Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1 Read online

  GEORGE: Enid, you are all right, aren’t you?

  ENID: ’Course I am, dear. It’s just an old woman rambling on. I haven’t done too badly for all that. Though occasionally the system needs a little prompting. I’ve made it a rule never to go far without a packet of prunes. Don’t pull a face, dear. Sex and bowels, I know. Shut up, Enid. I shall end up in a Home for Insufferables in Rickmansworth.

  GEORGE: Not while I’m here, you won’t.

  ENID: Oh, Georgie. (Kisses him.)

  GEORGE: Another drink?

  ENID: No. No. Or I shall be better company than a lady should. Better be making tracks. Home again, home again, jiggety Jig.

  BRIAN: I can lift you as far as Baker Street.

  ENID: In a motor? How marvellous.

  GEORGE: Are you sure you’re all right going home at this time of night?

  POLLY: It’s only a quarter to eleven.

  GEORGE: I thought you might be nervous.

  ENID: Nervous? Of what? Rape. In Stanmore. No such luck. Anyway all sex is rape in Stanmore, they’re such an unforthcoming lot. Where’s my bag?

  GEORGE: Good God, Enid. It weighs a ton.

  ENID: I know. It’s one of the things about getting older, there are more and more things one can’t do without. In the old days when I was a student at the Slade I used to set off in the morning, slip a sandwich and a packet of ciggies into my skirt pocket and I was set up for the day. Nowadays if I don’t have everything … books, Kleenex, pad, envelopes, scarf, cardigan … I’m miserable. And most times I never open the book, write a letter, wipe my nose or put on my cardigan. But I wouldn’t be settled without it.

  POLLY: Come on, Enid. Brian’s waiting.

  BRIAN: It’s all right.

  ENID: Coming, just – (Powdering her face)– just papering over the cracks. Do you mind if I just pop upstairs to the lavvy?

  POLLY: Oh, God, that’s another half-hour. Don’t wake the children.

  ENID: I don’t really want to go but one never knows whether one’s going to see another, does one. (Exits by stairs door.)

  BRIAN: How’s Andy?

  POLLY: He’s doing his mock Α-levels next week. He’s fine.

  GEORGE: You see, that’s news to me. I never even see him. The only one of the family who appears to have inherited my intellectual abilities and I never see him from one weekend to the next. This is simply his campaign headquarters, he’s here just long enough to get some more lead put in his pencil, then off.

  POLLY: All imagination. He’s not even my flesh and blood and I know him better than you do.

  GEORGE: You see him occasionally, that’s why.

  (ENID enters from stairs door with GEOFF.)

  ENID: I’ve found an unauthorized man on the landing.

  POLLY: Geoff, I’d forgotten you were in the house.

  GEOFF: I’ve measured it all up.

  POLLY: Geoff s making us an airing cupboard.

  GEORGE: I hope it’s all right tomorrow.

  ENID: Oh, yes, silly. Now, young man, let us hie hence in yon Aston Martin.

  BRIAN: It’s an MG actually.

  POLLY: Geoff lives Notting Hill way. Do you want lifting? Brian, you don’t know Geoff, do you?

  BRIAN: How do you do. It’ll be a bit of a squeeze.

  ENID: Good. (GEORGE goes out with them carrying ENID’s bag.)

  ENID: George, did I ever tell you: Sickert once pinched my bottom. You could see the mark for weeks. (POLLY and GEOFF are left. POLLY is flustered and tired.)

  POLLY: Good night, Geoff. I still haven’t got your number.

  GEOFF: Haven’t you? I’m not on the phone.

  POLLY: I never looked out that shrapnel.

  GEOFF: What?

  POLLY: That shrapnel. Last week, I…

  GEOFF: Yes, if it’s not any trouble.

  POLLY: No, it’s not any trouble. I’ve been keeping my eyes open for the other, but I haven’t …

  GEOFF: I fancy you.

  POLLY: Yes, I do. I mean … yes.

  GEOFF: See you.

  (POLLY and GEORGE now prepare for bed. POLLY clearing up the house. GEORGE is also tidying up. POLLY has a trannstor with her which is playing chamber music.

  A recurrent theme in the play should be GEORGE switching off this transistor whenever he can and POLLY switching it back on again when she notices. She should come back in her nightdress, with transistor and do some incongruous job that suddenly strikes her, like polishing some brass ornament or touching up a picture frame with paint. She goes out eventually turning the lights off, but GEORGE comes back, turns one of them on, now in his pyjamas. He looks at himself in the minor.)

  GEORGE: When does it happen? When did I turn into this? This sagging cistern, lagged with an overcoat of flesh that gets thicker and thicker every year. The skin sags, the veins break down, more and more galleries are sealed off. And you never notice. There is no pain. No warning shots. No bells ring back at base to indicate that another section of the front line has collapsed. This is the body I live with and hoist into bed each night. I heave it desperately from place to place, dump it with less and less enthusiasm on someone else’s body, then lug it off again and go about my business as a representative of the people. Save me, Ο God, from the car wash and the lawn-mower on Sundays, the steak house and the Whisky a Go Go. Deliver me from leisure and salmon pink trousers. Give me the Roman virtues, Ο God. Dignity, sobriety. And at the last, let my heart not be whisked across London preceded by fourteen police cars, sounding their klaxons, the transfer of my liver not be discussed by trendy surgeons (who consent willingly to make up) on late night television programmes. May I die, as I have lived, just about in one piece and my carcass not be scavenged as soon as the breath can more or less safely be said to have left my body. Shovel me into the dustbin, O Lord, without reducing me to offal in some sterile and gleaming knackers yard. And make me a decent man, O God.

  (He turns off the light, and for a second or two the stage is dark. During the last speech the sound of chamber music from POLLY’s transistor can be heard.

  This now ceases, as the outside door is unlocked, by ANDY, GEORGE’s son. He is a boy of seventeen, seen only by the light of the fridge which he opens and takes out a bottle of milk. He takes it to the mirror and drinks it, staring at himself Goes close and looks at it for a second. Puts the milk back in the fridge, and goes out by the stairs door.

  Lights dim.

  The same. A few months later. Sunday.

  GEORGE and ENID are packing up some rubbish, chiefly consisting of books; GEORGE is clearing out his bookshelves, running his finger down the shelves and selecting volumes he doesn’t want.)

  GEORGE: What time is it? I’m supposed to put the chicken in.

  ENID: Shall I do it?

  GEORGE: No. It’s all ready. I just have to pop it in.

  ENID: I hope it’s free range?

  GEORGE: Fat lot you care. No. It’s from one of those battery farms down near the cottage. They crack on their free range establishments and a few of the hens who’ve earned privileges for good behaviour are allowed out in front of the sheds. Meanwhile the rest are bound and gagged inside. Battery farms. Silence, low sheds and the chimney. The blueprint for the concentration camp. Odd depressions in the ground mock the trippers herding to the coast, stir memories of woods in Silesia, huts in a clearing and a sergeant being sick by a wall. Here we are, bird. Shorn of claws and beak, slung fluttering on some overhead shuttle, to be scalded, plucked and blinded and arrive at last upon our kitchen table, plump and white and comfortable with a lemon and one or two onions to give you the savour in death you never had in life. In you go at Mark 6.

  ENID: Where’s Polly?

  GEORGE: On safari in the East End with her faithful bearer. Apparently there is this back street in Bermondsey where Chippendale chairs are being given away for a song by people who haven’t the sense they were born with. Or so they’ve heard.

  ENID: Is there time for a cup of tea?

  GEORG
E: I loathe Sunday. Thank God the kids are at the zoo.

  ENID: Where’s the tea? It used to be in this thing.

  GEORGE: Ah no, there’s been a radical re-thinking of the kitchen. It’s now in the tin with the picture of the royal wedding.

  ENID: H’m. I remember buying one of those at the time. I don’t know. Everything’s catching up. These days you can hardly keep ahead of the past. This shelf is new, too. And this cupboard.

  GEORGE: Yes, both erected by Geoff, the Nazarene carpenter. I wonder whether Jesus did odd carpentry jobs around people’s houses? ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Cohen, I shan’t be in for the next forty days. No. Not really a holiday. Just coming to terms with myself really!’ Now, Enid, do I want I’ve Seen ’Em All, Memoirs of the Head Commissionnaire at Claridge’s?

  ENID: No.

  GEORGE: Or The City of Nottingham Civic Handbook 1953? ‘New Factories in the Green Belt make an Imposing Prospect’. Don’t want that.

  ENID: Doesn’t it bother you, them going off together?

  GEORGE: The amanuensis? No. I mean, she wants company. But I reckon he’d as soon stuff a Chesterfield. Anyway, it doesn’t mean as much to them. They aren’t always sniffing round for it the way we are. He said.

  ENID: Here we go, dear. We always end up talking about sex. It only happens with you.

  GEORGE: Anyway, I’m the one who has to mind his p’s and q’s. I’ve had one turn already. She’s only on her first leg. You would have liked Liz, the first Mrs Oliver. A much maligned woman.

  ENID: By whom?

  GEORGE: Me chiefly. No homemaker she. She was a slattern, a soft, amiable, lovable slut. We fixed up the wedding three times and she just couldn’t be bothered to get up.

  Politically, I need hardly say, she was of the left.

  (GEORGE possibly gets a photograph of him, Liz and Andy as a child.)

  A placid and utterly unmilitant presence at every sit-in. And the house … or flat, as it was then, always upside down. You’d keep on finding young men from the provinces sleeping on the floor. Fabled names in the annals of the New Left. All with monosyllabic names … Stan, Mike, Les, Norm. As if to have two syllables in one’s name were an indication of social pretension and to prove themselves of the true faith their names had to be circumcized and trimmed of surplus syllables. What was I talking about?

  ENID: (Still looking at books) Forgotten, dear. Wasn’t listening.

  GEORGE: Liz. She was Mrs Jellaby, I suppose, which is partly why I swopped her for one of the crab-apple jelly brigade. No offence.

  ENID: I don’t mind, dear. Polly’s always taken more after Leonard than she does after me.

  GEORGE: I don’t know that it matters. Andy was brought up on baked beans and Rice Krispies. It doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. He was a real battery boy.

  ENID: How is he?

  (GEORGE shrugs.) He has grown.

  GEORGE: Yes. Seventeen. He’s found his feet… and other parts of his anatomy.

  ENID: You used to be such pals.

  GEORGE: We did, didn’t we. Much more than I ever was with my dad. But of course our ages were much further apart.

  ENID: I don’t know where she gets all this baking her own bread from. Hard to find a more fervent disciple of bought cakes than me.

  GEORGE: She’s simply conducting a private rearguard action against the present day. No, they weren’t. Good God. My father was actually younger. He was closer to me in age than I am to Andy. He seemed ancient, always. It’s ludicrous. To look at us, you’d think we had a marvellous going on. We have two establishments, one here and the cottage. They’re run in nice conjunction. Not a plum ripens before it is forthwith translated into jam. Not an egg is laid before it is summarily drowned in waterglass. Even the hedgerows are scoured and their wild, heedless fruit thrust beneath a polite crust. Oh, no. There’s nothing wasted in this house, least of all opportunity. Scarcely does a plant poke its head above the soil before it’s rudely dragged forth to jostle tulips in a vase. Sewing, reaping, stewing, steeping, the larder’s stocked as if any day General Paulus might invest the doorstep for a siege of indeterminate duration. The larder is lined with jams in flavours of incestuous proximity … melon and marrow, lemon and ginger. Nothing, nothing is wasted. Nothing is allowed to break out of the endless cycle of retrenchment and regeneration. That cigarette end you have discarded, Vicar, it will find its way on to the compost heap. Part once more of the continuing process. Did you leave an old razor blade in the bathroom, madam? No. Don’t apologize. It will go towards a bus destined for Addis Ababa.

  ENID: There is something wrong, I suppose if we have to be dragged into the future. We ought to go forward with firm jaw and clear brow, all in profile like a Soviet poster. Instead of looking back, dragged behind those awful hard-faced men in the Business Supplement.

  GEORGE: I wish sometimes we could just go out and buy something when we need it, without all this performance of consumer’s guide and best buy. I tell you. We bought that gas oven last year. There was that much consultation and consideration we might have been getting a divorce. Your house, you see, Enid, isn’t like this. This isn’t a house. It’s a setting we’ve devised for ourselves. We’re trying to get something over, though God knows what it is. Think of your house … your kitchen … that foxed and fly-spotted fridge on legs, your old Belling gas oven. Wood tops, stripped white and ridged by scrubbing and use rather than two days in a bath of caustic at the back of the Fulham Road. Use, not looks. Old sossed-down chairs, a house that’s grown out of the life lived there, not a setting in which that life is lived.

  ENID: You are an old snob, George. More right wing every day. What you want is an old-fashioned middle-class household.

  GEORGE: That’s not right wing. But I do. The middle-class family… the most exclusive interior decorator in the world. An old brown carpet slipper of a house, comfortable, roomy and lived in. This … this is scenery. It’s been dropped in from the flies.

  ENID: It’ll age. It’ll mellow.

  GEORGE: The nicest part of your house, the thing that stamps it straightaway, so that you know exactly where you are, what level of society you’re moving at, is the vestibule. That bit between the front and the inside door. Plants, a pot containing various of Leonard’s broken walking-sticks. A croquet mallet and an old lacrosse stick, and a disgusting raincoat. I know that that particular sort of shabby gentility will always elude us. Our house will never look like that if we live till we’re ninety-five. Better the past a void than survive like this. We’re accomplices, Polly and me, with snake-hipped young men totting up back lanes in Grimthorpe and Featherstone, knocking on doors in Bishop Auckland, peering in through barricades of plants and ornaments for miners’ widows gone a bit silly and willing to trade the polished artefacts of a life’s history for a few quid. Reft of their associations, stripped like the eternal pine of the polish of memory and affection and association and brought back from northern counties to this sly southern air across the saddle bow of some chiffon-scarved Genghis Khan with a shop down Camden Passage and an eye for the coming thing. You’re quiet.

  ENID: (Laughs) Good job one of us is. I’m all right.

  GEORGE: Have you been feeling any better?

  ENID: Oh, yes. Yes. Heaps.

  GEORGE: Don’t want you. Nor you. (Chucking books in the box. He stands back and looks at the bookshelf.) It’s still no different. All those greens and yellows and blues. It looks like a caravan site in book form.

  ENID: Oh, no, love. They’re very cheerful. I like a bright bookcase.

  GEORGE: There again. Why don’t my bookshelves look like my tutor’s did … faded crumbling browns, sun-bleached dustwrappers.

  ENID: It’s what’s in them that counts.

  GEORGE: They’ve got no dignity. They’re on the game. Tarts for some smart publishing ponce. ‘Hello, dearie, don’t you recognize me in my new yellow plastic? It’s Jane Austen, dear, in my new uniform edition. Do you like it? We’ve had some times together, haven’t we? You
’ve taken me to bed more times than I care to remember.’ Look out. They’re here.

  (GEORGE and ENID now sit silent as POLLY and GEOFF slowly edge into the room.)

  POLLY: Just wait till you see this!

  GEOFF: It’s the most incredible thing, George, it really is. Look at that!

  GEORGE: But it’s a tombstone.

  POLLY: Well, it was. It isn’t now.

  ENID: It’s going to take some cleaning.

  GEOFF: I’ll give it a wash.

  ENID: Where did it come from?

  GEOFF: Fell off the back of a churchyard.

  GEORGE: ‘Sacred to the memory of Joseph Banks, who departed this life August 16, 1842. Aged 28 years.’

  POLLY: How’s the chicken?

  GEORGE: It won’t be done yet.

  POLLY: I’d better get my skates on.

  GEORGE: Did Brian say he was coming?

  POLLY: He wasn’t sure. Give him a ring. Leonard and the children are staying at the zoo, aren’t they? Enid, come and help me lay the table.

  (GEORGE dials.)

  ENID: Oh, yes, sorry, dear.

  GEORGE: Lines to Manchester are engaged. Please try again later. I’m not ringing Manchester.

  ENID: I shouldn’t fancy it. What are you going to do with it?

  POLLY: No need to do anything with it. It’s something in its own right.

  GEOFF: I’m going to make it into a coffee table.

  GEORGE: And what about him?

  POLLY: Who?

  GEORGE: Joseph Banks, now lying in some nameless grave, patiently awaiting the Resurrection. Well, this is it, Joseph. Everlasting life as a coffee table in Highgate. Enid, do you fancy a walk on to the end to get some beer?

  ENID: Lovely. Hold on while I just gild the lily. Then we’ll pop along to the local.

  GEORGE: No. Not the local. It’s just the nearest pub. It’s only the local if you subscribe to some nice consoling myth of community life.

  POLLY: And don’t stop there boozing. This won’t be long. And where are you taking all those?

  (GEORGE is carrying out the carton of books.)