by John Berger
Thank you very much.
I had an aunt, he said, who maintained there were two golden rules about invitations to tea. One is that cucumber sandwiches and sponge cake are obligatory items, and the second is that guests have to insist upon leaving, and succeed in doing so, before six o’clock . . .
I heard the ticking of a pendulum clock on the shelf behind me. There were at least four clocks in the room.
I want to ask you a question about our art-school days, I said. Do you remember a girl, the same year as us, who was studying Theatre Costume? She went around a lot with Colette.
Colette! replied Hubert, I wonder what has become of her? She used to come in with a new dress every week, remember? Often with the pins still in it.
She used to stay with Colette in her rooms in Guildford Place, I said. The rooms were on the first floor, overlooking Coram’s Fields. She was short, snub-nosed, had large eyes, was a little plump. Not at all talkative.
Coram’s Fields, said Hubert. I saw a painting of them in a show the other day. By a young painter called Arturo di Stefano. Kids on a hot, hot day by a swimming pool playing with the water. Full of the eternity – if I may so put it – of childhood!
No swimming pool there then, I said. Just a boarded-up bandstand, and the tall trees that looked down at us in the morning when we looked out of the window.
I don’t think I was ever at Colette’s place, Hubert said.
Do you see whom I’m thinking about though?
Was it Pauline who had an affair with Joe, the framer?
No, no, dark hair, short dark hair! Very white teeth. A bit stand-offish, walked around with her nose in the air.
You’re not thinking of Jeanne with the two n’s to her name?
Jeanne was tall! This one was small, roundish, tiny. She used to go home for weekends to somewhere smart like Newbury. Was it Newbury? Anyway, she loved horses.
Why do you need to know her name?
I’ve been trying for a long time to remember her name, and it keeps escaping me.
Was it Priscilla?
It was a very common name, that’s what’s so strange.
Probably she got married, most art students got married in those days and then her family name would have changed.
I only want her first name.
Are you trying to trace her whereabouts today?
On Mondays in June she came with strawberries from the countryside and would hand them round the whole class.
She may be dead, don’t forget!
There are only a few people today whom I can consult, that’s why I came to you.
True, unfortunately true. We are not so many. What was her work like?
Dull. Yet as soon as she came into a room you knew she had a sense of style. She shone. She said nothing and she shone.
I’ve always maintained that style is the inheritance of a number of talents. A single talent, however great, does not yield a sense of style. Did I take one of my pills? I’m talking too much.
I didn’t see you do so.
I wish I could place her for you. I’m afraid I can’t. She’s gone.
Nobody wore hats in those days, and she did! She wore a hat as if she was going to the races! Askew on the back of her head.
He said nothing. I let him think. And the silence continued. Hubert had always been prone to silences – as if life hung by a thread and foolish talking might snap it. In the silence I could feel that, since Gwen’s death, the standards the two of them had established and maintained here had in no way changed. What this room liked was still the same.
Let’s go upstairs, he finally said, and I’ll show you St Paul’s, a splendid view of St Paul’s from the balcony of my bedroom.
We took the stairs slowly. He held himself very upright. On the first landing he stopped and said: This terrace was built in the 1840s and the houses were destined for clerks who worked in the City. Poor man’s Georgian, as you can see. And it didn’t work out. Within a generation they had all been turned into lodging houses, with one or a couple of tenants living on each floor. And so it remained for a hundred years. When we arrived, forty years ago, the houses on the other side of the street didn’t even have electricity. Only gas and paraffin lamps.
The wall of the staircase we were climbing was hung with sketches for textiles and framed samples of precious fabrics, some of them Persian-looking.
Before we bought this house it was a brothel, serving the lorry drivers who delivered goods to London from the North. Come into the bathroom. See that mirror with the mermaids? The tenants left it in the bedroom downstairs and Gwen insisted upon keeping it. Sometimes I see Beatrice in it, Gwen would say laughing, Beatrice waving at me! Beatrice was a whore and her name is scratched on one of the window panes in the drawing room.
As Hubert straightened the mirror on the bathroom wall, I caught a glimpse of his face in the glass and was reminded of him as a young man. Perhaps something to do with the glass being speckled and darkened, so that the expression in his eyes was by contrast more sparkling.
When we moved in we had no money, so we told ourselves it might take as long to make a house as it takes to make a garden. We restored it room by room, there are seven, floor by floor, year by year.
On the top floor Hubert led me across his bedroom towards the French windows which gave on to a terrace.
Mind the geraniums! he said. I keep them out here to water them every morning.
They smell so strong!
Bloody cranesbill, he said, or in Latin: Geranium sanguineum.
I picked one of the leaves and sniffed it. It reminded me of her hair.
During the war ordinary soap was scarce, and there were no shampoos, unless you bought them on the black market. So newly washed hair smelt of itself. I remember her washing her hair in the morning after getting out of bed. It was summer and warm, and the windows were open. She washed it in an enamel handbasin which she filled with water from an enamel jug. There was no hot water in Colette’s flat. Then she came back, with a towel wrapped round her head and nothing else on, lay down on the bed beside me and waited until her hair dried.
St Paul’s, Hubert said, there’s nothing else to match it! And built in record time, only thirty-five years! Work began nine years after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and it was finished in 1710. Christopher Wren was still around to see his masterpiece inaugurated.
He was reciting, almost word for word, what we had been obliged to learn by heart in the History of Architecture class. We were also obliged to go and draw the cathedral. It had survived many air raids unscathed, and had become a great patriotic monument. Churchill was filmed speaking in front of it. And when I drew its architectural details, I added Spitfire fighters in the sky behind!
The first time it was neither she nor I who made a choice. I had come to visit Colette after an evening class. We ate some soup. The three of us talked and it grew late. There was an air-raid warning. We switched off the lights and opened a window to watch the searchlights raking the sky above the trees in Coram’s Fields. The raiders didn’t seem especially near.
Sleep here, Colette proposed. It’s better than going out. We can all sleep in this bed, it’s large enough for four.
Which is what we did. Colette slept against the wall, she in the middle, and I on the outside. We took off most of our clothes but not all.
When we woke up, Colette was making toast and pouring cups of tea, and she and I were entangled together, legs and arms interlaced. We were not surprised by this, for both of us were aware of something more surprising: during the night each of us had put to sleep the other’s sex, not by satisfying it, or by denying it, but by following a different desire which even today it’s hard to name. No clinical descriptions fit. Perhaps it could only have happened in London during the spring of 1943. We found in each other’s arms a way of leaving together, a transport elsewhere. We arranged ourselves, fitted ourselves together as if we were making a sleigh or a skateboard. (Only skateboards didn’t
yet exist.) Our destination wasn’t important. Any departure was to an erogenous zone. What mattered was the distance we put behind us. We fed each other distance with every lick. Wherever our skins touched there was the promise of an horizon.
I stepped back into Hubert’s bedroom, and noticed that it was different from the rest of the house. There was a double bed in the corner, but Gwen had never slept up here. This room was provisional – as though during the last decade Hubert had been camping here. The walls were entirely covered with images of plants and flowers – unframed prints, drawings, photographs, pages torn from books – and they were placed so close together that they looked almost like a wallpaper. Many were attached by drawing pins, and they made me think that he was constantly rearranging them. Except for the slippers under the bed and the collection of medicines on the bedside table, it looked like a student’s room.
He noticed my interest and he pointed to a drawing, perhaps one of his own: Strange flower, no? Like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song! It originally came from Brazil. In English it’s known as Birthwort. In Latin: Aristolochia elegans. Somewhere Lévi-Strauss says something about the Latin name of a plant. He says the Latin name personalises it. Birthwort is merely a species. Aristolochia elegans is a person, singular and unique. If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name. Which you wouldn’t do, if you knew it as Birthwort.
I was standing by the French windows. Shall I shut them? I asked.
Yes, do.
You always sleep with the windows shut?
Funny you should ask that, for recently it has been something of a problem. Before it was simple – I left them open all night. Now, before I go to bed, I open them. The house is so narrow it tends to be stuffy as soon as all the windows are shut. The other night I thought of the clerks who lived here when the house was new. Compared to us, they had very little space in their lives. Cramped offices, cramped horse-buses, cramped streets, cramped rooms. Then, come the small hours, before it’s light, I get out of bed again and I go and shut the windows, so that when the street wakes up in the morning it’s quiet.
You sleep late?
I wake up early, very early. I think I shut the windows because I need a kind of protection at the beginning of each new day. For some time now I’ve needed calm in the morning so I can face it. Every day you have to decide to be invincible.
I understand.
I doubt it, John. I’m a solitary man. Come, I’ll show you the garden.
I had never before seen a garden like this one. It was full of bushes, flowers, shrubs, each flourishing, yet planted so close together it was impossible for a stranger to imagine finding a way between them. A single path led down to the canal and it was so tight one could only go down it walking sideways. Yet the density of the foliage was not like that of a jungle, but like the density of a closed book, which has to be read page by page. I spotted Michaelmas daisies, Winter jasmine, Powder-puff hollyhocks and, bordering the path, Ribbon Grass known as Lady’s Laces, and a citronella plant whose leaves, shaped like tongues, were growing in such a way, and had placed themselves in such an arrangement, that each was accommodated within the other’s space. Each had found a position beside, or under, or over, or between, or around, its neighbouring leaves that allowed it to receive some light, to bend with the wind, to probe in its natural direction. And the whole impenetrable garden was like this.
There was nothing here when we came, said Hubert, not even grass. It had been used for years as a dump for all the houses along the terrace. A dump behind the brothel. Old baths, a gas stove, smashed prams, rotten rabbit-hutches. Try some of these grapes.
He stepped up to a vine growing against a brick wall that separated the garden from the neighbour’s. Over each bunch of grapes he had placed a plastic bag to prevent the birds from eating them. He inserted his long hand inside one of these bags and, with his fingers, detached a few small white grapes, the colour of cloudy honey, and placed them on the palm of my hand.
The next time I went to Colette’s flat in Guildford Place it was understood from the start that I would spend the night there. Colette slept on another bed in the second room. I took off all my clothes and she put on her loose embroidered nightdress. We discovered the same thing as last time. Once put together, we could leave. We travelled from bone to bone, from continent to continent. Sometimes we spoke. Not sentences, not endearments. The names of parts and places. Tibia and Timbuktu, Labia and Lapland, Earhole and Oasis. The names of the parts became pet names, the names of the places, passwords. We weren’t dreaming. We simply became the Vasco da Gama of our two bodies. We paid the closest attention to each other’s sleep, we never forgot one another. When she was deeply asleep her breathing was like surf. You took me to the bottom, she told me one morning.
We did not become lovers, we were scarcely friends, and we had little in common. I was not interested in horses, and she wasn’t interested in the Freedom Press. When our paths crossed in the art school we had nothing to say to each other. This didn’t worry us. We exchanged light kisses – on the shoulder or the back of the neck, never on the mouth – and we continued on our separate ways, like an elderly couple who happened to be working in the same school. As soon as it became dark, whenever we could, we met to do the same thing: to pass the whole night in each other’s arms and, like this, to leave, to go elsewhere. Repeatedly.
Hubert was attaching an armful of stems with yellow flowers to a trellis with several lengths of raffia, his hands still trembling a little.
It’s getting chilly, he said, let’s go inside.
He shut and locked the door behind us.
This is my workroom – he nodded towards a large wooden bench with a chair in front of it – this week I’m putting seeds from the garden into little packets, each one properly labelled with its common and Latin names. Occasionally I have to look the Latin one up in the herbarium, my memory isn’t what it was, though I’m happy to say I don’t have to do it often.
What are these packets for? I asked.
I send them away. Every autumn I do the same. See these here. Love-in-a-mist. Nigella damascena. Two dozen packets.
You mean you sell them?
I give them away.
So many! You’ve got hundreds of packets!
There’s an organisation which calls itself ’Thrive’, and they distribute seeds to people in need – old people’s homes, orphanages, reception centres, transit camps – so that there are flowers in places where usually there would be none. It doesn’t make much difference, of course, I realise that, but at least it’s something. And for me, now, it’s a way of sharing the pleasures of the garden. It’s a satisfaction.
My recidivist erections were at first a distraction but once she had named them – we’ll call them London! she said – they took their place and became no more urgent than – or as urgent as – the damp fern smell of her sweat, her rounded knees, or the curly black hairs in her arse-hole. Everything under the blankets took us elsewhere. And elsewhere, we discovered the size of life. In daylight life often seemed small. For example, when drawing plaster casts of Roman statues in the Antique class, it seemed very small. Under the blankets she fingered the soles of my feet with her toes and sighed ’Damascus’. I combed her hair with my teeth and hissed ’Scalp’. Then as these or other gestures of ours became longer and slower and we succumbed to a single sleep, our two bodies took account of the unimaginable distances they offered one another and we left. In the morning we said nothing. We couldn’t make sentences. Either she would go and wash her hair, or I would go to the window at the foot of the bed and look out across Coram’s Fields and she would throw me my trousers.
My real problem, said Hubert, is in the drawers over there.
He pulled out a metal drawer which slid noiselessly towards us. Double imperial size, designed for storing architectural plans. The drawer was full of small abstract sketches and watercolours which gave the impression t
hey were derived from places. Perhaps microscopic places, perhaps galactic. Paths. Localities. Openings. Obstacles. All drawn with fluid washes and meandering lines. Hubert gave the drawer a soft push and it slid back on its rails. He pulled out another – there were a dozen such drawers – which, this time, contained drawings. Intricately drawn with a hard pencil, full of scudding movements, such as you see in clouds and running water.
What am I to do with them? he asked.
They are Gwen’s?
He nodded.
If I leave them here, he said, they’ll be thrown away after my death. If I make a selection and keep only what seem to me to be the very best, what do I do with the others? Burn them? Give them to an art school or a library? They are not interested. When she was alive, Gwen never made a name for herself. She was simply passionate about drawing, about ’capturing it’ as she put it. She drew almost every day. She herself threw a lot away. What’s in these drawers is what she wanted to keep.
He pulled out a third drawer, hesitated, and then selected with his slightly trembling hand a gouache and held it up.
Beautiful, I said.
What am I to do? I keep on putting it off. And if I do nothing, they’ll all be thrown out.
You must put them in envelopes, I said.
Envelopes?
Yes. You sort them. You invent any system you like. By year, by colour, by preference, by size, by mood. And on each of the big envelopes you write her name and the category you’ve established. It’ll take time. Not a single one must be misplaced. And in each envelope you put the drawings in order; you write a number very lightly on the back of each one.
An order according to what?
I don’t know. You’ll find out. There are drawings which look as if they should come first, and there’s always a last drawing, isn’t there? The order will take care of itself.
And what difference do you think these envelopes are going to make?
Who can tell? In any case they’ll be better off.
You mean the drawings?
Yes. They’ll be better off.