Lewis Percy Read online

  What kept him in his seat was a peculiar ideal, all the more remarkable for having been glimpsed so early and at such a young age. What he wanted was not his accumulation of notes but an absence of notes, a holocaust of notes: what he wanted was transparency. He was aware that scholarship – the acquisition of knowledge – brought with it a terrible anxiety. How much was enough? How much more was there? Was there any end to it? If one did not possess enough knowledge how could one be sure of possessing more? And if one called a halt to the process how could one not die of shame? Thus with his love for his books went a certain obscure desire to have done with them, or rather not to have to be an officious midwife to small thoughts about great masterpieces. Let Stendhal, Balzac, Zola speak for themselves! That, after all, was what they were there for. He had even thought, in the days before he had timidly assumed the apparatus of the professional scholar, that one’s whole purpose with regard to the arts should be confined to seeing the world as the painter saw it, and reading the world through the books of the masters. Humility, a reasonable respect, were all that was required. He saw himself as having left this stage, even as having forsaken it in the interests of growing up, not knowing exactly what was required of him in the long run. In the short run he had to write and present his thesis, to gain the degree that would put him on the lowest rung of the academic ladder. He had to justify his choice to his mother, to his censorious cousin Andrew, his only other relative, and in euphoric moments – not difficult to come by in this city – he thought it might be a fine thing to expound on great works for the benefit of the eager minds of the young. For he did not doubt that they would be eager. He saw himself quite clearly, in a classroom, holding forth, and was pleased enough with the prospect. Yet at the same time he burned with grateful understanding as Julien Sorel, in his prison cell, pleaded for his ideal life and articulated the great dilemma. ‘Laissez-moi ma vie idéale …’ Over and above the life of contingencies was the life of the spirit, the life that many would never know. Real life, dull life, would imprison them, foreclose on their possibilities. Lewis was willing to bet that many people, of every age, woke up in the morning, surveyed the circumstances of the day, and formulated the same instinctive protest. Thus, while initiating his future profession, Lewis already looked ahead to the agreeable prison cell for which he was destined.

  At twelve noon, in the interests of his lungs and his stomach, he went out, walked around the stony garden of the Palais-Royal, and bought himself a sandwich in the rue des Petits-Champs. No coffee: that would come later, at the end of the working day. Once the morning was passed, he had little difficulty with the afternoon. In the afternoon, as the light faded, and the atmosphere grew thicker, as the lamps snapped on one by one, a sort of exaltation took hold of him; by four-thirty he thought no other life possible. It was as if his thoughts came more easily in the barely illuminated gloom of the dying day: the mornings were too harsh with rational life to enable him to endure his subdued existence. Also, his thoughts quickened not only with the insights of his trade but with the prospect of his imminent release. He thus rode two horses on which he might gallop in different directions, but was not yet at the point of having to commit himself to either one of them. The high vaulted room seemed to be scholarship itself, putting a finger to its lips, urging silence, but his youthful body demanded movement. After such austerity he desired gratification, simple sustenance, the prospect of adventure. He wanted noise, spectacle, a more than impersonal beauty. Yet in the street it was hard for him to shake off the peculiar thrall of his day, the palpable silence that kept him wrapped in his thoughts, unprepared for, perhaps unequal to, the challenge of real life.

  After five or ten minutes he was an ordinary young man again, looking forward to his walk home, his purchase of the cheese that was his passport, his entrance fee to that other world where there was still so much to learn, looking forward even to the privacy of his own thoughts, after listening to the conversation of the women. He was easily, naïvely, simply pleased. The silence pursued him down the ravine of the rue de Richelieu, as if the environs of the library partook of the various silences imposed inside the building, but in the Place du Palais-Royal all was animation. Noise, air, light! He stepped onto this territory as if he were crossing a frontier, and from then on the pleasure was of a different order. He travelled up from the depths to the life of the senses, was happy to know that so many lives were open to him. He took what he thought of as the rich man’s route home, passing through great thoroughfares alive with crowds, until he reached the Place de l’Alma, where he sat and allowed himself a cup of coffee. He was always tempted to drink another, to linger and watch passers-by, to increase his anticipation of the evening’s further pleasures, mild though they were by the world’s standards, but the thought of his widowed mother, drawing the curtains at home in the house in unfashionable Parsons Green, and chafing her permanently cold hands, kept his lips firmly shut, as if one more cup of coffee, drunk in a sybaritic frame of mind, would lower her temperature still further. He missed her: they were too close, and both knew it. Nevertheless the thought of his mother was not unlike the thought of the library waiting for him the following morning, and all the mornings after that, something on which, in this moment of reprieve, he did not wish to dwell.

  Conscious now of the dark, of the cold, and of the thin soles of his shoes, worn out with all the walking he imposed upon himself, he proceeded to his next ascertainable treat: buying his food. He bought little, but rehearsed for the day when he would buy much, much more, ‘pressed down, shaken together, running over’, he thought, remembering that surprising phrase from his Bible of days gone by. Tonight he would present Mme Doche with some superior coffee; that second cup, which he had virtuously denied himself, could not quite be written off. He made his way to the little shop in the rue de Longchamp, where they always gave him a kind greeting, although his purchases were so small. Sometimes, when he was feeling energetic, he would go further afield, curious about the lives of others at this domestic hour. He did not like to go home too early. He had no key: he relied on Mme Doche to let him in, and instinct told him to wait until she had given Mme Roussel her evening meal and was no longer to be seen in the guise of a servant. He liked her to have taken off her overall, so that he need not feel uncomfortable for her. Her position, he knew, was slightly ambiguous. He was solemn in his recognition of such niceties of behaviour, often lurking behind the door of his room when he heard the step of one of the women on her way to or from the bathroom. He hated it for them not to be seen as they would wish to be seen, and was too much on their side to be careless of their appearance or their modesty. They were all modest: their rooms were cells, unvisited. Lewis’s tiny room was put at the service of his ablutions and the writing up of his notes, being unequal to any other function except that of sleep. It was also the scene of prolonged calculations as to whether his socks and his shirts would last until the end of the week, when he could send them home to be laundered by his mother. He was aware of the existence of laundries in Paris, but he rather liked the feeling of being constrained by poverty: besides, when the parcel came back, it came back freighted with small delicacies, and smelling of his mother’s lavender soap. His youth worried him occasionally, his juvenility more so. He was chaste, and recognized this as a drawback, but did not yet feel the need to overcome it. High ideals, coupled with the need for female protection, had made him a model son, and he did not eagerly anticipate the day when both positions would have to be abandoned.

  The writing up of the notes occupied those evenings when the salon arrangements had unaccountably broken down, when Mme Doche took her day off, or Roberta stayed out to play bridge, and Cynthia went to bed early. Then the laborious transcribing into ink of what had already been written that day in pencil brought forth once more his idealism, as he tasted the joy of making connections between images placed like dropped clues, or rounding off a speech that had behind it the force of the author’s desire. It was only whe
n he raised his eyes to the thick dull stuff of the heavy brown curtains that he had intimations of subversive thoughts. Then the sound of voices in the street below, or the excited ticking of his watch in the ensuing silence, might make him lay down his pen. On such occasions he allowed himself an extra apple from his budget, although by now he longed for something else.

  His parsimony was voluntary. He had some money from his father, but he also had his dead father’s injunction to take care of his mother. Actually, he had never heard his father say this, but it seemed to be implicit in the fact that his father was dead. So timorous was his mother that Lewis supposed them to be living on a knife edge. Thus this year in Paris was a risk for both of them, although he did not understand fully just how much of a risk it was. He only knew that in the short time at his disposal he had to lay the foundations for a future career. He also knew that in enjoying himself he must not injure his mother. She, poor woman, had little enough to enjoy on her own in Parsons Green, and sometimes he thought of her looking sadly into the dying fire, making her preparations for going to bed, which she did very early, not with a voluptuous sense of self-preservation, like Cynthia, but in despair at the length of the day.

  From thoughts like these, with their dimension of scruple, he was delivered only by the evenings in the salon, which were the equivalent, to him, of the wage-earner’s homecoming, the warrior’s repose. Already he perceived what he took to be a natural order: female company at the close of a day dedicated to masculine patterns of endeavour. He had no desire to go out, was, in any case, secretly saving as much money as possible in order to buy his mother a stupendous present, a dressing-gown he had seen in the Trois Quartiers store, where he sometimes lingered on his way home from the library. This personal economy he espoused as a justification for all the times he spent not actively thinking of his mother, living her life with her, accompanying her at every moment of the day, as he sometimes thought he should: by dint of some form of self-denial he was granted permission to relax his vigilance, to sink passively into the world of the salon, where the women were kind, paid him no attention, and did not require him for any form of support.

  When he had lingered long enough in the cold bright streets, and watched the city firing itself up for the evening, he turned finally in the direction of the Avenue Kléber, longing now only for the sound of Mme Doche’s steps in the hall to answer his ring at the bell, longing to hear her invariable greeting, so mannerly, so benevolent: ‘Eh bien, Louis, vous avez passé une bonne journée? Oh, du café, comme c’est gentil. Je vais faire chauffer de l’eau. Entrez, mon petit, nous sommes tous là.’ And he would be safe; the evening could begin.

  2

  On his return to London Lewis was briefly amazed by the quality of the light, which seemed to him poor, as if the day could not work up enough energy to throw off the darkness of dawn. Used as he was to the fine greyish mist that cloaked Paris on the worst days of bad weather, he had frequently to rub his eyes in this land of what seemed to him ruminative half-shadow. He supposed that he needed glasses. Gradually, imperceptibly, he became accustomed to London’s muted tones, and to the wistful noise of a car passing along a street sunk in the slumber of mid-afternoon. For a few weeks he wandered about his neighbourhood, registering new facts or facts which he had forgotten. He was struck by the modest cheerfulness of the people, whose main efforts seemed to go into keeping the business of life ticking over. ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ they said, when asked how they did. ‘Can’t complain,’ as if to complain were to be caught out in an unpatriotic, an un-English activity, an activity that might let the side down. He supposed that the war cast a longer shadow here than in France. And daily life itself was modest, although it was stretched over a larger area: he noticed that new petrol stations were going up on every corner, as if to fuel the heavy lorries that rumbled just out of sight of his mother’s house. The lorries themselves were unusual in the city, but, he reminded himself, he was no longer in the Avenue Kléber, a few minutes from the Etoile, but in a suburb, a bus ride away from the centre of things. He felt a certain nostalgia for his previous way of life, yet soon fell into a mood that was indulgent, passive, in tune with his mother’s peaceful house, and the dark afternoons, and the uneventful evenings. After a while he hardly missed his former companions. Sitting with his mother in front of the fire, enjoying the comforts of home, and aware of how much he had forgone in the way of comfort in Paris, he congratulated himself on having completed an adventure, some part of him suspecting that he might never stray so far again.

  He had brought home the dressing-gown and his mother had been properly appreciative. He noticed that she looked tired, and thinner, but then, he thought, so did everybody else. The bones of her face seemed to press against his as he kissed her, and her hands were a little feverish: he put it all down to the fact that she had missed him, and felt a momentary pang of guilt. Strangely, she did not want to hear much about his great adventure, looked vague when he suggested taking her to Paris to meet his new friends. She cooked him delicious meals, but always said that she had already eaten when he expressed a desire for her to keep him company. Being an only son, he was used to his mother waiting on him, and nothing in this arrangement struck him as unusual.

  The unchanging nature of his home life he accepted with a rueful smile: it went, he thought, with the poor light, and the sad sound of a car passing on a wet road. He told himself that when he had finished his thesis he would strike out again, although he knew that his mother would want him to settle down as quickly as possible. Part of him, the peaceable part, the part that had always been attuned to his mother’s widowhood, and her fidelity, and her undemanding nature – perhaps in particular the latter – led him to accept the idea of a life that was not all excitement and gusto, but rather given over to what was expected of him, to meditation, and to repose. He had a vision of himself in later years, shopping in the Wandsworth Bridge Road, greeting a neighbour, and replying to his enquiry, ‘Mustn’t grumble. Can’t complain.’

  Was this to be borne? In moments of energy, at the beginning of the day, or especially if the pall of cloud ever lifted, he knew that such a life was appropriate to middle age, but not to youth. He felt the same ambivalence when he sat down at his desk in the British Museum, wanting to run, to shout, yet realizing that he was at home and had already taken on the protective colouring of the place. He was, he thought, destined to become a ruminant, a haunter of libraries, and maybe also to live out his life in quiet streets, to look after his mother, as had always been intended, and thus to do his duty as a man. As a man, but not as a hero, not like the heroes it was his present duty to examine. Such heroes had lovers, and he had none. He supposed that lovers would come along in due course, but for the moment his body was quiescent. And perhaps something in his mind was also quiescent, accepting the dim routines, sinking comfortably into blamelessness, where he felt he belonged. His mother had set a pattern which it was easy for him to follow.

  While waiting for the next instalment of his life to take place, he devoted himself to his mother’s care, and also to her expectations. She asked for so little! Every sortie he proposed – to the theatre, the cinema – she declined, urging him to go by himself or to take a friend. He thought she might be fearful of leaving home, of noise and crowds and unfamiliar streets, all of which he began to crave, and he promised himself that he would soon find a way of doing something to remedy this. Fortunately she was a great reader, and went to the Public Library two or three times a week. He took to accompanying her, and this became a custom; indeed it was the only fixed point in their lives. He was not unhappy, walking with her slowly to the bus stop, by the sodden Common; not unhappy, just waiting.

  He could not see what was required of him, other than to ensure that nothing would change. He assumed that this was what she wanted. She said little, and he had no access to her thoughts, nor she to his. They were so used to each other that even conversation seemed unnecessary. Coming home after an absence, he
could see that she was a separate person, a fact of which he had previously been almost unaware. She in her turn treated him with her usual solicitude but seemed abstracted, intent on an inner debate of which he could capture no echoes. She was the same, yet not the same; something was different. This something was never explained and Lewis therefore found it easy to ignore. That his mother appeared a stranger he attributed to his own recent preoccupations: she had grown older while he had been away. Smiling at him, she urged him to go out, saying that she was perfectly happy as she was. But he stayed at home, anxious not to leave her, and half sedated by the general mood of the house, which was sober and well-behaved. After a time he thought that she must be all right; he could relax his vigilance. She in her turn professed to be quite well, a fact which he had always taken for granted. Awareness of change he was therefore able to dismiss from his mind. If consulted his mother would have denied that any change had taken place.