Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

In any kind of opposition, under any sort of pressure, he exhibited a character of admirable strength and flexibility. But as soon as he was met with kindness, with affection, with love, he crumbled like a cube of sugar between your fingers. And yet, he liked to be liked. He liked to be loved and he hated to feel himself crumbling through the net of his own personality. And yet again he liked to see himself in a resisting situation, liked to feel himself in perfect control of his strength, deploying it with the ease and piercing sharpness of a consummate fencer thrusting to the death. And at the same time he hated to be pushed into opposition, hated to be constantly deploying himself in conflict. But, as he always observed, being what he was, being where he was, what else could he do? The thing was, he told himself, to develop his weapons and skill in using the, as highly as possible, as no one not in his position could, and enjoy the moments that revealed to him the marvel that he was. The marvel, of course, was the thrusting, the getting home, the witnessed agony and the knowledge that, because of all these things, the fight would never be done.

*

     “Isn’t it odd that you feel so happy in the face of such exclusion?” Sarah said to him.

     “Yes, perhaps. But to whom?” His mind was hardly with her. He was going, with careful eyes, over a print he had got that afternoon.

     “Natural1y, Wilfrid, to the only person that it could make me feel thus to put the question.”

     “Then we ought to have our positions clear, you know,” he said, poring over the print. “I’m not so sure I know where I stand. I can’t speak for you, of course, and perhaps you ought not to tell me

     On top of her disappointment she felt frustration. Was he deliberately pushing her aside as unworthy of him, but too circumspect to be obvious? Or was he, like a cat, unwittingly cruel?

*

     Wilfrid, the son of a carpenter, had distinguished himself brilliantly at school and, with a scholarship, at university. At the university, he not only distinguished himself but re-created himself from inside out. He was about six foot one, slim and exhausted-looking like a flower in its last hour. He was not handsome and there was nothing sparkling about his personality. He was like a good honest horse doing its work well on a farm. And yet, quite without his knowledge, quite without his wanting it, he affected people in remarkably contradictory ways. Some people disliked him violently without their knowing why, and others fell abasingly to him, making him shy away in revulsion and confusion. Those who hated him he could stand, understand even. And it was to them that that strength and flexibility of his own creation was displayed - not in brilliant colours, but with a piercing brightness. It was they who, after a brief confrontation, found him dazzling, brilliant and afterwards still more hateful. And those who fell for him, who showed him affection and kindness, saw him only as a man, ordinary as men go, even dull, but deserving his share of the things of the world which many say are conducive to making a man happily wedded to himself. It was the violence with which these people who felt that way towards him tried to give him those things of the world that disgusted him and made him shy - shy away.

*

     Wilfrid longed for nothing. It was not that not having had much affection in his life he did not know what ii was to have it - was therefore unable to realise that he needed to make an effort to secure it. It was rather that having been born into little he had endeavoured to live with little, and seeking affection from others, he felt, was seeking too much, was even being extravagant in one’s demands. However, he prized the affection of others and would have been glad to have it. He just did not crave it. And al though he knew that it was something to cherish once it had been given, he disliked having it pushed on him, hated having it offered to him like a golden calf as something good in itself without having to take the giver into thought. Am I not more valuable than what I can or cannot give? But he never said “yes” (or “no” either, for that matter) to either of the questions. What he did go on to ask was, in what way am I more? - which he thought was the important thing. And there was never the glimmer of an answer. And like the good contented horse on the farm he never felt disconcerted by his inability to find an answer.

*

     “Wilfred,” Sarah began one evening after she had invited him to her expensive News flat and cooked him a nice meal. “Has it never struck you that there are people who like you very much?” and she handed him his glass.

     “I know some,” he said.

     “And you don’t appreciate the fact?”

     “Not particularly,” he answered. “They make me feel uncertain as to what I'm supposed to do. You see, I’m not asking.” That took the wind out of hersail. She thought it was aimed at her. She was so often being bold in an indirect way and he was so soft to knife-edges. Just what was he not asking? Of whom was he not asking?

     “They might like to know if it’s worth the effort. And I don’t think they’d want you to be over-polite.” She knew this was all useless.

     “But is it a question of politeness or indirectness?” he said. “I’m thinking of answering. Can you be committed to everything you like and to everyone who likes you?”

     “I should say, yes - if you’re permitted to give commitment degrees.”

*

     Sarah had an aim which Wilfred actually did not know of or pretended not to know. And strangely enough the aim was not something she wanted to do or something she wanted to have. It was simply to get Wilfred to get her right, to see just where and how she stood and then to leave it to him. She would accept anything he decided. She just had to be sure that he knew. And all her efforts were directed towards that end.

*

     Sarah was the daughter of a rich owner of a chain of stores that sold women’s undergarments. She was Jewish with high, finely-cut cheek bones and light brown hair, about twenty-nine years old, three years older than Wilfred. She had been to many English and Swiss private schools, after which she had done a number of things. She had owned a boutique which she had had to give up because her forced relationship with a Jewish businessman friend of her father’s, thirty years her senior, was destroying her emotionally and ruining the shop because it had to be so often closed. She had then had a sweet shop which she gave up after a month. It was while she ran a Foreign News Agency which supplied foreign countries with English news about themselves that she met Wilfred. Wilfred worked as a copywriter. And that was how he had come to know Sarah who had come in one day to have a slogan written up for her business. Sarah had had slightly more affairs than she had had businesses, all frustrating, all self-destroying.

*

     “It just struck me that you might put some of the people right,” she said.

     “I can hardly put them right about themselves,” he answered. “And about myself....where, how would I begin?” She could see that he was hardly interested. That was all she could do. And what else? She knew that he was what she wanted. Everything and just everything she wanted, she convinced herself was he. And what hurt he so much was the depth of her emotional commitment, which was nowhere reciprocated in him and which, she felt sure, never would be.

     She had laid traps, she continued to lay traps, and the man, without trying to escape them, seemed just to stand there and defy being enmeshed - without so much as an effort. And still more annoying, it was not the mystery of him that had her enmeshed. It was simply he - he in everything he was: his unappealing features, his awkward ways, his cramped way of stretching his legs, his non-commital smile, his absurd way of sitting behind the steering wheel of a car, his terribly embarrassed air with a woman, his immense intelligence. It was all that, all being Wilfred, that had so completely, so irredeemably taken her forever prisoner.

     And how was she to tell him, unapproachable as he was? It seemed to her that the only intimacy he knew was intimacy with himself and that seemed impregnable. Even if one were to break in how was one to know that one would be able to stay there? And the man was so careful, so discrete and so much so in his mountainous discretion!

*

     “You know, I need a sign, Wilfred,” she said. “I simply can’t move without one and I want so much to move.”

     “It need not be put too hard,” he said. “Some assumptions are always right - and who doesn’t make them from time to time? What to do - that is what cramps!” And she thought she would tell him.

     “I love you, Wilfred,” she said, staring at him to see his reaction. But he didn’t seem to hear. He drank out of his glass and held it up to study the height of the liquid in it. Then he looked at her, his quiet eyes resting on her bosom like cigarette ash lying on the back of your hand.

     “It has never been too plain to me,” he said, “how to meet a proposal that is made in a statement. Which one to hold uppermost has always bothered me. Yet you’re a very nice person, Sarah. And unlike yourself I cannot come to any conclusion with you as a premise, or rather, with you as the, or any one of, the reasons for coming to it.” He looked at the fire, away from her.

     “What particularly must I be?” she asked him.

     “Nothing,” he answered. “One doesn’t always have to be particularly that and not that. It is usually the fulfillment of roles. And that is something rather to be done than....but perhaps what you just said would be necessary to that end.”

*

     It was an evening in late October and she had the hearth fire going. The coals were burning with a quiet glow. His glass was beside his chair, on the floor, and he stared happily, like a kitten, into the hypnotizing brightness of the coals. She observed how even at his ease he was quite incompetent at crossing his legs. They lay across each other like sticks that had been chopped down and thrown carelessly aside.

     “I’m not asking you to go to bed with me,” she continued. “Well, perhaps I am, but not really saying it like that. It usually comes to the same thing in the end.” He made no answer. A little grimace of pain had scuttled across his face.

     “You might tell me,” she went on without any encouragement, “if I’m straining too much.”

     “I think the point has been made,” he said. “But that has never been in question, that’s why I don’t quite understand. One never retains one’s position by falling.” He drank. Her aim, and it was her worry too, was to stay with him. If she let go, her opportunity would be forever gone. And staying meant swaying with every wind, picking up the direction and riding the wind before she was swamped.

     She had been to Switzerland to private schools, but you didn’t get that sort of thing there. Even if it existed there, like a stranger who bothers nobody, no one would know since no one would know how to recognise it, or if set to find it, what to look for. And she had missed it at her English private schools as well. It existed in England, but not everywhere. She knew that her demands were stronger than his. But that was just it - why didn’t they get home? Or was it a competence in passing them by?

*

     “You must not think,” she said, “that I try to speak for you. Even when I speak for myself and seem to draw you in you need not come. It’s just my tremendous desire to nnow.’

     “To know what?” he asked.

     “That I may go on,” she said.

     “But isn’t my being here, my coming again and again just such a statement that you may?”

     “Yes,” she agreed.

     She recalled - the evening had already turned into night - how he had been unfaithful, if either of them could be said to have been that in their odd kind of commitment, to her with the privileges she had given him. She had given him a key to the flat which he used as he wished. Her sports car was his too whenever he wanted it. On one occasion she had come back home, rather late after a concert at Wigmore Hall, to find a girl there with him.

     “Hullo,” she had said, without showing her surprise and disappointment. And it appeared that he had not told the girl that the flat was hers, at least to judge by the way the girl had seemed taken aback to see her walk in like that.

     “Hullo,” he had answered. “This is Allyson. Allyson, Sarah.”

     “Hullo.”

     “Hullo.”

     And she had said in complete embarrassment, ‘Can get you all anything?”

     “No, let me,” he had said.

     “No, no, no, I will,” and she had bustled away and brought them gin and tonic which she knew he liked. And after Allyson had gone, badly hit by the alcohol, they had had a mild argument which he had won, although not quite to her satisfaction.

     And on another occasion, one hot summer afternoon, she had walked in to find a girl dancing, with hardly anything on, to her music while he sat in his favourite armchair sipping gin and lime and looking over his shoulder.

     “This is too much,” she had shouted. “P1ease, whatever your name is, leave my flat at once.” And the girl had put on her dress, cheap and dirty, and left without a word to him, or one from him. And again, after she had left, there had been a fight.

     “You cannot do that, Wilfred,” she had said.

     “Why not? I thought I could use the flat, or do you stipulate how I shall use it?”

     “You cannot bring girls here and use the flat for those purposes.”

     “What purposes, dear?” he had asked, all sweetness and quiet expectation.

     “I don’t know, I don’t know. You just mustn’t. It hurts me terribly, Wilfred.”

     “And you will not tell me what it is?’

     “Oh Wilfred, do I have to?”

     “It might help me to know what I may not put the flat to,” he had answered, sweetly innocent - and perhaps he was, although she would not concede it. She had already suspected him of using the car for that - or those - purposes, too.

     And yet she could not accuse him of ingratitude, because she loved him. She had given him a lot, had put a lot within his reach, had given him direct access to a great many things; but she could not hold him ungrateful for any abuse of any of those things. And what was stranger, not even for the abuse of herself. Many of her friends had told her, even convinced her, that it was an abuse. What made their arguments less clinching, however, was that the abuse looked very much like a paradox, somewhat like papal infallibility.

*

     “You’re not to use it as a brothel,’ she had then shouted, at the very end of her rope. And he had only stared at her.

     “Yes,” she had gone on. “Don’t bring your whores here. It’s my flat, remember? And if you cannot be decent enough to honour an understanding you can at least be man enough to respect the place where I sleep. What you’re doing is the behaviour of a callously abusive person!”

     And then he had turned to go. As he was taking his jacket down from behind the door, she had jumped on him and begun to bite him, shouting abuse and screaming hysterically. She pounded him with her tight little fists until the pain in them began to drum up into her brain. And he did nothing to ward off her blows. He stood there like a punchbag, like a child’s teething ring and suffered her hysteria. And finally, like a chicken whose head has been severed from its body, jerking in spasms, she slowly made herself stop and slid gracelessly to the floor. And he had walked out.

     Her behaviour had so humiliated her that it was days before she could bring herself to telephone him and ask him to come back. And he had come back immediately and not said a word about the affair. He never tried to excuse himself over the girls in the flat and he never behaved as if he deserved any blame either. For her, the mystery that he was just went on deepening and deepening until she began to be afraid that it might engulf her and that she would get lost in a fog of futile debate, misunderstanding and incomprehension.

*

     “Do you believe,” he asked her, his eyes, even in the glow of the fire, as cold as ashes, “that everything imaginable is possible?”

     “If you tell me it is I will believe it,” she answered and he shot her a glance.

     “No,” he said. ‘Put it to yourself.” But she couldn’t. The question had interrupted her effort to get hold of him in the abstract. And in any case, it sounded like metaphysics for which she had no aptitude. She had been wondering, when the question came, whether he was saying no to her. If he were then she would not accept it. It would be an impertinence. If he were saying no, then she too would say no to his no, she would refuse to take it as a recommendation, let alone a wish, however she had pledged to respect his wishes.

*

     “You have never told me the truth, Wilfred,” she answered, instead of bothering about metaphysics.

     “It would be a miracle if I ever could,” he said. ‘Wouldn’t you have to know it first in order to recognize it when I told you it?”

     “Is that what I’m saying?” she asked in desperation.

     “I can only assume what is not offensive,” he said and asked her for another drink, which she obediently got him.

     The man, she recalled, as she poured and then carried back the drinks, who had the supreme ability of twisting people around themselves without ever committing himself to anything they said or asked! She had watched him in conversation, answering impertinent questions, saying things that people wanted to hear him say and he had never faltered, never lost his fluency, but had convinced, satisfied and placed those people without once having said a thing in which he believed, which he knew to be the truth; never once committing himself in his answers or through them. The contempt and the instrument he used were one. And truth, he would say when she challenged him afterwards, was for your friends, for those who can use it. It was for the very fineness of life, rejecting her argument that without it life would never become fine as going round oneself in a circle.

*

     It was when she handed him his drink that the idea came to her. It was to be her last chance. She was no longer going to paddle up the stream of ambiguity. Nothing up to now had worked. Her last weapon was her womanhood.

     “Were you ever intimate with any of the girls you brought here, perhaps still bring here?” she asked him.

     “No,” he answered. And she felt blocked.

     “In your own place, perhaps?” she asked.

     “No,” he replied again. And she couldn’t understand.

     “You don’t mean that....?”

     “It should have been obvious,” he said, long and straight and easy before the fire. “The straining, I’m not speaking for myself, is something that is put there from outside. And then if one lets go the end of the rope, is one really consciously, decidingly, necessarily personally assuming responsibility?” She was surprised by the eloquence. So often he was content to give short answers however baffling, or perhaps because of that, baffling.

     “Then I may not have been wasting....?”

     “Yes, you may still have,” he said. “I thought I just said, it has to be a decision. You have to live on the required level. It is there that one lets go the end of the rope. Anywhere else is betrayal. And not only there either - there is too, a moment. And once there has been one there will be, unless one makes another decision, others.”

*

     She got up. The warmth of the room, as the night insinuated itself even into the room, had become dense. Sarah felt the sweat trickling down from her armpits. The gin had slowly but quite definitely lodged itself inside her blood.

     “Would you like another drink?” she asked him.

     “Yes,” he said. That was something she liked about him. He never said no when offered something. It mattered very little whether he liked what was offered him or not. He took it and that was that.

     So she filled his glass with Chivers and filled hers with the same. She gave him his glass and stood over him. He sipped and she watched him to see if he’d comment on the change, but he said nothing. She put her glass to her mouth and drained it at one go. He lowered his own glass and looked at her over the rim. She re filled hers and sent the contents down again. He looked a bit sad and turned his head to stare into the fire again. She went to the bedroom. When she came back she was wearing only her panties and bra.

     “How do you like me?” she asked. Her eyes were glazed and she had a silly grin where she thought she had a smile.

     “I always have liked you,” he said, looking at her thighs.

     “Then you’ll come?” she said.

     He did not answer. He picked up his glass and drained it, keeping his eyes the while on her. And she went completely wrong. She turned and went back to the bedroom, beginning to undo her bra from the back. His answer had been unofficial, but the answer nonetheless, she thought. Having drunk his drink he got up, took up his coat and let himself out, leaving the key she had given him so long ago inside the lock.