As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman Page B

mediated utter verbal abandon, all the procedures and variations of that vital gravitational force known as sex but I never, as they used to say, knew her.
    â€˜Nor has anyone else,’ commented Otterley, ‘except the dashing squadron leader.’
    â€˜Her father?’
    â€˜Have you met that weirdy?’
    Otterley smugly interpreted (it could only have been, since he was really an exceptionally intelligent man, in the interests of a reputation for sophistication) all human relationships in terms of perversion. Generally, his interpretations were neither convincing, which they were scarcely intended to be, nor amusing, which they were. On this occasion , however, I could not help wondering about Selma and her strange father although I finally decided that if there were anything unnatural (outside nature?) in theirrelationship, with no mother, and the magnum of whisky and the wireless in the gracious flat, it had no corporeal expression. I decided that Selma was only a sort of new model, old-fashioned virgin who wished to marry intacta. Pretty, lively, a head full of sea-shells and no power, ultimately, to give one, or at least me, anything.
    But that autumn, I didn’t yet know that she was impregnable and dutifully took her out for the sake of later, I hoped, getting it in.
    We went to the cinema (the atoll, the camera eye, the sudden puff of elemental energy, trivial by astronomical standards but under which, had they been there, London or Paris would have dissolved). And then the feature. We held hands and watched the real people on the screen, moving in the real world, like ours, with cities, and country and desert and ships and shops and all the familiar appearances and yet not the ‘real’ world at all. An isolated world, and yet compelling, detached, by the cunning director, from chaos and apparently tracing an elemental tale. We had the meeting, the poetry, the revelation, the pangs of being human until, when the lights went up, and we found ourselves merely sitting in a musty hall, I had almost forgotten Selma. And then back into chaos, the glowing, rushing, slippery street, confined by the monotonous traffic to the pavement under the suitcases and travel posters.
    During that autumn, I say, as I went here and there, after working hours, with Selma, I often thought about my two sisters. Once I gazed down the short bar of the ‘Bell and Whistle’, while it rained on nocturnal London, at an owlish, dapper little man of about fifty and a pencil-shaped woman of about forty who were grumbling, in a persistent, accustomed way, about each other’s negligence and treachery. On the wall was a painting of the micro-structure of plasma, or of trampled lemons, and on the floor, rolling obscenely, was a heavy-papped bitch being tickled by the crouching barmaid, and on the secure bar was the companionable beer. First we were talking— talking ?Talking to Selma? Something must have been said, must have passed between us, but I see only the slyly glancing brunette, Selma, holding her gin and synthetic orange juice, and a bony, underfed, scowling young man, in a cast-off mack, gazing in glazed reminiscence down the bar while smooth, anecdotal Otterly appropriated his girl.
    â€˜Swiftly walk o’er the Western wave….’
    I had read that one through from beginning to end and then started reading some interminable thing called The Revolt of Islam , lost the thread after a few lines, and glumly wandered off down the attic stairs in search of Edna, leaving the dusty, small-printed, disintegrating volume sprawled on top of the chest inside which, a quarter of an hour earlier, I had found it.
    â€˜Swiftly walk….’
    The remembered line, or rather the forgotten others, finally nagged me back to the attic and I desperately learned the thing by heart and, helplessly and self- hypnotically , repeated it to myself until it became a burden. One day I said it to Edna, or tried to, but