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17 THE MAID OF HONOUR
“MY DEAR,” I TELL MYSELF, “you no longer need to butt in on people’s conversations and have someone hang on your shoulder reeling off all their troubles, I don’t want,” I say, “anyone to blow on your cuts and bruises to make them better or you to find in their eyes some universal validity for your snap judgements.” I say: “You no longer need to look for the common denominator of your nearest and dearest, instead, my boy, pretend you’re dumb, pretend your hearing’s gone, instead, beset by any torrent of talk, lend an ear to the interior monologue of your lost youth, instead lend an ear to the secret of sameness, and the solitude which you are entering won’t frighten you, and instead, by staying silent, transport yourself beyond the curtain of human conversation and be brought face to face with a mirror of silence. Thus, my dear, will you pass through the din into a vacant silence in which you will be, a second time, in mystical union with all things, as you were first time around in your mother’s womb, swathed in central heating and conjoined by your umbilical cord to the beginning of infinity…
And from the front platform of a tram there was a bleached blonde watching me for a long time with enormous interest, and having attuned my eyes I saw that, yes, it was the dream-girl of my youth, whose heart I sought to break and in return she promised to afford me the most beautiful proof of love. And I reached out and she stepped forward through the swaying tramcar, and as our hands met again after so many years, I let out a snort of excitement and a frightful bogey shot from my nose, a great long thing, like little kids get. And my dream-girl immediately extinguished the flame of her delight and her green eyes froze with revulsion, in my agitation I sought, but failed to find, the pocket in which I usually keep my handkerchief, and so I stood there in the middle of the car, riven by embarrassment and ignominy, passengers who up to then had been envious now schadenfried me, and the soulmate of my youth struggled towards the step, grabbed the brass handle, extended one shoe and her heels clacked down one by one and off she ran across the pavement, slingshooting with her enraged eyes and spouting abuse from her mouth so as to cauterise the predicament I’d contrived to put her in. And I had no alternative but to go for a pint.
Things were quite lively at the White Lion. A wedding party, much the worse for wear, was staggering into cabs, the bride came back for her bouquet and as she tried to find the way back out, she cast about for the door handle in the wall, the groom, a dreamboat in the Berber mould, had his tuxedo lapel covered in sauerkraut, these remnants of the wedding feast twinkling on his jacket like a recruit’s rosette, and as he led his new other half off, by drunken misjudgement they ended up in the kitchen. The waiters having taken the newlyweds outside, one bespectacled guest rose from the floor next to the toilet, the 00 sign on the door floating above him like a double halo, and started clapping and shouting: “Encoooore! Bravoooo!” And the taxis left and the waiters closed their eyes and heaved a theatrical sigh of relief.
However, the maid of honour, drunk, came back inside and started knocking back the party’s leftover Gambrinus, that golden pilsner brew, which trickled past her pink lips onto her pink bosom, inside her pink bodice, over her pink dress, which clung to her beer-sodden pink lap. Having downed the last dregs from the wedding feast, she didn’t dare lean forward, because the beer inside her reached all the way up to mouth level. And I just toyed with a beer mat, too scared to think of that unpleasantness in the tram. So instead I watched the hairy male arm encircling and squeezing the leg of a plump female at the next table. A pale man in an indeterminate uniform rose beneath the chandelier and staggered off to the toilet, and the door’s double zero having settled back in place, there was a bang of the bakelite seat followed by a long, mournful mooing sound, the kind tritons would blow on sea-shells to summon errant nymphs. The maid of honour’s fish-eyes roved about until they alighted on the hairy male arm.