A Start in Life (37 page)

After breakfast in my room, the telephone rang, and a girl asked to speak to me. It took a few moments to realize it was Polly Moggerhanger. Either there was something wrong with my memory or I wasn't the sort of person I thought I was. Since leaving her at the airport she had not come once into my mind, and now that she was speaking brightly into my ear I was so shocked and surprised to hear her that I didn't know whether or not I was pleased about it. She told me she'd had the most boring time yesterday with her friend and her family, and that if she didn't get out of it she'd go crazy and scream. It was a nice picture, but I couldn't let her do it, so I invited her to lunch.

I didn't know of any good restaurants in Geneva, so eating on the hotel premises might give her the idea that I did, but that I was merely being idle or pressed for time. I could hardly remember her from the desperate haze of yesterday, and thought that when I saw her maybe I wouldn't want to spend more time with her than lunch. There was a strong feeling in me to be on my own for a while in these strange surroundings – which seemed stranger the longer I was in them. It was as if yesterday's trip had taken me across an important borderline, and as usual, though I felt this strongly, I didn't quite know what the consequences would be. In fact I didn't know, in any way, at all, but when I saw Polly walking into the hotel lounge I realized that I no longer wanted to be alone for the next couple of days.

It came out over lunch that she was very unhappy, and didn't know what to do with her life – which seemed to prove that her despair wasn't monumentally serious. But when I said that unhappiness was the spice of life, and that if you weren't unhappy you were dead, she became a lot more cheerful. ‘I've had an ideal life,' she told me, ‘being the daughter of someone like my father, as you can imagine. He doted on me, and gave me everything I wanted, which suited me fine. It certainly kept me very content for a long time. But when I first started having men friends, he got meaner, though he didn't make too open a row about it. It got so I thought I was doing something wrong when I had it in somebody's flat or on the back seat of a car, and it stopped me getting all my thrills out of it for a year or two. Parents think they own you, just because they brought you up.'

‘I hope it's different now,' I said, dipping into my water ice. ‘Not for my sake, but for yours.'

‘Don't worry about that,' she said.

‘I won't,' I answered. ‘It's not my problem, is it? But where shall we go this afternoon?' When she had no idea I said we ought to bus along the lake to the castle of Chillon, and when I went on about Bonivard and Byron's poem, she thought it an exciting plan, because though she'd heard of it herself, she was more than pleasantly surprised to find that I was no stranger to it, imagining perhaps that a born smuggler like me could never know of things like that. I didn't really, but had read of it in a tourist hand-out from the hotel only that morning. Yet I was able to tell her, truthfully and with an offhand candour, about Byron's pad at Newstead where I'd been a time or two on a bus in my childhood and youth – on one occasion with my mother who was visiting a tubercular friend in the nearby sanatorium. It gave us something to talk about, with which to break through to the comfort of more private things, whispering sugar-nothings into a sweet ear of corn as we sat on the bus, the lake glinting in our eyes at every new bend. When I ran out of topics I asked her what she wanted from life, and she said that she didn't know. ‘I haven't been brought up to want anything, because I had everything I wanted.'

‘There must be something you want, though, that your old man can't provide.'

‘Tell me what
you
want,' she said, ‘and then perhaps it will remind me of what I could want. Maybe I've been too happy to want much.'

‘Or too unhappy,' I said, mixing her up, often the best way of getting the truth out of people. Since I wasn't in love with her, or even falling for her, I could try this kind of trick.

‘I'm not neurotic,' she said defiantly, ‘if that's what you mean. My father's started going to a psychiatrist, but I never will.'

I nearly slipped off the seat at the idea of the great Claud Moggerhanger spilling his past every Tuesday and Thursday on a headshrinker's couch. In fact, when the humorous point had gone, it actually disturbed me to think of it. ‘What does he go there for?'

She took the cigarette I offered. ‘Maybe to relax, to pass the time. He's nowhere near barmy, believe me. But he likes to keep up to date with the fads. All the Moggerhangers do.'

‘Even you?'

‘You just tell me what you want out of life,' she said, ‘and then I'll tell you.'

‘I don't want to have to wonder what I want,' I said, doing my best. ‘I want to live so that I never have to stop to ask myself what my ambition is or what I'm going to do. That's what everybody does. They want this job or that house or a car. They want to become a foreman, a director, or a manager. They have hopes of owning this or that, or they set their target on marrying a certain woman who it looks impossible for them to get. And when they have all these things they'll want something else, and when there's nothing else for them to want, or their spirit is so broken that they can't want or strive for anything in any case, they have a convenient accident and die, or just die. To want is the Devil's own trick. To live without wanting is God's blessing – though I don't believe in God or the Devil. Yet it was a black day in my life when I switched from not wanting to wanting, and I don't know when it happened. Probably before I was born, when I was still in my mother, or during the few minutes before my first feed. But I still only swing between the two like a skinned monkey looking for its skin. One minute I want, and the next minute I'm full of innocence. It's all mixed up mostly, because often when I want so that I'm ready to die getting it, that's when everything is hopeless and there's not a chance of me getting it. When I'm in the agreeable mood of not wanting, all I want to do is to stay alive. In the wanting frame of mind I'm so much full of want that I don't know what I want, or if I do it's so many things that I don't know what to try for first, and so end up not trying for any of them. So I get blown around like a straw, and in the meantime live more or less all right by doing as little work as possible.'

‘It doesn't seem to me that you're telling me the truth.'

I laughed. ‘It doesn't seem so to me, either. But I'm trying, though. You tell me what truth is, and I'll give you an everlasting lollipop. I won't know what I want till I've got it, and that's the truth, but it frightens me. It means I've got no control over my life, and though I've no right to have any because I'm so lazy, the fact gnaws at my craw nevertheless. What I often want is to have a few thousand pounds every year so that I could buy a small house and live there without worrying or doing any work.'

‘That's not much,' she said. ‘You could easily get that.'

‘Could I?' I was encouraged.

‘It doesn't seem too much to me. I'm surprised you want so little.'

This flummoxed me, and for a while I didn't know how to go on. We got to Chillon, and didn't go to the castle but sat at a café and went on talking while we held hands. First we were outside, but then a great thunderstorm burst over the lake, and we went in, to get more cream cakes and coffee down us. The sky was pink, and a flash of lightning split it like a pomegranate. Then it turned suddenly metal-blue, and a ripple of far-off thunder exploded into a great noise, shaking the floor under my feet.

‘The greatest torment in life,' I said, ‘is not to know what you want out of it, but I don't know what I want out of it because I don't know what it can give me. That's what education is for, I suppose. It doesn't teach you much, I'm sure, but it tells you what you can get, or expect. And the fact is that I don't want any career or job that can be offered to me. Apart from the fact that I'm not fit or qualified to get anything that might appeal to me, I don't trust any of them to do
me
any good. It's not that that sort of thing isn't for the likes of me, so much as that I'm not for the likes of them. The fact is that nothing I could do is of any value to people, though even if it were I still wouldn't do it. I don't want to be used, and I don't want to use, so you can see how difficult it is for me to tell you what I want out of life. I can easily tell you what I don't want. Maybe I won't always feel like this, but I certainly can't tell at the moment. A long-term policy isn't my cup of tea. All I'd like right now is for us to be back in my room at the hotel, so that we can be alone together.'

She showed her milk-white teeth in a laugh, which made a great contrast to her dark ringlets. ‘You're just greedy,' she said. ‘If you don't know what you want out of life you just end up grabbing all the small things, and getting nothing big and worthwhile.'

‘That's a good philosophical point,' I said. ‘But if you live well until you're ninety, then go out with a hallelujah on your lips, what bigger thing do you want than that? The best life is one that doesn't give you time to think. My life is already ruined by talking like this. Yours will be too if you aren't careful. We're birds of a feather, in a way, and after so much thinking we ought to enjoy it and not bother too much with what we want out of life. So let's get away from this view of walls and water and go back to my room at the hotel.'

‘I know I shouldn't,' she said, to my surprise, putting her arm through my arm, and squeezing it so that I got the warmth of her body, ‘but I feel like that as well.'

We walked back towards the bus, and I felt like a hero, as if all I lacked was a pipe in my mouth, and I was back at the age of fifteen, a firestone dip to centuries ago. If every year seemed like a hundred I really would live for ever. I was embarrassed at the tiddlywink leaping around inside my trousers, but the golden coat hit it safely till it quietened down a bit. We necked a few kisses in the bus, but the honest Swiss stared, so we left off and sat, almost glumly, not able to say much, now that we had committed ourselves.

It started to rain, and I wondered if she wanted to back down, but she didn't. Nobody said anything at the desk when I asked for the key and we went up to my room, not like in deep-blue puritanical old England, or so I had heard. As soon as we got inside and I'd seen to the lock we gobbled all over each other under the roof and the rain, to the tune of the wet pigeons warbling outside. It was afternoon and almost evening, and our naked bodies skimmed about like a couple of snakes, and I swamped her before even getting in. We didn't seem to mind which end was which, and Polly Moggerhanger did as much gobbling as I did, which I wasn't used to at all up to then. Not only I knew what I wanted (in this, at any rate) but she did too, and I hadn't met such an even match before. It was the sort of lovemaking that pulled my backbone out of place, seemed to heave my spine off centre. Yesterday's colossal expenditure of energy had put me in the way of showing Polly what was what, because I felt as if I'd been worn down to a pole so that not much of my body was left to feed off me. It had only itself to look after, and so could give all its attention to the present requirements, a perpendicular mangonel stiffening my attacks so that at some moments she was both delighted and frightened.

Four hours later we crept down to the dining-room for refuelling, both of us bruised and wacked-out, and quiet as we sat looking at each other, waiting for the food to come, which we then went into with the same gusto as had been previously used in attacks on each other, not talking much during the whole meal, as if our first prolonged time together had accounted for fifty million words that we need not now ever say.

Even so, it wasn't exactly like a church between us, and I had to keep my end up by telling her stories out of my rich past and varied family. She enjoyed those most about my drunken Irish grandparents, so once on to this line I could go on for a long time without running short of material, and I found myself making up stories, recounting them as if they were true, because she could never know the difference as long as my voice didn't hesitate or change tone. Music was playing in the background from
The Merry Widow
, or some such Viennese slop, and I said: ‘Do you remember, darling, how we climbed the Matterhorn in 1905? What a lovely time we had – though it was a pity when our ten guides fell two thousand feet and were never seen again. What a beautiful view from the top! I shall never forget it, because this music reminds me of it. Fortunately, the guide carrying our portable gramophone wasn't one of those who slipped, and we put on this record and listened to it while we drank our champagne.'

I made up fantasies of what we'd done during the life we'd been together, trekking across deserts that had killed all but one of our hundred camels by the time we walked into the last oasis (where our Rolls-Royce was waiting), sweating through jungles where two of our children had been eaten by tigers (she laughed aloud at that one) and I had been brought to the edge of death by a savage dose of Blackhead Fever. We sat over our wine till the waiter brought the bill as a gentle hint that the place was about to close down, and then we went up to my room again, and made use of the night for as long as we could keep awake.

We travelled back to London on the same plane. I thought this was a bright idea in case any of the customs men remembered my face. If they did, and wondered why I was going out, they would know the reason if they saw me coming back with a beautiful young woman. And if I left through the airport next week they might think I was only off on the same dirty errand again. I felt that William Hay would approve of this bit of bluff. The long bus of a plane was only half-f, and after the light went out about removing our safety belts, and the long climb towards heaven began, I told Polly to come with me to the back of the plane. ‘I want to go to the toilet,' I said, giving a wink, ‘so keep me company on the way.'