refusals. That will do for now.
When I returned to my desk after dinner, these evenings at Tonbridge Hall, my foot would ruck up the cotton rug on the polished floor, and I would imagine sliding lightly on my back across the room and through the wall, floating out, weightless, over Bloomsbury. Some evenings I took a spoonful or two of soup, made my apologies, pulled on my coat and sped out again into the autumn evening, and I see myself now as if – FLASH – an inner camera has caught me forever, hand flung up before a white face,
In Drury Lane, in the Aldwych, the theatres were opening their doors; in Houghton Street, a hot little cafe steamed its fumes over the pavement. I would run up the steps, into my place of work, my palace of wonders; the half-deserted building came with its echo, its ever-burning strip lights, its tar-smell of typewriter ribbons and smoke; in the mazes and catacombs you could sniff out your meeting, guided by your nose towards the dusty scent of composite resolutions, sub-sections and sub-clauses, stacking chairs, tobacco: the reek of Afghan coats and flying jackets, the vaporous traces left in the air they inhabit by weak heads and fainter hearts.
I do not remember that political philosophy was ever discussed, or political issues: only organization, personalities, how the Labour student movement should be run. In Paris, the ashes of the
It was men who spoke; not young and fresh ones, but crease-browed and leather-jacketed elders, men with bad teeth from obscure post-graduate specialities. They would shuffle or lurch to their feet; then would come nose- rubbing, throat-clearing; then their voices would rumble just audibly, like spent thunder in a distant valley. Some would speak slumped in their seats, eyes fixed on the ceiling, ash dripping from a cigarette. Their manner was weary, as if they knew everything and had seen everything, and they paused often, perhaps in the middle of a phrase, to blow their noses or make a snickering sound that must have been laughter. Their remarks reached no conclusion; at a certain point, they would become slower, more sporadic, and finally peter out. Then another would draw attention to himself, with the bare flutter of an agenda in the stale air: and grunting, shrugging, turning down his mouth, begin in the middle of a sentence . . . Dave and Mike and Phil were their names, Phil and Dave and Mike. Young women carried them drinks from the vending-machine, black coffee’s frail white shell hardly dented by their light fingertips.
I would put my head in my hands, sometimes, for even I must yawn; I would with delicacy track my fingertips back through my inch of hair, and say to myself, am I, can I be, she who so lately at the Holy Redeemer wore an air of purpose and expectation, and a prefect’s deep blue gown? So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this? Were these meetings as aimless as they appeared, or was I too untutored to see the importance of what was going on, or was I, in some deeper way, missing the point? Yes: that must be it.
As the clock ticked away, a fantasy would creep up and possess me: that if you could stay on and on – if you could stay at the meeting till midnight or the hour beyond – then the masks would slip, the falsity be laid aside, the real business would begin. For it seemed to me that my fellow socialists were talking in code, a code designed perhaps to freeze out strangers and weed out the dilettante. Only the pure of heart were welcome here. They must submit to a new version of the medieval ordeal: instead of poison, water, fire, a Trial by Pointlessness. Once you had passed it – once you had endured the full rigours of a full debate on a revitalized constitution for a revitalized Labour students’ movement – then, in the hour after midnight, the chatter would cease – glances be exchanged – the talk begin, hesitant at first, half-smiling, people near-apologetic about their passions and their expertise, quoting Engels, Nye Bevan, Daniel Cohn-Bendit; we would exchange our intuitions and half-perceptions, pass on our visions and dreams, each vision and each dream justified by some reference, recondite or popular. Comrades would say, ‘This is what makes me a socialist . . .’ and speak from the heart; perhaps someone would mention Lenin, and wages councils, and coal-miners, and the withering away of the state. Dawn would break: gentle humming of the Red Flag.
But in real life, nothing like this occurred at all. By ten-thirty the men would be looking at their watches, drifting and grumbling towards the union bar. I would hover a little, in the corners of rooms, on the edges of groups, hoping that someone would turn to me and begin a real conversation, one I could join in. Stacking chairs squeaked on a dirty floor, the women of the socialists stooped to haul up their fringed and scruffy shoulder bags; in the bar the women stood in a huddle, excluded by the ramparts of turned shoulders, with tepid glasses of pineapple juice clenched in bony white hands. Their eyes avoided mine; they smoked, and muttered to each other in code.
Disillusioned, I would trail back up Drury Lane. The theatres would have turned out already, and the stage doors would be barred. An empty Malteser box bowling towards the Thames would bear witness to the evening passed. My eyes would be heavy and stinging with cigarette smoke and lack of sleep. Behind my ribs was a weight of disappointment. Still the lines ran through my head, distressing, irrelevent: Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? / Is this mine own countree? The irresponsive silence of the land, / The irresponsive sounding of the sea.
‘Why, why,’ Julianne said, ‘if you were going to have your hair cut, did you have it so stubbled?’
‘To last me,’ I said. ‘Till Christmas.’
‘Did you think there were no hairdressers in London?’
‘I thought they might be expensive.’
‘You really shouldn’t be so poor, should you?’ Julianne said.
Each morning she flicked her white coat from its hanger, in case they were taken on the wards; her eyes large, soft, alert. She told some Sophies that I had run away from a convent, where my hair had been chopped off; she told others that I was a victim of the IRA, shorn for collaboration after a romance with a squaddie. ‘Caught in the Falls Road,’ she said, ‘her pantyhose around her ankles; her poor mother, if she were dead, would be turning in her grave.’
Pretending to be Irish was a great diversion for Julianne. Lancashire, Ireland, it’s all the same to girls called Sophy.
Sophies liked to be engaged to be married by the end of their final year. At breakfast they showed each other their solitaire diamonds. Facets winked as they passed them across the Thursday rasher and the side-plate of baked beans: exchanging them so that they could feel the fatness or looseness of a finger-joint, try on another future.
Claire and Sue, the churchgoers, lived next door to us in C2. ‘Come in for a coffee,’ Sue would say, fluttering, as we leapt upstairs after dinner: I’d say sorry, got to work, and Julianne would growl, ‘They want our souls.’
In C4 was Sophy, the original Sophy: a strapping girl who took fencing lessons, whose big feet lightly danced through Julianne’s dream-life as she pranced down the corridor each morning towards her breakfast. Sophy was straight-backed and sound in wind and limb, a girl with large pale eyes and a heavy drift of crimped, dirty-blonde hair; by the side of her mouth there was a mole, flat, definite, a beauty-spot. She looked as if she could stare down a persistent man and bend a useful one to her will. Sometimes she stalked the corridors in her tunic and breeches, with her mesh head tucked beneath her arm; then up in the four-person lift would come Roger, her boyfriend.
