Free As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman Page A

air, breezes, straggled along the narrow pavement. The usual talk, the talk that I had got used to in my years in the metropolis, stemming more, it seemed, from a desire to produce a cheery, background hum, than any impulse to exchange ideas or fathom character, was going on. My own group, shabbier and fairly obviously belonging to a less affluent and influential stratum of society than the average, consisted of Charley Nelmes, Peter Oglethorpe and a girl (a scowling, tiresome girl), Stan Mackay and a few others.
    Conversation amongst us had flagged. Peter’s head was nodding. He had been drinking all afternoon in some club and his normally slack frame was now so limp that he seemed more like a thing of rags than a highly-evolvedvertebrate. Nelmes was passing a few desultory after-reflections on the topic of ‘conspiracy’ which, in a discursive and not at all illuminating way, had been the theme of earlier discussion. I was gazing glumly over little Stan’s head, occasionally, as if haphazardly, allowing my glance to wander towards one end of the bar where a robust, red-faced girl was planted on a bar-stool with her legs, propped brazenly on another bar-stool, widely-enough separated to afford an unimpeded (but, to me, indirect) view of her thighs. While Nelmes produced, from his littered mind, what sounded like an authentic legal definition of conspiracy, I wondered if I might ‘casually’ edge round a few paces until I could gaze ‘naturally’ up between the farm girl’s legs, but the wretched woman suddenly swung herself round and stood up. Flushing inwardly with shame and rage at provocative womanhood (with clothes, like bodies, open in permanent invitation) and suddenly giddy with desire, I studied the pattern on the cut-glass screen above the bar and then caught a flash of white, the petticoat beneath a billowing skirt, as a young and lithe girl leaped daintily down from a window ledge and then found my eye caught by a casual hand first opening to uncatch and then sliding closed a zip fastener which, at its widest expanse, revealed a narrow section of naked thigh bounded by white knickers. For a moment suffocated by the great ‘conspiracy’ of provocation, compounded between girls, police and registry offices, by means of which ithyphallic, spastic man is always ultimately either harnessed to woman’s vastly more comprehensive sexuality or gaoled, I lifted my glass, quaffed deep and managed to intellectualize my fury with caustic thoughts of ‘Lawrence’s wholewheat sex’ and Dionysus in the park.
    The clock hands approached the conclusive hour. The manager poised himself to progressively request, urge and command recalcitrant drinkers to vacate his premises and cease endangering his licence. Peter suddenly lifted his head, in woolly recognition of the thirsty hours fast approaching,and bayed thickly for ‘a last round, eh, don’t you think? Better have one more—same again, eh?’
    I heard these familiar intimations, and was also aware of the gnat-knitted dusk and the purring and growling of the sleek, new cars as the jeunesse dorée slid in pairs away into the electric night but had managed to immerse myself in a train of thought. Inspired initially by the earlier wave of lust, borne on by sudden, and rather distressing to a self-supposed admirer, repudiation of Lawrence’s sex mystique (‘not sex at all, or rather, what he condemned, sex in the head—and anyway, how keep it out of the head, how keep anything out of the head, and what’s the literature he himself practised and needed but everything in the head?’), I had passed beyond the original limitations of the subject to a challenging, exciting territory, style and experience, and the relation between them, how the observable fact, the actual conformation of thought, yes and of the concrete of the material world or that portion of it, at any given evolutionary moment, susceptible to human modification, stems originally from stylistic