Storyboard, page 8
And she went on feeling tired. It was irritating for Keith that, on the evenings when he did get home in good time, she used often to fall asleep in her chair after dinner. “You can’t be tired. You never do anything,” he had once said, and she had replied, “Whose fault is that? Anyway, what do you know or care about what I do in the daytimes?” and there had been a quarrel which had brought on a headache as well as the tiredness. There wasn’t much for them to talk about during these evenings, because Keith had now become so much absorbed in the problems of his work at the Agency, he could no longer discuss them with her. He forgot that Sylvia did not know the details, could not follow his shorthand, needed to be reminded who was who and did what, had often not been told what (since it was so much in his own mind) he assumed she already knew, and he grew impatient. Sylvia did not like to be snapped at. She began to say that she was not interested in advertising. “It’s nothing to do with our home,” she said.
Stephen grew. Sometimes Sylvia was frightened that she did not love him, that it was all a sham, that really she … If it were not for Stephen … If Stephen hadn’t happened…. What did she feel for him? Love was not a word she understood (she thought at these times), but irritation … hate … Once when they had been standing together on the pavement, she had suddenly wanted, really wanted to push him off under a car or a big red bus, to push him off and watch the traffic crush him—and she had hurried home with him, trembling, frightened, unable to understand herself, not wanting to understand, not wanting to know. Because love was not, as one imagined it, something continuous; it was not something to be taken for granted; if it were instinctive, that instinct was intermittent, and could give way to other instincts—the instinct to hurt, the instinct to hate. As Stephen grew bigger, he grew less helpless, less hers. He came to know that there were other people in the world, other authorities than hers. He knew that his father and mother were not, after all, simply two aspects of the same god, but that they might disagree, and that one of them was sometimes kinder to him than the other. Of course Sylvia loved him; of course she did; why else did she worry so much about him? But it wasn’t fair, the way he played up to his father. It wasn’t fair, the way Keith encouraged him. Since Keith was home so seldom—a mornings’ father, a week-ends’ father—it was, Sylvia supposed, only natural in a way that Stephen should make up to him, should bid constantly for his attention, should flirt with him, as if to say in his childish way, “Look what fun we can have together. Stay home with me, and love me, and we shall have fun always.” It was only natural, but it was irritating for Sylvia. She herself would never dream of doing such a thing.
*
Ralph was not quite the country mouse. He’d never intended to stay in Leicestershire all his life, he would tell you, and if a fellowship at Oxford and Cambridge were impossible and he didn’t yet want to do a year in the United States, then London would be better than Stoke-on-Trent, Reading or even Manchester. Only he hadn’t ever needed to live in London before; one couldn’t count the three weeks he’d spent at the Y.M.C.A. off Tottenham Court Road, when, at the end of one Long Vacation, he’d done a little work at the British Museum. So now he would have to find somewhere to live. Some room somewhere. It wouldn’t be easy for him to hunt for London digs from Oxford, and he wasn’t sure how to go about it; his Oxford digs had been inherited from a colleague, and were extremely comfortable, with good cooked breakfasts and lunch on Sundays if he wanted it. One would have to come down for the day, he supposed, and spend it looking at the little cards outside newsagents’ shops, and ringing people up. How did one refuse if one didn’t care for the room? One would already be in it (the woman, no doubt, standing by the door to block a quick departure), and perhaps one should say, “May I let you know?” but what if she were to reply, “Why can’t you tell me now?” when really one had seen the room and there would be no reason why one couldn’t tell her, except cowardice. Would The Radical know of somewhere? Gloomily Ralph read the small advertisements on its back pages. A Socialist Guest House in Perranporth. A lady in Hampstead who wished to make a home for coloured students. A room and food in return for help with the children and instruction in Spanish. A large room in a Regency House overlooking the park, with a Study Circle that met on Fridays. Musical interests. Vegetarian interests. Cultural interests. Photographic interests. Theatre and Ballet. A gentleman with own car seeking another gentleman with whom to share a holiday in Andorra. Perhaps, Ralph thought, some local paper would tell him more about ordinary rooms at ordinary rents where he wouldn’t be expected to read proofs or do weaving in the evenings.
He wasn’t going to be paid enough for him to be able to afford a flat, even an unfurnished one, and anyway he hadn’t any furniture. He didn’t want anywhere squalid, and he didn’t want to be bothered. He didn’t want to have to move again soon; he had too many books for that. It was all so difficult. When Deborah told him that Sophia might know of somewhere, he took it as an excuse to put the problem out of his mind for a while. And when later on Deborah asked him whether he would like to visit the Agency and talk to Hugh, he was ready enough to do that much, since it was obviously so much less embarrassing than being shown a series of rooms by a series of women, all of whom (as he imagined them) would be either squalid or genteel or both.
Ralph looked at Hugh, and decided that he would be harmless and uninterfering. Hugh looked at Ralph, and decided that he was an ordinary young man, who would prefer books to hi-fi equipment, and would not be likely to take to popping in during the evenings. Ralph rather liked the idea of getting his own breakfast in the morning, and saw that it would now be toast and coffee. Both wished that Sophia would return; reassuring as it was to know that they would have nothing to say to each other later, for the time being it made both of them uncomfortable. After a long silence, Hugh said, “I have a very old Morris Minor. Do you think we should go and look at the room?” and Ralph said, “I’m sure it’s all right if you’re sure I’m all right,” and there was another silence. Then Hugh said, “I’ve no doubt we shall settle down. In our different ways. I’ve never been a landlord before, so you’ll have to make allowances,” and Ralph said, “Well, I’ve often been a lodger, so at least I know the form,” and Hugh said, “You’ll have to keep me straight then. I expect Sophia told you about the dachshunds. They’re very quiet except when I come home.”
Obviously the whole arrangement would be much more convenient than if Ralph had found something for himself. There would be things to work out between them—when to have baths, and how to share the telephone bill, and that sort of thing—but nothing that two reasonable people could not adjust. Perhaps Hugh would have quirks. Perhaps Ralph would discover that he himself had quirks. If so, no doubt the quirks could be accepted or reformed. Ralph was most grateful to Sophia. He said so in the lift, as she came with him to the ground floor. He was to make the move to town next week. He hoped that she would allow him to ring her up once he was settled in; Hugh would know her telephone number. Then they might go to a concert or something together, if Sophia would like that.
Sophia wanted to say, “Don’t think you have to, just because …” but of course she couldn’t say anything so gauche. Probably he was being polite. She had put him—or rather Deborah had put him—into the position where he felt he had to make such an offer. She was embarrassed for herself and for him, and wanted to refuse. She had been extremely forward, she felt now, in helping to make this arrangement; she had set up a chain of obligation it would be difficult for them to break, and which he must increasingly come to resent. Had she not been behaving like a spinster looking for a man, overeager to help, to please, over-conscious now of having done so, over-ready in consequence to find and give a slight? Simply by doing this, she had made it impossible (as she now saw it) for Ralph to offer or for her to receive an invitation in a natural friendly way, when ordinarily it might have been the most natural thing in the world for the two of them to go out together.
So she thanked him very much, and said that she would be delighted to go with him to a concert or something.
*
Ralph had expected that the offices of The Radical would have been more modern. Nothing about their letter-paper, nothing about the appearance of the magazine itself, which had recently been redesigned with a two-colour cover, had prepared him for the inadequately converted stables in Walton Street, just off the King’s Road, Chelsea, where The Radical was produced. The Radical had been founded in 1924 by a breakaway group of Socialists, whose position was, they said, somewhere on the true line which divided the arid materialism of the Webbs from the impracticability of William Morris. They had moved out the horses and moved in desks, and one of them had a small printing business in Wytham, where The Radical was still printed. Although the stables had been more and more converted as time passed and The Radical became respected and a political force, it did seem to Ralph that little unregenerate bits of them survived. The room in which he was given a table looked more like a loose-box than an office, and surely there were traces of chaff on the stockroom floor?
The whole building was of a nasty khaki brick, and small windows were set in it. It was built side-on to the road; there was a large back door at one end from which the delivery van was loaded, and a small front door at the other. Once inside the front door, one discovered that most of the ground floor consisted of one large room, in which the desks of the Accounts, Subscriptions and Advertising Departments, jammed closely against each other, gave way eventually to the piles of back and current numbers that covered the area known as the stockroom. The Editorial Offices were a series of tiny rooms opening off this big room, and set together in a row against one wall. On the upper floor, which was reached by an open wooden stairway, were the lavatories, the Editor’s Office, the Literary Editor’s Office, the Conference Room, and a room which was always kept locked and which, under the conditions of the original lease, was let off to the King’s Road Theosophical Society.
The Radical came out every week. It cost ninepence, and ran at a profit. Like the New Statesman and Nation and the Spectator, it gave its front half up to political matters, its back to literature. Like them it had benefited from the decision of the big corporations and trade associations to advertise to what are called “opinion leaders”, so that lucidly argued, passionately felt articles on the need for public ownership would be printed next to full-page advertisements composed in a documentary style, in which steel-workers told how they had bought their own houses and television sets and industrial journalists gave ex cathedra opinions that private enterprise and increased exports went necessarily together. Whimsical advertisements for soda-water flanked critical articles on James Joyce or correspondence on the after-care of discharged prisoners. Publishers’ advertisements paid for the book reviews and Company Reports for the exposes of inefficiency and corruption in the City. Most of The Radical’s readers bought it because they had always bought it and its arrival on the doormat every Friday was a reassurance that they still held the liberal opinions they knew they ought to hold, but which their way of living (if they allowed themselves to think about it) might seem to belie; these did not actually get time to read The Radical, and placing this week’s number in the contemporary magazine rack were often horrified to find last week’s number still there unlooked-at. But simply to subscribe to The Radical was for them a sign that they had not sold out, and was worth the ninepence. Other, younger readers, who spent their time more recklessly, bought it as a supplement to the Sunday papers, and read it all. And there were still a few readers who found in The Radical a connection to others of their kind. Separated though they might be, some in Newcastle, some in Dudley, in Grimsby and in Greenwich, in Tunbridge Wells and in Tiverton, probation officers, personnel relations officers, teachers, district nurses, dentists, solicitors, keepers of museums, industrial consultants—
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
—and for these (for whom The Radical had first been founded) it was a mine of fact, a buttress of opinion, another eye to see by, a living witness, in a world grown corrupt and compliant, that reason and the principles of humanism still had meaning (and a little force) and that it was not yet too late, if only the people would take heed, for society to reform itself on lines that were not now exactly Marxist, and certainly not Benthamite, but generally in accordance with enlightened and sensible opinion as far as it could be collated. Lastly, the corporations bought The Radical to read their own advertisements, and the common rooms bought it to put on common-room tables, and the politicians bought it, and had grown comfortably used to the fact that The Radical was always upset about some piece of injustice and chicanery, but had usually managed to get its facts, not wrong enough to make any essential difference to the accusation, but wrong enough to be dismissed as biased and inaccurate, so that one never needed to take any action on the matter, which could clearly be seen to be one of The Radical’s usual pieces of fuss and fume.
Ralph had not realized that the staff of The Radical would be so old and so young. The generation in between seemed to have been lost. He discovered that this was because the older members of the staff were determined to keep in touch, and hand on the torch, and all that; it was the only thing to do; The Radical wasn’t going to become out of date and doctrinaire if they could help it. In their forties, they had never felt any great need to keep in touch; they were in touch, the only people who were, as it had sometimes seemed to them. But at sixty, the sensible man adjusts to the fact that he is growing old. At the age of sixty, however, “the young”, the people to whom one says, “your generation”, are not forty odd, but twenty odd, and the staff of The Radical now consisted of mellowing old men who remembered Brailsford and arrogant young men who didn’t even remember Laski. Into this company, though he reminded himself that he was a scholar au fond and not a journalist, Ralph fitted well enough. He was to do bits of reportage, bits of reviewing, and was promised a series of articles on the problems of local government. On occasional press days, he might be needed to deputize for the Assistant Editor at Wytham where the printers were, but he could count on free time for his own work. “After all‚” said the Assistant Editor, who had a high beaked nose and whose skin was pale blue like London milk, “we all do it, one way and another. Television for us, and research for you.”
“Television?”
“Tonight, What the Papers Say, Press Conference, Panorama, Searchlight; that sort of thing. They used to talk about radio dons, but now it’s television journalists—our sort of journalists anyway; you couldn’t expect the popular ones to be very articulate. Most of it’s B.B.C., but even the commercial companies like being serious for part of the time, provided it’s not peak time; they have to, I suppose, if they want to keep their licences. When it all started, one couldn’t tell whether they’d go for Culture or Current Events, but after the first six months Current Events won. Quite right too! Who wants to watch the Hallé playing popular classics, when they can have us talking about teenagers, or the H-bomb, or the traffic problem, or the Middle East, or just about anything really, as long as it’s controversial? Have you found anywhere to live yet?”
“Yes. A room in Kensington.”
“Rather a traditional way of living. I hope you’re not going to wear a duffel-coat to the office. Piers Paraday used to do that, but one always felt he was playing at it rather.”
Ralph was determined to like and be liked. A piece of his past inside him, the pre-Grammar School bit which remembered the thin back garden and the wooden fence, the smell of the chickens’ food in the kitchen, and the other fusty smell in the front room where the only books were a set of H. G. Wells given away by a newspaper in the nineteen-thirties, a piece which remembered his cousin Harold who had bettered himself by getting a job in a bank, and rows and rows of identical houses in the rain, and going to the pictures with the Children’s Club on Saturday mornings, and Spam and chips, and the way the teachers at the Primary School talked differently from his parents, this part of him resented the Assistant Editor’s manner, but it had been much overlaid—deliberately overlaid—by other ways of thinking, particularly recently by what Ralph conceived to be the academic way of thinking, in which a certain arrogance and a detached view of the way in which ordinary people lived were usual. So he only said, “It’s not as traditional as it sounds. Someone I know found me the room, so I’m not one of the exploited. You know the sort of thing—own key and use of kitchen.”
“Admirable. You must come out to supper with us some time. We live at Richmond, because my wife has money.”
“My landlord’s really the—well, I suppose the boss, in an organizational way—of the girl who found me the room. He’s never let a room before, and he seems quite harmless. I’m much more experienced at it than he is. He keeps dogs, though.”
“If you’re lodging in a Kennels, I don’t envy you. Mais chacun a son goût.”
“No, nothing like that. He’s in advertising actually. A huge office, all plate glass, and carpets, and gladioli in the Waiting-Room—you know the sort of thing.”
“Indeed I don’t. You must find our own little office quite a come-down. It’s rather too hot in summer, and very cold now because the room’s so huge. All the heat goes right up to the ceiling, and stays there. It’s not quite so bad for us, because we have little electric fires in our own offices, and one sits over them, though even those tiny rooms never get warm—the partitions don’t go all the way up, you see. I suppose this landlord of yours is all right. I’m afraid I don’t know any advertising people. Some of one’s own generation do go into it, as you know, but one loses touch.”
