Accident, page 3
Anna said “Then what’s the point?”
I said “It has clarified this point about the scope and function.”
Anna did that disbelieving look going sideways around the room.
I said “But then, in fact, you find much the same sort of thing. If you look into your experience you find a succession of impressions of, for instance, thinking, desiring, hoping, fearing; but you don’t have a continued impression of a self that thinks or desires or hopes or fears. So the description of the self as an enduring entity is again impossible.”
Anna said “Then what is?”
I said “A possible way to talk about the self?”
Anna said “Yes.”
I said “You can analyse the way in which we actually do talk. But this of course is not an answer to the original question.”
A big girl in a long green dress. Her hair done up. Looking Dutch, with pink cheeks and round cheekbones.
Anna said “But surely people have been trying to find an answer. I mean writers and artists and so on.”
I said “Of course anyone can give his own answer. But you can’t give an answer that will be generally acceptable.”
Anna said “Even a great writer?”
I said “It’s true that art is the medium to offer answers, but these will of course be outside the scope of reason, which is all that can actually prove anything.”
Anna stared at her notebook. I had not really noticed her before. I wanted to engrave her. Memory.
I said “Do you see the point?”
Anna said “Not really.”
I said “If you’re not the sort of person who wants to do this, don’t.”
Anna said “I do.”
I sat down. Put my feet on a stool. Confident.
Anna said “But it only seems to analyse and separate, it doesn’t build.”
I said “You clear the ground.”
She said “What I mean is—” Stopped.
I said “What you mean is, what relation have the things we’re talking about to what actually we do, the way we behave.”
She said “Yes.’
Hostile look. Big blowsy face like a barmaid.
I said “You can say this of anyone.”
She said “But people don’t talk about it any more.”
I said “I do.”
She said “Do you?”
Philosophers are on the defensive. My smile like an Indian.
She said “I suppose it’s inevitable that everything seems so empty and unconstructive.”
I said “This is a certain kind of truth. Do you want to impose on it?”
She said “No.”
I said “Once it was all dreams, any old nonsense. We were obsessed by this. Now we know. And it’s a good thing we do, because now it would be too dangerous. It’s reason, at least, that keeps the world going.”
She said “It may not keep going.”
I said “Oh that!” I jerked my head.
She said “What?”
I said “Well yes, but at least now we’ve got choice. Before it was just accident.”
She said “It can still be accident.”
I said “Your generation is obsessed by this. You think the world’s going to blow up. That life has been unfair to you. I don’t feel this. I feel responsibility is better.”
She said nothing.
I said “The world is tough. No one up till now has thought it wasn’t.”
She said “All this is very different from my essay.”
I said “ We’re not all distant academics.”
She put a rubber band round her notebook.
I said “For next week write me something in your sort of language. On what you think is the problem.” She said “The problem of personal identity?”
I said “If you like.”
She said “You’ll think it terrible.”
I said “That doesn’t matter.”
After she had gone I tried to remember what I had felt about her. I could visualise her fairly well. Her green skirt and notebook. I wondered if I had flirted with her. Philosophers are not so clever when on the attack. Motives are different from actions. There is the putting forward of an idea, an event. Being unfair. Leaving the person to do what they like with it.
7.
I remember one Sunday about this time (what is a story? a sequence? meaning?) when I went with my wife Rosalind and the children to the Wiltshire downs, driving on a windy spring day to a country of flint and fir plantations, a white land with rain running off it, hard country with cold air. It was the time of some international crisis—Cuba, I suppose, or it must have been before—and there was the feeling glimpsed over the shoulder of death, of those bright men with their machines already buried. We climbed up a long slope with me carrying Clarissa on my back and Alexander picking up white stones to keep them; and I thought of that fire, that blast to nothingness, the world disappearing like a conjuror. I loved my family; there was something marvellous in it; this thing created, held, the four of us—Clarissa with her gold hair and bright black eyes, Alexander with his dream of forgotten continents, my wife Rosalind whom I adored. It was only sometimes I knew this—love, that other part of me, that I was pierced with an arrow to. Her grave eyes and long gold neck; Rosalind. We turned to the view at the top of the hill and there was the world below, valley and village. Compact in its nest, womb. Hardly born yet.
I said—“I’ve been talking to my pupils, some of them, what they feel. There is a sort of agony in it. They just see any violence, death, being wrong. They don’t think any more of rights, or duties, or motives.”
Rosalind said “Who have you been talking to?”
I said “I wonder if we ought to do something. I’m almost forty now. People become characters at forty. They stop. They don’t feel anything”.
Rosalind was unhappy. She did not like me talking like this. The hill was cold. Huge black clouds rushed on the surface.
I cried “Don’t turn away!”
She said “What do you mean we ought to do?”
I said “These people know something. They’re spontaneous. They have no defences.”
Rosalind with her pale tired face. Her coat blown over her womb, her baby.
I knelt down and picked up a chalk stone. I threw it.
I said “I know you’ve got the baby, darling.”
She said “Isn’t it all right?”
I said (as I so often said) “We know about this. People do feel dried up, unemotional. I don’t know if it’s age, or the bomb, or what. I don’t want any of the ordinary things.
I don’t want to drink, be ambitious, to have affairs. I’ve got this problem. It doesn’t matter much.”
She said “You’ve got the children.”
I said “I said I’ve got the children!”
Being pregnant, she was often on the edge of tears. Hanging over a precipice.
I picked up Clarissa and whirled her round, waltzing.
I said to Alexander “Race you to the fir trees and back!” We set off at a run, across the hard earth, Alexander in front, elbows out, Clarissa on my back with her head pressed tight against my shoulder.
Alexander shouted “I won!”
I said to Rosalind “Don’t be sad, my love, you know what I care about, you, you and the children, just a little about my work, nothing else. But we’ve got to talk. Nothing stays still. There’s an emptiness perhaps in a lot of people, now, perhaps me, in quite a new way. It’s nothing to do with love, or the children; but a sort of gap between us and the world, you know, all that mystical rubbish—” I knelt and patted my hand on the earth—“You know how I hate it!” I screwed my face up. “But it’s true!” I found myself still kneeling.
Rosalind said “I feel too close. Sometimes everything seems rushing outwards, as if one more thing would break it.”
I thought—I had wanted to talk about Anna. Say—This is the conversation I had with a pupil the other day.
Rosalind said “I had a dream the other night. I was being trampled by a crowd of people panicking.”
I stood and put my arm around her. Those forbidden things—love, tenderness.
I said “I was just talking.”
Rosalind put her cheek on my shoulder. We folded our wings inwards. Clarissa, whom I was still carrying, put her head against ours. We were three circles touching. Then Alexander, from where he clung to Rosalind’s skirt, had to be lifted, heaved, on to this tripod of emotions—into our arms, our joint arms, so that we would be together in the air like acrobats, a moment a festoon. This thing that made life worth living—feet, legs, thighs, earth, sex. I thought —We will make love tonight. Then I remembered the child, tender as pain. Rosalind hard with tree and muscle. This pyramid of living things: straining upwards. Holding it in our hands. Trembling.
III
8.
We sometimes go to parties in Oxford which are dreadful things in the Woodstock Road with a room cleared of carpets and bottles of wine in a Victorian bow window.
I enter. Nod against the noise like royalty being explained machinery.
William was there: a war-hero, both legs shattered, plastic surgery around his soul.
Tommy Parker was there: in all-black strip, laced boots, about to run on blowing a whistle.
A marvellous blonde girl with her back to me: long hair, from the waist down, no stockings.
I do not like parties. I say this while I am going, after I have left, while I am there. Undergraduates and the party-going dons and the art crowd. A woman in a Shakespearian helmet. Noise and rubble. I am always moving across the room to talk to someone else. I never do. Or on the defensive, looking animals in the eye. They do not jump.
I was yelling at the woman in the helmet. About opium. She had spectacles fluted like an early railway engine.
My wife Rosalind, pale, with long gold earrings, was talking to William. She was saying “Go and see Danilo Dolci.”
William tapped his cigarette. A one-legged man in an alley.
I thought—I am too old for this. I am going bald. My teeth hurt. I wear glasses.
There was a commotion by the door as a group of people came in. Someone shouted “My brother!” It was Charlie.
Charlie is not my brother; but he is sometimes taken to be because we look alike, being tall and thin and intellectual. Charlie pushed into the room carrying an umbrella. He looked like a corpse. He said “I just happened to be passing.’’ He put a hand on Rosalind’s shoulder. He began laughing. When we are with Charlie we always begin laughing. He is our joker. Our familiar.
He said “Are you coming to the antipodes?’’
I said “Yes.”
Charlie peered round. He was unshaven. His face was white and tired. He crossed the room to the marvellous looking girl with long hair who had her back to us. He put his hand on her shoulder. The girl turned. It was Anna.
I thought—But I didn’t recognise Anna!
Charlie said “Are you coming to the antipodes?”
Anna’s skirt was short, like something you skated in. A bit of fur. The ice wet.
Charlie shouted “No, I didn’t think you were someone else!”
Something old in memory, a golden age with satyrs and nymphs and fauns.
Charlie came back across the room and started saying “There was this advertisement in the Times for a party to go to—”
Charlie stammers. He ceases in mid-sentence and stands with his mouth open and his eyes closed like a child being given medicine.
“To the antipodes” I said.
“No no no!” Charlie yelled.
He shut his eyes again.
He was carrying his umbrella and a box of matches. Rosalind took the box of matches out of his hand, lit a cigarette, and put the box of matches back in his hand.
Charlie said in a deep fluent voice “Hullo my dear, that’s a nice new dress you’re wearing, did you make it?”
“Did you make your umbrella?” Rosalind said.
Charlie doubled up and began walking round the room with his head close to the floor. He passed close to Anna, who was watching him.
A magic circle on the grass. Charlie. A ring of fire.
Charlie came back to us. He said “Look!” He lifted his umbrella, and it opened slowly of its own accord.
“Japanese!” Charlie shouted.
Rosalind put her hand round the umbrella and tried to close it. She said “It’s dangerous!”
William had split some of his drink. He was screwing it on the boards with his foot.
Charlie began again. “There was this advertisement in The Times for some people to go and dig a deep shelter in the the—” He was leaning with one hand on Rosalind’s shoulder and the other on the umbrella. After a time he went on “I went to see him and—”
The woman in the spectacles said “You two boys going to the antipodes?”
Charlie opened his eyes and stared at her.
No one else was thinking this funny. I don’t know why we thought it funny. Charlie’s hair was standing on end. Rosalind and I were rolling about.
“He had a pick—” Charlie said.
“A what?” Rosalind said.
“A pick,” Charlie shouted.
The group of undergraduates with Anna had come over. They stood around not looking.
Charlie had taken out a packet of cigarettes. I knew what he was going to do. He pulled off the silver paper, gave the piece of cardboard a jerk, and all the cigarettes flew out on to the floor.
Charlie squatted and began picking up the cigarettes. They were all around Anna’s feet. He said “I beg your pardon.”
Anna squatted and began helping him.
Anna looked different with her hair down. Swedish. Thin. Dreaming into the sun.
Charlie said “What did you say your name was?”
He put his ear close to her mouth. Screwed his face up, showing a black tooth with silver round it.
Charlie shouted “Eh?”
To balance himself he put his wrist on Anna’s knee.
“Never been there!” Charlie shouted.
He was pushing the cigarettes and silver paper back into the packet. They went in crooked and bits of tobacco were squashed out at the other end.
Charlie said “Has anyone got a cigarette?”
I was introducing Anna to Rosalind. That odd moment when they touch.
Charlie began talking fluently to Rosalind. He said “Can I possibly come and stay with you tonight? I was really going somewhere quite different.” He had his back to Anna.
“Have you brought your own food?” Rosalind said.
Charlie said to one of the undergraduates “Once when I came to stay with them I happened to have a packet of—”
The undergraduate was frowning.
I thought—Are we really so awful? People hate us.
I said “Do stay.”
Charlie said “—cucumber sandwiches.”
William was trying to talk to Anna: Anna looking down, her face crooked as William’s sometimes was. Charlie and I were collapsing. There was this thing objectionable about happiness: it was so vulgar. I felt I was young again. A boy camping out, in the morning.
Later that night when Rosalind had gone to bed Charlie arrived and came through the hall and dining room that was like a passage and found me in the sitting room with the yellow carpet and black curtains. He was groaning and scratching his head. He said—“I’ve been drunk for three days. Why do we do it”?
When he is drunk or talking to you on your own he does not stammer. He sometimes seems to be talking to himself; making up a story.
He said “I went up to London, I’d been working in the country a long time, wanted to have a binge, you know, all that stuff. Domesticity and work. If you don’t do it what else do you do, you know, how to keep lively.”
Charlie acts what he is saying with pauses, gestures. The way he can manage it.
“So I went up to London to this club, a drinking club, you know, and sat, just sat there, like millions do it. And there was this girl, a big dark girl, on a bench, reading Balzac. I asked her why she was reading Balzac. Of all things. I said she must be insane. You know I love Balzac. After that we got on very well. A girl who liked modern art and all that stuff. I said it was too photographic. Would you believe it. God!” Charlie strode around as if in pain.
I said “Where is this club?”
Charlie said “I’ll tell you.”
He went on “So there we were, everything laid on, drinks, dinner, out in the street. Then—Why don’t you come home and have some coffee? I mean she said that, I didn’t. And up to a house in Hampstead, brown wallpaper, landlady, Indians, the lot. She began telling me the story of her life. She’d been married to an Italian who’d thrown her through a plate glass window. She’d been to school at Cheltenham. Her father was a major. She was living with a pimp in Hampstead.”
I thought—I’m too tired. I’ve been working.
I said “And then what?”
“She said, Would you like to stay? I said I wouldn’t mind. She said, You go on upstairs. I went upstairs. There were two children. In a cot. With teddy bears.”
I thought—This is terrible. Why is he telling me all this?
I said “What happened?”
Charlie said “Nothing. Morals aren’t an exhortation, they’re a fact.”
I laughed. I thought—This is a good story after all.
Charlie said “She said she didn’t want love, only sex. I said I did too. She said But do you love your wife? I said Of course I love my wife. She said Then why are you here? I said Of course I’m here.”
I said “And nothing happened?”
Charlie said “No.”
I said “You’re stuck with it.”
9.
Charlie is my greatest friend. He is a writer. He lives in Wiltshire, with a wife and three children.
Charlie is working class. At least he says he is. He says he has a grandfather who was on the railway and an uncle who is doorman at the Ritz. We were once driving past the Ritz and Charlie leaned out of the window and called “Uncle!” but he hit his head on a lamp post and was knocked unconscious.
