Under the Net (5 page)

A star is a curious phenomenon. It is not at all the same thing as a good screen actress; it is not even a matter of charm or beauty. What makes the star is some quality of surface and
éclat.
Sadie had
éclat;
or so the public thought, though personally I still prefer the word ‘flash'. You will have gathered that I am not keen on Sadie. Sadie is glossy and dazzling. She is younger than Anna and has Anna's features, only smaller and tighter, as if someone had started to shrink her head but had never got beyond the first stage. She has a speaking voice not unlike Anna's, only with the husky note made more metallic. Not chestnut husks but rusty iron. Some people find this very fascinating too. She can't sing.

Anna never tried to get into films. I don't know why; she always seemed to me to have much greater potentialities than Sadie. But perhaps her façade had a certain superficial lack of definiteness. You need to be a vessel with a sharp prow to get into the film world. After she parted from Sadie, Anna did a certain amount of more serious singing; but she lacked the training necessary to take her far in the world. When I last heard of her she was singing folksongs in a night club, and that sort of combination expressed her very well.

Anna used to live in a tiny service flat off the Bayswater Road, very much overlooked by other houses, and I would go there often to see her. I was greatly attached to her, but I could see even then that her character was not all that it should be. Anna is one of those women who cannot bear to reject any offer of love. It is not exactly that it flatters her. She has a talent for personal relations, and she yearns for love as a poet yearns for an audience. To anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will immediately give a devoted, generous, imaginative, and completely uncapricious attention, which is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender. This is no doubt another reason why she never went into films; her private life must be an almost full-time activity. This has the sad result too that her existence is one long act of disloyalty; and when I knew her she was constantly involved in secrecy and lying in order to conceal from each of her friends the fact that she was so closely bound to all the others. Or sometimes she would try another technique, that of deadening, by small and steady shocks, the sharpness of jealousy, until in the end the victim became resigned to the liberal scope of her affections, while remaining just as much her slave as ever. I don't care for this; and I saw through Anna very rapidly. Yet my interpretation of her never robbed her of her mystery, nor did her emotional promiscuity ever turn me against her. Perhaps this was because I so constantly felt, like the warm breeze that blows from a longed-for island bringing to the seafarer the scent of flowers and fruit, the strength and reality of her tenderness for me. I knew that it was very possible that it was with exactly this charm that she held all her admirers. But it made no difference.

You may wonder whether I ever thought of marrying Anna. I did think of it. But marriage remains for me an Idea of Reason, a concept which may regulate but not constitute my life. I cannot help, whenever I consider a woman, using the possibility of marriage as an illuminating hypothesis which is not in any serious sense an instrument of the actual. With Anna, however, I did come near to taking the thing seriously ; and that, although I'm sure she would never have said yes, was perhaps why I let myself drift away from her in the end. I hate solitude, but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a café will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself. But communion of souls was Anna's special subject. Also, Anna had a taste for tragedy which made me nervous. She always had her eye lifting for heavy drama. She took life intensely and very hard. Whereas I think it is foolish to take life so, as if you were to provoke a dangerous animal which will break your bones in the end in any case. So when Anna went to France to sing French folksongs in French night clubs I said to her vaguely that I would look her up when she returned, but she knew I wouldn't and I knew she knew. That was some years ago, and I'd had a peaceful time since then, especially at Earls Court Road.

When I left Dave's I walked to Shepherd's Bush and boarded an eighty-eight bus and sat in the front seat on top, and some of the reflections which I have recorded above were passing through my mind. It's not easy to find someone whom one has mislaid for years in London, particularly if she belongs to the sort of milieu that Anna belonged to, but clearly the first thing to do is to look in the telephone book. So I got off at Oxford Circus and went into the Underground. When I left Goldhawk Road I had no intention of looking for Anna, but by the time I was passing Bond Street it really seemed that there was nothing else in the world that was worth doing. Indeed, it was unclear to me how I had managed to exist without her for so long. But I am like that. For long times I settle down, and in these times I would not stir a finger to lift a guinea a yard off. When I am fixed I am immobile. But when I am unfixed I am volatile, and then I fly at random from point to point like a firecracker or one of Heisenberg's electrons until I settle down again in another safe place. Also I had a curious faith in Finn's intuition. It often happened that Finn made some unexpected suggestion which when I followed it up turned out to have been just the thing. I could see that the Earls Court Road phase of my life was over, and that that peace of mind was gone beyond recall. Madge had forced a crisis on me; well, I would explore it, I would even exploit it. Who can tell what day may not inaugurate a new era? I picked up the London phone book L to R.

The phone book told me nothing; I wasn't surprised. I then rang up two theatre agencies who didn't know Anna's whereabouts, and the B.B.C., who did but wouldn't say. I thought of trying to get hold of Sadie at the Belfounder studio, but I didn't want Sadie to know that I was looking for Anna. I suspected Sadie of having been a little sweet on me at one time; at any rate she was always rather unpleasant in the old days about my being fond of Anna, although I know that some women regard all men as their personal property, and I thought it possible that she wouldn't tell me where Anna was even if she knew. Anyway, since Sadie had become so famous I had seen nothing of her, and I didn't imagine that she would welcome any attempt on my part to renew the acquaintance, particularly if she had been aware that I had been aware of what I conjectured to have been the state of her feelings. By now it was about opening time. It seemed useless to start ringing up the night clubs at this hour, so there was nothing to be done but to work Soho. There is always someone in Soho who knows what one wants to discover ; it's just a matter of finding him. Also there was always the possibility of my running into Anna herself. My fates are such that as soon as I interest myself in a thing a hundred accidents happen which are precisely relevant to that thing. But I rather hoped that I wouldn't meet Anna first in a public place, for my mind had already begun to run very much upon this meeting.

I usually keep clear of Soho, partly because it's so bad for the nerves and partly because it's so expensive. It's expensive not so much because the nervous tension makes one drink continually as because of the people who come and take one's money away. I am very bad at refusing people who ask me for money. I can never think of a reason why if I have more ready cash than they have I should not be bound to give them some at least of what I have. I give with resentment but without hesitation. By the time I had worked my way along Brewer Street and Old Compton Street and up Greek Street as far as the Pillars of Hercules most of the money in my pocket had been taken away by various acquaintances. I was feeling extremely nervous by this time, not only because of Soho but because of imagining whenever I entered a pub that I should find Anna inside. I had been to these pubs a hundred times in the last few years without this thought coming into my head ; but now suddenly the whole of London had become an empty frame. Every place lacked her and expected her. I began to drink spirits.

When I found myself short of money I crossed the street to cash a cheque at one of my afternoon drinking clubs that lay close by; and it was there that at last I picked up the trail. I asked the barman if he knew where Anna was to be found these days. He replied yes, he thought that she was running some sort of little theatre in Hammersmith. He searched under the bar and produced a card which bore the words
The Riverside Theatre,
and an address on Hammersmith Mall. The barman said he didn't know whether she was still there, but that that's where she was some months ago. She had left him this card to give to some gentleman who had never turned up. I might as well have it now, the barman said. I took it, and went into the street with my heart pounding. It needed serious reflection on the state of my finances to prevent me from taking a taxi to Hammersmith. But I ran all the way to Leicester Square station.

THE address I had been given was on that part of the Mall that lies between the Doves and the Black Lion. On Chiswick Mall the houses face the river, but on that piece of Hammersmith Mall which is relevant to my tale they turn their backs to the river and pretend to be an ordinary street. Chiswick Mall is a lazy collection of houses and greenery that looks dreamily out on to the water, but Hammersmith Mall is a labyrinth of waterworks and laundries with pubs and Georgian houses in between, which sometimes face the river and sometimes back it. The number to which I had been directed turned out to be a house standing a little by itself, with its back to the river and its front on a quiet piece of street, and an opening beside it where some steps led down to the water.

By now I was in no such hurry. I looked at the house with suspicious curiosity, and it seemed to be looking back at me. It was a brooding self-absorbed sort of house, fronted by a small ragged garden and a wall shoulder high. The house was square, with rows of tall windows, and had preserved a remnant of elegance. I approached the iron gate in the wall. It was then that I observed a poster which was fixed on the other side of the gate. It was a home-made poster whose colours were running a bit, so that it had a rather sad appearance. I deciphered it. It said:

I stared at this object for some time. I don't know why, but it struck me as queer. Finally, with a slow crescendo in the region of the heart I pushed open the gate, which was a little rusty, and walked up to the house. The windows gleamed blackly, like eyes behind dark glasses. The door was newly painted. I did not look for a bell, but tried the handle at once. The door opened quietly and I stepped on tiptoe into the hall. An oppressive silence surged out of the place like a cloud. I closed the door and shut out all the little noises of the river front. Now there was nothing but the silence.

I stood perfectly still for a while until my breathing became more regular, and until I could see my way in the dark hall. As I did these things I was asking myself why I was behaving in such an odd way, but the possible proximity of Anna confused me completely, so that I couldn't think but could only perform the little series of actions which suggested themselves with a feeling of inevitability. I walked slowly down the hall, planting my feet with care on a long black sound-absorbing rug. When I came to the stairs I glided up them; I suppose my feet touched the steps. I could hear no sound.

I found myself on a broad landing, with a carved wooden balustrade behind me and several doors in front of me. Everything seemed neat and nicely appointed. The carpets were thick, and the woodwork as clean as an apple. I looked about me. It didn't occur to me to doubt that Anna was somewhere near, any more than it occurred to me to call her name or utter any other sound. I moved to the nearest door and opened it wide. Then I got a shock that stiffened me from head to toe.

I was looking straight into seven or eight pairs of staring eyes, which seemed to be located a few feet from my face. I stepped back hastily, and the door swung to again with a faint click which was the first sound I had heard since I entered the house. I stood still for a moment in utter incomprehension, my scalp prickling. Then I seized the handle firmly and opened the door again, stepping as I did so into the doorway. The faces had moved, but were still turned towards me; and then in an instant I understood. I was in the gallery of a tiny theatre. The gallery, sloping and foreshortened, seemed to give immediately on to the stage; and on the stage were a number of actors, moving silently to and fro, and wearing masks which they kept turned towards the auditorium. These masks were a little larger than life, and this fact accounted for the extraordinary impression of closeness which I had received when I first opened the door. My perceptual field now adjusted itself, and I looked with fascinated interest and surprise upon the strange scene.

The masks were not attached to the face, but mounted upon a rod which the actor held in his right hand and skilfully maintained in parallel to the footlights, so that no hint of the actor's real features could be seen. Most of the masks were made full face, but two of them, which were worn by the only two women on the scene, were made in profile. The mask features were grotesque and stylized, but with a certain queer beauty. I noticed particularly the two female masks, one of them sensual and serene, and the other nervous, watchful, hypocritical. These two masks had the eyes filled in, but the male masks had empty eyes through which the eyes of the actors gleamed oddly. All were dressed in white, the men in white peasant shirts and breeches, and the women in plain ankle-length white robes caught in at the waist. I wondered if this was Lazemnikov's great farce
Marishka;
both
Marishka
and its author were equally strange to me.