Well Done God! Read online

  Keeping my eyes to the ground occasionally has unlooked-for advantages : once I saw a great arrow in yellow chalk on the pavement and the words TO THE MAD LADY. It was for my embellishment I felt this mark had been made, a skeleton for me to flesh, and what I loosely term my mind was not content until I had searched through my pockets and found the small piece of (coincidentally) yellow chalk I had put there (sentimentally) on my last day as a teacher and had added to the original arrow enough others to make the design into a circle, a fistful, of arrows, pointing as near as the limitations of the medium would permit to all three hundred and sixty degrees of direction. If I had not grown bored I would have found some means of further extending this comment into a third dimension. But I left it there. I felt that, symbolically at least, I had done more than enough to make my point.

  Such things serve to keep my mind off the sea (it is the punishment once favoured by certain islanders that has estranged me from it : placing the condemned at low tide on a rock which is covered at high tide) at least until I reach the café on the edge of the brothel quarter which is my immediate destination. I have several times remarked in other cities that the richer quarter borders upon the brothel quarter, but have avoided the obvious conclusion since on further thought I have failed to think of some other quarters which I could consider metaphorically wholesome. The insufferable suburbs and the mediocre classes. But I think I have put all that behind me now.

  The café that I regularly choose to visit every other Friday is only just in the brothel quarter, being on the appropriate side of the street forming the dividing line. But it is an important difference. Here, in any case, I sit and drink (coffee) and read. I read all the morning newspapers at this time, between about four and perhaps eight. I feel I must keep up. Often when I have finished I think I have wasted my time, but on those few occasions when I have not read all the papers I have felt guilty and deprived, and more than once indeed I have missed something, have not kept up, have fallen behind. As I sit and drink my coffee and eat whatever I have ordered, therefore, I swiftly but thoroughly absorb what the morning newspapers have to offer me. In the case of most of them, this produces in me very little except dismay at the poor quality of the writing : the sports pages in particular are of a depressingly low standard. But there are three papers which do aim higher in most things : the deplorable right-wing one, the soft left-wing one, and the austere establishment one. It is in the letter columns of these three that I find the matter which interests me most keenly : the addresses of the famous. The establishment newspaper is the most prolific source of addresses, for many more famous people write letters to its editor. This might be called a hobby with me. I put a big crayon ring round the addresses of those people of whom I have heard, or whose titles seem to mean something, and, when I have finished, tear out the three pages from these newspapers and place them in an inner pocket where they are less likely to be stolen later in the evening. On returning home, against the famous names listed alphabetically I write the addresses in my card-index. It passes the time.

  I have found a brothel which does not displease me. It is some time now since it was revealed to me that the cant name for the female genitalia was in fact a tetragrammaton : and the frequency of my visits to the man and his cat accords well with my fortnightly need to worship. I make my way to this sacrarium at about eight, when the first rush of workers on their way home has been exhausted and the later influx of drunken incapables has not yet begun.

  The main foyer or salon or waiting room is very interestingly decorated. It was this decoration indeed which led me to return for a second visit rather than the quality of the vestals. It is as though the designer had set himself in one room the problem of employing logically, organically and harmoniously all the techniques of decoration that were available to him. Thus the walls and ceiling bear patterns carried out in mosaics, carved and painted wood, moulded and painted plaster, pieces of mirror (besides large mirrors in each bay) ceramic tiles in multicoloured repeating designs, painting (both realistic and trompe l’oeil), gilding, fresco work, and probably others for which I do not know the technical names. The Madame has tastefully chosen furnishings which do not detract from its remarkable effect : a plain deep red carpet gold velvet-covered sofas and chairs, and an ornate chandelier. Perhaps the furnishings too were chosen by the designer : certainly the harmony of the room is such that it is as if only one person had made the decisions.

  Until recently I had for many years avoided going with the same girl more than once. I had found that if I became a regular I tended to become a favourite. This did not flatter me, and I found that the next stage was invariably their confiding in me. I developed a way of dealing with such confidences : I would drag my shirt up under my armpits and show them the scar extending from my lower ribs up to the right infra-spinatus. It shuts them up, my scar. Afterwards I would usually leave a larger tip, as a solatium, but I would not go with such again.

  However, in this house (chiefly because of its architectural delights) I have broken my rule. When I had gone through all the girls once and had been magisterially refused by the Madame (who nevertheless remains friendly), I found I did not break the habit of coming here after my day with the man and his cat. And since my soul could not stomach the expense of coming here just to admire the architecture, I took the first girl again : and was surprised to find that I did not remember exactly what she was like, how I had first graded her performance : as I can remember from early years the gradings of others. But that was perhaps because I had had them so often, a dozen times each, at least the enthusiastic amateurs, the true loves : in one case several hundred times, over a period of was it fifteen months.

  My coming into this house on alternate Fridays automatically reserves the girl next in the cycle, a personal note of which is kept by Madame herself. While I wait in the salon, am a forecast element in its designer’s situation, am exposed to his eccentricity (too little allowance is made for the undoubted effect of architecture upon people, of environment upon action or inaction), I listen to the piano-playing of the man the girls here call Jelly Roll. He plays an accurate imitation of Jelly Roll Morton’s style, goes like the clappers at Fingerbuster, often on the breaks rises from his rotating velvet stool and saws at his crotch with his free hand, bass or treble, whichever one the break disengages, for some relief, apparent in his posture afterwards if not in his expression. I have talked with him. He is buried in the past, his whole life is less than satisfactory because he was not born a creole in New Orleans in about 1880, where he might have been employed (as JRM was) playing in a whorehouse : practising all day, and playing all night. This brothel is the nearest he can come to it. I do not understand why he goes on earning a living in this manner. But there, I do not understand anyone else’s job : they all make me feel dread if I think about them. There are some things which would be impossible for me.

  Madame herself calls me or catches my eye when the girl for this particular evening is free, and has cleaned and prepared herself especially for me. Perhaps I flatter myself. It does not matter.

  Unexpectedly, then, I am content with this cycle of girls in which I find myself set. They have had careful instructions not to confide in me ever since I mentioned my scar to Madame one day. It was not necessary to show it to her. She is an imaginative woman. Even that the order was arbitrarily fixed by my fancy on the first nine occasions of my visiting the house does not upset me. I can see revolutions of this cycle extending indefinitely, or at least until they decide I must be sent to another city. I do not find it in the least unpleasant.

  If worship is obligatory, then this is as agreeable a way as I have yet discovered. While my memory is such that I know which girl I shall be having on any particular alternate Friday, I am not yet satiated enough to recall exactly which particular kind of pleasure or chance of pleasure may that evening be mine. With some girls I do associate certain things, but they seem always to be incidental to the main business : with one, for inst
ance, the smell of something very like, I imagine, that medieval perfume which was compounded of equal parts of camphor and powdered mummy ; with another, the miniature silver corncob worn on a chain round the neck. And there are always unknowns : the influence of the moon (regularly irregular), less predictable illnesses or indispositions, arid twice since I have been coming here the sudden and unexplained replacement of a girl. This is ample variety for me. Am I becoming senescent ?

  It is usually ten before I leave, what with one thing and the other, and I usually have a considerable appetite for nourishment by that time. I go to a restaurant near the mercantile quarter but well back from the seafront, out of sight of the dark sea, where music is provided by a lady who plays the saw. The player is a thin woman of about fifty, straightwaisted as though wearing the apparatus necessitated by a colotomy, and she sits well forward on her chair to grip the handle of the saw between her thighs. With her left thumb at one hundred and eighty degrees to her fingers on the other end she bends the saw into a graceful double curve the radii of which she alters to produce different notes. She strokes the back of the saw, opposite the teeth, with a violin bow from which a number of severed horsehairs hang. The saw is a large one, but it is impossible from my table to discern the name of the maker which I assume to be engraved on its face : I can see, however, that the saw has a non-standard wooden guard which covers those teeth which would otherwise be in contact with her thighs. She achieves a continuous tremolo by means of a rhythmic movement of the right leg ; the whole performance of a hackneyed repertoire done with great style, to an audience of honest munching trenchermen.

  On my way home I pass late shops, the assistants looking weary, bored, mutinous. I do not know how they can work in such places, again, I cannot understand how people do such jobs. I could not do them. Even the thought of others doing them makes me feel unwell.

  Tomorrow it is painting drumskins, delineating battle honours on regimental drums. This regiment has not fought for the last twenty years, so I have only to copy the coat of arms or other representational emblem of those two outposts where it has been stationed. These I can find in the library in the morning, and I should complete the pair of kettledrums by late evening.

  I have built up my bed on crates and blocks (which also make convenient steps) so that it is within two feet of the ceiling, after I had seen convincing evidence that hot air rises. It can be cold at nights in this city.

  I still make religious observances, but in bed now. My half-brother (we had a mother in common, at least) and I went to the same Sunday school. He learnt the Catechism. I learnt the Table of Kindred and Affinity. I was far more interested (you never know with my relatives) in the disclosures that a man may not marry his Mother ; Daughter ; Father’s mother ; Mother’s mother ; Son’s daughter ; Daughter’s daughter ; Sister ; Father’s daughter ; Mother’s daughter ; Wife’s mother ; Wife’s daughter ; Father’s wife ; Son’s wife ; Father’s father’s wife ; Mother’s father’s wife ; Wife’s father’s mother ; Wife’s mother’s mother ; Wife’s son’s daughter ; Wife’s daughter’s daughter ; Son’s son’s wife ; Daughter’s son’s wife ; Father’s sister ; Mother’s sister ; Brother’s daughter ; and his Sister’s daughter. And even more taken by the ordinance that a woman might not marry her Father ; Son ; Father’s father ; Mother’s father ; Son’s son ; Daughter’s son ; Brother ; Father’s son ; Mother’s son ; Husband’s father ; Husband’s son ; Mother’s husband ; Daughter’s husband ; Father’s mother’s husband ; Mother’s mother’s husband ; Husband’s father’s father ; Husband’s mother’s father ; Husband’s son’s son ; Husband’s daughter’s son ; Son’s daughter’s husband ; Daughter’s daughter’s husband ; Father’s brother ; Mother’s brother ; Brother’s son ; and her Sister’s son.

  I think one of my fellow-lodgers must have access to my writings. Tonight I found pushed under my door a copy of the XLCR Mechanical Plot-Finding Formula. Perhaps it is he or she whose curly hairs are to be found embedded in the green soap every morning.

  Everyone Knows Somebody Who’s Dead

  So you like the title ? That is the first thing, they say here, the Title.

  Conflict, they say, as well. I should engage my reader in a Conflict.

  That is easy. What I have in mind is the conflict between understanding and what does not appear to be understandable. Few subjects could be more interesting. Surely you must see that ? I trust you, riot knowing you.

  It is also the partialness in the Soul (not a word I have ever used before, I think) of Conflict that concerns me here.

  There is Resolution at the end, I see, skipping ahead. Be calm. I have written before. Trust me, not knowing me.

  This is the difference between doing it and teaching it. Perhaps. Who am I to presume ? I am (like you) everyone to presume, there is no one else.

  Conflict, it says here. Of three kinds, viz. : within the self ; without the self, with other humans; without the self, with non-human forces. Gross simplification, but what else is there ?

  One conflict is within me, certainly. Many, rather. But what I have to write of is not a conflict within him : indeed it is rather of that moment of perfect non-conflict, in the end, of unity, unison, when his self was absolutely at one with his non-self, when the will and the act itself were in accord, at peace, were the same.

  One should also start at the Beginning, it says here. That I could have done, easily.

  I first met him at the evening college of London University, Birkbeck College. We must have sat next to one another at some lecture or another. English and Latin were what we had in common, History and I think Economics were points of divergence. Everyone had to do Latin. He was tall, angular is unfortunately the only word, smart : I was none of these. He Introduced me to the New Statesman and his fiancée, a dumpy, curly blonde quite unlike him in almost everything, unsuited, I thought. Or perhaps think now, with hindsight. I introduced him to me, I was all I had. We joined the college rowing club together, Saturday afternoons for that Spring we would imagine the exercise did us good. I may still have a key to their locker half a generation later, they may still have in it my heavy white wool sweater. He worked in an office quite near mine, both in Kingsway. Occasionally we would meet for lunch, too. Shell was his company, Standard-Vacuum mine, oil was another thing we had coincidentally in common. His job I cannot remember, mine is . . . Irrelevant.

  A Plot is. . . .

  There were other things. Bengs and Joyce were also friends, at this time. We each passed our examinations. He and I went separate ways, then. We left Birkbeck, the evening lectures and steady jobs, both managed to become possessed of grants to go full-time to different colleges, though still of London University. I chose mine because I thought well of the name, he his because he admired the staff. We were both five years mature. The Registrar warned me, objecting to my full-time going, that I at twenty-three would be amongst a lot of eighteen-year-old girls. That is probably also amongst the things which are not relevant.

  . . . a Conflictful Situation. . . .

  There was a party for Birkbeck friends, he and I met the curls at the Albert Hall (built as a rendezvous), the rain was heavy in a way not common in July. Probably that summer too I went once and never again to the family home, Churchill Gardens, tall flats aligned north and south so that the sun set garishly on the supper table. The conversation centred, so I remember, Bengs was there, on the way the place was warmed by surplus heat generated across the river at mighty Battersea power station, piped presumably. They were very early postwar reconstruction or development.

  . . . Exacerbated by Additional Circumstances of Increasing Difficulty. . . .

  He bought an identifying scarf for his new college. I obtusely wanted nothing of such symbols, it was more than enough that I was admitted. Though they looked warm, and the winter might be coming.

  That summer also I was best man at his wedding to the unlikely curls. I was brought in late, a kind of locum, second best man. I do not know why the first
choice man was not available. I did wonder then and later that he should have so few friends that I, little more than an acquaintance, and recent, too, should be honoured. But that is speculation. I am allowed a little speculation ?

  . . . Proceeding to one or more Abortive Efforts to overcome the Situation.

  The marriage was at a church overlooking Brighton. The spire was said to be a blessing to mariners, as well. It was a modern church. I produced the ring without any of the mishaps celebrated in tradition. Afterwards in the vestry, is it called, I paid the gentleman vicar. He kept what the other functionaries were owed and pressed back on me his own share, saying, It is something I do for young couples, I love weddings, you see. You see.

  At the reception I stole an epigram from Oscar Wilde, something about a spade. My punishment was that it fell flatter than a discus. And they probably thought I was bent too, all those relatives, to boot. This occasion represents my only appearance as a best man. At another wedding, where the best man’s name was Fat Gerald, the bride’s father asked me to make a speech because I was a writer and writers were good at speeches. But one of the reasons I am a writer is because I am no giver of speeches at weddings or anywhere else, I explained to him. I do not think he understood, he remained disappointed.