He knew how
abominably
he was behaving.
Orwell - Keep the Apidistra Flying
Yes, I would, I dare say.
’
‘There you are, then! That’s what I said — money! ’
‘No, Gordon, no! That’s not fair! You’re twisting my words round. ’
‘No, I’m not. You’ve got this money-business at the bottom of your heart. Every
woman’s got it. You wish I was in a GOOD job now, don’t you? ’
‘Not in the way you mean it. I’d like you to be earning more money — yes. ’
‘And you think I ought to have stayed on at the New Albion, don’t you? You’d like me to
go back there now and write slogans for Q. T. Sauce and Truweet Breakfast Crisps.
Wouldn’t you? ’
‘No, I wouldn’t. I NEVER said that. ’
‘You thought it, though. It’s what any woman would think. ’
He was being horribly unfair, and he knew it. The one thing Rosemary had never said,
the thing she was probably quite incapable of saying, was that he ought to go back to the
New Albion. But for the moment he did not even want to be fair. His sexual
disappointment still pricked him. With a sort of melancholy triumph he reflected that,
after all, he was right. It was money that stood between them. Money, money, all is
money! He broke into a half-serious tirade:
‘Women! What nonsense they make of all our ideas! Because one can’t keep free of
women, and every woman makes one pay the same price. “Chuck away your decency and
make more money” — that’s what women say. “Chuck away your decency, suck the
blacking off the boss’s boots, and buy me a better fur coat than the woman next door. ”
Every man you can see has got some blasted woman hanging round his neck like a
mermaid, dragging him down and down — down to some beastly little semi-detached villa
in Putney, with hire-purchase furniture and a portable radio and an aspidistra in the
window. It’s women who make all progress impossible. Not that I believe in progress,’
he added rather unsatisfactorily.
‘What absolute NONSENSE you do talk, Gordon! As though women were to blame for
everything! ’
‘They are to blame, finally. Because it’s the women who really believe in the money-
code. The men obey it; they have to, but they don’t believe in it. It’s the women who
keep it going. The women and their Putney villas and their fur coats and their babies and
their aspidistras. ’
‘It is NOT the women, Gordon! Women didn’t invent money, did they? ’
‘It doesn’t matter who invented it, the point is that it’s women who worship it. A
woman’s got a sort of mystical feeling towards money. Good and evil in a women’s mind
mean simply money and no money. Look at you and me. You won’t sleep with me,
simply and solely because I’ve got no money. Yes, that IS the reason. (He squeezed her
ann to silence her. ) You admitted it only a minute ago. And if I had a decent income
you’d go to bed with me tomorrow. It’s not because you’re mercenary. You don’t want
me to PAY you for sleeping with me. It’s not so crude as that. But you’ve got that deep-
down mystical feeling that somehow a man without money isn’t worthy of you. He’s a
weakling, a sort of half-man — that’s how you feel. Hercules, god of strength and god of
money — you’ll find that in Lempriere. It’s women who keep all mythologies going.
Women! ’
‘Women! ’ echoed Rosemary on a different note. ‘I hate the way men are always talking
about WOMEN. “Women do this,” and “WOMEN do that” — as though all women were
exactly the same! ’
‘Of course all women are the same! What does any woman want except a safe income
and two babies and a semi-detached villa in Putney with an aspidistra in the window? ’
‘Oh, you and your aspidistras! ’
‘On the contrary, YOUR aspidistras. You’re the sex that cultivates them. ’
She squeezed his arm and burst out laughing. She was really extraordinarily good-
natured. Besides, what he was saying was such palpable nonsense that it did not even
exasperate her. Gordon’s diatribes against women were in reality a kind of perverse joke;
indeed, the whole sex-war is at bottom only a joke. For the same reason it is great fun to
pose as a feminist or an anti-feminist according to your sex. As they walked on they
began a violent argument upon the eternal and idiotic question of Man versus Woman.
The moves in this argument — for they had it as often as they met — were always very
much the same. Men are brutes and women are soulless, and women have always been
kept in subjection and they jolly well ought to be kept in subjection, and look at Patient
Griselda and look at Lady Astor, and what about polygamy and Hindu widows, and what
about Mother Pankhurst’s piping days when every decent woman wore mousetraps on
her garters and couldn’t look at a man without feeling her right hand itch for a castrating
knife? Gordon and Rosemary never grew tired of this kind of thing. Each laughed with
delight at the other’s absurdities. There was a merry war between them. Even as they
disputed, ann in arm, they pressed their bodies delightedly together. They were very
happy. Indeed, they adored one another. Each was to the other a standing joke and an
object infinitely precious. Presently a red and blue haze of Neon lights appeared in the
distance. They had reached the beginning of the Tottenham Court Road. Gordon put his
ann round her waist and turned her to the right, down a darkish side-street. They were so
happy together that they had got to kiss. They stood clasped together under the lamp-post,
still laughing, two enemies breast to breast. She rubbed her cheek against his.
‘Gordon, you are such a dear old ass! I can’t help loving you, scrubby jaw and all. ’
‘Do you really? ’
‘Really and truly. ’
Her arms still round him, she leaned a little backwards, pressing her belly against his with
a sort of innocent voluptuousness.
‘Life IS worth living, isn’t it, Gordon? ’
‘Sometimes. ’
‘If only we could meet a bit oftener! Sometimes I don’t see you for weeks. ’
‘I know. It’s bloody. If you knew how I hate my evenings alone! ’
‘One never seems to have time for anything. I don’t even leave that beastly office till
nearly seven. What do you do with yourself on Sundays, Gordon? ’
‘Oh, God! Moon about and look miserable, like everyone else. ’
‘Why not let’s go out for a walk in the country sometimes. Then we would have all day
together. Next Sunday, for instance? ’
The words chilled him. They brought back the thought of money, which he had
succeeded in putting out of his mind for half an hour past. A trip into the country would
cost money, far more than he could possibly afford. He said in a non-committal tone that
transferred the whole thing to the realm of abstraction:
‘Of course, it’s not too bad in Richmond Park on Sundays. Or even Hampstead Heath.
Especially if you go in the mornings before the crowds get there. ’
‘Oh, but do let’s go right out into the country! Somewhere in Surrey, for instance, or to
Burnham Beeches. It’s so lovely at this time of year, with all the dead leaves on the
ground, and you can walk all day and hardly meet a soul. We’ll walk for miles and miles
and have dinner at a pub. It would be such fun. Do let’s! ’
Blast! The money-business was coming back. A trip even as far as Burnham Beeches
would cost all of ten bob. He did some hurried arithmetic. Five bob he might manage,
and Julia would Tend’ him five; GIVE him five, that was. At the same moment he
remembered his oath, constantly renewed and always broken, not to ‘borrow’ money off
Julia. He said in the same casual tone as before:
‘It WOULD be rather fun. I should think we might manage it. I’ll let you know later in
the week, anyway. ’
They came out of the side-street, still arm in arm. There was a pub on the comer.
Rosemary stood on tiptoe, and, clinging to Gordon’s arm to support herself, managed to
look over the frosted lower half of the window.
‘Look, Gordon, there’s a clock in there. It’s nearly half past nine. Aren’t you getting
frightfully hungry? ’
‘No,’ he said instantly and untruthfully.
‘I am. I’m simply starving. Let’s go and have something to eat somewhere. ’ Money
again! One moment more, and he must confess that he had only four and fourpence in the
world — four and fourpence to last till Friday.
‘I couldn’t eat anything,’ he said. ‘I might manage a drink, I dare say. Let’s go and have
some coffee or something. I expect we’ll find a Lyons open. ’
‘Oh, don’t let’s go to a Lyons! I know such a nice little Italian restaurant, only just down
the road. We’ll have Spaghetti Napolitaine and a bottle of red wine. I adore spaghetti. Do
let’s! ’
His heart sank. It was no good. He would have to own up. Supper at the Italian
Restaurant could not possibly cost less than five bob for the two of them. He said almost
sullenly:
‘It’s about time I was getting home, as a matter of fact. ’
‘Oh, Gordon! Already? Why? ’
‘Oh, well! If you MUST know, I’ve only got four and fourpence in the world. And it’s
got to last till Friday. ’
Rosemary stopped short. She was so angry that she pinched his arm with all her strength,
meaning to hurt him and punish him.
‘Gordon, you ARE an ass! You’re a perfect idiot! You’re the most unspeakable idiot I’ve
ever seen! ’
‘Why am I an idiot? ’
‘Because what does it matter whether you’ve got any money! I’m asking YOU to have
supper with ME. ’
He freed his arm from hers and stood away from her. He did not want to look her in the
face.
‘What! Do you think I’d go to a restaurant and let you pay for my food? ’
‘But why not? ’
‘Because one can’t do that sort of thing. It isn’t done. ’
‘It “isn’t done”! You’ll be saying it’s “not cricket” in another moment. WHAT “isn’t
done”? ’
‘Letting you pay for my meals. A man pays for a woman, a woman doesn’t pay for a
man. ’
‘Oh, Gordon! Are we living in the reign of Queen Victoria? ’
‘Yes, we are, as far as that kind of thing’s concerned. Ideas don’t change so quickly. ’
‘But MY ideas have changed. ’
‘No, they haven’t. You think they have, but they haven’t. You’ve been brought up as a
woman, and you can’t help behaving like a woman, however much you don’t want to. ’
‘But what do you mean by BEHAVING LIKE A WOMAN, anyway? ’
‘I tell you every woman’s the same when it comes to a thing like this. A woman despises
a man who’s dependent on her and sponges on her. She may say she doesn’t, she may
THINK she doesn’t, but she does. She can’t help it. If I let you pay for my meals YOU’D
despise me. ’
He had turned away.
He knew how abominably he was behaving. But somehow he had
got to say these things. The feeling that people — even Rosemary — MUST despise him
for his poverty was too strong to be overcome. Only by rigid, jealous independence could
he keep his self-respect. Rosemary was really distressed this time. She caught his arm and
pulled him round, making him face her. With an insistent gesture, angrily and yet
demanding to be loved, she pressed her breast against him.
‘Gordon! I won’t let you say such things. How can you say I’d ever despise you? ’
‘I tell you you couldn’t help it if I let myself sponge on you. ’
‘Sponge on me! What expressions you do use! How is it sponging on me to let me pay
for your supper just for once! ’
He could feel the small breasts, Finn and round, just beneath his own. She looked up at
him, frowning and yet not far from tears. She thought him perverse, unreasonable, cruel.
But her physical nearness distracted him. At this moment all he could remember was that
in two years she had never yielded to him. She had starved him of the one thing that
mattered. What was the good of pretending that she loved him when in the last essential
she recoiled? He added with a kind of deadly joy:
‘In a way you do despise me. Oh, yes, I know you’re fond of me. But after all, you can’t
take me quite seriously. I’m a kind of joke to you. You’re fond of me, and yet I’m not
quite your equal — that’s how you feel. ’
It was what he had said before, but with this difference, that now he meant it, or said it as
if he meant it. She cried out with tears in her voice:
‘I don’t, Gordon, I don’t! You KNOW I don’t! ’
‘You do. That’s why you won’t sleep with me. Didn’t I tell you that before? ’
She looked up at him an instant longer, and then buried her face in his breast as suddenly
as though ducking from a blow. It was because she had burst into tears. She wept against
his breast, angry with him, hating him, and yet clinging to him like a child. It was the
childish way in which she clung to him, as a mere male breast to weep on, that hurt him
most. With a sort of self-hatred he remembered the other women who in just the same
way had cried against his breast. It seemed the only thing he could do with women, to
make them cry. With his arm round her shoulders he caressed her clumsily, trying to
console her.
‘You’ve gone and made me cry! ’ she whimpered in self-contempt.
‘I’m sorry! Rosemary, dear one! Don’t cry, PLEASE don’t cry. ’
‘Gordon, dearest! WHY do you have to be so beastly to me? ’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Sometimes I can’t help it. ’
‘But why? Why? ’
She had got over her crying. Rather more composed, she drew away from him and felt for
something to wipe her eyes. Neither of them had a handkerchief. Impatiently, she wrung
the tears out of her eyes with her knuckles.
‘How silly we always are! Now, Gordon, BE nice for once. Come along to the restaurant
and have some supper and let me pay for it. ’
‘No. ’
‘Just this once. Never mind about the old money-business. Do it just to please me. ’
‘I tell you I can’t do that kind of thing. I’ve got to keep my end up. ’
‘But what do you mean, keep your end up? ’
‘I’ve made a war on money, and I’ve got to keep the rules. The first rule is never to take
charity. ’
‘Charity! Oh, Gordon, I DO think you’re silly! ’
She squeezed his ribs again. It was a sign of peace. She did not understand him, probably
never would understand him; yet she accepted him as he was, hardly even protesting
against his unreasonableness. As she put her face up to be kissed he noticed that her lips
were salt. A tear had trickled here. He strained her against him. The hard defensive
feeling had gone out of her body. She shut her eyes and sank against him and into him as
though her bones had grown weak, and her lips parted and her small tongue sought for
his. It was very seldom that she did that. And suddenly, as he felt her body yielding, he
seemed to know with certainty that their struggle was ended. She was his now when he
chose to take her, and yet perhaps she did not fully understand what it was that she was
offering; it was simply an instinctive movement of generosity, a desire to reassure him —
to smooth away that hateful feeling of being unloveable and unloved. She said nothing of
this in words. It was the feeling of her body that seemed to say it. But even if this had
been the time and the place he could not have taken her. At this moment he loved her but
did not desire her. His desire could only return at some future time when there was no
quarrel fresh in his mind and no consciousness of four and fourpence in his pocket to
daunt him.
Presently they separated their mouths, though still clinging closely together.
‘How stupid it is, the way we quarrel, isn’t it Gordon? When we meet so seldom. ’
‘I know. It’s all my fault. I can’t help it. Things rub me up. It’s money at the bottom of it,
always money. ’
‘Oh, money! You let it worry you too much, Gordon. ’
‘Impossible. It’s the only thing worth worrying about. ’
‘But, anyway, we WILL go out into the country next Sunday, won’t we? To Burnham
Beeches or somewhere. It would be so nice if we could. ’
‘Yes, I’d love to. We’ll go early and be out all day. I’ll raise the train fares somehow. ’
‘But you’ll let me pay my own fare, won’t you? ’
‘No, I’d rather I paid them, but we’ll go, anyway. ’
‘And you really won’t let me pay for your supper — just this once, just to show you trust
me? ’
‘No, I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ve told you why. ’
‘Oh, dear! I suppose we shall have to say good night. It’s getting late. ’
They stayed talking a long time, however, so long that Rosemary got no supper after all.
She had to be back at her lodgings by eleven, or the she-dragons were angry. Gordon
went to the top of the Tottenham Court Road and took the tram. It was a penny cheaper
than taking the bus. On the wooden seat upstairs he was wedged against a small dirty
Scotchman who read the football finals and oozed beer. Gordon was very happy.
Rosemary was going to be his mistress. Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. To the
music of the tram’s booming he whispered the seven completed stanzas of his poem.
Nine stanzas there would be in all. It was GOOD. He believed in it and in himself. He
was a poet. Gordon Comstock, author of Mice. Even in London Pleasures he once again
believed.
He thought of Sunday. They were to meet at nine o’clock at Paddington Station. Ten bob
or so it would cost; he would raise the money if he had to pawn his shirt. And she was
going to become his mistress; this very Sunday, perhaps, if the right chance offered itself.
Nothing had been said. Only, somehow, it was agreed between them.
Please God it kept fine on Sunday! It was deep winter now. What luck if it turned out one
of those splendid windless days — one of those days that might almost be summer, when
you can lie for hours on the dead bracken and never feel cold! But you don’t get many
days like that; a dozen at most in every winter. As likely as not it would rain. He
wondered whether they would get a chance to do it after all. They had nowhere to go,
except the open air. There are so many pairs of lovers in London with ‘nowhere to go’;
only the streets and the parks, where there is no privacy and it is always cold. It is not
easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money. The ‘never the time and
the place’ motif is not made enough of in novels.
Chapter 7
The plumes of the chimneys floated perpendicular against skies of smoky rose.
Gordon caught the 27 bus at ten past eight. The streets were still locked in their Sunday
sleep. On the doorsteps the milk bottles waited ungathered like little white sentinels.
Gordon had fourteen shillings in his hand — thirteen and nine, rather, because the bus fare
was threepence. Nine bob he had set aside from his wages — God knew what that was
going to mean, later in the week! — and five he had borrowed from Julia.
He had gone round to Julia’s place on Thursday night. Julia’s room in Earl’s Court,
though only a second-floor back, was not just a vulgar bedroom like Gordon’s. It was a
bed-sitting with the accent on the sitting. Julia would have died of starvation sooner than
put up with such squalor as Gordon lived in. Indeed every one of her scraps of furniture,
collected over intervals of years, represented a period of semi-starvation. There was a
divan bed that could very nearly be mistaken for a sofa, and a little round fumed oak
table, and two ‘antique’ hardwood chairs, and an ornamental footstool and a chintz-
covered annchair — Drage’s: thirteen monthly payments — in front of the tiny gas-fire; and
there were various brackets with framed photos of father and mother and Gordon and
Aunt Angela, and a birchwood calendar — somebody’s Christmas present — with ‘It’s a
long lane that has no turning’ done on it in pokerwork. Julia depressed Gordon horribly.
He was always telling himself that he ought to go and see her oftener; but in practice he
never went near her except to ‘borrow’ money.
When Gordon had given three knocks — three knocks for second floor — Julia took him
up to her room and knelt down in front of the gas-fire.
‘I’ll light the fire again,’ she said. ‘You’d like a cup of tea, wouldn’t you? ’
He noted the ‘again’. The room was beastly cold — no fire had been lighted in it this
evening. Julia always ‘saved gas’ when she was alone. He looked at her long narrow back
as she knelt down. How grey her hair was getting! Whole locks of it were quite grey. A
little more, and it would be ‘grey hair’ tout court.
‘You like your tea strong, don’t you? ’ breathed Julia, hovering over the tea-caddy with
tender, goose-like movements.
Gordon drank his cup of tea standing up, his eye on the birchwood calendar. Out with it!
Get it over! Yet his heart almost failed him. The meanness of this hateful cadging! What
would it all tot up to, the money he had ‘borrowed’ from her in all these years?
‘I say, Julia, I’m damned sorry — I hate asking you; but look here — ’
‘Yes, Gordon? ’ she said quietly. She knew what was coming.
‘Look here, Julia, I’m damned sorry, but could you lend me five bob? ’
‘Yes, Gordon, I expect so. ’
She sought out the small, worn black leather purse that was hidden at the bottom of her
linen drawer. He knew what she was thinking. It meant less for Christmas presents. That
was the great event of her life nowadays — Christmas and the giving of presents: hunting
through the glittering streets, late at night after the teashop was shut, from one bargain
counter to another, picking out the trash that women are so curiously fond of.
Handkerchief sachets, letter racks, teapots, manicure sets, birchwood calendars with
mottoes in pokerwork. All through the year she was scraping from her wretched wages
for ‘So-and-so’s Christmas present’, or ‘So-and-so’s birthday present’. And had she not,
last Christmas, because Gordon was ‘fond of poetry’, given him the Selected Poems of
John Drinkwater in green morocco, which he had sold for half a crown? Poor Julia!
Gordon made off with his five bob as soon as he decently could. Why is it that one can’t
borrow from a rich friend and can from a half-starved relative? But one’s family, of
course, ‘don’t count’.
On the top of the bus he did mental arithmetic. Thirteen and nine in hand. Two day-
returns to Slough, five bob. Bus fares, say two bob more, seven bob. Bread and cheese
and beer at a pub, say a bob each, nine bob. Tea, eightpence each, twelve bob. A bob for
cigarettes, thirteen bob. That left ninepence for emergencies. They would manage all
right. And how about the rest of the week?
‘There you are, then! That’s what I said — money! ’
‘No, Gordon, no! That’s not fair! You’re twisting my words round. ’
‘No, I’m not. You’ve got this money-business at the bottom of your heart. Every
woman’s got it. You wish I was in a GOOD job now, don’t you? ’
‘Not in the way you mean it. I’d like you to be earning more money — yes. ’
‘And you think I ought to have stayed on at the New Albion, don’t you? You’d like me to
go back there now and write slogans for Q. T. Sauce and Truweet Breakfast Crisps.
Wouldn’t you? ’
‘No, I wouldn’t. I NEVER said that. ’
‘You thought it, though. It’s what any woman would think. ’
He was being horribly unfair, and he knew it. The one thing Rosemary had never said,
the thing she was probably quite incapable of saying, was that he ought to go back to the
New Albion. But for the moment he did not even want to be fair. His sexual
disappointment still pricked him. With a sort of melancholy triumph he reflected that,
after all, he was right. It was money that stood between them. Money, money, all is
money! He broke into a half-serious tirade:
‘Women! What nonsense they make of all our ideas! Because one can’t keep free of
women, and every woman makes one pay the same price. “Chuck away your decency and
make more money” — that’s what women say. “Chuck away your decency, suck the
blacking off the boss’s boots, and buy me a better fur coat than the woman next door. ”
Every man you can see has got some blasted woman hanging round his neck like a
mermaid, dragging him down and down — down to some beastly little semi-detached villa
in Putney, with hire-purchase furniture and a portable radio and an aspidistra in the
window. It’s women who make all progress impossible. Not that I believe in progress,’
he added rather unsatisfactorily.
‘What absolute NONSENSE you do talk, Gordon! As though women were to blame for
everything! ’
‘They are to blame, finally. Because it’s the women who really believe in the money-
code. The men obey it; they have to, but they don’t believe in it. It’s the women who
keep it going. The women and their Putney villas and their fur coats and their babies and
their aspidistras. ’
‘It is NOT the women, Gordon! Women didn’t invent money, did they? ’
‘It doesn’t matter who invented it, the point is that it’s women who worship it. A
woman’s got a sort of mystical feeling towards money. Good and evil in a women’s mind
mean simply money and no money. Look at you and me. You won’t sleep with me,
simply and solely because I’ve got no money. Yes, that IS the reason. (He squeezed her
ann to silence her. ) You admitted it only a minute ago. And if I had a decent income
you’d go to bed with me tomorrow. It’s not because you’re mercenary. You don’t want
me to PAY you for sleeping with me. It’s not so crude as that. But you’ve got that deep-
down mystical feeling that somehow a man without money isn’t worthy of you. He’s a
weakling, a sort of half-man — that’s how you feel. Hercules, god of strength and god of
money — you’ll find that in Lempriere. It’s women who keep all mythologies going.
Women! ’
‘Women! ’ echoed Rosemary on a different note. ‘I hate the way men are always talking
about WOMEN. “Women do this,” and “WOMEN do that” — as though all women were
exactly the same! ’
‘Of course all women are the same! What does any woman want except a safe income
and two babies and a semi-detached villa in Putney with an aspidistra in the window? ’
‘Oh, you and your aspidistras! ’
‘On the contrary, YOUR aspidistras. You’re the sex that cultivates them. ’
She squeezed his arm and burst out laughing. She was really extraordinarily good-
natured. Besides, what he was saying was such palpable nonsense that it did not even
exasperate her. Gordon’s diatribes against women were in reality a kind of perverse joke;
indeed, the whole sex-war is at bottom only a joke. For the same reason it is great fun to
pose as a feminist or an anti-feminist according to your sex. As they walked on they
began a violent argument upon the eternal and idiotic question of Man versus Woman.
The moves in this argument — for they had it as often as they met — were always very
much the same. Men are brutes and women are soulless, and women have always been
kept in subjection and they jolly well ought to be kept in subjection, and look at Patient
Griselda and look at Lady Astor, and what about polygamy and Hindu widows, and what
about Mother Pankhurst’s piping days when every decent woman wore mousetraps on
her garters and couldn’t look at a man without feeling her right hand itch for a castrating
knife? Gordon and Rosemary never grew tired of this kind of thing. Each laughed with
delight at the other’s absurdities. There was a merry war between them. Even as they
disputed, ann in arm, they pressed their bodies delightedly together. They were very
happy. Indeed, they adored one another. Each was to the other a standing joke and an
object infinitely precious. Presently a red and blue haze of Neon lights appeared in the
distance. They had reached the beginning of the Tottenham Court Road. Gordon put his
ann round her waist and turned her to the right, down a darkish side-street. They were so
happy together that they had got to kiss. They stood clasped together under the lamp-post,
still laughing, two enemies breast to breast. She rubbed her cheek against his.
‘Gordon, you are such a dear old ass! I can’t help loving you, scrubby jaw and all. ’
‘Do you really? ’
‘Really and truly. ’
Her arms still round him, she leaned a little backwards, pressing her belly against his with
a sort of innocent voluptuousness.
‘Life IS worth living, isn’t it, Gordon? ’
‘Sometimes. ’
‘If only we could meet a bit oftener! Sometimes I don’t see you for weeks. ’
‘I know. It’s bloody. If you knew how I hate my evenings alone! ’
‘One never seems to have time for anything. I don’t even leave that beastly office till
nearly seven. What do you do with yourself on Sundays, Gordon? ’
‘Oh, God! Moon about and look miserable, like everyone else. ’
‘Why not let’s go out for a walk in the country sometimes. Then we would have all day
together. Next Sunday, for instance? ’
The words chilled him. They brought back the thought of money, which he had
succeeded in putting out of his mind for half an hour past. A trip into the country would
cost money, far more than he could possibly afford. He said in a non-committal tone that
transferred the whole thing to the realm of abstraction:
‘Of course, it’s not too bad in Richmond Park on Sundays. Or even Hampstead Heath.
Especially if you go in the mornings before the crowds get there. ’
‘Oh, but do let’s go right out into the country! Somewhere in Surrey, for instance, or to
Burnham Beeches. It’s so lovely at this time of year, with all the dead leaves on the
ground, and you can walk all day and hardly meet a soul. We’ll walk for miles and miles
and have dinner at a pub. It would be such fun. Do let’s! ’
Blast! The money-business was coming back. A trip even as far as Burnham Beeches
would cost all of ten bob. He did some hurried arithmetic. Five bob he might manage,
and Julia would Tend’ him five; GIVE him five, that was. At the same moment he
remembered his oath, constantly renewed and always broken, not to ‘borrow’ money off
Julia. He said in the same casual tone as before:
‘It WOULD be rather fun. I should think we might manage it. I’ll let you know later in
the week, anyway. ’
They came out of the side-street, still arm in arm. There was a pub on the comer.
Rosemary stood on tiptoe, and, clinging to Gordon’s arm to support herself, managed to
look over the frosted lower half of the window.
‘Look, Gordon, there’s a clock in there. It’s nearly half past nine. Aren’t you getting
frightfully hungry? ’
‘No,’ he said instantly and untruthfully.
‘I am. I’m simply starving. Let’s go and have something to eat somewhere. ’ Money
again! One moment more, and he must confess that he had only four and fourpence in the
world — four and fourpence to last till Friday.
‘I couldn’t eat anything,’ he said. ‘I might manage a drink, I dare say. Let’s go and have
some coffee or something. I expect we’ll find a Lyons open. ’
‘Oh, don’t let’s go to a Lyons! I know such a nice little Italian restaurant, only just down
the road. We’ll have Spaghetti Napolitaine and a bottle of red wine. I adore spaghetti. Do
let’s! ’
His heart sank. It was no good. He would have to own up. Supper at the Italian
Restaurant could not possibly cost less than five bob for the two of them. He said almost
sullenly:
‘It’s about time I was getting home, as a matter of fact. ’
‘Oh, Gordon! Already? Why? ’
‘Oh, well! If you MUST know, I’ve only got four and fourpence in the world. And it’s
got to last till Friday. ’
Rosemary stopped short. She was so angry that she pinched his arm with all her strength,
meaning to hurt him and punish him.
‘Gordon, you ARE an ass! You’re a perfect idiot! You’re the most unspeakable idiot I’ve
ever seen! ’
‘Why am I an idiot? ’
‘Because what does it matter whether you’ve got any money! I’m asking YOU to have
supper with ME. ’
He freed his arm from hers and stood away from her. He did not want to look her in the
face.
‘What! Do you think I’d go to a restaurant and let you pay for my food? ’
‘But why not? ’
‘Because one can’t do that sort of thing. It isn’t done. ’
‘It “isn’t done”! You’ll be saying it’s “not cricket” in another moment. WHAT “isn’t
done”? ’
‘Letting you pay for my meals. A man pays for a woman, a woman doesn’t pay for a
man. ’
‘Oh, Gordon! Are we living in the reign of Queen Victoria? ’
‘Yes, we are, as far as that kind of thing’s concerned. Ideas don’t change so quickly. ’
‘But MY ideas have changed. ’
‘No, they haven’t. You think they have, but they haven’t. You’ve been brought up as a
woman, and you can’t help behaving like a woman, however much you don’t want to. ’
‘But what do you mean by BEHAVING LIKE A WOMAN, anyway? ’
‘I tell you every woman’s the same when it comes to a thing like this. A woman despises
a man who’s dependent on her and sponges on her. She may say she doesn’t, she may
THINK she doesn’t, but she does. She can’t help it. If I let you pay for my meals YOU’D
despise me. ’
He had turned away.
He knew how abominably he was behaving. But somehow he had
got to say these things. The feeling that people — even Rosemary — MUST despise him
for his poverty was too strong to be overcome. Only by rigid, jealous independence could
he keep his self-respect. Rosemary was really distressed this time. She caught his arm and
pulled him round, making him face her. With an insistent gesture, angrily and yet
demanding to be loved, she pressed her breast against him.
‘Gordon! I won’t let you say such things. How can you say I’d ever despise you? ’
‘I tell you you couldn’t help it if I let myself sponge on you. ’
‘Sponge on me! What expressions you do use! How is it sponging on me to let me pay
for your supper just for once! ’
He could feel the small breasts, Finn and round, just beneath his own. She looked up at
him, frowning and yet not far from tears. She thought him perverse, unreasonable, cruel.
But her physical nearness distracted him. At this moment all he could remember was that
in two years she had never yielded to him. She had starved him of the one thing that
mattered. What was the good of pretending that she loved him when in the last essential
she recoiled? He added with a kind of deadly joy:
‘In a way you do despise me. Oh, yes, I know you’re fond of me. But after all, you can’t
take me quite seriously. I’m a kind of joke to you. You’re fond of me, and yet I’m not
quite your equal — that’s how you feel. ’
It was what he had said before, but with this difference, that now he meant it, or said it as
if he meant it. She cried out with tears in her voice:
‘I don’t, Gordon, I don’t! You KNOW I don’t! ’
‘You do. That’s why you won’t sleep with me. Didn’t I tell you that before? ’
She looked up at him an instant longer, and then buried her face in his breast as suddenly
as though ducking from a blow. It was because she had burst into tears. She wept against
his breast, angry with him, hating him, and yet clinging to him like a child. It was the
childish way in which she clung to him, as a mere male breast to weep on, that hurt him
most. With a sort of self-hatred he remembered the other women who in just the same
way had cried against his breast. It seemed the only thing he could do with women, to
make them cry. With his arm round her shoulders he caressed her clumsily, trying to
console her.
‘You’ve gone and made me cry! ’ she whimpered in self-contempt.
‘I’m sorry! Rosemary, dear one! Don’t cry, PLEASE don’t cry. ’
‘Gordon, dearest! WHY do you have to be so beastly to me? ’
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Sometimes I can’t help it. ’
‘But why? Why? ’
She had got over her crying. Rather more composed, she drew away from him and felt for
something to wipe her eyes. Neither of them had a handkerchief. Impatiently, she wrung
the tears out of her eyes with her knuckles.
‘How silly we always are! Now, Gordon, BE nice for once. Come along to the restaurant
and have some supper and let me pay for it. ’
‘No. ’
‘Just this once. Never mind about the old money-business. Do it just to please me. ’
‘I tell you I can’t do that kind of thing. I’ve got to keep my end up. ’
‘But what do you mean, keep your end up? ’
‘I’ve made a war on money, and I’ve got to keep the rules. The first rule is never to take
charity. ’
‘Charity! Oh, Gordon, I DO think you’re silly! ’
She squeezed his ribs again. It was a sign of peace. She did not understand him, probably
never would understand him; yet she accepted him as he was, hardly even protesting
against his unreasonableness. As she put her face up to be kissed he noticed that her lips
were salt. A tear had trickled here. He strained her against him. The hard defensive
feeling had gone out of her body. She shut her eyes and sank against him and into him as
though her bones had grown weak, and her lips parted and her small tongue sought for
his. It was very seldom that she did that. And suddenly, as he felt her body yielding, he
seemed to know with certainty that their struggle was ended. She was his now when he
chose to take her, and yet perhaps she did not fully understand what it was that she was
offering; it was simply an instinctive movement of generosity, a desire to reassure him —
to smooth away that hateful feeling of being unloveable and unloved. She said nothing of
this in words. It was the feeling of her body that seemed to say it. But even if this had
been the time and the place he could not have taken her. At this moment he loved her but
did not desire her. His desire could only return at some future time when there was no
quarrel fresh in his mind and no consciousness of four and fourpence in his pocket to
daunt him.
Presently they separated their mouths, though still clinging closely together.
‘How stupid it is, the way we quarrel, isn’t it Gordon? When we meet so seldom. ’
‘I know. It’s all my fault. I can’t help it. Things rub me up. It’s money at the bottom of it,
always money. ’
‘Oh, money! You let it worry you too much, Gordon. ’
‘Impossible. It’s the only thing worth worrying about. ’
‘But, anyway, we WILL go out into the country next Sunday, won’t we? To Burnham
Beeches or somewhere. It would be so nice if we could. ’
‘Yes, I’d love to. We’ll go early and be out all day. I’ll raise the train fares somehow. ’
‘But you’ll let me pay my own fare, won’t you? ’
‘No, I’d rather I paid them, but we’ll go, anyway. ’
‘And you really won’t let me pay for your supper — just this once, just to show you trust
me? ’
‘No, I can’t. I’m sorry. I’ve told you why. ’
‘Oh, dear! I suppose we shall have to say good night. It’s getting late. ’
They stayed talking a long time, however, so long that Rosemary got no supper after all.
She had to be back at her lodgings by eleven, or the she-dragons were angry. Gordon
went to the top of the Tottenham Court Road and took the tram. It was a penny cheaper
than taking the bus. On the wooden seat upstairs he was wedged against a small dirty
Scotchman who read the football finals and oozed beer. Gordon was very happy.
Rosemary was going to be his mistress. Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. To the
music of the tram’s booming he whispered the seven completed stanzas of his poem.
Nine stanzas there would be in all. It was GOOD. He believed in it and in himself. He
was a poet. Gordon Comstock, author of Mice. Even in London Pleasures he once again
believed.
He thought of Sunday. They were to meet at nine o’clock at Paddington Station. Ten bob
or so it would cost; he would raise the money if he had to pawn his shirt. And she was
going to become his mistress; this very Sunday, perhaps, if the right chance offered itself.
Nothing had been said. Only, somehow, it was agreed between them.
Please God it kept fine on Sunday! It was deep winter now. What luck if it turned out one
of those splendid windless days — one of those days that might almost be summer, when
you can lie for hours on the dead bracken and never feel cold! But you don’t get many
days like that; a dozen at most in every winter. As likely as not it would rain. He
wondered whether they would get a chance to do it after all. They had nowhere to go,
except the open air. There are so many pairs of lovers in London with ‘nowhere to go’;
only the streets and the parks, where there is no privacy and it is always cold. It is not
easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money. The ‘never the time and
the place’ motif is not made enough of in novels.
Chapter 7
The plumes of the chimneys floated perpendicular against skies of smoky rose.
Gordon caught the 27 bus at ten past eight. The streets were still locked in their Sunday
sleep. On the doorsteps the milk bottles waited ungathered like little white sentinels.
Gordon had fourteen shillings in his hand — thirteen and nine, rather, because the bus fare
was threepence. Nine bob he had set aside from his wages — God knew what that was
going to mean, later in the week! — and five he had borrowed from Julia.
He had gone round to Julia’s place on Thursday night. Julia’s room in Earl’s Court,
though only a second-floor back, was not just a vulgar bedroom like Gordon’s. It was a
bed-sitting with the accent on the sitting. Julia would have died of starvation sooner than
put up with such squalor as Gordon lived in. Indeed every one of her scraps of furniture,
collected over intervals of years, represented a period of semi-starvation. There was a
divan bed that could very nearly be mistaken for a sofa, and a little round fumed oak
table, and two ‘antique’ hardwood chairs, and an ornamental footstool and a chintz-
covered annchair — Drage’s: thirteen monthly payments — in front of the tiny gas-fire; and
there were various brackets with framed photos of father and mother and Gordon and
Aunt Angela, and a birchwood calendar — somebody’s Christmas present — with ‘It’s a
long lane that has no turning’ done on it in pokerwork. Julia depressed Gordon horribly.
He was always telling himself that he ought to go and see her oftener; but in practice he
never went near her except to ‘borrow’ money.
When Gordon had given three knocks — three knocks for second floor — Julia took him
up to her room and knelt down in front of the gas-fire.
‘I’ll light the fire again,’ she said. ‘You’d like a cup of tea, wouldn’t you? ’
He noted the ‘again’. The room was beastly cold — no fire had been lighted in it this
evening. Julia always ‘saved gas’ when she was alone. He looked at her long narrow back
as she knelt down. How grey her hair was getting! Whole locks of it were quite grey. A
little more, and it would be ‘grey hair’ tout court.
‘You like your tea strong, don’t you? ’ breathed Julia, hovering over the tea-caddy with
tender, goose-like movements.
Gordon drank his cup of tea standing up, his eye on the birchwood calendar. Out with it!
Get it over! Yet his heart almost failed him. The meanness of this hateful cadging! What
would it all tot up to, the money he had ‘borrowed’ from her in all these years?
‘I say, Julia, I’m damned sorry — I hate asking you; but look here — ’
‘Yes, Gordon? ’ she said quietly. She knew what was coming.
‘Look here, Julia, I’m damned sorry, but could you lend me five bob? ’
‘Yes, Gordon, I expect so. ’
She sought out the small, worn black leather purse that was hidden at the bottom of her
linen drawer. He knew what she was thinking. It meant less for Christmas presents. That
was the great event of her life nowadays — Christmas and the giving of presents: hunting
through the glittering streets, late at night after the teashop was shut, from one bargain
counter to another, picking out the trash that women are so curiously fond of.
Handkerchief sachets, letter racks, teapots, manicure sets, birchwood calendars with
mottoes in pokerwork. All through the year she was scraping from her wretched wages
for ‘So-and-so’s Christmas present’, or ‘So-and-so’s birthday present’. And had she not,
last Christmas, because Gordon was ‘fond of poetry’, given him the Selected Poems of
John Drinkwater in green morocco, which he had sold for half a crown? Poor Julia!
Gordon made off with his five bob as soon as he decently could. Why is it that one can’t
borrow from a rich friend and can from a half-starved relative? But one’s family, of
course, ‘don’t count’.
On the top of the bus he did mental arithmetic. Thirteen and nine in hand. Two day-
returns to Slough, five bob. Bus fares, say two bob more, seven bob. Bread and cheese
and beer at a pub, say a bob each, nine bob. Tea, eightpence each, twelve bob. A bob for
cigarettes, thirteen bob. That left ninepence for emergencies. They would manage all
right. And how about the rest of the week?
