The censor, p.19
The Censor, page 19
XII
ONLY The Times and the Daily Mail made any reference to The Wilfred Brookes Show on the following morning. Both reviewers showed concern at Brookes having ‘jumped the gun’ by reviewing something that was not yet immediately imminent and more worried by the obvious bias of the show. The Mail went as far as to say that it was disreputable journalism.
Nobody else said much. The facts were stored away by journalists and people working within the journalistic and publishing media. Sutton was to publish The Golden Spin in Autumn and it was a book that might just rouse some violent feelings.
Spring sharpened into Summer. The feel and atmosphere of London underwent its seasonal change. Askelon, from his window overlooking Holland Park, saw the fast-walking nannies and mothers turn into lazy, strolling ladies, eager to sink into recumbent huddles on the bright grass while their charges tottered around the trees. The yells of boy footballers changed to the occasional shout and tell-tale click of the bat against cricket ball. The view of the park was his daily scene as he worked on In The Hair Of My Children. The book took shape, became a living thing, its characters assuming full dimensions in the mind so that writing soon ceased to be a chore.
He saw Etta McCall around one night a week. They visited the less subtle play places like the Aretusa or occasionally, went gambling, though this was not relaxation for Askelon who found sitting at the tables a bore and had a tendency to wander off and attack the one-armed bandits, losing shillings as though steadily throwing them into a river.
They usually finished the evening by going back to Askelon’s place where Etta would spend the night. As far as Askelon was concerned it was a matter of bodily relief. With Etta, he suspected, it was something different: a tutorship to be used for the rest of the week. He was pretty certain that, for her, it was a different man each night, Askelon being the high spot for absorbing technique. As the weeks went by it became even more obvious, for Etta required constant change and sought experiment, not with the quiet joy of discovery that lovers will relish, but sickeningly fast and in a vacuum without any sense of style, art or the mounting poetry of pleasure. One week she would want to use her mouth; she would want him to use his mouth; her breasts, armpit, thighs, buttocks; she would want to be beaten; to try this position or that; clothed and unclothed. It was a restless uninspired sequence which left a stale and flaccid sensation in its wake.
But at each weekend there was June. Askelon found that she was the one person with whom he could really discuss the new book. She seemed to look forward to their meetings as small stretches of real communication He also lacked communication in depth, being out of touch with his two best guides, Joe Tireling and Peter Goldsberg, and June did more than simply fill the gap. If he had believed in inspiration, Askelon would have given the title to June. Somehow they had become engaged in a mutual opening of minds. He could try out great tracts of thought on June and get a certain response.
On the warm Saturdays and Sundays of June and July they would walk in the London parks: watch the children in Kensington Gardens, stroll through St James’s with the birds skimming low on the water, sparkling and riven by the small trails of ducks.
‘What have you been doing this week?’ June asked one Sunday evening as they sat in the Essex Place house listening to records and chatting away the last moments of the weekend. ‘Or should I say, whom? Apart from Etta McCall?’
Askelon stared at his feet. ‘You heard about that?’
‘The word gets around. I didn’t think you were having guitar lessons. She looks radiant on television.’
‘I don’t pester you, Junie. You said no. I take that as read.’
‘Ask again.’
‘Okay. Will you?’
‘No.’
‘Then what’re you beefing about?’ He paused, blowing cigarette smoke dragoning from his nostrils. ‘I get sad when I think of the finality of us. One day I’ll have to go back. I’ll be in New York and you stay on here and we’re a million light years apart.’
‘John needs me. I need John. I don’t make a thing out of it. I don’t play it for high tragedy. There’s no need. You tell me that facts are facts and that one day he’ll tire of me. Wait for the day.’
‘I don’t know whether my body has enough strength: not to cross a million light years by itself.’
She had an old Joan Baez record on the player. The words of the song suddenly penetrated their quiet dialogue like some counter-pointing movie score:
Go away from my window;
Go at your own chosen speed.
I’m not the one you want, babe.
I’m not the one you need.
You say you’re looking for someone,
Never weak but always strong,
To protect you and defend you,
Whether you are right or wrong.
Someone to open each and every door.
But it ain’t me babe.
No, no, no.
It ain’t me babe.
It ain’t me you’re looking for, babe.
‘A hint is one thing.’ Askelon made as if to rise.
June performed little pushing motions with her hands, the palms forward. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I promise.’
They laughed, but the mood had altered. After a silence, gilded by Miss Baez, Askelon said, ‘A very funny thing happened to me on my way to the best sellers lists last week.’
‘Doesn’t it every week?’
‘No, this is true. Thursday. I have to lunch with this lady journalist who’s going to do a glossy feature on me.’
June smiled. When David got into a story-telling mood she never knew what to expect: the literal truth, or a flamboyantly extravagant version of some small incident.
‘So I get myself all done up in my best set of threads and skip on down to the Savoy expecting to meet something truly extra-mural like in the fairy tales. No, really June, I’m all prepared, it’s going to be the big Hollywood classic where the big book writer meets the svelte journalist and they fuse. Total impact. Then she turns up. Twenty-four years old, dumpy and in tweeds. The whole jumper and pearls and sensible shoes thing, wallowing across the Savoy foyer like a fully-loaded barque in heavy seas.’
He stretched back in his chair. June sat with her knees up, arms clasped around her legs, rocking slightly, face bright with amusement.
‘When we get to the table,’ Askelon continued, ‘she knocks over glasses and nearly spears me with a fork. You’ve never seen such fumbling around. Then, when they bring on the smoked salmon, she suddenly bunches herself over the plate, gives a shriek and starts fumbling around in the fish.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘It’s true I tell you. Fingers right there dabbling in the fish. So I ask her what’s wrong. “My contact lens,” she says “I dropped my contact lens onto the plate. It just fell from my eye. It’s somewhere here”.’
June rocked unsteadily, her face contorted.
‘Finally the wretched girl drags her piece of glass out of the fish and you really won’t believe what happens next.’
‘Surprise me.’
‘In the middle of the Savoy restaurant she cleans off her contact lens in a glass of water, dries it on a napkin and replaces it. There at the table.’
‘You have a great imagination.’
‘I promise it’s all true. Every bit of it, and, June Rabel, will you marry me?’
The pictures raced in her mind, a confused montage of ideas and scenes which seemed to make no sense. Woodland, forest, lake: John with her in Paris, that awful time when he had wanted to go up into one of the towers of Notre Dame and she had become frightened with the crush of people going both ways on the narrow spiral stone stairs: frightened of the view, the gargoyle; swimming with John, the time she had dared him to go in; April and the hotel pool was like ice: they had rushed back to their room and he got straight into a hot bath, blue with cold, his genitals blue and shrunken so small in the cold; snow, the hard glitter, footprints; the unabashed soul emotionalism of Inez and Charlie Foxx singing Vaya Con Dios; a country hotel; a bed with a tapestry headboard; John with her; the sexy satin pants she had bought as a joke and then found their feel had a sudden incredible sexual stimulus: he had taken her on the stairs, lying back sloping up the stairs with her skirt pulled up; a bed; John and June; endless talking, talking, weaving ideas and plans and dreams; loneliness; snow: a white wedding; soft, stupid, slushy pictures of smiling brides and idiot grooms with the mamas crying, the salt trickle of emotions flooding cheeks; camera flash; champagne; publisher’s party; sunshine on the laburnums in the little square only a few feet from where she sat now; John talking and talking, soothing her, telling her that, eventually, everything would be all right; when the children were old enough to understand properly; it was his duty to maintain contact, to remain a father in the full sense of the word, and on and on and now this.
‘You mean it.’ A foolish statement of the obvious. She really should have understood before this.
‘Of course. I told you that you meddle with my mind, June Rabel. You’ve meddled utterly. I don’t know if I believe in marriage for people like us. But if it’s the only way ...’
‘The only way for what? A lay?’
‘Don’t be childish. The whole scene. The entwined minds, wills and bodies. I’ve dissipated my life, baby. Been around, done all the bad things that are good. I’ve almost ruined my palate. Being selfish I think you might just save it. Being loving, I would like to give you joy.’
‘It’s a beautiful speech, David Askelon, but I love John. Truly I love him.’
‘And he has a wife and two kids.’
‘Promises, promises.’
‘Will you at least think about it?’
She did not speak for a second. ‘There’s even a danger in that. If I think about it for long I’d be forced into talking it out with John. It could develop into blackmail. Moral blackmail as far as John’s concerned and I don’t want to put that burden on his back.’
Askelon laughed. ‘God we men aren’t worth it.’
‘Why?’
‘I’d been working up to this all weekend. Nervous. You know, real fluttery and wanting to be put out of my misery, yet I never doubted the outcome. Offer her the old middle class, centre of the road option, and she’ll be yours David boy. No sane woman could refuse. You do right to refuse, June Rabel, you do right. Men are just not worth it.’
‘A little time. I will think. I’m not refusing. Not yet.’
‘Not yet.’
*
For John Sutton it was a bleak time. At the office everybody had The Golden Spin in perspective. The build up was steady. It was their book of the year, but the list also included other books which had to be tended, pushed and prodded into place. It seemed, to Sutton, that the whole pace of business had changed. The slog of each month’s books getting out on time and being maintained, of new works commissioned, problems with authors, agents, the whole gamut of the publisher’s job had been cross cut with show biz so that he was forced into almost living a double life within his profession. One part had to do with the mainspring of creativity and the razmataz of promotion: the other dealt with the more sober aspects, sales conferences, print figures, dates, arguments with printer and works’ managers, the distribution problems. More was expected on all fronts. Meetings, journeys and lunches became longer. There was less time.
In the rare moments when he could be truly introspective he wondered if, at forty-three, he could be getting the first intimations of mortality. He found himself getting really concerned about how much he smoked, or the reaction of his body when he drank or ate that little bit too much.
His sex life was healthily vigorous, but there were occasions now when he found himself too physically tired at the end of a long day, and longer evening, to completely give himself to June who, as a healthy young woman, needed him with stunning regularity. He wondered, naturally, about her true reaction to his occasional flagging performance and, as with everything, he shared his fears with her.
For her age, June’s maturity was penetrating. She had a way of soothing him, allaying the doubts, pointing out that, with them, when sex was good it was very good indeed and that was better than the experience of sixty per cent of average married couples.
It was good. Somehow, when things were right, they had not lost that sense of wonder at the sheer pleasure their bodies could give to one another. For John, to be on June and in her, with both mounting towards a great prolonged peak and dropping to an endless plain of crisis, was an eighth wonder of the world. Until June, he had never known the excitement of the complete and mutual orgasm bringing with it that sense of one physical body formed from two.
Neither had they ceased to experiment. In moments of remembering he would smile at the way June loved to handle and examine him after they had fucked. How she would caress his drooped flesh, sometimes refiring it to life which would again stir her saturated vagina. Often, each day that part of her would come healthily into his mind. The hidden opening and the velvet tunnel of pleasure through which they had a bodily and spiritual communion. He thought of it in abstract terms, dark and glistening, perfumed, honey dripping; and in hard realities, of the outer mound and the hair warm and ready, hidden and snugly safe within her clothing, yet ready to open gently at his touch.
Then he would think of Askelon. He knew that she was seeing Askelon at the weekends when he was in the country. He knew from no facts, but from senses and emotions only. It grew inside him like a swelling, festering sore. For the past two years June had been his extra retina and the extension of his brain. She was his most cherished. She was, for him, that which was most satisfying in women, on which to look, or pry, or exchange thoughts. He granted also that she had been, at one phase, his private Christmas tree on which he could hang gifts and pour out extravagance. If he had to be seen with any woman, it was June with whom he would be most proud to be seen.
Now, with the unspoken knowledge of Askelon’s private presence when they were apart, the adored was slightly warped in his vision. It was not jealousy in the simple meaning of the word. The truth about himself had been momentarily revealed and he did not like what he saw. Nor could he contemplate the possibility of losing June, or his children, or the love of any of them. Now, with a younger man asserting himself, Sutton became pinched with worry. Daily he felt that he was being forced nearer to a decision. Decisions were his daily bread and life blood, but he gibed at making this one in the agony of knowing what it might do to him. There was the other torment also, that of knowing the decision might be taken from his hands and made in spite of himself.
Time was against him in more than one way. It was not simply a question of the ageing process, there was also the growing process. Martha was thirteen now, Dominic twelve. As soon as they’re old enough to understand. They were old enough, but would they ever understand?
His sense of being their father, a necessary part of their lives, had been constantly hammered in over the past two years. Their mother, Daphne, scrawny, dissatisfied, lonely, unloved, could give neither of the children the mental care and astute guidance they needed. Her function had sadly become that of a family service module; an operator of the car which carried the children between the house and the mixed and muddled, expensive, progressive school; a worker of kitchen utensils, food mixers and vacuum cleaners; a trick or treat dispenser of anything from aspirins to sugar coated breakfast cereals. Sutton’s conscience felt deeply for the woman’s mental and intellectual sterility, seeing himself as one of its causes and, at the beginning of July, he had an object lesson in these aspects of the situation.
It had been a fine Saturday morning with Sutton spending his time pottering. The house was half a mile from Guildford, just far enough from the London road to be pleasantly comfortable. A Victorian small monster with enough room in it for him to lose contact with Daphne when he was there.
Towards noon, he got out the mower and began to walk it up and down the modest, rectangular lawn, herbaceous bordered, larch fence against which sturdy conifers bulged, evergreen, ever sturdy. The picture of a well-bred, conformist, middle class business man. He was alone and the mower’s motor phutted against the odd country summer noises: the sudden shout of children, animal yelps, far off the buzz of some machine like his own, and the occasional shriek of a grey jet trailing against the sky.
When Sutton next looked it was twelve-forty-five. Daphne would be bringing the children back. He finished the line he was walking, looked back, strangely satisfied with the ribbons of light and shade, switched off the motor and went slowly into the house. From the hall he could hear voices raised in the kitchen. Dominic came through, tall, skinny, with a mop of blond hair.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Sutton.
Dominic shrugged. ‘Oh the usual. Women. Martha’s having a row with Mum. The usual.’
The girl and the woman paused in their passions as he entered the kitchen. Then, Martha blurted out, ‘You wouldn’t understand anyway. None of you can understand. It’s different.’
She pushed past Sutton, moving fast and uncontrolled, eyes blinded with tears, a sapling child with heavy shoulder-length blonde hair.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ he spoke gently, but Daphne’s retaliation came back with the lash of a whip.
‘She’s being her usual stupid self. Foolish, silly little thing. She’s been in some trouble and I can’t get anything coherent out of her. She won’t tell me a thing.’
Dominic sat alone in the Drawing Room, as Daphne pretentiously called it, his head deep in a comic.
‘Where’s Martha?’
A shrug. ‘I haven’t seen her since she went upstairs.’
Sutton turned to leave.
‘Hey Dad.’
‘Yes?’
‘She’s in a temper.’
He closed the door and leaned on it. ‘This often happen?’
