The Mimic Men (3 page)

‘Poor Johnny-boy,’ Paul said.

‘Tell them, Paulo,’ Lieni said.

Paul made a face.

‘Go on, Paulo. Tell them about one tit this way and –’

The glum Maltese laughed.

‘I wenta one day to see Johnny-boy, you see,’ Paul said, picking up his accent. ‘They was sleeping. Ladyship was naked. That is all.’

‘Rubbish,’ Lieni said. ‘Go on, tell them.’

‘She wazza sleeping, you see. And she wazza naked. And – she hadda one titta thisaway and one titta thataway.’ He wrinkled up his nose and made the requisite face of disgust.

The fire had stupefied most of us. The young alcoholic mechanically passed around cigarettes. The Frenchman sat blank and quite still in the American army tunic he always wore in the boarding-house. Elsa and her husband went in and out of the kitchen. The Countess sat and smiled. I don’t know what Lieni was preparing for us; but she was determined that we should do nothing to spoil our appetites. She had no more stories for us; but whenever she came in, with yet another scuttle of coals, she stopped to make us sing or do dances or play a game. We did as she directed; we became hotter. At the end we were all hugging the damp walls.

The basement bell rang. Lieni ran out to the passage. We heard conversation. A male voice was subdued: we guessed it was her engineer. We waited for her to bring him in. He was shy and had little English, but the occasion was also partly his. We waited. We heard the bedroom door slam; we
heard it locked. There were footsteps in the passage; the basement door gently opened and gently closed; and there were footsteps outside climbing up, crushing the cinders and frozen snow like dry leaves. Lieni didn’t return.

Elsa told us what had happened. The engineer had brought his laundry; this was his custom. Once, on Lieni’s birthday, he had left a gift, a piece of jewellery, in the pocket of his white coat; and had said nothing. Now Lieni, seizing the laundry, went through the pockets of the coat. She came upon a letter. It was from the engineer’s home in India; he was married, with children. It might have been a deliberate act of brutality, or bravery; it might have been accidental. The engineer denied nothing; he made no attempt to defend himself or reassure Lieni. When Lieni locked herself in her bedroom, he simply took back his laundry and went away.

That was the end of the party. One by one and two by two the Maltese and the boarders left. Rudolfo went back to his restaurant. Johnny-boy was trying to revive his wife in the kitchen; he was succeeding; she was becoming obstreperous. Elsa and her husband were getting ready to catch their train back to the country. Lieni kept herself locked in her room, out of the chaos of which a few hours before she had arisen, the smart London girl. The Countess sat and looked. Paul, still in his apron, cleaned up and offered food.

I went to a dance at the British Council in Davies Street. I fell into a flirtatious, mock-witty conversation with an idle French girl. These conversations with French women always wearied me. Still, at the end, I prepared to do what was expected of me. I said, ‘Do you dance?’ She at once rose. It was then that out of nowhere the impulse of cruelty came to me. I said, ‘I don’t.’ And I left. I walked back across the park. Snow was sharp below my shoes; it astonished me to find that in spite of the cold I was thirsty.

I was in bed that night when I heard someone sobbing
outside my door. It was Lieni, red-eyed in the cold passage. I let her in. I sat on the edge of the bed and she sat on my lap. She was not a small woman and I thought beyond her unhappiness to her weight, to the pressure of her bone on my flesh. I had an idea where her tears were leading. But I was unwilling. I shook my cramped legs; she clung to my neck. I stood up and she glided down to the floor. She sat on the chair and cried, her big fingers beating softly on the padded arms of the chair. I told her to be silent; she sobbed more loudly. I asked her to leave. To my surprise, she got up and left without a word. I felt foolish and uncomfortable. She had once told me that Lieni was the Maltese for Helen, and had added: ‘Have you ever seen a Helen so fat?’ But she was not fat. I thought of the incidents of the day; they seemed so far away. I thought I would go to her. Down the dark stair-well; past the frozen musty smell of the ground floor, where were the public rooms nobody used; to the cooking and baby and scorched smells of the basement. A night-light was on in Lieni’s room, sufficient to show, through the frosted glass, the clothes hanging on her door. I tried the knob; the door opened. A chaos of weak light and deep shadow: clothes and paper and boxes, wash-basin and crib and sewing machine and wardrobe. Lieni was in her bed, fast asleep.

This was my first snow.

H
ow right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city that we pursue, in vain.

So quickly had London gone sour on me. The great city, centre of the world, in which, fleeing disorder, I had hoped to find the beginning of order. So much had been promised by the physical aspect. That marvel of light, soft, shadowless, always protective. They talk of the light of the tropics and Southern Spain. But there is no light like that of the temperate zone. It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects. To me, from the tropics, where night succeeded day abruptly, dusk was new and enchanting. I would sit in Lieni’s basement room, in the clutter, and study the light, not willing to risk losing any gradation in that change. Light was slowly withdrawn; a blueness remained, which deepened, so that before the electric lights began to make their effect the world seemed wholly aqueous, and we might have been at the
bottom of the ocean. Then at night the sky was low; you walked as though under a canopy; and all the city’s artificial lights, their glow seemingly trapped, burned intensely; and sometimes the wet streets threw up their own glitter.

Here was the city, the world. I waited for the flowering to come to me. The trams on the Embankment sparked blue. The river was edged and pierced with reflections of light, blue and red and yellow. Excitement! Its heart must have lain somewhere. But the god of the city was elusive. The tram was filled with individuals, each man returning to his own cell. The factories and warehouses, whose exterior lights decorated the river, were empty and fraudulent. I would play with famous names as I walked empty streets and stood on bridges. But the magic of names soon faded. Here was the river, here the bridge, there that famous building. But the god was veiled. My incantation of names remained unanswered. In the great city, so solid in its light, which gave colour even to unrendered concrete – to me as colourless as rotting wooden fences and new corrugated-iron roofs – in this solid city life was two-dimensional.

At the lecture halls there was the young English student who, out of his own insecurity, had attached himself to me, an outsider. Shrouded in his college scarf now, he was doomed to later nonentity; but I listened. His ambition ever changed. It was poetry one week. He had a thing, he said, which he did not expect me to understand, about Nature and the English countryside; I remember that ‘the green of grass not grown’ was one of his lines. It was philosophy the next week. ‘Tell me, do I
look
like a Christian? I do? Aha! That’s what they
all
think.’ And the week after that: ‘Look at me. Do you think I will become Prime Minister?’ He was like me: he needed the guidance of other men’s eyes.

From the lecture halls and canteen of the School to the boarding-house, where the Frenchman always typed, Lieni always chattered in her basement room, and Duminicu, also
from Malta, talked of escape. Duminicu was short and fat; he worked in a department store; he saved his money. Once a week he went to the cinema; the rest of the time he stayed in his room, stripped to vest and pants, reading newspapers and magazines and working out crosswords. He often had tinned meat or tinned fish for dinner, eating straight from the tin with a knife. He said that in Malta his family was of some standing, and he didn’t get on with Lieni, whom he considered his social inferior. He resented being bossed around by her in London. But he didn’t leave. His reaction to his humiliation was kleptomania. He stole incessantly from shops and stores, and always had some new trifle to show. He would say, ‘I am not like some people I could mention who would buy something for five shillings and then say that they paid five hundred shillings. I will be honest with you. I stole this.’

And from the boarding-house to the halls of the British Council. Trying out my French, finding myself committed to difficult light conversation, whose velleities I couldn’t always grasp, with a series of young girls and women, domestics who said perhaps with truth that they came of good families. Hilariously practising Norwegian crossed o’s with Norwegian girls and Swedish j’s with Swedes. All the preliminaries to the invitation to the cinema, the book-shaped room, the fumbling with clothes and breasts, the lips first averted, then offered, the intense expression of the young girl who prepares to be wooed.

In London I had no guide. There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies. It was up to me to choose my character, and I chose the character that was easiest and most attractive. I was the dandy, the extravagant colonial, indifferent to scholarship. In fact my income was small, and the allowance I had fixed for myself was half of this; I didn’t think I could be happy spending without earning. But I let it be known
that on my island my family were the bottlers of Coca-Cola. The fact impressed less than I had expected. But the respect with which I was treated by boys from the island – to whom the fact was significant – was a help, as was Lieni’s willingness to play the game. Lieni. I had no guide, I said; and so it seemed to me at the time. But there was Lieni in her basement. I saw her every day. I thought she accepted the character as a character and sought merely to heighten it. But she it was – it is so obvious now – who, by suggestion and flattery, created the character of the rich colonial. We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others. She pretended that I was richer than I said. She made me aware of my looks, to which up to then I had paid little attention, content with the knowledge that I was no monster. It was Lieni who told me that my eyes might disturb and that my dark, luxuriant and very soft hair might be a source of further disturbance. It was Lieni who led me through the stores and chose my clothes, and suggested the red cummerbund. Her background was the war, whose glamour, fading as the peace dragged on, was more and more concentrated in her memory of an affair with an Indian officer in Italy. This was how she explained her interest in me. It was disquieting, yet at the same time oddly flattering, to be cherished as a substitute; and it imposed no obligation. I became her apt pupil.

It became a pleasure to get ready for an evening at the British Council, and with arms loosely held aloft to spin into my cummerbund. I exaggerated the dancer’s movements if I had an audience – some poor scholar from my island, for instance, who, seeking company, had brought me his complaints, and whom my frivolity, I could see, was reducing to despair. It was Lieni who told me that I ought to spend the extra half-crown two or three times a week to arrive at the School in a taxi, having travelled by public transport the better part of the way. It was Lieni who dressed me, approved
of me, and sent me out to conquer. I delighted in my act, and the boys of my island of Isabella, I was glad to see, with their feeling for the stylish, their tolerance of what they felt to be absurd, which, however, if well carried off, they were prepared to admire, the boys of Isabella approved of me. I exaggerated the role they admired. ‘My dear fellow,’ I said to a young man, wrapped in a college scarf, whom I met as he was coming out of a teashop, one of a popular chain, ‘my dear fellow, never, never, never let me see you coming out of those doors again. And remember that the sole purpose of your college scarf is to shine your shoes.’ This is not of course how it occurs in my memory; I was probably no more than flippantly reproving. I give the story as it circulated in Isabella some years later, when I had gained a little local celebrity. And I must confess I was pleased then that the character Lieni created had in its own small way become a legend.

But Lieni, with the woman’s limited view of the world, had sent me out to conquer. She wished to share or at any rate witness my conquests; she expected me to bring back women to her boarding-house. And because she expected me to do so, I did. It was not hard. In the halls of the British Council there were always women to be picked up. Those halls could be disagreeable, with acrid-accented Africans in stiff white collars and gold-rimmed glasses nursing racial grievance like a virtue and righteously seeking sexual reward from the innocent. But I preferred the halls of the British Council to the halls of the School. I could not separate those earnest scholarship girls from their families, from the bitterness and mean ambitions that had been passed on to them; I knew their language too well. It suited me better to have a relationship with someone whose language I couldn’t speak. From the halls of the British Council I wandered off on occasion to the art galleries. I thought that with their vast intercommunicating rooms, their excuse for movement
backwards, forwards and sideways, any number of times, they provided the perfect hunting ground. It grieved me to find out that I was not the first to have seen the possibilities. But the excursion trains to provincial centres of culture were, I flatter myself, a discovery wholly original.

To the town of Oxford, for instance, there used to run in those days a Wednesday excursion train. It left Paddington station at a quarter to twelve; it arrived at Oxford at three minutes to one; the return fare was seven shillings and sixpence. The Continental girls were easy to pick out. As I remember, in the late forties these girls went in for very pale, bloodless colours; they wore flat-heeled tan shoes and their macintoshes were nearly always of a fawn colour. I would try to choose my compartment sensibly; but in the end I always surrendered to instinct and luck; in these matters they are as good a guide as any. I would not attempt any conversation immediately. I would wait until the ticket collector came round. The excursion ticket was, suitably, fawn-coloured, contrasting with the regular ticket, which was green. If the girl proffered a fawn ticket I would put her down as a tourist like myself. I had taken care to provide myself with magazines, notably
Punch,
published as it still is on a Wednesday.
Punch,
then, I might offer; it would always be accepted. The way was then open for that type of conversation at which I was becoming adept. The slow French; the question about the Norwegian crossed o or the Swedish j; followed by the suggestion that we might do our exploring of the cultural centre together. At any one of three or four stages the encounter might have been rendered futile. But when one is in vein, as the French say, when dedication and commitment are total, mistake is rare. Will I be believed if I say that on four successive Wednesdays I made lucky strikes on the Oxford train? A Norwegian – what a country, Norway, its reputation in this respect dimmed by the somewhat inflated reputation of its vulgar
neighbour Sweden; a French girl and a French woman; and a German Swiss. After the disturbance of this last adventure I transferred my attentions elsewhere.