The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals. Elizabeth Smart
in the wastes of Kensington, the mean mad faces pass like derelict paper bags. The neat ruins of the war lie like a boring scar, whose history is all of the repetitive future, and all that memory can retain.
It is the autumnal equinox that blows out the pleats of my old tweed skirt. The moon races behind the tall and interminable wilderness of Onslow Gardens. All that was held in by courage and the ardour of people’s prayer to be good is loose now, and makes a lunatic and evil ghost to lurk in the trodden Squares.
There is no gas; there is no fuel; there is very little food. Also, there is still the demand for our pity for the poorer, the colder, the hungrier.
Cats are the freest beings, for very few people bear them any resentment. The foolish dogs waddle and trot about, unaware of how indelicately they expose the regrets and longings of their owners. The cheap sparrows peck about in the dust.
This is the scene for the drama which we are now too tired to perform. Christ how tired we are. Every article in the great cold room of the landlady’s flat has a different floral design. There are only remnants left over from her previous lives. She is making a fresh start in a rehabilitated house, which was only slightly damaged by blast, and now is made into flats. But really she is unable to make a fresh start, and her tired heart spends its holiday from the queues moping about her daughter who is in Leeds, waiting for her second baby to be born and her husband to be demobbed. The appearance of my landlady’s hope is only reflex action.
Women with strained faces are slapping their babies for relief.
The time of repentance is come. Soon even the most obtuse will be able to observe the wickedness of war. Repentance – but also reparation. We will REPAY. It is guilt that blows icily around corners with the autumnal equinox. The predatory suspicion is dogging us that we cannot, can never, escape the consequences of our orgies. When the door slams during the cinema we realize that there is no retreat. We are meek when bus-girls admonish us, because we are aware of how wrong we have been. But our mildness and our inconspicuous behaviour and our passive resignation will not deceive the Furies. They are adamant, oncoming, and, I fear, we fear, we know, will be overpowering.
For we are not massed for victory, and our subjective passions have not made a large image of righteous indignation to be our mirage and our guide. O Führer of self-love and self-hate, whose false moustaches fooled us into thinking he was not us: where is your twin enemy with the terrible banner of peace?
But even this invocation sounds too highfalutin for the times – out of place. I am, after all, just a woman in a fish queue, with her bit of wrapping paper, waiting for her turn. I wouldn’t budge an inch out of line for faith, for hope, or for glory. History is in the fishmonger’s hands, and I will be grateful for the stale allotment he allows.
Rising rapidly up the steps of the moving bus, I will not be too proud to mind if my landlady, my boss, or my lover, see the great hole in the heel of my stocking. Vanity has become a burden, and I think desire has failed too. On Bruton Street I saw a lady glancing sideways at the lingerie, with only a mild daydream about what would happen to her if it were hers; not, as it used to be, with the greed that begets action.
I meet kindness, sometimes, but very soft and autumnal it glimmers out in gratitude for an invocation of memory: of a child smiling, of a woman joking, for instance.
And hourly, yes, at every timeless hour, redundant and obsolete, the witches increase in Kensington, as one more woman becomes too weary to go on; too weary to dispel the glaze that has settled over her eyes. They crawl into their holes, where the gas no longer functions.
And winter is coming on.
This is the scene outside, and it seems to synchronize with the scene within, for it is not at all what a five-year-old child would have seen, chasing his ball in a still-green Kensington Gardens; or what an old man would muse on, sitting in his club, having weathered both kinds of war, and forgotten them all.
But these two categories are outside the story, merely the cosy covers of the book.
What is to happen now?
Out of this weary landscape, girding your strengths around you, you are to step through a couple of decades with your children on your back, singing a song to keep them optimistic, and looking to left and right. For the right and not for the left.
Left right, Left right.
Are you a friend to me, sergeant-major con-science, strictly insisting on keeping in step with the true, the true, the true that you once knew, and not the invented possibilities that reeled in front of your reeling mind when the lightning lit up everything?
You expected a bill, and a bill is what you get. This is the bill. Now pay it.
Left right. Right turn. March into this meadow, heaving your heavy rucksack full of the future, and see what the present brings.
I am friendless, covered in mud, cowardly, weak, untrained. But signed up for the duration.
You brought it upon yourself. You have only yourself to blame.
True. True. Perfectly true. Too late to desert. Too late to heave off your crippling kit and head for the hills. The problem now is how to put one foot forward, never mind best, just foot, foot, foot. Forward. On. Just keeping your feet from going numb. Just keeping them functioning.
In what direction?
Just avoiding the bogs, snipers, snares, enemy propaganda. Taking cover in skirmishes. Using techniques of camouflage. Lying low when the tanks roll out of the woods, squashing all before them.
A couple of decades will see you out of this bondage. A couple of decades will bring honourable discharge.
As I sat by my office window, I observed the generations, who are, after all, only the consequences of someone else’s desires, moving with fatuous smiles into traps.
I saw sad fathers and mothers moving patiently aside in buses.
And I saw myself spending my days punching holes in telegrams because of the consequences of my own desires.
I saw myself now ignominiously far from the bellowing Jungfreud with which I once leapt into the arms of circumstance.
And why should I file office books instead of putting my child to bed?
This question arose as I sat by my first office window.
Round and round like a frantic squirrel in a cage I chased it looking for a loophole. I found none. The exits were all blocked. Facts must be your friends, I said.
Panting, bewildered, I looked out to see the other prisoners, generations and generations, moving in a long queue through their unvarying days.
This cliff, I thought, this office block, would certainly suit a suicide.
After work, I dance in smoky nightclubs, swooning to jazzy versions of Liebestraum. What if next morning I look from my office window and say, ‘Shall I leap over the edge?’
The long fall is appalling.
Besides,