Amaryllis Night and Day

  It’s difficult to pinpoint when things began to change; I think it was around the time of our bird-woman conversation. Soon after that Lenore told me she was working on a kind of commedia dell’arte series. ‘It’s in modern dress,’ she said, ‘the commedia one sees every day.’ The next time I was at her place she showed me the first painting in the series.

  ‘Pantalone,’ she said, ‘the silly old man who likes to chase young women.’ She’d painted a very sly and shifty-looking me in my usual jeans and polo-neck but sporting the traditional goat’s beard and upswept moustache – definitely not the sort of chap you’d want your daughter to be seduced by. The pose was straight out of Callot and I was leering at a girl in very tight jeans who was bending over a portfolio. Mind you, this was in 1994 when I was twenty-eight and Lenore was twenty-two.

  ‘Do you think of me as an old man?’ I said.

  ‘Not in years but in style, if you know what I mean: the teacher exercising his droit du seigneur with the juiciest girl students.’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Yes, like me.’

  ‘As I remember, it was you who made the first move. I can quote your opening gambit verbatim: “Your main attraction,” you said to me, “is that you’re going to make me unhappy.’”

  ‘I was very vulnerable at that time; I’d just broken up with someone I’d been with for two years and I was beginning to see how these things go. Right now it looks as if time has proved me right, doesn’t it?’

  That one was high and inside and I didn’t swing at it. ‘Have you done any others in this series?’ I said. ‘What about Harlequin?’

  ‘Still working on it,’ she said, and showed me a canvas in which the figure in the skintight Harlequin costume was remarkably like hers as was the face below the half-mask.

  ‘That’s you,’ I said, ‘and you’re not in modern dress.’

  ‘Harlequin is an idea not bound to any particular time. Anyhow, this one is still subject to change.’

  That was in August. The school was closed for the summer and we both had more time but we were seeing each other less and less. Lenore kept pretty busy with her commedia dell’arte and I was fooling around with ideas for spooky paintings. If you ask somebody to name a spooky painting, nine times out of ten they’ll come up with that one by Fuseli with the little short bloke sitting on the woman’s chest. There are definitely big openings in that genre and I fancied my chances.

  In September, after we were back in the autumn routine, we watched a video one evening at my place, Hommes, femmes, mode d’emploi. The central character, Benoît Blanc, is a lawyer, a married man in his forties. A dedicated womaniser, he claims that ‘the right woman is many women’ and moves from one to the next as soon as he gets bored. Going for an examination for a stomach complaint, he finds himself in the hands of a Dr Nitez who was one of his discards when she was a medical student. There’s nothing wrong with him but she switches test results, tells him that he has a tumour, books him into chemotherapy and reduces him from a hearty adulterer to a shadow of himself.

  Lenore thought that Benoît Blanc only got what he deserved. ‘He was like an Indian collecting scalps,’ she said, ‘only he was a pussy collector, which is what most men are, really.’

  ‘Including me?’

  ‘Do you think you’re so different?’

  ‘Do you think I see you as part of a pussy collection?’

  ‘Maybe not. You’re afraid of women, really – your harpy paintings show that. Maybe I’m your tame harpy and I make you feel like a big man because I let you fuck me.’

  ‘You don’t sound too happy with me.’

  ‘How perceptive you are.’

  ‘When you said I was going to make you unhappy, was that a self-fulfilling prophecy? Have you made yourself unhappy with me to make it come out right?’

  ‘I said that because I knew it was going to happen.’

  ‘You weren’t talking that way when we walked the maze.’

  ‘That was before we’d been together for what is it, nine months?’

  ‘Are you saying that these nine months have been a mistake?’

  ‘God, you’re such a lawyer. Talk, talk, talk. I need a rest from your constant chatter, I need some breathing space.’

  ‘That’s a good idea: I think you should go somewhere and breathe for a good long time, maybe ten years or so, then maybe you’ll feel a little better.’

  ‘Are you saying this is it for us?’

  ‘Well, I don’t see anybody else in this room, do you?’

  ‘Right.’ She turned her back on me, slid her knickers down, and flipped up her skirt. ‘Take a good look,’ she said. ‘That’s the last you’ll see of it.’

  ‘That looks like the end, all right,’ I said.

  And she was gone. The next day she drove to Beachy Head and jumped off.

  33

  When I Remember

  When I remember Lenore I guess it’s love’s illusion I recall but I’m baffled by it. How could I commit myself for ever in January and be glad to end it in September? Well of course it was Lenore who brought the for ever into it when we walked the maze. A wiser man would have struck that clause out of the contract; had I been thinking with something other than my brain?

  No, that’s the usual simplistic answer. My problem was that I always needed to be in love, in the first flush of it, the qualifying heat of it. When that wore off I was ready to move on. I haven’t mentioned here the women before Lenore: Amanda; Sophie; Gillian; Catherine; Delphine; Sarah and others going back to the very mists of puberty. The fact is that by 1994 I still hadn’t achieved grown-upness.

  And there’s still more to be said: if I had behaved differently I don’t think she’d have killed herself. Yes, she seemed to get some perverse satisfaction out of unhappiness and she was certainly a difficult person to be with but if she had done her usual numbers with a better man she might still be alive. Sometimes between two people it’s as if one is a lock and one is a key and they take turns being lock and key; but at other times it’s as if both are keys or both are locks and nothing can be done. Still, I think something could have been done if I’d been a better man, if my love had been more giving and less taking. She needn’t have killed herself, and I blamed myself for her death.

  34

  Absent Friends

  From the National Gallery and Trafalgar Square I went, for no particular reason, to the Zetland Arms and Amaryllis was there; it was that kind of a day. When she saw me she smiled, flung her hands up in a gesture of resignation, and motioned to me to join her.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘I didn’t come here looking for you.’

  ‘Even if you did it’s all right – if this is how it is, this is how it is.’

  ‘In a way it’s like Klein bottle No. 15.’

  ‘Which one is that?’

  I took it out of my rucksack and held it out to her. ‘Take it in your hands,’ I said. By now it had become a fetish object for me; when I held it I seemed to feel in it a mystical connection between Amaryllis and me.

  ‘I’d rather not,’ she said, not looking me in the eye. With colour, with lights and smoke and shadows, with music and voices, the Zetland Arms enmazed our thoughts and silences as we moved towards and away from the centre, circling between the whisky yew and the bitter holly.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’ I said.

  ‘Everything.’ She was looking into the distance while sliding her thumb and middle finger up and down her glass.

  ‘Why won’t you look me in the eye?’

  ‘Because I’m afraid of everything. I wish Queenie were here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She helped me believe in the world.’

  A young man at the next table, wearing a blue-striped shirt with a white collar and an upwardly mobile tie, leant towards us and said, ‘Forgive me for eavesdropping, but were you talking about the old bull-terrier bitch that used to come in here with Fred Scoggins?’

  ‘Probably,??
? I said.

  ‘Both of them are no longer with us; she died and Scoggins put a rope round his neck and kicked the chair away.’

  Amaryllis was crying.

  ‘Sorry,’ said our informant. ‘Were you friends of his?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we were. Thank you for that graphic report.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘I’ll leave you to yourselves,’ and he withdrew to a distant table.

  Amaryllis found a wadded-up handkerchief in her shoulder bag, blew her nose. ‘We weren’t really friends,’ she said.

  ‘Compared to that bloke we were. You know, it’s possible to get along quite well without believing in the world, so long as you’re careful crossing the road and so on.’

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much, that solves all my problems. Listening to you talk bollocks is a great comfort to me.’

  ‘Speaking of problems,’ I said, ‘even though the Pines Motel didn’t rate too many stars, things seemed pretty good between us when you turned up at my place in the rain. Then you looked at that painting and threw up and off you went.’

  ‘Stomach thing,’ she said. ‘I really wasn’t feeling too well, and suddenly all the studio smells got to me.’

  ‘Smells can do that, I know.’

  ‘I was expecting to see a painting of me on the easel. What happened to it?’

  ‘Let me get a refill for you and a drink for me and I’ll tell you about it.’

  Life gets tricky when you have to think too much about what you’re going to say, and I was grateful for a few minutes’ respite as I watched the barman draw the pints.

  When I got back to the table I raised my glass. ‘Here’s looking at you?’ I said with a question mark.

  ‘Absent friends,’ she replied. We clinked glasses and glances. ‘The painting?’ she said.

  ‘It’s very strange–the painting of you seems to have changed into the one you saw on the easel.’

  ‘Seems to have changed?’

  ‘Well, it was certainly painted by me, but I’ve no idea how it happened. I wasn’t drunk or stoned but I must have got into some kind of altered state.’

  She looked at that explanation a little askance but let it pass. ‘Did you know Lenore well?’

  ‘Pretty well. You?’

  ‘Pretty well. I don’t suppose anyone knew her well enough to be able to give her what she needed.’

  ‘Any idea what that might have been?’

  Amaryllis shook her head. We looked at each other, looked away, drank our drinks, sidled away from the subject of Lenore.

  Amaryllis looked at her watch. ‘I’m going to the Little Angel Theatre to see The Sleeping Beauty,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked two seats just in case. Want to come?’

  ‘Sure. Sounds like our kind of show.’

  ‘I’ve always wondered about the story, wondered about her dreams through all those years when she was asleep. Did she dream she was awake? Even the flies in the castle were asleep, and the great tall hedge growing all around and shutting it off from the world. I never got to see a play of it when I was a child and I feel like seeing one now.’

  So we finished our drinks and went to South Ken for the Piccadilly Line. The train rumbled and mumbled to itself, and at Knightsbridge a thin girl with long dark hair and an accordion got on. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said, Oh Galuppi, Baldassaro …

  ‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Amaryllis.

  ‘I think she’s waiting for a suitable person to turn up and complete the quotation. What do you think she’s going to play?’

  ‘She looks like a Scarlatti type, maybe Soler.’

  The carriage wasn’t crowded; the girl took up a position between the central doors with plenty of space around her. She opened the accordion first, then her mouth, and sang ‘Plaisirs d’amour’ while she accompanied herself. Her voice, vinegary-sweet, made lamplight and shadows. Everybody stopped talking and listened. We looked in vain for someone to come round to collect money but there was no one. She finished the song, reprised it with the accordion alone, closed the instrument, smiled, and got off at Hyde Park Corner.

  35

  The Wood-Daemon

  The Little Angel Theatre seats a hundred and it was pretty full. The audience were middle-class children with a handful of adults who had apparently herded them there on the car-pool principle. The stage was in plain view before the performance; on it the king and queen sat in the main room of the castle. To the left was the tower, its three-storey interior exposed like that of a doll’s house.

  The puppeteers appeared and were applauded as they took their places on the bridge. The backcloth they stood behind was only waist-high, so their hands and faces were clearly visible throughout the performance. A woman sat at a spinet to provide the music.

  As the house lights dimmed and the play began Amaryllis immediately identified with the marionettes. ‘Hands above them work the strings,’ she whispered. ‘Mouths above them speak their words. What an awful way to live.’

  ‘They’re not alive, Amaryllis,’ I whispered back, ‘they’re marionettes made of wood.’

  ‘I know that, but they are the story; the story lives in them. And between shows they hang on hooks in the darkness without movement, without voices. How would you like that?’

  ‘Not much,’ I said, and we settled back to follow the action. The story went its slow way; the audience were attentive and responsive; they laughed as a frog joined the queen in her bath and promised that after many childless years she would at last have one. When the princess was born the wise women were invited to the celebration but one was turned away because the royal household was one silver plate short.

  The wise women who were welcomed were all rather ineffectual little things in gauzy pastel frocks but the odd one out was three times as big as they, wore vivid red and purple, had three twisty horns growing out of her head, and was clearly someone to be taken seriously.

  On being denied a place at the table the three-horned wise woman was very cross indeed and said that the princess on her fifteenth birthday would prick her finger with a spindle and die. The other wise women managed to plea-bargain that down to one hundred years of sleep for the princess and everybody in the castle, even the flies.

  When the prince came looking for her after a succession of losers he encountered a wood-daemon, a green satyr who tried to confuse him. First the wood-daemon claimed to be the princess, then he said the prince was dreaming. ‘I’m awake!’ said the prince. ‘No,’ said the wood-daemon, ‘you’re asleep and you’re dreaming that you’re awake.’ The wood-daemon, though ostensibly sylvan, was quite urbane, and it was plain to see that he enjoyed his verbal joust with the prince. His red eyes glowed; he had horns and goat-legs and a long tail; he seemed to have an inner darkness that was not child’s play; altogether he seemed more of a personage than the other marionettes.

  Not to be deterred, the prince pressed on, found the hedge which opened for him, and made his way to the tower bedroom of the princess. When he kissed her she woke up and said, ‘I dreamed that I was a princess.’

  ‘You dreamed what you are,’ said the prince, and shortly after that they were married, the house lights came up, and the children were taken to their various homes by their parents or those in loco parentis.

  ‘I keep seeing those hands dancing in the shadows above them,’ said Amaryllis afterwards. ‘And the faces above the hands – you could see their mouths moving when the marionettes spoke.’

  ‘You’ll feel better when you have something to drink,’ I said, and we cut through St Mary’s churchyard, crossed the road and went into the King’s Head. This pub, which houses a theatre, sports spotlights as well as the usual sort of lamps but the spots aren’t too bright, the pale-brown woodwork is polished, mellow, neatly joined and takes the light nicely, and the effect is intimate. There was no music, just a low murmur of conversation. Through the windows the Islington Sunday afternoon could be seen going its quiet way.

&n
bsp; ‘The glims she must have had in those hundred years of sleep!’ said Amaryllis as we sat down at a table.

  ‘She glimmed what she was,’ I said.

  ‘Glimmed she was asleep and glimming?’ said Amaryllis.

  ‘Woodenly,’ I said, and went to the bar for our drinks.

  ‘The wood-daemon was the one I liked the best,’ said Amaryllis when I returned. ‘The others were just wooden actors, but you could see that when he was carved the wood-daemon spirit entered him and he became it. His red eyes glowed and his face had in it the wood-darkness and the wood-fear even when he was fooling around with the prince. The world is a dark wood that we’re lost in, don’t you think?’

  I leant over and kissed her.

  ‘What was that for?’ she said.

  ‘We’ll hold hands through the dark wood, Amaryllis,’ I said, ‘and maybe we’ll find our way out. Or we’ll build a little hut and live there in the heart of the wood.’

  ‘There was a hut in the wood by the dark road we glimmed; in real life there was – a little shack that sold souvenirs and we stopped there that time on holiday when I was little. It was a time when everything was cosy, everything was nice. They bought me horehound drops and a black-velvet pillow with silver script lettering on it: For you I pine, for you I balsam.’ She pronounced balsam the American way: bawl some. ‘I loved that pillow, the way it smelled as I fell asleep.’