As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman Page A

think.’
    Eating our sandwiches together, under the steam pipes, in the hot, dry timber store.
    â€˜I’m gonna sign on—put in for an overseas posting.’
    While the savants pored over their formulæ which expressed the behaviour, under specific and inducible conditions , of protons, neutrons, electrons and the engineers tested their new alloys and some people lived high with bags of lolly and Scotch. And the rainbow fish swirled under the doomed atoll and the hulks of obsolete battleships lay listing in the lagoon ready for instantaneous decomposition and their last voyage, as weightless particles, around the world in the stratosphere emitting hard radiation .
    Another evening: rolling on the sofa with Selma in her rather elegant (to someone for whom accommodation meant furnished rooms) flat, while muffled sounds fromwithout suggested that her father might be pacing up and down in the hall.
    â€˜Whose that?’
    â€˜Daddy.’
    As I struggled to get my hand up her dress and Selma, without rebuking me, or saying anything at all, and never abandoning a more or less horizontal position on the bed, managed somehow, by means of athletic evasions, to prevent me, I wondered distantly if the door were locked and whether Squadron Leader Rushington might not have regarded it as even more compromising if it had been.
    â€˜What if your father——’ I began, and at that very moment, the door clicked and, clad in tweedy mufti, his face rather pale except for the mottling of alcohol-burst capillaries, the dazed-looking officer appeared. Selma bounced off the bed in a flurry of white petticoats, a motor-cycle drummed past outside and I sat up, stroked back my hair and gazed glumly at the floor.
    â€˜Good evening.’
    I found that he was gazing at me with a sort of blank intensity behind which, I felt, played tentative and broken ideas but nothing that could be related to paternal outrage. I felt that he might have ordered me to attention, or tried to kiss me or tested me gruffly for sound opinions.
    And Selma (whose arrival nineteen years before had destroyed her mother) had to live with him. No wonder she was a little off.
    He suggested that we come and listen to the wireless ‘just a thought—don’t know if it interests you—rather a good series …’ and when Selma, untruthfully, told him that we were going to the pictures, he nodded judiciously but didn’t withdraw. In fact, he stood about, saying no more except once ‘Care for a drink?’ which Selma ignored and I, with some reluctance, politely refused while she made up her face and put on her coat and we finally left together, I muttering an awkward ‘Good night’. He stood about the room, looking forlorn, cruel and unbalanced as if, rather thanpour himself another stiff Scotch and listen to a variety programme, deep inside he yearned to writhe in ritual desecration and disembowel goats.
    At Ned Logan’s party, in the usual bare room with red wine, candles and a gramophone, we danced (which Selma did well enough to communicate a certain proficiency, not unaccompanied by exhilaration, to me) and then, as the candles sputtered out and the room got even darker and hotter, lay about on the lumpy divans kissing and listening to jazz.
    I knew Selma for nearly a year, until she suddenly disappeared , Clark Otterley said to demonstrate tractors (she loved driving) in Africa and someone else to teach English in India. In spite of ‘necking’ (nuzzling, kissing, cuddling, caressing) at parties, I never f—— her, in spite of the fact that she visited my room in Rodney Street three or four times and on one occasion I managed to get off all her clothes but her knickers. Then, after dumbly wrestling with me for a few minutes, she calmly dressed again and, humming a popular song, made herself some coffee. Nothing shocked her, and she discussed, with a sort of feigned naïveté that