The Bo-Peep episode settles into chalky whiteness. It’s Whit-week, the poet is hungry for moon metaphors. The dark lady walks in his sleep like an audition for Vadim’s Blood and Roses. The poem is completed. He returns to London.
But that’s not the end of it, not quite; Keats chances on Isabella in a street ‘which goes from Bedford Row to Lamb’s Conduit’. She is still an ‘enigma’, but now she has been ‘in a Room’ with Keats’s brother, George, with his publisher (Taylor), with Reynolds. She enjoys a close relationship with Taylor. Who writes terrible sonnets, infected by his passion for a woman who is suddenly everywhere.
Isabella allows the hot poet to accompany her on a walk to Islington, a social visit; she lets him in to her apartment: ‘a very tasty sort of place with Books, Pictures a bronze statue of Buonaparte, Music, aeolian Harp; a Parrot, a Linnet – a Case of Choice Liquers’. Then, and this is the sinister part, she gives him a grouse, unplucked, to take home for his brother Tom – who is fading fast, consumption.
There is a night, just one, when they sleep together, before Keats goes off again, Chichester. Or do they?
Hush, hush! tread softly! hush, hush, my dear!
All the house is asleep, but we know very well
That the jealous, the jealous old bald-pate may hear,
Tho’ you’ve padded his night-cap – O sweet Isabel!
Too close for comfort. The pneumatic thrusting of those hushes, the ‘bald-pate’ and his jealousy. I was fighting a long-dead poet – for possession of a ghost.
The woman at the window table had evaporated. Leaving behind her newspaper. I scooped it up, shoved it into my rucksack. Along with the postcard she had mislaid. Even Roos, by this time, wanting to reach Pevensey Bay in time for dinner, was glancing at his watch.
‘A brandy for the road?’
My head hurt: voices, broken lines that might play some part in my projected fiction, but which I would never be able to write down or recall. Was this a meditation on time and memory? A guide book dressed with cheap quotations? An undercooked Mills & Boon romance (Hastings: home of Catherine Cookson)?
The mystery woman’s postcard was London. Night and fog. ‘Fred Judge’: repro signature (1923). A murky print like early Gainsborough Hitchcock (the studio by the canal). But on location. Sabotage (1936): Hitch’s version of Conrad’s The Secret Agent (dark deeds, family quarrels, pornography and terrorism). Shot in the same year, confusingly, as The Secret Agent, Hitchcock’s translation of Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.
Stop it. Stop right there.
Let the postcard sit on the bar. Alongside the brandy glass. Run your finger around the rim. Make that sound. Dip your finger. Taste it. She’s gone. Leave it there.
Fred Judge, a Hastings man, was very active in the exploitation of memory: a prolific jobbing photographer. Rectangles of stiff card. Weather. Having a lovely time. Feeling much better now. Sales accelerated by war (Hitler rumoured to be major card collector). Great boost to correspondence. Keep your pecker up. Early cards -pre-cinema, pre-radio – as news. The fire. The burning boat. The freak storm. Forked lightning. Trams. Views. Fred’s slogan: ‘Over 100 Medals & Diplomas Awarded’. Cards pinned to weatherboard, a fisherman’s shack on the beach. Like whitebait, flounders, plaice.
Millions of places: England. Judge or his representatives went everywhere. Even Whitby (rival turf). Ludgate Hill. What an archive!
Until Fred (moustache like the Kaiser, pinstripe suit of an acid-bath killer) decides he must do London. He changes his winning formula, and – influenced perhaps by Alvin Langdon Coburn, those long shadows – attempts the ‘uncharacteristic’ bromoil process.
Slipping away from the coast, on a late train, Judge made camera studies of London at night, blending Coburn’s high style with the canny postcard promoter’s staple of taxis, buses, policemen in uniform, equestrian statues.
Businessman first and artist as a consequence of that, Judge didn’t waste time on such wonders as Coburn’s cloud studies. He didn’t have access to Henry James, Mark Twain and Ezra Pound. His runs on London were covert, fifth-columnist, Hitchcockian: men in coats and hats, sinister crowds. Hastings by day (picturesque, charming) – and London by night, West End, river (you can follow the route he took).
Camera Pictures of London by Night (1924). The book. A collector’s piece. £350 or more for a fine copy.
November evenings. Stalking the action. Holborn Viaduct, Temple, the Embankment.
‘Movement, life, and mystery,’ Judge wrote. ‘One can almost imagine one’s self transported into another world, strange and alarming, alluring and sometimes fearsome.’
He wanted: an antidote for colour. A painterly funk of greys, crisscrossing vehicles, solitaries pursuing their ‘private diagonals’. Drama exaggerated by low-angle POV. The more you hide, the softer the focus, the better it plays. Bromoil soup against the clarity of coastal light.
Stop it. Jacky is trying to haul himself out of his chair, wondering if he’d better sort out some crisps for the walk to Pevensey, a family-size pork pie.
The lacquered surface of the bar, its puddles of spill. Brandy glass with one last swallow. The leopard woman’s postcard, her choice: ‘A Night Arrival at the Grand Hotel’. Very Thirty-Nine Steps. Very … Grand Hotel Garbo, Joan Crawford and a squelch of Barrymores. I approve the setting – cab with open door, mysterious stranger (collar turned up, leather bag). Illuminated triangle above dim entrance. Where is the photographer? What did society make of this provincial lurker? Private detective? Government snoop? When it was all over, did he slip away to the station?
STOP.
It was the bromoils that slipped, leaked. Go to Judge’s archive (Roos did) and they’ll tell you that prints can no longer be taken from those glass negatives. London has reverted to its original fog, memory devoured by fungi. The night city is an involuntary collaboration between what Judge saw and shapes like fingerprints. A superimposition of gas clouds, smears, phantoms of future terror. Soon the glass will be clear as water.
So turn the bloody card over. Read what she says.
Something’s dripping into my brandy. I could fill the glass in a minute. Vein pulsing like an over-generous optic. A new cocktail: ‘Bram Stoker’s Vortograph’. Mongrel blood, very fresh and red, with a shot of fine and a dash of Worcester sauce. The point of my chin, the old shaving wound, has spontaneously unzipped. I’m like a Romanov, a haemophiliac.
STOP IT.
‘Stop that right now. You can’t bleed here.’ The barman rushes me with an ice bucket. Try this.’
Don’t try it. Ice pinks as it melts, a fistful of cubes. Like a butcher’s bin. Splashing over the bar, the carpet. My shirt, my jacket. The colour is extraordinary, too rich for an old man. I must be fresher than I thought. I’m emptying, fast, in a lunchtime pub on the hinge of a seaside town that has seen better days: the road to Bexhill retail park.
‘You’ll have to go, mate. You can’t stand here bleeding. We don’t have a licence.’
I snatch up the Judge postcard. Swab it with a dirty rag. The woman has stamped it, ready to go, addressed it and written a few words.
Now you’re back – and when you’re ready – come and see me in Cunard Court. I’ve found out something very interesting about KB.
Love, Marina.
We could deliver the card by hand. The name of the addressee meant nothing – but she lived in Pevensey Bay.
Pevensey Bay
It was almost dark by the time we got there, twilight thickened around us like a comfortable wrap, muffling the shame of the territory we had to cross. I’d been prodding and poking Jacky since Bexhill: an endless marine strip. Caravan parks for the expelled of Lewisham and Eltham (community orders). Beach huts. Martello tower. Railway line. Low hills. Marsh. You might consider this a proper location in which to debrief a Soviet spy, a double agent, but live here? They hadn’t heard, most of them, old ladies (fit as gibbons) peeping out from behind lace curtains and wooden shutters: the invasion was off.
Hitler wasn’t coming this year. And Napoleon was doing a time-share on Elba.
A high shingle ridge that would never be high enough, Roos reckoned, to keep out the sea: mortgages refused on asbestos properties, strictly cash. A constituency therefore of Londoners (barbecues, beer, boats) of a particular stamp, sturdy individualists with interests in the motor trade, plumbing, taxidermy and other outreaches of the free market. World-class wet suits: wind-surfing, sewage-dodging, messing about on boards, in dinghies, making plenty of noise. Melancholics too. Non-commissioned documentarists, painters without galleries, writers who didn’t write. The holiday home of Peter Sellers (pre-Ekland and still the plump gadget freak with the 16mm camera): sober records of present malaise and future despair. A beach, a bungalow, a family. Spike Milligan hammered out a few episodes of The Goons between breakdowns.
It helped Roos to talk. If he couldn’t rabbit, he had to confront the reality of where he was, this ribbon-development POW camp – tolerated (for now) because there wasn’t quite enough land between sea and salt marshes on which to put a superstore. Pevensey lifers were the equivalent of the human shield in Baghdad. Donkey sanctuarists: dressed down and prepared to castrate invaders on sight. Feisty old dames who looked as if they swam over to Dieppe every morning for a cup of coffee. If a life sentence means what it says, Pevensey Bay has cracked it: a leathery immortality (animals included), clumps of sea kale, uninterrupted contemplation of the great fact of the English Channel.
We started to worry about house numbers. I tried to remember the address on the fugitive Marina’s postcard. Roos had his number, the home of the woman who found the clergyman’s severed head, written on his palm – but it was too dark to read. Buzzed by speeding cars that either travelled full-beam or didn’t bother with lights, we struggled to interpret the scrawl on the Belgian’s yeasty paw.
Snap! You guessed. Our numbers were the same. But impossible to make out from the road. Bungalows (three-deckers stacked one on top of the other, Spanish arches, papal balconies) were set way back, up on the shingle ridge. We had no view of the sea, but took it on trust, that rumble; wind howling through the narrow gaps between properties. Down where we walked, there was nothing to help us: garage doors, painted dustbin lids and a commendable absence of novelty nameplates. Pevensey Bay was strictly word of mouth.
Which meant that, every fifty yards or so, one of us (me) would open a garden gate, negotiate a set of steps, feel for numbers – or peep through an uncurtained picture window. I saw things that should remain private, between consenting adults and pieces of electrical equipment (television sets). I found the magic number: 147. (Like the catalogue entry for Max Beckmann’s Young Woman with Glass). I knocked.
Luckily, Roos was following close behind on the slithery wooden steps, a plump cushion. I might otherwise have tumbled right back into the prickly plants.
Blaze of light. Glimpse of nightkitchen. Laurel and Hardy in bowler hats. With none of their celebrated slowburn gravitas. Wrong shape, wrong size: Hardy was petite but padded, very pretty – despite the grease moustache. While Laurel was tall and strong; anti-gravity hair, black bowler perched like rowing boat on sandbar. They did the walk quite well – for women. The tie-wiggling. With camply extruded digits. Voices too: like folk who had come late, and reluctantly, to sound.
Long jackets and smooth bare legs.
‘Another fine mess,’ Hardy, the little one, piped; after some fastidious pantomime, removing a speck of dirt from the corner of her eye. Geisha blink of a whiteface transvestite with padded belly. ‘What took you so long?’
‘Don’t say a thing,’ Roos whispered, ‘about the head. Not yet.’
The odd couple – each to his own – bowed us in: through narrow kitchen to sitting-room (cushions, clothes, boots, sandals, scarfs, flatscreen TV, leather couch, pyramid of video cassettes).
‘We’re having a bit of a Bergman binge,’ the redhead announced. ‘Girls-together weekend, pigging out. Wine, chocky biscuits, black Pak. Find yourselves a glass.’
On the flatscreen, in morbid colour, someone had been killing sheep. A woman on crutches was having a bad time. And a cigar-smoker showed off an archive of gloomy photographs that he kept in a barn.
Jacky perked up at once. ‘The Passion of Anna. Great. Anything to eat in the fridge?’
‘I think we’ve finished the last packet but you’re welcome to look. And bring another bottle while you’re out there.’
I followed the waddling culture freak into the kitchen, a glassed platform on unequal stilts over a rough garden. I wasn’t in the mood for movies, Baltic angst (coals to Newcastle); mad women watching other women go mad. This pair looked just about capable of following the pictures in Rick Stein (pristine copy on shelf, along with the River Café thing). The only literature was a Zelda Fitzgerald biography and the grey Penguin of Nostromo – with nicotine-tanned pages. The girls were smoking their way through Conrad’s mythical South American republic of Costaguana. I checked. They’d reached the bit with the eyed-patched general, Barrios. Extraordinary night rides, encounters with wild bulls, struggles with crocodiles, adventures in the great forests, crossings of swollen rivers.
‘Shit.’
A dozen bottles of Pinot Grigio. A frond of black lettuce that was starting to sweat. A tub of margarine. Two bullet-like olives in the salad tray. Roos was furious. ‘We’ll have to use the phone. They must have an Indian takeaway in the village.’
I could hear low, miserable voices in the next room. And women laughing, gossiping, heart-to-heart: sisterly confession, moral support, futures mapped out.
Jacky wrestled with the cork. ‘We’ll get them pissed, right, then ask about the head. Who found it? Where? Human interest stuff. You can change a few details and call it fiction.’
When I came back, with the new bottle, the little one was shoving Marina’s postcard (which I’d placed, without comment, on the coffee table) under a cushion. She was wondering, quite reasonably, how we fitted in. The tall girl kept up a kind of rapid-fire commentary, the small one fell asleep.
‘Livy’s pregnant.’
‘Livy?’
Names offered. Ages withheld.
I wrote them down to keep the record straight. The little one is known, perversely, as Ollie. Livy, Livia. Olivia Fairlight-Jones. Border Welsh? Same background, I guess, as Tiggy Legge(over)-Whatever. The royal thingummy. Stan, the oversize Laurel, is Katherine Cloud Riise – or, more familiarly, Track. Got that? Friends, artists. The woman called Marina (who sent the card) is older, a benefactor, former teacher, something of that sort. She owns the Pevensey Bay bungalow – which she generously offers out, sanctuary for associates, damaged urbanites in need of R & R – while she rents a flat in Hastings, where she is supposed to be writing a book, a novel. Her first.
I felt some sympathy for those French hacks, nouveau roman, who didn’t bother with names: single letters were usually enough. R watched at the window as the woman undressed …
The Passion of Anna was winding down, the suspected sheepkiller had topped himself. The cameraman, so Roos informed us, was suffering from vertigo. Bergman was plagued with stomach ulcers. And Max von Sydow, commuting between the island location and Stockholm where he was doing theatre, was thinking wistfully of a Hollywood future and The Exorcist.
Anna wasn’t one of my names. Thank god. They can’t make a European art movie without her (character or star); it’s the symmetry, the loving gasp in the sound of the thing. I had my hands full with recurring Marinas, Ediths, Isabels. Annas were altogether too much. From the woman who disappears in L’Avventura to Jean-Marie Straub’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. From Magnani to Karina: a terrifying absence of invention. Track had four or five names without resource to the Anna thing. I never met a bona fide Anna, which I’m sure you’ll agree, given the weight of potential cross-cultural references, was just as well. One Anna and I’d be lost for life.
The Marina person who owned the bungalow had produced a very fine series of images, s
eascapes, views from a speeding car, retail parks: video-pulls (hence the expensive kit) reworked with paint. In the tradition, so I thought, of all those anonymous women who laboured, retouching Fred Judge’s anaemic prints. Or the colourists of Apocalypse (1941–2) and Day and Dream (1946), portfolios for which Max Beckmann took all the credit.
The women made a pet of Roos, they had him smoking, doping. Instead of getting them drunk, he succumbed to herbal frivolity, descriptions of favourite meals. He was as high as a man of his bulk, stuck to quality leather, can go.
‘You have such a lovely lovely little moustache, Ollie. Like a lobster. Let Jacky stroke. Talk to me – about that nasty old head on the marshes.’
‘I’d rather talk about dreams.’
She cupped her belly, the hard round shape, no cushion, the restless foetus in its saline pouch.
Track, so Ollie whispered to her new best friend, was sticky with love, a man who taught her how to dowse, they slept together in the car park of a Travelodge. Now they were going off on a circumnavigation of Canvey Island, part of an art project, a walk down the A13.
Livia enjoyed the fruits.
It was illogical. Even in Jacky’s current free-associating state. Track feverishly conjoined and Livia pregnant? Another Bergman on the screen, black and white. Track was opening the door, sliding it across, letting in night air, the roar of the sea. Its throat of stones. Roos snoring, heavily. And Livia breathing hard, resting her head, tenderly, on Jacky’s soft, paternal shoulder.
I had a dream and this was it. Nothing made sense.
The new Bergman: a burning monk, a child caressing a projection of his mother, an actress struck dumb. Roos told us earlier that The Passion of Anna, conceived in a dream, was itself a dream: the only way of resolving the pain, by acting it out. ‘A landscape,’ the critic said, ‘is a state of soul.’
Dining on Stones Page 29