My Last Duchess Read online

  “Which one is that?”

  “The Rotary. They seem to have been greatly impressed by my talk. I had a nice little note from one of them. The trouble is I can’t read the signature.”

  “Send it to the President then and explain the circumstances. He will understand.”

  “And I have another engagement booked in my diary for the following day. So the old man isn’t doing so badly.”

  All this time Mark regarded the son with what might have been envy or hatred. Who are these guiltless people, he wondered, what sinless world, cold as stainless steel, have they emerged from, fully formed? They speak with conviction of the profoundest matters and what they do not speak of they consider unimportant. They have abolished or never known the past. They hum about their work like air conditioners. They believe in nothing but the adamant of themselves and yet apparently this is enough. Expecting without rancour that everyone is out to cut their throats, they get the knife in first. They are the Fortinbrases of our civilization, the clinical men who hold the cold apple in their hands and who pay a passing public homage to the antique star of an autumnal Hamlet, in the grip of its cloudy obsession. Themselves incapable of feeling, they will change from one position to another without guilt or qualm, for principles are quicksilver and obsolete. Without thinking about it, Mark said:

  “Tell me, if it were suddenly laid down as a condition for professional men that they should wear their hair long, would they do so?”

  He was thinking of a young boy he had seen the night before in a pub, whose body was like a tulip, the waist narrow, the head surmounted by a bulbous halo of yellow hair, thick and deep like a pelt.

  There was a silence in which for the first time he heard an old grandfather clock ticking. But of course his error lay in thinking that people like the son were shakeable. No, such a question rising out of despair like a snake out of its pit had merely made him more interesting and more worth analysis.

  “It would depend, I suppose,” said the son thoughtfully, “on whether such a demand were consciously accepted and had an apparent justification. Yes, I suppose they would wear their hair long. After all, they wear strange gowns and hoods and were expected at certain times to discourse in Latin. What do you think, Father?”

  For the first time Frith seemed to be looking at Mark with some comprehension as if he had heard in the voice the faintest vibration of pain.

  “I think,” he said, “if they were asked to kneel in front of a stone statue of the Buddha in order to gain their certificates they would do so, but they would justify it.”

  Mark, turning the ring over and over in his hand, was still watching the son who had apparently dismissed the question from his lovely and unclouded conscience, for he had begun to say:

  “Hilda was saying that you have been sent a translation of one of your books into Finnish. Is that right? That’s something new, surely.”

  “Yes, quite new. But another strange thing happened this week as well. Apparently Jerry—do you remember Jerry Dalgleish?—is in town again.”

  “I thought he was in Nigeria.”

  “No, he’s back. They didn’t like his writings over there either. Of all things, he wants me to write an introduction to that biography he’s been working on now for the last fifteen years. He says he’s finished it. Some obscure publisher has agreed to do it. What do you think I should do?”

  “Oh, don’t do it of course if you don’t want to.”

  “But he’s in pretty low straits and he’s depending on this …”

  “In that case … Still, would it do your reputation any good?”

  “I don’t think it would do it any harm. No-one’s likely to read the book anyway.”

  “Well, do it then. He may not get it published anyway. By the way, I was speaking to a great admirer of yours the other day.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “The father of one of my pupils. He said he was standing beside you in a pub once and you, not of course knowing him, proceeded to give him a long discourse on Hemingway. He thought it very charming of you and says he learnt a lot. I wish some of the knowledge could be rubbed off on his son.”

  “How extraordinary. And I can’t even remember it. I find I can hardly remember anything that happened to me after the age of thirty. Isn’t that odd?” he said to Mark. “I was reading an article the other day in which the writer maintained that my later work is much better than my earlier.”

  “I am sure Mr. Simmons agrees,” said the son negligently.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh, why not?”

  Mark was about to elaborate when he realised that the son did not care one way or another, but that his mind—which never forgot anything, he was sure—would have assembled from various periodicals and scattered lectures enough facts to maintain an obtuse and ultimately barren argument in which neither could communicate with the other. So he said nothing.

  At that moment Hilda came to the door, glancing at him casually as if to say, “Are you still here?” She said, “I’m going down to the shops for some meat. Can I take your car?” she said to the son.

  “Of course.”

  “And bring back a bottle of whisky,” said her husband gaily. She ignored him as if she had heard that pleasantry many times before and then said to the son:

  “By the way, I see that friend of yours writing in the Spectator again.”

  “Oh you mean Maitland. Yes, he’s doing quite well.”

  “I suppose he finds English education quite different,” said his father. “When I was young there was no nonsense. The only streams we ever knew anything about were streams of piss.”

  The vulgarity, delivered casually in the cosy amber-coloured room, by the small toylike man, was as shocking to Mark as if the small leaded window had been shattered by a stone, but Hilda only laughed and pulled the door to and Mark could hear her walking over the frosty ground to the car.

  He began to think of leaving but as so often happened with him found it difficult to stand up and actually go. The vagueness of his pretext for being there—an open-mouthed adoring consultation of the oracle, the expectation of a monologue dense with wisdom and knowledge of life—made his departure so much harder to accomplish as if he felt that perhaps there was even yet a faint chance of communication beyond the parochial chit-chat to which he had been listening. He had wanted the novelist to talk about that early novel—which constituted in fact the only indisputably great work he had ever accomplished both by the intensity of the feeling and the bravura of the imagery—but as he was apparently no longer the man who had written it, no longer the man able to listen unafraid to the voices from another world which commemorated the wife both hated and loved, there was little point in staying. But, before he could leave, the son had said:

  “And how are your rabbits getting on these days?”

  “Oh fine, fine. Beautifully. I did write a note to thank Lena for them. The boys will be over to see them again soon.”

  “Yes,” said the old man suddenly. “I must say that I agree with that writer. My later work is better, and shall I tell you why? Because I am in control of it. And that is as good a reason as any. Not to be in control is bad. In my early work I wrote about ghosts that did not exist. I know why you’ve come,” he said to Mark, “you want me to go over and over that agony. Well, I won’t. Not for you and not for anyone else. I regret ever publishing that book. Bitterly. It’s a psychological document, not a novel.”

  He pointed his finger at Mark. “That’s why you came, isn’t it? I’m no fool and I have a life to live. You go on living yours. That’s your job.”

  The son looked from one to the other in an amused detached way. “I don’t know what all this is supposed to be about but I do know that you are supposed to take your tablets at about this time, aren’t you?”

  The little old man smiled delightedly and said:

  “I’d hoped you would have forgotten. But then you’re used to timetables and shit like that.”


  The son went to another room and returned with some tablets and a tumbler of water.

  “Come on now. Knock them down. You want to live for another twenty years, don’t you?”

  “Certainly I want to live. Who doesn’t? Even rats want to live.” As he was about to swallow them he said, “You know, a dream keeps coming back to me. I’m sitting on the upper deck of a tram and there are leaves trailing down the window. We’re going down an avenue, you see. And the tram is all glass like your schools and politicians’ heads. And I’m sitting up there by myself wearing shorts and some kind of chain. There doesn’t seem to be anyone on the tram—not even a conductor—and yet I’ve got a ticket. Anyway, we’re driving along—there are no rails either—and I see ahead of me a small statue crowned in flowers. Only this side of it there’s this girl who’s turning up her bottom at me in a mocking sort of way. I’m sure it must have some deep meaning.”

  Mark levered himself to his feet, like a rusty cannon, tightening his belt on his coat as he did so.

  “Must be going now,” he mumbled.

  Four eyes like torches glared at him. He felt himself subsumed in their different intelligences.

  “Pleased to have met you,” he mumbled.

  The son politely accompanied him to the door, watching him as he trudged along to the bus-stop. Mark then heard the door being shut behind him though he did not turn round to see.

  Through the waste gloomy day the bus plodded on, Mark sitting in a front seat, his hands deep in his tweedy pockets, pulling his coat tight about him. They passed cottages at which long-skirted women stood waving: they headed towards a sun the colour of rum straddling the road. Nothing leaped out at him. There was merely leather (on which he sat), conversation (which he half overheard), the held picture of the novelist and son in a light the colour of brandy, a Dutch house clean and neat and caged.

  His gaze rested on the driver’s massive head fixed to the hairy red neck, like a stone ball one sometimes sees perched on top of a gatepost. He thought of him driving day after day, night after night, very stiff, very upright, consistently making allowances for the crazy little drivers he saw below him careering hither and thither. Lorna could drive, crazily too, lovably clumsy, capable of breaking cup after cup. The driver, large and still, was responsible for them all, never perhaps even thinking about it, as was fitting.

  “I have nowhere to go,” some voice was saying deep within him and he listened to it as a radio astronomer might listen to the single piercing note—enough to vibrate glass—from outer space, telling of a distant star not visible to the naked eye and taken on trust. In his mind he turned the statement over and over—starry like a broken window—like a jeweller examining a stone. There had been Lorna and then before that there had been his parents and now there was nothing but the statement, “I have nowhere to go.” He felt much as an astronaut might feel, spinning crazily about the cabin of his ship headed for the moon or Mars, disoriented, head and body pointed in no particular direction that one could name in the depths of space.

  Open space now began to be filled with blocks of buildings—a hospital, a school, a block of flats—the beginnings of the city. Orange street lamps with flat viperish heads illuminated the roadway studying their own haloes. People laden with packages scurried across the road, and women in hoods entered and left the bus. He thought vaguely and without interest of the Christmas Cards which were sure to be lying in the lobby of the house. For a moment his mind blacked out and he thought of what he should buy for Lorna. His eyes smarted but remained dry: he locked his teeth together. By now the novelist and his son—a title to remind one of Dickens: why Dickens? Was it because of the Christmas associations and the sprig of holly he had seen lying on top of a magazine in the house?—would be immersed in their chatter. Why had he gone to visit Frith at all? It had been an action he could not rationally construe except of course for those months spent on the unfinished book about him, unfinished like the long labour of the man—Dalgleish, was it?—from Nigeria. He was shaken by a pain which started in his stomach and spread all round him, a real pain, a feeling at the same time of being dissociated and floating in space.

  The novelist—great untidy star—had hatched a star purer and colder than himself, casting the light of education with controlled discrimination all over the cold earth.

  That early novel of his where he had once walked with the blue light rushing from the abyss at his feet, these passages about a woman, careful of each emotion and measuring them out in doses, belonged to another man whose body was now immune to the onset of ghosts or passions.

  “What price my lecturing now?” he thought. “What price my Eliot and my Dante? Little Simmons, centre of the cosmic universe, what price your Eliot now?”

  He stumbled out of the bus and began to walk. The snow glared back at him as he walked, collar hunched up, into the keen wind, passing at a corner a group of students in long blue scarves gathered round a brazier and a large notice which told the literate world—burdened under its Christmas parcels—that they were on a forty-eight hour fast for Biafra. Their drama—inside which they themselves huddled: would they at the end of the forty-eight hours have a good large dinner in a good large warm restaurant and then go home to sleep together, perhaps in a good large warm bed?—meant nothing to him, or rather they seemed, like everyone else, to be acting out a public part which had no relation to anything his mind could seriously fasten on. He walked past them without stopping, a hunched up forty-two year old with scuffy brown shoes and a brown hat and a face beaten against by the bitter wind.

  The snow reflected an eerie glow such as one might find on the surface of a planet immune to life, its whiteness emerging without pretext from the night, unlike any other whiteness that one could conceive of, unlike for instance the whiteness of cotton or wool or Rinso or the foam of waves, inhuman, unable to be made use of, merely a visitation that, as queer as manna, dropped out of the sky. “A journey and such a long journey.” He felt the desire to urinate just as he saw an arrow pointing to a Gents which was at the foot of a flight of slippery steps. He descended—letting his body go—and entered the place all white and marbly and lit with a garish light. He looked at his face in a mirror and tried to adjust his scarf for the tenth time, feeling Lorna’s phantom hands on it and screwing his face up tight. He weighed himself on the weighing machine, digging down to the lining for a threepenny bit. Ten stone and, “YOU SHOULD TAKE RISKS THIS WEEKEND. YOUR LOVE LIFE WILL GO WELL”. The lavatory offered a brush-up service and he found a small hunched monosyllabic man with a pail and mop.

  “Sixpence for a brush-up,” said the man morosely as if it wasn’t quite the right thing for people to be taking brush-ups in lavatories at all, rather like cleaning women who get angry if there is anything to clean. Mark, raked by contempt, pulled the door shut behind him, removed his hat and coat and, sticking a paper towel down behind his jersey, began to shave, having taken from his bulging pocket the shaving bag with its brush, palmolive shaving cream, and green topped capsule of styptic. The small room he was in looked inhuman and dead like a fish-shop—he half expected to see the dead cold eye of a cod on a slab—a refuge for whiskery and whiskied men and he was suddenly frightened as if the steps by which he had descended were symbolic of another descent. “I am forty-two,” he thought, “what is there left for me?” Up until now he had not felt forty-two: in fact he couldn’t think what age he must have felt, perhaps an eternal nineteen as he was in that picture which hung in the kitchen showing him with bright ready eyes, wavy brown hair, a matching striped scarf and tie, and a smile which slightly inflated the cheeks. That had been taken in his student days when he would write flippant notes on the backs of photographs like “a distant relation of Darwin”. Then there had been the photograph with the two girls—one dark and one blonde—who sat placidly, hands on laps at the front, while he and David, now an engineer, stood behind, hands resting lightly on the girls’ shoulders.

  He washed in the warm w
ater and arranged his clothes again. He gave the man sixpence, and again felt, deep within, shaken by desolate tremors. The surly caretaker hardly spoke when Mark offered him the placatory news that it was a cold night outside as if the payment of the sixpence were not in itself enough. He merely grunted and carried his pail another few feet along. Mark entered the cold air again. He had no idea where he was going: all places were of equal value and therefore valueless. The red lights of cinemas flashed on and off all round him, and off to his right he saw the fairy castle tenderly illuminated and appearing like a large ghost in the white light. What Mark wanted above all was a warm place where he could sit and not actually freeze and when he came to a large theatre he entered it as the wind might enter a close.

  He sat in his seat—one of the very few occupied ones on the balcony—and stared, flinty-faced, into the arena below him, curtained as yet, since the precise time for beginning the show had not arrived. Most of the time he shivered uninterruptedly, now and again gazing with lacklustre eyes and a face that seemed polished by the cold at the little plaster angels in the corners of the roof, all blowing their plaster trumpets. The encounter in the lavatory had upset him. He imagined the Welfare State as a cosy bubble out of which he was being slowly squeezed like toothpaste out of a tube. He thought of the whiskery men he had seen in reading rooms here and there huddled in their large trailing coats, turning over page after page but reading nothing.

  Eventually, as he gazed, a microphone appeared in front of the curtain and the comic, in maxi coat, flat cap on head, danced out of the left wing of the stage.

  “Nice shed you got here,” he said and there was approving laughter, the audience wishing to show that they were not provincial enough to be offended.

  “Listen,” he said urgently, “I flew here. I flew here. My arms are sore yet. But, listen, there was this wain running up and down the corridor of the plane, the corridor of the plane, this wee wain, and I said to him, ‘Sonny, why don’t you go outside and play?’ That’s better. You’re paying for it. Might as well enjoy it. Might as well lean back and enjoy it as the bishop said to the actress. It’s better than being at home with the kids. Listen, this’ll slay you. Last night I told the wife I was coming here today, I said to her, ‘I’m going to the North Pole tomorrow,’ I told the wife that and I said to her, ‘I’d like toast and tea and a boiled egg. Don’t forget,’ I said to her, ‘toast and tea and a boiled egg.’ Well this morning, sure enough, she came in with the toast. Then she went out and a few minutes later she came back with the boiled egg. So after a while I waited and waited and waited but there was no tea. So I shouted to her, ‘Where’s the tea? Where’s the tea?’ I shouted to her. ‘What happened to the tea?’ And do you know what she said, do you know what she said? She said, ‘The electricity’s been off all morning.’ And do you know what? I’m still wondering how she boiled the egg.”