HUGE, TAME, EXOTIC
The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks
VintageMay 2022Selected by Barbara Epler
Rosemary Tonks’ The Bloater is hypnotically like a younger stepsister of Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper. Tonks has that same gift for tucking the reader under her arm and galloping off with her; she also shares that extra-peppery energy of an overall self-lacerating female braininess – though here, the narrating brain is less intellectual than Stevie Smith’s Pompey, being concerned entirely (and hilariously) with sex appeal. Our heroine Min, a BBC sound engineer in early 1960s London, is torn between various men as her husband George’s affairs increasingly get on her nerves. Min confides all her hopes about love to her best friends Jenny, Claudio (he’s semi-flirtatious, but mostly just sticks her with his impossible cat) and Billy (applying for the job of lover himself, quietly). Looming over all the possible flings, however, is an internationally renowned opera singer, who is most assiduously courting Min. Equally repulsed and attracted, she dubs him the Bloater (a swelled, salted herring). I love the bit where the sex-talk repartee with Jenny gets too close to the bone for both of them (their friendship’s “definitely rocking about”). Please read it for yourself: The Bloater is a miracle and a lost classic, back in print at last. – Barbara Epler
“Hullo.”
This is Fritz coming into the darkened hall, and calling out uncertainly. He says that “Hullo” more or less to himself; sometimes, if I’m there, I answer after a long half-minute: “Yes! I’m coming down.” The point is that it’s a quarter past two in the afternoon and I’ve just thrown myself down on the bed with a form of tiredness which is like drunkenness; your head goes on reeling, and there are varied layers of brand-new tiredness inside the massive, overall exhaustion, so that you go on falling through one after another. If you lie there long enough you reach the bottom, the ocean floor. Once deep down there, flat out in the pitch darkness, half buried in your bed and your thoughts… once down there, someone calls out “Hullo” with German-sounding syllables, and you instantly take an extra half-minute of darkness and oblivion, before letting yourself drift up to the surface and calling out, just as you hit the surface, in a voice of authority, with a sparkle in it like Asti Spumante: “All right! I’m coming.”
I know perfectly well he’ll go on standing there if I don’t answer. He likes to register the atmosphere with his head bent a little, listening in case there are surprises in the way of people or objects. Also, he sniffs the house to see what I’ve been up to. † If it’s got a dried-up smell, like old twigs, he thinks: “Oh, she’s been working. We’ll have to call an ambulance.” If there’s a whiff of scent – I’ve got a little bottle of light brown scent which only lasts 20 minutes on the skin, but will stay on my coat in the hall for 2 days – he thinks: “Parties! Just my luck to be a poor student, while others are going out getting sex, life, and heaven knows what.” Very, very occasionally there’s a smell of silicone polish which has been put on by me, in which case he pretends to be hurt: “You want to take my job away? That’s no good. The matter is that you are taking my work.” In any case you can’t please him; everything I do is to him disgraceful, fascinating. He has very strong views about women, they can never win: “They will get hits.” In reality he is kind, long-suffering, just, and good-natured.
Today there’s a smell of polish. But Fritz could never guess the reason for it, and I don’t think I could tell him, not without exploding with laughter. The polish went on that little African stool in the sitting-room – not because I look after it with care – in fact I only polished the top of it. It went on because a huge man was sitting on the sofa with his legs stuck out half-way across the room. This huge, tame, exotic man was reading a book as though he was sitting in an airport lounge, with no more regard for me than one has for the factotum in tinted nylon uniform-pyjamas who brings a cup of coffee and wipes over the simulated marble Formica with a morsel of rubber skin. Not content with ignoring me, this loafer, this self-regarding bloater – smells. Oh yes, he does. I, personally, can smell him from the kitchen door. I’m not interested in finding excuses for him; I do see that he is large and that washing takes time, I do see that he spends most of his life travelling, or appearing in a professional capacity (he’s a singer, a baritone). Even so, it’s monstrous of him. In addition to all this, he irritates me more than any man I have ever met. There are times when he turns up, bearing some sort of gift (this only makes me angrier), and follows me to and fro “helping”. I’ve got a feeling that bed-making is his speciality. The only time I’ve ever seen him hurry is in the direction of a bedroom. ◉
† Tonks' poetry and prose is often marked by a preoccupation with smell. Her version of 1960s London is awash with mud and the stink of cabbages, a counterpoint to the clichéd representation of the decade as vibrant and swinging, a world of miniskirts and mopeds.
After undergoing a religious conversion in the late 1970s, Tonks became increasingly reclusive, coming to believe that her own writing was the product of spiritual evil. She systematically borrowed and destroyed the copies of her work held in libraries, as well as her personal archive, making her novels incredibly rare.