Vac (5 page)

T
HIS BOOK SEEMS
to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC. I don’t know at this stage if I will adhere to VAC. The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum. The abbreviation had the further advantage of evoking
generalized
images of technology and I conceive the world of the
mid-twentieth
century as a global laboratory through which wary laymen wander. I think that we are, in fact, those interstellar scouts of science fiction tales who come upon the planetary relic of a stupendous science. The neat twist conferred by reality is that we have constructed the alien world ourselves and in our own time.

I knew that that moment was decisive, the evening we had dinner together, although I didn’t admit to myself that I had known for months afterwards and the knowledge masked itself from me at the time behind a façade of necessary but
light-headed
integrity.

We had been living apart for an incredible week, I in the flat, you in my mother’s house. It was for me a disagreeable arrangement because it ostentatiously located the responsibility for our separation precisely where it belonged, in my selfish desire for a spell of freedom.

You had olives, pâté, dry martini waiting for me. I noted that you were carefully groomed but your fiery and gentle beauty were still my daily fare, our week’s separation having heightened rather than clouded my awareness of you. We were playing a game. We were incontrovertibly one. You would forgive me.

Later, outside The George, as we sipped
aperitifs
under the
race of clouds, you said something gay and witty. I swept you into a hug and exclaimed:

It was our last spontaneous embrace.

The dinner was mediocre but we sat happily opposite each other as thousands of times before. As always when close to you I was at home.

After dinner we strolled down Heath Street. Soon I
murmured
cheerfully:

You would, of course, accept this. Two weeks weren’t very long. And physical reunion now would destroy the meaning of our separation.

As we chatted over the last drink, I allowed my thoughts to play agreeably over the possible agreeable consequences of the phone calls I planned to make after we had said
good-night.
I became aware that our chat was one-sided. You
responded
but did not initiate. The tilt of your head, your proud, faintly-incredulous smile, the sideways flicker of your glance expressed a message in a code I knew well, but I
refrained
from the slight effort at decipherment that evening.

We swung down through the steep suburb. You sat still and elegant beside me. Up or down these pleasant streets, past the house with the iron bar of inebriated music frozen into its gate, past the cancer hospital’s grim masquerade as a Victorian family mansion, past the seven white cherry trees massed in a sharp corner, we had trod hand in hand, on the way to a party or a pub, in the early days before we acquired our first rickety car.

Your parting smile was brilliant and subtly agonized. Again I repelled awareness of the latter quality. We said good-night. I drove away. Not long afterwards Conrad saw you enter the saloon bar of The Groat. The disloyalty and contempt of my
returning you to a lifeless room, with the evening sun still beckoning us out on an adventure, had carried you closer to despair than even our parting of a few days before. Under Conrad’s cowled eyes you bought yourself a drink. He watched as your glance first encountered that of the sallow, exotic youth farther along the bar. In the shadow of the green lenses that guarded Conrad’s delicate retinae, you were seen to accept a drink from Kemal and, by the end of that evening, you had initiated the relationship which was to endure for half a year and institutionalize the breach between us.

I
PALPATED A NODULE
in my abdomen. I stood naked on dusty boards in a blaze of filtered sunlight and solemnly fingered the mobile lump. Cancer?

When was that? I think it was shortly after I left the flat and you returned to it. I don’t think Kemal had yet moved in with you. But I can’t be sure. The timing of events in that complex phase of our lives is beyond my recollection.

Dr. Friedman’s dark, bulldog face loomed massively above me as, gazing vacantly over my shoulder into diagnosis, he wobbled the little sliding pea in my groin.

Down from the snow-muffled uplands, through the
rapturous
Vale of Peneus, skimming over the central plain and deviating from our direct course far enough to spend a night in Salonika, we still never reached Istanbul. During our night of confetti-bombs and
krasi
in Salonika, led but only partially financed by the fat station-master, I thought wistfully of the near-by Turkish frontier. But lack of both funds and time kept us from Santa Sophia and we veered back North to the cruel glacier that was Yugoslavia.

But I wondered. And it occurred to me that superstition might have been nourished by the fact that the one country
we had snubbed in our long tour should have despatched your lover to Hampstead. But, of course, I couldn’t seriously regard Kemal as the vengeful agent of a slighted mosque!

The mild glance of the little consultant clung to mine for a moment. Then a slight shake of his head asserted the security of his diagnosis:

I evolved into a buffoon. The completion of the process was signalled by a snort of laughter emitted by an acquaintance when I edged up beside him in a saloon bar. After snorting, he explained:

I understood him. A foe to monogamous marriage, I had nevertheless, while leading a married life, enjoyed an accepted social position. Now, stripped of you and your eloquent
devotion,
I no longer confronted others, nor was considered by them, with directness. Draped uncomfortably in, and yet
unable
to disengage myself from, the sticky veils of ambiguity our parting had draped about me, I still found it a shock to
discover
that I was now a buffoon.

Still, yer know, even buffoons got feelings.

Seated alone on the
terrasse
of The Hart I experienced anguish. It came brutally. I held a book but mused rather than read. The ugly church rode above a torrent of leaves. I
lowered
the book. The sun dazzled through the leaves. I stretched out one leg along the wooden bench. I wondered if around the corner would come the little actress with the devious eyes. Cars snarled down the hill. The church towered amidst a delirium of leaves. A shaft of remorse pierced my brain. As if a membrane of frivolity had ruptured, knowledge of what I had done flooded my mind. I had sent you away, torn you loose, cancelled twelve years of happiness. An avalanche of
gay and tender, loving and laughing, moments mocked through my mind and a silent scream of anguish startled me.

In dubious control of myself, a little later, I marched into the gloomy saloon for another pint. Hope that doesn’t happen very often. Could do without too much of that!

I swung into Repton Street and immediately braked to the side of the road. Issuing from the iron gates of the nursery school farther down the slope, face uplifted in easy confidence, came my little boy hand in hand with Kemal. I slid the lever into gear and then back into neutral. Instead of offering them a lift, I waited and then edged guiltily around the corner and roared away in a different direction.

I called at the flat sometimes. I watched Kemal sitting and smoking hashish and watching you iron. For a
nineteen-year-old
he had a pretty bloated habit. The drug had small obvious effect on him. While he smoked and you ironed, the portable radio he had brought with him ejected endless pop songs. A faintly speculative look crossed his face and he turned to me:

I attempted to satisfy him, during our meetings that summer, as to the precise richness of our isles in makes of car, brands of cigarette, distillers of whisky, manufacturers of lighters—his fascination with our culture was nothing if not naive.

They summoned me to the knife.

But visiting times brought the pair of them. He was a friendly lad, medium bright and with a ready laugh but I longed to have you alone. The registrar danced in clad in a green smock. Screens were pulled round the groaning young man.

Groans remained the only distinct response to the registrar’s quest for diagnostic data.

A nurse spooned soup into the wispy remnant of a man. When the fluid accumulated beyond a certain point in the ruined stomach a mild spasm hurled it all out again. The tiny Cockney was starving to death.

Plum-coloured liquid mounted in bottles attached to looped rubber tubes emerging from the penes of prostate cases.

The young man, no longer groaning, was restored to the ward. The capable registrar had correctly operated for acute appendicitis.

I was shunted down for surgery. Stunning eclipse of
anaesthesia.
Slow, muddled waking and your face wavering above me. Violent pain. I rolled and fidgeted through the hours until the promised morphia at bedtime.

Half-doubled we hobbled about the ward to keep sluggish blood from congealing. Even blasé nurses occasionally laughed at our grave, surrealist gyrations. One of them checked herself.

The registrar reached my bed. He was crisply handsome in the traditional English way. I asked Dr. Seligman about him later.

The registrar studied my chart. Then, as he recalled me from the session with the consultant, his face brightened.

He noted the faint reserve with which I received this news.

His life momentarily cheered by his encounter with my
unconventional
hernia the registrar passed on to the next bed.

Brian laughed. His laughter, emerging in little snorts, seemed to escape during moments when his vigilance was slack.

Brian looked up astonished. He shook his head in
amazement.
Then doubts as to the validity of being amazed seized him. He shook his head glumly. Barbara fled out of the
window
and disappeared into some shrubs. We were both morose. We returned to the studio and inspected an angular collossus. Brian brought back two yellow pints. As he approached me he stepped into a puddle, shivered and remarked:

I never saw his Committee. The way he described them, I had the impression of gummy eyes pitched on abstract
paintings.
Surely they must be docile if Brian dominated them? He expounded the virtues of a painting:

Stiff nudges. Toothless smiles. Brian takes off his horn-
rimmed
glasses and bites his lip. He exclaims:

Brian shrugs irritably. God? Better to go to church than argue about it. Barbara makes him go.

Brian reflects, nibbling his finger-nails, then adds.