The Golden Notebook Page 7

  “I wouldn’t mind being like your lot, it’s not that. I’ve been around listening to your friends for years and years now, you all of you seem to be in such a mess, or think you are even if you’re not,” he said, knitting his brows, and bringing out every phrase after careful thought. “I don’t mind that, but it was an accident for you, you didn’t say to yourselves at some point: I am going to be a certain kind of person. I mean, I think that for both you and Anna there was a moment when you said, and you were even surprised, Oh, so I’m that kind of person, am I?”

  Anna and Molly smiled at each other, and at him, acknowledging it was true.

  “Well then,” said Richard jauntily. “That’s settled. If you don’t want to be like Anna and Molly, there’s the alternative.”

  “No,” said Tommy. “I haven’t explained myself, if you can say that. No.”

  “But you’ve got to do something,” cried Molly, not at all humorous, but sounding sharp and frightened.

  “You don’t,” said Tommy, as if it were self-evident.

  “But you’ve just said you didn’t want to be like us,” said Molly.

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t want to be, but I don’t think I could.” Now he turned to his father, in patient explanation. “The thing about mother and Anna is this; one doesn’t say, Anna Wulf the writer, or Molly Jacobs the actress—or only if you don’t know them. They aren’t—what I mean is—they aren’t what they do; but if I start working with you, then I’ll be what I do. Don’t you see that?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “What I mean is, I’d rather be…” he floundered, and was silent a moment, moving his lips together, frowning. “I’ve been thinking about it because I knew I’d have to explain it to you.” He said this patiently, quite prepared to meet his parents’ unjust demands. “People like Anna or Molly and that lot, they’re not just one thing, but several things. And you know they could change and be something different. I don’t mean their characters would change, but they haven’t set into a mould. You know if something happened in the world, or there was a change of some kind, a revolution or something…” He waited, a moment, patiently, for Richard’s sharply irritated indrawn breath over the word revolution, to be expelled, and went on: “they’d be something different if they had to be. But you’ll never be different, father. You’ll always have to live the way you do now. Well I don’t want that for myself,” he concluded, allowing his lips to set, pouting, over his finished explanation.

  “You’re going to be very unhappy,” said Molly, almost moaning it.

  “Yes, that’s another thing,” said Tommy. “The last time we discussed everything, you ended by saying, ‘Oh, but you’re going to be unhappy.’ As if it’s the worst thing to be. But if it comes to unhappiness, I wouldn’t call either you or Anna happy people, but at least you’re much happier than my father. Let alone Marion.” He added the last softly, in direct accusation of his father.

  Richard said, hotly, “Why don’t you hear my side of the story, as well as Marion’s?”

  Tommy ignored this, and went on: “I know I must sound ridiculous. I knew before I even started I was going to sound naïve.”

  “Of course you’re naïve,” said Richard.

  “You’ve not naïve,” said Anna.

  “When I finished talking to you last time, Anna, I came home and I thought, Well, Anna must think I’m terribly naïve.”

  “No, I didn’t. That’s not the point. What you don’t seem to understand is, we’d like you to do better than we have done.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Well perhaps we might still change and be better,” said Anna, with deference towards youth. Hearing the appeal in her own voice she laughed and said, “Good Lord, Tommy, don’t you realise how judged you make us feel?”

  For the first time Tommy showed a touch of humour. He really looked at them, first at her, and then at his mother, smiling. “You forget that I’ve listened to you two talk all my life. I know about you, don’t I? I do think that you are both rather childish sometimes, but I prefer that to…” He did not look at his father, but left it.

  “It’s a pity you’ve never given me a chance to talk,” said Richard, but with self-pity; and Tommy reacted by a quick, dogged withdrawal away from him. He said to Anna and Molly, “I’d rather be a failure, like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But I’m not saying I’m choosing failure. I mean, one doesn’t choose failure, does one? I know what I don’t want, but not what I do want.”

  “One or two practical questions,” said Richard, while Anna and Molly wryly looked at the word failure, used by this boy in exactly the same sense they would have used it. All the same, neither had applied it themselves—or not so pat and final, at least.

  “What are you going to live on?” said Richard.

  Molly was angry. She did not want Tommy flushed out of the safe period of contemplation she was offering him by the fire of Richard’s ridicule.

  But Tommy said: “If mother doesn’t mind, I don’t mind living off her for a bit. After all, I hardly spend anything. But if I have to earn money, I can always be a teacher.”

  “Which you’ll find a much more straitened way of life than what I’m offering you,” said Richard.

  Tommy was embarrassed. “I don’t think you really understood what I’m trying to say. Perhaps I didn’t say it right.”

  “You’re going to become some sort of a coffee-bar bum,” said Richard.

  “No. I don’t see that. You only say that because you only like people who have a lot of money.”

  Now the three adults were silent. Molly and Anna because the boy could be trusted to stand up for himself; Richard because he was afraid of unleashing his anger. After a time Tommy remarked: “Perhaps I might try to be a writer.”

  Richard let out a groan. Molly said nothing, with an effort. But Anna exclaimed: “Oh Tommy, and after all that good advice I gave you.”

  He met her with affection, but stubbornly: “You forget Anna, I don’t have your complicated ideas about writing.”

  “What complicated ideas?” asked Molly, sharply.

  Tommy said to Anna: “I’ve been thinking about all the things you said.”

  “What things?” demanded Molly.

  Anna said: “Tommy, you’re frightening to know. One says something, and you take it all up so seriously.”

  “But you were serious?”

  Anna suppressed an impulse to turn it off with a joke, and said: “Yes, I was serious.”

  “Yes, I know you were. So I thought about what you said. There was something arrogant in it.”

  “Arrogant?”

  “Yes, I think so. Both the times I came to see you, you talked, and when I put together all the things you said, it sounds to me like arrogance. Like a kind of contempt.”

  The other two, Molly and Richard, were now sitting back, smiling, lighting cigarettes, being excluded, exchanging looks.

  But Anna, remembering the sincerity of this boy’s appeal to her, had decided to jettison even her old friend Molly, for the time being at least.

  “If it sounded like contempt, then I don’t think I can have explained it right.”

  “Yes. Because it means you haven’t got confidence in people. I think you’re afraid.”

  “What of?” asked Anna. She felt very exposed, particularly before Richard, and her throat was dry and painful.

  “Of loneliness. Yes I know that sounds funny, for you, because of course you choose to be alone rather than to get married for the sake of not being lonely. But I mean something different. You’re afraid of writing what you think about life, because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself, you might be alone.”

  “Oh,” said Anna, bleakly. “Do you think so?”

  “Yes. Or if you’re not afraid, then it’s contempt. When we talked about politics, you said the thing you’d learned from being a communist was that the most terrible thing of all was when political lead
ers didn’t tell the truth. You said that one small lie could spread into a marsh of lies and poison everything—do you remember? You talked about it for a long time…well then. You said that about politics. But you’ve got whole books you’ve written for yourself which no one ever sees. You said you believed that all over the world there were books in drawers, that people were writing for themselves—and even in countries where it isn’t dangerous to write the truth. Do you remember, Anna? Well, that’s a sort of contempt.” He had been looking, not at her, but directing towards her an earnest, dark, self-probing stare. Now he saw her flushed, stricken face, but he recovered himself, and said hesitantly: “Anna you were saying what you really thought, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Anna, you surely didn’t expect me not to think about what you said?”

  Anna closed her eyes a moment, smiling painfully. “I suppose I underestimated—how much you’d take me seriously.”

  “That’s the same thing. It’s the same thing as the writing. Why shouldn’t I take you seriously?”

  “I didn’t know Anna was writing at all, these days,” said Molly, coming in firmly.

  “I don’t,” said Anna, quickly.

  “There you are,” said Tommy. “Why do you say that?”

  “I remember telling you that I’d been afflicted with an awful feeling of disgust, of futility. Perhaps I don’t like spreading those emotions.”

  “If Anna’s been filling you full of disgust for the literary career,” said Richard, laughing, “then I won’t quarrel with her for once.”

  It was a note so false that Tommy simply ignored him, which he did by politely controlling his embarrassment and going straight on: “If you feel disgust, then you feel disgust. Why pretend not? But the point is, you were talking about responsibility. That’s what I feel too—people aren’t taking responsibility for each other. You said the socialists had ceased to be a moral force, for the time, at least, because they wouldn’t take moral responsibility. Except for a few people. You said that, didn’t you—well then. But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that’s not being responsible.”

  “A very great number of people would say that it was irresponsible to spread disgust. Or anarchy. Or a feeling of confusion.” Anna said this half-laughing, plaintive, rueful, trying to make him meet her on this note.

  And he reacted immediately, by closing up, sitting back, showing she had failed him. She, like everyone else—so his patient, stubborn pose suggested, was bound to disappoint him. He retreated into himself, saying: “Anyway, that’s what I came down to say. I’d like to go on doing nothing for a month or two. After all it’s costing much less than going to university as you wanted.”

  “Money’s not the point,” said Molly.

  “You’ll find that money is the point,” said Richard. “When you change your mind, ring me up.”

  “I’ll ring you up in any case,” said Tommy, giving his father his due.

  “Thanks,” said Richard, short and bitter. He stood for a moment, grinning angrily at the two women. “I’ll drop in one of these days, Molly.”

  “Any time,” said Molly, with sweetness.

  He nodded coldly at Anna, laid his hand briefly on his son’s shoulder, which was unresponsive, and went out. At once Tommy got up, and said: “I’ll go up to my room.” He walked out, his head poked forward, a hand fumbling at the door-knob, the door opened just far enough to take his width: he seemed to squeeze himself out of the room; and they heard his regular, thumping footsteps up the stairs.

  “Well,” said Molly.

  “Well,” said Anna, prepared to be challenged.

  “It seems a lot of things have been going on while I was away.”

  “For one thing, it seems I said things to Tommy I shouldn’t.”

  “Or not enough.”

  Anna said with an effort: “Yes I know you want me to talk about artistic problems and so on. But for me it’s not like that…” Molly merely waited, looking sceptical, and even bitter. “If I saw it in terms of an artistic problem, then it’d be easy, wouldn’t it? We could have ever such intelligent chats about the modern novel.” Anna’s voice was full of irritation, and she tried smiling to soften it.

  “What’s in those diaries then?”

  “They aren’t diaries.”

  “Whatever they are.”

  “Chaos, that’s the point.”

  Anna sat watching Molly’s thick white fingers twist together and lock. The hands were saying: Why do you hurt me like this?—but if you insist then I’ll endure it.

  “If you wrote one novel, I don’t see why you shouldn’t write another,” said Molly, and Anna began to laugh, irresistibly, while her friend’s eyes filled with sudden tears.

  “I wasn’t laughing at you.”

  “You simply don’t understand,” said Molly, determinedly muffling the tears. “It’s always meant so much to me that you should produce something, even if I didn’t.”

  Anna nearly said, stubbornly, “But I’m not an extension of you,” but knew it was something she might have said to her mother, so stopped herself. Anna could remember her mother very little; she had died so early; but at moments like these, she was able to form for herself the image of somebody strong and dominating, whom Anna had had to fight.

  “You get so angry over certain subjects I don’t know how to begin,” said Anna.

  “Yes, I’m angry. I’m angry. I’m angry about all the people I know who fritter themselves away. It’s not only you. It’s lots of people.”

  “While you were away something happened that interested me. Remember Basil Ryan—the painter, I mean.”

  “Of course. I used to know him.”

  “Well there was an announcement in the paper, he said he’d never paint again. He said, it was because the world is so chaotic art is irrelevant.” There was a silence, until Anna appealed: “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “No. And certainly not from you. After all, you aren’t someone who writes little novels about the emotions. You write about what’s real.”

  Anna almost laughed again, and then said soberly, “Do you realise how many of the things we say are just echoes? That remark you’ve just made is an echo from communist party criticism—at its worst moments, moreover. God knows what that remark means, I don’t. I never did. If Marxism means anything, it means that a little novel about the emotions should reflect ‘what’s real’ since the emotions are a function and a product of a society…” She stopped, because of Molly’s expression. “Don’t look like that Molly. You said you wanted me to talk about it, so I am. And there’s something else. Fascinating, if it wasn’t so depressing. Here we are, 1957, waters under bridges, etc. And suddenly in England, we have a phenomenon in the arts I’m damned if I’d foreseen—a whole lot of people, who’ve never had anything to do with the Party, suddenly standing up, and exclaiming, just as if they had just thought it out for themselves, that little novels or plays about the emotions don’t reflect reality. The reality, it would surprise you to hear, is economics, or machine guns mowing people down who object to the new order.”

  “Just because I can’t express myself, I think it’s unfair,” said Molly quickly.

  “Anyway, I only wrote one novel.”

  “Yes, and what are you going to do when the money from that stops coming in? You were lucky over that one, but it’s going to stop some time.”

  Anna held herself quiet, with effort. What Molly had said was pure spite: she was saying, I’m glad that you are going to be subjected to the pressures the rest of us have to face. Anna thought, I wish I hadn’t become so conscious of everything, every little nuance. Once I wouldn’t have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mined field; and why can’t I accept that one’s closest friends at moments stick a knife in, deep, between the ribs?

  She almost said, drily: You’ll be glad to hear the money’s o
nly trickling in and I’ll have to get a job soon. But she said, cheerfully, replying to the surface of Molly’s words: “Yes, I think I’ll be short of money very soon, and I’ll have to get a job.”

  “And you haven’t done anything while I was away.”

  “I’ve certainly done a lot of complicated living.” Molly looked sceptical again, so Anna gave up. She said, humorous, light, plaintive: “It’s been a bad year. For one thing, I nearly had an affair with Richard.”

  “So it would seem. It must have been a bad year for you even to think of Richard.”

  “You know, there’s a very interesting state of anarchy up there. You’d be surprised—why haven’t you ever talked to Richard about his work, it’s so odd.”

  “You mean, you were interested in him because he’s so rich?”

  “Oh, Molly. Obviously not. No. I told you, everything’s cracking up. That lot up there, they don’t believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa—they used to say: ‘Well of course, the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years’ time.’ They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, ‘We know that what we are doing is wrong.’ But it’s turned out to be a good deal shorter than fifty years.”

  “But about Richard.”

  “Well he took me out to a posh dinner. It was an occasion. He had just bought a controlling interest in all the aluminium saucepans, or pot-cleaners, or aircraft propellers in Europe—something like that. There were four tycoons and four popsies. I was one of the popsies. I sat there and looked at those faces around the table. Good God, it was terrifying. I reverted to my most primitive communist phase—you remember, when one thinks all one has to do is to shoot the bastards—that is, before one learned their opposite numbers are just as irresponsible. I looked at those faces, I just sat and looked at those faces.”

  “But that’s what we’ve always said,” said Molly. “So what’s new?”

  “It did rather bring it all home. And then the way they treat their women—all quite unconscious, of course. My God, we might have moments of feeling bad about our lives, but how lucky we are, our lot are at least half civilised.”