Pasmore Read online

  ‘Colin,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh. Marjorie,’ he said, his mood now swiftly changing.

  Two more children knelt by the chair in which, dressed in a black leather skirt and black leather boots, Marjorie was half-lounging. Neither child looked up but pored over some mechanical puzzle strewn on the floor between them. Only when kicked reproachfully by the toe of Marjorie’s swinging boot – one leg laid carelessly and revealingly over the other – did they glance up, half-startled, and frown in acknowledgement at Pasmore, failing to recognize Coles altogether before returning to their task.

  ‘Marjorie, this is Arthur Coles,’ he said, and added, ‘Arthur, this is Marjorie Newsome, a friend of Kay’s from round the corner.’

  Coles smiled. He nodded amicably at Marjorie across the room. Uncertain perhaps, for a moment, whether his introduction required a handshake, he gazed genially at her through his black-framed lenses. Then, deciding from Marjorie’s leggy indolence that no further gesture was required of him, he turned his smile once more towards the children.

  Susan pulled at his arm, tentatively, almost speculatively, shaking back her fair hair, her blue eyes moving up to Kay’s as if to measure out the significance of her action.

  Cynthia had no such awareness. She hung, literally, on his free hand, her legs curled up, her feet struggling to secure a hold on his knees. He was pulled down by her lithe, wriggling weight, jarred, and pulled down again, and she called out to him, in some odd way tormented.

  He turned to her, releasing the other girl to forestall her mood, hoisting her up with two hands, turning her over in his arms, changing the gesture finally into something of an embrace.

  Under Coles’s smiling scrutiny, however, she began to wriggle, then to kick, and, matching her despair with something of his own, Pasmore put her down. He watched helplessly as she flung herself face down in a chair, weeping. ‘Now, love,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  She buried her head in her arms.

  ‘Leave her,’ Kay said. ‘I’ll see to her.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and turned away, the boy still holding to his legs.

  He clung to him, looking up at Coles, not directly, but shyly, sideways, from beneath deep, frowning brows.

  ‘Hello, little man,’ Coles had said, bending slightly, his hands on his knees. ‘What’s your name?’

  The boy backed away, sliding behind Pasmore’s legs, waiting as he might behind a door, his eyes dark and listening.

  ‘Kenneth,’ Pasmore said to Coles with some sort of relief.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Coles said, straightening, uncertain whether to pursue his interest in the boy.

  ‘We’ll go next door,’ Pasmore said and, detaching himself from this, the last of his children, he led the way back into the passage and into the smaller room which overlooked the shadowed square.

  Unlike the varnished floor of the previous interior the floor of this room was carpeted from wall to wall. Furniture of a more slender, less robust design was arranged in spoke-like fashion around the marble fireplace. By the window stood a desk, facing onto the square, its surface occupied by a great number of books, papers, sheets and files, the majority of them arranged in neat, almost obsessively tidy piles.

  There was the sound of Coles’s voice from the room next door, then of Kay’s and Marjorie’s laughter, and a moment later Cynthia’s crying stopped. When Coles finally came in his face was flushed.

  ‘Oh, work, work, work,’ he said, clapping his hands. He gazed round at the room. ‘What have we got here?’

  He crossed over to the desk and began to glance through the papers. Some he had evidently seen before; over others he gave little sighs and groans.

  ‘When are we going to put some of this stuff together?’ he said, shifting one or two piles around.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pasmore said. As soon as Coles had disturbed one pile he set it straight. ‘I dig it all up. I don’t really know what to do with it. You’d think after all this time some sort of idea would come to mind.’

  ‘Yes,’ Coles said. He was still stooped to the desk, bowed, his elbows tucked into his sides. He looked superficially, in silhouette, like a bird of prey.

  Pasmore stepped back and gazed out of the window.

  In the square, several women with prams were collecting round the hut in the gardens. The sunlight, breaking through the leaves, lit up their figures.

  ‘The trouble is, Arthur,’ he said, ‘having established the nature of other men’s immortality, secularly speaking, I’m beginning to feel disturbed that my own will be left to or neglected by the same devices.’

  ‘I’m not too sure,’ Coles said, ‘that I know what you mean.’

  ‘I mean,’ he said, gesturing to the window, ‘how will they know, or why should they care, that I’ve treated my wife well, my children likewise, and that I’ve worked hard and conscientiously all my life?’

  ‘Well,’ Coles said, still gazing at the desk, ‘they’ll know,’ and added, looking up, ‘your wife and children.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, it’s strange. I’ve often thought about it, but now I’m beginning to worry about it, the relative anonymity, even in my work, let alone here, of everything I think most significant and precious.’

  Then, seeing Coles’s look, he turned away.

  In the square thin clouds of smoke rose from the women’s cigarettes.

  ‘What it amounts to,’ he said, ‘is that for you morality is a function of the sensibility, whereas for me, brought up in a world of working-class aphorisms, it’s a thing of fetishes and customs.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand,’ Coles said. He was gazing at him with some concern.

  ‘I come from a class of people,’ Pasmore said, ‘of which, only a hundred years ago, only one in ten survived to the age of thirty. Instincts bred from that don’t die out as quickly as you imagine.’

  Coles held out his hand, whether in gentle deprecation or not it was impossible, in one so physically uncoordinated, to tell.

  ‘The only reason I don’t lay into every woman I fancy, any woman I fancy, Arthur, is a morbid, shattering fear of what would happen if I did. A fear, Arthur, whose proportions I don’t think you can even remotely imagine.’

  The light glinted off Coles’s glasses. ‘What would happen,’ he said, ‘to whom?’ He seemed in no way surprised by this confession, turning to him, his hand held to his head.

  ‘To Kay,’ Pasmore said. ‘To her parents, to my parents, to my children . . . to tribes of people back home who see me as some God-given appeaser of all their private hysterias and doubts. It’s not me you see here, Arthur. I’m merely an appendage to a long line of stifled obsessions. The head of a caterpillar so long that if you tried to pull it out of its hole you’d be here from now until . . . well.’ He spread out his arms, gazing at Coles with his appeal. ‘The situation boils down to one thing, Arthur. How to accommodate adultery within the conventional framework of marriage.’

  Coles’s smile deepened as if the absurdity of such an assertion only deepened, for him, Pasmore’s charm.

  ‘It sounds familiar,’ Pasmore added, yet as if what he had just said, as a definition of his ailments, came as something of a surprise if not a shock. ‘No doubt in Clapham they have ways of dealing with it.’

  Coles hesitated, then said, ‘No,’ shaking his head.

  ‘I see.’ Pasmore watched his friend intently. ‘You think I should face up to myself and these things would vanish.’

  ‘Not vanish.’ Coles’s smile had disappeared.

  From the next room came the sound of the children’s voices, then of Marjorie’s and Kay’s.

  He glanced out of the window, at the group of women seated by their prams – some knitting, some smoking, the majority of them chatting – as if at tha
t moment not one of them, given the slightest encouragement, be it ever so feeble and tangential, would he have hesitated from assaulting, babies or no babies, prams or no prams, pregnant or not. The weight of his feelings crumbled his spirits. He felt absolutely downcast, glancing back at Coles now with some vague longing for revenge. It was as if in fact Coles had invited some such reaction – so perverted were those means by which, theoretically at least, people should have been able to enter and to leave his life.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally, avoiding Coles’s gaze altogether, ‘I’ll have to think that one over, mate.’

  A short while later, when Kay brought in their tea, he was packing away the various books and papers and Coles himself was preparing to leave.

  Two

  Pasmore was a big man; that is, he viewed himself as a big man, though he was one or two inches short of being six feet. He had broad shoulders and heavy legs, bowed it seemed from the weight of bone and muscle. His hair was dark, his eyes dark, too, and though this darkness gave him a somewhat melancholic look, the eyes themselves were set in a roundish, high-cheeked, even brightish face, full-lipped, almost pugnacious, with a jutting brow, his figure not unlike that of a wrestler’s tensing to a fall.

  His wife was of an altogether slighter build, fair-haired, blue-eyed, slim-featured, delicately boned; she had about her a startled, apprehensive look, the eyes bright, gleaming, like those of an animal peering from its burrow. About them both, at first sight, there was a feeling of self-division.

  Pasmore was almost thirty. His wife was two years younger. They had met at college and had married one year later after Pasmore was finally settled in his job. The area in which they had chosen to live had previously been occupied by working-class families. The houses themselves had been quite small, formless, almost without shape. Now most of them had been restored. White, gleaming fronts confronted each other across narrow streets, or, in the case of the square, overlooked the cultivated patch of the central gardens. The sun shone most frequently into the rear windows of the house, into the large living area and the tiny garden, and into the Pasmores’ bedroom on the floor above. At the front the two small rooms given over to the children looked out directly to the massive, coiling branches of the plane trees which stood like columns around the perimeter of the narrow square.

  From the roof of the house – which, in the past, Pasmore had spent much of his spare time renovating – it was possible to see the roofs of the college buildings clustered amongst those of Bloomsbury below, and, further off, in the evening, the lights which lit up the sky in an orange sheen above the West End.

  They had lived in the house for several years. In it, for most of that time, they had both been happy; in it their children had been born, in it they had celebrated their successes and consoled each other over their various defeats: only recently, it seemed, had anything gone wrong.

  For some time – for longer, in fact, than he cared to remember – Pasmore had been troubled by his dreams; and of all his dreams, by one in particular. He was running in a race, not unlike those races he had run, stoically though with no great enterprise, at school, when he had begun to be overtaken not merely by the runners but by all those idlers and dullards who jogged, or even walked along at the rear. Quite soon, despite all his efforts, he’d been left behind; each time he woke up with a sense of terror.

  Kay herself could see nothing frightening in the dream at all. ‘But it’s not just the feeling,’ he told her, ‘of being passed that I find so awful, so much as the feeling that, despite being last, I don’t want the race itself to finish. I know it sounds ridiculous. And I suppose in a sense it can even be explained. But what I can’t understand, despite the triviality of the dream, is its undiminishing sense of terror.’

  Then, invariably, seeing her expression, he would laugh at his own misgivings and turn away.

  Of only one thing in his life had he ever been ashamed – at least to the extent of admitting it to himself – and that was his job. He had continued at college, as a teacher, principally to prolong a situation he was used to, in which no definite decisions had to be taken, and in which, initially, he had further time to think things over and decide what he really wanted to do. From the age of five his life had been spent in one educational institution after another, dourly and stubbornly at first – his parents, as he’d indicated to Coles, were relatively poor and his work had been his only credential – then more pleasantly and triumphantly later when his efforts, in one sinecure or another, had begun to pay off. Now, however, he was coming to a point where he’d begun to sense that all his efforts had been in vain. He had applied for a fellowship – and much to his surprise had been awarded it – and had, somewhat belatedly, begun to write a book – his subject was the lives of certain evangelical idealists who had lived in the industrial north of England in the early part of the nineteenth century, a part of the country, if not a temperament, with which from childhood he had been familiar – and yet, before either of these events could in any sense be said to have been consolidated he had begun to realize that the missing elements of his existence were not to be identified in any of these terms, either of his work, that is, or of his private life. Where else he could look, and for what, he had no idea.

  He had few friends. In fact, when he looked round and tried to imagine what real friendship must be like, he decided he had no friends at all. ‘Look, no friends’, was a qualification of his independence, as well as an expression of a certain inalienable right to feel that, in their hearts, no one really knew him at all. He had been, and still was, a good and faithful husband; he had been, as it happened, a good and faithful teacher – and to his parents, still living, a good and certainly faithful son. Where had all this faith and goodness got him? It was as if the tenets by which life had been judged and settled in the past had melted into nothing. Was history – was life itself – really in such a mess?

  One of his difficulties was that the strength of his constitution worked so robustly against his obsessions. He was, he knew, a secure person. He encountered all the hazards of life from a firm sense of his own and other people’s reality. It was this which, in his own life, had created such a curious paradox; for it seemed to him that because of this security, this innate sense of the reliability of natural processes, their substantiality and permanence, he was excluded from much if not all the relevant and meaningful experiences of his time. Here he was, set down in – of all things – an era of disintegration, a period in which there was a complete disruption of those processes which in him were (as far as he could tell) so wholesomely integrated. Almost furtively, and with decreasing resistance, he had begun to see how everything that was good in his life, his peace of mind, his modesty, his reliability, his self-effacement, even his sense of achievement, was irrelevant to the kind of life which he felt obliged to live. How meaningful was his existence if he could not transpose himself into the world of individuals whose experience, patently, all around him, was lacking in those self-validating certainties which made up all he knew of himself as an individual?

  He was reluctant – driven to the other extreme – to measure out his world in deficiencies: deficiencies prejudicial, that is, to his moral well-being. He could, as many had, decide that his times were empty of the real food of his aspirations – hopeless, viewless, helpless, lacking that centre of credibility from which, at one time, all things had seemed to stem and to which all things had returned. To have accepted and believed all this would have left him on the side of those people he despised most; those who, amongst other things, looked to the past – or even the future – for the reassurance lacking in the present. He had to be content, it seemed, with a certain pride, if not a certain degree of self-pity, his consolation coming from feeling extraneous, self-tortured, lonely and confused.

  As the last days of the summer term passed, he began to regret having confided in Coles. He watched his friend go away
on holiday – he was taking his family, his wife and two children, camping as he did each year – without, relatively, another word having passed between them. He couldn’t help but feel betrayed.

  Left on his own over the summer months he began to suspect – it was nothing unusual: the very conventionality of the idea, in one sense, predisposed him towards it – that he was going insane. It affected everything around him. He found, for one thing, he was unable to touch his wife. It was odd; he felt neither repelled nor attracted by Kay; it was an inability to touch her, as simple as that; so that at times, lying in bed, she would – under what circumstances could he have revealed it to Coles? – begin to stroke herself in those places reserved, he had thought, solely for his caresses; stroking herself, that is, despairingly, reproachfully, until, provoking some cry of agitation from him, she would say, ‘If you don’t, somebody’s got to,’ drawing her head away with a kind of disgust, completely distracted, her voice so unlike Kay’s, her actions for that matter so unlike Kay’s, that he scarcely recognized her. ‘Why won’t you? Why won’t you?’ she would ask.

  Although it didn’t happen very often he worried about it a great deal. The more he worried about it the more uncommunicative he became. Like Kay herself, though reflective even introspective by nature, he wasn’t a person given by temperament to self-enquiry. His natural tendency, once his capacity for hard work was exhausted, was to wait and see. Even now he couldn’t help but think that, whatever his present circumstances, the outcome would inevitably be for the good. The gloom was only there to emphasize the light. He only thought he was going mad during those moments when his distractions could find no other relief.