Goodbye, Mr Dixon Read online

  She had been going on and on about his being a punk writer and an impossible egotist, and he had said, “Go to hell.” One thing about him, he didn’t have illusions. He knew that he was not yet a great writer but he would perhaps become a great writer, though not with her. He knew that clearly now. He simply didn’t like her. She was always interrupting him, she was always needing attention. She was always going on about things, trivial little things, stupid things. He needed someone else, someone younger, he needed someone who would give him peace. He needed someone who wasn’t always competing with him. He thought, what a stupid bitch she really is.

  There was snow on her coat and it was melting in the heat of the electric fire. He needed a fire all the time and the two bars were on. On the floor were little balls of discarded paper, rolled up pages. He looked at his typewriter. It was old and battered. He didn’t like new things. He thought, I have never compromised in anything, certainly not in my writing. I should never have married this one.

  Now she was saying something about his unsatisfactory sex life. He was thinking quite coldly, how much money have I got in the bank? He knew that he had ten thousand pounds or so, most of it from a film which had been made of one of his books, called Double Vision though the title of the book was Doppelganger. He was wondering, can I leave this apartment? She can have it. I’ve had enough. Thank God we don’t have any children. That moment was the decisive moment of his life. She had stopped talking as if she knew this. She was looking at him with parted lips. He thought, she has become becalmed. He thought, I shall smash her beautiful face. I shall go out into the storm. An orphan of the storm. He smiled grimly. He was quite handsome when he smiled like that. He said, “I’m leaving.” And at that moment he knew he must go, this was his last chance. If he didn’t go now he would never go. He took the paper out of his typewriter, closed the lid, and putting on a heavy warm coat left the house while all the time she gazed at him in astonishment, in complete silence. He walked across the snow knowing that she was watching him from the window. He was always conscious of other people watching him. He didn’t wave, he didn’t look back. He wasn’t at all angry, only resolved. He thought of the scene as something he might use in a future book. He caught a bus because he didn’t have a car. He didn’t know where he was going but he thought that he ought to get some peace somewhere. He deserved it. He deserved some happiness, he thought to himself. I shall send for some of my books, he thought, when she isn’t in. And he calmly and quite objectively considered what he had done, feeling quite cold, having come out of the warmth. He felt the cold intensely. As if he had left a cocoon. And yet he looked forward to being alone. Perhaps he could finish the book if he was left alone. Perhaps.

  3

  AS TOM WALKED along the street he was wondering how Dixon was getting on in his flat. Better to give him a slum—he himself had once lived in a slum—but a slum wouldn’t suit Dixon at all. When he himself had lived in a slum (now demolished) there lived above him a Protestant who, in the intervals of working as a fitter, would go out and shout insults at any Catholic he could find. Every Friday and Saturday night he would stagger home with blue stains under his eyes, beat up his wife (so that he, Tom, couldn’t get to sleep for the noise of crashing chairs) and on the Sunday morning would emerge airily in his blue suit to go and buy the papers and read up on the sport. Also in the same tenement there lived a woman originally from Donegal who had pictures of the Virgin Mary on the walls as well as one of someone called Emmett. Every summer she would set off with her asthmatic husband to Ireland where the grass was very green and people still rode about in carts and they would return punctually after a fortnight for him to go to work in the distillery again. On her mantelpiece she had a painted cardboard structure showing Christ with a crown of thorns mocked by squat Jews who had the well-fed air of prosperous Protestants.

  No, such an environment would be unsuitable for Dixon. Better would be a large, airy flat which would have large windows looking on to a lake of swans so that he would think of Yeats. In the evening he would stroll gently there, talking to nice people who owned dogs and lawnmowers and watched a lot of TV.

  But the problem still remained. How was Dixon to meet his new love, the one who would save him from himself and allow him the peace and silence necessary for the completion of his “great work”? Tom thought of this as he walked along, at the same time taking in his surroundings which weren’t at all pretty. There were walls of tenements with worn ads stripped away, there were closes with flaked paint (usually green), there were men going past with paper bags which presumably contained cans of beer and bottles of whisky. There were little shops where they sold pornography and second-hand detective stories side by side with dairies which sold rotten-looking vegetables in open window boxes. How did these places survive, all these little dingy shops that blossomed briefly and faded, and were eventually transferred to other hopeful newcomers who stayed up all night doing the accounts and making sure that the tomatoes and oranges and Victory V’s had come in? A living illustration of Darwin, shopkeepers; puny and dull, fighting each other to death in a warren of underground shops. He passed a window which advertised the most interesting range of sexual positions, and oral sex. A boy was standing at one corner selling newspapers, now and again clapping his hands and whistling through his teeth.

  The Art Gallery, naturally. That was where Dixon might meet such a girl. Or a select poetry reading. No, that would be no good. Poetry readings were ridiculous. He couldn’t bring himself to attend one of them even for the sake of his novel, all these little concrete poems read by hairy illiterate people with massive egos. Good God, imagine it. Once there had been a Homer and now there existed a being who had written a book called The Pink Aquarium or edited a magazine called Squeeze. How could the classical sun have descended so low in the sky? No, an Art Gallery was the best place surely. There one might meet such a person, a girl who was lonely and who yet had a respect for Art, who was not odd or ludicrous but who had not yet met the person she might love. Yes, surely the Art Gallery. And he knew for a fact that Dixon was exactly the sort of person who would visit an Art Gallery, never, however, the cinema. Dixon despised the cinema and TV. Tom himself didn’t. He loved the cinema, and remembered those poky ones down side streets which he used to visit many years ago, where old men paraded up and down shushing the children at the matinees and spraying disinfectant impartially over the old and the young, the clean and the unclean. Ah, those stiff-lipped prepackaged English lieutenants, eternal boys of the imperial sunlight, saying Bung Ho and things like that, before they raced up to their planes whose propellers were turning on small airfields: adjusting their goggles before ascending into the blue to save their mothers, uncles, aunts from a fate worse than death, protecting the English seaside and the fat women in large red bloomers: saying goodbye to their sweethearts in a corona of blue lamps, and saying Sir to their fathers who were often professors or ex-colonels.

  The Art Gallery, that was it. Dixon would go to the Art Gallery because in those canvases everything was fixed, art gave the illusion of permanence and privacy, it did not flash off and on like neon lighting and was not seen in the half-formed names of shops or on the backs of cornflake packets and soup tins. Yes, the Art Gallery would be an idea. He would surely meet her there, strolling about, peering at her catalogue, standing back and studying as if with an invisible lorgnette those pictures framed in permanence, sitting now and again on the sofa provided, tired out by the reds and greens and blues.

  He turned on his heel and began walking away from the rotten tenements and steadily as he walked he approached the better part of the city. The brown stone was replaced by grey, the windows bulged outwards and weren’t cracked, there were lawns and gardens where there had been nothing but pavements, the streets widened and there were trees. Surely Dixon would like this part of the city. Indubitably. He wouldn’t live in the tenements—their noise and heat and glare and intimacy—but here he could live. There would be sp
ace for him, space for his imagination to expand in an orderly manner. Here he could find something Georgian in the architecture, a fineness and neatness and solidity and spaciousness that he wouldn’t find in the city centre. Here he would be able to breathe. Here there would be tenements with clean well-lighted stairs and rooms with high ceilings. Here there would be children’s bedrooms with toys and fairy stories and books ranging from Enid Blyton to Emily Brontë. Here the children would sleep long with their dolls and teddy bears clutched safely in their hands, knowing that their parents would come when they called, that the light was still burning, that the giants on the stairs could not survive parental disapproval.

  As a matter of fact Tom himself did sometimes visit the Art Gallery, especially on a Sunday when there was nothing else that one could visit and he didn’t have enough money to drink. He didn’t, however, care much for Art Galleries though he believed that Dixon did: he believed that Dixon loved Art Galleries with a pure love that knew no fatigue, he believed that Dixon listened with ravishment to the Third Programme, and he believed that it was right of Dixon so to do. After all, surely it was better to love Beethoven than to love Bob Dylan (there really did seem so much difference between them): it proved that you did have a finer mind, that you were in touch with a great culture, that you were a more complex and worthwhile being. He felt that this was absolutely true, he felt that his own fatigue when he listened to classical music was a flaw in himself and not in the music, he did genuinely feel this. He felt that the world was full of better people than himself, who would listen to music like that or study paintings with minds as clear as windows.

  But he didn’t like Art Galleries. He found them dull and monstrous vaults, his body ached after he had been walking about them for a while, there were too many paintings and they were too different, and he didn’t know what to look for in them. He felt that he ought to like them but he didn’t. He felt that they might be trying to say something to him, but he didn’t know what, and this angered him as one might be angered eventually by a long argument with someone who did not see what one was getting at. He felt that the sculptures—the Davids and the rest—were momentous and monumental and weighty, but they usually left him cold and stony and he disliked himself for that. He felt he ought to like Michelangelo and da Vinci but he didn’t, they were too huge, too distant, too weird. They seemed to be speaking to beings who had long since passed away, who had lived noble, dignified lives, aristocratic people, edged and spiked with hauteur.

  He stood at the door for a moment looking up at the steps, and was reminded of Eisenstein, a profile of whom he had recently seen on TV. Now there was somebody: he could identify with him. He climbed the steps slowly. Sitting at a table in the foyer or hall or whatever, there was a woman with a mouth like the opening in a Barnardo’s box, unsmiling and dour. He didn’t buy a catalogue but walked in. The woman had looked at his khaki coat disapprovingly as if she thought he were some kind of refugee from Central Europe who ought not to be allowed into her calm halls. She had probably thought he was some kind of tramp. He hated her for this because she was such a stupid woman (he was convinced of this; otherwise why should she be there doing such a silly boring job?). He hated her because clearly she was easily deceived by appearances. She had dismissed him, he felt, without knowing what he was really like.

  He climbed some more steps and stood in the main body of the hall. He glanced at a tall thin spindly structure to his left. He didn’t have a clue what it was meant to be and toyed with some titles such as “Match in Urinal” or “Fasting Rocket”. He stalked around it, wondering whether the bit at the top was supposed to be an attenuated head or a stone berry. Perhaps the whole thing was a stone tree, something heavily symbolic anyway. Dixon wouldn’t have liked it. He didn’t like it himself for different reasons. He passed it and studied an owl constructed out of a rusty piece of wood. Two youths with wire limbs embraced each other. On the wall there was another painting which showed a lilac room and sitting on the floor in front of a long mirror either a chimpanzee or an ape. One picture in particular fascinated him. It showed a small shadow in the foreground and another larger one behind it as if it were tracking it and were about to devour it. The shadows both had jagged outlines like black stars. He looked past the larger one to see if there was another one but there wasn’t and this made him uneasy if not disappointed. The pursuing shadow was menacing and smug at the same time: he wondered if the smaller shadow was meant to be aware of the existence of the larger one, but couldn’t make up his mind whether it was or not. He looked at an assortment of other paintings—one which showed a man standing with a book in his hand while behind him there brooded an image which appeared to represent Death—but always he came back to the shadows.

  There was no one in the room except himself and a young man with a wispy beard who was sitting staring at a painting of velvety reds and greens: it looked like a MacTaggart, there was a deep dazzling shine about it such as one gets in stained glass windows. For the rest, there were the usual boats and hills and seas and professors and ministers and the artist’s daughter and/or wife and/or dog.

  After a while he left the room he was in and took a stroll round the museum which was also part of the gallery. There were replicas of ships and steam engines and boilers: there were ships becalmed in bottles, their tiny sails set for whatever stationary destinations they were headed for.

  And in one section there were glass fossils, old stones, fish and coins. He studied some of the shellfish and read what was written below them, he had a look at the coins, some small and beaten and grey. And it was then that he saw her.

  She was standing by a glass case staring down at one of the stones, a large grey stone such as one might find down at the seashore. And for a moment as he stood there—she was unaware of him—he imagined a timeless shore on which she was standing looking out over the briny water as if fixed in another time, far earlier than the present. Her face was quite pale and thin, she wore a brown coat with a brown hood drawn over her head. She was quite slim and she seemed to have been standing there for a long time. She wasn’t beautiful at all, she merely looked thoughtful and distant and vulnerable. It was difficult to say what she was thinking of as she stared at the stone. Slung over her arm was a brown handbag the colour of her coat. Her eyes he couldn’t see but he imagined that they were also brown. She looked about twenty-six but her figure was girlish and exquisitely defenceless.

  “They’re quite old,” he said casually as he stood beside her.

  “Yes,” she said in a slightly startled way as if she were emerging out of a dream. “Yes, they’re old and beautiful.”

  He wondered what Dixon would have said at that particular moment to retain her interest and keep her talking.

  He said, “They look quite blank.”

  “Yes,” she said with some animation, “that is exactly how they look, quite blank.”

  “Do you visit museums often?” he said carefully. “I must say that I find them interesting myself. Lots of people don’t bother.” He thought his voice sounded priggish, a bit like Dixon, with the implication that he himself was slightly superior to other people. He found it hard to say anything that didn’t sound artificial, as if the words would hang in the air after he had spoken them.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes on a Sunday. But I must be …” She looked quickly at a very small silvery wristwatch and turned away. He could not think of anything at all to say which would hold her there. It was galling to see her go when his book needed her but he wasn’t quick-thinking enough to make smart or chatty conversation.

  Dixon needed her: why couldn’t he think of something to say? Dixon might show off his knowledge of stones (Dixon had read such a lot) but neither Dixon nor he could think of anything. He stood there tongue-tied watching her go out the door.

  “Goodbye,” she said in a fluttery manner. He noticed that the ringlets of hair below the hood were brown and that the inside of the hood was of some whitish
stuff, probably angora.

  “Bugger it,” he thought, as he saw her leaving. “Dixon’s on his own now.” His first attempt hadn’t been very successful. But then Dixon was a bit inhibited: that was why he had left his wife, or his wife had left him. He wondered if Dixon would believe in fate, in the stars, and decided that he wouldn’t. Well, Dixon would have to stay for a bit longer in his flat and do without her; perhaps someone else would turn up. He went down the steps staring at the woman with hatred. There was no sign of the girl. Perhaps she had a car, though he couldn’t remember hearing one leave. He felt suddenly desolated and angry with Dixon for being so stupid. Now he wouldn’t be able to proceed with his book.

  He walked along the street between the trees as if he expected the girl to appear at the end of the avenue like Garbo departing to a discreet music at the end of a film. “Damn, damn, damn,” he muttered. He looked up at the windows as if he could see Dixon waiting there. Perhaps Dixon was blaming him for not getting the girl. He could imagine Dixon turning away from his book and lighting another cigarette. It would be a boring evening for him as well. He felt in a strange way responsible for Dixon. He turned into a pub and ordered a lager. He would have to be careful as he didn’t want to spend too much of his saved money. He reckoned he had enough to live on for about three months. Gathering the long skirts of his khaki coat about him he sat down in a corner by himself and watched dispiritedly the antics of a third-rate comedian on the coloured TV. The colours seemed garish and vulgar after the paintings he had seen, and he was reminded that Dixon wouldn’t possibly come to such a pub to drink: he wondered if in fact there was any pub in the area which Dixon would patronise, outside the lounges of hotels. Damn him, anyway, why hadn’t he been able to say anything interesting to the girl? For some reason her thin pale face rising out of the collar of the brown coat and surmounted by the hood haunted him. He might even have taken her to the pictures if it had been up to him.