The Mimic Men (7 page)

Language is so important. Up to this time my relationships had been with women who knew little English and of whose language I frequently knew nothing. These affairs had been conducted in a type of pidgin; they were a strain; I could never assess the degree of complication we had arrived at after the sexual simplicities. Once this had been glamorous and had suited me; now it was like entering an imperfect world, some grotesque tunnel of love, where, as in a dream, at a critical moment one is denied the use of arms or legs and longs to cry out. With Sandra there was no such frustration; the mere fact of communication was a delight; to this extent I had changed. And for all the recurring checks that occurred in my rooms, our relationship developed. It was with surprise that I discovered that, though of the city, her position in it was like my own. She had no community, no group, and had rejected her family. She saw herself alone in the world and was determined to fight her way up. She hated the common – her own word – from which she nevertheless freely acknowledged herself to have sprung and about which she therefore claimed to speak with authority; no one knew ‘them’ as well as she. To the end she had a cruel eye for the common, and she passed on to me the word and the assessing skill. No family, two or three school friends, now scattered: it was easy to see how she felt imprisoned and fearful and how important it was to her to be free of the danger of that commonness which encircled her. The king’s mistress! I saw the magnitude of her ambition and the matching difficulties of her struggle, and sympathized, not yet knowing the part I would soon be called upon to play in their resolution.

The war had also left its mark. No one was more sensitive to anything that savoured of the luxurious; no one had a greater capacity for creating occasions. A bottle of wine was an occasion, a meal in a restaurant, a seat in the dress circle. She took nothing for granted. Was I exploited? I never
misunderstood her interest; but no one offered himself more readily. She was rapacious. It was in her social ambitions, in her diligent reading of approved contemporary authors and her pursuit of culture, for which at home she willingly – perhaps even gratuitously – carried the cross of being considered odd; it was in her walk, in the bite of her speech, even in the way she ate food which she considered expensive; in all these things, not least in the adoration of her body, there was a consuming self-love. But how could I resist her quick delight? Her very rapaciousness attracted me. To me, drifting about the big city that had reduced me to futility, she was all that was positive. She showed how much could be extracted so easily from the city; she showed how easy occasions were. Her delight strengthened me; often, in public, I pretended to be seeing her for the first time: those close-set, myopic, impatient eyes, that jutting lower lip. In those days in London, when a decision had to be made every morning to dress, to go through the day, when on numberless nights I could go to sleep only with the consoling thought of the Luger at my head or the thought of retreat on the following day, the degree and the School abandoned, in those days at the darkest moments I was strengthened by the thought of Sandra. I would say, ‘I am seeing her tomorrow. Let me delay decision and last until then.’ And the day would come; and we would create, out of the drabness that surrounded us both, an occasion. It was the perfect basis for a relationship.

She was at her lowest that afternoon as we walked down into the basement canteen for tea, her grubby macintosh belted around her waist. The last few weeks at home had been difficult; she had had to put up with a good deal of mockery. She had failed a qualifying examination for the second time. That was the end of her government grant, the end of the School. No degree for her now; no escape by that route. And as we sat in the low, airless basement she out-lined
a life so destitute of glamour or point, a life which now, with the failed examination, neither imprecise ambition nor the pursuit of culture could enhance, that my own disturbance was sharpened. She reflected my own mood exactly. Her despair worked on me; we acted and reacted on one another, there in the canteen of a radio service which, when picked up in remote countries, was the very voice of metropolitan authority and romance, bringing to mind images, from the cinema and magazines, of canyons of concrete, brick and glass, motorcars in streams, lines of lights, busyness, crowded theatre foyers, the world where everything was possible; there now, at the heart of that metropolis, we sat, at a plastic-topped table, before thick cups of cooling tea and plates with yellow crumbs, each drawing out the frenzy from the other. What awaited her? The secretarial course, the librarian’s course, the common employer. She went on, railing at her society, bitter at her lack of protection and patrons within it. A job in the bank; the typing pool; the Woolworth’s counter. She was working herself up to a pitch of hysteria. Tears of anger came to her eyes. Then suddenly, fixing those moist eyes on me, she said, almost ordered, with a look of total hatred: ‘Why don’t you propose, you
fool?’

I have gone over this moment more than once in my mind; I do not think my recollection of it is wrong. The tone of Sandra’s request, so odd considering its nature, seems to me to have come from a number of causes. The idea, I feel, had occurred to her on the spur of the moment, the one clear flash in dark panic; she was impatient with herself for not having thought of it before, impatient because she wished to see it instantly realized; and impatient because she had broken down and shown weakness. And I suppose that if the idea had been put to me as a plea rather than as an order, if there had been the slightest suggestion that it issued from uncertainty rather than firmness and lucidity, I might
have reacted otherwise. But, and always my mood must be borne in mind, I had such confidence in her rapaciousness, such confidence in her as someone who could come to no harm – a superstitious reliance on her, which was part of the strength I drew from her – that in that moment it seemed to me that to attach myself to her was to acquire that protection which she offered, to share some of her quality of being marked, a quality which once was mine but which I had lost. So I did as she asked; and even added, strange to think of it now, an apology for not having done so before. Her anger vanished; just for an instant she looked a little abashed and apprehensive. We sat silent in the clattering canteen. And it was a second or two before, for the first time since our talk had begun, I thought of her painted breasts.

There were moments of stillness and awe later, of course. But Sandra gave me little time. Just two days later she moved in with me, to the delight of old Mrs Ellis, my landlady, whom by a display of exaggerated manners I had completely under my thumb. To Mrs Ellis, I discovered, Sandra had represented us as already married; and to Mrs Ellis, as to many others later, this marriage contained the elements of dark and stirring romance. Some little concern for my sake Mrs Ellis showed, however; she expressed the hope, with tears in her eyes, as she gave me a china dog, her wedding present, that I had made the right choice. The words struck me as odd in the circumstances. Sandra, on the other hand, spoke of the difficulties with her father, who argued like a crab; and for an instant, if only she knew, I was totally on his side. Apparently he too had been told that we were already married. I objected, but not as forthrightly as I might have done, contenting myself with wondering why, since nothing had happened as yet, she had told him anything at all. Even at that late stage I was still trying, feebly, to play for time. She said, ‘I haven’t got the patience either
to give him a blow-by-blow account or to lie to him.’ This won me back; she had the gift of the phrase. She said that we would soon ‘regularize the position’ so far as Mrs Ellis was concerned. This was another aspect of her speech. She spoke of workmen as ‘operatives’; she often linked unconnected sentences with ‘with the net result that …’; my two-roomed flat became our ‘establishment’, for which there had to be ‘catering’. Perhaps it was the influence of the School.

So now, in the shiny brown wardrobe in my bedroom, there appeared the grubby macintosh; and on satiny pink and blue hangers the dresses and blouses of soft cool colours which once it had taken away my breath to behold. The moment seemed to me profoundly tragic. Sandra, recognizing my mood, offered me her painted breasts later that evening. Where before she had been endlessly passive, accepting all strokings and kissings as part of a rightful homage, now she made an effort to take the lead. She laid me on my back and pressed her breasts on my chest, my belly, my groin. She hung over me and, holding her breasts, traced lines on me with her nipples; she brushed her breasts over me, and skin felt tickling smooth. In all this there was a good deal of determination and dutifulness; I was grateful, nonetheless. She also did certain things which puzzled me. She painted my own nipples; then she bit them, really hard; then she held them with her nails as though they were things to be severed. Even through the pain-killing passion, I regret to say: my first concern afterwards to see whether she had in fact wounded me and to check that what looked like lipstick was not really blood – even through this I thought I could sense the experimental, assessing nature of these attentions and I put them down to some too hastily consulted handbook of sex, as I had once attributed all her
mots
to Bernard Shaw. I wished neither to hurt her pride nor to turn her away from these studies. Accordingly I assumed
naturalness and behaved as one to whom these attentions were not novel. I suppressed the urge to cry out and slap her hand away. Eventually – for me it was a matter of urgency, as will be understood – we achieved success of a sort. She appeared tired but pleased.

It has since occurred to me that the art of physical love is in the keeping of women, and depends to a considerable extent on the position of women in society. As this position improves, so the art of love declines. Woman becomes neither server nor served; and with this emancipation prudery, the fear of the erotic, the fear of fear, has to be restated. The absurd view is promoted that sex is neither vice nor mystery. So we arrive at slot-machine or peasant sex; and the praise of profane love gives way to the farmyard lyricism about pregnancies and lyings-in. But enough of this. It was my intention to say no more than that, in this matter of sex, Sandra and myself were well matched; and to register my wonder at the frequency with which, in our imperfect world, through every type of accident and arbitrary decision, like noses out like.

We were married at the Willesden registry office. We travelled there on a number eight bus with our two witnesses, fellow students. The details of the absurd ceremony are too well known to be recounted here. The registrar, I remember, was concerned about Sandra. He warned her that in certain countries women could be divorced just like that; with his own hand he wrote out the address of an association which offered information and protection to British women overseas. To me he offered neither advice nor consolation – his manner, in fact, was one of controlled reproof; and in that largish room, full of empty folding chairs, the awful deed was done. Now I was truly appalled. I wished to get away at once, to reflect, to be alone again. But I was detained by one of our witnesses: the poet, philosopher, politician, now, as I suspected, sunk without trace in the society he was
so mad to master, and even then, with his tweed jacket and the beard he was beginning to grow, getting near to the schoolmaster he has no doubt become. ‘Well done, old boy. I say, I know it’s a hard thing to put to a chap on his wedding day. But you couldn’t advance me a fiver?’ I thought that both his language and the sum he had mentioned had come to him from a literary source and that both exceeded his requirements. I gave him ten shillings. I cut short his delighted acknowledgments and, telling Sandra in a garbled, wild way that I had something to do in the centre, ran after a number eight bus, caught it and allowed myself to be taken in a state of near stupefaction to Holborn where, habit reasserting itself, I got off and went into a public house, already, though only a husband of some minutes, feeling like the cartoon man who knows that the storm will presently break over his head for some dereliction of marital duty.

The dark romance of a mixed marriage I Think of me sitting in the Holborn bar, drinking Guinness for strength, holding an evening paper for the ordinariness it suggested – cheatingly, the greyhound edition, it being too early for the others – and being really very frightened. So at the time I thought of myself. I stood away from the pensive figure and considered him and his recent, terrible adventure.
Quantum mutatus ab illo!
The words ran through my head until they were meaningless, until they became the emotion of loss and sadness and sweetness and apprehension. So nemesis came to the dandy, the creation of London, the haunter of British Council halls, art galleries and excursion trains.
Quantum mutatus ab illo!

I have spoken of the mood of celebration with which I left London and which for the next ten years I sought to maintain, never ceasing to savour each day the pleasure of the
whole mind. I have also hinted at the uneasiness with which on the morning of arrival I saw through each porthole the blue, green and gold of the tropical island. So pure and fresh! And I knew it to be, horribly, man-made; to be exhausted, fraudulent, cruel and, above all, not mine. Yet I pretended that it was, and stood against the rail with the camera-clicking visitors who threw pennies into the clear water and watched the Negro boys dive for them, the pink soles of their feet like luminous fins. The boys also dived for oranges, apples, anything thrown into the water. The grey-green bay was still and in shadow; far away, in the early morning haze, fishing boats were going tinily about their tasks. Below us the diving boys rocked on their rafts; they giggled and laughed, all teeth; water glinted in beads on their seemingly dry heads; they invited us to throw more things for them to retrieve. Someone threw a rotten orange; the boys dived. It struck me as intolerable; it was one of the things I had stopped later. Not for long, needless to say. Distress can be shared only up to a point; to go beyond that point is to presume. In the recent tourist publicity for Isabella I see that the diving boys are again presented as a feature.