‘Maybe after I leave it’ll be the head of Orpheus again.’
‘I can’t say what it’ll do, we haven’t known each other that long.’
‘You and the cabbage or you and I?’
‘The head of Orpheus and I.’
‘I shouldn’t like to come between you.’
‘I think we’re all in this together, you and I and the head of Orpheus.’
‘In what?’
I was about to say, ‘This story,’ then I decided not to. ‘I don’t know.’
‘For a moment I thought you were going to say, “This story.” I’m glad you didn’t.’
‘So am I.’
12 In the Morning
In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff. Melanie stirred, clinging to the sleep that was casting her off. I looked at the long line of her back, the sweet Velasquez curve of her hip, then I got up and parted the curtains to see under a dark sky the distant red and green lights of the District Line and the long grey curve of iron sweeping towards Fulham Broadway. It was Saturday; an idle train stood empty while from behind it a Tower Hill train slid majestically round the long and shining curve.
I went to the larder under the stairs and found the head weeping quietly. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What are you crying about?’
No answer except a quiet snuffling.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to carry on like that at least tell me what’s on your mind.’
Still no answer. I heard Melanie in the kitchen. ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ I said to the head.
Melanie was naked under my anorak again, smooth and sleepwarm as we kissed good morning. I was looking forward to a slow and easy weekend together but in a few minutes she was dressed, had toast and coffee, and gathered herself for departure. ‘Sol’s going to drop off a typescript at my place,’ she said. ‘I’ll phone you later.’
When she’d gone I went to the larder to talk to the head but found only an exhausted-looking cabbage. ‘Once begun, the story must be finished,’ I said, ‘remember?’
Nothing. I put it in a carrier bag, took it to the river, dropped it in, came home and sat down at my desk and typed:
IN THE MORNING
In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff. Millicent stirred …
No, Millicent wasn’t right.
trapped in a car going over a cliff. Monica stirred …
Definitely not Monica, women named Monica have never fancied me.
In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff. Melissa stirred, clinging to the sleep that was casting her off.
Page one? I didn’t think so. Suddenly the idea of turning one’s experience into a story seemed not only bizarre but perverted; the idea of such a thing as page one seemed at the very least a monstrous vanity. Where was the beginning of anything, how could I draw a line through endless cause and effect and say, ‘Here is page one’? Well of course either one was a storyteller or one wasn’t, and it looked as if I wasn’t – all I could do was describe phenomena as I experienced them. I looked at the two sentences on my page one attempt until the telephone rang and it was Melanie.
‘There went today and tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Sol’s given me a twelve-hundred-page first novel by the ex-mistress of General Sphincter to read and I’ve got to give him my report on Monday.’
‘Twelve hundred pages! What size?’
‘A4.’
‘Good job they’re not foolscap. Why don’t you do it here? It’ll be really cosy.’
‘No, I’ve got to be in my own place with my own space-time. I’ll ring you Monday.’
Well, I thought as I hung up, there you have it: you need her more than she needs you.
The telephone rang again and Sol Mazzaroth jumped out of it and grabbed me. ‘How’s it going?’ he said.
‘GNGGX. NNZVNGGGG. NNVLL.’
‘Terrific. When can I see it?’
‘FNURRN.’
‘Great. Any time after three.’ He shook my hand and climbed back into the telephone as the dusk wrapped itself around me like a python.
Evening shadows make me blue, I thought in the voice of Connie Francis, when each weary day is through. How I long to be with you, my happiness. The dusk continued both as python and ambience as it filled the room with what the dusk brings, roads and faces long gone, action not to be revoked, the past that is always now and
THE LITTLE TRIBUNAL OF THE DUSK
Shadows, shadows, voices from otherwhen, faces from time lost, said the dusk. Do you remember the maze near Bicester and whom you walked it with? Do you remember the Cairn o’Mount Road over the Grampians, the tawny owl in the grey afternoon? And Portknockie? Do you remember the boat in the rain? Do you remember St-Paul-de-Vence and Kensington Square? Do you remember the olive tree? Do you remember, do you remember?
Yes, I said, I remember everything because this is
THE DUSK VS ME
How do you find? said the dusk.
Guilty, I said.
The universe, hissed the dusk as python, as ambience, as tribunal, is a continually fluctuating event that configures itself to whatever is perceived as centre.
I turned to the Vermeer girl, I looked at the colour plates in the books and the big print over the fireplace. She wasn’t there, the virtue had gone out of my poor copies, they were empty of her. The room filled up with a desolation that drained the virtue out of everything. All of the colour and accumulated detail of books and pictures, posters, puppets and art objects, charts and maps and Chinese kites, all the comradely clutter of shortwave radio and tape recorders, computer and printer, all the things on my desk, the stones from places of power, shrivelled oak leaves and dry acorns from favouring trees, shells from memory’s store of sunlit ocean (some of them broken and revealing mystical helices), the little china cat that played with a golden ball, the pensive bisque mermaid from a forgotten aquarium (Luise had given me both of those), the sombre broken-nosed painted lion (relic of some cast-iron peaceable kingdom) - everything in the room, the colour and pattern of Oriental carpets and cushions and furniture until now harmoniously sharing territories of light and shadow - all of it stopped looking right and began to look wrong.
It was after closing time. From the footpath along the common came shouts and drunken singing where jackals and hyenas prowled the wastes and the satyr cried to his fellows. This was only Saturday night; there was still Sunday to get through.
In the morning as always the Sunday Times and the Observer slid through the letterbox and flopped grunting to the floor, their review sections and supplements heavy with news of Juan de Fulmé, Boumboume Letunga, Jarvis Bendable, Charmian Rox, and every other writer who was not Herman Orff. I got through the day by answering letters and paying bills, my regular Sunday refuge.
In the evening I looked for the Vermeer girl again in the print over the fireplace and in the books and again she wasn’t there. ‘Why aren’t you there?’ I said to her. ‘What have I done to make you go away? Where have you gone?’
No answer.
‘You’ve always been here,’ I said. ‘How am I supposed to get along without you?’
Still no answer.
‘Listen,’ I said to the radio, ‘give me her voice at least.’ It was tuned to 7320 kHz, in the twittering and tweetling of the vast hollow aerial miles a soprano was singing Tales from the Vienna Woods in Russian. Desolate, those woods. Radio Moscow began to fade, and scarcely had I touched the tuning dial when a new voice came in, a girlish voice as fresh and clear as the run of spring water over clean stones. It was a presenter I hadn’t heard before, reading the news on Radio Tirana’s German transmission on 7310 kHz. I was caught by her brilliant simplicity; her speech was wholly unmannered, wholly uncovered, it came out of her with her breath and there was in it a fragrance as of her breath and an incandescent eroticism. She read the news like a schoolgir
l standing up straight with her feet together, her voice dancing a little with the enjoyment of its own physicality.
She spoke of Amerikanischer Imperialismus enchantingly and unmaliciously, and she finished each news item with a rising inflection in which one could hear her tidy small pleasure. Her voice made in the crackling and whispering of the evening airwaves a quiet place of its own. Knowing hardly any German I was able to let go of all comprehension so that she came to my ear naked, giving me, unvitiated by any surface meaning, the sound that signified only herself. Whenever she paused for breath I was shocked by the intimacy of it. It was just such a voice as the Vermeer girl might have spoken with.
Still listening to her I put on a videotape of a Channel 4 film of a tidal mangrove forest in Borneo and the crabs with bodies like human faces. I ran it with the sound off. The moon rose over the sea and the voice of the girl from Tirana moved with the spring tide that flooded the mangroves as the great female crab silently exploded her fertility into the sea, clouds of infant ancient faces rising around her. The German faded out, the sweet voice was itself only, beckoning wordlessly in the moving waters under the moon.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What are you saying?’
Come and find me, said the Vermeer girl.
13 The Hague
Liverpool Street at night is a darkling place; it darkles. Out of the dimness stare the red and yellow illuminated signs of the JAZZ BUFFET AND BAR, of CIGARETTES AND SWEETS. In the dimness under the fluorescent lights at the ticket barriers travellers manifest themselves halfway between chiaroscuro and silhouette. There is a general echoing of rattling and rumbling, there is a dark and stertorous clamour. The Harwich train will leave at 1940 from Platform 9.
I’d gone to Orpheus Travel in the Fulham Road but it was shut down; BILL STICKERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, said a sign on the window. Behind the window there were only scattered papers on a dusty floor. I bought my ticket at Thomas Cook in Harrods.
As the train pulled out I was astonished to see how many illuminated clockfaces looked out of the station into the night. I didn’t count them; I was strongly satisfied by them, that in the hurrying past of the uncelebrated moment these heralds were yet present to trumpet silently with their luminous faces all departures, all arrivals.
The train wheels, now authorized to take up their song of distance, clacked and clattered their traditional shanty of miles. The unseen boat not yet arrived at, the dark sea waiting, these already lent significance to the travellers on our train; everyone looked interesting.
An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of a night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.
Consider this, said the train wheels, repeating the message tirelessly moment after moment on the miles of cold iron that lay shining in the dark that led to Harwich and repeating face on face the faces reflected in the windows. Harwich achieved, the windows became empty of faces.
Signs pointed to LADIES, GENTLEMEN, SHIPS. My passport was stamped; with the other seagoers I went up an escalator and along a glassed-in passageway from which we could see the hinged shell of the stern of the Prinses Beatrix lifted to receive a stream of cars.
Having climbed the gangway and been directed by stewards to our cabins we then moved haltingly on such stairways as offered until the number on a door matched the number on a piece of paper in one’s hand. People stood in little knots of bafflement, then disappeared.
In a little while I reappeared in the self-service restaurant, sitting at a table with my notebook, a ham sandwich, and a bottle of beer. An illuminated clock on the quayside looked in through the glassed-in side of the restaurant. The glass was steamed up and dropleted, and on this misty surface appeared a show of moving quayside shadows as the ship cast off its moorings and eased out into the North Sea. In the bright light of the restaurant people ate and drank as the geometric shadows stroked past on the whiteness of the foggy glass.
The whiteness and the shadows withdrew from the glass as the Prinses Beatrix moved out. Night showed itself above the receding quayside and its many clustered bluish-white lights. Between us and those lights appeared a widening watershine. Bluish-white and yellow lights slid rearward; cranes and gantries, booms and cables and other marine articulations offered their detail growing smaller, smaller.
Actually, said the bluish-white lights, said the yellow, there is no place whatever, no place at all. We have told you this before in topographies of emptiness and on the roads of night, you have known it looking out of strange windows. You have always known it.
No, I said, I don’t know that. I’m not ready to know that. I have always found place, I have always had places. Death as it follows me takes away one place after another; sometimes it’s like the breaking of a string of beads; the beads all rattle on the floor, some roll into dark corners. But my places are not yet all gone.
Night and distance occupied the ship, hummed in the hollowness of it, throbbed in the engines of it, drove it like a line across a screen. I wondered if the Kraken felt the tremor of it, wondered if the blind and questing head of Orpheus swam before it, cleaving the darkness ahead of the bow wave and the marbling white wake that widened and vanished in the night. Certainly this night passage sang in the olive tree.
The train for Amsterdam, chic in yellow paint with blue blazons, stood ready just outside the customs hall. With other travellers I got into it and looked out of the window at a dark tower that lifted its head above some trees and showed an illuminated clockface. On the window that I looked through there was, instead of a crossed-out cigarette, a crossed-out bottle. What a good idea to cross things out on windows, I thought. What a convenience.
The sky as it grew lighter showed itself to be a good firm northern before-dawn sky. A resigned-looking man opposite me, very small, very moon-faced and eastern, put a black-cased radio-cassette recorder carefully between his legs like a shrine, extended the antenna, put on headphones, and sank back into the whispering of the news in his head.
The carriage filled up with people, rucksacks, and suitcases; the train stood motionless; it was not due to move for another hour. The sky grew more and more pale and more and more by-the-sea. There were dark blue streaks in it now and a few scattered marine-looking clouds. Across this paling sky flew the black shapes of silent gulls. Over the electric railway stretched a precision of gantries and wires. Between the train and the dark tower of the clock there was lifted up the black shape of a hammer-headed crane. It swung round and moved out of sight. A white light appeared above the trees. From the head of the moon-faced eastern-looking man issued tiny compressed Mozart. The sky was now dove-grey and altogether marine in its character.
At 0730 the train moved. We passed bulldozers and tractor shovels impassively moving earth, we passed cattle standing in quiet pastures while the mists of dawn rose round them. We passed sheep, blocks of flats, canals with perfect little bridges, and black ducks on silver water. There was no darkness to mirror our faces; our eyes looking out saw such world as framed itself in the windows with the crossed-out bottles.
In due course the train arrived at the beautiful Pieter de Hooch-looking red-brick station in The Hague. According to my books the Vermeer girl was at the Mauritshuis, but when I bought a map the newsagent told me that the Mauritshuis was closed for renovation and the paintings were to be seen at the Johan de Witthuis, which he marked for me.
A little after nine o’clock I arrived at the Johan de Witthuis, which did not open until ten o’clock. By that time I was longing for the conveniences as well as for the Vermeer girl. There were no signs anywhere that said anything like HERREN, no bifur
cated pictographs. Until ten o’clock I walked up and down looking at shop windows and wondering whether a preoccupation with dikes had made the Dutch constipated.
When the doors opened I paid my admission and bought an illustrated catalogue on the cover of which was Vermeer’s View of Delft. I said to the man at the desk, ‘Are all the paintings from the Mauritshuis here?’
‘No, only the ones in the catalogue.’
‘But the Vermeer, the Head of a Young Girl, that’s here, isn’t it?’
‘No, the only Vermeer is this one.’ He indicated the reproduction on the cover of the catalogue.
‘Where’s the Head of a Young Girl?’
‘It’s on loan in America.’
‘Thank you.’ Pondering the complexity of this demonstration I went inside and made my way to the toiletten in the basement.
When I came back up the stairs I went into Zaal A where I found myself looking at two panels attached to each other, Nos 843a and 843b, a diptych, evidently, by G. David (1460-1523). Two narrow vertical panels offering a dark wood, many leaves, a stream, a donkey, a bird, two oxen, a road, a stone building with a tower or a silo. A mill? Unlikely. The word hospice came into my mind. Did the stream flow under an arch and into the building? Or did the road glitter, did the road flicker and shine not like a road? The dancing beast of the mystery, was it in this mystic wood? What a dark whispering in those many leaves! Come and find me, she had said. In this dark and whispering wood?
It occurred to me then that this Witthuis, this new abode, was a place that the Vermeer girl had physically departed from. She’d gone away over the water. Out of her Witts? Away from wittingness, perhaps; beyond the reach of intellect. Her old dwelling-place had been the Mauritshuis. I had no Dutch dictionary but I had my pocket German Langenscheidt with me so I looked to see if there was anything close to Maurits in German. Maurer was bricklayer, mason. The number of the railway carriage in which I had travelled here from the Hook of Holland had been 727. G is the seventh letter of the alphabet, B the second. GBG: GIRL BECOMES GONE. The Vermeer girl had moved from the house of bricks, of gross earthy matter, to the house of wits, of the mind, but intellect proving barren she had become gone while Hermes for a joke sent me to find her. No, it wasn’t just Hermes - she herself had told me to come and find her and in some way not yet revealed to me this was the place where she would be found, I could feel it.