1982 Janine (31 page)

He banged the table very hard with his brow and went on doing so until we prevented him, then he violently embraced Helen, pushing his face into her hair, cried out in a muffled voice, “Please be kind to me Diana, I mean Helen”, and burst into tears. It was a disgusting performance. He was overacting, but overacting something he felt, so we could not laugh.

I was worried when I went back to Glasgow that night. I regarded myself as an honest, consistent, dependable man and in the space of a few hours I had told Denny I was finishing with the company and told the company I was appearing in their late-night show for the next three weeks. I had other reasons to worry. Denny was unemployed because the holidays had begun and nearly two months would pass before she returned to work. She was too young and badly paid to draw national insurance, and if she applied for national assistance she would be visited by an inspector who would ask to see her rent book. If the inspector learned she was living with me he would refuse assistance on
grounds that she was
cohabiting
, which means, being given food and houseroom in return for being fucked. The assumption that a woman living with a man is a self-employed whore is good practical Conservative economics. It saves the nation money, which is why in 1982 the cohabitation rule is still in force and will be in force until the Third World War. I accept the inevitability of this but thirty-odd years ago I was less bland, because my grant looked like being used up some while before it was renewed. I wished Denny would find a temporary job – her labour exchange had not offered one. Labour exchanges. We don't have these nowadays. When there were jobs the exchanges used to offer them, and when there were none they paid out insurance money and assistance money from adjacent counters, sometimes the same counter. On adjacent benches sat unemployed navvies, unemployed clerks, bankrupt businessmen and husbandless mothers. Very primitive. Now we have Job Centres and the Professional Register and the Social Security Office under different ministries. The bureaucracy has divided and increased in order to divide the hugely increased body of unemployed. Very practical. (Get back to Denny.) All right.

All right, Denny was my whore since the authorities would define her as that and a whore was a luxury I could hardly afford. Of course if she declared herself homeless and destitute she would be sent to some institution like the one I had persuaded her to leave, but I did not want to lose her. I loved her dearly for loving me so dearly, but I also disliked her for being such a fucking problem. I hated the glad light in her face as I entered the room, as if there were now no problems in the world because I had returned to her. I looked hard at her and the glad light died in her. Compared with Helen or Diana she seemed very very ordinary. She said quickly, “What's wrong Jock?”

I said, “Nothing. Let's go to the pictures.”

I grudged spending money on cinema seats but it was better than sitting at home. The film had Bette Davis in it and was about smart New York theatre folk who kept reminding me of the company in Edinburgh. I disliked that film but it incited me to compose in my head a speech of explanation to
Denny, a speech I did not deliver till the following morning. Before the film ended I got up and said, Come on, let's go for a drink.”

She said, “We cannae
afford
that, Jock.”

“All right, you stay here, but I'm going for a drink.”

We entered Launders' Bar on Sauchiehall Street with fifteen minutes till closing time, because in those days the Glasgow pubs shut at nine p.m. I ordered and drank several whiskies very rapidly. I had never done such a thing before. Perhaps I suspected I was going to kill part of her and wanted to anaesthetise myself first. My victim refused to touch anaesthetic so I drank hers too.

Our lovemaking that night was the worst I have known. She scratched my back bloody while I mentally whipped and raped her between Jane Russell and Helen and Diana and Bette Davis in a dungeon in a castle in a hollow tooth because WHY WERE THESE FUCKING WHORES MAKING MY LIFE PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE? I could feel her cunt gripping me like a beak, trying not to let me go from that place where I had once loved to lie feeling her softly cosily cuddling my prick, but that would never happen again, never again, no no no no never again.

“You can be hard down there? I can be harder, my dear.”

Did I say these words or only think them? I had her weeping, but I doubt if they were tears of joy. If they were tears of joy then what followed must have been even worse for her. Some time after dawn broke I said firmly, “This has got to stop.”

I arose and shaved and washed and dressed. I had a hangover, of course, and remembered with a shudder that I had used no contraceptive. I gave Denny a cup of tea in bed, then paced up and down the room delivering a speech which went like this.

“Denny, I want you to listen to me carefully. I am going to tell you something you will not like to hear, but there is a practical reason for it which I am sure even you will understand, I mean money. We need more money because you have no job and my grant was not intended to support two people. So I must get more money somewhere, and I will. This daft play in Edinburgh – this company – has a
chance of doing well, I think. All the omens point that way, so I am going back to Edinburgh this morning, and you will not see me for perhaps more than a fortnight, though I will of course write to you, yes indeed, you will get a postcard from me every morning because I love you, I think. I am placing the rentbook here, upon the mantelpiece. It contains two weeks' rent and five extra pounds for food etcetera because I have no wish to be mean and I know you are not extravagant, Denny. So now, what about a nice wee goodbye kiss?”

Was a more practical, reasonable, considerate farewell speech ever spoken?

It was a lie. It was an anti-Denny demolition job. The speech meant this: “You are not coming to Edinburgh with me. You will never see me at work, or meet or mix with my interesting new friends or have an exciting life, because you are not in my class. You are just the wee hoor I keep at home. You are a luxury I can no longer afford, but I am maintaining you for sentimental reasons because I am better than you, although I am also tired of you.”

I did not know I was saying this, but Denny was sharper than me and she knew it. When I handed her the cup of tea her face had the exhausted but newly-born look of someone who has come out of a bad storm or a bad illness. She maybe thought our desperate lovemaking had brought us together again and was wholly unprepared. In a moment her face went sharp and ugly, became the face of a nasty little terrified girl, then not even the face of a girl or a child but the face of something presexual and preanimal, something that was nothing but agonised helpless lostness and complaint, petty, nagging complaint because out of a mouth wide enough to emit the most deafening yell in the world came only a thin, eerie, continuous whine. Only horror-films and fairy-stories tell the truth about the worst things in life, the moments when hands turns into claws and a familiar face becomes a living skull. My words turned a woman into a thing and I could not face the thing I had made because the thing saw in my face the disgust it caused me. I turned my back upon the thing with the whine, I speedily packed my suits and underwear into a couple of cases. I was
afraid that the thing with the whine would jump up and grab me. I rushed out saying, “This is not the end of the world Denny, I'll drop you a postcard. See you in three weeks, that's a promise.”

I fear I cannot go on with this story, God. It is too dismal.

Needlessly dismal. I could easily have taken her to Edinburgh. We had plenty of room there. One of the upper chambers had been turned into a dormitory for the performers and helpers, it had been scrubbed clean and rows of mattresses laid on the floor. The mattresses were called cowlays. The practical radical had rented them from a farm-supply-warehouse, they were of green plastic but perfectly comfortable when covered by a blanket. Being too shy for communal sleeping I took my cowlay into a closet beside a fire-exit at the top of a small wooden stair, Denny could have slept with me there, the strangeness of the place would have refreshed our lovemaking. She would have worked in the restaurant, which needed helpers after the first two nights. Later on I saw opera singers washing plates behind the counter, not for money but just to be helpful. When the club started succeeding all sorts of surprising mixing and joining happened between the members and the performers and those who ran the place. The cast of a famous Oxford or Cambridge drama group ate and drank beside the Gorbals Young Communist Party: plumbers, electricians and folksingers who had split with the official party after Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech. Both lots were delighted to be rubbing shoulders with such dangerously far-out people. Had Denny been there she would have been welcomed as a useful, practical, good-natured attractive lassie, not well-educated, perhaps, but who is? If a good education is reading and remembering a lot of good books then most lawyers, doctors, businessmen, members of parliament and royalty don't have it. If good education means a wider experience of people and possibilities then that nightclub would have been the best possible school for Denny because she was only sixteen or seventeen and, as Alan said, very sharp. But I wanted to be A FREE SPIRIT, someone posh who could flirt with posh girls like Helen and Diana who (I learned later) were not
very posh, but seemed posh to me because they dressed well and had the confident speech-style they had learned at drama college; while they (I learned later) thought I was an eccentric scion of the landed gentry because of my Harris tweed three-piece suits and blue bow ties and the confident speech-style I had learned from my father and Old Red and a lunatic English teacher and a gifted descendent of some Irish tinkers. But I am sure they mainly suspected me of exalted origins because of the relaxed bodily assurance I had gained with Denny, who I did not want them to meet. Our system of class prejudice is the cleverest piece of self-frustrating daftness since the Tower of Babel, it benefits nobody but a few at the top. We fool ourselves into fooling others into fooling ourselves even more. Get through this dismal story as fast as possible. (You exaggerate.)

Correct, I exaggerate. The rest of the story is not all dismal. I will tell it a night at a time.

The club opened its doors at five o'clock and thirty or so helpers and performers sat round the great cellar feeling excited and uneasy and foolish. We had spent so much time getting premises and productions ready that we had failed to advertise them, taking it for granted that “word would get around”. By nine o'clock four customers had joined us and were drinking coffee and being serenaded by a glum guitarist. Our director suddenly used up nervous energy by ordering us to carry down the big masonic portraits from the upstairs room and place them on each side of the stairs to the hall where we would perform. He also ordered the art student to paint top hats on the chieftains' heads. The art student said, “I don't think I should. They've been ruined by what looks like two centuries of mastic varnishing, but for all I know they could be Raeburns or Ramsays.”

The director said, “They are ugly objects nobody gives a damn for. I'll give you a couple of quid to turn them into something amusing within the next forty minutes.”

The artist complied. Our show opened at eleven o'clock to
an audience of three. The director said beforehand, Regard this as a rehearsal.”

We played to an audience often or twelve, half of this being smart young people wearing (is this true or has my memory imposed it on them?) black dinner suits with white starched linen shirtfronts and collars with black bow ties. Our company was greatly excited because this was the cast of the Oxford or Cambridge group performing in the official part of the festival. At the end of the show they applauded politely. We cleared everything up and went downstairs and occupied a table in the cellar, where helpers and performers still outnumbered the customers. The club had no liquor licence but members could buy it outside and bring it in. The director produced bottles of wine and invited us to get drunk with him. The girls refused and so did I. After that sordid night with Denny I had decided never to drink alcohol again. The writer seemed to be drunk already. At this moment one of the Oxford or Cambridge cast, who were all drinking at a nearby table, said, “May I join you for a moment?”

Our director said, “Please do.”

The English actor, who became well known later on, although I cannot now remember if his name was Frost or Miller or Bennett or Moore, sat down with us and said,

“Congratulations. Your show is very good.”

“We don't think so,” said the director.

“Don't worry about the thinness of the house, that could improve quite rapidly,” said the actor, “but would you consider it an impertinence if we gave you one or two notes on your characters and timing? You see the play mocks the kind of people
we
are, and mocks us very cleverly, but the impact will be even greater, we feel, if you slightly modify one or two details. For instance, you –” he pointed at Rory – “you were splendid up to your final speech, the speech that ends the show, but you should
not
play that speech for laughs. You are no longer a sympathetic moron, you have become
it, the thing, the establishment, old corruption
, there are hundreds of names for the power you have become. It is
time to reveal to the audience that this play, after all, is no laughing matter, so expand. Terrify them.”