Judith Read Free Page B

front of them; they were bobbing backwards and forwards, exclaiming, making faces, laughing. Every now and then one or another of them would pick up a piece of paper and read something out; look over the tops of his or her spectacles owl-like, performing. For a moment everyone would be still; then they would all be bobbing backwards and forwards again, laughing. They were like one of those clockwork tableaux in Disneyland in which animals mime the goings-on of humans; there is one called The Bear’s Jazz Band; the bears go through the motions of strumming banjos, beating drums, blowing saxophones; crowds come to watch – why? – because there is some ghastly reassurance in the odd things humans do being done by animals? then, does it matter so much if the things humans do are ridiculous? Anyway, there was quite a crowd in the pub watching the
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people: it was as if some sort of glamour might rub off, rub on, just by the fact of watching and being watched. We were most of us pretending not wholeheartedly to watch: this not-being-quite-there seemed necessary for sophistication.
    One of the people at the
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table was Desmond. I did not know him at the time: I am going to call him Desmond. This is the beginning of the story that I have to tell you, really.
    Desmond was not quite like the other members of thegroup; he got his timing slightly off-beat for rocking backwards and forwards. He had rather long blond hair and a narrow face; he smoked a pipe; he seemed to be caricaturing Englishness. He was the only one of the
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people who could be called attractive.
    I thought I would pick up Desmond.
    I suppose this is one of the things it should be difficult to write about, women in stories having got used to seeing themselves as victims – I mean, in stories written by women. Of course, there are those phantoms with snakes in their hair in stories written by men. Perhaps everyone gets a kick out of seeing themselves as a victim.
    But the point of Judith was that she did not; was it not?
    I had learned how to do this sort of thing from my father’s old friend Miss Julie from Hong Kong (there is something incongruous about my father here: for the most part he appeared to be a typical academic). What you do is – stand in profile, one foot in front of the other, front knee slightly bent, toe pointing to the ground; as if you were within the frame of a picture; something like a Degas dancer perhaps; or one of those outdoor girls (Courbet?) feeling the temperature of some water. You do not, of course, aim directly at being like one of the girls of Miss Julie of Hong Kong – one hip jutting, framed within a doorway – however much the effect of this sort of thing might be what you require. But one of the points about art is to make something like seduction aesthetic, is it not? Anyway, if you stand like this, and become yourself like a painting – well, what do you think a painting is or does? does it not attract? has it not some force, or field, like gravity?
    Anyway, Desmond looked at me, did not look at me; looked at me, did not look at me. There was the counter-pull, of course, of the force of the
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people. Amongst animals this sort of thing is to do with smell. Humans have largely lost the faculties that go with smell. They pop up again, perhaps, with things like works of art; with paintings.
    I did not think Desmond would be able to make any positive move on his own: the weight of the
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people wouldbe like inertia. And Englishmen, it seemed to me then, had not only lost, as it were, their sense of smell but had got out of the way of picking up women even for the sake of prestige in the pecking order. They seemed to fear (also perhaps to desire?) the chance of getting chopped up like Holofernes.
    Well, what might Judith do in this interesting situation?
    My friend and I sometimes played darts in pubs. He would hold his dart in front of his mouth with his