Then, a few years back, I was trying to sort out the chaos of my office bookshelves after yet another hectic term. A thin brown pamphlet with nothing printed on its spine found its way into my hands. I was just wondering whether it was one more bit of college ephemera that could be tossed in the trash. But it turned out to be the catalogue from an exhibition of sculptures and bas-reliefs by Jean Arp at the Galleria Schwarz, Milano—a show that ran from the 8th of May to 4th of June 1965. Published along with the reproductions of exhibits were various examples of the artist’s poems in French, including one called ‘les pierres domestiques’ which still did something for me when I gave it a go. Underneath the English phrase ‘For Arp, art is Arp’, attributed to Marcel Duchamp, she had written ‘For Richard, a token of my arpreciation (not in the best line of McLeod wit, but one tries). From Alice, Christmas 1974.’ After standing there amongst the chaos, lost in memory a moment, I closed the catalogue and put it back into the bookshelves, but properly filed in the Dadaist section—making a mental note to see if the Gallery Schwarz was still there at Via Gesú 17 next time I was in Milan.
Alice. Yes, I hope she’s content, her marriage happy and her family thriving. What attracted me to her, what created that particular fondness and desire, remained caught inside, as if it were a puzzle without a piece. Of course, the years would alter the feelings about how we might have been experimenting, trying to invent our lives—whether needing to change or become what we thought ourselves likely to be. Is it self-forgiveness that alters others’ characters in memory, or the complacency of middle age? Alice McLeod: it stood for somebody gone for years, for a trace of what remains, what was once a living person, now these words.
CHAPTER 18
Lifting the reading glasses and staring out at our university town’s altered skyline, its pale yellow frontages of once smut-grimed sandstone now delicately contrasting with the grey-blue roof-slates, the wide tree-planted spaces between thinned-out rows of terraces, I found another coincidence coming back to mind. Again at Victoria Coach Station, taking the bus for Cornwall with you that New Year, I’d looked out of the window at another one leaving for the West of England—and there inside it, making me blush with shame, was Alice’s face. She was evidently absorbed in a book or magazine and didn’t, thank goodness, look up or look round. It was by no means the last time we saw or spoke to each other, but, as her coach pulled out ahead of ours, it couldn’t help but revive the confusion of our previous partings.
In London one early February night just after we came back from the trial in Milan, two Courtauld MA students who were to become friends for quite a few years invited us round to their flat for dinner. The kitchen was a low-roofed extension from the main rectangle of a terraced house in Hackney. Phil and Molly, another apparently inseparable couple, rented the downstairs flat. Beyond the dark window lay an indeterminate space of yard and garden, then the back wall of a similar arrangement in reverse. The heads of our two hosts, glancing and nodding, were two bright ovals in the un-curtained rectangle of the kitchen’s rear window.
You had curled yourself up on the sofa in front of an electric fire. Again you seemed to be worrying about your appearance, feeling at some slight roughness on your chin and cheeks. Your skin was always sensitive, and reacted visibly to anything upsetting. Your feet, in thick red socks, were tucked up underneath you, your legs curled in close fitting jeans, matching a thick winter shirt decorated with small pieces of bright-coloured material cut and sewn like a quilt onto the rough blue ground. You had just closed the curtains for Molly and settled back onto the sofa. The only sound was the regular, mechanical click and jump of the needle in the record’s run-off groove.
‘And what would anyone like to hear?’
‘Anything,’ you said, ‘anything at all.’
Flicking through the vertical stacks of LPs at the bottom of their bookcase, I dug out a collection of Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions.
Now Molly was stirring the cheese sauce, made with chopped ham and peas that Phil was tipping into the pan. Stretching across her boyfriend, one hand on the salt, the other holding a spatula, Molly turned her neck slightly, pointing her face with its side-fall and natural wave of blonde hair, upwards into Phil’s; his face, clean-shaven yesterday, with a stubbly emphasis of chin and smiling mouth, moved to meet Molly’s. As they kissed tenderly, my envious eyes were deflected to the red clay tiling of the kitchen floor, where tiny flecks of onionskin lay preserved in its more remote corners.
The grey metal pan with darker heat marks around its sides exhaled a gust of steam and seasoning as Molly carried it over to the table. A bottle of wine from Frascati had been placed at its centre, the cork removed and then partially reinserted. There was a brief hesitation among us about where each should sit.
‘No formalities,’ said Phil. ‘Put yourselves anywhere.’
After we’d complimented them on the food, the talk momentarily faltered.
‘So what have you been doing with yourselves?’ asked Molly, as if to save the situation. ‘Wherever have you been, dropping out of sight like that?’
‘Nowhere much,’ you replied.
Neither of us had any desire to spoil the evening. But then Phil would have to say he didn’t believe it, adding that my absence from the seminars had been noticed. I told them we’d been on a flying visit to Italy, to see the Bernardo Luini in the Brera.
‘Only for that?’ Molly asked. ‘What are you, made of money or something?’
Which obviously wasn’t the case. But finding it impossible to talk with friends about what happened had the unintended effect of making them seem so much the less friends. Just as in Bristol, everything beyond us took on a somehow weightless air: in Hackney on that first occasion when it happened, you smoothed over the silence by coming up with the more or less plausible tale that the Italian police had caught the man who snatched your bag in Rome. When Molly looked slightly puzzled and then exclaimed how it must have been exciting, you said it was simply a bureaucratic formality, identifying the man, boring really, and changed the subject.
‘You’re right. I’m left. She’s gone,’ Elvis sang.
In among the glasses, cutlery, Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper pots, and a half-empty bottle of wine, the sound of his yodeling voice came filling up the silence between us, matched the twang of Scotty Moore’s guitar—
‘You’re right. I’m left. She’s gone.’
‘Come on, if you’re coming,’ you repeated, your hazel eyes bright, as you opened the flat’s front door. You had obviously slept soundly and were eager for the exercise.
‘Why not let’s see what the old square looks like?’
We were walking beside the rough-hewn walls of the park. Inside were its couchant lions, their sandstone smutted and scratched, begrimed with bird-droppings and smoke. There was a lake as well, but back then it had been silted up and used for dumping rubbish. Pram chassis, bed springs and frames protruded from what remained of the water. As we approached its glistening, renovated surface, a flotilla of ducks came swimming in close formation, then they veered left to the bank and one by one waddled out onto the grass. The ducks were familiar enough with the habits of humans to expect a bag of crusts and crumbs. They were to be disappointed. Neither of us had any bread, but still we stood surrounded there in silence for a moment.
‘I wonder if they pitied us,’ you said, ‘the neighbours who used to take us to feed the ducks on Southsea Common?’
‘Pitied? Why?’
‘Because we were brought up so strictly and strangely,’ you went on. ‘They must have known what my parents are like, and given us treats when we played with their children.’
‘Don’t you think everyone feels that way about their parents?’
‘No, I don’t—and, anyway, it’s nonsense to think everyone feels the same, because they can’t possibly have all had the same reasons for feeling what we felt.’
Fair enough, I thought, learning one more lesson as I did.
On the stone beside the park’s other gates I could make out that daft bit of Sixties’ graffiti: ‘Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life’.
The wind was picking up as we walked along the moor side, crying through the high branches of trees. You were fastening the top button of your blouse as you walked.
‘That September when we were packed off to Dorchester by my parents,’ you said, ‘you know it wasn’t the first time it had happened to me.’
‘Really, when else?’
‘Remember that time we had a day out to Kingsdown, so I could show you my grandparents’ house, Pine Cottage? Mum and dad sent me there when Katie was about to be born.’
The pinewood and orchard had mostly disappeared when we went there, its croquet lawn of fond memory divided into building plots. Where you used to play, bungalows, chalets and holiday-haciendas had been erected. Pine cottage itself stood separate behind a beech hedge in a surround of gravel that wasn’t there in your grandparents’ day. The two-storey house had been imported in kit-form from Scandinavia—the first of its kind anywhere in England, you said. It had a decorated frame, with deep eaves, and was clad in cedar-wood shingles. We had trespassed onto its more recent pebbly drive, beyond the name Pine Cottage—just as it had been, but repainted on a different plate. That had seemed an idyllic day, you happily revisiting a place so replete with memories; but as you looked from the drive and waved I had the sudden piercing sensation of being no more than a vague phantasmal presence in your life.
‘I’ll have been just four when it happened,’ you were saying. ‘Both my mother’s pregnancies were difficult. You see she was very ill before my birth, and when Kate was due, granny came over to collect me. I was probably only in Pine Cottage for ten days or a couple of weeks, but it seemed much longer. Mum must have stayed in hospital quite a while after the delivery, because I also remember going with dad in a taxi to collect her and Katie from the hospital. I can still hear myself being told she was my sister.’
‘Don’t suppose it’s that unusual … or maybe wasn’t. It happened to my grandma on my mother’s side.’
‘You know, most people in my class had a holiday relaxing after their A-levels but not me, oh no, I was packed off for the whole summer to work at a religious community—thirteen miserable weeks of putting on weight.’
‘And what was the brilliant thinking behind that?’
‘It got me away from my boyfriend at the Poly, didn’t it? I never saw Simon again.’
‘Which is why you were “available”, I suppose, when we bumped into each other at that student disco.’
‘Perfectly true,’ you said, with a mysterious conjuring gesture of the fingers after a moment’s silence.
We had reached the bridge above a disused railway cutting. Gazing down at its trackless shale, wild grasses and willow herb indicating where the lines had been, I recalled that it was exactly the spot one blustery night Alice had said that if she stayed here it would ruin her complexion.
‘Can’t you see how it’s finished off everyone else’s?’ she said.
But even if we were allowing ourselves this bit of a nostalgic looking round, it was surely better not to let her name drop from my lips. Adapting Dorothy Parker’s witticism, you would now and then comment on the gamut of emotions from A to M; but really you preferred not to hear more of her name than your own faintly sardonic allusions to its initial letter. It seemed clear enough I would never really be forgiven for that, but then why should I be? Did I deserve it? So in silence once more, and parallel with that disused railway, we continued along the moor-side road.
There had been so many moments like this one when it felt as if you would never really forgive me, let alone forget. You might be standing on the bathroom scales or looking into the washbasin mirror.
‘Have I lost any weight?’ you’d ask. ‘Is my face improving?’
And your questions would sound curiously like the sessions of trial and judgment to which your parents used to subject their daughters’ boyfriends. It was impossible to say the right thing. I would always be weighing my words, attempting to make amends for that ever more far off mistake.
Perhaps a return to our student flat would help put that sort of thing behind us once and for all. No such painful thoughts had naturally crossed my mind back then: the world was all before us. But now we were heading in the direction of the past, towards St Luke’s Square in fitful September sun. First, though, we must walk in front of the church that gave its name to the place, and then cross over towards what was the old workhouse. Later the great stone edifice had been converted into a municipal hospital. As we cut through behind the back of the building, its rows of ward windows glinted in the sun. You could imagine patients wanting to move nearer to the stove in winter, nearer to the air in summer, hoping they could change to the beds nearer the door—the ones that meant you would soon be discharged. Those rows of apertures, gas-lit in a foggy Victorian dusk, looked like a glimpse into other people’s nightmares, their fears of euthanasia.
To enter the Square we crossed the cobbles of Fairfax Terrace, closed at the higher end by a blank wall, alleys leading to left and right, at the lower, by a row of house-fronts on the far side of the road. One side of the street had been sandblasted too, and closed to traffic by laying some flagstones over the cobbles. Bollards prevented cars from crossing the pavement, and there were three enormous concrete bowls for flowers that either had never been planted, had long since failed to take, or had been unable to survive the younger inhabitants of the place.
‘Remember when you threw out your old paintings? The kids from the houses around must have always been rummaging in our rubbish, only this time they found your masterpieces. Weeks after, coming home from the health centre placement, I used to find those old self-portraits of yours caught in the nettles and dock.’
The terrace house with our tiny flat on the first floor was in the furthest corner of the square. We walked round behind and down the alley with weeds pushing between its cobbles, a shrub turning yellow in the corner of one backyard. The past ten years hadn’t improved it at all. Faded net curtains still hung behind the rotten frames of what had been our student flat. Some of the panes were broken, patched with pieces of cardboard and tape. A great swathe of wallpaper was hanging from the wall you once painted a warm ochre emulsion with cream gloss skirting boards.
Gazing up at what were kitchen windows, I could just about picture the bedroom where the best of those daubs, as Dr. Green had called them, were hung on the walls. How little we’d had to do with the place. In a brief parenthesis, as if before our lives, we two had grown and then moved on, leaving, or so it appeared, absolutely nothing behind.
‘Difficult to imagine we ever lived here, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ you said.
During our time, just a few doors down, there’d been a brutal murder, a man stabbed to death in his bed. The police made house-to-house inquiries, but when they came to us, we were no help to the officers who called. It was the son, enraged by a family inheritance quarrel, who, it turned out, had committed the crime.
‘They don’t keep it as tidy as we did,’ you said, hardly able to conceal a shiver. ‘Could the place really have been this bad back then?’
In the years since I fluked, as you would put it, my lecturing job at the Art College, Winchester had become our home. It was there we spread sideways and put down roots. The decade spent in a comfortable Hampshire town had certainly mellowed and altered us. I had even got used to the idea of living in a place where the leaves came out in spring like wallets flourishing old one pound-notes, notes which would turn into ten shilling ones come September.
Two little Asian girls had stealthily tiptoed up behind us while we were staring through those windows at the musty nothing that was once our student
home. When we turned round and looked at the little sisters, we found ourselves stared at in return. The children couldn’t have been more than four and six, dressed in a combination of traditional sari and British kiddy clothes. Despite the mortgage, the overdrafts, the credit card bills, those girls made me feel too comfortably off, too uncomfortable, as we intruded into their different existences. What’s more, those two girls had produced a twinge of sorrow, our story overlaid with other hopes and disappointments.
‘Probably never seen anyone like us down their street before,’ you were saying, as we stepped back across the uneven cobbles of Fairfax Terrace. Yes, over those ten years you had stayed with your sense of social injustice. Entirely able to keep your intimate anxieties and public concerns in different boxes, you had changed jobs at regular intervals through the decade. You’d remained in health care management, though, the latest move taking you to a senior post in the Regional Health Authority teaching hospital. Now you were working to have the government guidelines implemented in the traumatic stress and bereavement counseling services. A couple of years later, you would edit a collection of papers on the subject.
Hands in pockets and the last of a smile on your face, you were leading the way across Ireton Road, through towards Jean’s college flat in the Halls of Residence. Now the streets were quite deserted. No one lived here any more. The area had been badly run down a decade earlier, but now there were just the shells of buildings, some without windows and roof, the floors caved-in, walls stripped or scorched from fires.
‘It’s as if a bomb had hit the place,’ you said.
We were walking along Mount Pleasant, its large houses set back from the road, and in what had once been the front gardens of wealthy people’s homes were only the burnt out shells of cars under trees scorched and blackened. Surely these buildings could not be saved.
‘Was there a riot or something here?’
‘One of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims was discovered in Mount Pleasant,’ you said.
September in the Rain Page 19