No More Learning

‘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? Not a penny for tobacco! But he refused to let
it worry him. Today would be worth it, anyway.



Rosemary met him on time. It was one of her virtues that she was never late, and even at
this hour of the morning she was bright and debonair. She was rather nicely dressed, as
usual. She was wearing her mock-shovel hat again, because he had said he liked it. They
had the station practically to themselves. The huge grey place, littered and deserted, had a
blowsy, unwashed air, as though it were still sleeping off a Saturday night debauch. A
yawning porter in need of a shave told them the best way to get to Burnham Beeches, and
presently they were in a third-class smoker, rolling westward, and the mean wilderness of
London was opening out and giving way to narrow sooty fields dotted with ads for
Carter’s Little Liver Pills. The day was very still and warm. Gordon’s prayer had come
true. It was one of those windless days which you can hardly tell from summer. You
could feel the sun behind the mist; it would break through presently, with any luck.
Gordon and Rosemary were profoundly and rather absurdly happy. There was a sense of
wild adventure in getting out of London, with the long day in ‘the country’ stretching out
ahead of them. It was months since Rosemary and a year since Gordon had set foot in
‘the country’. They sat close together with the Sunday Times open across their knees;
they did not read it, however, but watched the fields and cows and houses and the empty
goods trucks and great sleeping factories rolling past. Both of them enjoyed the railway
journey so much that they wished it had been longer.

At Slough they got out and travelled to Farnham Common in an absurd chocolate-
coloured bus with no top. Slough was still half asleep. Rosemary remembered the way
now that they had got to Farnham Common. You walked down a rutted road and came
out on to stretches of fine, wet, tussocky grass dotted with little naked birches. The beech
woods were beyond. Not a bough or a blade was stirring. The trees stood like ghosts in
the still, misty air. Both Rosemary and Gordon exclaimed at the loveliness of everything.
The dew, the stillness, the satiny stems of the birches, the softness of the turf under your
feet! Nevertheless, at first they felt shrunken and out of place, as Londoners do when they
get outside London. Gordon felt as though he had been living underground for a long
time past. He felt etiolated and unkempt. He slipped behind Rosemary as they walked, so
that she should not see his lined, colourless face. Also, they were out of breath before
they had walked far, because they were only used to London walking, and for the first
half hour they scarcely talked. They plunged into the woods and started westward, with
not much idea of where they were making for — anywhere, so long as it was away from
London. All round them the beech-trees soared, curiously phallic with their smooth skin-



like bark and their flutings at the base. Nothing grew at their roots, but the dried leaves
were strewn so thickly that in the distance the slopes looked like folds of copper-coloured
silk. Not a soul seemed to be awake. Presently Gordon came level with Rosemary. They
walked on hand in hand, swishing through the dry coppery leaves that had drifted into the
ruts. Sometimes they came out on to stretches of road where they passed huge desolate
houses — opulent country houses, once, in the carriage days, but now deserted and
unsaleable. Down the road the mist-dimmed hedges wore that strange purplish brown, the
colour of brown madder, that naked brushwood takes on in winter. There were a few
birds about — jays, sometimes, passing between the trees with dipping flight, and
pheasants that loitered across the road with long tails trailing, almost as tame as hens, as
though knowing they were safe on Sunday. But in half an hour Gordon and Rosemary
had not passed a human being. Sleep lay upon the countryside. It was hard to believe that
they were only twenty miles out of London.

Presently they had walked themselves into trim. They had got their second wind and the
blood glowed in their veins. It was one of those days when you feel you could walk a
hundred miles if necessary. Suddenly, as they came out on to the road again, the dew all
down the hedge glittered with a diamond flash. The sun had pierced the clouds. The light
came slanting and yellow across the fields, and delicate unexpected colours sprang out in
everything, as though some giant’s child had been let loose with a new paintbox.
Rosemary caught Gordon’s arm and pulled him against her.

‘Oh, Gordon, what a LOVELY day! ’

‘Lovely. ’

‘And, oh, look, look! Look at all the rabbits in that field! ’

Sure enough, at the other end of the field, innumerable rabbits were browsing, almost like
a flock of sheep. Suddenly there was a flurry under the hedge. A rabbit had been lying
there. It leapt from its nest in the grass with a flirt of dew and dashed away down the
field, its white tail lifted. Rosemary threw herself into Gordon’s arms. It was
astonishingly warm, as wann as summer. They pressed their bodies together in a sort of
sexless rapture, like children. Here in the open air he could see the marks of time quite
clearly upon her face. She was nearly thirty, and looked it, and he was nearly thirty, and



looked more; and it mattered nothing. He pulled off the absurd flat hat. The three white
hairs gleamed on her crown. At the moment he did not wish them away. They were part
of her and therefore lovable.

‘What fun to be here alone with you! I’m so glad we came! ’

‘And, oh, Gordon, to think we’ve got all day together! And it might so easily have rained.
How lucky we are! ’

‘Yes. We’ll burn a sacrifice to the immortal gods, presently. ’

They were extravagantly happy. As they walked on they fell into absurd enthusiasms
over everything they saw: over a jay’s feather that they picked up, blue as lapis lazuli;
over a stagnant pool like a jet mirror, with boughs reflected deep down in it; over the
fungi that sprouted from the trees like monstrous horizontal ears. They discussed for a
long time what would be the best epithet to describe a beech-tree. Both agreed that
beeches look more like sentient creatures than other trees. It is because of the smoothness
of their bark, probably, and the curious limb-like way in which the boughs sprout from
the trunk. Gordon said that the little knobs on the bark were like the nipples of breasts
and that the sinuous upper boughs, with their smooth sooty skin, were like the writhing
trunks of elephants. They argued about similes and metaphors. From time to time they
quarrelled vigorously, according to their custom. Gordon began to tease her by finding
ugly similes for everything they passed. He said that the russet foliage of the hornbeams
was like the hair of Burne-Jones maidens, and that the smooth tentacles of the ivy that
wound about the trees were like the clinging arms of Dickens heroines. Once he insisted
upon destroying some mauve toadstools because he said they reminded him of a
Rackham illustration and he suspected fairies of dancing round them. Rosemary called
him a soulless pig. She waded through a bed of drifted beech leaves that rustled about
her, knee-deep, like a weightless red-gold sea.

‘Oh, Gordon, these leaves! Look at them with the sun on them! They’re like gold. They
really are like gold. ’


‘Fairy gold. You’ll be going all Barrie in another moment. As a matter of fact, if you
want an exact simile, they’re just the colour of tomato soup. ’



‘Don’t be a pig, Gordon! Listen how they rustle. “Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the
brooks in Vallombrosa. ’”

‘Or like one of those American breakfast cereals. Truweet Breakfast Crisps. “Kiddies
clamour for their Breakfast Crisps. ’”

‘You are a beast! ’

She laughed. They walked on hand in hand, swishing ankle-deep through the leaves and
declaiming:

‘Thick as the Breakfast Crisps that strow the plates
In Welwyn Garden City! ’

It was great fun. Presently they came out of the wooded area. There were plenty of people
abroad now, but not many cars if you kept away from the main roads. Sometimes they
heard church bells ringing and made detours to avoid the churchgoers. They began to
pass through straggling villages on whose outskirts pseudo-Tudor villas stood sniffishly
apart, amid their garages, their laurel shrubberies and their raw-looking lawns. And
Gordon had some fun railing against the villas and the godless civilization of which they
were part — a civilization of stockbrokers and their lip-sticked wives, of golf, whisky,
ouija-boards, and Aberdeen terriers called Jock. So they walked another four miles or so,
talking and frequently quarrelling. A few gauzy clouds were drifting across the sky, but
there was hardly a breath of wind.

They were growing rather footsore and more and more hungry. Of its own accord the
conversation began to turn upon food. Neither of them had a watch, but when they passed
through a village they saw that the pubs were open, so that it must be after twelve
o’clock. They hesitated outside a rather low-looking pub called the Bird in Hand. Gordon
was for going in; privately he reflected that in a pub like that your bread and cheese and
beer would cost you a bob at the very most. But Rosemary said that it was a nasty-
looking place, which indeed it was, and they went on, hoping to find a pleasanter pub at
the other end of the village. They had visions of a cosy bar-parlour, with an oak settle and
perhaps a stuffed pike in a glass case on the wall.



But there were no more pubs in the village, and presently they were in open country
again, with no houses in sight and not even any signposts. Gordon and Rosemary began
to be alarmed. At two the pubs would shut, and then there would be no food to be had,
except perhaps a packet of biscuits from some village sweetshop. At this thought a
ravening hunger took possession of them. They toiled exhaustedly up an enonnous hill,
hoping to find a village on the other side. There was no village, but far below a dark
green river wound, with what seemed quite like a large town scattered along its edge and
a grey bridge crossing it. They did not even know what river it was — it was the Thames,
of course.

‘Thank God! ’ said Gordon. ‘There must be plenty of pubs down there. We’d better take
the first one we can find. ’

‘Yes, do let’s. I’m starving. ’

But when they neared the town it seemed strangely quiet. Gordon wondered whether the
people were all at church or eating their Sunday dinners, until he realized that the place
was quite deserted. It was Crickham-on-Thames, one of those riverside towns which live
for the boating season and go into hibernation for the rest of the year. It straggled along
the bank for a mile or more, and it consisted entirely of boat-houses and bungalows, all of
them shut up and empty. There were no signs of life anywhere. At last, however, they
came upon a fat, aloof, red-nosed man, with a ragged moustache, sitting on a camp-stool
beside a jar of beer on the towpath. He was fishing with a twenty-foot roach pole, while
on the smooth green water two swans circled about his float, trying to steal his bait as
often as he pulled it up.

‘Can you tell us where we can get something to eat? ’ said Gordon.

The fat man seemed to have been expecting this question and to derive a sort of private
pleasure from it. He answered without looking at Gordon.

‘YOU won’t get nothing to eat. Not here you won’t,’ he said.