I switched on the torch and saw the sculptures peering out from between the columns: Cerberus, the three headed dog; the Chimera; Pan; and the she-goat. In one of the recesses was the marble statue of a Harpy which looked like a bird of prey except for the head which was that of a beautiful blank-faced woman. I followed the colonnade along until I came to the dark entrance marked in the drawing and went in.
I was now in a labyrinth of stone clad passages, just wide enough and high enough to allow me to walk upright. I took out Whittle’s plan and shone the torch on it. Why was I doing this? Was I imagining it all? What did I hope to find? I still don’t know. This is only what I remember.
As I came nearer to the core of the maze I began to hear noises. Someone was groaning faintly and breathing hard. I turned a corner and almost fell over a man in shirtsleeves and pale, baggy trousers crawling away from me. He looked up. It was Whittle. He was pale and there were red scratches or gashes on his throat. I stooped to pick him up but he shook his head at me and pointed in the direction that he had been crawling. The more I hesitated the more urgently he pointed forwards. Now I could hear both his gasps for breath and someone else panting ahead of me. So I left him behind and, with the help of his map, came to the circular space, about fifteen feet in diameter, at the heart of the maze.
My torch flashed about the round chamber whose roof went up to a single central keystone at the apex. It was like being inside a smaller version of the beehive tombs at Mycenae. My torch beam continued to travel until it halted on the thing which I had heard panting in the dark. It squatted on the floor in the very middle of the chamber. What I saw first were two human heads facing me, one above the other. I then made out their white bodies, the larger clasped to the other’s back, like a pair of mating toads. The body on top was that of a man, his face bloated and heavy with small glittering eyes and a long, lipless crack of a mouth that gaped uselessly. My heart began banging against my ribcage because I had recognised the face from the frontispiece of the guide. It was Dr Leichenfeld, and the face beneath his was that of his wife Aspassia. I saw for the first time her savage eyes stripped of their shades, and her hair uncovered. It was long, silky and white.
They remained there in the centre of the hive, heaving slightly, locked in their sweating, animal embrace, and though they made no move to attack me, the loathing and rage in their eyes was palpable. My right hand held the torch, my left felt in my trouser pocket and gripped Stavros’s worry beads with the little metal cross.
I did not turn. I backed out of the beehive tomb and slowly retraced my steps. When I came on Whittle again I lifted him up and together we staggered out of the Hollow City, up infinite numbers of steps and into the overworld where a reluctant sun was beginning to creep up from behind Mount Aidoneos.
The hotel seemed to be empty when we staggered in. I took Whittle to his room and locked myself in mine. Later that morning I told the Blue Overalls to prepare my bill because I was going. They seemed rather indignant about this: I could not leave, they said; no bus was going from the hotel that day into Chora. I asked them to order a taxi. No, there were no taxis on Thrakonisos. Very well, I said, I would walk to Chora, ‘meta podia’. They had no answer to this, so I went into the dining room, feeling that I had scored a victory.
There I received a final shock. Whittle and Madame Leichenfeld were sitting at their usual table taking breakfast. At least, he was devouring bread and jam while she was drinking her black coffee. She did not look at me at all, but Whittle stared at me for a while, blankly, without a trace of recognition on his face, while he crammed great gobbets of bread into his mouth. His skin seemed unnaturally waxy and smooth; his formerly pink complexion was as white as Madame Leichenfeld’s.
Immediately after breakfast I packed my rucksack and walked the six kilometres into Chora. There I spent the morning at the bar, drinking beer and reading Dodds until the afternoon ferry took me across the sea to the mainland.
I find it rather surprising now that these events did not have more effect on me at the time. Perhaps it was because the mind goes numb when it encounters what it cannot understand; and I had been, as the Ancient Greeks used to say, ‘a donkey at the Mysteries’. So I simply continued my tour of Greece and saw many lovely things. If there was a change in me, it was that I was less earnestly interested in the classical antiquity of the places I visited, and more generally concerned with their beauty and their people.
In this way I came to the Meteora in central Northern Greece to the East of the Pindus Mountains. The place is famous for the strange rock towers, great bony fists of stone that thrust their way upwards from the Thessalian plain. The wind whistles round them with a sound like the sea, and on them are perched the monasteries of the Meteora. Some are inhabited by large colonies of monks, and these are the most accessible and frequently visited ones, but I was determined to visit them all if I could.
The Monastery of St Simeon can only be reached by coming up from the valley floor and climbing the several hundred steps that are carved into the living rock of the pinnacle. I met no-one during my ascent. At the top of the steps I rang a bell at the monastery gate. A dark-robed monk with a long black beard, sunglasses and a limp answered my summons and in perfect silence escorted me round his domain, of which he was the sole human inhabitant. At the top of some clumsy wooden steps a cat arched its back and stared at us with indifference. The monk showed me the winch and pulley system by which he hauled up provisions from the ground below, then he took me to a chapel stained with mildew but painted all over with scenes from the life of Christ.
He moved about the chapel silently pointing out to me the various images painted on the walls. Several times I noticed him staring at me; then, with a sudden, impulsive movement, he led me over to a tiny side altar, no more than an apsidal niche. In the apse was the fresco of a scene which I later identified as the Anastasis: the Harrowing of Hell. Jesus, in a dynamic pose, unusual for the conventionally iconic style of painting, is dragging the dead from their tombs, his whole body redolent of the energy of the Risen Christ. I have come across this image many times since in Greek Orthodox iconography, but one detail, as far as I know, was unique to this particular image. The figure on the right whom Christ is dragging by the arm from his sarcophagus, was here being held back by a curious, pale, toad-like creature whose two long forelimbs were clasped round the man’s legs. The spectator is witnessing a moment of perfect equilibrium and suspense, the outcome of which remains for ever uncertain. Will the dead man be dragged free into Paradise, or is he to be hauled down again into the tomb? The monk said nothing to me but his finger pointed towards the scene for a long time, indicating first the toad, then Christ, then the toad again, then Christ. Finally he made the sign of the cross over me and led me into a small painted cell where he indicated that I should sign a visitor’s book. When I lifted my eyes from this task I found him standing by me with a small tray on which was a glass of ouzo and a piece of Turkish delight. While I consumed these he watched me in the same grave silence.
I had climbed down the pinnacle of St Simeon, and was walking along the road back to Kalambaka when I ran into an old school friend, Mark Hutton. Like me he was going up to Oxford in the autumn to read Mods and Greats, and before leaving England we had made vague arrangements to meet up on our travels. I was surprised by how relieved I felt to see his hearty, cherubic face. As we walked back to the village I told him about the classical sites I had visited. Without consciously avoiding the subject, I made no mention of Thrakonisos. At the end of my recital Mark stopped and studied me. A tiny frown wrinkled the freckled space between his eyebrows, a characteristic expression. My memory of it was dug up only last week while I was attending his memorial service.
‘Yes,’ he said ‘I can see you haven’t been lounging about on beaches, soaking up the sun and ogling maidens in bikinis. Are you sure you’re not taking all this classical archaeology a bit too seriously? No, really. There’s hardly any colour in your cheeks. You loo
k like death warmed up. Come with me. A few glasses of FIX should fix it. They shall be to you as the waters of Lethe were to the departed spirits in the Underworld.’
THE HEAD
It was a clear midwinter evening with the black branches of trees spidering across a dull gold sky: an Atkinson Grimshaw world. I was driving through St John’s Wood when the head appeared again. It was on the passenger seat beside me, as before, but for the first time it spoke. It said: ‘A bit Parkinson this evening, ain’t it?’ It was Ron’s head, of course, but I couldn’t be sure if it was his voice. The words were strange. Didn’t he mean ‘parky’? But ‘parky’ was not a word Ron would have used. He would have considered it vulgar.
Eighteen months ago I had been sent by my minicab firm to pick up a client in Glebe Place Chelsea. They knew I liked ‘the posh ones’; they also knew ‘the posh ones’ liked me. I’m young; I dress smart, always the suit; I’m saving money to get a degree and do something with my life. With me it’s more like a chauffeur for the night, though I draw the line at a peaked cap.
I rang the bell. It was one of those beautiful little old houses in a row with the fanlights above the door. I waited an age, but I didn’t ring twice because I knew clients didn’t like that. At last, through the fanlight, I saw a chandelier go on in the hallway and heard heavy dragging footsteps coming towards the door. There was a good deal of fumbling with locks before it opened. Then there was this huge man in an old fashioned dinner suit with watered silk lapels, leaning on an ebony cane.
‘I must apologise for keeping you waiting. Thank you for having had the patience to ring but once.’ He had these little fancy ways of talking.
At a guess I’d say he was in his late sixties, or early seventies, and he was big in every direction. Of course he was overweight, but he was tall—taller than me and I’m over six feet—and broad with it. I guessed he might have been an athlete as a young man, and I was right. He told me later he’d rowed for Cambridge.
His head was big too, with a high shiny cranium, one of those thin beaky noses, and a cluster of reddish grey curls clinging to the back of his head and around his enormous ears. I told him once he looked like a Roman emperor, and he was pleased with that. It was a head to remember.
It took a bit of time to get him into the back seat of the car because his left leg, which was swollen, was causing him terrible pain. Phlebitis, I think he said it was. Anyone else on this job would have said: ‘You oughtn’t to be going out with that leg of yours,’ or some such; but I’m different. I knew at once he was the kind of person who wouldn’t take that sort of shit from anybody, so I said nothing.
When he was safely in my car, he said: ‘I want you to take me to the Royal Academy if you would be so kind.’
Of course, I knew this already, but, just by way of conversation, I said: ‘Are you going to the opening of this new Matisse exhibition, then?’ In my rear view mirror I could see his face. He was impressed.
‘I am indeed. Are you an admirer of Matisse?’ he asked. I said I’d like to study him; I’d like to study art.
From Chelsea until we got to Burlington House he talked almost non-stop. Some of it was about art, but most of it I couldn’t understand at all. It was gossip about art dealers and exhibition curators. How this person managed to get to borrow a Velazquez for an exhibition from the Frick Collection but only by betraying this other bloke, that kind of thing. They sounded like a load of bloody sharks, no different from where I was born in the East End. Worse even. I gathered he was a dealer in a small way, but mostly he wrote about art for posh magazines.
When we got to the Academy we were allowed to drive right up to the front steps because of his leg. After I had helped him out he asked me to call back in an hour and a half and take him home. This had not been part of the arrangement but he handed me two twenty pound notes, so I agreed. Then he shook my hand.
‘My name is Ronald Pattinson, but you can call me Ron. Everyone calls me Ron.’ That was funny. He didn’t look at all like a Ron to me, but there you go.
After that he would ask for me specially. ‘I should like Mr Trevin to drive me,’ he would say to the firm. That’s my name, Ed Trevin, though Ron always called me Edward. And the firm would oblige him because he was a good payer which I didn’t mind either. And I was learning a lot from him.
If he was on his own and not meeting anyone, he would often take me in to see exhibitions, sometimes at the Tate and the R.A., but most often to private galleries in Cork Street and the Piccadilly area; provided I could find somewhere to park. I hadn’t known before that you can just walk into these places. Ron seemed to know everyone, and everyone seemed to know him, though I wondered if this was sometimes just his manner. He’d go into a gallery like you or I would go into our local pub. His voice was loud and he articulated clearly, so everyone heard his opinions good or bad.
Sometimes he would ask my opinion, but in a slightly lower voice. ‘Now, Edward dear, what do you think of this?’ Then he would listen to me—I spoke very low too—with his head on one side. If I said something he thought stupid he would make no comment, but if he liked anything about what I said he would take it up and make it seem clearer and cleverer than it was.
I think he got a kick out of my being with him. Once he introduced me to a gallery owner as ‘my nephew Mr Edward Trevone’. I don’t know why he changed the name, and I didn’t ask him. Maybe it was his way of making it all like into a play and me an actor in his play.
It didn’t worry me. He was teaching me how to see things and how to get Modern Art. ‘An abstract canvas looks easy to create;’ he used to say, ‘that is why it is so difficult to create well.’
He had decided opinions about everything in art. There were times when I thought he was trying to print his personal taste onto my mind; but I’m not a blank sheet of paper, or ‘tabula rasa’, as he would say. He would come out with things like: ‘Tracey Emin has only one subject, herself, and that is a lamentably inadequate one . . . Late Picasso is the work of a highly gifted senile delinquent . . . Rothko? My dear Edward: Privileged despair; tastefully padded cells for wealthy New York neurotics.’ I tried to argue with him about that one, but he wouldn’t be moved. He had very high standards.
I remember we were going round the Tate Modern once, and somehow I’d wangled a wheelchair for him. We stopped before a Jackson Pollock: ‘Look at that. Every drip seems meant doesn’t it? Now compare it with the Cy Twombly over there. Interesting passages, but hit and miss. Sometimes those scribbles are just scribbles. The man’s an amateur by comparison. Every mark must have its meaning.’
I saw inside his house once. Most of his things were old, but he had a little Paul Klee water-colour of what might be multicoloured rooftops that I wanted to walk away with, and above the fireplace was a Francis Bacon. It was an early work and Ron said it was a portrait Bacon had done of him when he was young, but I couldn’t see how it could be a real portrait. It was this man sitting in a dark bluey-greeny space. He’s a big man in a grey suit, you can see that, but where the head ought to be there’s just a black space and a few silvery vertical lines. Maybe there’s just the suggestion of an open mouth and teeth, but it’s hard to tell. I told him it was obvious from the picture that he was a very good looking chap when he was young and he laughed. That was the sort of joke he enjoyed: sharp and ironical, like him.
Of course, when I took him to visit the people he called his friends, I’d stay in the car. In fact, though he was very lame, he did not even want to be escorted to the front door. He sometimes insisted that I park way down the street out of sight of his friend’s house and that he should do the painful walk there unhelped.
I only once met one of his friends. It was a house in Holland Park and, as usual, I was parked some way down the road from it. I’d been there about an hour—it was a lunch date, I think—when I heard this tapping on the window. It was a Filippino maid: ‘Mr Edward, you come,’ she said. I followed her to the house where Ron was lunching. It turned o
ut that Ron’s host, Mrs Argenti, having heard of my interest in Modern Art, had insisted I come in and see her collection of Barbara Hepworth drawings.
You could tell at once it was the house of a very rich person because all the walls and curtains and upholstery were white or cream and looked brand new. Only very rich people can afford the servants needed to keep all that white stuff looking spotless. The furniture was antique French; the pictures were modern.
I was shown into the drawing room where I saw Ron, sitting, hunched over his ebony cane, looking, I thought, rather ratty. Mrs Argenti stood beside him, a small woman in her sixties, thin as a skeleton, in an Armani trouser suit. Her skull of a head was topped by an ash blonde coiffure, like a dollop of whipped cream on a tombstone. She directed me to a wall where the Hepworth drawings hung. Very fine they were too; I hadn’t known she drew as well as sculpted.
I suppose I ought to have enjoyed them more, but all the time I was conscious of Mrs Argenti looking at me. She’d heard something about me from Ron and had called me in out of curiosity, I suppose. I was just another thing for her greedy little eyes to take in, like the Hepworth drawings. I hoped that was why Ron was looking so down about it all, but I don’t think it was.
He had some funny habits, Ron, as well as a funny way of talking. Once I caught him jacking off in the back of my motor; but he didn’t seem much embarrassed. ‘I found myself having my annual erection,’ he said, ‘and sought swift relief. These things are a mere passing nuisance in old age, no longer an obsession. And don’t worry, I shall not stain your valuable upholstery: I have tissues to hand.’ When we stopped at the next traffic lights, he threw the tissue out of the window.
Then he asked me if I had a girlfriend. I said no, they got in the way; so he asked me what I did for sex. I told him I wasn’t that bothered, but that I would get a blow job from a tom from time to time if I wanted to get rid of my dirty water. But a high class pro, mind: no dogs, no rubbish. This made him laugh for some reason. I asked him why but he wouldn’t tell me.
The Ballet of Dr Caligari Page 3