like a child in the womb, like an enigmatic moon

8/2/2019 Like a Child in the Womb, Like an Enigmatic Moon

1/19

Like a child in the womb

Likeanenigmaticmoon

Matthew Lee Knowles[April 2012]


2/19

[Sentences extracted from David Lodges novel The Picturegoers]


3/19

Like the dress uniform of some historic regiment buried in the khaki uniformity of amodern army, it was a defiant, hopeless gesture to a drab, uninterested world.

Mr Mallory always liked to drop from the bus while it was still moving.

And the people seemed to take the evening like a reviving drink;one could sense a week-end cheerfulness in the air.

He paused to buy an evening paper from the nimble-fingered newsvendor,who drew it with a flourish, like a sword, from the sheaf under his arm.

Hes no age to be on the streets with the likes of you.

Somehow one couldnt help calling a picture-palace a temple of Mammon even if one wasentering it to see an edifying film like Song of Bernadette - it tried so hard to look like one.

But I wouldnt like anyone to think I made a practice

Queer lot she was getting that evening, what with that fussy woman and the clergyman and now this bloke who preferred

to sit right at the side, where everybody on the screen looked long and thin like in the Hall of Mirrors at Southend.

There was a time when he liked this demure gesture a lot, but this eveninghe found it difficult to suppress the desire to shake off her hand.

He seemed strangely reluctant to take her anywhere where they might encounter his college friends, but shehad a very clear idea of the girls, with their urchin-cuts and trousers and feline spectacles - all of which featuresseemed much more likely to appeal to Mark than her own puzzled and timid experiments with her appearance.

Nevertheless, as he turned to look at her, he felt a wave of affection for the delightful picture she presented: the clumsily applied lipstickof the wrong colour; the superb clarity of complexion (why did so many nuns have faces like polished marble); the too-long skirt;

the blouse, bought on a wild impulse, its plunging neckline abbreviated, on a modest afterthought, by a brooch representingOur Lady of Lourdes, with arms extended as if to tug the offending garment together; the short, tent-like coat

that made her look pregnant, and in fact disguised a firm well-fleshed and almost flawless torso.

In the window of the shop the suits stood stoically,crowded shoulder to shoulder like men in a rush-hour tube.


4/19


5/19

One should live either like Oxford before the war, or like Paris after it,he decided - either have too much money or none at all.

Sometimes I feel like kicking it, Im so vexed.

Seriously, though, Mr Underwood, its not that we have anything against non-Catholics, in fact Ive far more against someCatholics I could name - no, its just that it could be uncomfortable and awkward for a non-Catholic living with us -

no meat on Fridays, everybody rushing about like mad things on Sunday mornings, and so on

One night he had overheard one of the twins at her prayers say:and please let Mark be a Catholic like us.

Id like to take it, Mr Mallory, if thats all right by you, said Mark.

They read nothing but comics, and now they even talk like comics.

Would you like another cup of tea?

The only shadow cast across that first, pleasant evening was a rather grotesque and ominous one - the dog-like

facial silhouette of Damien OBrien, with the sloping lines of his forehead, nose and jaw almost parallel.

Well, when he left the seminary so, he comes to London,like they all do, hoping to find the streets paved with gold

Any dramatic or cinematic performance, however crudely executed,seemed to draw from her the same rapt, child-like attention.

But he liked the song on the whole.

He would have died before saying it, but he did feel like a king whenhe was out with Bridget, so pretty and smiling and adoring.

Like an ice-cream?

Yes, that was what hed like to do to that curly-haired tart.


6/19

Like fish in a glass tank, their stupid, gaping faces were pressed to the window on a world they could never hope to achieve, where giantbrown men stalked among big-breasted women, and where all events kindly conspired to throw the one into the arms of the other.

She still remembered vividly that when she was in her last year at the convent as a pupil, she and another girl who intendedto take the veil had been skilfully abstracted from a particular R.I. lesson given by Sister Anthony, a grimly efficient

nun who was generally given the unpleasant jobs, like dealing with the occasional boarder who smelled.

The room itself, though ugly and strident in appearance, was richly furnished with deep-piled carpets, broad,low sofas like beds, and gadgets with unimaginable functions cunningly disposed around its broad area.

Just because he didnt like his wifes new hat.

That I would like to see.

Take anything you like.

He consulted a telephone directory, gargantuan like everything else in the room,and lifting the receiver snapped, Get me the Ajax Home Help Service.

Voluptuous, yes; like ripe fruit waiting to be plucked and squeezed - but waiting, innocent.

It would be like the South Downs after the Pyrenees.

What a beautiful room though, no cleaning to speak of, everything smooth and fitted, not that she likedthe style much, didnt have much time for this contemporary, though Patricia was always on at her to

paint the walls in the living room different colours, wasnt homely enough for her taste.

Harry swallowed, and his spit was like bile in his throat.

He wanted a tart like that and a car like that and a swank apartment like that, Christ, how he wanted them.

The discovery that he could see a film as many times as he liked for the same price as one had rather turned his head,and he sat doggedly through the most boring films until he was forcibly removed from the cinema.

It wasnt fair really - he felt that she should be like him, and let the misery of partinginto her mind by degrees, so that it wasnt so crushing when the moment came.


7/19

It didnt need much imagination to realize what it must be like to live from one leave to the next.

If it was agony saying good night to Bridget now, when he could see her the next day, what

would it be like to say good-bye and not see each other for a week, a month, a year?

Please, God, and Ill do anything You like.

I must insist that you wear a blouse like the other ladies.

Suddenly Mark found himself suffocated by an enormous depression,which closed over him like tons of cotton wool.

He felt he was a prisoner inside his own body, which was compelled to act exactly like the rest of the crowd, to gothrough the same motions as these dumb, patient beasts, holding out a coat, queuing for a bus, boarding it,twisting in his seat to capture the change from his trouser pocket, asking for two fares to Ringwood Road.

The words were like felt in his mouth.

Sorry to be like this, he apologized, taking out a cigarette.

She didnt like it if he smoked when they were alone.

The seat was placed at a cross-roads that scored High Hill like a hot cross bun.

It was one of the highest of the first hills that ringed London, and on a fine day you could see the whole city,right to Highgate in the North, spread out before you in a smoking, shimmering expanse of buildings, punctuated

here and there by the splayed fingers of river-side cranes, and great buildings like St Pauls and their own cathedral.

Why be like this, Mark?

But look, its like this: I think my stories are good,and you think my stories are good.

I think of sewage pulsing through thousands of miles of pipes, of trains crammed with humanity hurtling through the tube, of the people whonever stop walking past you on the pavements - such infinite variations of appearance, none of them alike, each with his own obsession, his

own disappointment, his own set of values, his own magazine under his arm catering for his own hobby - railway engines or beekeeping.


8/19

One feels that one wants to gather them all in like a harvest; or stop one, understand him, absorb his identity,and then pass on to the next one - but theres no time, there are too many, and youre swamped.

Its like being asked to conserve a waterfall in a thimble.

If like was like a film which you could stop or slow down at will,you might be able to study it, to find a pattern, a meaning.

Oh, Len, why does every evening have to end like this?

Thats because youre like this.

I dont like letting you go home on your own.

She couldnt like them.

Yet he looked like the one who had watched her at the street-corner.

Most likely she had frightened herself for nothing.

He didnt like it.

Like our little ray of sunshine here, he added, indicating Harry.

An apartment like the one in the film, with a bar and refrigerator.

Pretended she didnt like gin, had to be coaxed to take it like medicine - but it took

some of the starch out of her - eased the strings of her corsets, so to speak.

He had wrenched one shoe off without undoing the laces, and stood now in a stork-like posture,arrested half-way through the removal of the other shoe by the beauty of his wifes hair.

He wobbled like a tight-rope walker who feels his confidence vanishing: the gravitational forces of worry began to assert themselves.

He liked to read the Office every day, though it was difficult to find the necessarytime and peace in the hurly-burly of modern secularized society.


9/19

Like the finger-bones of some amorous skeleton Laurie Landsdownesprinted hands gently clasped each swelling buttock.

Their bodies could be mapped out like the butchers charts showing the different cuts of meat.

Were other people like this, he wondered - always observing themselves,trying to surprise themselves in a spontaneous emotion?

It was one of those times when there seemed to be nothing else to do but measure something quite meaningless,like the number of red motor cars on the road, or the time a cloud took to cross the moon.

Like Yeats great-bladdered Emer.

Why not simply admit that he liked smut - made respectable by the presence of literature, of course.

It was like being trapped in a cinema bleu, seeing the same film over and over again.

But that was what she liked about Mark, he treated her like an adult.

It was no use repeating the words of the prayer faster and faster, like a skippingrhyme, when her mind was feverishly occupied with other things.

Was it wrong of her to like it?

Had she liked it before she broke away?

For he did seem to like her, to find some relief in talking to her.

In the presence of her moist, bud-like freshness he felt old, coarse and soiled.

Youre like some beautiful but accusing sunbeam shining into a den of vice, he said.

It wasnt that they didnt like tea.

And it wasnt that they liked getting up.


10/19

The house resounded now with their energy: the bustle was like an accusation.

Like a trout she could be caught by very skilfully and delicately tickling her

religious susceptibility; tickling her belly would have to come later.

Father Kipling emerged from the sacristy, paced slowly across the altar,genuflected, and mounted the pulpit, pausing on each step like an old man.

The lascivious woman sounded like Amber Lush.

Although going to church was like going to the cinema: you sat in rows,

the notices were like trailers, the supporting sermon was changed weekly.

Yet if you tackled them on the subject, even kids like the twins,they were quite cheerfully positive about it.

That was the bald, terrific idea these people asked you to swallow like a pill.

Mark stared at it, and belief leapt in his mind like a child in the womb.

But now he was back on the ground again, a little puzzled and disgruntled, like a man who hasbeen ignominiously picked up by a great bird and dumped back in the same place again.

Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was like love - you couldntexplain it or produce it at will; it was just there, or it wasnt.

The blank face - the blank, pale disc that hoveredlike an enigmatic moon over the priests fingers.

Perhaps it was because she went to an early Mass to have breakfast ready for them when they returned; but she didntlike lying in bed in the mornings anyway, and as he had said many times (admittedly without great enthusiasm)

they could quite easily go to Mass together, and wait a little longer for breakfast.

No, she liked to hint obliquely that no ones pleasure or comfortwas obtainable without some sacrifice on her part.


11/19

He was cold and dank like the inside of a morgue.

The fellow carried his failure before him like a monstrance.

He was really a very likeable lad, though a bitmysterious and withdrawn at the deepest level.

He liked to be in a warm, dimly-lit room, thick with cigarette smoke and vibrantwith witty conversation, with the dark outside, protective and all-enveloping.

Like an elderly coquette hiding her wrinkles, she didnt allow much sunlight

into the auditorium, but it was enough to give the game away.

Real Cockneys of the old type, once the music-halls main source ofsupply, and now, like the music-halls themselves, nearly extinct.

What shocks you now - and would have shocked me when I wasa lad - it just rolls off these kids like rain off a ducks back.

He said everybody liked to go out and amuse themselves on Saturday night.

Like converted Pagans, they were reluctant to give up their old gods.

An uneasy conscience chafed him like his new, scratchy tweed suit, caused him the samepersistent discomfort as the broken spring he was hatching out beneath his buttocks.

Where were the luscious slave-girls with swelling breast and buttocks likeripe fruit, on which he could feed his harmless, middle-aged lechery?

Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, accents uncertain

They would probably worry like anything.

But they insisted on treating her like a child - or,what was worse, like an adolescent.


12/19

While everybody else hurried slowly and aimlessly through the streets, lifting her face to the stinging rain,and watching the low rain clouds driven across the sky like waves seen from under the sea.

Scuffling and tittering emanated from a round shelter sliced into four sections like a cake.

She followed a path into a wide macadam clearing, in the centre of which stooda bandstand, gaunt, skeletal, deserted, like some abandoned pagan temple.

In her early childhood, in the war, the puzzling structure had symbolized for hermythical pre-war delights - like talking-dolls, pineapples, and sea-side rock.

Mark had blown in like a fresh breeze, hinting, with wild scents, ofother delightful worlds where the air was free, pure, invigorating.

As soon as she had realized that he was making no attempt to disguisehis liking for her, she had known that there was no hope.

Their love was like a bonfire behind someone elses high fence.

As she walked along the High Street, these thoughts had infiltrated her mindlike the scouts of an advancing army of depression and self-pity.

She would like to get her own back for that row she had got into last October.

After all, it was expected that he would become a priest, like James.

It was part of the evidence he was collecting against himself: he looked at Blighty furtively in the barbers; he tried drawing women, sometimesin the nude, always with big busts, in a drawing-book he kept hidden at home; he desperately wanted to kiss a girl to find out what it was like.

He was bored, and Harry didnt like to be bored.

He didnt like foreign films at the best of times:you couldnt understand what they were saying.

A blade glinted, and as if by magic a crescent appeared on the mans cheek,with little beads of blood seeping out like juice from an orange.


13/19

Like Gladys said, you felt your clothes falling off every time he looked at you.

Like that time she had been followed, last October.

And as Old Mother Potts wouldnt allow men visitors, and Len didnt like dancing,it had been pretty dreary just walking about the wintry streets together.

Her train of thought halted with a sickening jolt as she rememberedthat this summer there wouldnt be many evenings like that.

Already he could feel depression and worry creeping over him like a periodic fever.

Did Mark like the new style?

I mean, whether the cruelly realistic medium of the cinema is entitled to tragic endings like that.

I liked the way he composed his pictures, like those continual shots of long, depressing concrete vistas.

She always felt rather uneasy when he became absorbed in anything like this.

Would her own marriage be like that?

Like a see-saw, her drop had sent him soaring into religiosity.

You build up a frightening picture of an immensely long, empty passage of time, only to cancel it out with your last breath,leaving your audience thoroughly confused, but clinging to the idea that eternity it like a great length of time.

Say simply and honestly that eternity is as much like an instantas like a million years, because its equally unlike either.

Its not like a length of time, its just different.

Id like to see you explain all that to a first form, said Clare, exasperated.

It was with her always, like some unforgettable sight or sound, like thecry of a drowning man, always echoing in the back of the mind.


14/19

Love was like childhood friendship.

But now she was beginning to regret her prodigal outpourings: he had almost sucked her dry, and she was afraid,afraid that when there was no more mystery about her, he would cast her aside like an empty container.

You know what girls schools are like.

Well, theyre like that, believe me.

She paused again, struggling for words to convey the innocence and intimacy of that friendship,

words that had to be like a spiders web, strong yet delicate, if she was to communicate to Markscoarse masculine intelligence some inkling of what that friendship had meant to her and Hilda.

Well, there was nothing like that between - Our relationship was quite different.

It would have been like stamping on a little bird you watch learning to fly.

And besides, I liked Hilda.

The other sisters were very severe; I liked Hildas admiration.

More than anything in the world she longed for Mark totake her into his arms and comfort her like a baby.

Without warning, something gave inside her, like somepart of a dam long under unsuspected strain.

It wasnt until they were inside the dark hall, and Mark had taken off her coat and carefully hung it up,that shame and humiliation began to return to her numbed consciousness like the blood to her face.

It was quite unnecessary that Underwood should clasp her like that.

Harry shivered slightly in the shadow of the sagging wooden hut that had once been somebodysgarden shed - some poor bugger that was blown to bits by a buzz-bomb most likely.


15/19

Personally she hated the rain - spoiling shoes, spattering stockings,making her clothes look like rags, and her hair go frizzy.

Len was different; she had never seen him look at another girl like that.

One evening in the park the previous summer he had made a frank gesture that was like a question, and one side of her had wantedto say Yes, but she had said No, Len, and he had taken his hand away, and kissed her, and quietly accepted her decision.

Already their affair was like marriage, with its own dispiriting routine,this shabby coming together for a few hours in the shabby office.

It was only a few months ago, but it seemed like years, since the young girl, who kept herself to herself,and thought she knew what she wanted from life, unpacked them with secret glee.

Again and again the nightmare rose into his mind like bile into the mouth; he threshed about in a desperateattempt to shut it out, but again and again he suffered the humiliation, the panic, the pain.

The bitch had teeth like knives.

Mark sensed a tension that was like static electricity in the air.

Thanks, but I dont really feel like one tonight.

But it was one of the twins, in fluffy pyjamas, who flitted acrossthe landing like a moth, eyes half-shut under the electric light.

I hope you dont mind me coming in like this, Mark.

For another - well, there was something peculiarly touching about adolescent suffering;and their sins and neuroses, like babies excrement, gave no offence.

Mummy and I - we love each other of course, but we just cant go on living like this any longer.

But I like being lonely.

Yet in their presence God was made and eaten all day long, and for that reason


16/19

those people could never be quite like other people, and that was Catholicism.

So what was it that had made him go, but a furtive, half-acknowledged sense that not to have done so would have been like turning

ones back on the Crucifixion, that here perhaps at last was the litmus which might determine the validity of his readopted faith.

But he had felt that he was still the same Mark Underwood, drearily going through the motions of belief instead of drearily going through themotions of disbelief; that the searing, galvanic experience men called conversion was like an unexploded bomb ticking away inside him.

There are a few like myself, who look as if they wished they werent there,and would like to get the whole thing over as quickly as possible.

Even when the sun had disappeared, the night sky was likea dark blue glass globe, lit by a faint glow from within.

Against this background the rosy-tipped lamp standardsseemed like fabulous lantern plants in a land of faerie.

Will there be more hills like this one?

He was tired of his body, tired of dragging it after him everywhere like a petulant child.

Says e feels like a young man again.

I told im not to be so silly, or ed strain imself, and ood ave to look after im then, Id like to know?

Thats right the ole thing sounds just like the Salvation Army, only posher.

It don arf sound like the Salvation Army.

As for Mr Berkley, the conversation seemed to him like the macabre chorus of some drama in whichhe was eventually to appear, by some unexpected twist of the plot, as the despicable villain.

Shes not like girls of her age, I just dont understand her.

They passed some sidings full of tube trains, looking lost and blind above ground, like worms.


17/19

Would you like to wash your hands?

You liked him very much?

As it is there are thousands of girls like me, and at least we have the comfortof knowing that he belonged to no one, and can belong to no one.

When you grow up you realize that its like the icing on a cake.

But its our life, to do what we like with it, what we feel is right.

So you had studiously to act out a charade of affection and natural ease until,like politicians, you had settled the issue in private, one way or the other.

Suddenly, like thunder following lightening after a breathless pause,it hit her; she turned over on to her stomach and wept bitterly.

He laid a hand on her shoulder, and she felt already in his touch the conscious, prudent reserve of the religious; rememberingthe sensitive fingers that had once tuned her body like a fine instrument, her soul howled with the sense of a loss.

The sounds of summer - crickets, bees, the distant shouts of children -were like heavy objects being moved around in her head.

What have I done to make you feel like this?

He said a lot of rather hard things, like you.

Dont you like living with us any more?

I like it too much.

For just running away from what I didnt like, instead of trying to change it.

From the very first time you took me to the pictures, you started tochange me, shape me in your own image, make me like you.


18/19

Now Im like you, youre like I used to be.

Its like a see-saw: one side goes up, one side goes down.

Oh sure - go home looking like this.

Was she in trouble, like the Higgins girl?

And there was something about the girl, with her contemptuous mouth and lolling posture,something strong and indefinable, like a smell, the smell of a bitch on heat.

It was a shocking sight to see innocent little children chasing a ball among their hot desires, burning like dangerous flowers in the grass,each couple shameless and oblivious, weaving around themselves a tight cocoon of lust and indifference to others.

I like it here.

Ill never be nice to anyone again, she vowed, like a child in a tearful rage.

Damien was all queer and twisted because he had thought she liked him when she didnt.

He would end up as another frustrated religious failure like herself and Damien.

Love was like a bus driven by a child: the more passengers, the more fatalities.

He was looking washed out after his exams, and Clare would like it.

It was the room that Mark liked least.

Their bodies can be mapped out like butchers charts

She was a reasonable woman, and he knew that she liked him.

Do you know, he said, with a rather pathetic, confiding tone, like a patient describing embarrassingsymptoms to a doctor, I sometimes think that either Im mad, or everyone else is.

I can see Mark Underwood turning out like that.


19/19

I sometimes wonder whether Mark really knows asmuch about ordinary people as he likes to think.

Well, I would like a cup of tea.

And Father Kipling mentioned that hed like to help you.

Id quite like to go, really.

Just like the old days, sir, said Bill, as he staggered out on to the pavement withthe long-disused queue signs - so long, in fact, that he had had to alter the prices.

Just like the old days.

It wasnt really like the old days, but he was too pleased to quibble.

But the face of the new usherette he had just engaged to replace herrapped his conscience like a dentists probe on a decayed tooth.

She didnt particularly like the tent style, but there was the future to think of.

Nothing like the dear old Smoke, is there?

Any time I like.

They would sound to her like a string of incoherent obscenities: - the Army and - second stag on East Wing Guard and - SergeantTowser who cancelled his last leave pass and - the troop train back to Catterick on Sunday night and - the cold walk from

the station to the camp and - the platform where he kissed Bridget good-bye at the end of leave and - the street cornerwhere he had to run for his bus and - the Teddy-boy who had attacked her and - all the people and all the regulations

and all the time-tables and all the clocks that had tried for so long to stop them from having this.

A sensitive soul walked into this town like a white missionary into a malarial swamp.

I thought Id like to give you a little memento.

Dyou like the new carpet?

Oh, I never did like the colour.

Id be hopeless at anything like that.

like a child in the womb, like an enigmatic moon

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