Room at the Top

14

I left the flat before Alice, as I generally did. The flat was on the top floor and the lift was out of order,; I remember that the stairs seemed never to end and I remember the deep silence of the place. The building had been decorated in the usual postwar manner and had the air of a big ship. There was a queer dry smell like hot toast and chlorine. The stairs were broad and the thick grey carpeting seemed to blot up all sound. It was all very clean and shining; very nice too, except that it gave me the impression that no human beings had ever lived there. I imagined nothing but emptiness behind those white doors with their chromium numbers and neat little name-cards.

Once all the rich people in Leddersford had lived in the district round the flats. As cars had become more dependable and the city had become more dirty, the rich people had moved out to towns like Warley. The houses which hadn't been converted into flats and private hotels now belonged to doctors and dentists and photographers. There were a lot of trees and the roads were broad; in a way it reminded me of Warley. But it had ceased to be a place a long time ago.

It was clear evening with a warm wind. Spring was on the way; not that it made much difference there. The laurels and pines and firs would look exactly the same all the year round, dark and melancholy and alien. I wasn't due home until ten; it was only half-past eight. There was a vast useless stretch of time to fill; I occupied my mind with dreariness like a starving man eating earth. It's all over now, the sensible part of me said, you're well rid of the neurotic bitch. You're out of the danger of scandal, you're out of the danger of being possessed. But another side of me kept remembering the big tears rolling down her cheeks, remembered, with shocked tenderness, how they had washed away her attractiveness.

Then I thought of her lying naked beside me, and the pain returned, as real as toothache. The strange thing was that I hoped she had lied to me, that she had slept with the artist. That would have made it bearable. What hurt me was the fact of her exposing herself unemotionally, as if her body were of no importance. An arrangement of colour and light - as if an arrangement of colour and light could cut its finger with the breadknife, get married, make love, receive my most secret confidences - it was the excuse, the palliative for my jealousy, that hurt me most. I called her the worst names I could think of, repeating them again and again under my breath, but it didn't relieve my feelings very much. (There are, after all, only about a dozen foul words in the English language and nine of them aren't, properly speaking, foul, but merely physiologically descriptive.)

I thought with bitter regret of the time when she had been a stranger to me and I wouldn't have cared if she'd walked the streets naked in broad daylight. She'd done that as if I hadn't existed - I bit my lip sharply, drawing blood. My head was throbbing and my mouth tasted of vomit and my throat was dry. I put my hand against the wall. It was as if I were being attacked by an invisible enemy. I crossed the road and kept on walking. It was a street of large terrace houses; I remember that one had its curtains drawn back and that inside there was a crowd of young people and a sound of music. As I passed, they drew the blinds. I walked on; the houses became smaller and there were no more trees and the mills loomed up at me from the gathering darkness. I didn't want to think of what Alice had done and yet my imagination persisted in returning to London ten years ago: I saw her, innocent, firm, smelling of youth, going into the studio, undressing behind a screen then, quite naked, a little abashed perhaps, being reassured by the artist. He looked rather like Jack Wales, but he had a beard. I saw her sitting on the model's throne, her legs parted a little ... That was as far as I got; savage, useless, sick anger took over again. I thought of Charles and me looking at the nudes in Leeds Art Gallery, and of the time we'd been to a London revue. "Of course," Charles had said, "they're no better than prostitutes. Wouldn't care to marry a woman who'd show all she'd got to dirty young men like thee and me."

I wondered if George knew. If he did, would he care? I frowned with concentration. If it would hurt him, then he was my kind of person, and some of the pain was, as it were, shared. But I knew very well that it wouldn't matter to him; if he thought of it at all, it would be with amusement. So that was an extra torment - magical, but there, indisputably, the fact was.

I saw a large pub standing a little off the road. I went in; it being Thursday, it was nearly empty. Drinking my pint, I began to go over my last lesson in economics. The theory of surplus value states ... I have normally a memory like a sponge; I used often to fill in spare moments by presenting pages of print before my mind's eye. But now I saw the lesson torn into scraps of paper, the facts were totally unrelated. On the page I was looking at I could only see Nude; I closed my eyes for a second and saw a red blur and then opened them to see the word again. I looked at the far corner of the room and saw the poster. THE NEATEST NAUGHTIEST NUDES IN SHOW BUSINESS - SANDRA CAROLE ELISE LIZBETH ... And Alice, I wondered if she'd done that too, if that was another thing she hadn't bothered to tell me about, if she had stood in the pink spotlight in a spangled headdress and a gold fig leaf with a thousand eyes settling on her naked flesh like leeches. I couldn't be sure that it hadn't happened, that she, with her bright, quick mind and sharp tenderness, hadn't descended to this last tatty extreme; it was as if I'd seen her given over to torture in some shabby cellar. That was what hurt me. It wasn't the fact of modelling, but of Alice modelling. Some of my standards were still Dufton standards, and in Dufton artists' models were thought of as tarts, not quite professionals, but simply the kind who couldn't be bothered to say no. It was unbearable to think of Alice in that way; and I didn't know, or didn't want to know, why it should affect me at all. And I was jealous retrospectively - it was almost as if I were standing frustrated outside the studio, a pimply sixteen.

Looking back, I see myself as being near the verge of insanity. I couldn't feel like that now; there is, as it were, a transparent barrier between myself and strong emotion. I feel what is correct for me to feel; I go through the necessary motions. But I cannot delude myself that I care. I wouldn't say that I was dead; simply that I have begun to die. I have realised, you might say, that I have, at the most, only another sixty years to live. I'm not actively unhappy and I'm not afraid of death, but I'm not alive in the way that I was that evening I quarrelled with Alice. I look back at that raw young man sitting miserable in the pub with a feeling of genuine regret; I wouldn't, even if I could, change places with him, but he was indisputably a better person than the smooth character I am now, after ten years of getting almost everything that I ever wanted. I know the name he'd give me; the Successful Zombie.

I don't of course care whether that young man looking at the theatre bill was wiser or kinder or more innocent than the Successful Zombie. But he was of a higher quality; he could feel more, he could take more strain. Of a higher quality, that is, if one accepts that a human being is meant to have certain emotions, to be affected strongly by all that happens to him, to live among the people around him. I don't mean that one has to love people, but simply that one ought to care. I'm like a brand-new Cadillac in a poor industrial area, insulated by steel and glass and air-conditioning from the people outside, from the rain and the cold and the shivering ailing bodies. I don't wish to be like the people outside, I don't even wish that I had some weakness, some foolishness to immobilise me among the envious coolie faces, to let in the rain and the smell of defeat. But I sometimes wish that I wished it.

What has happened to me is exactly what I willed to happen. I am my own draughtsman. Destiny, force of events, fate, good or bad fortune - all that battered repertory company can be thrown right out of my story, left to starve without a moment's recognition. But somewhere along the line - somewhere along the assembly line, which is what the phrase means - I could have been a different person. What has happened to my emotions is as fantastic as what happens to steel in an American car; steel should always be true to its own nature, always have a certain angularity and heaviness and not be plastic and lacquered; and the basic feelings should be angular and heavy too. I suppose that I had my chance to be a real person. "You're always in contact," Alice said to me once. "You're there as a person, you're warm and human. It's as though everyone else were wearing rubber gloves." She couldn't say that now.