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By Root 373 0

see this only when the crash had come and when the search for order had been abandoned for something more immediate and more reassuring. And the need for reassurance was constant. I began, as the saying is, to frequent prostitutes. Instinct alone didn’t suggest this; I was also influenced by what I had read. I became an addict of what these women offered, which was less and more than pleasure: the quick stimulation of fear, followed by its immediate dissipation. But it was a grotesque business, not the least grotesque part of which was the vocabulary. Personal service; correction; domination; thirty shillings dressed, two guineas undressed. The first occasion was a failure; it was an occasion of unrelieved fear. I remember a very warm ante-room with a gas fire, a wallpaper of flowered, country cottage pattern, and an elderly cigarette-smoking maid in an upholstered armchair reading the evening paper by the light of a dim ceiling lamp. In the room beyond there was the manageable talk of money and something extra for the maid; then the humiliation. After some time the body threw me off, rearranging its stiff, evil-smelling hair. But the cruelty and cheating were, as I discovered later, exceptional; I never experienced them again. The occasions that followed are a blur: of encounters less with individual bodies than with anonymous flesh. Each occasion pressed me deeper down into emptiness, that prolonged sensation of shock with which I was every minute of every day trying to come to terms. Still the cummerbund, though, still the well-brushed hair: in those days my only act of heroism.

I write as though Lieni is in some way to blame. This is not my intention. Lieni might even have saved me. I was not with her when the crash came. I had left the boarding-house, and the move had been a climax to disturbance. The house had been sold to the Countess and we had all, Lieni as well, been given notice. So we scattered. I made no attempt to look up Lieni. Presently I had my own private fight; I didn’t think I could face her. I saw her, from a taxi, twelve years later. It was in that same area, on a Sunday afternoon, sunny, the street littered with paper. She was in a party of macintoshed Maltese, perhaps the very men I knew: small, pale, worried, with bodies and faces that carried the signs of childhood deprivation. Her own style had changed little. Her heels were still very high, her lipstick still a little too bright on her wide mouth: not the smart London girl, but a full-bodied woman who could be recognized at a glance as an immigrant, Maltese, Italian, Cypriot.

Six months after I moved I saw both the Countess and the boarding-house mentioned in the News of the World. The house had been turned into a brothel. I cried out to Mrs Mural, my landlady, when I read the item, delighted to recognize an address with which I had been connected. It was the Murals’ paper and it was the sort of item they relished. But they did not care for the connection. The Murals were on their postwar rise; they were breeders of boy scouts; they grew more grave as they grew more acquisitive. Mr Mural once had a suit made to measure by a firm with many branches; for a full week the card advising him that his suit was ready lay on the letter tray in the hall. He was a scrupulous bill-maker. The bill which followed a minor illness, during which they had had to feed me, began: Telephone call to Doctor 3d. I paid without comment. Folding my cheque, not putting it away, he became genial; he told me that once, during the war, he had seen the Emperor Haile Selassie. ‘Standing by himself on Swindon station.’ Poor Emperor! Mrs Mural nourished her family with care, and my ration card was not without its uses towards this end. Some little portion fell to me, it is true. My breakfast, with its little pat of rationed butter and its little dish of rationed sugar, was brought up to me in procession every morning: Mrs Mural, her daughters, aged five and seven, and the dog.

One morning the elder girl hung back in my room. She had something to say. She said: ‘Shall I show