He pulled himself up in his chair and reached for his tobacco tin. ‘She’d had enough. She was distraught for…’ He opened the tin and teased out some tobacco. ‘For ever really… She lived till 1942, you know.’
‘I know.’ I hadn’t meant to talk to him about his mother or Gladys’s death – but it didn’t seem to upset him, though there was a silence, during which he lit up, inhaled and stared into the fire. I sat down in my usual chair opposite him. He yawned loudly and leaned forward with his hands on his knees. He would soon remember that people would be arriving in an hour to drink sherry and eat Gentleman’s Relish. I wanted to say something, about his sister – or his father – to keep the conversation alive.
‘It’s a shame your father didn’t write anything.’
He yawned and grunted, stood up and stretched his arms elaborately. ‘Actually, he did. Not much… about five letters. I’ll try and find them for you if you like.’
I was surprised and said I’d like to read them – and was about to ask why he hadn’t mentioned them before, when he looked at his watch.
‘God strewth! Those blasted people will be here soon. You should have woken me up.’
He put on a new tie that my half-sister Ann had given him for Christmas, and we borrowed chairs and sherry glasses from the woman who lived at the front of the house. He toasted bread and I cut it into triangles and spread them with Gentleman’s Relish. The party went well, in the senses that my father considered it a success, Old Bowen’s wife didn’t come, and Arabella and I got on and talked quietly in a corner.
Later we had turkey sandwiches and Arctic Roll with cherry brandy, and watched Scottish dancing on television. My father promised to look for his father’s letters, but said he wasn’t sure where they were; he hadn’t read them since soon after his mother had died.
We toasted the New Year with cherry brandy and went upstairs at about half past twelve. I felt a little drunk, and lay in bed thinking once again about Gladys’s death and Tom’s departure and how, at the age of ten, my father had been left with only his mother and his grandfather, after a short lifetime filled with love, people and fun – as well as drunkenness and squabbling.
* * * * *
The next day I returned to London and met Pat outside the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street. He was leaning against the wall near the end of a long queue with his hands in his pockets. A cold wind blew along the street from the east and paper bags and newspapers swirled around our feet. The shops were shut, their windows filled with banners announcing sales, but the Christmas illuminations – a smiling Father Christmas, slung high above the road and flanked by gaudy, geometric snowflakes – lit up the dampness in the evening air.
Pat told me about his Christmas and New Year in Dorset; he and his parents had drunk a lot, and his serious-minded sister had disapproved. I didn’t bother to tell him about Christmas lunch with my mother and just four old ladies; Uncle Godfrey and the 105-year-old Auntie Georgie had died and been cremated during 1966. Christmas seemed a long time ago.
The queue didn’t move and I thought about Bonnie – still at home with her parents. I imagined her on a sofa facing a flaming fire with her parents either side of her in chintz-covered armchairs; they were drinking sherry and her father was raising a toast to the new year.
‘Chroist! I’m so bloody cold.’ Pat put his hands in his armpits underneath his jacket and stamped his feet. A minute later he held something in front of me. It was a roll-up.
‘I’ve got some fags, thanks.’
He leaned against me. ‘Go on. It’s a joint.’
I saw that it was lit. ‘Here? Now?’ I looked casually around. It was a drab setting for my initiation; I associated this sort of thing with white rooms, Aldous Huxley, joss sticks and music. Behind us a man with wavy grey hair was holding the arm of a woman in a leopard-skin coat; she was carrying a patent-leather handbag and wearing a small black hat. In front was a group of about six people in jeans and scruffy coats.
‘Just take a drag and hold it in deep. No one’ll know.’
I took it, inhaled, handed it back and exhaled slowly without moving my shoulder away from his. ‘Why not do this somewhere more private?’
‘Where? Can’t smoke this at home. The old man might smell it.’
The queue started to move. He passed it back to me twice before we came to the ticket office, where he licked his thumb and forefinger and pinched it out.
I felt a little strange as we walked down the stairs, and leaned against Pat until we were sitting down. Straight away I was absorbed in the trailers and advertisements. There were narrow strips of white light at the edge of the screen; perfect droplets of water hung in the air as beautiful people sat on rocks smoking beside a waterfall.
Later, after a delicious ice-cream, I seemed almost to become Jean-Louis Trintignant standing on the beach wondering at Anouk Aimée who was Bonnie’s darker-haired elder sister and the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Drops of rain made shapes on the windscreen and I was eventually lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the windscreen wipers and the sound of a thousand beautiful voices.
‘Chroist! That was beautiful, man. Great music.’
‘Dubba dubba dub, dubba dubba dub, da da da, dubba dubba dub…’
We laughed a lot as we wandered slowly to the Golden Egg and ordered mixed grills with chips. I ate fast and asked Pat whether he had heard of Stan Getz. He had, but knew only what I had already assumed – that he played the saxophone.
* * * * *
Bonnie and I started to see each other two or three times a week, going out – like a proper couple – for drinks, meals, films and pop concerts, and staying in with Stan Getz when Kate was out. We were warm and physical and paid each other compliments – but I managed not to say the word ‘love’.
The Woodman, a busy low-ceilinged pub with floral upholstery, near Bonnie’s flat and Highgate tube station, became our regular meeting place.
On a Wednesday towards the end of February I arrived there five minutes early, bought a pint and waited at our favourite table – by the window overlooking the traffic lights on Archway Road. I kept glancing at the door. Half an hour later, Bonnie still hadn’t arrived and I was wondering which to do first, phone her or buy another pint, when Kate sat down in front of me. She was pale and out of breath.
‘David, Bonnie’s not coming.’ She was biting her lip. ‘She’s not well. Can I get you a drink?’ She stood up.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
She looked embarrassed. ‘Oh… some flu thing. I’ll get you a drink.’ She picked up my glass, walked away and turned back. ‘Red Barrel?’
‘Sure.’ I lit a cigarette. Bonnie had put off a night out we had planned the previous Friday because she had to work late typing a script; she was going home to her parents’ for the weekend, so we had rearranged to Monday; then she had postponed Monday – the script still wasn’t finished. Tonight would have been the first time I had seen her for a week.
Kate came back carrying my pint and a bloody mary.
‘Thanks. Nice of you to come.’ We sipped our drinks.
She was frowning. She sat back and crossed her legs, then uncrossed them and leaned forward with her elbows on the table. She looked into my eyes and then away and back again. She put her palms either side of the ashtray and moved it slightly. ‘David, this is really unfair… and hard to say. Bonnie isn’t ill.’ She looked down at her hands and up again. ‘She’s got a new boyfriend… I’m really sorry.’
A shiver surged through my body; I could feel it on my face, in my arms, everywhere. I sat up, tried to swallow and reached for my beer. ‘Just like that. You mean… she doesn’t want to see me again? … Just like that.’
‘She’s behaving really badly. She should be here to tell you. She rang me from somewhere and asked me to come and tell you she was ill. I said I wouldn’t. I would only tell the truth – ’
‘She doesn’t want to see me again? What? Ever? You know that?’
&nb
sp; ‘Yes.’ She reached across the table and put her hand over mine.
‘How do you know, if she just asked you to say she was ill?’
‘She’s been talking about nothing else for about two weeks: how to let you down lightly… her new bloke… on and on.’
I drank some beer. Two weeks: that meant we had seen each other twice – and slept together – since she had met this other man. ‘Who is he?’
‘Oh, just someone she met at work.’ She swallowed a mouthful of bloody mary. ‘An American, a producer who just started working at Rediffusion.’
‘Producer. How old is he?’
‘About thirty. Bit of a creep, I think.’
I drank some more beer. I found what she was saying hard to believe. Bonnie was twenty, and she thought I was nineteen; why would she want to be with someone who was thirty?
‘I’m sorry, David.’ Her eyes were slanting downwards; she looked miserable. ‘You’re such a beaut bloke. It’s unfair.’ She looked away, out of the window.
I stood up. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ I picked up my cigarettes and left the pub. I walked down the hill towards Archway, stopped and stared at my reflection, murky but complete, in an unlit shop window. I went a little further, leaned one arm against a bus stop and stared down into the gutter. She couldn’t just end our relationship like that; we were such good friends – I had even met her parents over a stiff Sunday lunch. I dropped a cigarette butt at the foot of the bus stop, trod on it, and walked slowly back up the hill.
Kate was still sitting by the window. She was smoking. She didn’t see me. I stood outside the door for a few moments, then went back in.
‘Are you sure?’
She pulled my hands towards her across the table. ‘Look. She would have told you herself… sometime. I just wasn’t going to come here and lie about her being ill, so it’s ended up being me who’s told you… Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I – ’ Her expression changed; she was looking at something behind me.
Bonnie was standing there in the red coat with the white furry collar that she had worn on the night we first met. There were tears on her cheeks. I stood up and hugged her. She sobbed into my shoulder, and kept saying, ‘I’m sorry.’
While Kate bought her a drink, she told me through tears that it was true: she loved this other man; she loved me too in a way, but not the same way; she had to choose; she couldn’t have two boyfriends; she hated to hurt me.
‘Why choose him?’
She had been holding my lapels. She let go, her face puckered and there were more tears. My question had been angry and futile. I regretted it.
When Kate came back, I whispered to Bonnie, ‘I love you too,’ kissed her and left.
I sat on the tube facing my own image distorted in the blackness of the window opposite, and paying attention to nothing except my own angry thoughts. I wanted to tell Bonnie to go to hell and I wanted to punch the smooth jaw of the American producer whose image was firmly in my mind – he had short dark hair with a sheen to it, like something I had seen in a hairdresser’s window, and a perfectly pressed pink shirt with a button-down collar; at the same time I was going through the possible ways of rescuing my love for Bonnie and what I thought was hers for me – she had said she loved me.
* * * * *
Dave and I had found a flat around the corner from my mother and the Goat in Boots. It had two rooms: one with armchairs in the middle and a bed at each end; the other a kitchen with an old dining table on which Dave laid out his medical books and I put my new second-hand typewriter. We shared a bathroom with a pair of male Canadian accountants from the floor below and became adept at cooking eggs and bacon while shaving at the kitchen sink.
I had got a full-time job as an editorial assistant on Humanist magazine, which was published monthly by the Rationalist Press Association, an organisation with its roots in the nineteenth century – loosely allied to the British Humanist Association. It had ten or so employees and a narrow Georgian building in Islington. On the magazine, apart from me, there was just the editor, a genial man of about sixty, respected among humanists for his books and lectures and known to everyone as HH. I was taught how to put the magazine together using articles he gave me. As long as the magazine came out on time and looked as it usually did, he and the rest of the staff were happy. This was fortunate because, under the pretext of having to check proofs at the printer in Tufnell Park, I was soon spending time at the flat of a woman who came in to the office twice a day to make tea and coffee. She was twenty-eight and hid provocative messages under my teacup. For a few days I was surprised at myself; she was so old.
Sometimes at weekends and in the evenings I did the same sort of work for nothing for Richard, the Australian, but there was a big difference. The design of Humanist followed a pre-ordained style, and much subbing work was needed to make the text and pictures fit the page precisely; Oz was created by a long-haired designer called Jon, to whom every page was a work of art and the idea of a column of text aligning with the one next to it was anathema.
For both magazines I worked away quietly with a scalpel, Cow gum and a plastic spatula, but I had to go out in search of pictures – to picture agencies for Humanist and to Martin’s flat above the Pheasantry in the King’s Road for Richard and Jon. The picture agencies were little bureaucracies where I had a coffee and a cigarette with people who became friends while I searched their files and they filled in forms. Martin would be either alone, hatching and cross-hatching and showering the bare floor with ink, or surrounded by rock stars and models who were friendly in a restrained, you-look-a-bit-young-and-I’m-not-quite-sure-who-you-are way. Whether he was alone or not, there would be music and marijuana and sometimes charades, as I waited – often for hours – for the completion of a drawing or collage which would blow the minds of incipient hippies. Over several months I read a battered copy of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf in Martin’s flat, in between making coffee, rolling joints and looking for pictures he couldn’t find.
Soon after my idyll with Bonnie ended, I had a drink with Peter the Painter. He listened to me bemoaning her treachery, nodded sympathetically and said that a similar thing had happened to him. ‘You didn’t really know her, Dave. If you had, you’d have known she was the sort of girl who would come across all lovey-dovey – and, fair enough, let you fuck her, but I bet she enjoyed that too – while all the time she was on the look-out for something better, or maybe not better, just something that would build her career.’
‘No, Bonnie wasn’t like that. She just – ’
‘You’d be surprised, mate.’
‘All right, maybe I didn’t know her well enough, therefore I shouldn’t have fallen in love – but how could I have helped myself?’
He shook his head and his long curls flapped around his chin. ‘It wasn’t love Dave. It was lust.’ He swallowed a third of a pint, put the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘There’s a difference.’
‘What about love at first sight?’
‘It’s bollocks. It’s what sensitive souls, like your good self, call lust. It’s better just to accept that you and all of us men and quite a lot of women’ – he laughed roguishly – ‘are lustful, and just act on it – not try to dress the whole thing up as something fancy and poetic and spiritual and all that bollocks.’
23
Lost in Earl’s Court
Peter the Painter played rhythm guitar in a rock group called Ocean Daydream. He had talked about it a lot – it sounded like an English Jefferson Airplane – and had shown me a sketchbook, in which he wrote lyrics in large, clear handwriting in black ink, but, despite invitations to remote venues on the edge of London, I had never seen them perform.
On a cold evening in the spring of 1967, he took me to meet the other members of Ocean Daydream – friends of his from art school who lived together in Earls Court. They had got a recording contract; the record would be coming out quickly and Peter and the others were placing an advertisement in
Richard’s magazine, at their own expense. Being artists, they had designed the advertisement themselves and wanted to hand it over to me personally.
The flat was in the basement of a Victorian mansion block in a side street. We walked down a wide stone staircase littered with chewing-gum wrappers and cigarette packets. The door was ajar, lights were on and somewhere, someone was playing an electric guitar. Inside, we crossed the hall to a large room which looked as if it had been painted white a long time ago; there was a sofa, some upright chairs and a table covered in small bottles of paint, but no people. I followed Peter back into the hall where he pushed lightly on a door that wasn’t quite shut. He put his head in and quickly pulled it out again. A man’s voice said, ‘Come in Pete, it’s OK.’
A man with long wavy hair was lying in bed under some blankets; his face was open and friendly. There was a woman lying on top of him; I could see bare shoulders and straight reddish hair. ‘Hi, come on in.’ The woman moved sideways and pushed her nose into his neck.
‘This is Dave… about the ad. That’s Eric. And that’s Julia.’
Julia had turned her face away. She waved the back of her hand towards us. Eric laughed. ‘Go make some coffee, or get a beer. I’ll see you in a minute.’ He laughed again.
There was a large fridge in a large dirty kitchen, but no beer. As Peter filled a kettle, a man with straggly thin hair and tight trousers came in. A red electric guitar hung on a strap from his shoulder and glittered in the light; he was fiddling with the tuning. ‘Hello, mate.’ He looked up at Peter and back at the guitar. ‘Who’s this, then?’ He glanced at me.
‘This is Dave.’
‘Hello, Dave. How are you, mate?’ His face was pale and flat; he had brown eyes and it looked as if his nose had been broken.
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘He’s come to talk about the art for the ad… remember? This is Chas, by the way.’
I nodded.
‘Yeah, I’ll get the stuff.’ He finished tuning the guitar and went away.
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