The Golden Notebook

‘Why?’

‘Well, obviously, it’s so ugly.’ He was looking curiously into her face. After a while he remarked: ‘People live in it.’ She shrugged. ‘Do you hate them as well?’ Ella felt resentful: it occurred to her that for years, anyone she was likely to meet would have understood without explanation why she hated ‘all this’; and to ask her if she ‘hated them as well’, meaning ordinary people, was off the point. Yet after thinking it over, she said, defiant: ‘In a way, yes. I hate what they put up with. It ought to be swept away—all of it.’ And she made a wide sweeping movement with her hand, brushing away the great dark weight of London, and the thousand ugly towns, and the myriad small cramped lives of England.

‘But it’s not going to be, you know,’ he said, with a small smiling obstinacy, it’s going to go on—and there’ll be more chain shops, and television aerials, and respectable people. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

‘Of course. But you just accept it. Why do you take it all for granted?’

‘It’s the time we live in. And things are better than they were.’

‘Better!’ she exclaimed, involuntarily, but checked herself. For she understood she was setting against the word better a personal vision that dated from her stay in hospital, a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive force that worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in war and cruelty and violence. Which had nothing to do with what they argued. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘better in the sense of no unemployment and no one being hungry?’

‘Strangely enough, yes, that’s what I do mean.’ He said it in such a way that it put a barrier between them—he was from the working-people, and she was not, and he was of the initiated. So she kept silence until he insisted: ‘Things are much better, much much better. How can you not see it? I remember…’ And he stopped—this time, not because (as Ella put it) he was ‘bullying’ her, from superior knowledge, but from the painfulness of what he remembered.

So she tried again: ‘I can’t understand how anyone can see what’s happening to this country and not hate it. On the surface everything’s fine—all quiet and tame and surburban. But underneath it’s poisonous. It’s full of hatred and envy and people being lonely.’

‘That’s true of everything, everywhere. It’s true of any place that has reached a certain standard of living.’

‘That doesn’t make it any better.’

‘Anything’s better than a certain kind of fear.’

You mean, real poverty. And you mean, of course, that I’m not equipped to understand that at all.’

At this he glanced at her quickly, in surprise at her persistence—and, as Ella felt, out of a certain respect for it. There was no trace in that glance of a man assessing a woman for her sexual potentialities, and she felt more at ease.

‘So you’d like to put a giant bulldozer over it all, over all England?’

‘Yes.’

‘Leaving just a few cathedrals and old buildings and a pretty village or two?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And then you’d bring the people back into fine new cities, each one an architect’s dream, and tell everyone to like it or lump it.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Or perhaps you’d like a merrie England, beer, skittles and the girls in long homespun dresses?’

She said, angry: ‘Of course not! I hate all the William Morris stuff. But you’re being dishonest. Look at you—I’m sure you’ve spent most of your energy simply getting through the class barrier. There can’t be any connection at all between how you live now and the way your parents lived. You must be a stranger to them. You must be split in two parts. That’s what this country is like. You know it is. Well I hate it, I hate all that. I hate a country so split up that—I didn’t know anything about it until the war and I lived with all those women.’

‘Well’ he said at last, ‘they were right last night—you’re a revolutionary after all.’

‘No, I’m not. Those words don’t mean anything to me. I’m not interested in politics at all.’

At which he laughed, but said, with an affection that touched her: If you had your way, building the new Jerusalem, it would be like killing a plant by suddenly moving it into the wrong soil. There’s a continuity, some kind of invisible logic to what happens. You’d kill the spirit of people if you had your way.’

‘A continuity isn’t necessarily right, just because it’s a continuity.’

‘Yes, Ella, it is. It is. Believe me, it is.’

This was so personal, that it was her turn to glance, surprised, at him, and decide to say nothing. He is saying, she thought, that the split in himself is so painful that sometimes he wonders if it was worth it…and she turned away to look out of the window again. They were passing through another village. This was better than the last: there was an old centre, of mellow rooted houses, warm in the sunshine. But around the centre, ugly new houses and even in the main square, a Woolworth’s, indistinguishable from all the others, and a fake Tudor pub. There would be a string of such villages, one after another. Ella said: ‘Let’s get away from the villages, where there isn’t anything at all.’

This time his look at her, which she noted, but did not understand until afterwards, was frankly startled. He did not say anything for a time, but when a small road appeared, wandering off through deep sun-lit trees, he turned off into it. He asked: ‘Where’s your father living?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see what you’re getting at. Well he’s not like that at all.’

‘Like what, I didn’t say anything?’

‘No, but you imply it all the time. He’s ex-Indian army. But he isn’t like the caricatures. He got unfit for the army and was in the administration for a time. And he’s not like that either.’

‘So what is he like?’

She laughed. The sound held affection which was spontaneous and genuine, and a bitterness which she did not know was there. ‘He bought an old house when he left India. It’s in Cornwall. It’s small and isolated. It’s very pretty. Old—you know. He’s an isolated man, he always has been. He reads a lot. He knows a lot about philosophy and religion—Buddha, for instance.’