On the day of the opening, he sent a note which said ‘Your singing gave me a fright,’ and before she knew what she was doing, she had written back, ‘What do you mean not coming tonight?’ God. Fuck. Christ. She screwed up her reply and threw it into the bin, looked at it for a while, then screwed it up some more and pushed it down to the bottom.
FOUR
Juliet decided that most of the women at the opening were variations on Tania. Like her, they had vague features defined by bright lipstick and characterful glasses, and wore detailed clothes in strong muted colours such as mustard and plum. Their shoes were ill-fitting and overly eccentric. There were others who wore black and grey, and did not use their hands when they talked. They varied from slender to statuesque but always along straight lines – like Juliet.
She shoved her way into one knot of people after another, elbowing and grumbling and thrusting out a tray of drinks, and was hovering crossly by a group who had not noticed her when she nudged someone’s back with her tray so that he turned and the group parted and she came face to face with the person they had been listening to. This woman was taller, fairer, heavier and maybe ten years older than Juliet, who instantly thought of her as someone to be admired.
The woman kept talking as she took a drink. Her hair was a blend of silver, ash and sand, and her clothes were an equally technical combination of kingfisher and cobalt blue. She wore jade leather boots and a cashmere shawl in the babiest of blues round her shoulders. Her eyes were dolly blue and her face had an expensive liquid finish. Her voice was avid and cool. She did not look at Juliet or say thank you, nor did she pay any attention to her audience but peered beyond them. Just as Juliet turned away, the woman craned forward and seemed to grow and to soften, and then her over-stretched smile collapsed into a small ‘o’.
‘Oh,’ said Barbara as she realised that the person at whom Jacob was directing the full force of a smile she had not seen for years was not as she had thought for a moment herself, but someone standing between them. The plain thing handing round the drinks. Boyish, cropped and scrubbed, with the virtue in Jacob’s eyes of not being one of the grown-ups. ‘Oh.’
Juliet, who had seen none of this, was looking for another group to interrupt when a hand landed on her shoulder and a mouth brushed her ear. ‘You are so rude.’
Juliet put the tray down on the floor and reached up to embrace her brother. ‘Have a drink, Carlo. Thank you so much for coming. Fred’s buggered off to some banker’s do. Have six.’
‘I’ll have two. A green and a blue?’
‘Good choice. The pink’s dreadful.’
‘Come outside for a smoke.’ Juliet grabbed the hem of Carlo’s jacket and leaving the tray on the floor, led him towards the back door.
‘Do you have to stick around all night?’ he asked.
‘I’m not going to.’
‘The Natural Fringe are playing at The Glory Hole. We could walk over and give them a bit of an audience.’
‘Double family duty for you tonight then.’
They were about to go back inside to get more drinks when a man approached and asked for a light.
‘Sure.’ Carlo pulled out a box of matches and began to strike one after the other into the man’s cupped hand. They would not stay alight. ‘Sorry.’
The man shrugged and dropped his cigarette. ‘Never mind.’ He did not walk on but stood there, smiling at Juliet.
‘Hello,’ said Juliet.
‘Hullo,’ he replied. ‘Hullo, you.’
Even after Juliet had explained to Carlo about the wall, and how they had to listen to each other all day but had never before met (not mentioning the notes), and Carlo had laughed and introduced himself (‘The big little brother!’), and everyone had run out of things to say, Jacob made no move to leave them.
‘What do you think of the show?’ he asked.
Juliet had spent days helping to hang works and lay out installations. There had been nothing that she would choose to touch or enter.
‘It’s a shipping office,’ she said. ‘I should be recording cargoes not collating mailing lists.’
‘Same thing,’ Jacob countered softly.
‘No it isn’t, it’s more like –’
‘We really ought to be getting over the river,’ said Carlo, offering an apologetic nod to Jacob.
‘We have to go and support … someone we know, who … sings a bit,’ Juliet explained.
‘Sounds great.’ Jacob was nodding at everything she said. He kept nodding until Juliet found herself nodding back, which he appeared to take as an invitation.
Carlo began to walk towards the main road and Juliet wanted to follow him but was unable to turn away from Jacob, who was still nodding, smiling, staring.
She stepped backwards, ‘It was nice to meet you at last,’ and then tripped and stumbled, which meant that he could catch her elbow, steady and steer her.
Carlo looked resigned when Juliet appeared with Jacob, who had only just let go of her arm. She could not think of anything to say because the situation seemed so momentous, but also hilarious. Jacob raised his arm to hail a taxi and then dropped it again because Carlo spotted a bus, which took them as far as Waterloo.
Crossing the bridge, they passed a girl huddled against the wall in a sleeping bag, who reached out and tugged at Jacob’s coat.
‘Got any change,’ she sneered. The styrofoam cup in front of her contained a few coppers.
Jacob muttered ‘Sorry,’ without looking at her and did not slow down. Carlo appeared not to notice whereas Juliet paused, dug into her pocket and passed the girl some change. Jacob looked back, hesitated, patted his own pockets and walked on. He reached the next beggar first, a man who cradled a can of beer inside his leather jacket and did not look up but belched as Jacob dropped several coins in front of him without being asked. Juliet looked cross, even more so when the young man asked her if she had any change.
‘I only give to women,’ she announced and strode past.
Going down the steps on the north side, they passed another beggar who was buried in his sleeping bag with one hand protruding, keeping a grip on his cup. Carlo threw something in, saying primly, ‘And I only give to sleeping bags!’
Juliet guffawed and took Carlo’s arm, while Jacob hung back as if repelled by the force of her laughter, but he continued to follow the brother and sister through the streets and into Soho, where a weedy neon sign above some basement steps pointed the way down to The Glory Hole.
The more he drank, the more Carlo swelled out of his chair. He leaned comfortably against his sister. ‘If he wants to keep buying the drinks, let him. Just be a good girl and give him a nice time later on.’
‘He’s married.’
‘He doesn’t look married. He doesn’t even look grown up.’
Jacob was making his way towards them, holding three plastic glasses of colourless lager. A withered slice of lime clung to the rim of each.
Carlo whispered, ‘Do you think he keeps that hat on in bed?’
Juliet smacked his arm. ‘It’s only a hat.’
‘Oh no it’s not,’ he said, nodding at Jacob who was trying to squeeze the drinks onto the full table, ‘it’s corduroy.’
‘So,’ said Jacob, ‘what’s this band called?’
‘The Natural Fringe,’ Carlo replied.
‘Interesting, it suggests –’
‘They’re named after a haircut.’
Jacob appeared about to laugh.
Juliet explained: ‘Our friend, the singer – her mother used to cut her hair when she was a child and she had a thing against neatness. You should see the photos. The poor girl looked like a juvenile psychiatric patient.’
‘She was one, wasn’t she, after she walked on water?’ pondered Carlo.
Jacob turned away, not listening.
The DJ began to play some bebop. Carlo stood and hauled Juliet up after him. She shook her head and turned back to Jacob, who was tapping his foot and clicking his fingers in a limp, exaggeratedly offbeat
manner. What could she say to him? She followed Carlo.
The Glory Hole had been a jazz club, a discotheque and a punk venue, and in these indecisive times was something of each. Carlo pushed his way onto the kidney-shaped dancefloor. He grabbed his sister, reeled her in and then set off in a tight circle. Used to this, Juliet gave in and kept her balance as best she could, determined not to let Jacob’s presence embarrass her; only it did, terribly.
The lights went down and a saxophonist began to play a few notes, then paused and played a few more. He played rushing trills and deep swoops, as if sticking to the edges of whatever piece of music he might have been playing. Eventually, a pianist joined him and their instruments fell into a dialogue in which nothing accumulated or added up. This kind of music annoyed Jacob as things do when they reflect your own nature.
A woman made her way out from behind a curtain to stand between them. She was small and pale, and wore a long black dress that fell from her white collarbone to her white ankles. On her feet were a pair of apricot satin high-heeled sandals, which looked too big. Her mouth was red and her wide weak eyes were outlined in black. Her dark hair was pinned back in a knot. She started to sing: The cold begins to tell, outside a long long while … and the piano and saxophone fell into place behind her.
Jacob was more interested in the band once the girl had joined them, even though she pushed the words out of shape as much as the musicians did the tune. She looked frail and disturbing, and her voice was so clear that her singing seemed to move meaning out of the way, leaving the air full of unanchored feeling. What song was it anyway? People stopped trying to work it out. They liked her voice; the details didn’t matter.
The band finished, the audience began to clap, and the woman stepped forward and froze. She raised a hand as if about to reach out, only her palm flattened and her gesture became a sign, ‘Stop’. Then she was gone. There were one or two whoops and whistles, and a call for an encore, but the applause quickly faded. At this moment, Carlo and Juliet got to their feet and began to chant ‘Mary George! Mary George!’ and the rest of the crowd, encouraged or amused, joined in: ‘Mary George! Mary George!’
A taxi pulled up in the sidestreet next to the Shipping Office and a woman in a fluffy blue coat and noisy heels got out. She marched round to the back of the gallery and banged on Jacob’s door. She rattled the handle and gave the door a kick, but Jacob was not there. He was at The Glory Hole, standing behind Juliet, his mouth inches from the back of her neck and his finger tracing, without touching, the shape of her large flat ears and the pattern on her nape where her cropped hair revealed its curl.
Barbara Dart had gone to the Shipping Office in the middle of the night to take Jacob his post. Every envelope had been opened and some had been scribbled on. Barbara had no doubt about her right and need, a practical one, to know what was going on.
As she expected, the padlock on his door was not quite in place. When she first met him, he had carried a knapsack full of books, cigarettes, fruit and beer, overloaded and loosely buckled, and whatever escaped had been left where it fell. She laid the post on his bed and began to flick through his papers: half an essay on Bob Dylan and the flâneur, the beginnings of a letter to his mother, an old-fashioned porn magazine, a list of what looked like payments and debts, a gift catalogue and other circulars to which Jacob paid so little attention that he did not even throw them out. Barbara opened every cupboard, box and drawer in Jacob’s room, not looking for anything in particular and finding nothing she wanted.
The night Barbara realised that Jacob was not coming back, at least not for now, she had poured the contents of his study into binbags and left them here on his doorstep. Now they were just inside the room, squashed and split and leaking a mixture of intimacies with which she was rawly familiar. Jacob asserted his independence by leaving his secrets around, and Barbara had spent years coming across things beginning with the notes from other girls while they had been living together at university – heated, high-minded exchanges he insisted were necessary and harmless. Even back then, in his twenties, he had kept copies of everything he wrote to other people and here they were. There were letters to people he wanted to sleep with or wanted to be, so finely tuned that you might think him calculating and manipulative. To Barbara he was none of these things, just frightened, driven and beyond himself. ‘You understand me,’ he liked to say and she liked to believe she did.
Juliet and Carlo, with Jacob close behind, emerged from The Glory Hole into the heightened air of a cold still night. They shivered and toughened, and Juliet wondered that she could feel so distinct. Carlo whispered something to her and said goodnight. Jacob offered to put her on a bus.
Juliet savoured these after-hour streets with their residue of drama and secrets; it was like being on stage just after a play had ended. She walked carefully beside Jacob, who led her left and right and into dead ends which turned out to be alleyways connecting places Juliet recognised but had not known to be within reach of one another.
A heavy, anonymous door swung open and a giant in evening dress hauled in a cordon of purple rope knotted onto silver plastic bollards. Further, a dug-up pavement herded them into a cratered hallway next to a board on which two hands held out a pair of perfectly circular breasts. They negotiated the pungent, leaking binbags outside a restaurant and the heap of empty crates propped against the shuttered windows of a delicatessen. Jacob noted the charm of the boarded-up front of a fishmonger’s, which Juliet thought sad. He complained about the hard-lit, alarmed and bolted entrances of photographic agencies and film companies, and said nothing about the side-doors lined with cards and intercoms. A café, little more than a counter, served coffee to a couple wearing city suits who could not stop kissing. A pair of teenagers in pumped-up jackets and low jeans swaggered past looking flushed and lost, and Juliet watched them go with the feeling that they were carrying on something she had left off. She did not listen to their music or take their drugs, and was about to remark on this to Jacob when she realised that she could probably say the same about him, too.
A tall, finely painted woman brushed against Jacob (deliberately! Juliet could tell) and dropped an elbow-length glove, which he leapt to retrieve. The woman said an elaborate thank-you in a crooning baritone and sailed on as if it were a hundred years ago, a time when ladies wore gloves and their dropping one meant something. Three men, arms linked, walked past with luxurious slowness, their skin wet and their breath feathering the air. A police car idled by.
Juliet and Jacob continued on, past the all-night cinema where Carlo was fighting sleep in the back row, struggling to follow the plot of a subtitled Russian film in which a telephone kept ringing. He was there because he had a crush on the projectionist, who was also a masseur, and whose card was on the noticeboard in the cinema foyer. Jonathan Mehta. Carlo tried to concentrate on the film. No one picked up the telephone.
A woman came in and pushed past him without saying ‘Excuse me’. Her bag knocked against his knees, but she didn’t apologise. She sat down beside him and stuck out her elbows, letting her fluffy coat spill against his arm. When her body started shaking, he turned to join in her laughter only to see that she was crying. Although she swung her head so that her slithery blonde hair covered her eyes, Carlo had seen her face, its feathering surface and the dark runnels under her eyes, and he apologised, ‘Sorry’, and standing up said ‘Excuse me’, as he left.
Jacob, who had had something to say about every other building they passed, stopped talking, giving Juliet the chance to wonder: ‘So what is it you do … in your room?’
‘I write.’
‘What?’
‘I write.’
‘No, I meant what do you write?’
‘You are endearingly emphatic. I write on art and architecture, and about the cultural life of the city.’
‘Should I have heard of you?’
‘Yes.’
Juliet snorted. ‘Well I have, sort of. That is I’ve got Foucault’s Eg
g, but I haven’t read it. I forgot it was by you.’
‘You didn’t know me.’
‘Actually, I didn’t read it because I thought I did know you, at least your type.’
‘And what is my type?’
‘You use words like “quiddity” and “ineffable” more than you ought. Your prose is awash with parentheses and you usually throw in some casual Latin and slangy French, oh and an anecdote about Goethe’s socks which makes it sound as if you washed them yourself when you haven’t even actually read him …’
She stopped and looked at his face. He was staring at the ground with a tight smile that she took to signal amusement, especially when he said, with such dryness, ‘Do go on.’
‘You use cricketing terms, and refer to your “wireless”. At parties, you look ostentatiously blank if anyone refers to a television personality, but you sometimes throw in a reference to something terrifically in-touch like hip-hop or acid house.’
‘But who am I?’ His smiling face revealed nothing.
‘I only said I know your type,’ Juliet continued unabashed, ‘not you.’
‘And do you have a type?’ he asked, still showing no sign of annoyance.
‘Inevitably. Do you know it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can you sum it up? Like I did?’
‘Is that what that was? The summary of a type? Well, well.’
Juliet stumbled, feeling that the path beneath her feet was nothing more than ice and that at any moment she would plunge through and drown in her own embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, it’s just that there’s so much of all that.’
‘All what?’
‘So much charm, and it works. I read that kind of stuff and I am charmed but I’m not satisfied. I don’t feel I’ve been given anything to grapple with, to grasp. It’s so mobile and non-committal. It wants to come across as modest when it’s not even shy, just unwilling.’
‘Unwilling?’
An Irresponsible Age Page 4