by Neil Hegarty
She looked at him, and raised her left eyebrow. This was one of her tricks: not everybody could master it. She said, ‘I will – though you’d better tell me your name, first.’
A blush. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘My name’s John.’
‘John. But there must be more than that. I’ll need a little more than “John”.’
‘Irwin,’ he said. John Irwin.
‘That’ll do,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Though I knew that already. How do you do, John. I’m Stella.’
‘Stella.’
She smiled. ‘Stella. Stella Wakeham. Well. Shall we go now?’
They went to the cafe all the college students patronised, on Camberwell Green. It stayed open half the night, and it ladled out a sort of chicken stew, or they claimed it was chicken, day and night. It catered to all comers; the chicken stew, at two in the morning, did the job, was a life-saver, set you back on your feet if you were half-cut.
Now, at three in the afternoon, the cafe was almost empty. They sat in the window, and drank reeking black coffee out of inch-thick mugs. Red buses passed by, endless traffic; the Green was hardly green at all.
They sat there all afternoon. The reeking coffee created consternation in their stomachs, but there would be enough time afterwards to worry about that. Then, with the light fading outside, he asked her back for a bite.
‘A bite!’ – and this time she laughed aloud, laughed her head off.
‘I could scramble you an egg.’
Peals of laughter. ‘Go on, then. Have you bread?’ He had bread, too. ‘Go on then. A scrambled egg and toast will set me up for ever. Have you butter?’
He had butter. ‘It isn’t much, my place,’ he said, already half regretting his offer.
‘Whose is? You have bread, and butter, and an egg. Two eggs, if you have them. As long as the eggs are well scrambled, I won’t mind a bit what the place is like.’
Well, at least he had managed her expectations. Slowly, they walked up the hill together. The street lamps shone through newly opened plane leaves; late spring and London at dusk, at its most gentle on this mild evening, and the plane leaves were a bright, startling green in the lamplight. ‘As long as you don’t expect a palace.’
‘A palace,’ she repeated, and looked around at the great houses that lined the hill: one or two shabby still, with decay all too evident in sill and frame and lintel. More had been restored, beautifully, grandly; a few windows lit softly, already. ‘I’m not expecting a palace.’ And a pause, and then, ‘In fact, I don’t want a palace. A palace is the last thing I want.’
He thought that she might have lived in a palace, or the next best thing. Her tones, her accent, the way she carried herself: everything implied that she was posh. There were a lot of posh, confident girls in the college, but here was a poshness of the sort that he hadn’t encountered all that much. So: ‘Have you ever lived in a palace?’ he asked her, and she shook her head, as though it were a serious question.
‘Never.’
Veronica, he guessed, and again she shook her head. A silly guess: too Spanish, too Catholic. You most likely didn’t get too many nice English girls called Veronica. ‘Those awfully strange Spanish statues with great manes of actual human hair,’ she said, ‘have you ever seen one of those?’ He shook his head. ‘No, well, I haven’t either, but I’ve seen pictures of them, and they always give me the chills; and I always imagine they’re called Veronica.’ She shook her head decisively. ‘St Veronica, wiping away. So, no.’ Vanessa, he guessed: no, but getting close, now. ‘I know so many Vanessas, darling. You’ve no idea.’ Virginia, he guessed, and this time she nodded her head seriously.
‘That’s me.’
Virginia.
‘It’s a terrible name, isn’t it?’ she said, and pressed on without waiting for a reply. ‘Though Ginny it was, mainly. I insisted on that,’ she said, and she lifted the heavy coffee cup and sipped. That was where the wicker and the gingham came in, he realised later: for the moment, he only had the name to go on. Ginny. And her fine disgust. That was enough.
Easy to see why she had shed the lot of it.
‘From Virginia Water?’ he asked.
She laughed. ‘My parents aren’t as literal as that!’ A pause, and then, ‘Although no, they are. They’re completely as literal as that, what am I saying? Not Virginia Water, though.’ But near enough: deepest Berkshire, though she was finished with all that. She was Stella now, and people could take her or leave her.
Stella took the smell of gas and the smallness of the room in her stride: she was a trouper that way – and besides, it was just a place to sleep, wasn’t it? One could sleep or not sleep anywhere, was Stella’s way of looking at it. ‘Not that I’ll be sleeping here tonight,’ she added, ‘because I’m not that sort of girl. Next time, maybe.’ And that was a good oilcloth on the table, she said, and ran an appreciative hand across its surface. She was a practical girl – and this gas-smelling room on Camberwell Grove wasn’t Berkshire, and that was a good thing, was the bottom line.
‘I’m twenty-five today,’ he said.
18
He had a name for himself – or rather, he was beginning to acquire one, as he turned twenty-five: for his work, his art, but also for his life. He lived in squalor, the gossip went, in a nasty little place up the hill from the college. In a bedsit, it might be called, though bad even for a bedsit. It was supposed to be bad; he never let anyone near the place, except for the girls he brought back, and sent packing early the next morning, before they could take an inventory of the place. They told tales in the college and in the clubs, about the gassy smell – though this was all water off a duck’s back for him.
So he understood. He heard the tales, they were repeated back to him, by the men who were envious of him.
He did a little teaching in the college, to supplement his income. He had a studio there, too, which he filled with difficult, troubling work. He sold a painting here and a painting there; he acquired a few patrons, never women, always men, queers, usually, who were then only too pleased to parade him for their friends. He was fine with the queers: you’d want to be fine with them, in the art world, so that was lucky for him. And the college teaching tided him over – and it was lucky too in another way, as he reflected after he had scrambled Stella her eggs and she had eaten them, and stayed on chatting, and then a little kiss, and then a walk back down under the green-shining plane trees to the bus, and a chaste goodbye, because, she said again, she wasn’t the sort of girl who would go to bed with a man the first time she met him: it was lucky that he was in and out of the college, because otherwise he would never have met Stella at all.
So he managed, just about, between teaching and the odd sale. And the fact was that he was pleased with his gas-smelling room on the hill at Camberwell. Deliberately unfashionable, and good to come back to, to close the door, and take a small coin from his pocket, and light the fire, and stay awake all night.
‘Oh yes,’ said Stella, judiciously on that first evening. ‘I can see that. Though, don’t be counting on staying here too long.’ She gestured out of the window, glanced speculatively at the spruced-up house on the other side of the road. ‘These are great houses: the size of them! Give it another eighteen months, and you won’t find a run-down house left on this hill. That’s the way it’s going now, even in places like Camberwell.’ She might have been an art student, Stella, but she had a good, smart head on her shoulders.
‘Well,’ John said, looking around the room, ‘we’ll see.’ He didn’t look eighteen months ahead, or eight months, or two months. And he didn’t, needless to say, give much thought to home, to any future home. He knew better, now. The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away, and that was the Lord’s business, but when the council began to take tips from the Lord – well, then you were in trouble.
*
His mother had died early in the city in the sky: a cancer swept through her in a matter of weeks, and she threw herself into this new experience with
something like gusto. The tower, with its wide views and gales and excesses of fresh air, had worn her out: it was ‘too much, altogether,’ she said, and she closed her eyes and went with the gobbling, greedy cancer.
She seemed to expect that her son would be fine, left alone. Regina Road with its starched antimacassars and its crisp pastry might just as well never have existed. The furniture came with her, but the antimacassars were washed and folded in tissue paper and placed in a drawer, never to be seen again; and the three-piece suite, naked without the antimacassars, filled up the sitting room in the sky, so much so there was hardly room to move. She didn’t mind that, because she didn’t move much, after a while. No pastry, either. Not much cooking, and John she left to fend for himself.
It was as though she had placed the entirety of her past life into the drawer with the antimacassars. It was as though he had been placed there, too, and his dead father, and just about everything that meant anything to him – and his disorientation was all the more dreadful for being silent. She didn’t want to know about it, and there was nobody else to tell. There was only this light-filled flat in the sky, and the wind that screamed on stormy nights, and whistled thinly, along with the water pipes, most of the rest of the time.
She seemed, in fact, to think that he would be well rid of her: all those hours spent trailing home, back and forth to their tower, up in the lift and down again: this time could be put to better use. He could get himself a place of his own (with what? – but this thought also didn’t seem to occur to her) and get on with his life, without any irritations or distraction. None of this was said, and so he couldn’t quarrel with any piece of it, but it was all perfectly understood, and none of it made sense.
And, get on with what, exactly?
But when she was gone – and it was a quiet crematorium affair for her, and no drinking in the Prince Regent to send her on her way; that was all definitively over, now – he did indeed leave their flat in the sky and return to earth. Maybe his mum had had some sort of premonition of what he might do, and what he might become: because he did feel a sense of liberation. Guiltily, with grief distilled inside these sensations of freedom he was feeling – yet liberation, just the same. It had been punishing (for him, though apparently not for her; at any rate, she disguised it very well) to see how cancer consumed a body from within, leaving skin stretched over a skull, thin skin and seemingly translucent, stretched across the knobs of his mum’s wrist bones in a way that horrified him, that made him want to vomit. Like canvas stretched too tightly over a picture frame, so tightly that it might at any moment rip and burst apart, and expose what lay beneath. He had seen too much now of his parents’ bones.
And yes: it was liberating too, after a fashion, to be completely alone in the world, to have nobody else to think or care about. Yes: his mum had been on to something, there, well before he had realised it himself.
Though, he wasn’t completely alone, for there were grants, you could almost say that there was plenty of money – in his terms, at any rate: there was enough to live on, which constituted plenty. There was, he felt, guilt from on high that had to be assuaged: they had ripped up his community, and there were plenty of people in the same boat. There had been crimes committed, and they would have to be paid for, in cold cash. And John was pleased to seem to assuage this guilt by taking the money, by applying to art college and being welcomed in, by accepting the grants, by studying and acquiring his qualifications. They made him study photography and a little history of art; they made him look at daguerreotypes, and talk about Cubism – but not too much, thank God; he had an abundance of time to work, to paint, to layer his materials onto a bare canvas: cries of pain, at first, and then bones, grey and white, a slashing of paint onto black canvas.
Charcoal, sometimes, though now at least he didn’t have to go scavenging the old bomb sites for bits of burnt wood. They paid for the charcoal, too.
The colour – this he kept tucked away, for now.
‘Not everyone’s cup of tea, John,’ an uneasy tutor told him, early in this process, looking at the bones, the greys and whites and blacks, ‘but look,’ backtracking as soon as the words were out of his mouth, ‘do what you have to do. And the technique is interesting, certainly.’
And to be sure, his pieces did not generally find favour: but this was London, and it was the 1970s now, and there were always eyes watching, and taking in the new stuff. A piece, a large canvas, large enough to fill a wide wall, was purchased quietly at an end-of-year show; then another and another. An exhibition in a small gallery, and then another: and so it went on.
And invitations: to dinner parties, with bad food but amusing company, in Chelsea and Fulham and Kensington – and sometimes further afield, by the pioneers who, just as they were tarting up the houses on the hill at Camberwell, had also tarted up what had once been hovel houses in Notting Hill and near the old cattle market on the Caledonian Road. Their gambles had paid off: their ropy neighbourhoods were ropy no longer, and now they gathered, in groups of ten or twelve around long dining tables, all candlelight and stripped and polished wood, congratulating themselves on the glorious Georgian and Victorian houses that they had saved from the wrecking ball.
He was an object of scrutiny and even a certain degree of fascination, and he knew it from the off. He knew about Bedlam: about the inmates being viewed, as animals are viewed at the zoo, by the rich seeking diversion and entertainment. These evenings were Bedlam too, and he was the lunatic, the tiger, and they were gathered to take him in. He was a feather in their cap.
‘Oh, I know all about that,’ Stella told him. ‘I know all those people, even if I haven’t actually met all of them.’ She shuddered: not fastidiously, but from pure boredom. These people had infested her life.
‘You don’t think I’m being unfair?’
‘Unfair?’
‘On these people.’
‘Heavens, no.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, who knows: London is full of people, and perhaps not all of them are dreadful. But on balance, darling, I think you probably have them just about right.’
One such invitation: a chief patron, on the scout for a new piece and happy to wait for it. Coming to view John’s progress, to observe the dirty whites and greys standing up on each element of a new triptych, whipped like waves, like a dirty froth or scum on the beach, surrounding a dark void. The same thing again, and again, a compulsion. Connective, John called the triptych: the patron – Etienne – already had Tissue 1, Tissue 2 and Tissue 3.
‘His walls are many,’ said Stella later, ‘and his appetite insatiable.’
As Etienne was leaving, he asked John to dinner the following Friday. He was one of the queers, though he was at pains to be clear that there was no agenda of that sort.
‘A mixed bunch,’ he said, ‘old friends and a few TV people; I think you’ll find them amusing.’
John nodded. Why not?
‘Super, wonderful. Shall we say seven thirty?’
John nodded.
‘I thought I might make my beef-and-mango casserole,’ Etienne said proudly. ‘It’s quite special.’
Etienne was Etienne Foster – the Etienne a nod to a French mother, another feather – and he lived off the Brompton Road. He gave John copious, anxious instructions, right and left and right.
‘I’ll find it, don’t worry,’ John said. ‘Can I bring a friend?’
‘But of course you can,’ Etienne said, extending his arms wide. ‘A man?’
‘My girlfriend. Stella.’
Etienne’s face fell. A girl, London was full of them; when men were so much more interesting. ‘Stella, lovely.’
Stella, though, was not pleased. ‘Oh no, I’ll have to pass on that one. Honestly, darling, didn’t I say, wasn’t I clear, entirely clear?’ She stood with hands on hips. ‘Absolutely not: these affairs make me want to dash my brains out against a wall, as you very well know.’
‘I said you would,’ he told her calmly. ‘He says he’ll make his speci
al beef-and-mango casserole.’ He had learned a thing or two from her about the husbanding of one’s resources. And she was a stickler for manners, try though she might to shed her English middle-class rigours. She would go. ‘Too late now.’
Stella was too pragmatic, he could see, to waste energy on an argument. But she drew a line. ‘Oh, very well. But never ever again.’ A pause. ‘The Brompton Road, you say? Well, we’ll see what’s what.’ Another pause, and then, ‘Oh God, what a joyless Friday evening, to be spent with bores and prisses and Uranians. I do hate you.’
That was the beginning of the end, although John could not know it at the time.
19
I’ll have to pass on that one, Stella thought. She set her mind to thinking of a way to wriggle gracefully out of an evening that surely would be not merely boring, but objectionable. She had in fact glimpsed this Etienne person on the lurk in the college, sniffing after a triptych here and a triptych there, and he had seemed hardly worth anyone’s time or attention. But not so: full pockets commanded attention – even from John, even if he appeared to disdain the very notion of money. She had watched Etienne glance at some new work in one of the studios: pointing, waving largely, his finger wavering over one piece and then another. She had asked a discreet question or two about him: he hardly cared, she was told, about the art, he hardly looked at the art he bought. He was a collector – of art, in theory, but in fact of reputations. Of people, Stella realised, and their room for manoeuvre. He liked to flourish sets, as one might spread a deck of cards across a table, or arrange a tea service in a glass cabinet. His walls were many. Money, Stella thought. He collected money.
And he was busy collecting John Irwins, now: a full set of difficult, painful, jagged paintings, all white and grey against black. To convert into money, in time.
Nothing of the real thing. Her flesh crawled.
Now, she considered how best to protect John from such a person. By diplomacy? By a dropped comment, an aside? Would John even care? – money was money, after all, and a wall was a wall, and a collection was a collection. But surely he would care.