Shuttlecock

[3]

I travel home on the Tube. The Northern Line: seven stops to Clapham South. Up, out of the ground, and then down into it again. I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other’s arses and nuzzle each other’s fur. But animals do this innocently and — who knows? — with affection. What goes on in the Tube is done with suspicion and menace. It is as if everybody is trying to search out everybody else’s story, everybody else’s secret, and the assumption is that this secret will always be a weakness; it must be something unpleasant and shameful which will make it possible for its owner to be humiliated and degraded. The fact that I am making these observations makes it clear, of course, that I am guilty myself of the activity I am describing. But look at any group of people in an Underground train. You won’t see much laughter, smiling, or even talk. Not nearly as much, at least, as you’ll see in any bus or railway carriage travelling through the genial daylight. Ignore the people whose faces are conveniently sunk in books and magazines. Watch the eyes of the others. Am I right? Everyone is trying to strip everyone else bare, and everyone, at the same time, is trying not to be stripped bare himself. Oh yes, I know, in one sense, this is almost literally true. Half the men in the carriage are mentally removing the clothes of the girls who are strap-hanging near the doors. They are titillated by their stretched arms, by the little ovals of sweat which appear at the armpits on their blouses. But, beyond this, something deeper, something darker, is going on. Am I right?

Now and then, when I travel on the Tube, I get this feeling that something terrible and inevitable is going to happen. All those bodies crammed together, all those furtive faces searching each other. All this mystification. And I can’t help thinking of the populations of animals which live in burrows — rats, lemmings — which (I read somewhere) exist in far greater concentrations than any human population. When I get out at Clapham South, up into the air, past the newsstand and the florist’s, I breathe a deep breath of relief. Opposite the station is the common — criss-crossed and encircled by incessant chains of ill-tempered traffic — but it is the common. It’s spring. There are daffodils nodding near the bowling-green on my walk home; the sticky-buds are opening on the chestnuts, and there are catkins on the silver birches. There is no doubt what commons are for. They are proof that, huddled as we are in cities, we couldn’t live without trees and grass, at the expense of no matter what urban convenience. And this need crops up in many ways. Marian, for example, as I’ve already mentioned, keeps indoor plants. In the winter, when the garden is dead and colourless, our house still sprouts with leaves. And whenever I am in one of my moods, Marian talks to her plants. It’s true. Going round with her plastic watering-can, she has whole conversations with them.

Have I described my wife? She is thirty-two. She has sandy-blond hair, straight and light so that when the wind catches it, it blows, in a rather clichéd but, for all that, artless way across her face. She has a slender, supple and still provocative figure, even though she has been a mother for ten years. I am particularly grateful that she hasn’t slumped as some women do after they have had their children. You could say that my wife has her share of beauty. Why does that statement half catch me unawares? Her face is a little on the long side, but because her mouth is full and her eyes large (blue, with little chips of green in them), you wouldn’t notice this. She has a way of lowering her eyes and then raising them and suddenly opening them wide when someone speaks or when something claims her attention, as if she spends all her life far away, in a trance — which is not to say that she cannot be alert, even athletic. This blank, startled expression sometimes makes me feel (it is a strange thing to say, I admit) that she doesn’t know who I am. Before we were married and we had Martin and Peter she worked as a physiotherapist in a hospital. She likes pale colours, but I prefer her in dark ones. Her complexion is smooth, on the pale side, and is one of those complexions which never change very much with mood or emotion — which suggest passivity or concealment. But the thing I like most about Marian (excuse me again if this sounds odd) is her malleability, her pliancy; the feeling I get that I could mould and remodel her (she must have learnt a thing or two at that physiotherapy clinic), contort and distort her, parcel her up and stretch her into all kinds of shapes, but, just as you can work a piece of clay a thousand times but still have left the same piece of clay, she would still, at the end of it all, be Marian. Marian.