Compulsory Games Read online

  “Please don’t worry, Laming,” said Ellen, cooingly.

  And when the time came for them to rise up finally, the seat was empty. Truly, it was by then more overcast than ever: Stygian might be the very word.

  “Don’t forget your parcel,” said Ellen, not merely conventionally but with genuine solicitude.

  She linked her arm affectionately through his, and uttered no further word as they drew away.

  He was quite surprised that the gate was still open.

  “When shall we meet next?” asked Ellen.

  “I have my job,” said Laming, torn about.

  “Where is it?”

  “We usually call it Bloomsbury.”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were wise and perhaps mocking.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Near Finsbury Park.”

  “I’ll be there on Saturday. In the park. Three o’clock in the American Gardens.”

  She reached up and kissed him most tenderly with her kissing lips. She was, of course, far, far shorter than Helen.

  “What about Helen?” he asked.

  “You’re going to the Apollo with Helen on Tuesday,” she replied unanswerably.

  And, curiously enough, he had then found the address for the parcel almost immediately. He had just drifted on in a thoroughly confused state of mind, and there the house obviously was, though the maid looked very sniffy indeed about the state of his suit in the light from the hall, not to speak of his countenance and hands; and from below a dog had growled deeply as he slouched down the steps.

  Soon, the long-threatened rain began.

  •

  Of course, had he been a free agent, Laming was so frightened that he would not have seen Ellen again. But he was far from a free agent. Had he refused, Ellen might have caused trouble with Helen, whom he had to meet on Tuesday: women were far, far closer to other women in such matters, than men were to men. Alternatively, he could never just leave Ellen standing about indefinitely in the American Gardens, he was simply not made that way; and if he were to attempt a deferment with her, all her sweetness would turn to gall. There was very little scope for a deferment, in any case: the telephone was not at all a suitable instrument, in the exact circumstances, and with his nervous temperament. And there was something else, of course: Laming now had a girl, and such an easy-going one, so cosy, so gorgeous in every way; and he knew that he would be certain to suffer within himself later if he did not do what he could to hold on to her—at least to the extent of walking up to the American Gardens and giving it one more try, Helen or no Helen. It is always dangerous to put anything second to the need we all feel for love.

  It was colder that day, and she was wearing a little coat. It was in simple mid-brown and had square buttons, somewhere between bone and pearl in appearance. She was dodging about among the shrubs, perhaps in order to keep warm. Laming had wondered about that on the way up.

  “Hullo, stranger!”

  “Hullo, Ellen!”

  She kissed her inimitable kiss, disregarding the retired railwaymen sitting about in greatcoats and mufflers, waiting for the park café to open.

  “We’re going somewhere,” said Ellen.

  “Just as well,” said Laming, with a shiver; partly nerves, partly sex, partly cool, damp treacherous weather. But of course he had struck entirely the wrong and unromantic note. “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” said Ellen, and took his arm in her affectionate way, entirely real.

  The railwaymen glowered motionlessly, awaiting strong tea, awaiting death, seeing death before them, not interfering.

  Ellen and Laming tramped silently off, weaving round the bushes, circumventing crowded perambulators.

  Orsino, Endymion, Adonais: the very roads were named after lovers. Laming had never noticed that before. He had always approached the park from the south, and usually with his mother, who did not walk fast, and often gasped painfully. Once in the park she had downed a whole bottle of Tizer. How they had all laughed about that; for ever and a day!

  Round this turn and that, in the queer streets north of the park, Ellen and Laming stole, tightly locked together; until, within the shake of a lamb’s tail, as it seemed, they were ascending a narrow flight of steep black stairs. Ellen had unlocked the front door, as if to the manner born, and of course she was going up first. She unlocked another door and they were home and dry.

  “Did it work out all right about your clothes? The mud, I mean?”

  She merely smiled at him.

  “Who lives here?

  “My sister.”

  “Not Helen!”

  Of course not Helen. What a silly thing to say! How stupidly impulsive! Ellen said nothing.

  There were little drawings on the walls by imitators of Peter Scott and Mabel Lucie Attwell, but all much faded by years of summer sun while the tenant was out at work.

  Or tenants. Most of the floor space was occupied by an extremely double divan; even a triple divan, Laming idiotically speculated, squarer than square. It hardly left room for the little round white table, with pansies and mignonette round the edge. All seemed clean, trim, self-respecting. The frail white chairs for dinner parties were neatly tucked in.

  “Is your sister married?”

  Ellen continued silent. She stood in front of him, smiling, abiding.

  He took off her coat and suspended it from the hanger on the door. There was a housecoat hanging there already, sprayed with faded yellow chinamen and faded blue pagodas and faded pink dragons with one dot in each eye.

  “She won’t barge in on us suddenly?”

  Ellen threw back her head. Her neck was beautifully shaped, her skin so radiant, that it seemed all wrong to touch it. She was wearing a little mauve dress, fastening up the back, and with a pleated skirt.

  Laming put his hands gently on her breasts, but she did not raise her head.

  When he lifted it for her, it fell forward on her front, in renewed token of uninterest in sociable conventionalities, in the accepted tensions.

  Laming unfastened her dress and drew it over her head. Unskilfully though he had done it, her hair looked almost the same, and, in what slight disorder had arisen, even more alluring.

  She was wearing a lilac-coloured slip, with smocking across the bosom.

  Then she was wearing nothing but a plum-coloured suspender belt and lovely, lovely stockings.

  Laming wished there was somewhere he himself could undress alone. There were various doors. The kitchenette. The bath and water closet. A cupboard or two for oilskins and evening dresses and ironing boards. It would look silly to open so many doors, one after the other. Laming drew the curtain across the window, as if that made any difference. In any case, and owing to mechanical difficulties, he had drawn it only half across the window.

  He undressed with his back to her, as if that made any difference either.

  She would be naked by now, and half laughing at him, half fractious: because he had never before knowingly seen a naked, adult woman.

  When, lumpishly, he turned to her, she had removed her suspender belt, but still wore her stockings, now secured by garters.

  She had brought them out from somewhere. They were bunched up in pink, and violet, and black lace. She was no longer smiling.

  She looked as serious and ethereal as an angel on a card.

  “What about—?” There was that; and everyone knew it.

  “Come in,” said Ellen, climbing in herself.

  The immense divan was as the sea. Clinging together, he and she were drowning in it, down, drown, down, drown. As they dropped, all the way, she showed him small, wonderful things, which tied him in fetters, clogged him with weights.

  Hours later, as it seemed, it was over; and until who could tell when? It had continued for so long that he was afraid to look at his watch. Post coitum omne animal triste est, as the boozy classics and history master had pointed out to the Middle Fifth, Laming’s highest form in the school.
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  However, it was still daylight. Could it be the next day, Sunday? Had his mother been left alone in the house all night? Of course not; but the real trouble was the utter and total irreconcilability between this life, real life perhaps, and daily life. Laming apprehended this with a lurch like a broken leg or arm: a fracture that could never mend.

  Ellen was pottering about: doing things to herself, making tea.

  It occurred to Laming that exactly at the point where this life, real life, and daily life were at right angles, stood Helen; or, rather, sat on a park bench. Laming, naked in some almost unknown person’s bed, actually found himself looking around the room for her, and with small starts of terror, as when jabbed by a school friend’s pen-knife.

  Ellen emerged from the kitchenette with two cups of tea on a small tray. It had been a gift offer, and was covered with eider ducks; the name of the firm scrupulously omitted. Ellen had straightened both her stockings and her tight, frilly garters. Laming could still feel the latter tickling his thighs when it had all begun.

  Tea was just what he wanted: Ellen had somehow known that, as his mother always knew it. Ellen was drinking it only for company’s sake, and making eyes at him over the rim of the cup. God, the illusion there can be in a single cup of hot tea! In the first cup, anyway. But it would be quite like Helen to materialise ever so faintly, just when he was relaxing; though it would have been difficult for her to find anywhere suitable to sit in the bijou flatlet. The only armchair was piled with copies of The Natural World, so that Ellen was sitting on the foot of the divan, with her legs pressed together in the most ladylike degree. Her breasts were firm as cockle-shells.

  She rose chastely and came for his empty cup.

  “More?”

  He faintly shook his head. Normally, he would have accepted, and probably gone on accepting; but now he felt unequal even to drinking tea. He was a haunted man.

  Ellen took the cups back into the kitchenette, and he could hear her tidily washing them up. She put the milk back in the refrigerator, and what was presumably the ingredient itself back into a little cabinet which shut with a click and was probably marked “Tea.” She returned to the living room, and, standing before a small octagonal looking glass in which the reproduction of The Childhood of John the Baptist had previously been reflected, began to comb her silky but sturdy hair.

  Laming assumed from this that they were about to depart, and felt most disinclined. It was as when at last one reaches Bexhill or Bognor Regis and the beach is calling, but never before has one felt more promise to lie in mere musing in and upon one’s new bed and, thus, half slumbering one’s life away.

  Ellen combed and combed; then she tied a wide cherry-coloured sash round her breasts, and re-entered the divan with him. He could smell the scent she had sprayed on her neck and shoulders in the bathroom. Even her eyes were brighter than ever under the influence of some ointment. Her hand began once more to explore Laming. To his surprise, he roused up immediately, and was bemused no more. It might have been the brief and partial breaking in of daily life that had half-stupefied him. He tied Ellen’s sash tighter than ever with the strength that is supposedly male; so that her bright eyes clouded like pools.

  Hours later once more; it was not merely dark but black as blindfold, and they were both lying on the floor, relishing its hardness through the carpet, which stretched from wall to wall, though that was but a short way, however one measured it. Ellen’s body was hard too, now that there was resistance. Their legs tangled like rubbery plants. She showed him things that can only be done in the dark, however clumsily; things he would never be able quite to evade or reject.

  Laming felt an agonising sciatic pain and writhed upwards, though Ellen’s arms were still round his waist.

  He saw that from what must have been the ceiling, or at least very near the ceiling, a pair of pale eyes were looking expressionlessly down on him, on the two of them. He could even see some hint of the bone structure surrounding the eyes. Then there was another pain, like a gutting knife ripping out his tendon.

  He yelled out: from the pain and from the vision. Instantly, Ellen was all softness and tenderness; a ministering angel of the midnight. He clenched his eyes shut, as he had so often done in childhood and at school; however foolish it might seem to do it when all was dark anyway.

  Midnight! Or could it be even later? He had no idea what had become of his watch. He only knew that his mother must have started worrying long since. Her dependence on him was complete, so that much of the time he quite forgot about her.

  He was lying on his back with Ellen on top of him, embracing him, enveloping him, enchanting him. Her released bosom pressed tenderly down on him and her mouth rested softly on his chin. In the end, she had reconciled him to reopening his screwed-up eyes; which were above the level of her head. He had to give himself a mental jerk in order to perform the operation; but he really knew quite well that the other eyes, or face, would have gone. They never remained for very long.

  When they had the light on, and were walking about again, he still felt the sciatic stress; very much so. He was positively limping, though Ellen could not have been nicer about it, more sympathetic. It proved not to be midnight at all, let alone later. It was only about quarter to eleven.

  “Doesn’t your sister want to come home sometimes?”

  “Not when we want the flat, silly.”

  They walked, arm in arm, to Manor House station. Even the jazz on the wireless had mostly stopped.

  “I’m seeing Helen on Tuesday,” he remarked idiotically.

  “And me on Saturday,” she responded. “Same time and place. O.K.?”

  There was some kind of pause.

  “O.K., Laming?”

  “O.K.,” said Laming.

  She kissed him softly and disappeared down the station steps with complete composure, utter serenity.

  It was only just after quarter past when Laming put his key in his mother’s front door. Though his mother was pale, she was so glad to see him that it was quite easy to explain that another chap had suggested that he and Laming go to the pictures and that the picture had proved much longer than they had thought and so forth. The picture had been about climbing in the High Andes, Laming said, and there were wonderful shots of llamas.

  “I thought they were in the Himalayas, Laming.”

  “These were llamas with two l’s, Mumsey dear. As if they were Welsh llamas. They have almond eyes and they spit.”

  The explanations were practicable because he had in fact seen the film, without having bothered to tell her. It had been shown some weeks ago in the canteen next door to the office, where many of the men found their way in for lunch. It was being circulated to such places by some adult educational organisation. The oddest things prove in the end to have a use of some kind, Laming reflected. He had often noticed that.

  “What’s the matter with your leg, Laming?”

  “I think I’ve twisted it somehow.”

  “Better see Dr. Pokorna on Monday before you go to work.”

  “It’ll be quite well by Monday, I promise, Mumsey.”

  She still looked doubtful; as well as pale.

  “I promise.”

  What he could never decide about her was whether she really took it for granted that girls were a matter of indifference to him.

  •

  “Something wrong with your leg, Laming?”

  “I seem to have twisted it, Helen. I’ve no idea where.”

  “What have you been doing with yourself since our little party?”

  “Same old grind.” Really, he could not bring himself to meet her eyes. He did not see how he ever again could meet them, look right into their paleness. What was he to do?

  “Not many people here,” he said.

  “We mustn’t let ourselves be affected by numbers. We must behave and react exactly as we should if the theatre were packed.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Laming, though he did not know how he was going
to do that either.

  Furthermore, the curtain simply would not go up. Even though no one new had come in for ten minutes by Laming’s watch; the watch that had been lost in the big bed.

  “Did you enjoy our party?” asked Helen.

  “You know I did, Helen.”

  “Ellen said she thought you didn’t like her.”

  “Of course I liked her, Helen.”

  “Don’t you think she’s very attractive in her own way?”

  “I’m sure she is.”

  “I sometimes feel quite a shadow when I’m with her, even though I may be that much cleverer.”

  “She doesn’t seem to speak very much.”

  “Ellen’s a very nice person, but she happens to be the exact opposite to me in almost every way,” explained Helen. “I should adore to change places with her once in a while. Don’t you think that would be great fun?”

  A man in a dinner jacket had come on to the front of the stage and was reading from a piece of paper, having first assumed a pair of spectacles, while they watched. It appeared that one of the company had a sudden attack of gastric flu; time had passed while his under-study had been sought for on the telephone; and it had now been decided that someone else’s understudy should come on in the proper costume and read the part from the script.

  “I thought that understudies were always waiting about in the wings,” said Laming.

  “I expect there isn’t much money with this production,” said Helen. “It’s a shame about the poor fellow being ill, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “It might have been his big chance,” said Helen, “and now it’s gone, because the play might be off before he’s better.”

  “We mustn’t think about that,” said Laming, following her earlier and more sanguine cue.

  How on earth was he to entertain her at the end? After that party? What exactly would she expect? The problem had been worrying him all day. He had become involved with two girls when he could not afford even one: never had been able to, and probably never would.

  Descending the many steps to ground level, Helen summed up excellently: the rest of the cast had naturally been affected by the zombie in their midst, and it would be unfair to judge the play, as a play, by this single overcast representation. “I adore blank verse, anyway,” Helen concluded.