A Circle of Friends Page 17

  ‘Is Lawrence enjoying Cambridge?’

  ‘I don’t know. He never writes.’

  She decided to stay and live out the neighbours’ grins and nudges, and Mrs Fuller’s thin lips.

  ‘I shall read Proust,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been meaning to, and now I can, can’t I?’ There was no mention of Adam.

  She thought it better—I put it that way—for me not to be around. She lent me the money and took me to the airport to go back to America. She wanted an ocean between us. She sent me to Michael Salvesen, the professor I’d met at Howard’s the night I met her. He taught English, it turned out, at Colorado University at Boulder, and without questions, but with an uninquisitive kindness which almost choked them, he and his wife found me something to do. I had no ideas of my own.

  The Dawson Hotel in Estes Park, up at the top of the Big Thompson, was thin-walled and over-heated and the television in the lobby relayed its commercials to all corners of the building. I had a room on the first floor at the back, overlooking a parking-lot. Beyond the frozen cars the Rockies stared down at me. The hotel was cheap, not too depressingly clean, and its restaurant, advertised in a sideswipe of yellow neon, was called ‘Ruth’n’Vic’s’. The trout were always fresh—there’s no season in Colorado, and they were easy to catch through the ice—but everything else was deep, deep frozen. I had a theory that Ruth’n’Vic had laid down supplies during the Korean war, fearing a more general conflict, and that their restaurant was still serving them. Anything you buried on a north slope up there would stay cold for centuries.

  I drifted in, slightly shocked still, perhaps, and found that my job was to help Vic run the hotel. I served meals, checked that the heating was always kept well above the level of European comfort, swept the porch and answered the phone. Virtually no one came to Estes Park on weekdays, and though women’s clubs sometimes lunched daintily with us, and the bridge club met every Thursday in the dining-room, we were usually idle till the week-ends, when the skiers swarmed up from Denver and the various local college towns—Boulder, Greeley, Fort Collins. I had plenty of time to think, and to nurse the nose-bleeds I got from the altitude. The air severed the small veins of my nasal passages like a scalpel. Apart from that, I felt extremely well. Every day, I made myself trudge through the snow for a couple of hours in a solemn ritual of needless exercise. The blood bounced through my arteries like a child with a hoop. You don’t have to move in Colorado to feel fit. It’s not, I understand, recommended for heart cases.

  It was also quite unsuitable for me. I don’t know what the Salvesens had told Ruth’n’Vic about me, but they treated me like a mental patient in need of simple rehabilitation, granted only a wary liberty. They always liked to know where I was going, though they never enquired about where I’d come from. Though it was easy enough to describe my walks, my ultimate destination was quite as mysterious to me as it was to them, and we never discussed it. I wasn’t at all sure what I was doing there.

  I thought, I now think, that the solution to my life’s continual absurdity lay in a systematic attack on my notion of my own personality. If I thought I was a spoiled schoolmaster, then I must try manual labour. If I imagined I was urban, then I must get out of doors and away from cities. The Rockies answered this preposterous misconception to perfection; their very name suggested the challenge I felt I needed. I decided to spend the winter getting fit for a summer of leading parties of tourists across the National Park, cutting tracks through wilderness areas, dealing directly with nature. ‘Wildlife’ and ‘wilderness’ were words that brought the blood rushing to my nose. Saying goodbye to Henrietta at London Airport, I had cut my old life away from me as a parachutist cuts his harness once he’s safely on the ground. On the ground was where I was going to be from now on. I was not going to revert under any circumstances to my previous airborne personality. I had drifted with the wind and been blown in a hopeless emotional fog and against all truth and justice into the divorce courts—I, a virgin. All that was over. The whole mad flight to Estes Park was based on the ludicrous idea that I wasn’t guilty, and that the person so stigmatised by Mr Justice Dunbarton was someone quite else, not me, not Martin C. Bannister, the odd odd-job man of the Dawson Hotel.

  Only all that was nonsense, of course. I took, I suppose, a week in that cold Coloradoan air to realise the full lunacy of my enterprise, and another month to admit the falsity of my premise. The judge was right. I was guilty. I had no business blazing imaginary trails through the scenic splendours of a foreign land. It was true that Henrietta and I had not committed adultery, but irrelevant. She had lusted for Adam just as I had lusted for her. The whole elaborate pretence of distant admiration and concealed passion, of poetry rather than penis, had been shown up for what it was. I had decided only my dull conscious self. I had wanted her physically, just as I’d wanted that nameless girl down the road at seventeen. I had coveted my neighbour’s wife while enjoying his hospitality, and though not guilty in fact, I had longed to be so. The verdict was correct. Though the court-room never echoed to the real evidence of our appetites, so plain and unprintable, justice was done and was seen to be done. Aesthetically, the judge was right. The facts didn’t matter in the slightest.

  I felt purged at last. All my life I had felt guilty about something or other, and now I was formally punished. I accepted the truth about it all in a three-day blizzard, sitting in the lobby with Ruth’n’Vic, watching endless westerns and detective stories on television. Accepting it, I had also to accept myself, poor forked and muddled Martin, a mess of a man. But I had a decent brain and it was time I did something with it.

  I spent another month up there, and all I did was breathe. Nothing happened. One day I bought a dwarf-pine from one of the souvenir shops in the town. It cost ninety-three cents and all I could see was a pine bowl, as wide as a saucer but as deep as a tea-cup, full of what seemed to be chips of grey wood and ash. The man assured me that a pine would appear in due course, stunted but ultimately green. It was just a seed at the bottom of the ash for the moment. There were instructions about the temperature it had to be kept at and the amount of sunshine and water which it should be fed.

  ‘They’ll grow most anywhere,’ said the man. ‘Want some rocks?’

  His store was full of the American equivalent of the British seaside saucy postcard, and piles of semi-precious stones of every colour and shade. A small polisher ground away at some black stones with whitish streaks—apaches’ tears. There was nothing in the shop that anyone could ever really want. It seemed extraordinary to find so much rubbish so far from anywhere.

  I left my dwarf-pine on the window-sill of the lobby, but forgot to tell Ruth what it was. She emptied it into the waste-paper backet by the Coke machine, thinking it was a new ash-tray Vic had bought or been given by a salesman. She was very upset when I told her it was a tree she’d thrown away, and she offered to buy me another one. I told her not to worry. I searched without hope among the hotel’s torn paper and cigarette butts. The stench of stale tobacco turned my stomach, and there was a sharp rotting smell from an apple-core. It was my job to empty the basket, so I took it outside to the trash-can and threw my invisible tree away. The ash hadn’t really looked like cigarette ash, but Ruth had been very kind to me. It did seem, though, like a sign that nothing I did in Estes Park was likely to endure.

  There is always a shortage of teachers in London’s comprehensive schools, and I got a job by post for the beginning of the summer term. Ruth’n’Vic were sorry to see me go, and a little worried, I think. I could see them wondering if I was ready for the outside world yet. I thought I probably was. I couldn’t really understand the mental processes by which I’d ever thought I wasn’t.

  On my way through New York I called up Howard and he invited me round. For once it was daylight and I could actually see the picture in his hall. He saw me looking at it, and the cigarette dipped with amusement. He took it down from the wall without a word.

  It was a drawing of an orgy by
a nineteenth-century artist I’d not heard of—Simeon Solomon. The people were drawn with great sentimentality in a sugary, pre-Raphaelite way, and their private parts, such as were visible through the pencil’s smoky innuendo, were glossy and large beyond life. The figures were arranged in a complicated sexual pattern beneath a tree, and what looked like a substantial meal awaited the dimming of their ardour.

  ‘A family group?’ I said, handing it back to Howard.

  He grinned, and put it back on the wall. ‘You could call it that, I suppose. It was my grandfather’s. He used to keep it in the men’s room.’

  ‘I think I’d have it in my bedroom or nowhere.’

  ‘I keep it here,’ said Howard. ‘I never know who’s not going to be in my bedroom. I hate to shock people.’

  He said that Henrietta had not been back to New York and that Freddy had married Sally the day after the decree was made absolute. Strangely, I found it hard even to listen to him. It all seemed very distant, and I was full of my future in Lee Green. Nothing Howard said was important. He simply told me a lot of gossip about people whose faces I could scarcely remember.

  I didn’t see anyone else in New York. Now I live in Black-heath—not the fashionable part near the heath itself, but in the usual row of Victorian red brick with purple pattern, green gutters and a fretwork porch. I am very busy. I haven’t seen Henrietta or her children or any of those people for—oh, it’s getting on for years.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

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  All rights reserved

  © Julian Mitchell, 1966

  Preface to the 2013 Edition © Julian Mitchell, 2013

  The right of Julian Mitchell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–30417–2