Amaryllis Night and Day

  Asking directions in phrase-book Italian and mostly not understanding the answers I threaded my way destra and sinistra through little dark streets and over many bridges. The odours were dark and melancholy, they hinted at things better left unhinted at. The smell of the chalk and blackboards of my childhood came to me. Once during the summer holiday some friends and I broke into the school: so many echoes! Such lonesome sunlight. Was I being followed? I kept looking behind me but I was never sure whether I saw or imagined someone dodging out of sight around corners and into doorways. ‘I don’t need this!’ I said. ‘Life is hard enough.’ Contemptuously, the bronze Moors struck the hour but I didn’t know which one it was.

  Eventually I found the Questura and was shown into Commissario Brunetti’s office. ‘Please forgive me for taking up your time,’ I said. ‘I know you’re a busy man.’

  ‘This is your gleam,’ he said in perfect English. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Did you say “gleam”?’

  ‘How can I help you?’ he repeated.

  ‘I think someone might be following me.’ I described Hastings. ‘I was wondering if he might have come to your attention.’

  ‘It this man local or a foreigner?’

  ‘He’s British.’

  ‘A tourist?’

  ‘He’d be here like me – visiting.’

  ‘Has he threatened you, this man? Menaced you in any way?’

  ‘No, not really. It’s just that I’ve got a bad feeling about him.’

  ‘Ah! A bad feeling! At this moment there are more than a million tourists in Venice and most of them give me a bad feeling. But even in my own gleams I haven’t the resources to do anything about it unless they actually commit a crime. I’d be happy to balsam if I could but …’ He shrugged and spread his hands with the palms upturned and I woke up.

  ‘Wait!’ I said. ‘I forgot to ask you about the woman who looks like a Waterhouse nymph! Her name is Amaryllis, she has blue eyes!’ Too late.

  Two dreams without Amaryllis. Could do better.

  8

  Old Woman as Black Cat

  My third attempt gave me a feeling of desolation and an old woman posing as a black cat. I’d dreamt her many times before; she looked like the old witch in the Grimm story who sent the soldier down into the hollow tree for the tinder-box. She was never very convincing as a black cat but she enjoyed the pose and she liked to speak in what she fancied was a feline manner. Her cat costume was nothing more than a shabby black poncho and a black sombrero but she believed in it. She was sitting on the steps of a little shack somewhere on a lonesome road with pine woods on both sides.

  ‘How long has it been?’ she said purringly. ‘Souven years?’

  ‘You mean seven?’

  ‘I speak as I find,’ she said. ‘Have you been practising unnaturally?’

  ‘I’m looking for Amaryllis. Have you seen her?’

  ‘Do you pine for her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bawl some?’

  ‘It might come to that.’

  ‘I have where to lay your head, you know.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  ‘Please yourself. But keep in mind there is a bomb in Gilead.’

  ‘You mean balm?’

  She spat, opened the door of her shack, and went inside as I woke up.

  9

  Everybody has One

  In 1993 when I started teaching at the Royal College of Art Lenore was in her last year there. I’d taken over from Julian Webb who’d died suddenly, and on my first day I was looking at portfolios and putting faces to the names on my list. I had twelve postgraduate students, most of them in their twenties: seven women and five men. Their work was of a high standard – untalented people don’t turn up there – with the usual variation in originality and interest. Despite our being in what has been called ‘a post-skill era’ in the visual arts, all of them could draw, which cheered me immensely. It won’t stop global warming or make the air fitter to breathe but it makes me feel good.

  As far as I know, plain girls are not rejected by the RCA – it just happens that female art students in their twenties tend to be a good-looking lot, and my seven were all eye-gladdeners. Being a man I couldn’t help noticing this, and being visual-minded I was pleased by it.

  Lenore could have done well as an actor, I think. Her face was striking, she had long black hair with a fringe; she had commanding black eyebrows; she was wearing black jeans that she could only have zipped up while lying down, a black leotard, and black motorcycle boots. She was able, without appearing to make an effort, to be more there than the people around her so that I found myself watching her as I made my way from student to student and portfolio to portfolio.

  When I got to Lenore I asked her what she was working on and she said, ‘Seeing.’

  ‘What have you seen lately?’ I said.

  Stacked up on one side of her carrel were four hardcover notebooks. She handed me the top one. It was yellow and had the number 21 on the cover. I opened it and found notes and sketches on every page. The handwriting was small and elegant, almost calligraphy. ‘Have a look at yesterday’s page,’ she said. I turned to it and read:

  Twenty-seven people in this carriage and each one has a different death inside. These deaths are like animals.

  Following this were sketches of people sitting side by side, Underground passengers evidently. They were very good drawings; her eye was sharp and her hand was sure. Another note below the sketches:

  This one’s death is a little dog that barks all the time; that one’s is a crocodile that waits with only its eyes sticking out of the water. Someone else’s is a brown rat that scurries and sniffs with its nose twitching. Everybody has one, and all of them are different.

  She was looking up at me in a challenging way. ‘What’s yours?’ she said.

  She caught me off balance with that one. ‘My death?’ I said. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘An owl, I think, waiting to swoop down on the mouse of you.’

  ‘You see me as a mouse?’

  ‘How do you see yourself?’

  ‘Mostly I don’t. What’s your death?’

  ‘Mine’s a raven.’

  ‘With a name like yours that’s not surprising.’ But I could see that raven, the blackness of it in a high grey sky as it flapped its wings and grew small in the distance. We left the college together at the end of the day and had coffee at the Greenfields Café in Exhibition Road.

  It was a brisk October day, my favourite kind of weather, the time of year that always seems to me a season for new ventures, taking chances, not being too careful. We sat there under an awning while the world and his wife and children walked by and I felt pretty good. I’ve said that Lenore was striking but some might have called her beautiful; for me there was just that hint of brutality in her mouth and the set of her jaw but she was by anybody’s reckoning a good-looking woman. I must admit that I felt a little challenged by her perception of me as a mouse. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is a good day for it, don’t you think?’

  ‘A good day for what?’

  ‘Anything at all.’

  ‘Yes, here we are today, and some other day you’ll sit here with someone else and it’ll be a good day for it then as well.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll sit here with someone else too. That doesn’t make today any less pleasant. My rule is not to piss on a new beginning.’

  She shrugged and looked into the middle distance. That’s when I made that comment about her walking around in a name out of Edgar Allan Poe and the conversation went on to where she said I was going to make her unhappy. When she asked me if I didn’t want to kiss her and make her feel better she wound herself around the question like a serpent around a tree. If we hadn’t been sitting at a table at the Greenfields Café it was clear that she’d have wound herself around me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, taking her face in my hands, ‘I do want to kiss you and make you feel better.’

  ‘Good,’ she sai
d. ‘Then we might as well get started on it.’ So we did some kissing, then with each other’s taste in our mouths we went to South Ken station and took the District Line to Baron’s Court. Mmmmmm? said the train with the surge of its engine. Mmmmmm?

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  Lenore’s flat was up three flights in a house that shook when the trains passed under it. I have followed various bottoms up stairways here and there with varying degrees of expectation; the coming-down, both physical and romantic, was sometimes fast and sometimes slow but Lenore had a fateful bottom, a this-is-it bottom that made me think this was no brief fling.

  Her door was black, and when she opened it she switched on pink and blue fluorescent tubes that stuttered into life and gave us more blackness looking at us from the walls of what had once been a living-room and was now a windowless studio with the smells of pigments and linseed oil, damar varnish, turps, and canvas. There was no furniture other than her easel and a tabouret with a crusted palette, jars of brushes, various bottles, and a crumpled paint-rag. There was a canvas on the easel, something dark and unfinished with a dim and spectral figure walking what looked like the lines of a turf maze.

  ‘Don’t look at that,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’ Other canvases leant against the walls with their backs to me. There were also two or three portfolios, some ethnic cushions on the floor and a couple of cardboard boxes of books and CDs. She picked up one of the discs and went into the bedroom, emerging as the unmistakably modern sound of a clarinet, violin, and piano now issued in something of a serious no-fooling-around nature. I didn’t grind my teeth but I clenched them.

  ‘He composed this when he was a prisoner-of-war in Stalag VII in Gorlitz, Silesia,’ she informed me.

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Messiaen. This is his Quartet for the End of Time. He was inspired by Revelation X.’ She read from the notes:

  And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire …

  This continued for what seemed a long time, and while she droned on I had a good look at her walls. Almost everywhere she had painted, in purple lines on the black, something reminiscent in style of Goya’s Los Caprichos but closer in content to Bosch’s Garden of Delights. She had borrowed his broken eggs on legs, with scenes of her own devising going on inside the eggs. It isn’t that they defied description, it’s just that I’m not going to describe them. Also in that mural were other creatures composed of autonomous human parts, and the usual compound characters with heads coming out of their bottoms or whatever.

  The part of one wall, the one directly ahead as we entered the flat, that was not given up to Lenore’s Garden of Whatever, rejoiced in two enlargements of Piranesi’s Plate VII in my book of his Prisons etchings, the one described as Carcere, with numerous wooden galleries and a drawbridge. These blow-ups were about 24” by 36”. The one on the left was the first state, the one on the right the finished etching.

  These prints, seen in that size, were overwhelming in the ponderosity of the stone and the improbability of escape on the various bridges, galleries, and stairs all looming in their weight and complexity as the viewer’s glance moved upward looking for a way out. The partly raised drawbridge, the feature to which the eye went immediately, sprang from a murkiness on the left and seemed to go nowhere useful on the right.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You like Piranesi because you see life as a prison?’

  ‘That goes without saying,’ said Lenore, ‘but look at State 1.’

  I’d seen it often enough in my book: in the first state of the etching the prison seems all light and airy, seems weightless despite its stonework, its winch and tackle, its towers and turrets and bridges all seen through a massive arch.

  ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘at this staircase on the lefthand side, the one that spirals around the outside of that tower. In the first state he’s indicated stairs spiralling right the way up to the top.’

  ‘Yes, what about them?’

  ‘Look at the finished etching: he’s obliterated the stairs he’d sketched-in where the first flight of the spiral makes the turn around the tower. Now that flight ends in a hairy shadow where it twists into itself like a wrung-out dishcloth.’

  ‘The spiral continues in the next flight up,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Sure it does, but you can’t get to it.’

  ‘What are you saying, Lenore?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything – I’m just thinking about that staircase.’

  We both thought about it for a while with my hands wandering here and there. Lenore abandoned Piranesi, leered at me pleasantly, took me by the crotch in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way, and towed me into the bedroom which also had black walls on which the purple drawings continued into scenes more intimate with players genetically more diverse than those in the living-room. ‘Let’s see,’ she said, ‘if we can make it round the twist.’

  We made it round the twist several times despite the music and the rumble and vibration of the District Line; the bed was a big brass affair that encouraged extravagance and we wanted to make a good impression on each other.

  I had noticed, on the little Indian bedside table, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, the I Ching, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Uncle Remus, by Joel Chandler Harris, a 1917 edition with illustrations by A. B. Frost. I was leafing through this as we lay there close together in a post-coital glow of achievement and camaraderie when Lenore said, ‘Will you read to me?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What would you like to hear?’

  ‘The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story,’ she said. ‘You’re American so you can do it right.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ I said. The bedroom had a window through which came the sounds of evening traffic. I opened the curtains and looked at the October dusk and the golden windows of other houses. Then I got back into bed, switched on a Tiffany-style lamp, arranged Lenore comfortably against me, opened the book, turned to page 7, and began:

  One day atter Brer Rabbit fool ’im wid dat calamus root, Brer Fox went ter wuk en got ’im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentine, en fix up a contrapshun wat he call a Tar-Baby, en he tuck dish yer Tar-Baby en he sot ’er in de big road, en den he lay off in de bushes fer to see wat de news wuz gwineter be …

  When I’d reached the end, where Brer Rabbit, having tricked Brer Fox into throwing him into a brier patch, escapes with the immortal words, ‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox – bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’, Lenore chuckled and said, ‘That’s a pretty good little political allegory, don’t you think?’

  ‘Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit political?’

  ‘I’d have thought it was obvious: Brer Fox is the white oppressor, Brer Rabbit is the black people, and the Tar-Baby is the stereotype that was forced upon them. The brier-patch is the hard place they’re used to but they’ll get through it and come out on the other side.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘one learns something new every day, doesn’t one.’

  ‘If one hangs out with the right people,’ said Lenore.

  10

  On Buses

  On Wednesday, the day after the dream with the old woman as a black cat, I wanted more than anything else to go looking for Amaryllis although I knew it was better not to be too anxious. Still, I would have gone looking for her if I hadn’t arranged a couple of weeks before to meet Seamus Flannery for lunch. He teaches at the National Film School and we talk about films a lot along with everything else. We have lunch about once a month and always at II Fornello, in Southampton Row near Russell Square. Although the restaurant bills itself as Italian the staff are mostly Spanish; they speak Italian when they feel like it but Spanish when the conversation is personal. Juliano and Paco, who mostly serve us, have assigned Seamus, possibly owing to his baldness, the honorific of Professors. As I’m younger than he they grant me the distinction of Dottore.
/>
  Although we usually have the same thing, Lasagne for Seamus and Pizza della Casa for me, we tend to linger over half-pints of lager while we update each other before ordering.

  ‘What do you think of buses?’ Seamus asked me.

  ‘As transportation or as metaphor?’ I asked.

  ‘As a sentient system.’

  ‘Say more.’

  ‘Well, you remember the sentient ocean in Solaris that responded to thoughts and memories and made them real?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, one of my students is working on a screenplay in which London buses respond to the thoughts and feelings of this man who’s waiting at a bus stop.’

  ‘That’s as good an explanation of their behaviour as any,’ I ventured.

  ‘I doubt that the film will ever get made,’ said Seamus, ‘but the idea of interaction between buses and people is intriguing. I have to say I’ve sometimes felt there was something more than mechanical going on. Poor old Harold Klein was killed by a 14 bus not all that long ago.’

  Harold Klein, an art historian who was seventy-two when he died, had been a mutual friend. ‘Harold always had a thing about the 14 bus,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if there came a time when he’d had enough and he stepped out into the road and let the 14 do the job.’

  ‘He used to say that the red of the 14 changed from day to day along with its moods,’ said Seamus.

  ‘Speaking of buses,’ I said, ‘what would you think of a multi-decker made of bamboo and rice paper?’

  ‘Sounds visually interesting.’

  I told Seamus about the dream in which I’d first seen Amaryllis.

  ‘You say she wanted you to get on the bus with her?’

  ‘Yes, she beckoned to me.’

  ‘Ah, beckoning! We know about beckoning from the Oliver Onions story, don’t we?’

  ‘The Beckoning Fair One is the title of the painting I’m working on at the moment.’