Jerusalem the Golden (2 page)

Peter, unlike Clara, had the advantage of being upon home ground, for he himself wrote poetry, and he also claimed the honour of being acquainted with Samuel Wisden. It was this acquaintance that had drawn him to take Clara to the poetry reading in the first place; he liked the idea of appearing by her side as an intimate of published writers. And he knew that Clara, unlike some of his other girls, was susceptible to such impressions, and that she would be suitably affected by his claims to a foothold in the poetic world. And she had been impressed: she had even gone so far as to look up some of Samuel Wisden’s works before attending the reading. They were shy, lyrical, lower-middle-class pieces about young men in cheap suits in parks and on railway stations; she had pictured some plain and sensitive man, given to riding bicycles, and was agreeably surprised when she found that a motorbike was more the image that he evoked, for he was flamboyant, leather-jacketed, and he had a fancy hair cut. She liked such floutings of expectation. Eric Harley, whose poems were highly sophisticated, obscure and ambitious, turned out to look far more like the Samuel Wisden of her imagination; he had an accent which she recognized as northern, though well overlaid by American, and he was wearing a very old suit. Margarita Cassell, the only one whose fame had filtered through to the regions where Clara lived, looked just as a poetic actress ought to look; she was middle aged and beautiful, flippant and intense, strident and informal. Her dress was of pale shining embroidered silk, and she read with great emotion, and when Peter said, finally, in Clara’s ear, that she was not good, Clara knew that she had known it, for how could
anything so pleasant be good; and yet she was nevertheless grateful, for such colourful badness, for the drab empty stage, with its bleak abstract backcloth, and its ill-rehearsed lighting changes, demanded such relief.

Of the four performers, Sebastian Denham was the only one to exude real authenticity. He was, for one thing, the oldest; the programme said that he was in his early fifties. He was also the most famous, though Clara could not have known this had she not looked him up in various works of reference, because before she had been invited to the poetry reading she had not so much as heard of him. As she looked through the list of his published works in the library catalogue, and read the comments on him in the Penguin Guides, and inspected his career in the programme notes, she felt ashamed that someone of such evident distinction could have eluded her consciousness so entirely. His reputation was clearly as firm as a rock; adjectives such as ‘classic’ and ‘masterly’ abounded in the vicinity of his name. And when she stopped to consider that she could name, offhand, no living English poets other than T. S. Eliot and Robert Graves (and was not Eliot dead?) she had to concede that there was room in the literary world for other fixed stars. She noted that he was the only poet (apart from Miss Cassell, whose virtues were non-poetic) to be represented on other evenings of the national Poetry Week, and that he had top billing. His very appearance was a kind of guarantee, because if he was not a real poet, in such a place, he was nothing, for he clearly had not been selected on decorative grounds like the embroidered Margarita. He was not ugly: he was dull. No ulterior motives, no ephemeral yearnings, nothing more than the gift itself could have placed him there, upon that wooden platform. He wore a suit and glasses, and the programme said that he was a lawyer in his non-creative life. He looked so unlike a poet that Clara felt that he could be nothing else, that he was unmistakably the real thing, and she found in his solid, impassive cultured countenance a guarantee of worth. His poetry she could not understand. It was about subjects of which she knew nothing, and the scansion of it was regular, and it rhymed. She could not have said more about it, and luckily nobody asked her to do so.

And when she came face to face with Mr Denham, in the large and shabby dressing room, she found it surprisingly simple to shake his hand and to say that she had so much enjoyed the evening. He replied, unremarkably, that he was glad; clearly he expected and hoped for no more original a salutation. He stood quietly, with his back to the wide dusty mirror, smiling affably, mild, adult, dissociated. Margarita Cassell, on the other hand, though her age might have equalled his, seemed genuinely anxious for opinions: when Samuel Wisden introduced Peter and Clara to her, and when she had made polite inquiries about Peter’s mother, with whom she had once been at school, she turned about the subject of the past evening with an eager greed. ‘Well then, what
about
it?’ she said to them, and the rest of the assembled company. ‘Whatever did you think of it? Was there anybody
there
? I just kept my eyes shut and didn’t look, I was so afraid there wasn’t going to be
anybody
there at all.’

‘Of course there were people there,’ said Samuel Wisden. ‘There are always people at these things. God knows why they go to them, but they do. The poetry lovers of England, you know.’

‘It was quite a good house, actually,’ said Peter. ‘The front stalls were a bit thin, but the rest was almost full.’

Clara listened to this and to the ensuing discussion with pleasure: she liked to hear people use phrases like ‘quite a good house’. She knew them all, all the right phrases, but some deeply excluded modesty prevented her from using them. And she liked the way they talked about poetry and about poetry readings, and audiences, and whether people understood it or not, and whether people liked it or not, and whether people who went to poetry readings liked whatever they heard anyway, simply because they were the kind of people who liked going to poetry readings and hearing poetry: and she could tell from the tone and the pattern of the talk that everyone there had expressed similar views in similar conversations a dozen times before, but was nonetheless ready to express them yet once more, for all that: and it was this sense of trivial, gossipy familiarity and repetition that most pleased her, for it convinced her that she was listening to real professionals. Even Peter, who could be intense and zealous enough when on his own, was managing to affect a
finely nonchalant contempt about the problems of communication; she liked the cosy way they all seemed to assume that the evening was a wash-out, inevitably, and that the whole job of writing and reading poetry was somehow fundamentally ill-conceived. And yet, at the same time, they wanted to think they had done it well. The mixture of general cynicism and personal vanity was peculiarly appealing; Margarita at one point, perched most delicately and leggily upon Sebastian Denham’s dressing table, said, ‘Of course the
most
depressing thing is the way they all grow instantly silent for the
worst
possible poems, like that one I did of Reggie’s, and no offence to poor darling Reggie, but it really is
nothing
but a bit of sophisticated
jingle
, and yet it always goes down marvellously at readings, haven’t you noticed?’ Clara, who was often depressed by her own observations, found herself merely enchanted by such emphatic indulgent transparency.

And while they talked, Clara found time to watch, and to check up on who was there. Apart from herself and Peter and the four performers, there was a man from the BBC called Lionel, who was connected in some way with the show – director, she thought, or producer, or possibly both. There was another man whose name she had not caught, but who might have been Margarita Cassell’s husband. There was also an astonishingly pretty boy, who was quite clearly an actor; she worked this out for herself and felt clever, and then reflected that in the circumstances the deduction was not truly brilliant. He too seemed to be connected with Margarita Cassell. He was so pretty that Clara could hardly take her eyes off him, although it would clearly have been more profitable to pay her attentions to Samuel Wisden, who was handsome enough, without being excessively, exclusively so. And then there was Sebastian Denham’s daughter. In view of all the other men in the room, Clara paid no attention at all to Sebastian Denham’s daughter, apart from wondering whether she had heard her name aright, for she seemed to be called Clelia: the name, at first hearing, was so uncannily like Clara that Clara dispensed with the notion that she might have misheard the initial consonant, and that the girl might be supposed to be called Dahlia. Clelia was a name with which she had no acquaintance. She
did not think it likely that she would ever need to use it, so she was not unduly uneasy about her ignorance.

On the other hand, as time wore on, she did begin to feel mildly uneasy about her claims to existence in that dressing room. She wondered, in short, if she and Peter ought to go. Nobody else seemed to be going, and Peter’s friendship with his poet seemed to be, fortunately, at least as intimate as he had claimed, but she did feel that they ought not to spend the evening there. She wondered if anyone might want to put the room to its true purpose, and undress in it. She did not see why anyone should want to undress, as everyone was quite respectably clothed; nobody was wearing anything outlandish and embarrassing, like a dinner jacket. The only person who might have been thought to be uncomfortably or unsuitably dressed was Miss Cassell, whose dress was even more amazing off stage than on, but then it was not even her dressing room; her dressing room was next door. Moreover, she showed no inclination to change her dress; she clearly enjoyed its extravagance, and leaned right forward from time to time to make sure that no one missed the magnificence of her bosom. And Clara, whenever she managed to wrench her gaze away from the beautiful young man, found it resting itself inevitably upon those two tight pale mounds, and the deep powdery yawning cave between them. She had never before seen such a dress upon anyone with a right to wear one, and the combination of natural and unnatural gifts was quite startling; she suddenly saw what all those other women had been aiming at in their strapless gowns and their deep cleavages with their large chests and their thin collar bones. And she understood the other women, because it was an effect worth taking a few risks for.

She did not want to go. She wanted to stay there, and hear them talk about poetry and money, and about how Eric Harley got more for being on ‘The Spoken Word’ series on ITV than he’d made out of a year’s writing. After a few minutes, somebody suggested opening a bottle of champagne, and then somebody else said that it might be better to go down to the pub before closing time, and she hoped that they would go to the pub, because she did not feel that she could stay and drink their champagne, even if it was offered to her.
Although it would have been nice to have been obliged to drink a glass of champagne in a dressing room. She could not recollect that she had ever tasted champagne, and she liked the thought of its spiritual flavour. However, as so often happened, the gathering, threatened with action, started to show signs of breaking up; Margarita Cassell said that she had to go to the pub anyway as she had to meet a friend there, Eric Harley also claimed a friend in the pub, and the Lionel man said he had to go home, and put on his coat and went. Then Clelia Denham, who had hitherto spoken not a word, rose to her feet and said, ‘I’ll be off too.’ Clara began to feel slightly alarmed, not because she had any interest in Clelia, but because she did not like this desertion of the evening and she was afraid that if enough people went Peter would decide to go too. She thought she could rely on Samuel’s inclinations, but then on the other hand he might have other fish to fry. So she was quite relieved when Clelia’s father said, ‘Don’t go, Clelia, come and have a drink. I’ll give you a lift home if you hang on for half an hour. And I promised to have a word with Maurice. Not more than half an hour.’

Clelia looked at her watch. She appeared to be slightly, very slightly annoyed. ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you down there.’ And she went.

Clara was also relieved by the universal assumption that there was only one pub to be visited; she had always had a horror of ending up, by some misunderstanding, in the wrong and empty and unfashionable place. She could not quite see why the pub, relentlessly nameless, should be so clearly recognized by everyone there as an obvious destination, as she had not yet grasped the principle that nearly every theatre has its own pub. There was no reason why she should have grasped it. She had no experience of such things. But when she and Peter and Samuel and Eric made their way down the wooden, broken staircase, and through the dark warren of small rooms full of light switches, and out through the stage door, she could see that it would have been difficult to miss the correct pub. Because it was part of the theatre: the other half of the theatre. And it was full of the theatre audience, and the stage management, and of unmistakable actors and actresses; even the Lionel man, who had
departed so resolutely, was there having a quick whisky. And Clelia was there, leaning on the bar, snapping her fingers at the barman. She ordered herself a drink. Clara was impressed; she had never in her life dared to buy herself a drink. Somewhere, in the depths of her heart, she feared that if she were to ask a man in a public house for a gin and tonic, he would spit in her eye or call the police or laugh at her or rape her on the spot. She could not overcome this fear, and it was too shameful to confess. She did not mind drinking, and accepted Samuel Wisden’s offer of a drink with pleasure, but she looked at Clelia Denham’s back with initial stirrings of respect.

Eric’s friend, after a few moments, turned up; he was a high-powered school teacher, and he provoked a new and somewhat repetitive discussion of the poetry reading. Clara listened, but she spent more of her time watching. She noted, with satisfaction, the lovely entrance of Margarita Cassell, who arrived with one arm through her husband’s and the other through the arm of the pretty young man; in the sombre Victorian gloom her dress and her wide cold neck shone with a pale and striking colour. And her voice preceded her and welled out from her, deep and vibrant and delightful: an instrument of sound rather than of communication. She and her entourage established themselves within speaking distance of Samuel’s group; they talked, and from time to time a remark was flung across the gap between the two parties. Clara could not help noticing that although Margarita relinquished her husband’s arm fairly promptly (as soon, in fact, as he had been dispatched to order drinks) she instantly took hold of the boy’s hand, and kept a firm though flippant grasp upon it, almost as though she did not dare to let him roam loose upon the pub floor. Clara found this sight cheering, disturbing, and exciting. She wondered if in such circles such an act meant something or nothing, and then concluded that nothing, anywhere, in any circle, meant nothing.