The Centre of the Green by John Bowen Read Free Book Online Page A

thought it would be you.”
    “Simon,” Julian said, “what are you doing here?”
    “My dear, what are
you
?”
    It was Simon Purvis, a fellow copywriter from the agency. Standing there in the steam, the bald crown of his head a mottled pink surrounded by tufts of spiky black hair, he looked like something from the Hall of the Mountain King. Once upon a time during the war years, Simon had been a poet; he was a contemporary of Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes, and had published two books of poems, both well considered in those serious times. Then the war, as he would himself have written “became over”, and Simon went to New York City. He lived in Greenwich Village, wrote some violent and stylized short stories, and was taken up by New Directions. He did graduate work at Columbia, and, in the evenings, haunted the bars of Twelfth Avenue. He had an unhappy experience with an alcoholic boy from Iowa who had read the stories, and so he came back to London, where he found work first with one advertising agency, then with another, then with another. He wrote no morepoetry and no more short stories. He believed that advertising should be fun. “I mean, if it isn’t fun, what’s the point?” he would say. “You might as well go straight out and cut your throat.” He was not often sober during the afternoons. Once Julian had found him alone in his office, reading aloud to himself from one of his own books, and blurring the page with drunken tears.
    “Do you come here often?” Simon said.
    “Why does everyone keep asking me that? I’ve never been before. I’d heard it was a cheap place to sleep.”
    Simon giggled. “I’d never thought of that, but I suppose it is,” he said. “I’m in here quite often.”
    “It’s company, I suppose.”
    “Very dreary company most of the time, but one of the masseurs is rather sweet.” Simon climbed up to the top tier, and sat next to Julian. “Still, it keeps you from getting lonely, and sweats some of the alcohol out of your blood. Out of mine anyway.”
    “Simon,” Julian said, “I’ve sometimes wondered. This world you live in … this life you lead…. How do you
manage
!”
    Simon said, “I’ll give you a short answer. I don’t manage very well. Not many do.” He stared ahead of him, round-shouldered, bony, the sweat dripping from the point of his chin on to his knee. “I suppose it would be easier if one grew less discriminating as one grows older. But one doesn’t. If anything, one gets more choosy, more easily bored, more greedy for youth.”
    “And what happens in the end?”
    “Loneliness and self-pity. You thank God you’re normal, my dear. A queen’s life can be very glamorous and exciting when you’re young—not that I was ever pretty myself—but the winter sets in early.”
    “Poor Simon!”
    “You couldn’t be sorrier for me than I am for myself.”
    “Not all normal people are happy, you know.”
    Simon turned his little poked-out head, sharply sideways like a bird. “Trouble at home, is there?” he said. “I thought as much. Well, don’t you worry——” He patted Julian’s knee. “—You go to bed, and sleep it off. Things will seem quite different by tomorrow.”
    *
    Julian and Penny lived in the top half of one of a row of grey brick houses in Putney. It was not what Penny had been used to, but of course they had the river and the common, and it was so convenient and so cheap. With Penny’s salary from the Public Relations department of a film company and Julian’s as a copywriter, they could have afforded a much higher rent, but after all it was better to wait until they had found something they really liked, and then buy. They were on a furnished tenancy, and could move at any time. They had been living in Putney for three years.
    Most of the furniture in the flat was their own—the studio couch, the two armchairs from Heal’s and the five wooden chairs from the Portobello Road, the bookshelves that hung on brackets from