The Picturegoers Read online

  With a slight shrug of irritation, he dismissed these nagging anxieties from his mind, and applied himself to mastering the unfamiliar ritual of entering the cinema. Song of Bernadette—a poster (albeit a rather small one) caught his eye. Well that was all right. And this was the Palladium. The omnibus conductor had very kindly pointed it out to him, and the name was unmistakably emblazoned all over the building’s façade. Palladium. Strange that for all its strident modernity the place should bear a classical name. But he was frequently struck by the same phenonemon in the names of various sordid products such as cosmetics and permanent-wave solutions. What impact the manufacturers expected to make on classical dons and theological students, to whom a knowledge of Latin and Greek was now virtually limited, he couldn’t imagine. Palladium, a defence or protection, from the Greek Palladion, the statue of Pallas, on whom the safety of Troy was fabled to depend. How many of the thousands who patronized the place knew the derivation of its name? But perhaps it was not such an inept appellation after all. There was something slightly craven and defensive, something suggestive of a retreat, in the way people were converging on the cinema.

  ‘Take us in, Mister?’

  The question startled him.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said politely, and peered down through his spectacles at the group of rough dirty children who surrounded him.

  ‘G’orn, Guv, take’s in.’

  Father Kipling smiled uncertainly, and decided on an I’m-in-the-same-boat-as-you-fellows approach.

  ‘Well, really, you know, I don’t think I can afford it.’ Things had come to a pretty pass when children begged unashamedly on the streets for money to indulge in luxuries such as the cinema. He began to feel quite indignant.

  The ring-leader scrutinized him as if he could scarcely credit the evidence of his ears. He glanced meaningfully at his companions, and began to explain.

  ‘We don’t want you to pay for us, Mister. We just want you to take us in.’

  ‘Jus’ say we’re with yer,’ backed up another.

  ‘’Ere’s the money, Guv.’ A grimy, shrivelled paw held up some silver coins.

  ‘But why?’ asked Father Kipling, bewildered.

  The leader took a deep breath.

  ‘Well yer see, Mister, it’s an “A” and you can’t get into an “A” …’

  Father Kipling listened carefully to the explanation. At the end of it he said:

  ‘Then really, you’re not allowed to see this film unless accompanied by a parent or guardian?’

  ‘That’s right, Mister.’

  ‘Well then, I’m afraid I can’t help you, because I’m certainly not your parent, and I can’t honestly say I’m your guardian. Can I now?’ He smiled nervously at the chief urchin, who turned away in disgust, and formed up his entourage to petition another cinema-goer. Father Kipling stared after them for a moment, then hurriedly made good his escape.

  Inside the foyer he was faced with a difficult decision: the choice of seat. The prices all seemed excessively high, and he was conscious of a certain moral obligation to go in the cheapest. On the other hand, this was a rare, if not unique occasion, and as he had few enough treats, he was perhaps entitled to indulge himself to the extent of a comfortable seat. He couldn’t choose the middle price, because there were four. As he hesitated he caught the eye of the commissionaire staring at him, and he hastily purchased a ticket for the second most expensive seat.

  For the next few minutes he seemed to be in the grips of a nightmare. When the young woman at the swing door had rudely snatched the ticket from his hand, and just as rudely thrust a severed portion of it back again, he was propelled into a pit of almost total darkness and stifling heat. A torch was shone on his ticket, and a listless voice intoned:

  ‘Over to your left.’

  In the far recesses of the place another torch flickered like a distant lighthouse, and he set out towards it. When he couldn’t see it he stopped; then it would flicker impatiently again, and he would set off once more. Beneath his feet he crunched what appeared to be seashells; he gasped in an atmosphere reeking of tobacco and human perspiration. Dominating all, the screen boomed and shifted. At last he reached the young woman with the torch. But his ordeal was not over. She indicated a seat in the middle of a full row. The gesture was treacherously familiar. Horror of horrors! He had genuflected! The usherette stared. Blushing furiously he forced his way into the row, stumbled, panicked, threshed, kicked his way to the empty seat, leaving a trail of execration and protest in his wake. He wanted to die, to melt away. Never again would he come to the cinema. Never again.

  * * *

  Hands thrust deep into the pockets of his beltless, once-belted, black, sharp-shouldered raincoat, Harry moved alone, on noiseless crêpe-soled shoes, threading his way through the crowd, never breaking his step, twisting his shoulders to avoid the contamination of their brightness, happiness, stupidity. You could read in his face that Harry was different from them; he didn’t wear flash clothes and take cheap little tarts to the pictures, not Harry. He wore black, all black, except for the white, soft-collared shirt, and he took his pleasures alone. Any girl could tell at once that she’d get no change out of Harry; she’d tell from the pale, taut face, and the hands thrust deep in the black pockets, that Harry was one who walked alone, one to be feared and respected. He wasn’t interested in any of these little tarts dressed up to kill. He preferred to wait until he could have class.

  ‘Take us in, Mister.’

  Poker-faced, terrible in his black suit and raincoat, he sliced through them, a big, aloof fish through a shoal of sprats, ignoring their insolence.

  ‘Oooer!’ called a mocking voice from behind. ‘Oo’s ’e think ’e is—Robert Mitchum?’

  Fury burned inside him. Ignorant little bastards, didn’t know who they were talking to, how near danger was. But his face showed no flush or twitch of anger. He had perfected the disguise of his feelings, preferring to ignore, for the time being, the insults and the indifference of the ignorant sods around him. One day he would show them all. Meanwhile he treasured up the insults and the indifference, feeding his store of hatred, which one day he would dash like vitriol in the face of an appalled world.

  Reluctantly he queued for a ticket; resentfully he removed one hand from his pocket and put two coins on the metal ledge.

  ‘Two and nine and ten Woodbines,’ he said curtly.

  ‘Didn’t nobody teach you to say please?’ inquired the girl.

  He cauterized her with a savage glare, palmed his cigarettes and twisted aside. Her turn would come too, that poxy blonde, when she lay tied naked to a table, and he slowly swung a red-hot poker in front of her eyes, bulging with terror:

  ‘No don’t … I’ll do anything … anything … I’ll give you a good time …’

  He cut her short with a cold smile.

  ‘I don’t have to ask your permission for that, baby. Besides, I always had a weakness for pokerwork. …’

  Inside the usherette indicated a seat in the middle of the central block. He ignored her gesture, and with hands still deep in his pockets, slumped into a seat against the cinema’s wall.

  Doreen, the usherette, shrugged her shoulder-straps, and, erect in her Second Skin corselet, her tummy gently perspiring through the new Miracle Fabric, her breasts held lovingly aloft in the ‘A’ cups of her Treasure Chest bra, turned the indifference of her smoothly sheathed back upon the indifferent Harry, and walked, as gracefully as was possible against the incline, up the aisle. Queer lot she was getting that evening, what with that fussy woman and the clergyman and now this bloke who preferred to sit right at the side, where everybody on the screen looked long and thin like in the Hall of Mirrors at Southend.

  * * *

  With calculated gallantry Mark Underwood assisted Clare Mallory off the bus. He wasn’t naturally polite, but the pleasure she derived from such tokens was so ridiculously out of proportion to the effort required that it would have been both churlish and impoliti
c not to gratify her. As they walked towards the cinema she slipped an arm through his. There were times when he liked this demure gesture a lot, but this evening he found it difficult to suppress the desire to shake off her hand. He fumbled for his handkerchief, making this the pretext for disengaging his arm. Clare waited patiently until he had finished, then put her arm through his again. He didn’t want to be touched. But he didn’t want her not to be there. He wanted to worry her, to inflict his depression on her.

  Masochistically he probed for the root of his discontent. Oh yes. The story. Of course he should never have sent it to those people. ‘We sell your story and keep 15 per cent of the payment. If we don’t think it will sell, we will tell you why and suggest how you can improve it.’ It had been the last sentence that had really hooked him. The polite inscrutability of rejection slips was driving him mad; perhaps the London Institution of Fiction would explain the mystery. But the pseudo-academic name should have warned him that behind its façade was just another quack peddling literary cure-all pills.

  Dear Mr Underwood,

  My Chief Reader was so impressed by your story A BIT MUCH, that he passed it to me for my special attention—something which, I am sure you will appreciate, I am not able to give to every work which passes through this organization. I enjoyed reading it, for it shows unmistakable talent, but I do not think you are quite ready to publish yet, though you are very near it. To be quite candid, your story lacks dynamism of characterization, slickness in dialogue, and a scientifically constructed plot.

  What I would recommend is that you enrol in one of our Advanced Students’ Correspondence Courses, which I myself specially designed for promising young writers like yourself. If you prefer, you can submit your story for a Detailed Criticism for one guinea, or a Complete Scientific Analysis and Rewrite for three guineas. In any case, I have enclosed a copy of the illustrated booklet Fiction: a Science not an Art which gives details of all the courses and professional advice open to you. I hope to hear from you soon.

  Wishing you a steady flow of editors’ cheques, I am,

  Yours sincerely,

  SIMON ST PAUL

  Principal L.I.F.

  The recollection of the neatly-typed words on the too-opulent note-paper made him want to spew. When he got home he would pencil ‘BALLS’ in crude, heavy characters across the letter and post it back. Or else annotate that bloody booklet with deflating quotations from Virginia Woolf and Henry James. On the whole he rather thought he would do the former: it would require less effort, and the immediate impact would be greater, especially if Simon’s sycophantic secretary opened the letter. (He was bound to have a sycophantic secretary; she was probably his mistress too.)

  Still, he could not help feeling that the only adequate retort would be to get the story published, and there seemed no chance of that. His mood had not been improved by reading in that evening’s paper a review of a play by some seventeen-year-old barrow-boy, which had been successfully presented at a West End theatre the night before, and which as far as he could judge, had said most of the things he himself had been pondering for the last two years.

  ‘Never mind!’ he exclaimed abruptly. ‘To the pictures! To the pictures! To the warm embrace of Mother Cinema. Where peanut shells are spread before your feet, and the ice-cream cometh!’

  This sort of deranged poetic declamation never failed to amuse Clare.

  ‘Well, at least you’ve said something,’ she remarked, ‘even if I didn’t understand a word of it.’

  She smiled, but the smile hid a certain anxiety. She was a little tired of falling back on the amused, uncomprehending, common-sense, womanly response to his behaviour. Sometimes she knew he was not talking pure nonsense, and wished she could appreciate the jokes and allusions. In fact it was a mystery how he could tolerate anyone so hopelessly uninformed as herself. ‘You must educate me,’ she had said to him once. ‘I’m not absolutely stupid you know; it’s just that you’re not encouraged to read very widely in a convent.’ But he had just said ‘I don’t want you educated. I’ve got educated girls round me all day, and they give me a pain in the … neck.’ ‘But I want me educated,’ she had complained; but he had only laughed and hugged her with his arm. And that had been nice, she remembered bashfully.

  Also it had been nice to know that he didn’t care for the girls at his college. He seemed strangely reluctant to take her anywhere where they might encounter his college friends, but she had a very clear idea of the girls, with their urchin-cuts and trousers and feline spectacles—all of which features seemed much more likely to appeal to Mark than her own puzzled and timid experiments with her appearance.

  He returned her smile, thinking how sweet it was, and how its sweetness, its slight suggestion of patient suffering pluckily disguised, might become rather cloying in time, an annoyingly insistent claim upon the emotions, like a dog’s eyes. Nevertheless, as he turned to look at her, he felt a wave of affection for the delightful picture she presented: the clumsily applied lipstick of the wrong colour; the superb clarity of complexion (why did so many nuns have faces like polished marble); the too-long skirt; the blouse, bought on a wild impulse, its plunging neckline abbreviated, on a modest afterthought, by a brooch representing Our Lady of Lourdes, with arms extended as if to tug the offending garment together; the short, tent-like coat that made her look pregnant, and in fact disguised a firm, well-fleshed and almost flawless torso. Clare was a treasure, and only he had the map. It pleased him that she should resemble a child who had blundered into a big store and amused herself by ‘dressing-up’, because it guarded the secret so much the more effectively.

  ‘You look very fetching this evening,’ he said.

  ‘Do you really think so, or are you only saying that?’

  ‘No, honestly.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice then, I never know whether you regard me as a girl or as a huge joke.’

  He chuckled, rocking somewhat from the accuracy of her stroke.

  ‘Won’t we be late?’ Clare asked.

  ‘The later we are the better. The second feature’s only some second-rate crime film.’

  They passed a shop which called itself Modern Menswear.

  ‘Do they?’ inquired Mark. ‘So much?’

  ‘Do who what?’

  He pointed.

  ‘Do modern men swear?’ It seemed awfully feeble. Clare laughed merrily, shaking her head.

  ‘You are a fool, Mark.’

  In the window of the shop the suits stood stoically, crowded shoulder to shoulder like men in a rush-hour tube. Gaudy shirts thrust out their chests, and detruncated trousers crossed their elegant legs. A multitude of banners and posters exclaimed hysterically ‘Giant Sale!’ ‘Total Clearance!’ ‘Premisses [sic] to be Demolished’ ‘Unrepeatable Offers’ ‘Buy! Buy! Buy!’ Though the shop was closed, and he knew that there would be nothing he would want to buy anyway, Mark stopped and ran a critical eye over the merchandise.

  ‘Not a bad tie, that, for the price,’ he remarked, indicating a black silk tie with a discreet lightning pattern. ‘Club tie for the Schoole of Night.’

  ‘I’ll buy it for you,’ said Clare.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, moving on to the next shop. It sold lingerie.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, pointing to a suspender belt. ‘Tell me, do you wear that over or under your pants?’

  Clare felt her stomach knot, and blood rush to her face so violently she could scarcely see.

  ‘I think you’re … not very nice,’ she said, and began to walk on.

  Without hurrying obviously, he managed to catch her up.

  ‘I need the information, you see, for a story I’m writing,’ he explained casually.

  ‘Then it must be a vulgar story.’

  Mark was about to object that it depended on what you meant by vulgar, when he reflected that the statement was probably valid whatever you meant by it, so he merely replied, ‘Very possibly.’

  As they walked on in silence it
occurred to him that there was room for a London Institute of Pornography, of which he might be the prosperous Principal.

  Dear Author,

  I have read your novel Undress Rehearsal with interest and appreciation; but to be quite candid, your understanding of the technicalities of feminine underwear is woefully inadequate, and your seduction/page ratio is well below the required average. May I recommend that you take our correspondence course ‘The Mechanics of Masturbatory Literature’ which I myself designed for ambitious pornographers like yourself?

  ‘It’s under,’ said Clare suddenly. She blushed deeply. He smiled.

  ‘Thank you Clare. I just wanted to know.’ He chalked up another minor tactical success in the siege of her innocence. It was just as well, he reflected, that Clare did not know how he had first found the answer to his question.

  Clare was glad she had managed to say it, and hadn’t let him be cross with her. Nevertheless he was a bit queer, or ‘rude’ as they used to say as children. She supposed it was because he was a writer and had to know things. It was nice anyway to think that she could help him with the writing.

  ‘Take us in, Mister?’

  Mark looked down at the group of urchins skipping backwards before him.

  ‘Do you solemnly promise to sit in the corner of the cinema farthest from us when we get inside?’

  ‘Yer, we always do, Mister. Trust us,’ said the leader, winking cheekily at Clare.

  ‘Where’s your money?’

  ‘But, Mark, you’re not going to take them in?’ said Clare.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, taking the warm silver coins and counting them. ‘You’ll have to go in the two-and-nines,’ he added.