But while I yearned and fretted on the Tube home about our not sharing a bed any more, you had evidently
accepted we couldn’t live the student life forever. These constraining circumstances, you seemed to say, would have to be put up with for as long as it took to move on.
Despite the difficulties, it was really something to be working deep in the heart of London, in Bloomsbury, where the Darling Family lived, or where the Vorticists
instigated their Rebel Art Centre around the corner in Lamb’s Conduit Street. And around that corner too was Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop, the place the Georgian poets would meet and recite their latest works. Going by those spots every day was like being an extra in the film when you’d already read the book. Sometimes, after
working, I would wander off towards Tottenham Court Road. From one square to another, I read the various publishers’ names and the blue plaques where those great writers had achieved their immortal works … or pressed my nose up to that antiquarian bookshop window with its unaffordable Tavistock edition of Reflections on the Nude. Lunch hours were often spent in Russell Square with sandwiches and Klee, Kandinsky, Berenson, Gombrich or Wollheim, as I began to work my way through the preliminary reading list supplied by the Courtauld Institute. To keep up, I would hurry over to Dillons bookshop for a snack in their basement café, or the British Museum—where a T’ang Buddhist Painting exhibition was on all that summer, right down to the end of September.
The leaves turned brown early that year. There’d been no rain for weeks; by August the grass was scorched. A
seemingly endless sequence of bright days followed upon one another. Sometimes, if we were lucky, a faint breeze would ruffle the robes of patients being wheeled from the Italian to the National under Queen Square’s shady chestnut trees. We would go past the public benches where outpatients whiled away the time before their appointments. It was my job to manoeuvre them around the children playing, then push on by the black water fountain marked UNFIT FOR DRINKING and the rows of red telephone boxes where people would be calling relatives to let them hear the latest news from the consultants. We would continue into Outpatients so my passengers could receive their various treatments. Then I would wheel them back again.
The New Wing at the National, with its private ward on an upper floor, has a choice of entrances. The left displays the word HEALING above the door. The right has the word RESEARCH. Both are ornamented with bas-reliefs in the style of 1930s neo-classicism. It was as if I could decide to enter the building by means of the one idea or the other. But these days, on my occasional returns to Queen Square, its grass damp and littered with the leaves of brown from the previous autumn, I find myself wondering how I might even try and attempt the impossible—and go in through both doors at once.
The journey by wheelchair from the Italian to the
National took practically no time at all. Just two curbs had to be managed by the porter and endured by the patient. The others were provided with handy ramps for easing the transit of hunched figures in pyjamas and dressing gowns or nightdresses and bed-jackets that formed a daily feature of life in Queen Square. Steps led up to the stained-wood entrance doors of the Italian, also avoided by means of a ramp. Pale cream net curtains hung in its ground-floor windows. Back then you could distinguish its porters from those at the National: they had blue coats, whereas I wore a short white jacket. Porters would negotiate the clattering grilles of the old-style lift to the wards. They would help the nurses manhandle the patients out of bed, or give the poor creatures an arm if they were among its walking wounded. Then we renegotiated the iron lift doors, and headed out down the polished corridor back towards its main entrance into Queen Square.
The nurses who worked inside the Ospedale wore yellow uniforms with white aprons, and starched white cones pinned to the tops of their heads. Many were Italian, or of Italian extraction, with jet-black hair, olive skins and intriguingly mobile features. They too made me long for the Italy I had never seen, only read about in books, whose paintings studied in illustrations had so much inspired me. All through that scorching hot summer in the mid-Seventies everyone appeared in holiday mood. Within the railed precincts of the square’s garden, off-duty ancillary workers, porters, nurses, doctors, secretaries, hotel staff and recuperating patients would be sunbathing on the bone-dry ground. People were getting to know each other, choosing out new friends and confidantes from chance
acquaintances and work-mates. It would help them through the routines of those long and sultry days.
The private patients being wheeled from the Ospedale Italiano could be seen wrapped in bandages, or swathed in veils and headdresses. Shrunken within loose clothes and veils, which fluttered against their sickly skin outside, they seemed entirely withdrawn from Queen Square’s party mood, where, as wheeled patients approached them, great flights of pigeons would rise into the leafy air.
CHAPTER 2
My sister Christine always wanted to go into advertising. Sometime back in the mid-Eighties, she took me along to a dinner in St John’s Wood with that friend of hers, the trainee therapist and, her work associate, an account manager with one of the bigger and better firms. Perhaps to impress his new girlfriend, the account manager spent the entire evening dominating the conversation with a sales-pitch about what a fantastic operation he worked for, how everyone was treated equally, right down to the receptionists and doorman. The chief executives were such nice guys—hard headed, but reasonable. Everyone really looked up to them. He even reported, perhaps for my benefit, that these philanthropists went in for sponsoring opera and avant-garde art, buying into the higher emotions, as it were.
‘But,’ I asked, as he paused to fork some buttered
parsnips into his mouth, ‘don’t you have any sense of metaphysical worthlessness?’
The momentary silence was only underlined by the sounds of plates and cutlery.
‘What on earth do you think?’ was all he said, returning to his slogans and the tale of his tribe.
‘I can just imagine what he thought of you, you spirit broker!’ my sister laughed as she drove us back to her flat. Putting the Peugeot into fourth, she was accelerating out across an almost empty Waterloo Bridge in the early hours of a Sunday morning. Having managed to go easy with the spirits after dinner, my head was already clearing as the Festival Hall and the Hungerford Bridge went by. Along the river, beside the Savoy, the pleasure-boats’ lights still glinted on the murky Thames below.
‘By the way,’ she said, after a few minutes’ quiet as she threaded her car through that maze of roundabouts and exits heading south, ‘I happened to meet an old friend of yours last Saturday.’
We were held up at yet more traffic lights; the road in the other direction was deserted, tempting her to inch forward out across the junction.
‘It was at Belle’s wedding … Isabel, come on, she was at university with you. I was her lodger, remember, till she and her bloke decided to take the plunge.’
‘So who was this friend of mine?’
‘Alice something-or-other … at least that was the maiden name, if I could only remember it, the name she said you’d know her by.’
‘How come she knew we were related?’
‘She recognized a family resemblance!’ my little sister said—a tall slim blonde, still in her twenties, eleven years my junior, with a broad white smile, a tiny turned up nose and hazel eyes.
There was a grinding noise as she crunched the gears.
‘If I were you, I’d get someone to look at that.’
‘And this is the man who wouldn’t know the difference between a clutch and an embrace!’
‘You should use that on someone more deserving,’ I said.
Tower blocks and red brick terraces, miles of deserted pavements went by. The earliest morning traffic was just an occasional car moving smoothly past shadowy segments of grass, dimly sketched out by a neon streetla
mp among the leaves of Clapham Common.
‘So what was she like then?’
‘Isabel?’
‘Alice.’
‘Homely Scottish mother,’ my sister said, ‘with three or four kids. Still managing to keep her looks. Husband a schools inspector. Living somewhere up in Shropshire. Converted farmhouse type of thing. Thinking of going back to teaching when the kids are a little older. Not quite your type, I’d have thought.’
‘Funny, that’s exactly what she said.’
My sister made a tricky right-hand turn across the carriageway.
‘Curious coincidence, you answering that flat-share ad,’ I found myself saying to half-change the subject.
Alice and Isabel were inseparable at university. When she graduated, Isabel, practically a Sloane Ranger from birth, managed to wangle herself a stopgap job in a theatrical costumier’s near Drury Lane. But within a few years she’d presumably started her training as a child psychotherapist. Come to think of it, wasn’t it Isabel’s encouragement that decided Alice on giving up and moving down here? Following a frankly admitted homing instinct in your choice of final-year placements, you too had made the journey south.
‘She did ask after you,’ my sister conceded.
‘Isabel?’
‘Alice! And she spoke rather warmly of you too, I’d say … Did you have some kind of a thing going on back then, or what?’
‘Sort of.’
‘What sort of “sort of”?’
‘The usual sort —’ and I crooned the hook to Just One of Those Things.
‘And what did your wife think about that then?’ she asked. ‘Can’t imagine Mary didn’t find out. You being such a hopeless liar, and all.’
‘Well, yes; but we weren’t exactly living together at the time.’
‘Interesting,’ she mused, ‘and I always thought of you two as the ideal couple, the great inseparables, two peas in a pod, all your eggs in one basket.’
‘The ideal couple: as if we were yoked together …’
‘She wanted to know if you got married in the end,’ my sister continued. ‘She asked if you had any children.’
‘Naturally, you filled her in on the details.’
‘How could I?’ She laughed. ‘You never tell me anything!’
‘Come on,’ I said, niggled by her harping yet again on that bit of family myth, ‘you know we got married.’
‘You must admit, though, you do tend to keep things to yourself … things like this Alice whatever-her-name-was.’
‘And what if there’s nothing to tell?’
‘Now I don’t believe that for a moment. Everyone’s got skeletons to rattle, but if anyone so much as touches your cupboard door, up come the defences, on goes the mask, and there you are, standing on one leg with a distant look in your eyes, gazing off somewhere and saying precisely nothing!’
‘Have it your own way,’ I shrugged.
‘So how is Mary?’ my sister asked.
‘She’s fine. Fine. Getting on with her things as usual.’
‘See what I mean?’ she said, glancing at the lighted dash. Outside, an orange glare of street lamps only seemed to emphasize the dark. ‘What Alice said was that everybody used to admire your mind; but you weren’t exactly a social success.’
That was nice of her, I thought, remembering her legendary tongue.
My sister was trying to get the car into a gap between two white transit vans a little way down from her ground floor flat.
‘Sometimes I do think it’s a pity we lost touch,’ I said.
‘Really? It’s a long time ago. Things are bound to be different. She seemed such a comfy motherly kind of person. Difficult to imagine you two arm in arm and walking down a street together, talking about metaphysical worthlessness.’
For the summer after she graduated, Alice had found a job on an educational program at the Brooklyn Museum. The experience visibly changed her: she’d bought herself a New York bohemian wardrobe, had let her hair grow longer and waved it. The other people working there had been such enthusiasts. They really believed in experimental art. The moment of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Op, Minimalism, Conceptualism, the entire shooting gallery. Even the kids in their school parties seemed to be wild about it. Alice would say she really woke up in New York. She was used to adopting a canny reserve, but her co-workers didn’t see the point of that. It was as if she were insulting them with her lack of superlatives. The whole thing had come as a revelation and release. She was going to become a curator. Back in England, she’d quickly found herself missing the excitement.
‘Actually, she was a dedicated follower of poetry and painting. I learned a lot from her.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, Joan Eardley … and Louise Nevelson … and Arp, Jean Arp: she was the first person I ever heard pronounce their names.’
‘So it wasn’t just her body you were after?’
‘What? No: absolutely not. She didn’t say that, did she?’
But that didn’t deserve a reply, so after manoeuvring back and forth a few times, my sister got the Peugeot parked the way she wanted near the curb. Then she turned from the windscreen a moment and produced one of her parody daggers looks: eyes narrowed, lips pursed, head tipped to one side.
‘Belle told me Alice had had an awful miscarriage. The baby died in her womb when it was already developed. The doctors knew, of course, and so did Alice, but she had to go through with the delivery anyway. Poor dead thing … a terrible experience, Belle said.’
There was a moment of blankness between us. The stillborn child had made her vivid in her life without me. My sister switched off the engine.
‘Maybe I should write …’ I was thinking out loud and unheard as I slammed the passenger door. ‘You don’t happen to have an address, do you?’
‘No, though I could easily get one—but really, I’m not sure it’s worth it. I mean she was quite interested in what’s happened to you. But, you know, just so she could file you away. I wouldn’t imagine you had anything very much in common with her, you know, even if you ever did.’
Now I couldn’t help feeling a sharp twinge of irritation at the way my sister’s words had seemed to write off that fretted fondness and desire, the mixed emotions starting up inside me, completely uncalled for and caught inside, like a puzzle with a missing piece.
‘What’s that supposed to mean, then—“if you ever did”?’
But by now Christine had the key in her blue front door.
‘Well, honestly, I can’t begin to imagine what she ever saw in you!’
CHAPTER 3
When I phoned her from the National that afternoon all those years ago, she gave me Isabel’s address. Yes, if I remember rightly, it was Isabel’s encouragement that brought Alice down to London in the first place.
Once in the capital, she quickly found a job as a Girl Friday for a professional photographer named William. Now Alice was working long and unusual hours on his shoots. The trains south of the river to where she rented a room in Sydenham were practically nonexistent after midnight, and on more than one occasion she found herself stranded in the West End, the last service from London Bridge long gone, with no alternative but to telephone Belle. A spare key for Alice was the obvious solution. The flat, so I gathered, was somewhere high on the Northern Line, but not far from the Tube station, easy enough to find … and if I had a problem?
‘Well, you’ve a tongue in your head,’ came her voice down the line.
‘I’ll be round straight after work,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring the wine.’
‘That’d be nice,’ her voice returned. ‘Oh, and make it white.’
The hour or so until clocking-off time would often be more or less empty of jobs: the clinics finished, inpatients accompanied back up to their wards, outpatients taken over to their nearby hospitals, or g
one home with relatives more or less under their own steam. That day, idling away the last bit of time with some desultory chat, the morning’s newspapers or weekly magazines, was more than my libido could stand. Now, expectantly ticking off the stops on its map, the Underground carriage deserted, I watched my face elongate and shorten by turns in the crazy house mirror of its glass.
Just the previous weekend, we had hitchhiked back up North for a birthday party at Jim and Veronica’s rented terrace house. Our mutual, already-married friends had stayed on to begin research degrees. Both of us had been sent invites to the party and separately told we were welcome to stay the night. We found themselves alone together in the small hours of that Sunday morning with a mound of bedding in the half-cleared room where the gathering had been held.
We had naturally made up two beds on the floor. But lying there under the sheet, still chuckling over that incident from the party when Alice had gone into the bathroom only to discover Alison and Mick, sworn enemies from the year below, hard at it in the tub, the thought came over me: ‘Well, why not?’ After all, it wasn’t as if the thought had never crossed my mind during our late-night talks at university. So, crawling over in the dark, I attempted to plant a kiss where it seemed her lips ought to be. I wasn’t far wide of the mark, and, no, she didn’t take offence, thank goodness, but put both arms around me and let things continue in their own precarious way.
I could hardly believe my luck, and our journey back South on that Sunday afternoon was charged with unspoken implications, possibilities and consequences. The chatty driver of an artic dropped us off where the North Circular meets the motorway and we took the Tube from Hendon.
Now, just five days later, as the West Hampstead station sign flashed past the window, I was still picturing her as she had looked round for her exit at the end of our weekend together. Through the sliding door, she had given me a glance that was as much as to say: ‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Suddenly another future beckoned like a crack in the surface of that curving concrete wall. Back in a seat with my train disappearing into a tunnel, I felt as if nothing could ever be quite the same again.
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