I never use it now. Other images floated back to Brian, were presented at times even a little desperately, for Mrs Orme and Alix: a round wooden ball, a monkey on a stick. She didn’t know where they’d gone, she hadn’t seen them in donkey’s years, she said, children didn’t care for such things nowadays, they were all wanting computer games. Triumphantly, in the spring visit of 1982, she discovered in the back of a drawer of the sitting-room what-not the white wooden cotton reel on which Kathie had learned to do French knitting: it had four little tacks hammered into it, and a little tail of mysterious useless woven red wool tubing still projecting from its hollow middle . . . I used to think it magic, said Brian, gazing awestruck at this relic, but you wouldn’t teach me how, you said boys didn’t do knitting. I never, said Mrs Orme, I never did, I’m sure of that. Oh yes you did, said Brian, and they quarrelled amiably: I must have been having you on, said Mrs Orme. Milk-bottle tops, round, perforated, waxy cardboard milk-bottle tops had featured in other pursuits: Brian had helped to make woolly bobbles for baby Barbara’s pram, unravelling the wool from moth-eaten old jerseys, rewinding it into crinkly, jimpy balls, threading it round and round the cardboard disc, then cutting the edges – and hey presto, a fluffy pompom, a many-coloured fluffy pompom.
The amusements of the poor. Matchsticks, cotton reels, milk-bottle tops, cigarette cards, unravelled wool, patchwork, scrap rugs. A way of life, a culture. It did not immediately occur to Brian or even to Alix that these objects represented poverty, so rich were their associations, so common a bond had the war forged in their childhood between working and middle-class – for Alix too had unwound jerseys, pegged rugs – but driving south one year, down the M1 in the middle lane at a steady soporific seventy in the early 1980s, with Sam asleep in the back, Alix, to keep Brian awake as he drove, entertained him with conversation about these objects, about the nature of toys and artifacts, about wood and plastic and Plasticine and Playdo: and as she spoke, she saw perhaps for the first time, how pitifully sparse by modern standards had been Mrs Orme’s collection, how rich in its sparseness, how eloquent.
‘Yes,’ said Brian, ‘I feel that if I stare at these things hard enough – I don’t know, I feel that history will speak from its cradle and tell me where I came from. You know what I mean?’ The Mississippi steamer, the hay wain, the eclecticism, the oddity, the eccentricity, the china horses with their real little brasses and their real carts with real bits of leather tack and bridle that stand in front-room windows up North, commemorating Arcadia in the industrial back-street. A deep, deep yearning, up and down the ribboned semi-detached estates, up and down the older terraces, and surviving, who knows, on the lofty, unseen unvisited fourteenth-floor window sill of the new, already derelict high-rise walkways in the sky. ‘Oh yes,’ said Brian, as they spoke of these things, as they passed Watford Gap driving south to Wandsworth, ‘yes, that’s my life, you know, that’s the imagery of my life, I knew nothing other.’
Sentimentality? To visit an old woman left largely friendless, to stare at rubbed knobs of wood looking for time past?
Otto Werner had never worshipped an old wooden cotton reel: he was not entranced by the past. He was a refugee. He believed in the future. He believed that the British Labour movement in general, the manufacturing North more specifically, and Brian Bowen his old friend in person were all in danger of worshipping an old wooden cotton reel. Some called it class solidarity. Otto could not see the charm of it at all. Otto once, after standing over Brian in Brian’s Wandsworth study, watching Brian typing out a letter of recommendation for a mature student, had taken it upon himself to comment on Brian’s typewriter, an old, heavy, battered manual machine, which Brian attacked with four fingers, which had developed various idiosyncrasies, and which made a loud, thumping, stuttering, machine-gun rattle that shook the room and, according to Alix, the room below: ‘Brian,’ said Otto, ‘that machine is prehistoric, I’ve never heard such a din, why on earth don’t you get yourself an electric typewriter, if you won’t consider a word processor?’
‘What do you mean din?’ said Brian, turning round indignantly, placing his big hands gently, defensively over his keyboard: ‘it makes a lovely noise, a lovely, companionable noise, I wouldn’t dream of getting a quiet machine, I wouldn’t know I was working, would I?’
Downstairs, over a whisky, Otto had continued to tease Brian, inviting his wife Caroline’s and Alix’s collusion: ‘It sounds like heavy industry,’ said Otto, ‘it’s absurd, don’t you think so, Alix?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Alix, ‘I’ve got used to it, I quite like to hear him at it.’
‘It sounds like someone drilling the road,’ said Otto.
‘Writing is like someone drilling the road,’ said Brian. ‘And I like to know I’m doing it.’
Well, one could read a lot into that, thought Alix, later: and quite rightly; for it was there to be read. Brian, grey haired, bending benignly over his battleship-grey semi-portable, semi-immovable machine, hammering, with the inherited rattle of machinery soothing his exiled heart: Otto, quick of movement, quick of mind, restless, sitting before his glowing screen, pressing the soft silent smooth gentle effortless keys, watching the play of digits, the flitting of illuminated messages in synthetic green and luminous white, accompanied by a quiet, incomprehensible electronic, south-of-Watford hum. At the mercy of cleaning ladies and electric plugs, or roving children and distant power cuts, but modern, for all that, modern; as Brian hammered away at the past.
Alienation. Well, we are all alienated: some of us don’t think about it much, but Alix and Brian Bowen did, and Otto Werner did, and Alan Headleand did, in their different ways, and within themselves they confronted confrontation. They noted the words CLASS WAR NOW as they appeared sporadically in large white letters on low suburban walls or high railway bridges, they noticed them as they lurked less aggressively, more insidiously, more archaically, in the subtext of the tabloid press, in the subtext of the increasingly right-wing respectable press. They observed that the establishment, through ignorance, through stupidity, or for its own ends, continued blandly to attempt to deny the persistence of the class system, continued to pretend that things were getting better all the time, instead of worse and worse.
‘Of course class dominates people’s thinking,’ said Otto, ‘this is the most class-divided society in Europe, we all know that, it’s just a question of deciding to go forward from here, because if we don’t, we’re done for. But how?’
‘Your proposals,’ said Brian to Otto, speaking of the new political party which Otto supported, ‘your proposals,’ he said (a little pompously, but with feeling), ‘would bring about the permanent disenfranchisement of the working class.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Otto, ‘they will bring about the transformation, the integration of the working class: it’s seeing the working class in this old-fashioned way that’s holding us all up.’ Otto came up with some ingenious arguments about the changing base of the working class, but Brian did not accept them. He stuck to his old cotton reel. In a way, Alix admired him for this, and phrases like ‘the permanent disenfranchisement of the working class’ continued to work on her emotional loyalty, to bring tears to her eyes: but at the same time she noticed in herself, over these years, as she listened to demagogues on the radio and watched newsreels of workers confronting pickets and pickets confronting police and journalists egging on both sides of any dispute – well, she felt, as we have said, a certain unease, a sense that Otto might be right in his analysis, and Brian – well, wrong? Were there not, on the Left as well as the Right, these days, these years, some deeply dishonest people? She did not like to think these thoughts, even in the privacy of her own heart: she felt an uncomfortable, unhealthy, but at times exhilarating excitement as she heard Otto and Brian argue these issues. She and Otto’s wife Caroline would occasionally cross sides, Caroline (who was in fact apolitical, little concerned) taking Brian’s part, Alix taking Otto’s: and sometimes Alix fancied that Otto was look
ing to her for more than nominal support. He seemed to think that she knew what he was talking about: and the truth was that she did.
As Brian and Alix worried irrelevantly over these important matters, and grew grey, Alix’s golden boy Nicholas grew more and more irrelevantly golden. He paid no attention to politics: he lived outside the system, painting his paintings, going to films, sitting around with his friends, earning money intermittently, signing on intermittently, smoking marijuana, drinking beer or cheap wine and eating pizza out of huge square cardboard boxes. He was happy. He had no reason to be, but he was. He was in his mid-twenties, older already than his father had been when he died, and his hairline, to Alix’s great relief, had stopped receding. Nicholas was relieved too, tor he condescended to worry about going bald. It was the only anxiety he admitted. He claimed to have defeated incipient baldness by a homeopathic medicine bought from the Indian chemist on the corner, but when cross-questioned about this by Alix admitted he’d only used it twice and then forgotten to continue the treatment.
‘It must be will-power, Mum,’ he then claimed: a commodity of which Alix had once assumed he had little. She was now beginning to wonder. For there was something oddly pesistent in his way of life, in his application to his own work: something very unlike his father. True, he had dropped out of art school after a couple of terms, and refused to consider any other form of higher education, but now, some years later, he was still painting. In the spring of 1980 he acquired a girlfriend who painted: they kept one another at it.
The girlfriend was also golden. She was called Ilse, and her family came from some middle-European country, though she had been born in England: and she was a little taller and a little older than Nicholas. She wore her coarse silvery-golden hair sometimes harshly, spikily loose, sometimes in pigtails, and she dressed with a hint of folklore: embroidered blouses, coloured skirts, wooden necklaces, bright scarves. She had an extra finger on her left hand, and claimed to be a white witch. She was larger than life: bold, emphatic, widely gesturing. The first time that Nicholas brought her to supper in Wandsworth, Alix had been a little alarmed by her, a little put out by the ease with which she charmed young Sam, a little awed by her large, loud laugh, her throwing back of her head, her swooping, husky voice, her rapid eating of large mounds of food: on guard against jealousy, Alix had repeated invitations, had attempted to befriend her and domesticate her, and Ilse and Nicholas had accepted eagerly, had come round quite frequently to gobble up plates-full of shepherd’s pie and fish pie and pot roast and cassoulet, to drink tumblers of cheap wine. Alix assumed they were hard up, that they appreciated a free meal, for it was not at all clear to her what they lived on: Nicholas had moved out of his squat, and he and Ilse now shared a flat in a condemned building in Stockwell. Alix assumed they were glad to be asked out of it, and was surprised when, one evening, Ilse formally invited Alix, Brian and Sam to pay a return visit.
‘Come to supper,’ Ilse said, leaning forward eagerly on her elbows across the table, nodding emphatically, smiling broadly: ‘Do come, do come.’ Alix glanced at Nicholas, but he nodded support: ‘Do come,’ he echoed.
So Alix and Brian and Sam Bowen, one evening in 1982, called upon Nicholas Manning and Ilse Nemorova: with, on Alix’s part, some foreboding. What would it be like, would it be warm, would it be habitable, would the food be edible, would there be any food? She envisaged bare floor-boards, torn curtains, cracked windows, mattresses on the floor: inner city, cracking creaking, peeling squalor. And the exterior of the house where they lived was not promising: it stood alone, at the end of a dingy little terrace cul-de-sac, with boarded windows, awaiting demolition, a detached house, once better than its neighbours (the doctor’s, the rectory?), but now in terminal decay: tall, oddly shaped, eerie in the gusty late autumn night, its upper windows bright, its lower windows dark and forbidding.
‘Help,’ said Alix bravely, and bravely rang the bell. Down came Nicholas like an angel, and led them up, past the derelict ground floor, up uncarpeted stairs, to paradise.
‘Good Lord!’ said Alix, staring around her, gaping, amazed, ‘How beautiful, how absolutely beautiful!’ The two angels smiled proudly, as they took coats and scarves and gloves. ‘Ilse,’ said Alix, ‘how have you done all this? Brian, isn’t it wonderful? Wonderful?’
And wonderful it was, like a fairy story, a Bohemian fairy story. The little room was illuminated by candles, by a paraffin lamp, by crackling packing-case twigs in a real fire in a real Victorian grate: its walls were painted a dark midnight blue, its floor was painted a deep red with a dark-blue and green patterned border, wooden painted chairs stood at a table covered with a white embroidered cloth and painted bowls and plates, huge cushions lay in heaps in a corner, there were two comfortable chairs covered (Alix recognized the material) with the old velveteen curtains her own mother had brought down from Leeds years ago, and which she’d never got round to hanging.
‘Sit, sit,’ said Nicholas, and Alix and Brian sat in the comfortable chairs, while the angels hovered, with glasses of fire-light-glinting red wine, with olives on a white plate, with nuts on a blue plate.
‘I must just gaze,’ said Alix, boldly, as she sipped, speechless, and stared around her: at the paintings hanging on the walls, at the painted dresser with its rows of plates, at the plants on a cane table, at a wooden sculpture, at dyed dried flowers and grasses, at a heaped bowl of gourds and onions and peppers, at a smiling pumpkin head with a glowing inner candle. A wooden loom stood in a corner, with a stool before it: a cloth of red and gold was in progress.
‘But how do you do all this?’ repeated Alix, and Ilse smiled, and said: ‘Of course, we do it all ourselves, we make these things ourselves. By magic, in the dark, dark night.’ And she laughed, and clapped her hands and went into the kitchen through the archway to stir the soup, as Nicholas continued their story; the furniture was junk, some of it they’d picked up off skips, they painted it themselves, they painted everything, they were really into painting wood: they picked up firewood from the skips, from the waste ground, from the empty houses in the half-demolished street: they sold painted plates and chairs to a man in Peckham: they scavenged, they scrounged, they transformed: and upstairs, in the roof space, they had their studio, they could go up to see it after supper if they chose. And Alix, listening to this, remembered that Ilse and Nicholas had mentioned such things before, but that she had not listened, convinced as she had been that they were speaking of the scruffiest, the most incompetent making-do and getting-by: how could she so have misjudged them? Her heart overflowed with penitence, with admiration: twenty times nicer it was than her own home, she told them, as they nodded and smiled happily, as they ladled out barley soup, followed by stuffed cabbage leaves: twenty times more delicious than my own cooking, she cried! No, not at all, they protested: and Ilse said, glowing, her hair flaring in bright sparks and points in the candlelight, ‘but we have only just got this ready for you, we have worked for months on this – ’ and Alix could see that this was so, the labour involved was immense, that this island of colour and light had been salvaged from the darkness by long hours, great pains, great ingenuity. It moved her almost unbearably, the beauty of it, the warmth of it, in the surrounding night. She did not dare to ask what tenure they had, was relieved when Brian raised the subject, was semi-relieved to hear that the house could not be demolished as its yet untraceable owner lived in Sarawak and the agency that had previously let it was happy for Ilse and Nicholas to stay on pending interminable enquiries.
‘We’re a freak, we’re an anomaly, that suits us fine,’ said Nicholas.
‘But your investment here, you could lose it at any time,’ said Brian, worried, stepfatherly.
‘We can always begin again,’ said Ilse, dismissing fear with a toss of her head and a munch of beetroot salad, ‘we can always move on.’
‘There’s a brave gypsy,’ said Brian, admiringly: and the illicit firelight flickered in the hearth, sending a thin flag of dissident smoke i
nto the Smokeless Zone of South West Nine where Nicholas Manning and Ilse Nemorova camped, comfortable in the heart of urban desolation.
Sam Bowen thought the house was great, but drew the line at beetroot salad. He hated beetroot. He recommended that Ilse and Nicholas should get a kitten and informed them that Liz Headleand’s tabby was expecting. A kitten would go really nicely by that fire, said Sam, who had himself long and ineffectually been pleading for a springer spaniel. Out of the mouths of schoolchildren, thought Alix, for it was clear to her that Nicholas and Ilse ought to have not a kitten but a baby: a baby in a little painted wooden cradle, a baby with golden hair. She wondered if they had ever thought of it themselves. They seemed prepared to consider one of Liz’s cat’s unborn kittens. They also told her, to her surprise, that they were going to spend the weekend with Nicholas’s grandmother Deborah, who was not well: information which aroused in her a pang of jealousy, and also of sorrow, for she herself had not kept adequately in touch with Deborah, and felt a certain guilt
After supper, they went up to the studio under the roof. It was too dark to see the paintings properly, and too cold to linger: by torchlight they inspected Ilse’s work (small, icon-like, jewelled landscapes, rich miniatures) and Nicholas’s (much larger, cooler, more spacious, more abstract, with suggestions of figures in geometrical distant perspectives: very different from his early phase of sub-Bonnard domestic interiors), but they could not see them very well, and could think of little to say, being illiterate in the vocabulary of the visual arts: ‘Very nice,’ they murmured, politely banal, Alix conscious that they might be works either of considerable commercial or considerable artistic potential, or of none at all, for all that she knew, for all that she could tell. She had learned little, from her brief marriage with Art, from her long friendship with Esther Breuer, Art Historian: and indeed the thought of Esther crossed her mind, as she made her way carefully down the unlit lower stairs to the front door, for Esther had often crisply, emphatically, not wholly credibly, disclaimed any interest in or knowledge of art of any period later than the late Renaissance, yet Esther would surely have responded as strongly as herself to that bright, glowing, candlelit, coloured interior, that jewelled nest? Had it not, perhaps, a touch of Esther’s own style – less sombre, more cheerful, more naïve, more peasant-like, but a touch nevertheless? Domestic art, easel art: she thought of these contrasts, and of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, as she descended the stairs: her own house was shabby, she did not care how she lived, it was comfortable but shabby, she did not work at it, she had no concept of it: and Nicholas had this grace, this gift, this heritage, this Ilse. On the cold pavement they stood and looked upwards, at the lighted windows in the dark, windy, high-clouded moonlit night, in the wasteland.
The Radiant Way Page 29