As we left the café and idled over the road to the bus-stop I felt a listless bewilderment come over me. Rachel’s character was about as high-powered as her syntax. Where had I got the idea she was clever? Geoffrey? No. Geoffrey’s sister? No. Me? Yes. What sort of mumbo-jumbo world, I asked myself, do you think you’re living in, bub?
Seemingly, in one afternoon, the entire Rachel Papers rendered defunct. All that scholarship … wasted, utterly wasted.
‘Don’t you even like Blake?’ I complained.
‘What?’
‘I was wondering if you liked Blake, because if you do I thought we might go and look at his paintings at the Tate next Sunday, if you haven’t already seen them.’
I had, of course, planned to say this. But it sounded very flat now. I wasn’t stroking her shoulder, nor was I staring at her in the compelling way outlined in my hip-pocket note-pad. I wasn’t even looking at her. I said, ‘I just thought you might like to … I’m not…’
Her bus appeared round the corner. I stayed where I was while Rachel edged forward with the queue. I wasn’t going to get anywhere. My disappointment and fatigue seemed to prompt a loud groan, and I would have uttered it too, if Rachel hadn’t suddenly been saying:
‘Oh Charles, I’d love to, really, but … things are so complicated.’
She glanced accusingly at the bus. She looked fretful, importunate, almost bouncing up and down, like a little girl wanting to pee. It seemed totally spontaneous. I moved closer, intending to seize her hand with involuntary earnestness. But they were both in her pockets.
‘It’s DeForest. He’s coming to lunch. He might stay.’
‘Oh well.’
‘But ring me. No do. Will you?’
A stocky old woman with what looked like a triangular polythene bag on her head shouldered me brutally out of the way at this point and joined Rachel on the crowded platform.
‘You never know,’ I shouted. Irony and blood returned to my features.
Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road.
Very well: demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extraterrestrial wayfarers; Intense Consciousness of Being; pathetic fallacy plus omnipresent déjà vu, cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager’s religion. The Rev. Northrop Frye fetchingly terms it ‘queasy apocalyptic foreboding’. An Angus Wilson character terms it ‘adolescent egotism’, thereby driving me almost to suicide last Christmas. Is that all it fucking is, I thought. For the question that interested me about this feeling was not ‘What is it?’ so much as ‘Does it matter? Is it worth anything?’ Because if there isn’t a grain of genuine humility there, it’s the electrodes for me. Does it simply get weaker and weaker, like one’s sense of uniqueness? Or do some of us hang on to it? Then, I suppose, I’d have to throw in my lot with all those twitchy twenty-five-year-olds I had noticed about the place, the characters who find egocentricity numinous in itself. Intermittently articulate, something held back, a third eye hovering above their heads, intrigued and forever gripped by the contrast between them and everything else. Look round: everything, except you, is (wait for it) quite unlike what you are, altogether dissimilar, a totally different kettle of fish. Yet this is what interests them most about the observable world. Well, I’ll have to make up my mind at midnight, twenty and all, one way or the other. How about you ?
I telephoned Rachel the next evening. We chatted like friends.
When I brought up Blake she spoke of that engraver with enthusiasm and surprising familiarity. Obviously, if we did go, I would have to mug up on him.
‘Yes, but there’s at least as much blank fear in the Milton paintings as there is spiritual afflatus.’ I paused, counted down from three. ‘And the point is, will you be able to come?’
‘Charles, I feel—’
‘Hang on, you’ll have to speak up. I’ve got some people here.’ I slammed the door, so that the sounds of the radio-play on the kitchen wireless were reduced to an underground rumble. That’s better. Yes?’