Hearing all the arguments, his psychoanalyst also disapproved. ‘If you succeed, I’ll be pleased and surprised. But the chances are that you’ll fail, which will put you back two years’ — as if advising a tubercular Sisyphus not to push his great stone once more up the mountain when the gods had ordained it.
But Keith had decided to isolate himself from all advice since Kevin called on his way through London and said Pat had a man in to share her bright little cottage. A high moral tone had always been her line, and now she wasn’t only having an affair but had let Kevin go up and live in the same rotten nest. He at least had always kept that part of his life separate from what he termed his ‘permanent domestic cage’.
He filled the car with a homely stench of French cigarettes — which made him feel somehow safe. The wipers cleared his vision, swilled rain and dust against the outside screen. A youth and rucksack at the next hilltop held up a thumb and smiled, as if the thumb were injured and he were putting a good face on it. But Keith pointed to the right, as if turning off too soon to bother stopping. He felt guilty again, but couldn’t stand fifty miles of chattering, having to think of that bloody image, as well as plan his gambits for when he bumped into Pat. Not that there’d be much room for manoeuvre. It’s plain as all hell, getting Kevin up there while she’s living with another man. I’m not against it, oh no, she can do what she likes for all I care, but not in front of my son, understand? Not in front of my son, for God’s sake. Kevin hadn’t even disliked the chap, which shows how successful she was at, well, corrupting him — there’s no other word for it.
He’d intended stopping the car to consult the R A C book and find a way towards Peterborough, but whenever a layby was signalled his hands wouldn’t react to the offer of it, and he held a steady sixty along the present road. I’ll stop now, he kept saying, and draw in — but it was impossible. As long as I’m going north: he consoled himself for the strange state of his will, as if to stop would end his life, make him call off his expedition, fall asleep over the wheel, burst into tears, turn round, begin to doubt himself all over again. He pressed on the accelerator, nearly hit a grass verge at the next bend, then slowed to fifty on the straight because he had frightened himself.
Crossing London he’d licked through Highgate, and Muswell Hill — the place he was born and lived at most of his life. It hadn’t altered, he saw, detouring along the avenue and stopping by his childhood house. The extrovert Keith loathed it, while the introvert tended a secret passion for the hidden depths and darknesses of it. He recalled those ideal days before the war, the long never-ending boyhood peace of them. Later he rebelled against all that house and suburb stood for, had even joined the Labour Party at one time. Who hadn’t rebelled? Rebellion was the anaesthetic of youth, and that was the only way to get through it for some people; though if someone would kindly point out the anaesthetic for middle-age he’d be bloody glad.
Cambridge showed on the roadsigns: there was no point in turning off now, so he stopped for a legstretch and petrol. He wanted four gallons, watched the big hand of the meter slowly register, fascinated by its unclogged movement, an unattainable harmony that men got from machines but not themselves. A pity, but then, maybe they just sent machines ahead as an advance guard, and one day they’d catch up with the way machines worked now. Take this car: care for it, feed it with oil and fuel, drive it lovingly, and it would give good use and service for years. Why couldn’t a man be like that? Because he can’t. He’s more mysterious, superstitious, clumsy, despondent, clever. There’s too much we don’t understand about the light and darknesses of his insides. Isolate a specimen, do everything right both flesh and mental, and what happens? He dies one day from something you can’t trace. Not a hope. Even I’m like that, one time poet and now a mechanic of the wormy depths in the service of advertising, an instigator of conspicuous consumption which, as we all know, breeds spiritual cancer. But that’s my job, so what the hell? I’m not one of those who paid cash for his house.
One time he travelled around in a Jag, but they were getting too common, so he preferred the distinction of anonymity in a souped-up sports. In any case he’d soon be a shade too old for a Jag. Maybe after forty he’d change to a Mini, just to be on the safe side. He walked impatiently along the pumps, his appearance that of a well-dressed young middle-aging man, fairly tall, with fair wavy hair and the troubled aspect of someone whom smallpox had thought to attack but changed its mind at the last minute, merely branding him as a person who had gone through the mill in some indefinable manner. He had a high forehead, lined to match, and hazel eyes that looked out from a man-created hell, imploring as they looked, not at those they turned on, but begging the furnace within to make them less imploring. Such eyes resented what the mirror of his soul had turned them into, without questioning the soul itself. His small mouth, the sort that didn’t seem inclined to open often, would only say something if his soul in agony screamed at him to protest.
Working at the hidden springs of other people’s slothfulness, he had no time (or perhaps, after all, no desire) to turn these perceptions on himself. This he left to a psychiatrist who hadn’t till now made a good job of it. In spite of everything the expression of suffering was taken as sensitivity — which blended so well with his well-shaped chin and intelligent forehead that he not only inspired confidence in those he worked for, but was considered by women to be good looking.
The sun shone, driving through Trumpington, up past Fitzbilly’s and Pembroke. The sun had shone on it too during his three years reading English after the troopship crawl from Burma in forty-eight. Cambridge hadn’t altered. The students weren’t quite the sort he would have mixed with then, and might make good salesmen at Harrods, he thought, observing a scarved knot of them on the street. After leaving the Labour Club he had prayed many days in King’s chapel, entranced by the stained-glass windows, meditating on their pictures of Christ and the Virgin. Even in the bursting cold of midwinter he would behold them for hours, scribbling fervent impressions in his leatherbound notebook, nose red but scarf well drawn. After Burma he considered this extreme change good for his soul, and remembered Cambridge as part of a rich and varied life. While others were roistering and masturbating, he had revelled in the mellow, satisfying depths of tradition and scholarship.
Foregoing coffee, he got out with his memories as fast as he could, on the road to Ely. Twice in this short burst of the rainy day he’d stumbled on places that brought back disturbing echoes, made off from each with relief and guilt at having strayed into them against his will. Life, he had known for a long time, was something of a battle between his objective and subjective worlds, and neither treatment nor willpower could keep it level. If he looked out of the window one fine day and saw cleansing sunlight on opposite roof-slates, a voice within told him that all would be black rain before he got into his car for work. But if by then the sky was still clear and warm, he wouldn’t revel in it and bless his luck, but would see it as a sign of impaired reason, as another point scored by the interior subjective bully of himself. It won continually, by the bell and on points, but for once he felt the victor, saw his daylight swoop on Pat and her boy friend as a rational blow in a scheme to coax her back to the comfortable fold of his bijou gem and get some love and order once more into their lives.