Exquisite Corpse

by Robert Irwin

  MacKellar carried on, conscientiously describing shop after shop, but I was hardly listening, as I carried on with my Blind Pew act, tapping the ground ahead of me with an Indian sword-stick. The sword-stick had been provided by Oliver for the day. My hat (very like the one worn by Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) had been lent to me by Apache Jorge. The coat I was wearing had been absent-mindedly left by Ned in my rooms a few days ago. The sleepmask over my eyes was, however, my own. While MacKellar struggled with words to create his version of London, I was seeing quite a different city laid out upon my eyelids, so that I appeared to advance through great chasms and pass by oriental temples. I saw nuns and priests shepherd crocodiles down otherwise deserted streets. I entered houses at random and walked through crowded drawing rooms in which all the conversations were animated but silent. Out of doors again, I confronted huge mobs and, though I could distinguish every feature of every face in the mob with minute particularity, I noted without surprise that I had never seen any of these people before. So wonder after wonder unfolded itself on my eyelids as I walked blindfold through London.

  ‘Fourmillante cité pleine des rêves

  Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant

  Les mystères partout comme des sèves

  Dans les canaux étroits du colosse puissant’

  MacKellar shook me out of my Baudelairean reverie,

  ‘We are passing a duchess. Raise your hat. Now we are passing a cheese-monger’s. Magnificent cheeses! Smell them!’

  I sniffed. The smoggy air was damp and heavy with coal dust. No cheese. The other reason for not listening to MacKellar was that he was lying. We had left my place in Cuba Street early in the morning and, after walking out of the Docks area, we had taken a tram. Lunch was in an eel-and-pie shop, probably the one in Whitechapel Road. MacKellar had helped me to feed myself, explaining to our fellow customers how I had been blinded in the service of Surrealism. Since then we had been walking a long time and I guessed that we were on the edge not of Hampstead but of Soho. However, MacKellar always lied whenever he could. It was more or less a matter of principle with him – essential training for a writer of fiction. He even pretended to be an admirer of Dr Josef Goebbels and would quote appreciatively, ‘The bigger the lie, the more beautiful!’ and MacKellar would add that lying was like lipstick, in that it did indeed make the world more beautiful and more interesting.

  In the East End we had had some trouble. MacKellar had got into a fight with a crippled beggar who had thought that I was going to poach on his territory. A little later I heard a posh voice saying that I should be horsewhipped to get the nonsense beaten out of me. But since then there had been no excitements.

  ‘I’m tired and bored,’ I announced loudly. ‘I want to be taken to a brothel – a really good brothel!’

  ‘Hush man. I’m taking you to one. We are almost there. It is the best brothel in Hampstead.’

  And in a few minutes we pushed through some swing-doors.

  ‘Is this the brothel?’

  ‘Aye, this is the brothel. But not so loud or you will scare the ladies.’

  ‘Are the ladies beautiful?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Describe them to me.’

  ‘I will, but first I will get the madame to provide us with some drinks.’

  MacKellar forced me down on to a hard wooden chair and I was left alone in what was evidently a crowded room. I could smell beer. I remember that I wondered why I was doing this. Defamiliarising the world might have its uses as an exercise in the cleansing of perceptions and it was true that there were the visions. Even so I was restless. I was waiting for something really exciting to happen – something that would change my life forever. When I had set out this morning my hopes had been high. I had been expecting the unexpected and I had visualised myself as a sort of goat tethered to a hunter’s tree as bait to trap the marvellous.

  MacKellar returned and pressed a pint of beer into my hand.

  ‘For God’s sake man, what do you see? What manner of people are these?’ I cried.

  ‘This is one of London’s most exclusive brothels,’ he assured me. ‘Apart from us, all the men here are in white tie and tails, but the madame is a particular friend of mine and she let us in as an exception.’

  I nodded patiently. I was fairly sure that this was one of two public houses in Greek Street. Probably it was The Eagle. I had visited the pub when I was researching my illustrations to De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. (De Quincey met the prostitute Anne in this street.)

  ‘By contrast, all the women are nude,’ MacKellar continued. ‘They are lying or sitting on red velvet sofas at the far end of the room. Some of them are looking at you curiously. They must be wondering what it would be like to make love to a blind man. Any moment now one of them will come over.’

  ‘Are any of them beautiful?’

  ‘I have told you, they are all beautiful.’

  Until then all I had been able to smell was beer and Guinness, but then suddenly I caught a faint and bitter hint of a woman’s perfume and from close by I heard a woman’s voice asking softly,

  ‘Why is he like that?’

  ‘Ah, love is blind,’ replied MacKellar.

  Then he went silent. I fancied I could hear the scratch of his pen. That day and for that matter every day MacKellar carried a notebook in which he jotted down his impressions of the world. His constant fear was that he might experience an epiphany without having on him the means to record it. I sat and drank, thinking of MacKellar’s many problems. Suddenly, and it was a little like missing a step when descending a staircase in the dark, I had the sensation that he was no longer with me.

  ‘MacKellar? MacKellar?’

  A young woman’s voice, perhaps the same voice as before, answered me.

  ‘Was that the name of your friend?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, he’s gone out just now, but he wrote a message which he pressed into my hand.’

  She read it out. It was plain from her reading that she was amused.

  ‘Dear Miss __________,

  You have a kindly face. I beg you, take care of this tragically afflicted young man. God help me. It has all become too much for me. Thank you and God bless!

  His despairing father,

  M.’

  ‘MacKellar,’ I sighed.

  She giggled and then,

  ‘You are coming with me.’

  Her voice, though pleasant, brooked no contradiction. It was not a cockney voice, but then again it was not a Mayfair voice. I guessed that it was a voice from Metro-land. Then, as I continued to listen to it, I thought that I could detect an exaggerated clarity of diction which reminded me of certain screen actresses. It was even possible, I concluded, that this young woman might have gone to elocution classes – not the voice of a debutante, but the voice of someone who wished she had been. There was a kind of constraint in it that I found erotic. It sounded as if all her vowels were bound in consonantal corsets.

  She took my hand and led me out of the pub. I felt like a trusting child in an infant school crocodile. (That was the sweetest thing ever, her hand nestling in mine like a tiny bird.) It was indeed the first time I had held hands with anyone since infant school. The sun at last had beaten its way through the haze and I felt its faint heat on my face. At first I said nothing for I was concentrating, trying to visualise what sort of body would go with that sort of voice. Surely it is true that certain kinds of body go with certain kinds of voice. Hence opera singers. The voice that was now guiding me, I was sure, issued from a body shaped like a violin. Only a woman with a narrow waist and swelling hips could give birth to such a voice – so I hoped.

  I was listening to the pleasant click of her heels upon the pavement when she spoke again.

  ‘What do you do – for work I mean?’

  If it had been MacKellar, he would have spun her some yarn about being a professional mah-jong player or a zoo keeper, but
I spoke the truth,

  ‘I am an artist – a painter.’

  ‘An artist! How fascinating!’

  I winced and I wanted to say ‘No. No. It is not fascinating at all. It is solitary and boring. Most of it is technique and preparation for the application of technique – stretching the canvas, mixing pigments, diluting them with oil – all very boring’. Whenever I talked with Felix, it was always about where to buy certain oils, how to clean brushes and dealers’ commissions. We enjoyed such talk, but nobody else could possibly enjoy it. Whenever I put a painting aside as ‘finished’, I still have the feeling that I could have spent yet more time on what I have been working on and have done it better. However, I was certain that this was not what she wanted to hear, so I gave her an uplifting version of my current work – a commission from a publisher to illustrate MacKellar’s The Girlhood of Gagool.

  On the previous day I had started work on a lithograph showing the young and beautiful Gagool triumphing over the corpse of Prince Ndomba and looked on by the respectful Kukwana guards. Gagool, dancing on the corpse of the prince, demands to know ‘What is the lot of man born of a woman?’ and the Kukwanas chorus ‘Death!’ Here and throughout his absurdist novel MacKellar, aiming at parody, had modelled his prose on that of the Chums Annual, but I was unwilling to follow the same juvenile model. In the book, Gagool represented the force of liberation arising in the heart of Africa, which was going to free us all from the forces of Western scientism and rationalism. I had shown the Kukwana warriors, leaning on their assegais, to be almost as stiff as the dead prince. Gagool, by contrast, all flashing eyes and floating hair, frozen in her spider-like dance, appeared to incarnate the force of life. It is one of the key moments in the book and the trick for the illustrator is to spot such moments.

  So then she wanted to know about MacKellar and, after him, the rest of my friends. Were they all like that, writers, painters and philosophers and all a bit mad? Then she wanted to know my name. I told her it was Caspar.

  ‘Caspar!’

  I hastened to assure her that Caspar was not my real name.

  ‘Nothing about you is quite real.’

  I heard an undercurrent of wistfulness in her voice. I became defensive. Why should we let past generations impose their names upon us? As for surnames, they were labels devised for the convenience of the authorities, so that they could survey, tax and conscript us more easily.

  By now we were walking on grass. It must have been St James’s Park. I felt the sun intermittently, but it was obvious that the shadows were lengthening.

  I took over the questioning.

  Her name was Caroline. She was a typist and she worked for a fur importer with an office at the bottom of Soho. After work, if she went anywhere other than back to her room in her parents’ house in Putney, then it was to the ABC cafe on the corner of Piccadilly with a friend from the office. (‘She’s awfully nice, but ever so boring!’) This was the first time she had ever ventured alone into a pub after work. So this was her adventure as well as mine. When she had tremulously pushed open the door of the Eagle, she was entering a world which hitherto had existed only in her fantasy. Since she had never been in a Soho pub before, she had had little idea of the sort of people she would encounter in such a place, but she had vaguely imagined herself getting into conversation with some sort of louche, Bohemian artist. And then she had fallen into conversation with me. Life can be so predictable at times …

  At work Caroline typed invoices and letters for the fur company. There were five of them in the office. It was all so normal and yet so strange to me that I was entranced. Office work! Regular hours! Office intrigues! Office jokes! To me it was a fantasy world in miniature, a modern Lilliput, endearing in the pettiness of its concerns. She told me how hard she had to work to satisfy Mr Maitland’s high standards; how careful they all had to be in economising on typewriter ribbons and carbon paper; how Jim, the office-boy, teased her; how they quarrelled about what sort of tea to buy; how she dreamt of something vaguely different and better, but it was so vague that she could not quite find the words for it. Suddenly I found myself longing to become part of this Lilliputian fantasy world.

  ‘I should like to become an office-boy,’ I announced. ‘How does one set about it?’

  ‘You are too old to be an office-boy.’

  Her voice reproved me. She probably suspected me, quite unfairly, of teasing her. Too old at twenty-five to become an office-boy! Already one career closed against me before I was even really aware that it existed! I fell despondently silent. I should have liked to have found work as an office-boy in the same office as Caroline. I would take messages, make tea, put stamps on envelopes and tease Caroline. It would all be very easy at first, but slowly I would work my way up and take on more responsible tasks. And in the evenings Caroline and I would go out. Sometimes we would go to the pictures, but on other evenings we would walk together, window-shopping in Oxford Street, dreaming of how we would furnish a place of our own once we were married. Having become Mr Maitland’s assistant, I then replaced him. Caroline and I married and moved out into a place of our own in Barnes. I learn how to smoke a pipe, fill in tax forms, plant vegetables, play canasta and wear carpet slippers. Such skills cannot be impossibly difficult. I have read about people mastering them. I am perfectly willing to learn. Anyway in this new life in Barnes occasionally I will switch on the radio and quite by chance catch a snatch of a talk about Surrealism, and I will think to myself what a lot of pretentious and boring rubbish! What was that all about? Of course in the life I am envisaging for us there will be boredom too, as I have to discuss international fur prices in the office and the pattern of curtains in the home. But that would be precisely the beauty of this amazing and strangely contrived way of life. It would all be quite beautifully boring. It would be a way of containing the commingled mysteries of sex and happiness. That is the whole point of the bourgeois way of life – putting sex and happiness at the centre of existence and making their achievement easy. It was evident to me as I contemplated the bungalow in Barnes, the predestined theatre of our thoroughly domesticated passion, that it was far more beautiful than any painting either I or Salvador Dali was ever likely to paint.

  Caroline was impatient with my silence. She wanted to know what I had been doing sitting in a pub with a sleep-mask over my eyes? I tried to explain about the Serapion Brotherhood and its quest for convulsive beauty. It was important to train oneself to sense auras. It was necessary to disorder the senses, or even to switch them off altogether for a time, in order to become sensitive to the auras. My temporary adoption of blindness was a form of cognitive estrangement. It was a way of letting the darkness of the night and its dreams invade the daylight hours. With MacKellar’s help, I had been sniffing blindly and casting about in the streets of London, hunting for the dream-woman – the woman who so far had existed only in the Brotherhood’s dreams. I quoted Paul Eluard’s verse in ‘La Revolution surréaliste’:

  ‘Une femme est plus belle que le monde ou je vis

  Et je ferme les yeux.’

  ‘A woman is more beautiful than the world in which I live, And I close my eyes.’

  I was not making much sense even to myself. I took another deep breath, but she silenced me with a finger to my lips. I kissed the finger. I was aware that she was no longer beside me but in front of me.

  ‘Well I think it is very silly,’ she pronounced with mock solemnity. ‘But it’s quite nice.’

  And we kissed mouth to mouth. I had no precise idea where we were and, for all I knew, there were a ring of thirty or forty people around us intently watching us kiss. I let the sword-stick drop to the ground and my fingers ran everywhere over her face. I was trying to use them as eyes. My hands caressed the hair which fell in waves down to the shoulders. Then my hands dropped to brush against the firmness of the breasts under the heavy fabric of her dress. My hands continued to explore lower down, passing the line of her girdle. Would she be violin-shaped like her voi
ce?

  Would she be wearing silk stockings? Might she not have only one leg? I would not have put it past MacKellar to have lined me up with a one-legged woman. However, she firmly prevented me from discovering how many legs she had and she pulled me down to sit beside her on the grass.

  ‘So now, am I – what was it you said? – your convulsively beautiful, utterly mysterious woman?’ The voice was teasing.

  ‘I should like to paint you, Caroline. Come to my place – 41 Cuba Street in the West India Docks – and I’ll paint your portrait. Come this weekend. My fingertips tell me that you will make a good portrait. Your skin texture is excellent.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ I could practically hear the sceptically raised eyebrow.

  ‘I’d paint you with your clothes on.’

  Silence.

  I was trying to work out how to explain to her that my offer to do her portrait would not be the prelude to my seducing her, but this was difficult, since that was indeed my intention.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Let me think about it.’ She removed her hand from mine. ‘I’m going to get us some ice-cream.’

  She left me sitting there. As I sat alone in the dark, listening to the ducks and the distant murmur of conversations, I could feel that the sun had finally sunk behind the trees and, though my skin was still warm, I shivered. She did not return. I was such a fool that I sat there for the greater part of an hour, but she did not come back to me. Finally I removed the sleep-mask. The park at dusk was still crowded and in every direction I looked I could see young women – blondes, brunettes and redheads. None of them appeared to pay me any special attention.

  Chapter Three