The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

WEST END

I.

It was five o’clock, dark, and beginning to drizzle. I crossed Oxford Street by the Marble Arch, wondering what to do—for I had no raincoat—and my eye fell on the signboards of a small cinema theater. There was an early Chaplin film—“The Pawnshop”—and I could think of no better way of passing an hour; so without hesitation I approached the woven-wire guichet, pushed a shilling and two coppers through the little pigeonhole, received a metal ticket in exchange, and walked into the dark theater. A color-film was on the screen—and a string quartet, with a tinny piano, was playing, or trying to play, the “Unfinished Symphony.” I sank into the seat illuminated by the usher’s electric torch, lit a cigarette, and watched a procession of muleteers descending a rocky gorge. It was somewhere in Spain. The rocks were red, glaucous prickly-pears leaned above them, the donkeys picked their way down a winding pathway, with wagging bells. The riders, sitting astride the little beasts, and wearing wide-brimmed hats, looked enormous by comparison. They came to a ford—the water was beautifully green. The donkeys plunged in with no sign of alarm save that they put back their ears; and then, floundering out on the farther bank, among broken rocks and poppies, wound in single file through an orchard of cherry trees, which were in bloom. The colors were excellent—the trees looked as if they were foaming. I stretched out my legs, relaxed, and began watching the film with that dazed and hypnotized fascination with which one always watches an ever-changing motion. As one follows the flowing of a stream, with its innumerable sparkles and fluctuations of shadow and gleam, so I followed this soundless cataract of adventure in Andalusia. London, and February in London, and my engagement for the evening with the Proctors, became remote and unreal.

It was after half an hour or so of this state of abstraction that I became aware of the woman who sat on my left. I had felt a sort of stealthy pressure from her—very much as if she were trying to pick my pocket; and on looking down sharply to see what she was doing, I found that she had dropped her right hand over the arm of the chair, allowing it to rest against my side. I looked quickly then at her face, which, in the dim light, I could see to be that of a woman middle-aged. She knew that I was observing her, but she made no effort to withdraw her hand. Instead, after a moment, she leaned more closely toward me, so that her elbow pressed hard against mine. At the same moment, also, with the least perceptible motion of her face and eyes, she stole a quick glance at me, simultaneously giving a discreet little middle-aged cough.

My first feeling was one of cynical amusement. I withdrew, as gently and inoffensively as I could; and then it occurred to me that this was rather heartless. Besides, I was curious. So without more ado, I took out my cigarette case and offered her a cigarette. She accepted it with a quietly said “Thank you,” I lighted it for her, she slipped her arm through mine, and we began a desultory conversation about the film. She didn’t like Chaplin—she thought he was vulgar; but she liked Harold Lloyd. She was very fond of Theda Bara, and of the vampire type of film in general. She told me that Theda Bara had been born on an oasis in the Sahara Desert. She thought she had a marvelously beautiful mouth, and that she looked as if she were very passionate. I countered by saying that my own favorite movie-actress was Mary Pickford. At this point, Charlie was taking the alarm clock to pieces on the counter of the pawnshop. I laughed, and she gave me a look of tolerant disdain.

“How can you see anything funny in it,” she said.

I replied that I thought he was simply delicious.

Her answer to this was a disquieting squeeze of my arm. It became apparent that she was going to make love to me. The idea was not in the least attractive—it struck me as grotesque. For an instant, I felt trapped; a kind of amused panic seized me; I wondered how on earth I was going to get out of the situation. I had cruelly misled the poor thing—it would be impossible for me simply to get up and walk away. I thought rapidly, and then suggested that we go out and have tea, or a drink.

“Don’t you want to stay here?” she said.

“No, I’m thirsty. And I’ve seen this picture before.”

She hesitated, as if disappointed.

“All right,” she said. “I’ve had my tea, but I wouldn’t mind having a glass of port.”

She rose, clasping the feather boa round her neck, and we went down the aisle to the emergency-exit at the left of the stage. Pushing through the heavy plush curtains, we found ourselves in a bare stone corridor. It was here that I had my first good look at her. She was a woman of about fifty—small, shabby, pathetic, fadedly genteel. When they were new, her brown satin dress and tweed coat must have been “good”; but now they looked weather-beaten. Her shoes were scarred and down at the heel; her stockings (which passed for white) were mud-spattered; the feather boa had moulted about half of its feathers.

I took in all this as I held the door open for her; and I found myself smiling at her in an effort to conceal my real feelings. I was terribly afraid that she would guess my attitude—that she would be hurt. Would she imagine—and justly—that I was somewhat chagrined at finding myself in such company? I smiled, therefore, to encourage her; and I must admit that I smiled also because there was something in her face and in her tired blue eyes which moved me to sympathy. It was a dilapidated face—red where it should have been white, and white where it should have been red—but for all its dilapidation it was a face not without charm, and must once have been pretty. Pretty, but weak. Charming, but destined for defeat. Life had been too much for her; and she had become (I could see at a glance) one of that countless army of semi-respectable women who frequent, after nightfall, the “family bar”.… She smiled back at me, affectionately, taking my arm; and we scuttled round the corner to the King’s Head. It was raining hard. The idea of sitting in a warm pub, and drinking port, was not unpleasant.

There was a small green baize table in one corner of the private bar—an aspidistra plant stood on it (in a horribly ornate sham-majolica pot) and an empty glass ringed with the brown froth of stout. I removed the glass, and brought in its place two large ports.

“This is the kind of night,” I said, “when port tastes good. Even port from the wood. Any port in a storm.”

“Don’t you like port from the wood?”

“Not as a rule—it’s too sweet.”

“Oh, I like it sweet,” she said.

She took off her black gloves and lifted the glass to her lips.

“The port they have here is good,” she added. “I often come here. Whenever I go to that cinema, I come here afterward.”

“And do you go often to the cinema?” I asked.

“Oh, yes—three or four times a week.”

“You mean you go and see the same pictures over again?… How on earth do you stand it!”

She gave a little embarrassed laugh—the kind of laugh that must, when she was younger, have been accompanied by a blush—and looked down at the table, turning the stem of the glass between her fingers.

“I don’t go there for pleasure,” she said.

“Oh—I see.”

There was an awkward pause. I tasted my port.

“What’s the use pretending?” she then went on. “You can see what I am, and I’m not ashamed of it, either. You’ve got to live, somehow, and I suppose there are worse ways.”

I murmured that I supposed there were, but that it must have taken a great deal of courage. To this she demurred.

“Courage? Oh, no. Not now. At the beginning, yes, but not now. I’m a hardened old sinner.…”

II.

She unclasped the feather boa from her neck and flung it rather sharply into the empty chair beside her—like a gesture of defiance. At the same time she gave me a quick little grimace of a smile, which was intended to be arch. The corners of her mouth at once, however, drooped into their natural expression of gentle petulance; and I found myself smiling back at her a little too long. She then took a rougestick from her handbag and began touching her lips with it.

“Not that it does any good,” she said, looking up at my slyly. “The port will wash it off.… How old do you think I am?”

I guessed, as flatteringly as I could, after submitting her to a friendly inquisition of inspection; and she told me that she was fifty-three. On my expressing my disingenuous surprise, she added that she was married and had a boy of fifteen. I was impressed.

“Somehow, you don’t look like a mother,” I said.

“Don’t I?… I’m a good mother, just the same, if I do say it as shouldn’t.”

I asked her if her husband and boy lived with her. She said that the boy did, but not her husband. He had been a bad egg from the beginning. He was in the army—and it was when he was sent out to India that the trouble had started. His idea was that he would send for them after a while, but he had never done so. He wrote to her very seldom, and sent her very little money. She supposed he was having love affairs with “brown girls,” and spending it all on them. Anyway, she began to be hard up. And she didn’t know where he was.

“Of course, I may say it was a relief to both of us,” she said. “He was always drinking when he was home, and betting on the horses. It wasn’t much of a life.…” She gave her empty glass a little insinuating push toward me, with two fingers. “Get me another, will you—like a good boy?”

I took her glass and had it refilled at the bar. As I sat down again, I said something about the problem of “separation” in marriage—the way it leads to alienation. She looked at me cynically, or with a look that was intended to be cynical: but the narrowed lids, which were red at the edges, and the wandering blue eyes, failed to convey the desired effect. The attempt at a pose of refined cynicism was pathetic.

“Nothing of that,” she said. “I was as glad to be shut of him as he was to be shut of me. As a husband, he was a fair washout.”

“So now you and the boy live together,” I said. “I should think that would make complications.”

She shook her head, doubtfully; and then went into a kind of abstraction. She gazed over the table at the sawdust-sprinkled floor, sucking in her lower lip. The port was beginning to flush her faded cheeks, and to give her (I could see) that kind of bemused feeling of well-being in which one becomes totally indifferent to one’s surroundings. She was remembering something, and wondering whether she was too bored to talk about it. Perhaps, also, she was remembering how often before she had thus talked about her life to strangers. But what did it matter? It didn’t matter at all. It wasn’t of any consequence. You lived indifferently, and you talked about it indifferently. Either way, the thing was hopeless, but also rather amusing. You might as well talk as not.

She began talking again, therefore, with her eyes still oddly fixed. She talked as if I were an accident, a mere nonentity. The complications had existed, she said, only at the beginning—and then the boy was too young to know what it was all about. Nowadays, it was different. But there had been some funny things at the beginning. She gave a chuckle, and looked at me appraisingly—as if she wanted me to ask her what these funny things had been. I smiled, and she smiled back. We exchanged, as it were, an unspoken agreement about the excessively odd things that life will do. Life was, indeed, riotously funny. The idea brightened in her eyes, and she began to laugh.

“You’d never guess,” she said, “what started me off.”

I admitted the hopelessness of this. It occurred to me to begin improvising, extravagantly, on this theme, but I was afraid it would fall flat, or throw her off. So I merely shook my head and admitted it again.

“It was seeing all those West End tarts,” she said.

“What?”

She repeated the remark, paused, laughed, and then elaborated it. It was when she was feeling very blue, she said. No money coming from Mac—her husband—and no other way of getting any. It was costing more to live, too, with the boy growing up. Saving on gas and food didn’t do any good. She’d always been a bit of a fool—couldn’t even mend a frock properly—couldn’t fancy herself going into “the service.” But she had to do something. And one night, when she was wandering round in Piccadilly Circus, seeing all those West End tarts in their satin slippers, the idea had occurred to her. She had been in the habit, she said, of haunting Piccadilly Circus—she liked to see the crowds, and she had nothing else to do in the evening. She couldn’t go on reading the newspapers all day, could she? I admitted, cheerfully enough, that she couldn’t. So she took to haunting the region of Piccadilly Circus. And she was infuriated by seeing the West End tarts. They were having such a good time—they were so well-dressed—they always had somewhere to go and something to do. They went to the best restaurants, and rode in taxis. It was seeing all this that put the idea in her head.

“It came to me all of a sudden,” she said. “I just stood still and said to myself, why shouldn’t I be a West End tart?… And I couldn’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t.”

She put her head on one side, and looked at me distantly. The pause was rhetorical—she wanted me to appreciate the immensity of this decision. It had been astonishing—she seemed to say—but also it had been entirely natural. Nothing in the world could have been more natural. The only wonder was that she hadn’t thought of it before. Nothing (said the tilt of her head) could have been so obvious.…

“So that was that,” I said, with perhaps a trace of heartless flippancy.

She was annoyed, but annoyed only fleetingly: nettled. I wasn’t to think it was as easy as that. Not at all. It might have been easy to make the decision—to act upon it was another matter.

“I couldn’t think how to go about it,” she said.

“Naturally,” I replied.

She added that if you’d been brought up a lady, it wasn’t so easy. How could she begin? She tried to pick up men in the streets, but it was no good. They were always the wrong sort of men, and they looked so horrible staring at her from under their hats. At the crucial moment, she always got frightened and walked on. She would hold her breath, and if she heard them coming after her, she would run. I was asked to imagine what it must have been like. I imagined it, and lighted another cigarette for her. It was as if together we watched her nocturnal maneuvers in Shaftesbury Avenue and Regent Street, her pauses in dark doorways, her uncertain hoverings at the corners.

“It wasn’t any good,” she said. “I decided it wasn’t my line. I had to think of something else.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, partly to screen them from the cigarette smoke, partly in an effort to assume the appearance of a person very wise and very resigned. I assumed the same pose, and said that she ought to have known that she was not the kind of woman for that sort of thing—she was obviously far too refined. She nodded, acquiescing.

“I decided to try the Café Bonaparte. You know the Bonaparte?”

I told her that I knew it only too well.

“You know what it’s like, then,” she said. “I didn’t—except from hearing about it. But I was told that it would be very easy there. So one night I went.”

She indulged in a sour little retrospective smile, the corners of her mouth sharply turned down. Then she looked off toward the dark window of the bar, on which the rain was beating.

“The question was what to do with the boy. You see? I couldn’t leave him at home all evening alone. So I took him along with me.”

“To the Bonaparte?”

She gave me a withering look, and then shook her head wearily: I had been very stupid.

“Certainly not,” she said. “I took him to a cinema in Leicester Square and told him to wait there till I came for him. Then I had a drink and went to the Bonaparte by myself.”

She began to laugh. It was very funny—the whole thing was hysterically funny. To think that she had been so frightened, by anything so simple! This amused her intensely. She went in, she said, trembling like a rabbit—absolutely trembling like a rabbit. The crowds, the smoke, the mirrors—the whole thing dazzled her. She had no idea what she was doing. She walked in as fast as she could and sat down in the first empty seat she came to. And then, right off, she saw a sign which said that ladies without escort were not admitted. Imagine. A waiter was rushing toward her, and she was on the point of running out again in a panic, when a man sat down opposite her and said good evening. Just like that: she nodded at me for emphasis. He asked her to have a drink with him and she accepted. Then he invited her to dine with him. He was very nice—a clean type of man, she could see that at a glance. But when he asked her to dine with him, she didn’t know quite what to do … She asked me if I saw the difficulty of the situation, and I said that I did.

“I couldn’t leave the boy there all evening without his dinner, could I.…”

“Of course not.”

So she told the man all about it. He asked her questions, and got more and more interested. She could see that he was surprised: of course, that was natural enough. But he was damned nice about it. And he said, when he heard the whole story, that that settled it—they would go and get the boy and all three have dinner together. He paid for the drinks, and they went round the corner to the cinema theater, where she got the boy; and then the three of them went to a Spanish restaurant for dinner. It was the first real dinner, she said, they’d had for a long time. A big bottle of wine, fried eggs with bananas, some Spanish sweets for the boy—they both ate themselves almost sick. And the whole thing was so funny, when she stopped to think about it. She and the Major—he was a major—both said that at the time. They couldn’t get over it. They laughed and laughed.… And the Major kept patting the boy on the head and calling him Cupido. After that, he always called him Cupido. The boy and the Major took to each other at sight, you might say.…

The really funny thing, however, came later: it was when it came time for them to go home.

“It was when we were in the taxi, and the boy kept going off to sleep, that it first came to me.…”

The trouble was that there was only the one bed, where she and the boy always slept together. She couldn’t think how they were going to manage. When they got to the flat in Bayswater, she showed the Major how it was. Just the two rooms, and the one bed, and the boy so sleepy that he couldn’t stand up.… Had I ever heard of a situation like that?

I admitted that I hadn’t.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me at once—she wanted to be sure, first of all, that I savored the situation to the full. She cocked her head on one side again, breathed smoke out through haughty nostrils, and surveyed me with amused cynicism. The point was too good: it must not be hurried over. Situations like that, she seemed to imply, didn’t occur too often in life, and should be relished for all they were worth.

“The Major settled it,” she then said. “We put the boy to bed and waited. When he was asleep, we picked him up and carried him into the sitting room and put him on the floor. And later on we carried him back again.… While we were waiting for him to fall asleep we just talked.”

She smiled at me, with an air of modest pride and triumph, and I smiled back. Tacitly, thus, we agreed that life was a really extraordinary business. You could never tell what tricks it would play. She and the Major and Cupido, there in the little flat together, and for that astonishing purpose—could I ask for a queerer thing than that, or one that did her greater credit? It was really unparalleled—really unique.…

III.

After that, it had been comparatively plain sailing. The Major continued to look after them, and she and Cupido had lived in what you might call luxury. They had everything they wanted. Holidays two or three times a year at the seaside, good clothes, good food. The Major was very fond of Cupido, and talked of putting him into a school. Two or three times a week he came and dined with them, or took them to the theater. Everything went along beautifully; she was happy for the first time in her life. But then all of a sudden, out of clear sky, Mac came walking in. Just strolled in to tea, with a bag full of crumpets, as if he’d never been away. She cried all night, wondering what to do. The next day it all came out by accident—it was when Mac said something about where they were going to dine that evening. Cupido piped up with “But Mummy, tonight, don’t you remember, we’re having dinner with the Major.” “Major? What Major?” said Mac; and the whole thing came out, then and there. There was hell to pay. It was the end of Mac, however—he kicked things around a bit, and then put on his tunic and went. It was the last she ever saw of him, and a good riddance, too.

“I was properly fed up with him,” she said.

I said that I didn’t blame her, and got up to replenish the glasses. Then I asked her about the Major. Had he sent the boy to school? He sounded to me like a good fellow.

She gave a flaccid little laugh, brief and bitter.

“What do you suppose?” she said. “No, he didn’t.”

This, apparently, had been too much to expect. But she bore him no grudge—quite the contrary. He had continued to stand by them for three and a half years after that, which wasn’t so bad.

“Especially,” she added, “considering that I wasn’t as young as I used to be. I was getting on. My looks were going. And when I finally lost them, I lost the Major. He just went off to France and never came back. Wrote me a lovely letter, and enclosed a draft for a hundred pounds. He didn’t try to make excuses: that wasn’t his way, ever. He just said ‘My dear, our affair has run its course.’ That was all. I couldn’t blame him. I cried my eyes out, and I didn’t know really what to do with myself at first, as if I was lost, but I didn’t blame him.”

“I suppose it’s what you have to expect,” I said.

“It’s what women have to expect,” she answered.

“Well, it’s a man-made world, and no mistake—what did you do then?”

She shrugged her shoulders, relaxed, sighed, seemed suddenly to become a great deal older.

“I did the only thing I could do. I went back to the Bonaparte.”

“Oh?”

“I made the hundred pounds last as long as I could, first—but when it was getting low, I saw that I’d better do something. So I went back. But it was too late.”

I failed to catch her meaning, and she rather wearily explained. She was too old, that was all—the men paid no attention to her. Evening after evening she would sit in the Bonaparte, drinking coffees, only to come away alone. To begin with she had been too proud to give up; refused to admit the truth. But then it dawned on her. Her clothes were giving out—she had to find something else—so she hit on the cinema. She began to haunt the cheaper cinemas, and found that she could just make a living out of it. She would approach men—preferably the older ones—as she had approached me. She had two or three “regulars” whom she saw every few days. They gave her half a crown, and sometimes a drink or two afterward. It was, in fact, one of her regulars—an old man—whom she had been waiting for this afternoon, at the Elite Palace, when I had come along. So that was that.

“What an extraordinary thing!” I said.

She didn’t seem to think so. It was like everything else.

“What can you expect?” she said.

I suddenly remembered the Proctors, and the distance from Marble Arch to St. John’s Wood; and I looked at my watch.

“The only thing is,” she went on, “if I should happen to be ill. What would I do?… For instance, one day last autumn I slipped on those greasy cobbles in Covent Garden and hurt my ankle. I fainted among the cabbages and cauliflowers and when I came to I was in the ambulance. They took me to the hospital and gave me ether. I had such a funny dream when I went under—I was stuck in a long red sewer-pipe, with one doctor putting his head in one end and another at the other, and both of them bellowing at me to come out. Suppose it had been something serious? As it was, I was only laid up for a fortnight, and it happened I had enough money. The boy went shopping, and I could hobble round enough to cook. But sup pose I’d got a broken leg.… My God!…”

She gave an amused, rather maternal, chuckle.

“It would be awkward,” I admitted.

There was a pause, and then I said that I would have to be going. She flushed, looked a little scared, cleared her throat.

“You couldn’t spare me half a crown, could you?” she said. “I think I’ll stop here and have a sandwich.”

I took out a ten-shilling note and gave it to her. She thanked me.

“Goodbye,” I said, shaking her hand, “and the best of luck.”

She half stood up, and then sank back into her chair, smiling confusedly.

“If you’re ever in the Elite Palace again—” she said.

“Right-o.”

I pushed open the glass door and went out. It was still raining. A clock was striking the half hour. I walked to Oxford Street, hailed a taxi, and started off to St. John’s Wood.

Ann and Jim would already be mixing the cocktails. Poppy would be playing the piano, and the host of kittens would be charging from end to end of the long corridor under the rain-sounding skylight. I would tell them about it—I would tell them what life was really like. Would they believe me? Yes, they would be fascinated. It was just the sort of thing to tell at dinner—it would start the party off admirably. And then there would be a discussion. I could hear Jim saying “But is life that, or is it this—the four of us sitting here and talking about it?” Poppy would be bored, as usual, and Ann would be furious. Jim would offer us a choice of vermouth or beer. We would drink, talk, listen to music, wonder whether a little more garlic ought to have been injected in the lamb. Poppy would tell us about X’s, the painter’s, latest rout. And meanwhile, the West End lady, having finished her sandwich and perhaps her fourth glass of port, would be returning to the Elite Palace.