by Adam Thorpe
Mark did the washing-up (which he called ‘clattering the crocks’), I dried. He had a smell about him of old barns and it was delicious. I was telling him about my love for animals and the concept of the Tao when the telephone rang. It was for him.
‘Oh no, it’ll be his Auntie May,’ Jill whispered to me. She was putting the plates away.
‘’Ow do, our kid,’ Mark shouted. ‘Line’s good. You can talk normally, Auntie May. Yo’am OK, then? And the chrysanths?’
The others went silent, which I considered a little rude. The following is an honest account of what we heard Mark say, in a broad Black Country accent.
‘I brought us a pullie, course I did. No, don’t fret, the Mafia’s more down south. She is hanging on to her handbag, like it’s got money in it. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. It might just be indigestion from bending over. Well of course you’am famished if you don’t eat yer pays!’
When he came off, everybody (except Jill and myself) looked as if they were trying to blow up invisible balloons.
‘Auntie May sends you her love,’ Mark said to Jill, picking up the scourer. ‘And she hopes you’re hanging on to your handbag.’
Then the others exploded, snorting and giggling and saying sorry all the time. Jill looked cross, not with the others but with Mark. Or with the others via Mark. I hoped Mark would walk out into the night, giving me an opportunity to follow him, but he did not. Instead, he carried on scouring the dishes with his back to them and it was ten minutes or so until the mirth subsided.
I lay on the high, old, country bed and listened, not to the difficult piece I was meant to be choreographing, but to my faithful old tape of the music of Lawrence of Arabia.
I worked very hard on the dance – the ebb and flow of it. The spatial mathematics kept snagging on my desire to do something bold and dangerous. I could not conceive of the mother-figure – the terrifying, Lindow Woman figure, the revenant who enters on the sudden, deep throb of the synthesised second movement – in any way that either convinced me or would convince that exacting European audience. I knew the company had a date in the Roundhouse in London. Its vast, converted railway turntable-shed was both wonderful and hellish to work in. You needed gouts of revolutionary surprise to match it. I needed a Larionov to design our set, but there were no Larionovs left.
Then I realised what was wrong. Lindow Woman had to be danced by a man. It was so obvious. Lindow Woman would dance as Mark had danced on the ramparts, like a man pretending to be effeminate. It would be both a warrior’s dance and a perverted, dead thing that ghosts dance. Mark told me they thrust the victim down with the aid of a forked stick. The goddess they were sacrificing to was Freya.
‘Freya must have been a cruel goddess,’ I commented.
We were sitting on the lawn. The sun was out and it was warm enough. I was reading a book written by a friend, about his time with the Druze of Lebanon. Mark was scanning the woods below with his ‘twitch-can’. The others were ‘resting’. It was just after lunch. He had emerged from the house alone. The book was indistinct in my hands: my friend had been ambushed by the Druze, but I was reasonably sure that this incident was exaggerated. Lebanon is complicated. I got extremely hurt by a Lebanese boy, once.
‘How do I know, I wasn’t there,’ Mark said. ‘It’s not my field, at any rate.’
‘But let’s face it, she was a goddess with an appetite.’
‘If you say so.’
‘How can you not agree? She was hardly the Virgin Mary.’
‘We don’t know enough to say.’
‘She rode in a trap driven by a pair of cats.’
Mark lowered his binoculars.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I am into mythology. Like I told you, I’ve read P. V. Glob.’
‘Things have moved on a bit since his day. He did a lot of conjecturing. I stick to what I know. Data and analysis.’
‘Mark, that is not what makes the world go round. That is like analysing the grammar without appreciating the contents. You are capable of more than that. In fact, Mark, I believe you have a great hidden force in you. I’ve been watching you. You’re holding yourself back. You’re a little frightened, I know, but you are very much holding yourself back.’
‘From what?’
He looked sullen and a little afraid. I fixed him with the gentlest and most intense of stares, but my heart was galloping.
‘From where you really want to go, Mark. You are a very special person. There are not many people in the world with your kind of energies.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘I do. It’s a question of belief. Of believing in yourself. I think you lost that the moment your dear mother disappeared.’
‘What the hell has she got to do with it?’
‘Everything, Mark. Just about everything.’
‘Everything and everything, amen.’
‘Yes.’
‘On yer bike,’ he murmured.
He raised his binoculars to his eyes and swivelled and looked at me through them.
‘Oo, a loriculus.’
‘What’s that, Mark?’
‘A blue-crowned hanging parakeet.’
I was wearing my blue denim sun hat. I laughed.
‘Mark, you are really the most amusing person. And brilliant with it.’
He lowered his binoculars again.
‘You’re pulling my leg,’ he said.
‘No, I am not.’
‘What are you after, mate?’
I did not blush. Maybe the sun was too hot on my face. ‘After, Mark?’
‘Yeah. You’ll be offering me a piece of cake next. Or a nice big ’nana.’
I laughed again, although I felt queasy with disappointment.
‘The trouble is, Mark, you feel threatened by compliments. I have met many men like you, who feel threatened by compliments. Let me be frank, Mark. You are punishing yourself, because you feel guilt about your mother. I have welcomed my seventieth spring, I have seen the blossom grace the blue air seventy times, as a good friend of mine put it in his poem, but my own mother is still alive. She is ninety-three. I escaped her by moving to California. You never escaped your mother because she was dead and ghosts never go away.’
Mark was not looking at me. He was listening, his head slightly to the side, the tendon taut in his brownish neck.
‘Buzzard,’ he said. ‘Hear it? Like a short-circuited seagull.’
He remained staring out, saying nothing more. There was the faintest high-pitched mew that was, I guessed, the buzzard, and there was the silence between us which was very graceful.
We went on some interesting visits together, during those two weeks. Leonardo da Vinci’s house, for instance. Paulo had come and unfortunately he was good with cars: he laughed when he found the dirty connection. At the very last minute I suggested I accompanied them in the Mini. I really did want to see Leonardo’s house.
Jill drove. Mark made Formula One noises the whole way. He claimed it was the only way to keep the ‘char-a-bang’ going. Jill got very irritated. It rained when we got to the village and Jamie blamed Tamsin for not warning him to bring his smart raincoat. I was upset to see Mark and Tamsin exchange knowing looks. The farmhouse museum had models of Leonardo’s contributions to human progress: the tank, the machine-gun, the mounted limb-slasher. I told the others that he was said to have said, ‘I’ll do anything for money’. Lucy spent twenty-three minutes choosing a ‘Leonardo’ T-shirt while Oliver grumbled in the café. I was enjoying myself: I felt back in my twenties and the sky cleared and everything shone in the wet.
‘Look,’ said Lucy, at last, ‘it’s got his backwards-writing on it, just what I was looking for.’
‘In German,’ I said. ‘And very explicit.’
‘Oh, Christ in heaven,’ she moaned, looking at it.
‘What does it say, go on, tell us,’ Tamsin urged, wriggling in her seat.
Lucy held the T-shirt up for me to read. I don’t know an
y German, beyond the very basics. I pretended to mouth what I was reading. I pulled a face.
‘My my,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that was physiognomically possible, even!’
I made them laugh. I was their boon companion. Meanwhile, my feelings for Mark were written in invisible backwards writing on my heart.
That evening everyone, including me, drank too much. They were going to Florence the next day, but though I wasn’t actually invited, I couldn’t have stood another long car trip. Instead, I told them to watch out in the Uffizi for the Virgin’s robes, which were very sexual.
‘They are red and they have folds in them like labia, in which there is often her finger resting. This is not masturbation but penetration. It is the finger of God. It is to show how God penetrated her in a divine way, with his spirit.’
‘What a load of crap!’ barked Oliver.
‘That is precisely what Veronese said to the dirty minds of the Inquisition when they interrogated him about his Virgin’s robes, painting by painting.’
They laughed, even Oliver. I was holding them in thrall.
‘Was it subliminally unconscious or subversively deliberate?’ Jamie asked, revealing a sharp intelligence behind his languid manner.
‘That is a very good question,’ I said. ‘I think all great art is the fusion of the conscious and the unconscious. You know that you don’t know what you show. It’s the dreaming time of the wakeful imagination.’
I had never thought of this before. I felt I was coming very close to the heart of creativity but I was one glass of Chianti short. Mark’s eyes glistened in the candlelight, but he said very little for once.
Lucy especially drank too much and told me on the terrace, while she was locking up her side of the house, that she thought she was totally worthless. I was not locking up; I was enjoying the night, the stars, the early nightingales, and feeling good about the way the dance was going and that faint delicious pain in my heart. The wine was swaying in my head. I told her to sit down next to me and we talked. I was like a grandfather to her, she said, without meaning to hurt – or maybe only subliminally meaning to hurt. I’d have preferred it if she’d said I was like an uncle. Her grandfather died when she was two, she strained to remember him. She looked much more attractive in the one candle I had kept burning. She had this quiet, interior expression that fought against her love of society, her good breeding, her English manners. But it never quite made it through, that was the thing. Zimbabwe had been too great a shock for her, it had operated at a level so much deeper than dinner-parties, or even Christian good works, that she had disturbed her equilibrium. This is what I suggested, anyway – quite erroneously, I now recognise. She was just a snake tongue under the powdered sugar.
‘You’re a very good man, Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m not a good person.’
‘You have this idea of goodness that’s been handed on to you,’ I said. ‘That idea is to do with the status quo keeping power and privilege. The powerful people – your parents – decide what is good and what is bad. It’s like a papal decree, you know? You are questioning that idea with your innate energies, with your heart. The heart is always truthful. You have to stretch yourself in life, go further. A lot further. There’s a kind of zero point, a neutral position from which you start out, and that zero point is maybe where you are now, because it’s a lot to do with recognising that you are not satisfied with where you are. And you are interpreting that as worthlessness. You have to change your criteria, Lucy.’
‘You are clever, Jack. I think I know what you’re saying.’
She had this strangely diffuse face – large teeth, plumpish. I have no great memory of it. Her eyes were soft and a little dull, as if she didn’t have to bother to look at anything properly because it would all be there anyway. I search to recall her precise appearance, but she was all about the imprecision of comfort. As I was carrying on like some California shrink, reassuring her in our mutual haze of drink and night air, I thought that she was probably right about being worthless. There was something futile about her and there always would be. She already looked about forty-five. At forty-five she would look as she did now, and everyone would think she was very well preserved. And then, out of the blue, she asked me if I was gay.
‘I fall in love very easily,’ I said. ‘I have fallen for girls, too.’
‘Half-and-half, are you?’
I smiled. ‘You know in Spartacus how Laurence Olivier as Crassus has that scene with Tony Curtis as his slave Antoninus, massaging his master’s back, and how Crassus says that some men like snails and others prefer oysters, and after Antoninus says he likes one or the other, Crassus says he likes both snails and oysters? I believe they cut that in the official version, but I get to see the full version in special cinema clubs in San Francisco. Does it bother you if I say I like both snails and oysters?’
‘No. One of my closest friends is gay.’
‘That’s good.’
‘I really hate snails and oysters, in fact.’ She laughed.
‘I hope you’re not talking metaphorically, now. Actually, I am not really bisexual,’ I added. ‘I have never fallen for a girl in the same way I have fallen for a boy. I have an innate adoration for the human body and the heart inside that body, but my love for a girl would always be brotherly.’
‘Hi, brother,’ she laughed, raising her hand.
I took her hand and held it.
‘Lucy, take charge of your own life.’
She blinked back tears.
‘Oh, it’s all so boring, my little life. I haven’t even seen Spartacus, it’s more Mummy’s generation. She had me when she was nineteen, she’s not even forty-five and amazingly glamorous, still. I wish I was someone like Mark, who’s so directed, who just doesn’t bother about pleasing anyone else.’
I realised my hand had flexed involuntarily, tightening on her fingers.
‘Mark?’
‘Yes. He’s so completely selfish. It must be nice not having to think about behaving properly, or ever wondering whether everyone’s happy around you.’
‘You think Mark is like that?’
‘Well, haven’t you noticed? Of course you have, you’re just being frightfully diplomatic. I’ve noticed how nice you are to him despite the fact you’re obviously incredibly irritated by him, like we all are. Except Jill, of course. He so puts on his northern accent thing, he doesn’t really need to. He makes such a point of it.’
‘Well, it’s where he comes from,’ I said, a little astonished. ‘The Black Country. That’s how a lot of people speak in that area, like Texans in Texas or whatever. I had a north London suburbs accent, once. It’s been layered over –’
‘Yes, but it comes and goes, have you noticed? It’s so self-conscious. Oliver’s going to hit him, soon, and as for Jamie . . .’
‘Oh, but I don’t mind Mark,’ I said, feeling quite upset. ‘Why was Jamie kicked out of his public school, by the way?’
Lucy laughed.
‘For organising a hike,’ she said.
‘A hike?’
‘No, I mean a heist. I’m incredibly thick, by the way. I don’t know how I made it to Cambridge.’
‘A heist?’
‘There was this Gainsborough painting in the Common Room, an enormous painting worth a fortune, and the door wasn’t even locked and there were no alarms or anything. He claims he was approached by someone in the town and then the police got onto it and somehow found out that Jamie was the inside chap, or whatever they call it. It was something to do with the IRA, in the end.’
‘That’s very impressive, Lucy.’
‘And now he wants to be a lawyer,’ she said, softly. ‘He’s Oliver’s best friend. A bit arrogant, though, isn’t he?’
‘Jamie?’
‘Look, re Mark. Can’t you say something to him, like you’ve said things to me? It’s not to do with any working-class or lower-middle-class thing, either. I’ve lots of friends from very ordinary backgrounds and strong accents and e
verything. It’s just to do with a total lack of consideration for anyone else. He never lifts a finger. Like a fifteen-year-old.’
‘He did the washing-up that time,’ I said, but she ignored me.
‘I can’t think how Jill stands it, though she’s not got much choice of men, I guess. And Jamie reckons Tamsin’s gone on him – Mark, I mean. That’s not what she told me! OK, he’s a bit of a hunk, but he’s such a nerd with it. Jamie’s always been incredibly possessive. I knew him at Marlborough. He was just the same then, except then it was boys. That’s strictly hush-hush, by the way.’
I looked at Lucy’s round, shining face and wanted to tear it up, the way you’d tear up a magazine photograph. I let go her hand and stood and wished her goodnight, gently, giving nothing away. Oliver called at that very moment from the top floor, where Ivor had made what he called the Music Room, with a Bang & Olufsen stereo and some antique leather chairs. I could hear, as Oliver called down for Lucy, the strains of a Rossini opera through the open window.
It struck me that pretty well everyone was falling for Mark, in their own way. We would start to tread on each other’s toes, very soon. I recalled something La Rochefoucauld said, about friends getting disgusted in the end with friendship and devotees getting disgusted with devotion. As I went up to my bedroom in my half of the house, wishing we didn’t have to share a terrace, the thought came to me that maybe people who loved living could get disgusted by life.
‘I want,’ I said to Mark, ‘to ask for your help. I want you to dance for me.’
He snorted. He had breakfast crumbs at the side of his mouth.
‘I’m serious. Between you and me, Mark, I’m an important choreographer, I’m very well known, and this dance I’m working on is going to be famous. You have inspired this dance. It’s going to be called, ‘Lindow Woman’. Just that.’