The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

Donaghy appeared at the door. ‘This is not Heinz and Dibble,’ the judge shouted.

  Donaghy muttered apologies and hustled them into another room. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back.’

  When Donaghy returned he was wearing his jacket and carrying a black book. A typist followed him, and a black porter with a broom.

  ‘I’m going to marry you now,’ he said. ‘These here are the witnesses.’

  They stood side by side, facing him. Peter felt Paula’s shoulder begin to shake. He kept his eyes on Donaghy. Paula covered her face. She was giggling soundlessly.

  Donaghy took out a large handkerchief. ‘That’s right, Miss,’ he said. ‘You go right ahead and cry. This is a pretty big moment in a girl’s life.’

  She took the handkerchief and plunged her face into it, converting her laughter into plausible sobs.

  The ceremony was over and they were heading back to their rented apartment when they found themselves once again on the edge of the square. It was not crowded at this hour, and they went in and sat down on one of the benches. In the intervening days Peter had forgotten about the black man. Now that sick despairing face came back into his mind. He felt the horror of death. He imagined the body naked under a sheet, the face hardened, the eyes open. He imagined it lying unattended in the middle of an empty room, full of light and the reflections of light, silent except for the clanking of trolleys, and the clatter of instruments falling into metal dishes, that echoed now and then from rooms and corridors nearby. He imagined two men in green coats entering the room, taking up the body on its litter and sliding it, head first, into a refrigerated chamber until only the pink soles of the feet, and the big toes tied together with a strip of cloth, were visible. Above and below those feet were other pairs of feet, and on either side of the door which now closed on them were other doors.

  As if to save himself from his own fantasy Peter reached out and put his hand on Paula’s knee. She laid her hand over his. He looked at her. She was still close to laughter. ‘That was a pretty big moment in a girl’s life,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I suppose we’re now legally qualified to commit adultery.’

  ‘Don’t let’s start at once,’ she said.

  He looked across the square at the brilliant skyline of the central city. Above the hum of traffic he recognised the lazy chopping of a helicopter. He searched for it in the hot sky, and caught sight of it for just a moment before it sidled away and disappeared behind a shimmering tower of glass on the edge of the square.

  Determined things to Destiny

  SHORTLY AFTER MY SIXTY - THIRD birthday I stood on—and in—a machine outside the New Life Superstore in the Doubleday Grand National Shopping Mall somewhere, I am no longer sure exactly where, in the United States. I was travelling, as ageing academics do, talking, as they do, about my subject, literature at large, poetry in particular. I put in the required coins, and the machine, telling me first to stand straight, then eyeing me with a red beam, printed out my height and weight, in metrics and in the older measures. That these facts came together with a print-out of the date and time, even to the hour and minute, gave what might be the most precisely recorded moment of my biography, should anyone care to write it—and I hasten to affirm that, to this late date, there has not been the least reason why anyone should.

  What it told me was:

  Weight—79.4 kg / 175 lb

  Height—1.84 m / 6 ft

  Below there was a line showing the ‘Ideal Weight (depending on Constitution)’ for a male of that height:

  Light

  Medium

  Heavy

  76.8 kg / 169 lb

  80.3 kg / 177 lb

  85.2 kg / 188 lb

  It looks almost perfect; at the very least satisfactory. For a six-foot male (which is to say tall in the 1950s, medium-tall in the new century) of ‘light’ constitution, I was a little overweight, about what you would expect for one of my age who walks a lot, doesn’t pant going up hills and can still (briefly—say for a few hundred yards, or even metres) run like an imitation of the runner he once was.

  These are the facts. But the truth is not quite (and when is it ever?) caught by them; and it was this hidden discrepancy that set me thinking about Claudia Strange. It was in those late 1950 years, when I was tall rather than (as now) medium-tall, that I knew Claudia as a friend. That was in England where we had each come, she from the United States, I from New Zealand, as post-graduate students—both on scholarships.

  ‘Friend’ is exactly right, as in ‘just good friends’—meaning ‘only’ and ‘no more than’. I would have liked more; but Claudia had a preference, a predilection, even (it doesn’t seem too much to say) a passion for men who were, on the New Life Superstore machine’s simple scale, ‘Heavy’. Not ‘Heavy’ in the sense of fat. Claudia’s men had to be big; they had to bulk large; but it had to be hard bulk. It was as if she wanted to be crushed by an excess of maleness.

  Other things were important. Brain was important. Personality, wit, sensibility, imagination, social skills. A man who wanted to interest her had to have them all. She had no wish to be dominated, oppressed, extinguished. It was only that if a man was to arouse her romantic side and her sexual passion (and we were at an age when the two are only distinguished with difficulty), these excellent personal and social qualities had to be amply housed. They had to inhabit a large strong frame.

  Which is why the New Life Superstore’s print-out made me think of her. Most of my life I have been a string bean—a strong string bean, ego demands I should add. I was athletic, healthy, a very large eater—but thin, gaunt, almost (I am trying to see myself as she would have seen me) emaciated. At fifteen I was already six foot and weighed in for school boxing at under 150 pounds. Thirty years later my height and weight were the same. I was a fat person’s dream of success. But (and such is the nature of human perversity) for most of my adult life I yearned, as I put it to my family, to ‘achieve fatness’.

  I achieved it, or achieved it by my own poor standard of bulk, only in my fifties, by which time Claudia Strange was long dead, and (I think it’s not too much to say) famous.

  There’s a scene I remember very clearly which I think catches something about the arcane nature of our friendship. Claudia was visiting me in London where I had gone to do research in the British Museum, and we were walking in a long narrow park which (at least in my recollection of it) runs north from Kensington High Street somewhere west of the narrow lane where I occupied a bedsit. It was a time when nannies could still be seen about that area in large numbers, walking their charges in prams and pushchairs; and by my observation they divided into two distinct types—the round-hatted uniformed professional English kind, hard-faced relics of what was even then a past age, who gathered at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens; and the stylish young au pairs, mostly French, sometimes Swedish, who were to be seen in this little park close to what had become my home.

  In those days I had women-friends, any number of them. Even my foolish and self-mocking obsession with Claudia Strange didn’t prevent that; and there was one of these French nannies who had taken my fancy and who seemed, though I hadn’t yet spoken to her, to be encouraging the interest I let her see she aroused. On this particular day I took Claudia with me so she could see and comment on the young Frenchwoman; also, perhaps, so the young Frenchwoman could see me with a nice-looking American girl.

  It was part of what seems, when I look back on it, an elaborate game Claudia and I played. I wanted to arouse her jealousy; and I even believe I did arouse it—or, if it wasn’t jealousy, it was at least possessiveness. She would say to me, looking at some young woman I pointed out in a library or at a party, ‘Yes, she’s perfect, Mark. Go for it.’ But I always felt she did it knowing that that was not what I really wanted. And my tardiness, my failure to go into action as long as she was there to entertain me, pleased her, reinforcing the confidence it gave her to know that I was in love with her. Claudia didn’t want me; but nor was s
he quite ready or willing to give me up.

  But on this particular day the young French nanny never appeared. We found a park bench and sat waiting for her, watching others of her kind, giving them marks out of ten, making literary jokes and weak puns. And at some point in this aimless verbal tennis which we both loved to play I used the word ‘skinny’. Perhaps I said, touching the old wound, that of course this Frenchwoman wouldn’t want me as a lover; like Claudia she would find me too skinny.

  Her reaction was strange. I don’t think it was that she had never heard the word— though I do remember she told me that in America it would be much more common to say scrawny. But the way I had said it delighted her because, she told me, I had ‘screwed up my nose!’ She got me to say it again—and again. Over and over I had to screw up my nose and say it: ‘Skinny.’

  Was she mocking me? I don’t think so. It was almost as if, just for a moment, she was in love with me. What is certainly true is that from that moment on I could usually please Claudia, catch her attention, make her laugh, win her back from a displeasure or a sulk, almost (even if only for a moment) make her love me, simply by reminding her that I was ‘skinny’.

  Claudia, I should explain, was a scientist, a Harvard graduate in physics who had come to England to do a post-graduate degree at Cambridge. But she had been one of those brilliant, and rare, students who shine almost equally at arts and sciences and have difficulty choosing between them. She had loved studying literature, and still liked to read good books and talk about them. She found most of her fellow science students unappealing. The men, she said, were too narrow—either ignorant of the arts or interested (the mathematicians, usually) only in classical music. As for the women (and there were very few in science in those days)—she dismissed them as an unstylish lot, with big legs and no make-up, whose idea of a good time was singing ‘Green grow the rushes, oh’, or ‘No more double-bunking’ around a fire in a tramping club hut. ‘Weedy’ for the men, ‘dowdy’ for the women—those were her words, and that was her summing-up of her colleagues. It’s not surprising that some of them spoke slightingly of her after her death.

  Claudia and I got to know one another first by correspondence, and that, as I will explain, was unfortunate. She kept a journal—highly literate, clever, witty, brisk and unbridled—the entries accompanied by excellent black-and-white sketches; and it was a small section of this journal, just a few pages dealing with her journey by sea from New York to London, that appeared in a universities literary magazine edited by the young (as yet unknown) Ian Hamilton to which I contributed a poem. I was struck by what she had written. It leapt off the page, slightly breathless, the words and impressions spilling out and tripping over one another, but vivid, lucid, spontaneous, full of energy and colour. The notes on contributors mentioned her college, and on an impulse, a quite untypical one, I wrote to tell her how much I had enjoyed her contribution.

  Back by return post came a letter. I have it here on my desk as I write. ‘Very bad form of me,’ it begins, ‘not giving you a moment to catch your breath, but I’m firing a note straight back to tell you what an immense kick it gave me that someone, a contemporary and student of literature (and a poet to boot—a real one!) should not only like my journal extract, but like it enough to find words for why, words quite wise and carefully weighed, and should even be generous enough to put pen to paper and stamp to envelope …’

  So it rattled on. That was Claudia’s way. She told me about herself, where she came from, what she was doing in Cambridge. She wrote warmly about my poem. I was charmed, as I had been by the journal, and wrote back. It was still an age of letter writing. Our correspondence continued for seven or eight weeks before our first meeting, and in that time more than a dozen letters went back and forth.

  By now I was truly interested in her, keen (as she was) that we should meet. We had exchanged photographs and I could see she was at the very least pretty, perhaps beautiful. She, I suppose, could see that I had eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, hair, all in reasonable condition and in the right relation one to another.

  As for our minds, these had already met on the page and liked one another, even when there were differences of opinion. So now we could get on and like one another in reality. Neither of us could know, of course, what other lovers, potential or actual, already existed. In my case there were a few, none of them very serious. In hers, since she was an attractive and clever young woman at the University of Cambridge, where men out-numbered women ten to one, my potential competitors were an army. But since Claudia responded as positively to my letters as I did to hers, the omens were propitious, and disappointment lay in wait for us both.

  That autumn I bought my first car. It was a secondhand Morris Minor, round and blue and already run off its feet but very dependable. It cost me £250. I looked out at it parked in the mist under a street lamp in the lane outside my bedsit, half pleased, half alarmed at what I’d done. I had no licence to drive, and no immediate prospect of getting one. This had something to do with the Suez Crisis. The queue of new car-owners waiting to be tested was long, and meanwhile I was supposed to drive only with a licence-holder beside me.

  One afternoon, on an impulse, I removed the large red ‘L’ from my front and back bumpers and set off, unlicensed and unaccompanied, for Cambridge. First there was the problem of getting out of London—nothing like as difficult as it is now, but for a learner driver a nightmare nonetheless. There was no M11 in those days, and I can see, looking at a road map which might be the one I used all that long time ago, that once clear of the outskirts of the city I must have ambled north through Harlow, Bishop’s Stortford and Great Chesterford.

  I remember there was a part of the journey when the charm of rural England swept over me—a charm which, for one of my colonial background and education, was always powerful. It was the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, and so much of what I saw had literary echoes, as if the showering orange woods, the discreet streams and hills, the cropped fields and thatched villages had come into existence as illustrations of famous books and poems rather than the other way about. And this excitement merged with the pleasure of being free of claustrophobic London, and with the prospect of meeting the young American woman whose letters and photograph had taken such a grip on my imagination.

  But as I drove the autumn mist got thicker and, near Cambridge, while the afternoon closed down towards dark, became fog. British fogs in those days (it was before the Clean Air Act, or before it had begun to have an effect) were unimaginably thick, and by the time I reached the outskirts of the town I was stopping every few hundred yards and walking up the road in the weak beams of the Morris’s headlights so I could be sure what was out there ahead of me.

  Somehow I found Claudia’s college, and the house nearby where she lived with other American and Commonwealth students who, like her, were already graduates. Inquiring for her there I was directed to a nearby pub. When I walked in I recognised her almost at once, sitting at a table with a group of young women and one or two men. She was dressed in a way which I remember seemed, though I’m no longer sure why, distinctly American. She was wearing a neat brown jacket with a matching skirt (I think she would have called it a ‘costume’) and a yellow shirt. Her hair, thick and golden-brown, was quite long and softly wavy. Her eyes were blue and keen. She wore bright lipstick which, when she laughed, framed two perfect rows of strong, white, evenly spaced teeth. There was a general look of being well groomed. She had submitted (as the poet Yeats would have said) ‘to the discipline of the looking-glass’. And there was in her manner the impression of one eager to please, or to make an impression.

  Claudia saw me staring at her, failed to recognise me, and when she looked a second time and my eyes were still on her, gave me the kind of glare a confident woman gives to a stranger whose attentions are unwelcome.

  Hungry and thirsty after my difficult drive, I bought a pint and a pie and sat at a table near the door, where I could keep her in my sights without
staring.

  Half an hour later she got up to leave. As she passed I tugged at her sleeve. ‘I’m sorry if I seemed to stare,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t want to interrupt your conversation. You don’t recognise me?’

  I had stood up to greet her. She took the hand I held out to her, holding it absent-mindedly while she looked hard at me—at my eyes, my face, my hair, my thin shoulders and narrow waist.

  ‘You’re not … Mark?’

  I expected this recognition would be followed by one of those broad smiles I had seen her unleashing at her companions around the table. Instead there was a frown. Her mouth closed tight. Her eyes flashed. I’m not even sure she didn’t stamp her foot. What did I mean by coming unannounced? I should have let her know, not just burst in on her life like this. She was completely unprepared. It was bad form. It was …

  I said I was sorry. I was already backing away from her, taking my coat from the chair where I had thrown it, making for the door. In part what I felt was guilt. Because there wasn’t time to reflect, I behaved as if I had indeed done wrong. But already there was another part of me thinking this was very strange behaviour; that it was … mad, wasn’t it?

  I hesitated at the door and looked back, but she wasn’t coming after me or signalling me to stop. Her eyes were on me still, her expression unrelenting. I found my way to my car, got in and drove out of Cambridge, without any certainty about whether I was heading north or south. The fog persisted and soon brought me to a halt. I was lost. I didn’t want to pay the cost of accommodation, so I spent the night in the car, curled up and shivering under my overcoat on the back seat. I would have said I didn’t sleep at all, only dozed, but in the morning I was woken by a tapping on the window. I wound it down. The fog now was on the inside of the glass. Out there it had cleared. A policeman was peering in at me.

  Of course, I thought. He was going to ask to see my licence, discover I was only a learner. I began to prepare my defence. I was not, when apprehended (‘May it please Your Honour’), actually driving …