Ableman Vac

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31417-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 158 Seiten

'This book seems to be about us. Within a day or two of starting it I devised a title: VAC... The subtle idea was to fuse the suggestion of holiday or vacation with that of vacuum...' Paul Ableman's third novel, first published in 1968, is - through the voice of its narrator Billy Soodernim, libidinous and regretful by turns - a meditation on love and carnality, monogamy and promiscuity, childbirth, separation and indeed the whole of the fraught relations between the sexes: 'male and female, citizens with distinct personalities, flesh inwraught in flesh.' 'Paul Ableman's novels were praised for their inventive language, bawdy high spirits, and originality of form by Anthony Burgess, Philip Toynbee, Robert Nye and other friends of the avant-garde. They are witty, original, and full of good humour, and I am delighted Faber Finds are reissuing them.' Margaret Drabble

Paul Ableman (1927-2006) was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter, born in Leeds and brought up in London and New York. He was the author of five novels, most famous of which was I Hear Voices, in which his writing is inspired not only by the modernist avant garde but by psychoanalytic theory. He also wrote plays and scripts for radio, television and theatre. He was chief fiction reviewer for the Spectator and the EveningStandard, and London literary correspondent for the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ableman, Paul

Leseproben

SHE LOOKED UP warily from the magazine she had not been reading. He had returned to the attack. He glared at her from the bedroom door until she was compelled to glance round. Then he snapped:

— Well?

— Well what?

— Well, for fuck’s sake, do you mind?

She answered calmly:

— No. I said I didn’t mind.

— You do fucking mind!

She didn’t reply, pretended to read her magazine. He gazed at her bitterly. He knew she did mind. He could read it in her manner—resentment, jealousy. If she genuinely hadn’t minded, she would have said it differently, used different words, a different tone of voice. Couldn’t she at least be candid? In a calmer voice he urged:

— Lucy, you do mind. Admit it.

— I mind a little.

Instantly he snarled:

— Why?

— Well—

Well? Well? The tiny lightning of his nerves flickered in a torment of impatience. Well? She couldn’t even argue rewardingly, maintain the pressure, sustain at least the exhilaration of flashing tongues. Very deliberately, ominously, he prompted:

— Yes—well—what?

— Well—I’ll miss you!

With a gasp he sank on to the bed as the projectile exploded in his mind. She had despatched the words with a little sullen glance of defiance. God! Images danced through his brain, of love and joy and tenderness. Waves of yearning rolled from him. He wanted to rain assurances on her, drench her in a torrent of pledges, engulf her in an opium mist of security and devotion. He gazed at the shabby, red carpet and muttered:

— It would only be for the weekend.

— Well!

Once again she pierced him with a sullen, shy, meaningful glance. This time he could immediately amplify her remark. That ‘well’ meant: I miss you in the day, when you’re at work. I miss you if you go out for cigarettes. I live in and for you. I can’t help it. And you should be glad. You should cherish the rare gift. How many men are loved as you are?

And his silence replied: you are my truth and delight. He sighed and suggested:

— You come too.

— How?

True. She could hardly give up her job for a long weekend of pleasure. But that was it. It wasn’t pleasure, not exclusively pleasure. There would certainly be people there it might be useful for him to meet. Now that the verbal exchange had started again he began to sense her duplicity. It was true that she would miss him but it was not the whole truth. He murmured grimly:

— I’m not planning—to do anything—

The sense he wished to convey, and accurately interpreted by her, was that he did not intend, even in the remote event of an opportunity arising, to be unfaithful to her during the weekend at the party in the country. But having to offer this assurance humiliated him. Why must he beg for leave like a child in an orphanage, make his request for the right to a brief separation contingent upon his adherence to moral values he did not, in any case, recognize? He said tightly:

— Mad. Really, it’s mad!

— All right.

Now a fresh cataract of images glittered through his mind, images of freedom and adventure, of laughing bachelor friends, fragments of the night laden with voluptuous promise, rooms dense with drunken, merry, free-living people. Why must love be narrow and exclusive? He rose and crossed to the window, pulled back the curtain and gazed down at the leaf-netted street-lamps and at the gleams of light round the wings of cars. He muttered:

— I think I’ll go.

— All right go.

He smiled at the intensity of his own childishness and fury. This was the second or third time he had wrung from her reluctant consent. Damn it, he didn’t want to wade off through the sludge of her misery. He wanted to dance away on the wings of her loving approval. Why couldn’t she rejoice in his going, realizing that, whether she went physically or not, she could accompany him. If there were true communion between them everything could be shared.

— It could be shared!

— How?

Yes how? What did he mean? He felt the coherence of his argument beginning to crumble. Was he expressing a reasoned plea for greater flexibility in marital relations or merely howling like a child for a toy? Was he trying to provide her with deeper insight into his own nature and that of his sex or simply rationalizing because he felt guilty? Was he saying what he believed? Did he believe what he had said? Was there even a fluctuating thread of consistency in his attitude? Once again he urged:

— You know I never deceived you. I told you what I felt when we first came together. You remember?

— Yes.

— I said that I promised to love you and look after you but not to be faithful to you. And you accepted it. Didn’t you?

— Yes.

He looked at her hopefully. He didn’t want to amplify further. To have made the reproach more explicit would have involved reanimating his own profound but repressed conviction of the hypocrisy of the original agreement.

It was certainly true that he had claimed the right to sexual freedom almost from their first meeting. But it was also true that he had known from the start that the sort of relationship he sought with this vital and lovely peasant girl was incompatible with any such freedom. He had realized at once that only exclusive loyalty and passion were in her gift. Thus integrity demanded that he should have made a choice, taking her in the only role consonant with her nature, that of exclusive wife, or sacrificing her to the freedom he believed in and craved. But he had done neither. He had weakly compromised. He had taken her and at the same time told her, and compelled her to acknowledge, that it was only a partial deed. But the stipulation had been negated by the statement of his taking her. By so doing he had ratified her terms, whatever reserve clause he had feebly stammered. And he had never subsequently had the courage to admit this to himself because he had never been able to bear the thought of being closeted for life in marital fidelity. Better hemlock! What price the earth and its dusty, derivative pleasures if one could never again drink from the source, never again explore a woman?

Nevertheless he recognized the moral squalor of all this. He knew that he had, with whatever craven and unconvincing reservations, made his choice. He should therefore have had the strength to transmute its consequences into something of value, to grow and deepen in the love of his splendid wife and bend the gipsy urges to creative ends.

All this was now latent in his mind as, governed by a new spurt of fury, he reached once more into a mental scabbard and withdrew the dagger he loathed but never ceased to hold at the throat of their union:

— Well, fuck it, you can’t just say yes. I mean, what did you think I meant when I said that?

She didn’t reply. She had no reply. She hadn’t command of the subtle levers of casuistry as he had. He wanted to seize her and wring out of her an admission of his essential integrity:

— Lucy! Answer me! When I said I promise to love you but not to be faithful to you, what the fucking—fucking!—goddamn fucking hell did you think I mean!

Finally, sullenly, she murmured:

— Well—I thought when you found how sweet and fresh I was you wouldn’t want to.

Hush!

Again he collapsed. Pricked by the needle of her candour the bladder of his egotism shrank again to a wisp. Oh it was true! He had craved those things; her sweetness, freshness and devotion. He had craved them and been unwilling to pay the price for them, the price of accepting the conventions that went with them: the hermetic life, the fortress-family, the monogamous ideal.

He gazed at her with a dazed look. Yes, yes it was that. In the terror of the world, it was her love and care which made life not merely bearable but, if only intermittently apprehended as such, a great chorus of praise to the loveliness of the earth. Parties? Girls? Freedom? He was like an idiot at a banquet gazing greedily at a sour apple tree beyond the window.

He smiled at her in bewilderment, at the effortless alchemy with which she could transmute his rage into reverence, his greed into tenderness and she, in return, threw him little questioning glances. Was it all right again now? Was he hers again? Had the switch been thrown and the powerful field of their love sprung into being again?

He shook his head with a dry cough of laughter. What was it? Some issue? He glanced about the room. He had no great affection for objects but these defined him. The bed from one relative, the chest of drawers from another, the carpet and bookcase they had actually bought, all of them shabby enough but, vitalized by long resonance to the rhythm of their life together, a home. Where else could he be? How could he be anywhere where she was not? A home is a gaol. And a cathedral. And a womb.

It was clear enough. Already his heart, or those centres of the brain which govern emotional response, was filling again with the bright serum of tenderness. He wouldn’t go to the party and he wouldn’t regret it. And tonight they would have tea together and talk, taking up again the lilt and ripple and melody of the long, laughing...