by Alex Monroe
That night, that didn’t help at all though, not for me. I just felt lonely and depressed instead. I was probably simply too tired, but being surrounded by beautiful people having fun seemed to compound my bad temper. And then of course I felt even more disappointed, frustrated at my own inability to join in. I began to hate everyone around me for having so much fun, and myself for failing to.
Just as I was about to leave, I saw the face of the most exquisite-looking girl I had ever seen in my entire life. She was chatting with a group of her friends, on the far side of the overexcited, heaving barroom, and they were quite obviously all models. Even in that crowd she stood out. A peacock of a girl. Young, tall and slim. Perfect skin, no make-up, and with that air of confidence peculiar to the incredibly rich or the incredibly beautiful. Her eyes were clear and grey, and she had light hair, a high forehead, a strong jaw and an aquiline nose. She was the kind of woman I’d only seen before in a Dolce & Gabbana advert.
She made me feel more out of my depth than ever. I was an imposter, a gatecrasher. This was not my world.
Fuck it. I’m leaving.
I drained my champagne, and the music muddled in my head. I looked down at my empty glass, then back to the girl. Across the room she was unpopping another bottle of champagne. I watched her as she tentatively eased the cork out with her thumbs, holding the bottle away and squinting in anticipation of the bang. Through the noise, I heard the cork pop. But instead of flinching, she calmly raised her eyes and fixed me with a look.
I was paralysed by it. And then a moment later . . . plop! The cork landed in my empty glass.
When I looked towards the girl again, she was still staring at me but now she was smiling. Every romantic cliché came into play at once. I felt transformed. Everything else evaporated. The noise and the people; my tiredness and depression. I walked straight across the room and said hello in my best French. (Thank God for Paris Match.)
Salut. Tu veux quelque chose à boire? she replied.
And I did. I badly wanted a glass of that newly opened champagne and I wanted her to pour it for me.
Her name was Johanna and we arranged to meet the following day.
I’m working on the little feather first, the one I pulled from my pillow, soldering now instead of engraving. I solder half-round tapered wire onto my cut-out, gently curving it to form quill and shaft. The wire is so thin that when the solder melts, it is sucked down onto the feather by the capillary strength of the molten metal. Even after adding the quill, my feather looks too flat. I need to work on that anticlastic form, shape it in such a way that it curves on two planes – a curving curve, if you like. It’s a pattern that’s both natural and mathematical, suggestive of order and disorder at once. You see it in an unfurling leaf, a saddle, the spout of a beaten metal jug.
The quickest way to create that movement here will be to make a couple of formers and squeeze the feather between them. It’s a prospect that cheers me immediately. I love making special tools for particular jobs and I have drawers full of them, some of which are still used all the time, others not for decades. There are hammers in daily use which I turned on a lathe at college, hand-forged repoussé punches, and most recently a very successful clamp I made to hold pearls while we filed their backs flat in order to be able to glue them.
I’ll need a relatively soft material to bend a tiny silver feather. Not too soft, though. Boxwood, I decide, and then start to hunt through my wood store. I’m pretty certain I’ve got the right thing hoarded away somewhere. Yes – I pull out a handful of old boxwood punches like a fistful of Cuban cigars. Drawing the curve of the quill onto the first piece of wood, I file either side of the centre line away into a shallow V-section. On the second punch I file exactly the same shape in reverse, so the two fit perfectly into each other. I clamp one punch into the vice and carefully lay my feather on it. Then I hold the second punch on top and, mallet in hand, I give it a whack.
A pot of buff-sticks (pieces of wood covered with emery paper) in the Elephant and Castle workshop.
A rack of hammers in my workshop.
Placing the little feather on my bench in front of me, I take a long look at it. It’s almost as if someone has just plumped up a great big silver pillow and one feather has escaped and floated down to settle where it lies on my workbench. Success. I carefully unclamp the boxwood punches and put them neatly in my bottom drawer, wondering if I’ll ever use them again.
It didn’t seem real when we met and it didn’t seem any more real when Johanna and I walked through the Tuileries the next morning. Pleached trees, hoggin paths and fast-scudding white clouds across a spring-blue sky. I was the Dauphin out promenading with Marie-Antoinette. I was Henry of Navarre meeting my Marguerite. We strolled towards a group of old men, boules players discussing a point. Their chatter tailed off as we approached and they stood and gawped as Johanna floated by. I could swear there were twelve solid plops as they each dropped their boules in astonishment. I think I even heard a sigh. It reminded me of the song ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, and I was pretty sure that every person she passed went, ‘ah’.
We strolled past beautifully planted beds of nicotiana, burgundy and cream against green. Men stared and women glared. Leaving the gardens, we crossed the Pont Royal and walked south along the Rue du Bac. The road is long and narrow but right at the far end, past the Metro station and past Rue de Babylone, there is rather a plain stone wall on your right. It has low, barred windows and a dark wooden-arched doorway. It’s a secret place that you could easily miss: the Chapelle Notre Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuse. On this very spot in 1830, the Blessed Virgin appeared to a novice called Catherine Labouré, one of the Daughters of Charity. She gave her a medal, which came to be known as miraculous. Johanna took me there as if letting me into a secret.
We pushed open the heavy door and stepped through into a hushed courtyard. Then through a side door and into a kind of anteroom, which led into the chapel itself. Inside was lush, hushed and mysterious. Frescoed walls, gold, marble and Virgin Mary blues. Johanna crossed herself as we entered, then she kneeled down at a pew to pray. This just added to her allure for me – I find the rituals of Catholicism fascinating. I looked round like a common tourist, and then we both lit candles. Johanna seemed to make a little prayer as she lit hers. I just pretended and tried to look thoughtful.
The gift shop was a shining cornucopia of trinkets, and the miraculous medals cheaply mass-produced ovals not much bigger than a fingernail. The Virgin Mary stands on a sphere, crushing a serpent’s head. She holds her hands out by her sides, palms facing out, beams of holy light radiating from them. An inscription in French reads: O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you.
On the back is a capital M entwined with a cross, twelve stars – for the twelve Apostles – and two tiny flaming hearts. One is wrapped in a crown of thorns – the Sacred Heart, who died for our sins. The other is bleeding, pierced by a sword: the Immaculate Heart, who intercedes for us. The detail is superb.
The medals are described as miraculeuse, lumineuse et douloureuse – miraculous, radiant and sorrowful. Miraculous because they were thought to have protected so many from a terrible outbreak of cholera in the 1830s. Radiant because the immaculate Virgin Mary is depicted wearing bejewelled rings on her fingers from which a light shines, radiating from the gemstones down onto the earth. Sorrowfulness is shown in the hearts on the back.
I loved these little medals and bought several, unconvinced that they would offer me any kind of protection. But the shop was also full of other tokens. A whole host of little medals, some antiqued and some enamelled, mostly in that lovely Mary blue but some in yellows and oranges, translucent so the images below were revealed. I bought several rosaries as well, to hang beside my grandmother’s above my workbench.
We left the chapel and stepped out into the sunlight, heading for the Luxembourg Gardens. By now I had grown used to the way people stared at us. After all, they were mere mortals. I, on the o
ther hand, was walking with an angel. We found a quiet spot and sat down on the grass until a park keeper spotted us. Pelouse interdite! He chased us out of the park, while we laughed like drains. Then it rained. A sudden springtime shower sluicing out of the sunshine, making us dash for cover and huddle close together in a doorway on Rue de Vaugirard. We dried off in a café on Boulevard Saint-Germain where, over coffee, Johanna showed me her book.
There’s nothing unusual about a model carrying her book – a small, black-bound mini-portfolio of 8- by 10-inch photos and pages torn from magazines to show off her best work. You never know when you might be called to a casting. I leafed through it, lustfully, aware of Johanna’s eyes on me. She looked more and more gorgeous in each one, and seemed to wear fewer and fewer clothes. If this was courtship, I approved. Beauty was everything to me.
I turned another page. There she was in black and white, wearing nothing but a pair of knickers. She stood there looking defiantly into the camera, arms by her side and feet planted firmly. There must have been a fan blowing because her hair was billowing wildly. I looked at the image. I knew she was watching me. My mind swam. I was drowning fast.
In my best French but with the strongest of English accents I said, Wonderful lighting. Yup . . . mmm . . . great composition too . . . um . . . oh yes, I really like this one.
Then she asked me if I had ever seen Quatre mariages et un enterrement. I was confused by the question. I told her I didn’t know.
But the words must have meant something to me, for at this moment I produced a ring I had brought to give her. It was a chunky silver trinity ring, three thick bands intertwined into a sort of Turk’s head. She loved it, she said. She rolled it onto her slender, tanned finger, where it shone brilliantly against her skin, the sunlight bouncing off it in blinding flashes.
Johanna asked me if I liked the theatre and I lied and told her I loved it. She had a couple of tickets to see Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in an out-of-the-way arty place and did I want to come? I lied again and told her I loved Samuel Beckett. And I offered to pay. Secretly I thought nothing could be so awful it wasn’t worth the pleasure of sitting next to her in the dark. And after that?
I packed up a few belongings and hitchhiked to London in the back of a battered old Ford transit van. A friend of a friend heard that the drummer of a band called Kissing the Pink had just moved out of a room in Leytonstone. I found the house, handed over some cash and sat in my new room, feeling very sorry for myself. It had been painted black and used for Satanic ceremonies, and inverted pentograms were drawn on every wall, so the first thing I did was to buy a pot of white paint and redecorate.
The next day I took the Tube into town and got off at Sloane Square. This was 1982 and the King’s Road was close to heaven for an arty boy from Suffolk. Punks. Post-punks. New Romantics. You almost looked out of place if you weren’t wearing make-up. I headed straight for BOY, a cool boutique where they sold clothes designed by Vivienne Westwood. I bought a massively oversized T-shirt printed with four words, LEAVE THE BOY ALONE, and a pair of black jodhpur-style trackpants with zips running all the way up the back of each leg.
London was electric. Prince Charles had just got married and Brixton had rioted (you could still feel the tension), while yuppies flaunted their new-found wealth. The IRA blew up a military band and their horses in Hyde Park and we had just finished a war with Argentina. Now Margaret Thatcher turned her sights on the unions. The police were the fist of the state and, as such, became the enemy. Out of this madness a New Romantic style was emerging, a softer evolution of punk, which suited me better. Not that punk was exactly dying out. Rainbow-coloured Mohicans made a few quid by getting photographed by tourists, and Rockabillies hung out at Camden Market. Hip-hop and rap had just arrived from America along with ridiculously large trainers. And I got a place at university to study jewellery.
I wasn’t expecting to see a friend with Johanna when she turned up to meet me at the Metro station that evening. I disguised my disappointment and kissed them both on the cheek. Following them down the steps, I began fiddling around for some money for a ticket, but without a pause in their chatter, the two girls jumped the barriers and strolled on.
Um . . . Hello? Je n’ai pas un billet . . . attendez un moment . . .
But they were gone. So I leaped the barriers too and caught up.
We surfaced in a tatty district. The theatre was freezing cold, the seats were hard and I found the play hard work too. Four actors on an empty stage talking a lot. Hamm is blind and stuck in a wheelchair. Clov pushes him around every now and then. Nagg and Nell have no legs and live in a dustbin. That much I understood. But my French isn’t really that good. It isn’t a long play but that’s not how it felt. When Johanna asked me halfway through if I understood everything, I just lied some more and said yes. She must have known it wasn’t true, for she then explained that the characters were realising the inevitability of their end. I sympathised with them.
Afterwards, in another café, the girls whispered to each other. Johanna’s friend asked me if I was sure that I hadn’t seen Quatre mariages et un enterrement. I said I was sure. Years later I realised they had typecast me as a bumbling public-school Englishman of the Hugh Grant variety. Johanna was as deluded about my attractions as I was about hers.
We met again once or twice before I went home. She popped in to Première Classe and we went for a coffee, arm in arm. Nothing more than that ever really happened, not so much as a proper kiss. It wasn’t for want of longing on my part. But somehow the opportunity never quite arose. I wrote to her after returning to London. A few weeks later I pretended I had to come to Paris on business and we arranged to meet in the Café Bonaparte on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This time, I’d do things properly, I promised myself.
I was early, so I took a seat outside, looking out onto the Place with the church on my left. When Johanna arrived she was with another friend. This one was a handsome young man. He was dressed in the style of the internationally wealthy. A European version of the Ralph Loren Ivy League look, all perma-tan and Ray-bans. She introduced us and of course he was utterly charming, a viscount or something from Montenegro. I couldn’t help hating him. They sat and held hands as I finished my coffee as quickly as I could and made my excuses, watching her sadly, my girl from Ipanema.
After we moved to Freston, my parents got proper jobs again. By the time the great storms swept across the country in 1987 the house was big enough to fit us all in with ease, and all but Tom had flown the nest. That October night a heavy bough from the massive elm that stood behind the house came down and landed right on top of it. The building works began again. The repairs were all finished by Christmas and the whole family got together to celebrate.
All four older children had returned to their new lives, Tom was studying in Ipswich and my parents had left for work when, early on the morning after Twelfth Night, the neighbours heard an explosion. It may have been an electrical fault or perhaps defective gas pipes. A fireball thundered through the house and within minutes the whole place was alight. The fire engines arrived to find the house blazing and thick black smoke billowing out into the surrounding countryside.
The firemen had gone by the time I arrived from London. Just a few policemen were there, filling in forms, offering my mother their condolences, picking over the warm remains for clues. About three-quarters of the house had been virtually destroyed. The top section had been curiously cut off about 5 feet from the ground, leaving a precise black jagged line between what remained and what had disappeared. It was like a cartoon. I stared at a pine dresser in the kitchen. Again, it might have been sliced precisely in half by a white-hot scythe, neat rows of cracked plates below, emptiness above. By the sink I noticed a puddle of white plastic, like melted candle wax, pooled over a spiralled electric element. A bare copper flex was attached to it, like a tail. This had once been a kettle.
One section of the house – about a quarter of the building – stood taller. My
parents’ bedroom remained, but it was open to the sky. Downstairs, I pushed at a brittle, charcoaled door, which still hung on its hinges. I saw a blackened soggy bed. A wardrobe full of clothes.
The fire made the front cover of the Evening Star: fire ravages luxury home. One of the policemen told me that we could expect looters in the night. If it’s in the papers, they’ll come from miles around. Great.
Tom and I volunteered to stand guard. Sifting through the wreckage we found several bottles of wine still intact, and a good selection of spirits that had been lurking at the backs of cupboards: rum, brandy and Grand Marnier. An inky-black film coated the glass. We poked around in the shed for our old air rifles and gathered an axe or two. Covering the one remaining bed with a plastic sheet, Tom and I piled bottles and weapons around us. Night fell on our gothic nest and the pervading black grew blacker. Tom pulled some of my father’s clothes from the wardrobe and we wrapped ourselves up to keep out the icy January chill. We worked our way steadily through the booze but the heady mixture of excitement, fear and cold seemed to ward off drunkenness. Lying on our backs with our nostrils and lungs full of the acrid smell of fire, we gazed soberly up at the stars and shivered.
The first car arrived at about midnight. We fired off a couple of shots and chucked an empty bottle or two but it was too dark to know if we hit anyone. They scarpered pretty smartish anyway. We laughed out loud and whooped. Just like the old days. It was the first car of many.
My parents were poorly insured. They stayed with friends for a few weeks until a caravan was delivered to the house. For a good year they camped out, doing as much as they could to rebuild the house themselves. I returned to London to get on with my studies, working every spare moment in bars and restaurants to pay my rent.