September in the Rain

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Jean’s still asleep, by the sound of it,’ you said, proffering me my jacket. ‘We can be back before lunch.’

  Never able to get a good night’s rest on an unfamiliar sofa, I had given up pretending to sleep before dawn and was sitting over one of Jean’s books in her kitchen when you finally appeared. Jean Walsh, you remember, the playwright; we got to know her during that year she spent as a writer in residence at the Art College. Jean had been offered the post after her series of fringe successes culminating in the West End run of her first hit satire, Money for Jam, about the deregulation of the City. She was coming to the end of a two-year stint as a community theatre fellow in our old university town. It was almost fifteen years since you and I had left. The council was starting to sandblast the house-fronts and lower the housing density towards the end of our three years in the place. Now the transformation appeared all but complete.

  Still dominating its skyline of sloping slate roofs was the Mill tower: a slender imitation of an early renaissance campanile. It had been saved by preservationists, and was part of the town’s industrial museum. Trying to keep up the idea of a future in exhibition organizing, Alice had volunteered to work there when she came back from New York. The historical displays in the museum were just beginning to be put together. She typed up labels, cut out large squares of hessian sack to use as the ground for object displays, all in the hope that a vacancy would come up, but it quickly transpired there’d be no salaried positions for years—and, besides, she had no museum curator qualifications.

  One Saturday afternoon those years before, we three had climbed to the eighth floor of the main university building. Up there, in a large empty space used as a practice room by student bands, a not-quite-in-tune piano stood open in the corner. Immediately after catching your breath, you wandered over and started to pick out the Labour Party Anthem with one finger; Alice managed to conjure some of its words from the air. Below us, smokeless and still, lay the panorama of that threatened Victorian townscape. It must have been only a few days before she left for London. Suddenly the prospect seemed emptied of purpose, the painted flats and props of a flopped kitchen-sink drama.

  ‘All this can be yours!’

  It was just such a view of the place that had prompted your professor to make that remark. She meant, of course, the rashes of social problems breaking out all over those streets of terrace houses. But that day, up there with you and her, our university town had felt like the stage set of the Mill which Jean’s agit-prop students were building out of cardboard.

  The evening before she’d showed us around the theatre’s deserted auditorium.

  ‘What’s the play about?’ you asked, walking up to centre stage with a faint squeak from the floorboards at every step you took.

  ‘The Chartist lock-out,’ Jean replied from the middle of the front stalls. ‘It’s a documentary dramatization.’

  ‘When was that? What happened?’

  ‘In early 1849: Bester, the mill owner, brought in blackleg Irish labour, shut out the work force, and broke the strike.’

  ‘Not exactly a happy political message,’ you said.

  ‘No,’ Jean agreed, ‘but though the Chartists were defeated, their lessons weren’t forgotten, and it was then that the Trade Union movement in this industry really began to gather momentum.’

  ‘Reminds me of all the school plays I was in,’ you said, near the wings now, in a stage whisper.

  ‘Oh your paws and whispers!’ I could still remember Alice saying.

  The student stage designer had attempted to represent the imposing mill tower and factory in a squat and corrugated form.

  ‘Doesn’t look much like the real thing,’ my voice came from down left, a smear of black powder paint on one index finger.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Jean. ‘We couldn’t possibly make the flats look like a realistic factory even if we tried. So I’m getting the kids to work on alienation effects, symbolic tableau, direct addresses to the audience by narrators, using historical documents, rapid shifts from scene to scene on stage at the same time and picked out with lighting changes … You know the sort of thing.’

  But looking out from Jean’s kitchen window that morning, I had gazed a good while at the real campanile. There it remained, with the aura that an artwork could attract. Stripped of its function, that complex of buildings represented nothing but a value, the meaning to something that no longer existed. And it was just such a magical aura that Jean’s student play seemed designed to dispel—as if the only thing which prevented life turning into virtual art was the unending effort of historical memory, as if the only way to forgive and forget was exactly to remember.

  CHAPTER 16

  That autumn evening, the best part of fifteen years’ back now, Alice had been standing in the park by Cabot’s Tower. Suddenly, as dusk descended, the household lights of Bristol suspended themselves in necklaces of crescents and terraces, glinting through the darker branches of autumn trees round the navigator’s monument.

  Not quite with your permission, but certainly your acquiescence, I arranged to meet her at the end of October. Whatever Mrs. Young had expected or wanted, it was impossible simply to pretend that the days spent with her in Holland never happened. I wrote a letter with the barest outline of how things had gone after our parting at ’s-Hertogenbosch. In it I told her how you had met me in Brussels. I mentioned how the next day we managed to get to the German border with a series of short lifts, and were then found by an Austrian heading for Graz. Dropped in a bad spot outside Munich, we’d been rescued by Peter Bastian, a Frankfurt doctor visiting his grandmother in the Trentino.

  He had taken us to stay the night in the village of Brunik St George. Then, the next day, we were driven to Florence by a pair of Austrian couples coming from Sweden to spend their summer car-factory earnings. I barely so much as hinted that you had been robbed in Rome, and then said how things had gone horribly wrong on the way back home. But then I just didn’t know how to put it. The words were so flat and brutal. I was sorry I hadn’t her telephone number … ‘but please write and I’ll call you. It’s too difficult to explain in a letter. I need to talk. Perhaps we can meet somewhere soon. Please do write—with much love.’

  When she replied, I did call and took the bus from Victoria Coach station one Friday afternoon to spend a few days together the very weekend Pasolini stopped his car in Ostia and picked up Death himself.

  Alice had been standing there waiting at the city centre depot. It wasn’t much of a walk from the hollow of Bristol’s city centre to her flat in Cayninge Gardens. She showed me the way up the main street, past the university, through elegant squares of Georgian terraces, across the green and into a dignified street of cream-coloured stone buildings. Once merchant’s houses, they were now mostly divided into rented accommodation for the student community or better-off young married couples.

  When we reached the house, she offered a coffee and we sat sipping from her Liberty mugs in dark wood chairs by the windows of a second floor bed-sitting room. Above the desk hung a print of Cranach’s Adam and Eve, the couple’s sorry story in their coolly rendered flesh. Her print of Joan Eardley’s Glasgow sweetshop had been taped-up over a blocked-in fireplace. She was wearing a fawn mohair cardigan and a blue velvet skirt.

  ‘So how was Amsterdam?’

  ‘You already know,’ she smiled. ‘Only stayed one night. Being a girl there on her own, men kept coming up and accosting me. It was all very unpleasant. I did have a look round the Flea Market, though; but then took the first boat train back home.’

  I could picture her alone on the deck of a ferry: the sea breeze blowing out her reddish hair as she leaned on a rail gazing into the turmoil of the small ship’s widening wake. Gulls swooping and rising around its stern seemed to twist like question marks in a still summery sky. Sipping at the rim of her mug, she described how she had spent a quiet week wi
th her parents in Edinburgh, then packed up her things at Sydenham and moved into the flat found by some fellow-students back in late August.

  Leaning against the work surfaces in its kitchen, pretending to a little composure, I asked her what she might have in mind for the weekend.

  ‘The film club’s showing Chabrol’s Juste avant la nuit,’ she said. ‘We could go to that if you think you can cope with the subtitles.’

  ‘Pushing against an open door: isn’t there something a bit more cheerful?’

  ‘Oh—how about something I’m learning to cope with: Zero de conduit by Jean Vigo?’

  ‘You’ve seen it then. Me too.’

  Alice looked puzzled, or I thought she did, and not for the last time that weekend. Sniffing the air ostentatiously, I complimented her on the aroma of the risotto. She was adding some white wine and stirring the rice in a large frying pan. Dropping the cinema idea, and whatever other plans she might have thought to mention, she started to give an account of her flat-mates. It was a houseful of girls all training to be teachers.

  ‘Cayninge Gardens!’ she said, with another of her smiles.

  After eating the risotto, we went back down into the town centre and decided on the spot to see Two for the Seesaw, which turned out to be showing at the film club. After the black-and-white love story of Robert Mitchum, a divorcing lawyer from Nebraska, and the young Shirley MacLaine, a Greenwich Village dancer, we walked back towards Clifton, the dark of our autumn evening all but banishing memories of that summer’s heat.

  ‘You look tired,’ she said, curling up on the wall side of her bed after kissing goodnight.

  ‘Coraggio! Coraggio!’ a policeman kept repeating as I tried to get to sleep.

  The next morning, she gave me a guided tour of her training college, its library, lecture rooms, and cafeteria. Alice was doing her teaching practice at a large comprehensive on the outskirts of Redland, and talked about discrepancies between the theories presented in lectures and the day-to-day realities of timetables, classroom discipline, about the sheer exhaustion from work loads teachers had to learn to bear. Waiting in the library while she dropped off an essay, I drifted along the shelves pulling out volume after volume at random, flicking over a few pages, and then pushing them back where they came from.

  ‘Bookworm!’ your voice kept repeating. ‘Bookworm!’

  It would be a weekend of desultory wanderings. She needed a new lampshade for her bedroom, and that afternoon we shopped for one in the craft section of a store on Whiteladies Road. Then she took me out along Bristol’s deserted and decaying docklands to the Arnolfini Gallery, a museum space on the waterfront, where a Patrick Caulfield exhibition happened to be on.

  Alone in a large high-ceilinged room, we gazed at the peculiar interiors and still-lives, their blank sweeps of strong colour broken by thick, child-like lines of drawing. The most provoking ones for me contained segments of neatly painted, postcard-style views inserted into their spaces—a photographic realism located in the schematic frames of their period modern interiors. They seemed copied from travel brochures or the pictures fastened to the walls above the passengers’ heads in continental railway compartments.

  What did I think of them? Nothing positive came to mind, so I shrugged my shoulders and put on an uncomfortable face.

  ‘Not like you to be lost for words in a gallery,’ she said.

  Then, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head and slight wave of the hand, she made it clear we might as well leave. Perhaps she had already realized that we would no longer be able to share those sorts of experiences—at least with the meanings they had briefly implied. My clumsy reserve made it all too obvious. There are things you can’t come back from, however much you may wish you could, or even pretend you have. Yet as we walked over the cobbles of the wharf and headed for a department store coffee shop she liked to frequent, it wasn’t at all clear which of us was bringing our involvement to an end.

  ‘So how’s the course going?’ she asked.

  ‘Difficult to get excited about the provenance for “school of” works destroyed in the bombing of Dresden,’ I said. ‘But there was a good lecture last week about a lost masterpiece mentioned in the literature which turned out to have been painted over by the artist himself. The slides of the x-rays clearly revealed it.’

  ‘All sounds rather intangible.’

  ‘Like in the galleries—where you’re not supposed to touch the precious works of art … It’s always been a puzzle, that—the way painters can have their finger marks all over some reclining nude or odalisque until it’s finished, and then it becomes something we’re only allowed to stalk about in front of, gaze at a moment, then move on.’

  ‘Well now, darling, are you absolutely sure you’re in the right field?’ she asked me in her teasing vein.

  ‘It’s much more technical than I thought it would be: stuff about the chemical formulas for the pigment they used, theories of restoration, enlargements of the paint strata as evidence for the artists’ procedures. Don’t seem to be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Actually finding it a bit hard to concentrate at all. But it’s only the beginning. It’ll start to make sense before too long, I’m sure. How about yours?’

  ‘Even stepping into the classroom’s a bit scary,’ she said, ‘but of course you’ve got to be brave.’

  That evening she introduced some of her trainee-teacher acquaintances in the crowded back room of the Coronation Tap. Stood there sipping a half of bitter, it was difficult to hear yourself think. The cheerful noises of people who didn’t seem to know each other all that well only made my silence seem even more cold and aloof. We left after a couple of drinks.

  It was Saturday night. So, as if for old time’s sake, I tried my best to make love to her. She kindly put up no resistance; that was never her way. Rather her generous person had come to feel like an emblem of complicity. Why dwell on it? My one summer of half-innocent youthful confidence had gone forever. Displaying the foresight of the truly realistic, she had been right after all: a brief affair, yet with how long-drawn-out an aftermath, at least, that is, for me.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s alright.’

  During those three days she never so much as mentioned what had happened in Italy. Perhaps she was just being tactful. Whatever expectations she may have had for that weekend and later, she must have quickly seen they would come to nothing. I might have wanted to live as if nothing had changed; I might have wanted to keep open that possible future. Still, the fact of what had taken place kept returning in the words of a song, a laugh animating her features, or bits of my no longer tanned face glimpsed in the mirrored pillars of some department store interior. We looked almost exactly as we had just six weeks before, but nothing now could feel the same. The only future to be lived had changed its aspect in the two of us too. We would walk the afternoon away, and end up by Cabot’s tower as dusk was closing in.

  ‘What are you reading?’ she asked, noticing the top of a Penguin paperback pushed into my jacket pocket.

  ‘Novel by Wyndham Lewis … Revenge for Love. It’s about art forgery, among other things.’

  ‘Interesting title,’ she said, with yet one more of her wry smiles.

  CHAPTER 17

  Over the next three years, we continued to meet now and then. Alice moved back to London after qualifying and took up a post at a high school in Brockley Rise. Now, the rabbits securely back in place, she and I were ‘just good friends’ once more. Meeting outside the ICA, we seem still to be climbing broad steps towards the clubs and Piccadilly, off to catch a show in Cork Street, perhaps, or at the Royal Academy, disappearing into the crowds of another all but forgotten afternoon.

  How did we stop meeting altogether? The last time we set eyes on each other had been a pure accident. There she was standing in the queue for tickets to a concert at the Albert Hall.
As I gazed towards her, not quite believing it, because there were thousands of people crowding around, she turned—and her start of recognition was one to which I couldn’t but respond. Was she pleased? She didn’t introduce me to her friends, momentarily glancing down the queue towards mine. Maybe she wondered were you coming to the concert too. But, no need to worry, you weren’t. She mentioned, as if her words were suggested by the chance meeting, how she had recently heard from some other old boyfriend of hers at university. The name meant nothing to me. All the same, it produced the unflattering sensation of being a closed chapter in her past, located beside other episodes, other brief affairs.

  ‘Good to see you,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk more when we’re inside.’

  Once past the box office, I went searching around so we could continue the conversation, but I wasn’t able to see her anywhere in the crowded concert hall. Perhaps she had even tried to look for me too.

  Then, four years later, a Christmas card arrived by a roundabout route. It contained a telephone number. She was still living in the capital.

  ‘It’s the year for mending contacts,’ she said.

  ‘Let me phone you again when I get back from Italy. I’m just going over for a few days research.’

  ‘Glad you’re still gadding about,’ I heard her say.

  One week later the card had mysteriously disappeared, the phone number with it. When I asked, you vehemently denied throwing it away. More years of silence followed, till again by chance news of her married life and motherhood arrived via that dinner with my sister, who had met her, you remember, at Isabel’s wedding. For some time after that I would imagine her ferrying her children to a playgroup, or smartening up her daughter for Brownies, wondering what she should do with the letter—the one sent after my sister found an address through Belle. Perhaps it never reached her. Whatever, it resulted in silence.