at that very moment there was a light rat-tat on the door-knocker and a sound of youthful whistling – the sort of sound one associates with urchins and barrow-boys. That, at any rate, I am sorry to say, was the impression the sounds made upon my host, whose eyes immediately lit up with interest, while he dropped my hand and cocked his ear towards the front door. We heard the Philippino go down the passage and open the door: at once, the voice of a girl-man said: ‘I’m dreadfully sorry to intrude at
such
an hour, but Lord Lamprey
simply
ordered
me not to pass through London without calling on his
best
friend. I would have come
hours
earlier but I was detained –
forcibly
detained, my dear – by some scandalous people in Wapping.’ At this, my host left my bedside instantly and went to the door, calling: ‘Come in, come in! How is Lamprey’s wound?’ Even the stoutest of girl-men, I am afraid, lose their poise where a peer is concerned: to the abnormal vanity of their type, they add the snobbishness of you and me.

He returned with a slim lad in uniform and promptly said to me: ‘I can’t introduce you because I haven’t the least idea who either of you is. Do excuse me if I leave you briefly’ – and with that they both left the room.

No sooner were they out of hearing than I sprang off the sofa and cried: ‘Harold! Harold! Do come at once, Harold! It’s most important!’ But I called for five minutes before the door opened and Harold appeared, looking sulky and cross. ‘What is it now?’ he asked in a high voice. ‘If it’s more of that
endless
business about your sex I’d rather not hear a
word.
There’s muddle enough in a girl’s life without your adding your tedious bewilderment. And what
does
it matter, anyway? Who cares what sex anyone is? Who cares about sex, for that matter? Not I.’

‘You will when you hear what I have to say,’ I replied firmly. ‘Harold, that girl-man who has just come in is not a girl-man at all.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘What else would he be?’

‘He’s a she, Harold. She’s the man-girl who scratched my face. Voilet has sent her as a fifth column.’

He gave a scream and ran from the room. I heard him shrieking and raving up the stairs: a second later the Adonis, still stark-naked, raced through the living-room, closely followed by the Philippino with a broom. An awful tumult began upstairs: roars and shouts, the crash of broken Tanagra. But I hardly heard it. Someone, outside, struck the window of the living-room a sharp blow; a pane fell in, a huge hand pushed the edge of the black-out curtain to one side. Next minute I saw staring at me through the aperture the terrifying face of Violet herself, a Commando knife clutched between her teeth….

*

The next minutes were the most terrifying of my life. Much as I would have enjoyed a good faint, manliness told me this was no
moment for it. Instead, I screamed till my lungs gave out – and yet, transfixed by Violet’s glare, could not have run from the room had not a happy accident occurred. Upstairs, a window opened and there was a scruffling sound; I heard a feminine scream and the Master’s voice saying firmly: ‘I’m sorry, dear, but there’s
no
alternative.
Push,
Carlo!’ Next minute, there was a colossal thud and Violet’s face shot backwards into the night. They had thrown the man-girl imposter out of the top window; she had landed on Violet’s neck.

However manly I may be in other respects, I am enough of a woman to pity those who are injured in battle. I thought now what a hard day it had been for poor Violet, crushed beneath an oak table under police-officers and Amazons, and then risen only to be struck on the neck by a plummeting girl-friend. But even as my heart softened, my muscles stiffened as an even louder roar came from outside, and the sound of hammer-blows on the back door. I heard Violet bawl: ‘Come on, men, one – two – three, altogether,’ followed by a shattering crash: at once, the Master came racing down the stairs, crying sharply, to Carlo, Harold, and the Adonis: ‘It’s a siege, girls! We hold that door to the death!’ Outside, Violet shouted in her deep voice: ‘If you wish to avert unnecessary bloodshed, hand her over and our forces will withdraw.’ To which the Master retorted in cold, high tones: ‘Not to every Liza in Lambeth! We’ve got him and we’ll keep him!’

For the next half-hour the battle proceeded with unimaginable fury. Violet and her men seized on everything the little garden could provide – bricks from the path, crazy-paving, sections of concrete, nude statues of Pan, and a bust of Lord Kitchener. The wrought-iron garden-bench was used as a battering-ram. The Master and his girls had no such weapons, and it was with the grim looks of those who destroy the beautiful in order to preserve the system which created it that they scoured the rooms for heavy works of art. The French Impressionists were the first to go, dropped from the upper windows with crushing effect; they were followed by whistling mobiles, immense abstractions and three valuable Picassos. The Master himself wielded a reclining Henry Moore: few men in London, I believe, could have so much as lifted it.

How far we have come, how very far, from the days when my simple parents walked the sitting-rooms of life in amiable nudity and expatiated on dogs’ ways! It was clear to me, as I shrank back upon the
sofa, that this was no world for such as myself, who hope to be Independent Members in the Parliament of sex. Woe, I cried to myself, to the husband who has thrown aside the beard of his forefathers and built his sexual identity upon the sands of equality and shared authority! Woe to the wife who glories in the destruction of her husband’s power and exalts herself upon the pyre of self-immolating emancipation! They shall all, all be utterly consumed, and rise from the ashes true girl-men and men-girls, finding in Violet or the Master the authority and domination for which they crave! I – poor, indecisive me! – am nothing but a forerunner of that which is to come, when the vast, lethargic mass of ambiguous men and women is torn from its rootless desert and forcibly shared between the girls of Marathon and the men of Amazonia. And how close that moment seemed when I heard the Master cry, out of the kitchen: ‘Violet! I challenge you to single combat!’ and heard Violet roar back: ‘I accept your challenge. Expose the prize!’

Oh, the ruthlessness of them! Combatants of both camps seized my quivering, asexual limbs, dragged me into the garden, and stood me on the bird-bath. It was January, and the wind whistled through my blue-silk pyjamas – but the shame was more cruel than the wind: I thought it would kill me. At least, I hope I did. To tell the truth, I must confess that despite the wind and the shame I did feel a
little
proud of being so much in demand and a
little
relieved to think that once the battle was over the question of my sex would be decisively answered. Nor did I care particularly which of my two champions carried me off: there is little to choose between a brutal life and a malicious one. As the supporters of both sides began to cheer, I simply put my hands over my eyes and shivered….

There came a crash like two rhinoceroses meeting head-on….

A bomb had fallen on the house.

*

English obituary notices always make strange reading, if one has known the corpse at all well. Violet’s for example, was devoted almost entirely to a discussion of the best kind of boots to wear climbing Everest, as if the obituary-writer had decided that this was the only aspect of her life from which the general public could draw a useful moral. The Master’s, similarly, emphasized that though he had had
many friends in both Houses of Parliament and was a born curator of museums, his spiritual home had been the Palm House at Kew Gardens. I quite understand why it should be thought necessary to write this sort of obituary; the only thing I have against it is that it causes people to try and read between the lines, with the result that they often suspect the deceased of crimes of which he or she was completely innocent. Thus, it was no surprise to me to hear someone say, some months later, that Violet had been secretly married to a sheik, whom she had poisoned because he had betrayed her with other women; and that the Master had spent a year in prison for importuning women in Shaftesbury Avenue. Such stories are harmful, because they arouse the passions of younger people, who unconsciously model themselves on the legendary identity and, later in life, are found performing acts of crime, such as poisoning and importuning, which they believe to be purely imitative, when in fact they are entirely original.

What (I often think) will the obituary writers have to say of
me
? The mystery of my true sex has never been cleared up and it will intrigue me to the end of my days. As I grow older, my sex, far from becoming more defined, only grows more diffuse: in certain moods I imagine myself a normal husband, crushed underfoot by a contemptuous wife but finding solace in drink and the malice of cocktail-parties; in others, I see myself as this same wife, suffering the horrible agonies of unalleviated power, dreaming nightly of abduction by a male gorilla but incapable, in her waking moments, of regarding the other sex with anything but hatred and resentment. Sometimes I soar above this humdrum and see myself as a rough prototype created hundreds of years too soon – product of some fantastic mating between an inverted man-girl and a perverted girl-man. Like everyone who is not at home in contemporary society, I spin out the most ingenious theories to prove either that everyone was once like me or that everyone will be, in years to come. Harold, who was one of the few survivors of that terrible night and to whom I am now, in a sense, married, simply sticks his pink fingers in his coral ears when I begin to air such views, but at heart I think he envies me the notoriety which my books have brought me and the large increase they have caused in the number of people of undetermined sex: this, thanks to my writings, has now been recognized by Parliament and is enjoying quite a vogue. A healthy vogue, too, even though it has attracted riff-raff like the one who,
though sexually registered with the Food Office as ‘Undetermined’, claimed extra cheese as a nursing mother. Harold never misses a chance to poke fun at me and my sex, but it is my private opinion that he himself would like to climb on the bandwagon and become undetermined instead of inverted. But the years have rolled on; he is an old dog now, and too set in his ways.

*

‘Dogs,
Mr Jellicoe! Surely not! Badgers yesterday, dogs today! What will tomorrow bring? Cats and canaries?’

‘Mrs Paradise, I am tired of explaining these things. I explained to you the badgers; it went in one ear and out the other. I shall say
nothing
of the dogs.’

‘But Mr Jellicoe, think of the
expense
!
A huge house-party with full staff; days and days of consultation; sixteen turkeys eaten already: special clothes and printing machines and the best wines! Surely biscuits and love are all an animal requires?’

‘Would you like it better if they talked about human beings?’ asked Jellicoe sarcastically.

‘Well, why not, Mr Jellicoe? People matter too.’

‘What do you think they would have to say on
that
difficult subject, may I ask?’

‘Do you have to be so bitter and sarcastic? Why shouldn’t they have ideas about people too? They could discuss the importance of honesty and faith and love, couldn’t they? And beautiful memories and things of that kind.’

‘I expect that’s what they are doing, except that it is animals involved. Will you never understand that all our knowledge starts like that, Mrs Paradise? We make tests with beasts, and, if they live, we go on to people, knowing that what we are doing is correct. When they get back to London the gentlemen upstairs will do a pamphlet about dogs and badgers and then the people who read the pamphlet will do it to you and me. The trouble with you, Mrs Paradise, is that you are every inch a woman. Women are only interested in things which are about them, directly; a man’s mind is open to anything that is half-way promising.’

‘Just as long as all that money isn’t being wasted….’

‘No fear! If you want proof, just pause outside the door. The shouting!
The anger! The indignation! You’d think it was the
R.S.P.C.A
.’