Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [35]
‘She ordered me to take it to the lounge,’ I said. ‘To feed off the palms.’
‘But of course you did no such thing. You threw it overboard.’
I was startled, suspecting he’d actually seen the incident.
‘And that’s not all, is it?’ he added. ‘Come now, be straight with me. Conversation is useless, don’t you think, unless one addresses the truth.’
Though hesitant, at first, scarcely having known until then that the truth was at issue, or indeed in what way I’d been evasive, I soon got the hang of it and poured out more than I intended. This was partly due to his skill in drawing me out and partly because of the heady satisfaction to be gained from talking about oneself. I told him of the fire in the stokehold, my dream of the night before, my involvement with Tuohy in Belfast, my glimpse of Ginsberg with his hand on Wallis’s waist. I left out, in connection with the fire, Tuohy’s belief that it was legitimate to use sabotage in the struggle for Irish Home Rule, along with his conviction that the ends always justify the means.
Scurra interrupted from time to time, seeking clarity on this or that statement, demanding further details, correcting assumptions. For instance, when I said the Socialist meetings I had attended had shaken my soul and convinced me of the truth of Marx’s theory that the real value of commodities lay in the labour embodied in them, he brought me up sharp, insisting that the value of any given product was in direct proportion to demand, and though the theory of surplus value was generally expounded with special reference to capitalistic production, in reality it was independent of the system.
‘One must distinguish,’ he said, ‘between use-value and exchange-value. The air we breathe seldom has exchange-value, but always high use-value, being necessary to life. Philosophically speaking, life may be said to have use-value, but only for the individual. Its exchange is death, which has no value whatsoever unless one is in severe torment.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘one should substitute worth for value, the latter word leaning too strongly towards the notion of goodness.’
‘A point well made,’ he said.
At which I glowed with pleasure, though not for long, for he proceeded to tear my new-found beliefs to shreds, not by demolishing the ideas themselves but rather by questioning my own capacity for sound judgement, the young, he asserted, being prey to delusions, awash with misplaced guilt and only too prone, by virtue of unexplained chemical changes and immortal longings, to be struck by the lightning bolt of giddy ideals. He wasn’t unkind or dismissive; he eyed me with affection while he laid me bare.
‘But I must believe in something,’ I heard myself plead, ‘some purpose . . . some cause . . .’
‘Of course you must,’ he soothed. ‘It’s essential at your age. You’ll grow out of it as the years pass.’
‘But I don’t want to grow out of it. There has to be a new way of living . . . a different way of . . .’
‘Of what, exactly?’
‘Of men being equal—’
‘But they’re not equal,’ he said. ‘Nor is it desirable that they should be. What would be the value of St Peter’s in Rome if every other church in the world was of the same shape and dimensions? What price the flowers in the garden if each were of the same height and colour?’
‘I’m talking about people,’ I retorted. ‘Not flowers.’
‘It’s entirely to be expected,’ he said, ‘that a young man such as yourself, rich, pompous, ignorant of the lives of the general mass of humanity, should find himself so persuaded.’
‘I haven’t met any others,’ I protested. ‘You wouldn’t find Ginsberg or any of the chaps I know worrying about the working man and the worth of his labour.’
‘I was talking about you,’ he said. ‘Your temperament sets you apart. That and your beginnings. Which is why your dream was so explicitly symbolic of darkness and danger.’
I was taken aback that he should be so blunt. Though I supposed some of my uncle’s generation were acquainted with the facts of my early life, none had come out with it so plain.