Autumn

by Ali Smith

  Made me what I am.

  The ideal woman, a kind of faithful slave, who administers without a word of complaint and certainly no payment, who speaks only when spoken to and is a jolly good chap. But a revolution is on the way, all over the country young girls are starting and shaking and if they terrify you they mean to is what she’d soon be saying out loud on the radio herself, you know.

  One day a group of students was staging a protest outside a building. A BBC man came up with a mike. He chose the pretty girl. She was in a duffel coat strewing rose petals on the paving in front of the building.

  What’s a pretty girl like you doing at this sort of event?

  She told him. This building is a real stinker. We’re protesting it. We’re mourning the death of architectural beauty.

  But I’ve heard that this building is thought to be very efficient inside, he said.

  We are outside, she said.

  High in confidence. Low in confidence. Moodswings. Not a cosy girl. Don’t come and see me today. Goodbye Cruel World, I’m off to join the circus. That was a pop song, Ken used it in his film when he followed her and three of the boys about and showed their lives, their work, their day. She filmed a dream instead, a real recurring dream (her final year dissertation was dreams) and after that film by Ken, in came all the dream jobs, the acting offers, 1963, dream of a year, anus mirabilis ha ha ha. All the things that had happened were the kind of thing, she supposed, that if they were ever to do one of those timelines of your life, born 6 March 1938, died whenever, would look sort of marvellous on a timeline. Grabowski show, radio work, married Clive, dancer on Ready Steady Go!, acting at Royal Court (acting was a time thing, though, sort of confidence trick. Painting was the real thing).

  And then the future.

  All the thirties up to thirty nine sounded great.

  Between forty and fifty would be hell.

  She hoped she’d never get hard. She’d never want to be too fixed in her ways.

  (She’d be sketching and painting right up to her death. She’d sketch, among others, her friends in the band, 19th Nervous Breakdown. Paint it, Black. Her baby’d be in a cot at the foot of the bed. Her pictures after she died? Gone, lost, and the ones that weren’t lost, thirty years in silence in her father’s attic and an outhouse on her brother’s farm, close shaves when it came to trips to the skip. The writer and curator who’d search for them thirty years after and find them in that outhouse? He’d burst into tears when he did.)

  There was a circle of roses at the heart of her surname, all round the O in a woven open wreath.

  There was a carved mermaid holding up the table.

  There was never any money.

  There was the brass bed, the paraffin stove.

  There was pretending to be off-your-head berserk when the landlord came round hammering at the door to try to get to sleep with you.

  There was wearing your coat all day in your room on the cold days.

  None of that was life.

  Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you. Painting? was what you did, alone, and you sat there, and it was your own terrible fight or your own lovely bit, but it was really terribly alone.

  To take the moment before something had actually happened, and you didn’t know if it was going to be terrible or if it might be very funny, something extraordinary actually happening and yet everybody around it not taking any notice at all.

  She pasted. She cut. She painted. She concentrated.

  In her dream, she slapped the past in its face.

  Telling her schoolfriend Beryl, they were both sixteen, I’m going to be an artist.

  Women don’t get to be that, Beryl said.

  I will. A serious artist. I want to be a painter.

  It is yet another day, weather, time, news, stuff happening all across the country/countries, etc. Elisabeth goes for a walk in the village. Almost nobody is about. The few people out cutting things back in their gardens scowl at her or ignore her.

  She steps to one side to make room on the narrow pavement and says hello to an old lady she passes.

  The old lady nods, doesn’t smile, walks past, imperious.

  She comes to the spraypainted house. Either the people who were living here have moved or they’ve repainted the front of their house this bright seaside blue. It’s like nothing’s ever happened, unless you know to look a little more closely to make out the outline of the word HOME under the layer of blue.

  When she gets back to her mother’s the front door is wide open. Her mother’s friend Zoe comes out of it at a gallop. She almost collides with Elisabeth. In the near-miss she catches her up in her arms and swings her round in something like a Scottish country dance move, then skips backwards away from her down the path.

  You’ll never believe what your mother’s gone and done, Zoe says.

  She is laughing so much that Elisabeth can’t not laugh too.

  She got herself arrested. She threw a barometer at the fence, Zoe says.

  What? Elisabeth says.

  You know, Zoe says. Thing that measures pressure.

  I know what a barometer is, Elisabeth says.

  We were in the next village along, in the antiques place, you know it? Your mother took me there to show off how much she knows about antiques. And she saw a barometer she liked, so she bought it, cost a fair bit too. And we were on our way back in the car and the radio was on, and the news story came on about our new government cutting their funding for the houses where the kids who arrive here as asylum seekers have been staying, and the report said those kids are now going to be dumped in the same high-security places they put everybody. And your mother lost it. She started shouting about how those places are worse than jail, everyone under guard, bars on the windows, not fit for anybody, doubly not fit for kids. And then the next news story on the radio was the scrapping of the Minister for Refugees. She made me stop the car. She left the car door hanging open and she ran off up a path. So I got out and locked the car up and I followed her, and when I found her, well, I heard her before I saw her, she was shouting at men in a van at the fence, I mean fences, and she was shaking the barometer in the air at them and then I swear she threw it at the fence! And the fence gave this great cracking sound, a flash came off it, and the men went crazy because she’d shorted their fence. I couldn’t help it. I yelled too. I yelled that’s the way Wendy! That’s the spirit!

  Zoe tells Elisabeth that her mother’d been held for an hour, got off with a caution and is right now at the antiques yard down the road at the junction, stockpiling more stuff to throw at the fence, that her mother’s new plan is that every day she’s going to go and get herself arrested (and here she imitates Elisabeth’s mother perfectly) bombarding that fence with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times.

  She sent me home to bring the car, Zoe says. She’s going to load it up with junk missiles. Oh, and I mustn’t forget. They phoned for you on the house phone. Ten minutes ago.

  Who did? Elisabeth says.

  The hospital. Not hospital, the care place. Care providers.

  Her mother’s friend sees her face change. She stops being flippant immediately.

  They said to tell you, she says. Your grandfather’s been asking for you.

  This time, the woman at reception doesn’t even glance up. She is watching someone get garrotted on Game of Thrones on her iPad.

  But then she says, still without looking up,

  he’s eaten a good lunch today, enough for like three people. Well, older people. We told him you’d be delighted he’d woken up and he said, please let my granddaughter know I’m looking forward to seeing her.

  Elisabeth walks down the corridor, comes to his door and looks in.

  He is asleep again.

  She gets the chair from the corridor. She puts it beside the bed. She sits down. She gets out A Tale of Two Cities.

  She closes her eyes. When s
he opens them again his eyes are open. He is looking straight at her.

  Hello again, Mr Gluck, she says.

  Oh, hello, he says. Thought it’d be you. Good. Nice to see you. What you reading?

  November again. It’s more winter than autumn. That’s not mist. It’s fog.

  The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like – no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass.

  There’ve been a couple of windy nights. The leaves are stuck to the ground with the wet. The ones on the paving are yellow and rotting, wanwood, leafmeal. One is so stuck that when it eventually peels away, its leafshape left behind, shadow of a leaf, will last on the pavement till next spring.

  The furniture in the garden is rusting. They’ve forgotten to put it away for the winter.

  The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still.

  Look at the colour of it.

  I’m deeply indebted to everyone who’s written about Pauline Boty but above all to the seminal work of Sue Tate and to her two volumes, Pauline Boty: Pop Artist and Woman (2013) and, as Sue Watling, with David Alan Mellor, Pauline Boty: The Only Blonde in the World (1998); and also to the interview with Boty by Nell Dunn in Vogue, September 1964, the full-length version of which is published in Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women (1965). The stories about Christine Keeler which feature briefly in the novel can be found in Nothing But ..., by Christine Keeler with Sandy Fawkes (1983), and Secrets and Lies, by Christine Keeler with Douglas Thompson (2012). I’m also fortunate to have been able to read a typescript of Sybille Bedford’s as yet unpublished account of Stephen Ward’s trial in 1963, The Worst We Can Do: A Concise Account of the Trial of Dr Stephen Ward, some of whose details of the trial (the court transcriptions of which still haven’t been released into the public domain) have slipped into this novel.

  Thank you, Simon, Anna, Hermione, Lesley B., Lesley L., Ellie, Sarah, and everyone at Hamish Hamilton.

  Thank you, Andrew and Tracy and everyone at Wylie’s.

  Thank you, Bridget Smith, Kate Thomson, Neil MacPherson and Rachel Gatiss.

  Thank you, Xandra. Thank you, Mary.

  Thank you, Jackie.

  Thank you, Sarah.

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