Free Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble Page A

be rather successful. The film was a Western, and without guidance Clara would have dismissed it as a childish frivolity, a glorified version of
The Lone Ranger
. However, Walter Ash said it was a classic, and talked knowledgeably about the genre, and so she permitted herself to enjoy it. She had not even known that Westerns were a genre of their own; it was exciting news to her. He talked, it was true, with a little too much self-confidence, and she could tell that his views were not entirely original, but she did not really care, because they were interesting, and it was something to be interested. She was tremendously impressed by a casual comparison which he drew between the victorious hero of the film and Corneille’s
Le Cid
, and all the more
impressed because Le Cid was one of her set texts for A Level, whereas he was taking physics, chemistry and mathematics. ‘It’s all a question of the difference between the epic and the tragic,’ he said, when she expressed a preference for heroes that die. ‘In this kind of film they’re not supposed to die, they’re supposed to win.’ His chief failing was a habit of cracking heavy pedantic jokes; he was unable to let a good idea drop, and remarked several times during the course of the film that the heroine looked like she ought to be playing the horse. The comment had some truth in it, in that the heroine did indeed have an equine cast of feature, but he made it too often, and with too little variation; however, she was willing to forgive him, in view of his evident tolerance of her own social errors, such as an inability to say whether or not she wanted an ice cream.
    This outing was a prelude to many more. She went out with him faithfully for several months, and as time went on she found that she liked him both less and more. He annoyed her in many ways – mostly by his incurable facetiousness, which went down very badly with her girl friends, and by his desire to undress her at every possible opportunity. Although only sixteen, she was not much shocked by his attempts, but she was alarmed by her own lack of response, for she did not fancy him nearly as much as she had fancied the infinitely tedious Higginbotham. What she liked in him most was the sense which he gave of being connected to and aware of other worlds; he promised connection. He was aware of things which she had known only by hearsay to exist, and he possessed sophistications which were most unusual in one of his age. For instance, he took her to a newly opened Greek restaurant, and introduced her to the delights of something called Baklava Syrien, which, having a sweet tooth, she very much enjoyed – although he managed simultaneously to annoy her by various highly irritating remarks about the way in which West Indians eat Kit-e-Kat, and by a joke about a man in a Chinese restaurant who found a finger in his Chinese soup. His taste in films, plays, books and music was far more decided than her own, though she would not admit that it was superior: she thought that, given time, she could outdo him, but as he had a good start on her in time, she was glad to listen to him. What impressed her most of all was his knowledge of
the town itself, and of the way a town functions. She had no knowledge of the town; her impressions were confined to the bus ride to and from school, and to various coffee bars and shops in the centre. But Walter was well on the way to knowing his way around. He knew which cinemas occasionally showed good films, and which cinemas never; he knew about a painter who had been born in Northam, and whose work could be seen in a room at the Public Library. He knew the name of the Mayor, and he knew why Battersby was not the best Grammar School. He was sufficiently well-informed to be able to declare that it was a scandal that the town lacked any kind of orchestra, whereas Clara would have taken the lack of it as a simple act of God. He even ventured, once, a remark on the architecture of the