What to Look for in Winter

by Candia McWilliam

  Five or so years before his death, the owner of this flat sustained a stroke that made movement difficult, although it did not stop him painting. In order to help him remain independent, banisters and grabs were installed exactly as though it had been a ship. They save me from sinking.

  I could have done with more of those grabs, on a metaphysical level, when I was at Cambridge. I did not know that there lay within me a thirst nothing could quench that would nearly kill me. There were signs, but they were illegible to me and my friends at the time.

  My room at Girton was called F6; it took some ascending to. I was next to a popular girl whose parents visited most weekends bringing lox and bagels. I was very grateful one Sunday when the mother of this family gave me a bagel, stuffed full. Some kind of fear set in. I did not understand how to get out of one’s room except to go to the college library or for meals in hall. I knew that when women were first up at university they joined one another for intense conversation over mugs of hot chocolate. I had two mugs, so that was a start. Further research revealed a row of three baths, each in its cubicle and each the size of a lifeboat, so I spent a good deal of my first year at Girton just sitting in the bath reading and getting wrinkly. I was an unreliable and irresponsible student, having come straight from school where, during the last term that Katie and Rosa were there, I had worked as a housemaid and kitchen maid, because I had got into Cambridge before my A levels, didn’t want to be separated from them and needed to earn money. It was interesting to see the modification of girls’ behaviour towards me as I changed from senior to skivvy. Mrs Rock, the house cook, was kind to this unhelpful pair of hands and gave me jobs she knew I could do like emptying the commercial dishwasher, grating fifteen pounds of cheese, or slicing ox liver and onions for fifty-six people with a knife whose steel was whippy, sharp and thin as a line.

  The school train started at Waterloo and ended at Sherborne. For some happy reason, one summer day when we were in our A-level year, it dawdled at Basingstoke. We were told that we might go and purchase refreshments at the station buffet. We were not yet changed into our school uniform, and no one in their right mind would want to challenge Katie’s raised eyebrow. We purchased two pork pies and two miniatures of brandy. Brandy is rage and turmoil to me, gin the taste of isolation.

  Otherwise strong drink hardly made its appearance at Sherborne, though there was a rebarbative cocktail offered by the headmistress to those girls considered made of the right stuff to meet visiting preachers such as Sir Robert Birley, formerly headmaster of Charterhouse and Eton. Katie and I were chosen for this privilege and liked him a lot. Neither of us felt the same about Dame Diana’s refreshing sherry, tomato and orange juice cocktail that was the speciality at White Lodge, the headmistress’s house.

  In the first weeks at Girton, should someone have asked me what was wrong, I would have replied that I was simultaneously anxious and bored. I seemed frozen to the spot. I couldn’t leave my room. In my room was a bottle of sherry. Everyone knew that undergraduates offered one another small glasses of sherry. I drank the bottle on my own and went to sleep. I imagine that this sleep will have been the first blackout of my life, and that having glimpsed this option, my brain’s biochemistry was on the very tentative lookout for more.

  There was a bus that took Girtonians into town for lectures and seminars. I ended up sleeping on the floors of my patient friends, Anthony Appiah the most patient of all, playing me his records of Marlene and Mahler and Noël Coward and allowing me to cramp his love life.

  Of course there were some friends from school. Edward Stigant, descendant of the Archbishop Stigand on the Bayeux Tapestry, was reading History at Christ’s under Professor Jack Plumb. Edward looked like a very naughty Russian girl. He had the profile and eyelashes of a Borzoi and was short, lissom and bendy. His gift with languages was prodigious. When we did our examinations for Oxford and/or Cambridge, which were in those days separate from A levels, there was a translation paper from which you had to choose two longish passages from among a dozen or so languages to translate into English. Edward had done them all, with time to spare, and waltzed off with a scholarship. This took courage. His older brother had earlier achieved distinction at the same college and taken his own life while still at university.

  Edward did not live very much longer than that brother, but oh the delightful nuisance he caused in his life. He was completely kind and, of course, when we first met at the school classics club, ‘The Interpretes’, which was a decorous means of meeting boys, I lapped him up. He was having an affair with a Turkish air stewardess at the time. This strange reversion to what might be thought of as deviancy in the context of someone quite so camp, also struck him during the week of our Finals, when he fell head over heels in love with a magnificent girl, and sent her a dozen red roses every single day. They both emerged with congratulatory firsts.

  I’m astonished that I have any friends from Cambridge. I was a dilatory worker, a shocking shirker of essays and supervisions, and I did not understand that it was perfectly possible to say no at any stage of the transaction should you be invited out by a member of the opposite sex. I had a powerfully developed sense of my own repulsive ness that cannot have been helped by the fashion for platform shoes that coincided with these years. Thus, when I did leave F6, I was six and a half feet high and, in some senses, quite unstable. There were three dons at Girton whom I feared and respected, though they might not have guessed it: Jill Mann for Chaucer, who spotted me at once for a coaster; Gillian Beer, who has, despite it all, become a friend; and Lady Radzinowicz, who, with her dachsund Pretzel, taught me Milton and Spenser. I was so nervous about leaving F6 and actually getting on to the missile-launcher bus for central Cambridge, that I attended relatively few lectures, though I developed a fondness for Professor J.A.W. Bennett who must have been about twelve hundred years old by then. It was also compulsory, for reasons of cool as well as literary curiosity, to attend the lectures of the poet J.H. Prynne. I adored watching him take words to bits.

  One day a vision entered the lecture theatre. Of course I had seen beauties before and there were even two at Girton, but this was different. She was attired in a coat of a red fox and it was clear that her electrical and crackling head of hair weighed more than her etiolated and fashionably attired body, from her Manolo Blahnik boots to her Joseph jeans and her Sonia Rykiel jersey (I was a Vogue reader and could do the semiotics). We had a catwalk model among us and she was one big cat: Tamasin Day-Lewis.

  Tamasin was at King’s, a college full of interesting people who were not Girtonians. They included descendants of old Bloomsbury, precociously brilliant philosophers, a girl who lived with a man who had already sired children, and my beloved friend Rupert Christiansen, who allowed himself four minutes off work between breakfast and lunch and five in the afternoon for the ingestion of a cheese scone. Every vacation Rupert worked in the Arts Council bookshop in Sackville Street. He had one, orange needlecord, suit. Rupert is colour blind. He saved up every penny to go and stand in the gods at Covent Garden.

  It says much for Rupert that he took me out to see the ballet La Bayadère. After three days’ thought I dressed for this occasion in eight-inch cork platforms, white tights, a wraparound white cheesecloth skirt, a scarf tied across my by now ultra-skinny chest and an enticing new bubble perm inspired by the film of The Great Gatsby with Mia Farrow and Robert Redford. Rupert is a good six foot two and he weathered this fearful first date to become my daily correspondent, my test of decency, my measure of honour.

  It was during Prelims that I realised that I could speak in tongues, or rather that I could do so if drunk enough and if the drink were whisky. Today I do not drink at all or I would be dead, and when people ask, ‘Do you miss anything about drinking?’ I can with perfect truth say no. But I do miss the smell of those island malts, that are nothing more or less than the smells of the islands themselves, of sea, of kelp, of heather, of peat, of wrack, of mist, of slow, slow burning.

 
I gave a party at the end of Cambridge, for my twenty-first birthday, for the friends I had somehow made. I sent out invitations on which I had drawn a bough with golden apples. The words written below invited each recipient to help me take my golden bow. The house in which the party took place belonged to none other than my present landlord, to whom, that first time, I was a lousy lodger, borrowing his tank tops, sending telegrams via his phone bill and continually introducing cats into the ménage. I remember Peggotty and Portnoy, who was a Siamese and therefore always complaining. In this may be glimpsed something of the golden character of Niall Hobhouse, who was Anthony Appiah’s cousin. To my twenty-first birthday party, the golden bow, I wore a jumpsuit made of paper that I had sprayed gold, and gold cowboy boots. I had not neglected to spray my hair gold.

  For some reason, just as the party got going, Katie told me to cook some crumpets. She talks so quickly that I frequently mishear. I have before now jumped out of a boat when she was just telling me to ‘go about’. I set to with the crumpets and continued being my entertaining self, welcoming my friends and no doubt swigging along. For the record, Katie tells me that she was in Singapore on this occasion; so memory casts its dramas.

  The grill began to send out little flames. I bent to attend to it. There was a thick smell of burning hair. The paint with which I had sprayed my hair and dungarees was gold car paint, highly flammable. I rushed upstairs dressed in flames, a zip, underwear and cowboy boots, drenched myself in the bath and returned later to my own party re-attired in some no doubt fearful ensemble, maybe even the £2.99 pink rubber dress from Sex on the King’s Road.

  At the party was my very quiet friend Amschel Rothschild. He wore a navy blue velvet suit, an expression of amusement on his face, one that might have been painted by El Greco, and a cymbidium from his hothouse in his buttonhole. He had neatly sprayed the orchid gold.

  But for him, who took me out of Cambridge for the last weeks before Finals and set me to my books as you might set an animal to exercise, I should have had no kind of a degree, let alone the pleasure of discovering what it means really to work at a subject and how that pleasure has no end. While it may be solitary, it is, at its best, love and sight, or, rather, vision. A love in which there is no doubt that you wish to do the best you can, not for your own but for its sake. Amschel died far too young and I shall miss him till I die. So I owe him my ‘good’ degree and many more degrees of gratitude.

  LENS II: Chapter 5

  In the summer of 1976, there was a heat that dried the green out of England. It was possible to faint away when you stood up. Water was rationed. There was even, I believe, a Minister for Water, or perhaps he was a Minister for Drought. During that summer, I fainted on a train that was crossing Suffolk and woke up with words branded on my arm in sunburn: Second-Class. I had seldom travelled far; after all, England was quite far away from my first home in Edinburgh and Colonsay was in itself both domestic and utterly exotic. There had been Holland, Italy, Switzerland; nowhere outwith Europe.

  Amschel had at the time the use of his parents’ house in St James’s on Barbados. The house was reminiscent of Caribbean life as it’s not often advertised, a life of conversation, books and ideas. Amschel invited Tamasin and me to stay at the house and then to travel with him to Cape Cod to join his sister Emma.

  Two days before travelling on this, to me, unimaginably complicated journey, I was on the tube on my way to work at Vogue. A nice young man called Simon Crow greeted me. I was standing; it was a crowded carriage. Simon was sitting down. He asked me what I was up to and I said that I was going on an aeroplane to Barbados and America. Simon was in the Foreign Office and knew his stuff, clearly.

  ‘Have you got a passport and a visa?’ he asked, still half asleep.

  I had neither, but I did have a pair of pink stripy lounging trousers I’d sewn that I considered very suitable for Caribbean nights.

  Simon Crow, who I think was at Oxford while I was at Cambridge, got me a passport in one day and stood in line to get me a visa. The sort of man you need in diplomacy.

  The reader may not believe the following story. Or rather, it could not happen now, as old people say. Two days before my first wedding, my husband-to-be asked if I had a passport in my married name, since our honeymoon destination might require one. I really don’t know whether I quailed within while looking noncommittal or if I confessed. What I did do was telephone the Passport Office in Petty France. The telephone was answered in those times by a person. I blurted out my story in all its idiotic detail:

  ‘Getting married in two days; new surname going to be Wallop, yes that’s right W-A-L-L-O-P; don’t know where I’m going because it’s my honeymoon; yes very happy indeed; I have got into a mess like this before and the person that helped me out was called Mr Potts.’

  ‘This is Potts speaking.’

  But I’m travelling ahead of myself. In Barbados I learned how delicious are limes, that mace is the web that wraps itself around the nutmeg, that really good manners go all through a person, that Tamasin would be pre-eminent in whatever world she decided to take on, that you must never sunbathe under a manchineel tree or its tannic fruit will drip poison on you. I read all the books save for the esoterica concerning the world of spermatology (Amschel’s father Victor Rothschild was a world expert on sperm as well as many other things including Jonathan Swift and the safe defusing of bombs). I sat on the white sand reading books and going blotchy in my Celtic fashion. Only one beach boy tried to pick me up during the whole ten days and he gave up on about day four when I said I was happy reading. ‘You not a woman, you a machine.’

  It’s the quiet of the luxury of the place that I shall not forget, the white coral walls, the polished white coral floor, the stuffed white sofas and chairs, the delectable shade, the pale, light-lipped sea. In the library, the books were plump with sea salt, hygroscopically swollen. Books literally holding water is an theme for me since so much of my life has been spent at sea or enislanded.

  The rain came promptly at siesta time, when Amschel would retire with verbally sophisticated modern authors whose drift he might sometimes explain to me later. Tamasin and I occasionally set out upon adventures, certainly the least bearable of which was a trip on a pirate vessel named the Jolly Roger. This vessel pumped out reggae for an hour in the middle of each afternoon, anchored offshore, offered limitless orange petrol to drink, and was operated by a captain with a strong line in innuendo; the voyage’s highlight was a mock marriage involving a good deal of crazy foam and rice. I do not mind if I never have that kind of fun again. Tamasin, in her unapproachable beauty, fared rather better than a poiseless Scot absolutely lost without her book. The drink was at this stage of my life too nasty even for me to drink.

  We flew to Boston and drove down boulevards of thrilling tackiness; here the Leaning Tower of Pizza, there ‘Dan’s Clams: the more you eat the more you get’. The house Emma and her friend Alexander Cockburn had taken for the summer was a silvery clapboard house with verandas, perfect for a reader of Updike. You could walk out along the quay and swim from it through soft yet salt water edged with rushes. Intelligence was again the air of the house, this time fashionably radical and very fast moving. Alexander made us Manhattans to drink. For some reason, although I had in Barbados been soaking up four or five daiquiris a day, that Manhattan did me in. I spoke in tongues, I howled, I went on and on about the things about which drunks go on and on, the things they drink to forget. I remember being excruciatingly boring about Colonsay, and going on too about mothers. I was out of my depth in all senses after two measures of bourbon, a sugar lump and some bitters.

  Emma did what she does, which was remain white and cool. Alexander, having much and distinguished Irish blood, must have seen a drunk Celt before but I was terrified to meet anyone’s eyes at breakfast, so I stayed upstairs for as long as I could reading Paradise Lost. I also found, read and was scared by Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger. Its photographs of dead people in undignified settings, head
in the oven, perfect hairdo hanging out of a ruined car, stays with me. It set one register of my bad dreams. Somehow the shamefulness of the book attached itself to my shame about having got so drunk.

  I reassembled myself and occurred brightly into the others’ normal day at about eleven with the gelatinous acted normality that will be familiar to all who are or know alcoholics.

  We progressed to New York, where Emma lived on Central Park West. Again the note in the house was of the Left, of books and the want of show. I discovered that New York was a walkable city, like Edinburgh, and loved it. I was unprepared for its expressive beauty, the variety of shapes, the quality of reciprocated light thrown between the buildings. Amschel fell for a Moholy-Nagy in the Guggenheim and drank gimlets at the Plaza Bar. We visited a bookshop at midnight and called in meals; what could be better?

  Years later, when I was just over thirty, my Girtonian friend Miss Montague of Greenwich Village got married. She asked me to be one of her matrons of honour. There were, I believe, eight of us. I was much the tallest and the smallest was a groovy society photographer called Roxanne Lowitt who could look good in a brown bag. Sarah herself was a vision as a bride, lacy, light, frothing. I may have to go into the background of the garments worn by those of us in her train. Her mother was a balletomane and was to be found, as a rule, wherever in the world Nureyev was dancing. Sarah had one precious piece of material designed by Bakst for the Ballets Russes. It was a shimmering jungle silk, but there was hardly enough of it to go round eight people, so a plan had been devised. Each of our dresses, cut exactly to fit our disparate measurements, would bear at its neck a lozenge of the precious cloth.