The Complete Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James

  Since I had self-obsession instead, I was not best equipped to maintain my equilibrium. Writing badly by night and coding badly by day, I was getting less enjoyment than I should have done out of my first long taste of being alone and paying my own way, or some of it. But not even the most determined cultivation of chaos can prevent the occasional outbreak of order. Having been advised by Robin that the Courtauld Gallery was just around the corner, I began spending some of my lunch-time there. The Italian primitives would probably not have said much to me even if they had been first-rate: my appreciation of painting was fated to work backwards from a starting point in recent times, so as yet I found the Renaissance, when I visited the National Gallery, an elaborate preparation for Rembrandt, whose main achievement in turn was to have done all that could be done with darkness, so that one day the Impressionists would show the same exhaustive virtuosity with light. But the Courtauld’s Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were first-rate. The great names were represented by only a few paintings each, yet these were capital works without exception. For the first time I got beyond admiring the individual painter and became immersed in the individual painting. There was a comfortable leather bench on which I sat and stared at Manet’s girl at the ‘Bar of the Folies-Bergère’ for half an hour on end, not always in the hope that Millicent would walk in and catch me there looking intense. After the first few weeks the accumulated evidence that she was never going to visit the Courtauld Gallery had become overwhelming.

  As with many scatter-brained women her handbag was a bin, out of which she would produce, when the tea-break conversation flagged, one of those cube-shaped paperback novels by which American authors in elevator shoes take revenge on their country for its having rendered them illiterate. In Millicent’s case it was always the same novel, called something like The Insatiables. She would take squares of fudge out of the bin and melt them in her lovely mouth while it formed silent words as she slowly read. She is probably still reading that book and I would be surprised if the fudge hadn’t taken its toll, although not disappointed. Usually we do not want people to flourish after they have proved that they can live without us, but Millicent was a special case. And to think I never got near her – except when, instead of the fudge, she produced from her bin one of the ten cigarettes to which she rationed herself each day. I would always lean across the table and light it for her. The table was eight feet wide, but before the filter tip of each lucky Dunhill had settled into position between those sumptuous lips I would have lit a match and be sliding across that polished mahogany like a speed skater falling headlong and face downward on the fleeing ice.

  My own cigarette ration was more like twenty during working hours, with twenty more each evening. By the time I eventually quit, about twelve years ago, I was smoking eighty cigarettes a day. People who scoff at this figure have never noticed how quickly a true addict smokes a cigarette, so that the burning tip, instead of being a shallow glowing cone, is like a red hot wire. Also you get to the point of having two cigarettes going at the same time, until you reach the terminal stage when you have three of them in your mouth at once, recoiling in sequence like guns in a turret. I finally quit when I found myself at two o’clock one morning assaulting a cigarette machine which had taken my last four coins and given nothing in exchange. The machine will probably never forget my deadly flurry of right uppercuts and left jabs, but that’s another story. Even when confining myself to a comparatively moderate forty a day, however, I must have been a spectacle, with butts piling up around me and my beard turning yellow around the mouth. On my right hand, only the little finger was the colour of skin. The thumb and three remaining fingers were a startling mixture of orange-peel and gold leaf. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the nicotine must have been turning me the same colour inside as outside. All it took was someone capable of mature reflection.

  More important in the short term, which for a long time remained the only term I could think in, was that the cigarettes ate up a large proportion of the money I had left over after paying the rent and buying the ingredients for my evening meal of bacon and sausages cooked in the fat of a similar meal cooked the evening before. The last duty-free Rothmans was far behind on the horizon, like a ship disappearing towards a more affluent world. For a while I still smoked the same brand, but with tax added to the price they would have been far too expensive even if my first pay packet had not revealed the full meaning of the word ‘stoppage’. It meant heart-stoppage. Some form of emergency tax had been imposed until such time as I qualified for a rebate. Presumably one qualified for a rebate by being able, for several weeks consecutively, to read the amount which had been withheld without succumbing to cardiac infarction. This was all a bit much, especially coming on top of the weekly National Insurance slug. I had thought that National Insurance was meant to insure me, but judging from the size of the compulsory contributions the idea was to insure the nation. So I switched to Players No. 6. A lot shorter than Rothmans, they were the tiny kind of cigarette that children smoked at matinees. In recompense my daily consumption shot up to sixty, with consumption sounding like the operative word. If coughing was a sign of literary ability, I would soon be up there, or down there, with Keats and Kafka.

  Summer arrived, the job ran out, and the team dispersed, some of them to take an early holiday before starting serious work. Millicent walked out of my life, swaying gently at the hips: a new recruit for the growing army of the untouched, another chapter in the history of what never happened. I took the loss stoically, screaming only when alone. One of those naturally grave young men to whose air of tranquillity I aspired in vain, Robin had impressed me with the seriousness of his enforced exile, something with which voluntary exile has little in common. I was merely on a long holiday. He was banished. But all the more devotedly he studied to be a lecturer in English literature, showing remarkable tolerance for my views on the subject, which he was well aware owed their fluency to a culpable superficiality in the actual business of reading the books. It is never heartwarming, when you are three-quarters of the way through The Wings of the Dove, to be told by someone who has read only three pages of it that it is not worth reading. Robin not only mastered his justifiable impatience, he actually helped me line up another casual job, just around the corner in Gordon Square – something about counting up all the foreign students in Britain. But the job didn’t start for another two weeks, during which I would be once again flat broke.

  Telling people I was on a fortnight’s holiday and would soon be drawing pay again, I raised almost enough scratch to smoke and drink continuously, provided I got plenty of sleep during the day. Much of this sleep I got in the parks. I slept in Hyde Park near the Serpentine, St James’s Park near the pond, Green Park, Regent’s Park and Holland Park. Daringly ranging further afield, I slept for several hours in the grass at Richmond while deer cropped up to a few feet all around me, so that I woke up looking like a chrysoprase cameo. Most adventurously of all, I slept in the meadow at the Mill in Cambridge.

  One of my old Sydney fellow students and drinking mates had already been up at Trinity Hall for a year, reading the second part of the Modern Languages tripos as an affiliated student. During his last summer in Sydney we had been on stage together in the Union Revue, I playing Abdullah Tracy, the Arabian millionaire detective, and he making a show-stopping appearance as the rhythm and blues belly-dancer, Fatima Domino. After the show we would join the Downtown Push at whatever party they had crashed and get drunk enough together to forget the waves of indifference which had emanated from the audience. The last time I had seen him, on the drunken night before he sailed for England, he had been wearing full Push battle order, right down to the suede desert boots worn shiny on the toes. Our faces six inches apart, we had shouted farewell on the understanding that the Poms would never suck him in. Now, in Cambridge, he was suddenly in a three-piece suit and sounded like the Queen broadcasting to the Commonwealth. His new accent cut me off at the knees.

>   Even with his old accent I would not have found it easy to understand what he was talking about. Apparently there were sound academic reasons why he was still up, when everybody else had gone down. Otherwise he would already have gone down and not come up again until Michaelmas, or Candlemas or possibly Quatermass. But being obliged to stay up was nothing like as bad as being sent down. There was a big difference between being sent down and going down. That was one of the first things one learned when one came up. When I heard him use the word ‘one’ I began to suspect that he had been drugged, tied to a chair and brainwashed. But after a few pints of brown water in the Eagle, plus a few more in the Little Rose – Pepys’s pub, he explained with enthusiasm and difficulty – it was more like old times. He hired a canoe at the Mill and we paddled to Granchester, where a lot of young people were sitting around. These, it was explained to me, were not up. A succession of pints at Granchester was cut short by afternoon closing time, whereupon we paddled back to the Mill. Up at Granchester the church clock had stood at ten to three but down at the Mill it was ten to five. Up, down, up, down. The itinerary was out of Rupert Brooke, the echolalia out of Four Quartets, the situation out of hand. On the meadows there were some girls sitting down who were also not up. For a while we lay down and then later on we got up. It was in this condition that I fell into Corpus Christi and looked up at where Christopher Marlowe, no mean piss-artist himself, had had his rooms. I was led into Trinity Great Court as Byron had once led his bear. In the main court of King’s I was held steady until the Chapel stopped moving. The sun was gone out of the sky but the twilight was like day, so that the dark, honey-soaked biscuit of the stone – long overdue for the thorough cleaning it has since received – looked like an edible cut-out against the brushed azure. A trembling cut-out. Up, down, up, down. A small old man who looked like E. M. Forster shuffled by. It was E. M. Forster.

  That evening we ate in an almost empty hall, called Hall. But the Hall of Trinity Hall was not the same as the Hall of Trinity. Trinity Hall was not a Hall at all. Trinity Hall was a college. This was merely its Hall. It was Trinity Hall’s Hall, that’s all. I was wearing a borrowed gown which kept tripping me up while I was sitting down. I had to keep getting up to fix it, whereupon I would fall down. Brown water was served by a man in a white jacket who helped me when the potato salad got into the sleeve of my gown. Up at the high table, called High Table, there were men looking down on us. These men, I was told, were Don’s. Don’s what? It was agreed that I was too tired to contemplate going up to London until next morning, so I slept that night in my friend’s rooms. We went up a set of stairs, called a Stair, and fell down in a set of rooms, called a Set. My companion slept in or near his bed but I was not envious. I was perfectly comfortable with my left arm hooked over the towel-rail and my head in the wash-basin, although every half-hour or so there was a terrible noise, like a man singing the first few bars of ‘Celeste Aida’ into a bucket.

  6

  Statistical Catastrophe

  Having seen an old friend fall so conspicuously on his feet should have tipped me off that I was falling on my head. Incredibly this was a fact that I had still not faced. It was finally brought home to me by an episode which strikes me even now as so shameful that I have to struggle, as I begin to tell it, against the urge to hide behind chalk-white make-up and a putty nose. But whereas it is simply good manners to make a story about one’s ordinary human failings as entertaining as possible, one’s extraordinary human failings require less self-indulgent treatment. What I did next couldn’t be glossed over with ten coats of hand-rubbed Duco. I took a job on, mucked it up, panicked and ran. That’s the long and the short of it. There was a girl involved, but that makes it worse, because she in no way approved of my behaving badly, and the only reason she couldn’t help me behave better was that I didn’t listen. Remorse, remorse. But let’s not jump the gun.

  Once again the job was in Bloomsbury, just around the corner from Woburn Walk, in one of whose bow-windowed little houses W. B. Yeats had once written poetry, and in another of whose bow-windowed little houses Ezra Pound had once played the bassoon. Whether the second activity helped or hindered the first has always remained an open question, but to the inward ear of my imagination this was a mighty conjunction of creativity, as if Goethe and Beethoven, instead of slipping through each other’s grasp, had settled down in the same street to write Faust as an opera. I couldn’t walk past those bow windows without shivering, and indeed still can’t. Twenty years ago the shiver was at least partly caused by apprehension. The job had something wrong with it. It was too easy.

  My employer was some official outfit called the Association for Commonwealth Institutes, if it wasn’t the Institute for Commonwealth Associations. Its headquarters were in the usual Georgian terrace house. From the architectural viewpoint, Bloomsbury had been raped twice, once each by the Luftwaffe and London University. The attack by the University had been the more merciless, but there were still a lot of Georgian terraces left. Few of them, however, were quite so elegant as the one housing the Institute for Associations. With the credit obtainable from friends on the basis of my prospective first week’s wages minus stoppages but plus rebate, I bought a pair of black chisel-toed Chelsea boots to go with the Singapore suit. Entering the building, I felt that I needed only a bowler hat and a tightly rolled umbrella to make me look the complete Establishment figure. If I had had the hat, hanging it on the hat-rack in the hall without being rendered temporarily headless by my suit would have entailed a pretty energetic combined jump up and lunge sideways, yet the idea was sound. Even the beard, after suitable attention from a pair of nail scissors, looked like something that might have been approved of by the Navy, instead of fired at on sight.

  Once having entered the building, I bent to my task. This I did literally, because the task was spread out on one of those familiar large mahogany tables, except that this time I was on my own. The task was a large chart in which I was to enter, against the names of all the institutions of higher learning in Britain, the number and provenance of all the Commonwealth students attending them. At the end of the scheduled two months, the task would be completed by my tallying the total number of entries, thus to give a set of figures which could be read out by the responsible Minister in answer to a parliamentary question already tabled. A cinch. Nothing to it. All it needed was a level head.

  For years after the disaster I tried to convince myself that a level head was something I possessed naturally and that I lost it only because of Pandora. In cold retrospect it becomes apparent that a man with the Medusa touch will wreak havoc whether he has help or not, but at the time of the explosion, and for as long as the debris was falling, I couldn’t help believing that the whole débâcle had at least something to do with Pandora’s legs. Pandora’s legs had the rest of Pandora on top of them, which didn’t make things any easier. The man in charge, a nice old thing in a three-piece suit with a watch-chain, had explained the chart, shown me how to analyse the data sheets, made a few sympathetic remarks about how my new shoes must have been hurting, and left me alone. It was all plain sailing for about an hour, and then Pandora opened the door to ask me if there was anything I wanted. Instantly I wanted Pandora. Her severe expression only added to her appeal. Those career-girl glasses were something cruel: when she looked at you it was like having your photograph taken by the police. Their frames were so big that she was getting both your profiles to go with the full face. But her mouth was all the more intriguing for being set in a firm line. From there on down she was Jaeger twinset, pearls and plaid skirt with a safety pin, but it was all put on over a figure twanging with whip-lash energy. Millicent’s sensuality, the memory of which now began a rapid retreat into the past, had been languid, passive, receptive. Pandora’s was the other thing entirely: avid sinuosity on a hair-trigger. And whereas Millicent’s legs had been merely poetic, Pandora’s were rhapsodic. They came tapering down out of the hem of that glorified Black Watch kilt like a pair of angel
s nose-diving with their wings folded, did a few fancy reverse curves of small radius so as to recreate the concept of the human ankle in terms of heavenly celebration, and then swooped at an only slightly less vertiginous angle into a pair of black lacquer stiletto-heeled court shoes with little bows near the toes. Stiletto shoes had come on even further in the previous few months, to the point where prospective airline passengers were asked not to wear them. Airliners kept crashing in the Andes and when the search party finally managed to cut its way through the jungle it would find the usual fuselage full of skeletons, except that at least one of the skeletons would be wearing stiletto shoes which had to be extracted from the metal skin of the pressure cabin with a pair of pliers. Pandora’s heels were like that. Looking at her for the first time with roughly the emotions of the Flying Dutchman meeting her namesake, I suddenly and strangely remembered a more than usually weird case study in Havelock Ellis about a man who got his rocks off by lying down and having women stand on his vital areas without removing their buttoned boots. If Pandora were to co-operate in such a venture, there could be no doubt that the experience would prove terminal, but what a way to go. Pinned like a butterfly. This ambiguously disturbing prospect was made even more unsettling by her air of severity. Though she didn’t look as if she would be much interested in your pleasure, an interest in your pain was clearly not to be ruled out.

  I was maligning her, of course: it was just the glasses. Having foisted one of my fantasies on Millicent, I had immediately set about foisting a different fantasy on Pandora. But there could be no doubt that the detachment of her manner was more effective than a provocation. To indicate that there was nothing I wanted, I raised both hands as if to fend off help, while saying: ‘No worries.’ What I said came out muffled, but her reply was witheringly clear. ‘Is there something wrong with your clothes? What happened to your head just then? You looked like Charles I.’ I told her the story of the Singapore suit, a would-be self-deprecating routine which by then, after so much practice, was in a high state of polish. Any normally equipped English-speaking female could be depended upon to laugh aloud at least twice during this comic tour de force, but Pandora didn’t crack a smile. This was particularly galling in view of the fact that her line about Charles I had been pretty good. Not perhaps a miracle of invention, yet tellingly delivered from the dead pan. Pans didn’t come deader than Pandora’s pan. I was gibbering. What could I do to break the pack ice on that minatory face?