Jerusalem the Golden (18 page)

When they dropped her off at her doorway, she thanked them for the lift, and they said, politely, that they hoped that they would see her again. She said she hoped so too, and then she said ‘Good night’, and went. She had meant to say ‘Good night, Gabriel’, she had meant to use his name, just as he, smiling, warm, provocative, had used hers, with that note of deliberate intimacy in which his family so much specialized, and which came from him with a sudden breath of danger: ‘Good night then, Clara,’ he had said, as she turned from saluting Phillipa in the back seat, and she had replied, losing nerve, a
simple good night. She regretted it, for she had meant to use his name, as a recognition, to herself, of the fact that she had accepted it, and the system that had chosen it, and the implications that, to her, it carried. It would have meant nothing to him, had she used it, for it was after all his name, a word to which he might be expected to answer: but to her it would have meant much, as much as the facility of the embrace which she had bestowed upon his sister. For these strange names would not pass, try as she would, her unaccustomed lips; she was not ready for them. They sounded as ill in her voice as the accents of a faultily pronounced foreign language. She could not speak them naturally; generations of harsh restraint prevented her. She would have felt foolish, using such words, however far from detection, however much herself admiring them. She had conquered, on the whole, the flat edge of her birthplace; the tones and accents of others came naturally to her now, but their words and phrases sometimes failed her. Endearments failed her: men found her more lavish with acts than with words, and to call anyone ‘darling’ would have killed her, for to her the term was buried deep in profound layers of ridicule, soft and dead and rotten. She liked to hear it, she liked others to use it, but for her it was dead. And Christian names, even those less rare than Gabriel’s, defeated her. She liked Christian names, she liked those who used them as a sign of easy inclusion and intimacy, but to her the use of a name remained a proclamation, an action, an event. She was not accustomed to names. Her parents, friendless, respectable, disconnected, used surnames only; and they spoke of each other, when addressing the children, as ‘your father’ or ‘your mother’. They never, to each other, used any form of address or even of courtesy. If in sight of each other, they would look at each other and speak; if not in sight they would merely raise their voices. Their names, whenever she heard them, took her by surprise; her mother was called May and her father was called Albert, but the names were the names of strangers.

She wondered what her mother would have made of Amelia, Magnus, Gabriel, Clelia and Annunciata, let alone Sebastian and Candida. She hardly knew what she thought of them herself; she could
not tell whether they were names exotic to the point of absurdity, or whether they were strange to her alone. She thought it possible, perfectly possible, that many people in the world might hear such names, and be seized by not the faintest impulse to laugh or to admire: and yet on the other hand she had sensed from time to time a certain mockery of the family itself towards itself, and had not Mrs Denham herself expressed a doubt that with Annunciata she might have gone too far? What she could not grasp was the notion that a family might deliberately, and without guilt or irresponsibility, choose for its children names not wholly suitable or conventional, for the sake of a whim or an association, or for the sake of beauty or charm. The use of a singularly beautiful or portentous name had always been derided by her mother; names like Helen, Grace or Alexander had been known to cause ill-placed mirth. But how, with so fine a sense of distinction and significance, her own mother could have called her Clara, she could neither understand nor forgive. Carelessness might have been forgiven, but not intention. And yet, at the same time, Annunciata might forgive her mother, had she needed to, because the intention was, Clara thought, so innocent, so lacking in harm. And yet, there again, she did not need to, because she would not have minded, however eccentrically christened; she could have worn such a name, as she could have worn Clara’s green dress at that dance so many years ago.

Clara often found herself wondering what her mother would think. Such wonder never prevented her from any course of action – on the contrary, she sometimes feared it impelled her – but nevertheless, when drunk or naked, thoughts of her mother would fill her mind. And with the Denhams, these thoughts pressed upon her intolerably. As she lay in bed that night she could not help comparing this evening, the evening of Annunciata’s departure for Oxford, with the preceding evening, which had been that of her own departure from Northam for London. Oddly enough, her mother too had asked the family round, though not, as she from time to time declared, through any sense of occasion; she thought occasions unecessary. The family thus invited had consisted of her brother Alan and his wife Kathie, and they had been asked because
Mrs Maugham had wanted to consult Alan about some problem connected with the rates. Clara did not know whether to regret or to rejoice at their arrival; she did not get on well with either of them, and in many ways they subjected her to precisely the same strains as her mother did, and yet on the other hand their presence did not intensify the difficulty of an evening, but somehow dissipated and confused it, so that at least its burden did not rest upon herself alone. And after several weeks of evenings spent largely
à deux
, she was glad, quite simply, of a little change.

She had always preferred Alan, the younger brother, to the absent emigrated Arthur, largely because he had always been more kind to her; if she could have felt that he liked her, she would have liked him. He worked at a chemical factory on the other side of town; he and his wife lived on an estate about six miles away from their old home, and the distance and their two small children prevented or excused them from visiting Mrs Maugham often. Kathie, as a girl, had lived in the same road, and Clara had once admired her from a distance, for she had seemed the very essence of desirable, attractive, unattainable normality. She had pale red hair, and blue eyes, and freckled white arms that stayed white in the summer; and this colour scheme had for years seemed to Clara to be the mark of beauty itself. Kathie had always managed to hit the very middle of everything; she was neither clever nor stupid, neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, and she always wore rather pretty versions of what everyone else was wearing, and read the comics that everyone else was reading, and played tennis with other people, and when she grew older she went to dances to which all other girls save Clara seemed to be invited. She was good-natured and sociable, and once she wrote in Clara’s autograph book, when autograph books were obligatory, ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’: from anyone else Clara would have taken this remark as an act of malice, but from Kathie it came to her as a mere happy lack of invention.

However, two children, and the passage of time, and marriage to Alan had managed to sour Kathie’s nature considerably, and Clara now found her both less attractive and less patient than herself. She had grown fatter; her bottom had spread, but she seemed unhappily
not to have acknowledged the fact, for she wore skirts of the same size as she had worn when a girl, and they did not fasten properly, and bulged and sagged in the wrong places. She no longer wore make-up, and her hair, though still frequently done at the hairdressers was now done in a style too old for her years, too formal, too rigorously waved and matronly. And her manner had taken on a scarcely concealed resentment and impatience. She had once treated both Clara and her mother with a kind of superior, assured, charitable kindness, but now she seemed to find their company hard to bear; she snapped at Mrs Maugham when Mrs Maugham tried to persuade her to have another potato with her fish for supper, and reminded Clara more than once that she had forgotten their eldest’s third birthday. She did not remind her directly, naturally; she merely repeated, from time to time, the recital of the miraculous way in which Uncle Arthur’s present had arrived all the way from Australia on the very day itself. Clara was depressed by such petulance, and wondered that she had not seen the signs of it before.

After supper, a coldly festive meal of salmon, boiled potatoes and wet lettuce, they went to sit in the sitting room. There was one settee and two matching armchairs; Mrs Maugham, as usual, took her chair, and Alan took another, so Clara was left to sit on the settee with Kathie. She hated the settee: she hated the feeling of contact, the jarring stirrings of the springs, the stifled, antagonistic closeness. Kathie smoked, constantly; her mother-in-law did not like her to smoke, and made much show of having no serviceable ash trays, and Kathie muttered audibly that there was no other amusement going, and nothing else to come for. Clara found herself thinking, for the first time, how much a drink would have helped; nobody in that house ever drank. After a few minutes she accepted one of Kathie’s cigarettes, though she did not like smoking; even an amusement she did not enjoy seemed momentarily better than no amusement at all. They drank tea, and made remarks, from time to time, about the children, and about the garden, and about Arthur’s letters, and about what colour Alan would have his house painted next spring. After a while all conversation died away, and when he had finished his second cup of tea Alan got up and put the television
on. The sheer noise was a solace; they gazed at it, all four of them, and their stiff efforts weakened and died, and they sat back in their chairs and relaxed. The programme was a variety show; they sat there and watched singers and dancers and comedians, escaping not from themselves but from each other, paying the programme no attention at all, but relieved by it of the necessity for choosing between silence or talk. Silence was too great, too evident an indictment, and talk too great an effort, so they watched the television, where in larger rooms, on bare and wider floors, people could move and shout and make jokes.

Clara thought of the Denhams, where conversation had flourished, where there seemed to be no end to current and interesting talk, no possibility of silence, so diverse and so rich were the possible permutations, the possible connections: in such a room as theirs, moreover, there could be and frequently were several conversations carried on at once. Talk is expensive. She thought of Phillipa Denham, Gabriel’s wife, sitting at one end of the settee (a settee so long and so sprung that it gave no sensation of indecent proximities) and holding on her knee a small, bright, silk-fringed cushion: she was pulling at the fringe, restlessly, all the evening, with long stained fingers, and she was irradiated from behind by some small gold local source of light.

At the Maughams’, all the light fell brightly in the small square bow-fronted room, from one central plastic-shaded bulb.

Clara’s next meeting with Gabriel took place upon neutral ground. She was delighted by this fact, for it seemed to add to his authenticity; she was also delighted by the evidence, thus innocently and without contrivance presented to him, of her possession of other friends. She had never managed to dispel the everyday threat and terror of contemptible solitude, and was beginning to see now that it would never be dispelled; she would never be able to take society lightly, and the frantic loneliness of Northam would never leave her. And in some way her acquaintance with Clelia had merely impressed upon her the slightness of all other contacts in her life; it had increased her hunger, as well as satisfying her needs. So she felt
curiously gratified to meet Gabriel at a party, at a third party’s party; she felt herself to be represented in a most satisfactory light. She at the same time felt the light to be unrepresentative, though this feeling was without foundation, for she went to many such parties, though she could never believe, as each one came, that she would be invited to another.

The party was in Swiss Cottage, and it was given by a boy whom Clara had known at college, in conjunction with his elder brother, and it took place about six weeks after her first encounter with Gabriel. When she first saw him, he was talking to a group of his contemporaries, but when he caught sight of her he abandoned his conversation and crossed the room to talk to her. He did not say much; he asked her how she was enjoying education, asked her how she liked her flat, asked her what she thought of Clelia’s gallery’s new exhibition, asked her, most idly, if Clelia still fancied Martin. Clara answered all these questions save the last, for Clelia’s affairs always seemed to be too subtle and delicate and
sui generis
to repay discussion, but she was flattered by the suggestion that she alone might know. He did not press his query, and shortly went away. But his very withdrawal seemed portentous. Clara looked around for his wife, but did not catch a glimpse of her until an hour or so later: she was dressed, as on her last appearance, in all the splendid, ephemeral glory of instant fashion and she looked more vain than gay.

She next saw him a week later, at his parents’. She had gone round there to spend the evening with Clelia; all the rest of the family were out, attending a function in South London of some bizarre and dutiful literary nature. Clara and Clelia boiled themselves some spaghetti for supper, and sat eating it in front of the fire; neither of them could cook, and the spaghetti was not quite done, but they did not mind. They talked about their experiences abroad; both had been resolute hitchhikers, and both had covered most of western Europe. Clara had once lived for a month in Spain on fifteen pounds, and Clelia had been attacked and indeed wounded in a ditch by a man with a knife, and both were proud of their adventures; and Clara thought that on such territory at least their past histories converged. She had to fight for those holidays, herself; they had not been offered to her, as
Clelia’s had been. But nevertheless, with the excuse of linguistic exploration, and the rigorous saving of and improving on State money, and the precedent offered by that first mild Easter trip, she had managed to convince both herself and her mother of the necessity for such excursions, and she had had them, as much as anyone, she had had them. From the moment of embarkation, each time, there had been nothing to differentiate her from other voyagers. Indeed, her French put that of the middle-aged, middle-class tourist to shame. Such, she reflected and said, was the Welfare State. And Clelia, agreeing, asked whether the alarmingly increased velocity of progress might not perhaps take its toll, some day: whether one person could achieve, in effect, the travelling of many generations. You think I’ll crack up, said Clara, you think they’ll win, you think I’ll go back: you can’t hold back, said Clelia, there is nowhere for you to go. Knowledge cannot be forgotten, no will power can forget knowledge. And then they talked about their affairs abroad, and of the utilitarian, experimental nature of such affairs, and Clelia put forward the view that nowadays girls go abroad for their sentimental education, having nowhere in England to find it, and Clara was just about to put forward her theory about herself, which was that she was incapable of enjoying herself with anyone who had any odour of a long-term, respectable prospect about him, when Gabriel walked in. And Clara’s first thought, upon seeing him, was that he had known she was there, for he did not seem surprised to see her: he could well have known it, for the evening had been arranged some days ago, and she knew that all the family were in daily contact; they would ring each other up constantly, all over the country, at vast expense. It seemed dangerous to assume that he might have wished to see her; it seemed to be a notion that verged on madness, as so many of her notions in the past had done, or if not upon madness, then upon some colossal, crazy, optimistic hope. And yet other hopes just as crazy had in the past been fulfilled, so why not this one? Perhaps he looked at everyone in such a way, but she could not believe it; or if he could, he was but the more remarkable.