“Look,” I say to her. “Why listen to all this stuff? Tell me about yourself. Let me immortalize you with polysyllabic taste.”
“No, honest, Gregory, I like it. What I understand. It’s not everything, but Rachel …”
“Ah, you like Rachel?”
“Was you married to her?”
“No.”
“Was she … a street woman, a bad one?”
“No. She was an art student.”
“Did she let you … I mean … she was a girl of goofambly wasn’t she?”
“Her father was a soap king.”
“Coo.”
“Yes.”
“You was married but not churched, eh?”
“Yes.”
“The other’s not interesting. Read me some more about Rachel. What kind of clothes did she wear?”
“Usually none.”
“Haven’t you no description of her clothes?”
“None. Look, Gracie, why listen to all this? Tell me your life and I’ll write it down in a story. That’s more interesting.”
“Ooer, my life? What are you talking about? I’m just ordinary. Nothing from the common, I am.”
“That’s why.”
“I’m a bad girl.”
“Good.”
“But I never took money for it unless I was stony broke, honest to God, cross my heart, may I die if I’m lying.”
“I’ll make a note of it.”
There was Bob. On these mild mornings, when the clouds are like enormous limbs sprawled in weariness after an orgasm (acknowledgements), we talk about Bob. Bob is a source of great misery to Grace because he done a flit on her. He was a fine upstanding boy, of a good family. His father owned a radio shop. He took a fancy to her, and she took a fancy to him. They fell. Marriage was on the cards, because in those days, and in spite of her father, Grace was a virgin, entirely educated by the cinema in which orange blossom is always depicted as the right true end of lerve. O.K. he had said, looking as much like a conquering gunman as possible. O.K. But there were conditions attached to this business which she would have to fulfil first.
He was poor, and she was honest. O.K. Then why wait for the mere cash to arrive? Where was the point of it all? Bob used to say, with fine buckishness, snorting cigarette smoke and lolling on his sumptuous elastic calves: “Listen, baby, you leave it to me, see?” And Grace would numbly leave him quite alone and puissant in the territory of ideas. “I know my stuff, baby.” He would continue, “’Ave no fear. It’ll all be swell. You see. Yes SIR. Oil say.” Rolling his small blue beads. “Oil say.” He was a patron of the Albany when he had the money; a strong supporter of that Swedish maneater, Greta Garbo; a banjo player of no mean calibre. Above all, a good businessman. Yes SIR. Oil say. Saturday nights he would feel her furtively in one of the various cinemas. And one reverberating Sunday afternoon he deflowered her clumsily on the golf links where they were “courting”. O.K. Or rather, not quite so O.K. Gracie wept a little bit, partly from surprise, but mostly from pain. But Bob soon soothed her with a fine line of talk, pleasantly salted with gunman slang. Was he a cheap skate, he asked indignantly? Was he a hoodlum? No. Then why all the fuss? “When I says something is O.K., kiddo, it’s O.K.,” he intoned.
The following Saturday afternoon found her sitting numbly in the nearest free clinic for the teaching of contraception. Bob was a clever lad. A wise guy, see? On her finger she wore, with a frightened air, a five-bob wedding ring. A hefty circle of brass. She registered herself as Mrs. Smith, and was initiated into the priapic mysteries. Well, Bob had solved the one pressing problem, viz. How to keep her wind and water tight. His tenancy began, with an option on a ninety-year lease later on.
The option, however, was never claimed. Their affair dragged on for a year or so, through various vicissitudes. Then Bob was offered a traveller’s job in Manchester, which he took in his stride. Even then there was the vague understanding that if it turned out all right etc. etc. and prospects were good etc. etc. they would marry. Not so. A few months later she got a letter full of interesting Edwardian phrases (Bob was a user of Penfold’s Manual, The Gentleman’s Letter-Writer, sixpence at any bookstall), calling the whole deal off. Young people, the letter began, often do things on impulse, recking not the cost. And a lot more stuff about taking the gentleman’s way out, and quotes from Revelation. The letter she still keeps in her handbag, along, with less interesting mementos — sticky toffees, film photos, lipstick, and a cheap packet of condoms. Reading it aloud to me, she moons softly and sadly on the fate Bob left her to. In an elf’s voice she tells me how upright and honest he was in all money matters. What a card he was, always in demand at parties. Of course the letter, for all its tragic news (perhaps because of it), she considers a masterpiece of its kind.
But it is no use trying to solder this old stuff to the present, to make it topical. In these dog days nothing is (was?) topical except the fantasy which encircled us. The enormous nubians in the sky and Gracie airing her repertoire of games for boring afternoons. Let me drop the historic present. It is a device that looks a little shallow after a time: as the conjurer I am self-conscious, yes, there is the aorist. It was up my sleeve all the time.
Gracie was my fate: IS dead. A sort of mirage, this word I cannot grasp. A tinsel moon on a garish back cloth. A circle of blackness which blots out all new horizons. A rent in the clean daylight of her yellow, peaky, little face. O.K. But if one were to start a quibble about temporal realities would the present tense justify itself? Is she behind me sitting in the chair, coughing over the latest Film Paper? I do not turn round, because I know at once that she is. In bed, worn out, languorous, aching with pleasure between starched sheets? Yes. But only when I am on that borderline of the realities when every abstraction has solidity, weight, volume. I can lift desire in my fingers like this small bud of a breast. I can see it, feel it. It enters my experience like a calamity.
Gracie and her merry tricks! Pranks for wet afternoons! The time we spend sticking pins in the fuses and putting the hotel in darkness. The solemn, wholesome enjoyment we derive from that humourless black telephone. Watch her sitting there naked, playing one of Bob’s hairy pranks on the local butchers. This is early morning, mind you.
“Is that ’Iggs the butcher?” she says, very ladylike in a voice like a pat of butter.
“Yus, madam, Hit his.” The porky assistant wiping his hands on his apron. Then Gracie, in a frightfully subtly accented voice:
“Do you keep dripping?”
“Dripping, ma’m? (say, Fred, do we keep drippin?). Yes, madam, we do.”
And Gracie slowly melting down into laughter, gripping her fist hard between her knees, the laughter gushing up in the wonky lung: “Then what are you going to do about it?” The click of the receiver and the endless soft whewing and crowing which was her laughter filling the little room. What a rich jest!
Against this medallion I offer you another, later, more puzzling picture; a Happy Snap taken when reality had at last closed down on us — myself in a black skullcap phoning for a five-by-two cedar-wood coffin. Ci-gît. Ci-gît.