Okay, slide me that glass. There … you know, every so often, despite being a prole, I sometimes feel this big emptiness in me. It’s like the way His Ex-Lordship suddenly feels homesick. The worst thing is the way they won’t leave you in peace. There’s advertisements everywhere — buy this, order that. I’ll order up a one-way ticket to heaven next, just so I get some peace. When I was in Rome I heard how back in the old days, when the Caesars were around, the top Roman guys used to tickle their throats with a peacock feather so they could heave up in order to make room for the next delicious thing. That’s what those advertisements are: peacock feathers. They get you all excited, and I don’t mean just me, but the dog and the cat besides, since they can see what great things the dogs and cats on TV fill their bellies with. That’s the class war today! We’ve won, buddy! It’s just that I have to touch my head to check it’s still there, and to see if I can stuff any more into it.
When Sweetheart was cleaning out the john back home, being rich meant something different. She spent a whole night telling me about it.
I can’t remember everything she said. We talked like we were trying to spin out a never-ending good-bye. But some of those things come to mind now and then. It was like it wasn’t her speaking at all those times, not Sweetheart at all, the girl who’d made her way up from the very bottom — I mean, she never went to school, not like Her Ladyship, the one she served. And Sweetheart could really talk, talk like a tape recorder, like recorded speech. Her mind was like a narrow strip of sound tape: it preserved every little thing, every bit of background noise. Every syllable stuck to it the way a fly does to flypaper. You say it: it stays there. Maybe all women have a spool of tape inside them like that. And maybe, once in their lives, they find just the right set of equipment, one that catches their voices just so, and then they say everything they’ve been saying to themselves, inside themselves, all those years … It’s quite a fashion item now, the recorder, and women soon catch on to fashion. Sweetheart quickly extracted the important information from the stuff the gentry used to chat about in their own secret language, the kind of language only the invited and members of the family spoke. It’s like the way only Gypsies understand Romany, the horse dealers and the guys in caravans. The gentry had their own self-made language too. It’s like not saying what you really think but doing a kind of dance around it while smiling sweetly all the time. The times people like us curse, they keep quiet. And they eat different stuff. And they get rid of it differently too, not like us proles. But Sweetheart saw all this and was a quick learner. By the time she met me, she could have been a professor at some institution where they teach civilization to the spiritually deprived. From the moment she started scrubbing out the john she learned everything from the gentry, things she could never have dreamt of in the ditch. Believe it or not, it turned out that later she had not only jewels, not only furs, but her own nail-polish remover. What’s up? You don’t believe me? I tell it as it is. Mind you, she herself spoke about it in an embarrassed kind of way, as if the deal weren’t quite straight.
She paid attention to everything; she was like a sparrow that pecks up grains in horseshit. That was till she met the bald guy, some kind of writer, who was highbrow, like the big shots here in the bar, but in a different way. He was the sort of writer who didn’t want to write anymore. And some of the things he said got under Sweetheart’s skin — they excited her. She told me in a shaky voice that she had never slept with him, that they only had soul-to-soul chats, that’s all. It might have been so, I guess, otherwise she wouldn’t have followed him to Rome. The clown must have given her some ideas that made her feel a little giddy. He rambled on about how there was something that couldn’t simply be demanded at the barricades or extorted by threatening to bomb people. It was something really extra, like the shivers you get when you’re at it in bed. And when it comes to things like that, a prole like me begins to suspect that it’s pointless having every bargain going, that there’s no real happiness to be got till he’s wrestled some special magic from the old master’s fist.