Before we left for the station Alan showed me a stone sculpture he’d done that lay in a corner of the garden. It was a compact stubby little man lying on his side with his legs drawn up and one arm shielding his head. It wasn’t just a stone figure of a man, it was a little stone man sleeping. Glimming stone glims.
‘What do you call it?’ I said.
‘The Awakening’ he replied.
30
Souvenir
On the train back to London I put my rucksack in my lap and reached inside it to caress the No. 15 Klein bottle. With my fingers I followed the curving tube of itself as it passed through itself again and again. I was soothed by it; I felt that by touching that hidden mystery I was taking in some secret through my fingers. Yes, I said to myself, this is how it is with the selves of Amaryllis and me.
After a time I fell asleep and found myself on the road through the pine woods approaching the little shack where I’d last seen the old woman posing as a black cat. This time there was a sign over the door: SOUVENIRS.
I opened the door and went in. There was no bell to announce me; the place smelled as if it had been hauled up from the bottom of the sea. From the single window with the blind pulled down came a glaucous dimness in which I made out the old woman, wearing her black poncho and sombrero as always, sitting in a rocker which creaked metronomically.
‘I knew you’d be back,’ she said. ‘Give your old black cat a big kiss.’
‘Give me a break,’ I said, backing away. Her breath would have knocked over a horse and she needed a shave.
‘Horehound drops are good for coughs,’ she said. There was a jar of them standing on an old barrel by a small display case in which I saw, behind the smeared glass, a black velvet pillow with script lettering in silver paint:
For you I pine, for you I balsam.
There was nothing else in the place. ‘There it is,’ she said, ‘a souvenir of times gone by. A place to lay your head.’ Her voice changed, ‘This train is now approaching King’s Cross. Please be sure to take all your belongings with you when you leave.’
I began to cry and I was still crying when I woke up. A woman tapped me on the shoulder. Middle-aged, kind face. ‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m just passing through myself.’
She nodded sympathetically. ‘I know it’s hard but you can do it, you can take charge of your life. Let me give you this,’ and she pressed a copy of Notes from a Friend into my hands.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re a real Samaritan.’
‘Always remember,’ she said as we left the train, ‘the fact that you’re alive means that someone cares about you.’
31
A Seaport
I hadn’t seen or heard from Amaryllis since she’d bolted from my house after seeing Lenore in the painting on my easel. My thoughts were in a turmoil and it was obvious that she’d been greatly disturbed and distressed by the picture. I took it off the easel and leant it against the wall with the back facing out. I was wondering what to do about Amaryllis but so far nothing useful had occurred to me.
I’ve written about four of the glims I had without her: the Brass Hotel; Venice; the old woman posing as a black cat; and the deserted beach. These were quite strong but mostly the ones I glimmed alone were less interesting. Even in these she often appeared in non-speaking parts, sometimes seen briefly in the distance, sometimes as a picture on the wall or a headline in a newspaper. These were low-budget productions, usually only one or two scenes with a small cast. The major glims, the ones with Amaryllis as the female lead, were vivid, intense, rich in colour and atmosphere, complete in sensory experience, and altogether more real than real.
This was Sunday. Saturday night I had one of my low-budget glims but it was a special one. The colour was very muted and the whole thing was just one quick scene. In it I had a book of Claude’s paintings open at the page with A Seaport. My hand held a magnifying glass to the picture and I saw that two of the figures on the strand were Amaryllis and I. The light in the picture changed from late afternoon to dawn and I woke up smiling.
I had no doubt that a visit to the National Gallery would prove auspicious in one way or another. I closed my eyes and saw dim ships in a golden haze so after breakfast I took a Tower Hill train to Embankment and changed there for the Northern Line to Charing Cross. While in the Underground I kept being aware of all the thoughts, all the words and pictures in the heads of other passengers. I didn’t want all that buzzing and humming and visual interference but that’s the world.
Emerging from Charing Cross station I crossed the road to St Martin-in-the-Fields, rejected the advances of the Brass Rubbing Centre, and nodded to Nelson on his column as I went up the National Gallery steps. I passed through the crowd on the porch, joined the crowd inside, and made my way to Room 15.
On the way I paused at van Hoogstraten’s peepshow in Room 17. I check that peephole from time to time and look in on the little dog sitting in the Dutch interior; there are several humans visible through doorways but the dog is the inhabitant who presides over that interior; I like to look through peepholes and I like to be reassured that the little world seen through this one is unchanged. The Dutch painters of the seventeenth century delighted in trompe-l’oeil, spatial illusion, and perspective; peep-boxes were done by various masters, and the idea of crooked painting creating the illusion of straight reality is a comfort to me.
In Room 15 there were two Claudes: Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula and Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah. The story of Saint Ursula distracted me somewhat from the painting; she was beginning her pilgrimage with eleven ships each carrying one thousand virgins. The women following her were all full-grown and I found myself wondering how large a geographical area would have to be combed to find eleven thousand full-grown virgins, even in an age of faith. The painting was very pleasing but lacked the golden haze I craved. The Isaac and Rebekah marriage seemed under-populated and tame for a Jewish wedding but was full of happy tranquillity. The landscape with its distant mountain and aqueduct, its middle-distant water mill and weir and shining water, and its foreground frame of trees was a delight to the eye, and I suspected that the weir and the water mill symbolised the power of God who makes all the wheels go round and had inspired Rebekah to take a chance on the far-away unknown Isaac and become a camel-order bride.
Still pursuing dim ships and a golden haze, I went on to Room 19 and more Claudes. There I found a half-circle of green-blazered children gathered round a young female teacher in front of Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid. The children, most of whom looked to be under ten, seemed enthralled as the teacher told them the story of the painting with gestures, facial expressions, and enough italics to sink a battleship. ‘Psyche had never seen her husband; he came to her only in the hours of darkness and left before the dawn (here some of the children exchanged knowing glances). Her sisters reminded her that the Pythian oracle had said she would marry a monster.’
Breathlessly but never out of breath, the teacher went on to tell her charges how Psyche provided herself with a knife and a lamp, ready to have a look at her sleeping consort before she finished him off. The light revealed the beautiful winged Cupid but a drop of hot oil from the lamp woke him and he spread his wings and flew out of the window. The teacher and Psyche were alike desolated by this and I moved on to the sea and ships. I hadn’t thought of the Cupid and Psyche story for a long time, and although I saw myself neither as the one nor the other I was obscurely troubled by it.
Down at the waterfront I saw the Queen of Sheba outward bound in fair weather on a making tide. There also was A Seaport, the one with the golden haze: in the westering sunlight of a declining day a ship is moored close to the shore; another rides at anchor in the distance. Farther out stands a tall lighthouse. In the left foreground is a great palazzo with broad curved stairs and a landing stage. Beyond it recede other noble architectures with more ships
visible through an arch. The foreground figures on the strand seem theatrical, like an opera chorus before the arrival of the principals. This is one of Claude’s all-purpose imaginary seaports, available for conferences, weddings, and the comings and goings of heroes, saints, and royalty. The sketch for this painting, which appears in one of my books, conveys no particular mood, but the atmosphere of the painting is such that it seems at the same time to be waiting for something and saying goodbye to everything. Amaryllis was standing in front of it. The back of her T-shirt said:
The worst never falls short.
I recognised the line from the film Hommes, femmes, mode d’emploi. She turned towards me as I approached, and the front of her T-shirt said:
Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour …
‘Fare Well’, Walter de la Mare
‘Random?’ I said.
She looked at me, shook her head, and sighed heavily. ‘Support,’ she said.
I made a little sound to express that I understood how that was.
‘What do you think of this one?’ she said, indicating the Claude.
‘Well, it seems at the same time to be waiting for something and saying goodbye to everything.’
‘Is that how it is with you?’
‘Pretty much. You?’
‘Pretty much.’ Although her eyes were on my face I sensed that she saw over my shoulder Lenore standing at the edge of the cliff. Her own face seemed a reflection in a dark pool; any word of mine might be the stone that would scatter it in broken ripples.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m waiting for something more than I’m saying goodbye to everything.’
‘Every hello has in it a goodbye to the thing before it, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, I guess I’d say that. Would you have a coffee with me?’
‘Today I think I need to feel strange all by myself. I’m going now.’
‘OK, see you.’
‘Yes,’ she said as she walked away. I had coffee in the Brasserie, then went down to the exit where I paused at the Plexiglas-enclosed model of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, and their surroundings. ADMISSION IS FREE, said the words bannered across the bottom of the Plexiglas. PLEASE GIVE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN TO HELP US KEEP IT FREE. I called to mind Amaryllis’s face and the way she had looked at me just before she left. ‘Please,’ I whispered, and put a five-pound note into the contribution slot.
I went out into Trafalgar Square, blinking in the sunlight, and was mobbed by pigeons that fluttered and flapped around me like dead thoughts. Nothing, shouted the pigeons. This is all there is, there never was anything else. One perched on my shoulder, one on my lifted arm. Nearby a van sold PIGEON FOOD, and outbursts of tourists were being St Francis, the women squealing as pigeons landed on them while their husbands, boyfriends, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends and random strangers photographed them with little amateur cameras, larger professional ones, and camcorders. This is what it’s all about, said the cameras to one another. SIGHTSEE! clamoured the passing buses, THIS IS THE OFFICIAL SIGHTSEEING TOUR! BE SEEN TO BE SIGHTSEEING!
Boys climbed on to the heads of the bronze lions and slid down their backs, whooping and hollering. Hot-dog vendors offered to the breeze the smell of the one street that is everywhere. Brightly coloured vans supplied SOFT ICE, COLD DRINKS. Small entrepreneurs displayed henna tattoos, hairbands, plastic trolls, jiffy portraits, postcards, prints, and a variety of inexpensive fetish objects. Mallards cruised domestically in the fountains, ignoring the bronze mermaids, mermen, and merchildren. Always the waters jetted into the air, rising and falling to rise and fall again, a little wind from the west blowing the spray on to bystanders at the eastern rim.
Words in many tongues filled the air like locusts but everything in Trafalgar Square was less than the pigeons; they flew, walked, fluttered, hopped, and shat among the St Francises who squealed and hopped and fluttered among them while high above them the ghost of victory still perched on Nelson’s shoulder. I felt like a scene in a film where the desperate lover tries to push through a milling crowd as the woman, lost in the throng, disappears for ever. Cleaners in chartreuse hi-vi vests lounged at the edges of the square with their brooms and shovels, uncaring.
She wasn’t here. Had I thought she would be? Or had I simply needed to be mobbed by pigeons? I didn’t know. She didn’t want to be with me at this time, so why was I being the desperate lover in the milling crowd? I was having trouble fitting into the prevailing time and space. Had I perhaps slipped out of reality into something less comfortable? The picture in my eyes seemed to be melting like a film stuck in the projector.
I put my hands over my eyes, took them away. The picture was firm again. A woman was standing in front of me, middle-aged, kind face. Was she the one who’d given me Notes from a Friend? Was there a league of them?
‘It’s real,’ she said. ‘Even if all of us here close our eyes it won’t go away.’
‘I read about a tribe somewhere,’ I said, ‘I think it’s in South America: they all glim the same glim.’
‘They what?’
‘You know, they see the same thing in their sleep.’
‘In their dreams?’
‘They all have the same one.’
‘Every night?’
‘I don’t know how often they do it. It’s their story glim, the story of them. It explains everything.’
‘Why do you call it a “glim”?’
‘Speech impediment.’
‘Maybe it’s reality.’
‘What?’
‘Their dream – maybe reality is a dream and they know how to dream it.’
I closed my eyes again. When I opened them she was gone. It couldn’t have been the woman from the train; she wouldn’t have said reality was a dream.
32
The Commedia Dell’arte
Joni Mitchell used to sing that she didn’t know love at all, it was only love’s illusions she recalled. So clearly I’m not the only one who’s learned that lesson. I suppose if two people share an illusion, then that’s their reality for as long as it lasts? It’s hard to know where love ends and something else begins; it’s also hard to know what’s love and what isn’t. According to Georg Groddeck, if a man can use the toilet after the woman he loves has just vacated it and not be offended by the smell, that’s love. Lenore and I passed that test in the beginning. Smells certainly matter: I remember, when we walked the Troy Town maze that January and I kissed her, the smells of earth after rain, of her cold face, her hair and the black wool scarf she wore. Love-smells.
Lenore was a smoker, not so much when I first knew her but more and more later. When she’d been around the house always smelled smoky and she smelled and tasted of cigarettes but I was willing to overlook it. Things changed as things will but the sex stayed good and there were times when it was our main form of communication. She was a pleasure to look at with her clothes off; she had a wonderful back, long and sinuous, and a callipygian curve that made me forgive her for a lot of things. The nudes I did of her were some of my best; I used to love drawing the snakiness of her and sometimes I called her Lamia which was not her favourite pet name.
Her smoking: she smoked Marlboro Regulars which come in a soft pack rather than a box. When she started a pack she’d pull off the little strip that opened the cellophane, then she’d tear off the bit of silver foil that exposed the first six cigarettes. Some people at that point tap the upside-down pack against the index finger of the other hand to make one of the cigarettes pop up; she didn’t: holding the pack right-side-up in her left hand she’d give it a vicious jab in the bottom with her right thumb. I half-expected the Marlboros to cry out and I winced every time she did it.
I’ve already gone into our conversation about my bird-women. That took place a few months after I asked her to move in with me and she said no. As I think of it now I know we’d have driven each other crazy but at the time her refusal shook me and I h
ad to accept that something had gone out of what we had at the very beginning. People say, ‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ when they want to bypass all the introductory material and get to the heart of the matter but maybe in matters of love the introductory material is the heart of the matter – that mutually respectful recognition that doesn’t want to lose any of the goodness of the thing by hurrying. Lenore and I had certainly cut to the chase and I know now that something was lost in the process. ‘It’s how you enter a room that matters,’ a woman once said to me, and more and more I think she was right.
Lenore and I had walked the maze and declared it was for ever in January 1993 but by the end of summer what we had between us seemed less and less like love. She rarely showed me her notebooks any more whereas when we were first together she was keen for me to see her notes and sketches almost daily, and even though she tended to be pompous in her remarks about seeing she was almost childishly proud of her sketches and her words and she was eager for my praise. Her drawings were excellent, her verbal observations were sharp, and I was able to say the sort of things she wanted to hear while slipping in a useful comment from time to time.
We did the things that lovers do: we went to concerts and the opera, saw films, drank at pubs, dined at restaurants, cooked for each other, visited museums and the National Gallery, took long walks along the river. Lenore liked Messiaen, Ligeti, Boulez, Birtwhistle (‘I have no time,’ she asserted, ‘for composers who try to please, except when I’m in the mood for Antonio Carlos Jobim’), Tosca (‘I love it,’ she said, ‘when she sticks the knife in Scarpia, there’s real chemistry there. He was hot to penetrate her but she penetrated him first’), The Vanishing (‘Women get buried alive all the time in one way or another. He made it happen when he let her out of his sight – he stopped seeing her, stopped perceiving her, and that was the beginning of the end for both of them’), the Zetland Arms (‘If they have John Smith bitter they ought to have Pocahontas lager’), the Blue Elephant (‘I bet in Bangkok they’re queuing up at Burger King’), mushroom soup (hers), wiener schnitzel (mine), Tyrannosaurus Rex (‘If he’d been able to climb the Empire State Building they might have made a film about him’), Velasquez (‘Is her rear view nicer than mine?’), and the Battersea Power Station (‘Why don’t they stand it right-side-up?’).