Some of the Things That Happened Between
1970 and 1974

For forty months, beginning with that September when his eyes were very clear, Keith lived in Larkinland—fish-grey, monkey-brown, the land of sexual dearth. The most salient feature of Larkinland is that all women, after a few seconds, can tell that that’s where you live—in Larkinland.

At first, all his moves on girls were met by a rearing-back or a twisting-away or an emphatic shake of the head. One very articulate postgraduate, having rebuffed him, went on to say that he exuded a strange mixture of electricity and ice. “As if you’ve got PMT,” she said. That phase passed. His advances became tentative (he reached out a hand), then quietly vocal, then impotently telepathic. That opposites attract is not among the rules of amatory physics. In 1971, and again in 1973, he had successive entanglements with two nervous wrecks from the Poetry Society (round the corner from his dank flat in Earls Court): its treasurer, Joy, and then Patience, the most glazed and tenacious attendee of its twice-weekly readings. In 1972, and again in 1973, he became familiar with the narrow staircase that led to a certain attic flat in Fulham Broadway. Inside it was a publisher’s reader of a certain age called Winifred, with her cardigan, her sweet sherry, her John Cowper Powys, her tic.

He trolled through his past of course, but Ashraf was in Isfahan, Dilkash was in Islamabad, and Doris was in Islington (and he had a drink with her there, in a pub—with her and her boyfriend). Every five or six months he spent a celibate night with Lily (while she was briefly between affairs). He tried to get her back, naturally, and she pitied him; but she wasn’t coming back.

1974 was seven days away (it was Christmas Eve) when he had his first re-encounter with Gloria Beautyman.

•

It is the kind of gathering convened by the more bohemian sector of the moneyed young—the kind of gathering at which Keith is by now very seldom to be seen. I won’t describe it (humid pools of velvet and luxurious heads of hair). Gloria arrives late, and tours the room, moving through a thoroughly grasped and mastered milieu. Physically she makes you think of Viola in Twelfth Night or Rosalind in As You Like It: a girl transparently and playfully disguised as a boy. Hair up under the cocked hat, a tight silk trouser suit of Lincoln green.

He is waiting in a passageway. And this is their opening exchange.

“Are you pretending you don’t remember me? Is that what you’re doing?”

“…I find I fail to understand your tone.”

“Did you get my messages? Did you get my letters? How about dinner one night? Or lunch. Keep the afternoon free. Suppose there’s no chance of that.”

“… No. None. To be honest, I’m astounded you’ve got the nerve to ask.”

“Yeah, stick to your own kind. Okay. Tell me. How’s the world of cheese?” She takes a step back. And for four or five excruciating seconds he feels himself being painted by her radar—not just scanned, but exactly targeted. “Wait,” he says. “I’m sorry. Don’t.”

“My God. The curse of Onan is upon him. My God. You can almost smell it.”

Keith’s new suit (which cost six quid from Take Six) hugs him in its fire.

“Ooh, I want to talk to you,” she says. “Stay here. This is fascinating. I feel—I feel like someone slowing down to look at a car crash. You know. Ghoulish curiosity.”

Gloria turns and walks … And yes, it is too big, much too big, as Lily always insisted; but it now strikes his famished gaze as an achievement on an epic and terrifying scale, like the Chinese Revolution or the rise of Islam or the colonisation of the Americas. He watches her move from guest to guest. Men looked at Gloria, now, and automatically wondered what was happening on the other side of her clothes—the concavities and convexities on the other side of her clothes. And yes, she is astronomically remote from him, now, far, far beyond the capabilities of his naked eye.

She keeps going away and coming back again, but she tells him many things that night.

“Oh dear … And you were quite sweet to girls in Italy. Because girls were quite sweet to you. But it’s all gone terribly wrong, hasn’t it. With you and girls. And this is only the beginning.”

Beyond a certain level of sexual failure, she goes on to explain, a part of the male mind gets to work on hating women. And women sense this. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophesy, she says. And this he already knew. Larkinland, it self-fulfils, it self-perpetuates, it self-defeats.

“And it can only get worse. Ah. Now see that beautiful youth who’s just come in, the tall one with the golden hair? That’s Huw. The one with the castle in Wales.”

“Typical, that is. Yeah. The economic basis of society.”

“… You can’t help yourself, can you. You only sound as if you’re being a nightmare on purpose. One’s instinct is to walk away. My legs want to walk away. But it’s the festive season. Goodwill to all men. Are you ready for some advice?”

He stands there, smoking, with his head down. “Tell me. Help me.”

“All right. Take a turn round the room. Hover near the girls you like most. I’m going to go and kiss my fiancé, but I’ll be watching.”

Ten minutes later she’s telling him something that at least sounds quite symmetrical: the prettier the girls are, the uglier he looks—the more furtive, the more rancorous.

“You seemed perfectly at ease near Petronella. The one in the smock with the port-wine stain. And Monica. The one with the slight harelip. Mm. Your eyes aren’t fizzy like they were, but something’s gone wrong with your mouth.”

“Show me,” he says. She shows him. “Christ. Gloria, how can I get out?”

“Well you’re so far gone, that’s the trouble. Are you still a student? No? Then I’m sorry, but I’m assuming you’re a complete flop at what you do.”

This was actually very far from being the case. On graduation, with his exceptional degree, Keith applied for jobs more or less at random—he worked in an antique shop, an art gallery; for two months he worked in an advertising agency, Derwent and Digby, in Berkeley Square. Then he stopped being a trainee copywriter, and became a trainee assistant at the Literary Supplement. He was now a full editor there, while also publishing uncannily mature pieces on critical theory in the Observer, the Listener, and the Statesman and Nation. About a dozen of his poems had appeared in various periodicals, and he was the recipient of an encouraging note from Neil Darlington, editor of The Little Magazine and co-publisher of a series of pamphlets called Slim Volumes …

“Oh I see. Hopeless,” she says. “You’ve got to earn more, Keith. And lose that dank look. There are exceptions, but girls want to go up in the world, not down. Do you remember that touching ballad? ‘If I were a carpenter and you were a lady.’”

“‘Would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby.’”

“Well the answer to that question is certainly not. The funny thing is, all you need is one pretty girlfriend and the others’ll follow.”

He asks why this is.

“Why? Because the rules of attraction are vaguer with girls. Because men’s looks matter less. So we keep an eye out for the smoke signals. We listen to the tom-toms. If one of us—a pretty one—thinks you’ll do, then we take notice. Here and now I could make you halfway attractive. A walk round the room would do it.”

He sighs. “Oh Robin Hood. In your Sherwood green. You take from the rich and give to the poor. Walk me round … I’ll pay you a hundred quid.”

And Gloria, ever surprising, says, “Have you got it on you? Mm. No. It’s quite a performance, and Huw’d get vexed.”

“Then I’m going home. So it’s to be Huw, is it?”

“Probably. He’s perfect. Apart from the hellhag mother. Who hates me … I’m twenty-six you know. Tick-tock goes the clock.”

“Which reminds me.” And in a weak voice he tells her about Scheherazade. Already married (to Timmy), already the mother of two (Jimmy and Millie), already devout (according to Lily). She shrugs, and he says, “Time to go.” The voice within him (Christ, what a croak it is) makes a suggestion. It doesn’t sound much to Keith, but he says, “Well, festive wishes. Uh, it’s traditional, isn’t it, to leave something out for Santa. Don’t bother with a mince pie. Just give him a beautiful sight. You praying naked on your knees.”

Her colour, her shadowy bronze, intensifies. “How d’you know I pray naked?”

“You told me. In the bathroom.”

“What bathroom?”

“You remember. You turned, holding the blue dress. And I said, ‘No bee sting.’”

“Oh what nonsense. Then what?”

“You bent over the towel rack and said, ‘It’s actually quite far in.’”

“So you still think that really happened? No, Keith, you dreamt it. I remember the bee sting, though. How could I forget? And it’s true that I really do genuinely hate ruins. Good luck. You know, all this stuff is like conkers. Do you remember conkers? A mere oner beats a twenty-fiver, and suddenly it’s a twenty-sixer. You see, you can’t get a pretty girlfriend until you get a pretty girlfriend. I know. It’s a right bastard.”

“Yes, isn’t it. And how’s your secret? Still well?”

“Happy Christmas to you.”

He walked in the snow down Kensington High Street. What kind of poet was Keith Nearing, so far? He was a minor exponent of humorous self-deprecation (was there any other culture on earth that went in for this?). He wasn’t an Acmeist or a surrealist. He was of the school of the Sexual Losers, the Duds, the Toads, whose laureate and hero was of course Philip Larkin. Celebrated poets could get girls, sometimes many girls (there were poets who looked like Quasimodo and behaved like Casanova), but they seemed to evade prettiness, or shied away from it because it was just too obvious. Larkin’s women had their world,

So, with a kind of slothful heroism, Larkin inhabited Larkinland, and wrote the poems that sang of it. And I’m not going to do that, Keith decided, as he turned left towards Earls Court. Because otherwise I’ll have nothing to think about when I’m old. Anyway, he didn’t want to be that kind of poet. He wanted to be romantic, like Neil Darlington (“The storm rolls through me as your mouth opens”). But Keith didn’t have anything to be romantic about.

In those days the capital shut down for a week, at midnight, on Christmas Eve. It went black. God had his hand poised above the switch: any second the lights would go out and wouldn’t come on again until 1974.