As Near as I Can Get by Paul Ableman Page A

to their small, chic mews flat. She had been supposed to accompany them but had written and obtained, on the improbable, but apparently compelling, grounds of a fictitious opportunity to take a summer course in ‘gliding’, parental authority for remaining in England. I moved, temporarily as it turned out, out of Mike Rea’s quarters above the street market in the Southampton Road and Vanessa and I lived in the Dunot’s maisonnette together for six weeks.
    ‘Seen the f—— rota?’
    ‘Cor!’
    ‘Eva Constance—that’s her! Over by the bookstall—the blonde tart!’
    ‘You on late shift this week?’
    ‘’Oo? Never ’eard of ’er.’
    ‘The singer—the—don’t you know nothing?’
    ‘I know that Lofty’s gonna get a thick ear if ’e don’t do something about that rota. My missus’ll give it ’im.’
    The tanks were massing again at some disputed frontier. The distinguished Swedes and Indians were off again to arbitrate, to pump a little verbal lubricant into the jagged spaces, inhabited by Earth’s population, between the iron ideologies.
    ‘Although the President remained in Washington today, cancelling an official visit, it was denied that this was in any way connected….’
    ‘While there can be no question of condoning aggression ….’
    ‘A surprise move from the Far East today aroused speculation ….’
    ‘The distinguished diplomat descending from his plane at….’
    ‘Undoubtedly serious but also, by a strange paradox, perhaps the most hopeful opportunity since the war of strengthening the foundations of mutual trust by compelling world leaders to re-examine….’
    ‘… winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics said today at his home in….’
    ‘Pravda….’
    ‘Nah, it ain’t the Russians. Do you want to know who it is? It’s them Indians.’
    ‘Lofty did the rota? I might have f—— known it!’
    ‘I wish,’ I muttered wistfully to Vanessa, on our first evening in the Dunot’s house, ‘I wish….’
    ‘Do you like flounder? Plaice you call it?’ she asked briskly.
    The room gradually went dark. It was a lozenge-shaped room of which I remember a thin, tall, white vase that lived, like a private Zeitgeist, amongst us. Everything else was low or had its vertical lines cunningly blended with vertical planes: bookcases, stuffed with modern art and novels, a grand piano, plastic and wire cradles for sitting in, polished horizontal surfaces for putting things on (journals open at glamorous diagrams of transparent homes; an ascending white vase like the ghost of thetwentieth century), rugs, lamps and a small, jocular coffin full of cigarettes.
    ‘It’s gone dark!’ cried Vanessa, now a second ghost at the kitchen door, a dusk away from me behind the piano. ‘Now it’s gone purple. What is it?’
    The hue, in fact, was lilac, but a deep, eerie lilac through which, at any moment, one felt tremendous daggers of lightning might lance in some ultimate experiment involving the total atmosphere.
    ‘It’s a cloud,’ I murmured, wondering myself at the unearthly effect.
    Still clutching a half-pound of margarine, she wound her way across the room to the window and stood gaping out, so bemused by the pseudo-eclipse (really the accumulated discharge of hundreds of factories held down by a layer of warm air) that, for a few moments, she gave no response to my close presence behind her, to my hands sliding furtively up from her waist, to my urgent thighs tightening against her firm buttocks.
    A few windows lighted up across the mews, at the open end of which a gaudy bus plyed slowly past. The leaves of a colour-drained sycamore lay limply on the faded day.
    ‘A dog …’ murmured Vanessa, in absent surprise at the unconcerned mongrel nosing its way briskly up the mews. ‘No!’
    With a sudden, deft plunge my eager hands slipped inside the loose neck of her summer blouse and found, each one, its objective. Her own hands were instantly at my wrists, but only for a moment was