by Will Self
The stony canyon of Kingsway terrified the members; they hugged the ankles of the buildings, keening for mercy. They almost scampered into Lincolns Inn Fields, and made their escape, via the Old Curiosity shop, into Portugal Street.
They didn’t properly regain their breath until, cigarettes lit, they were ensconsed in the theatre bar, and the Martian had bought them all a drink – a triple for Val, who was most in need. ‘Why – why the fuck,’ Val panted, ‘did we fucking walk here?’
But, of course, none of them knew.
The crowd in the bar were not the usual sort of first-nighters. These sports-jacketed men, with British Home Stores bolsters of wives, had driven in from the outer suburbs, or even further afield; some with teenage children, others with elvers still more jellied. No more familiar with Beckett than Val Carmichael (less so, in point of fact, because he had met the playwright, once, with Trouget. ‘What’s he like?’ the Extra had asked. ‘Her?’ Val replied. ‘Total cunt.’), these punters had come to see Terry Pierce, the fresh-faced and rubber-legged star of the hugely popular peak-time sitcom Baloo’s Den, in which he played an accident-prone young Scout master.
Backstage, Pierce had been appalled by the state that Bolton had arrived in. The Extra caromed off the distempered walls and nutted the safety lights’ wire basketry. However, after applying to an attentive stagehand for medicinal cocaine, the actor, who was to be the very embodiment of Beckett’s joyful pessimism, did indeed achieve a kind of … joyful pessimism.
‘Terry, darling,’ he slurred, propped in the doorway of his costar’s dressing room. ‘Don’ worry ‘bout nuffin, sweetie. All I gotta fuckin’ do is sit there, babes – iss you gotta do the work!’
This, while technically accurate, was still not particularly reassuring for Pierce, who, in common with so many farceurs, had a deep – almost pathological – yearning to be taken seriously. The Extra, as Hamm, might well be able to sit in ‘an armchair on castors’ for ninety-some minutes, but whether he could bring the right kind of sonorous asperity to lines widely regarded as the very acme of bleak Absurdism seemed altogether doubtful. He couldn’t even remember the names of the actors playing Nell and Nagg – who fluttered about solicitously in their grey weeds, faces doubly whitened – merely waving them away with an idle, ‘Will you fuck off, you little cunts.’
Bare interior. Grey light. Left and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn … The spartan set and insufficient lighting mandated by Beckett’s anal-retentive stage directions may have temporarily dampened the audience’s spirits – they were, after all, anticipating an evening rich with belly laughs – but the entrance of their hero, and his funambulist compliance to those self-same directions, soon ignited outbreaks of giggling, especially among the teenagers.
… goes and stands under window left. Stiff, staggering walk … He turns and looks at window right. He goes and stands under window right. He looks up at window right. He turns and looks at window left. He goes out, comes back immediately with a small step-ladder …
With each wobbly revolution and spring-heeled gyration, Terry Pierce called forth gales of laughter. Then, when he eventually closed in on the shapeless form centre stage and whipped away the sheet shrouding it to reveal Bolton in a dressing gown, stiff toque on his head, bloodstained handkerchief covering his features, the merriment faltered.
In the wings, the director of the piece was on his knees, a prayer on his lips, albeit a secular one – an adaptation, to suit these harrowing circumstances, of the playwright’s own aperçu concerning Hamm: that he was ‘The kind of man who likes things coming to an end but doesn’t want them to end just yet.’
Midway back in the stalls, strung out along the best seats in the house, sat the membership of the Plantation. They had already attracted whispery opprobrium in the bar, as they sucked up booze, spurted out smoke and cratered the haze with their ‘cunts’. Now, in the blacked-out auditorium, their purse-lipped critics discovered that the Plantation members not only looked off, they smelt it, too.
Very red face. Black glasses. Handkerchief removed, a reversal began the very instant the Extra spoke Hamm’s first line: ‘Me –’ (he yawns) ‘– to play.’ The Extra hadn’t needed much make-up at all to conform with Beckett’s instruction that Hamm have a ‘very red face’, and, while he may have been drunk, he was still an old trouper: he remembered his lines, and gave them a slushy, sibilant delivery that sent out small puffs of spume, clearly visible in the footlights.
Bolton’s fellow members – who, while possessing little culture themselves (with the obvious exceptions of Trouget and the Typist), none the less knew perfectly well how to be snobbish about it – were appalled by the levity with which their country cousins were responding to the crepuscular vision of the great dramatist. They tut-tutted, and the Poof even poked the eleven-year-old boy sitting next to him and hissed, ‘Shut up, you little prick.’
But then the hicks became transfixed by the Extra’s Hamm. He may have remained seated, but his performance was definitely a high-wire act. The unutterable pathos of the human condition, as revealed by the desperate, halting exchanges between Bolton/Hamm and Pierce/Clov, fell heavily on them: a mighty weight crushing their bourgeois complacency. The mums and dads ceased chuckling; the teenagers stopped tittering; the smaller kids struggled on with their giggles for a few more minutes, but soon, flummoxed by the weirdness of it all, they, too, shut up and lapsed into that state of shocked boredom that Theodor Adorno characterized, vide Endgame, as the ‘gerontocracy of late capitalism’.
However, Very red face. Black glasses. Hamm, calling upon the dogged, hapless, slavish Clov to poison himself. Hamm, static unless wheeled; self-obsessed unless rebarbative. Nell and Nagg in their bins, the whitened after-images of human affection, condemned for ever to an atemporal realm in which they acted out, and acted out, and acted out the pathetic dependency they called love.
Very red face. Black glasses. It didn’t need Ken Tynan – the only individual who had known both mise en scènes intimately – to recognize that this set-up was uncannily like the daily psychodrama in the Plantation Club; nor to grasp that Hamm, as portrayed by the Extra, bore close comparison with Val Carmichael himself. By the time Bolton reached the line ‘Do you not think this has gone on long enough?’, and, worse, delivered it with an accurate imitation of Val’s whining croak, the overseer of the Plantation could bear it no longer and whined back, ‘It certainly has, you cunt.’
The Extra was too much of a pro to react to this, but Terry Pierce fumbled, then dropped the three-legged toy dog. Having got this off his sunken chest, Val had no intention of leaving; besides, he had wittingly planted an evil seed, and in the last half-hour of the play was delighted by its burgeoning, as, unable to control himself, Bolton began to gash Hamm’s gnomic utterances with more and more ‘cunts’.
Now it was the members’ turn to be convulsed, while the small town burghers sat – possibly as Beckett had intended – desperate for it all to end right away.
By the time the Extra glossed Hamm’s final weary remark thus: ‘… speak no more … Old cunt! You remain,’ they were shuddering with embarrassment, whereas Val was clucking with delight. Backstage, the director lay unconscious in a pool of his own tears.
The critic from Time Out declared Bolton’s Hamm to be a ‘masterful improvisatory tour de force’, restoring ‘a much needed contemporary bite’ to a piece that was beginning to petrify in the gorgon stare of academic eyes. Others were not so sure, and, although Endgame smouldered on at the Peacock Theatre for another sixteen performances – with most of Bolton’s expletives deleted – it was soon enough stubbed out by lawyers acting on behalf of its author, who, whether or not he may’ve been a total cunt, totally objected to any bowdlerization of his work.
However, that night at the Plantation – which Val, in an almost unprecedented move, had reopened – the Extra received a hero’s welcome. No Larry Olivier or Ralphie Richardson could have been more lauded. Val ordered H
ilary to suck Bolton off in the toilet. Trouget loitered, standing everyone champagne for an hour or so, then slipped away. The Martian made good the deficiency, buying round after round – always triples for Val – and Val, pressing on with Hilary’s gavage, took care to pour a little of each V & T into his understudy’s glass.
The Poof mounted the piano stool and pounded out, over and over and over again, ‘(Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage) Mrs Worthington’, a ditty that, although risqué in its own day, took on a filthy contemporary tinge as the members bawled their heads off, adding ‘cunts’ in all the irrelevant places.
The Prince Consort, safety-pin nose-ring jangling, pogoed on top of the piano; Her Ladyship’s dewlaps jiggled; Bolton cut a wonky caper. By the till, Val Carmichael lit Embassy after Embassy, each from the tip of the last, while surveying the giddy pavane with a dangerous leer. The Cunt roared, His Nibs smiled sardonically, the Dog howled with drunkenness.
Some time after midnight, the Typist, who had long since concertinaed into blackout atop her stool, wet herself; but no one paid this the least attention, as they were all caught up in the whirling circularity of dervishes, who, as they spun faster and faster, became more and more abandoned in the devastation of their short-term memories, until they metamorphosed into figures with no more ability to think of the next move than a chess piece.
Each on its appropriate square, left to right at the bar: Val, the Dog and the Poof. In the second row the Cunt and the Extra; dumped on a stool her own colour, the queenly Typist; trapped at the end of the board, the Martian and Her Ladyship; taken by it all, slumped against the wall, His Nibs. And observing the whole scene, that silly goose, the Boy. Hilary, who on this dark night was granted a painful moment of not to be repeated clarity, and grasped that this was a zugzwang from which he could never escape.
★
A couple of years later they were all still on the same squares. Entire civilizations of dust mites had arisen, then fallen, while in the human realm nothing had changed, except that it was June, earlier in the day, and the Tosher was in. He stood by the door, diffident as ever; that was how Trouget made his way in the world: light as a fly sensing its way across a soufflé. Give him a tin of brown shoe polish and a bottle of vintage Taittinger, zip him into his Bell Star jacket and hand him a first-class plane ticket, and away he’d go with no thought to the morrow, intent on dropping ten, twenty, fifty grand on the tables at Biarritz or Monte Carlo.
When the Tosher was in town he toshed all day at his studio, which was above a sanitary-ware manufacturer in Peckham Rye, fuelled only by successive glasses of champagne. Then, in the late afternoon, he applied his polish, lacquered his hair into a hard helmet and went up to the Plantation, where he stood by the door and drank champagne. Cunty, darling.
Without the Tosher, the other members would have been mere mudlarks grubbing on the foreshore for trinkets discarded by the Truly Significant as they swept past on their gilded barges, heading downstream to the silvery sea of posterity. Without Trouget their ossified mores would have been a stylization that had forgotten style. Trouget – by virtue of his great success alone, for he was as daft as one of his own brushes – belonged to the world without; a world that was steadily growing faster and brighter, while in the club it only grew slower and dustier.
‘Are you well hung, cunty darling?’ Val asked him on this particular day. The Tosher murmured an affirmative. ‘It’s all in the hang, isn’t it, Tosher?’ Val continued. ‘I mean, if your daubs ain’t hung just so, no cunt’ll buy ‘em.’
Again, Trouget’s weird young-old face contorted consent. The world-famous artist suddenly spasmed forward, pecked a few peanuts from the bar and popped them into his mouth. He brushed his fingertips on the flanks of his jacket; the grains of salt fell to the carpet, poisoning the peaceful fields of dust.
Val took another line: ‘Have you got our cunt-boards? And are our names on the silly list? You know I can’t be doing with a wait.’
Trouget dropped his weak chin to his strongman’s chest.
The Boy, who had been tidying up the bottles of Britvic orange beloved of the Martian, couldn’t prevent himself from breaking in at this point: ‘Um, T-Tosher, c-can I come, too?’
Over the years Hilary had lost any awe he may have once had in the presence of the others, who, while they were hopeless sots, were none the less what his mother quaintly referred to as ‘your betters’. But with Trouget, Hilary was still tongue-tied; and this despite the fact that the painter had once, very civilly, asked Hilary to beat him with a small hammer, the kind railway engineers formerly used to check tappets. More of that, never.
Val, outraged, froze: his Embassy aloft, his claw gripping the till, as if it might give him the strength of money.
Had you, for the past two years, been spending all afternoon, every day, in the Plantation, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the changes in Val – the changes, specifically, in his nose. The spider angioma was far more advanced: ruptured blood vessels now entirely enmeshed his fleshy beak in a net of angry bluey-red lines.
The sight was so arresting that newcomers to the club – of whom, admittedly, there were few at this time – would be altogether transfixed by the nose as it shone, a warning buoy bobbing in the whirlpool of booze. If, at some later date, these neophytes were asked about their visit to Soho’s oldest and most celebrated private members’ club, they would only ask in return: ‘That man who says “cunt” all the time, what’s wrong with his nose?’ As if you would know.
It was comforting to think of Val Carmichael’s nose as evidence of bad character – each bloody filament a wrong choice or an evil deed – but the truth was far sadder, and more desperate. True, Val had not been exactly nice to begin with, but for a long time now it had been the nose that was lighting his way into the most Stygian recesses of human nature.
The nose burnt with unholy indignation.
Trouget said nothing, then unzipped his jacket and, withdrawing a thick deck of engraved invitations, dealt one on to the bar in front of the Boy. It read Trouget 1955–1985, A Retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, then the usual guff. The Tosher didn’t stop there: he went on from place to place, silently dropping invitations into the hands and the laps of the members. It was a fait accompli; however much the ugly old sister hated it, the Fairy Godmother had decided: Cinders would go to the ball.
In the Methuselan lifespan that it was taking for Val’s indignation to subside into resignation, the Martian rose and slowly scuttled the five steps to the bar. ‘Have a drink, Val,’ he cautioned him. ‘On me – Boy, get Val a V & T, a triple, I think.’
‘She, she, sheeeeoooo.’ Val’s attempt to become the screaming pope and excommunicate Hilary ended with a sound the members had never heard before: his sighing. Hilary, who had been holding his own bad breath, at last managed to swallow.
This time they didn’t make the mistake of walking. Even so, when the two cabs pulled up on Belvedere Road, and the ten members of the Plantation party struggled out into the summer evening, they found the light and the noise and the air and the people almost overwhelming.
His Nibs, who had more cause to venture outside the square mile of the West End than the rest, took the lead. Yet even he, once they had entered the labyrinth of stairwells and walkways that corrugated the cardboard Brutalism of the South Bank, was altogether bamboozled.
McCluskey halted and looked back. Coming up behind him, arm in arm, were Val and the Boy; while to their rear limped the rest of the members: defeated Tommies retreating across a concrete no man’s land. At the very back was the Martian, one hand on each of Her Ladyship’s buttocks so that he could propel her forward.
His Nibs was oft times precluded from deep insight – by reason of alcohol, of course, and also for professional reasons: so much of his intellect was adapted to the secretion of shmaltz – the heating up of it, and then its smearing across the tabloids – that he had lost his nose for what might, or might not, be kosher.
The Boy, almost a decade on now, had reached a peculiarly affecting stage: plump and dazed, subject at least once or twice a week to blackouts, his suffering lending his thin nose and flabby cheeks a kind of nobility.
McCluskey was no gastronome; he knew neither of the iecur ficatum – the livers of geese force-fed with figs – originated by Apicius, nor of the manner in which the medieval European Jews had, as a by-product of their own dietary laws, preserved the practice of gavage. Nevertheless, observing the Boy and his tormentor, His Nibs grasped that what existed between them was no Beckettian stalemate; and that no matter the extent to which the Plantation and its members were outside time, there was still a linear process at work here, one that, no matter how haltingly, was limping towards some strange fruition.
According to Pliny the Elder, when the Romans’ geese were fat enough, they were drenched with wine and immediately slaughtered. In Hilary Edmonds’s case the drenching was taking years, and His Nibs now realized that the only thing that might prevent his eventual demise was the saturation and slaying of the poultry keeper himself.
McCluskey was not the only one to be granted insight on the night of Trouget’s triumphant retrospective. (The prices paid for the Tosher’s canvases quadrupled in the first few days of the show, while he was levered from a position of undoubted avant garde pre-eminence to a pedestal of Portland stone. The OM was spoken of – and we’re not talking Buddhist chants here.) In the topsy-turvy galleries of the Hayward – spaces at once airily vast and oppressively claustrophobic – some hundred and fifty of the Maître’s mighty oils loomed and brooded, deepening the mystery.
Trouget’s brushwork may have changed over three decades, from the smooth viscosity of Léger to the scraggy abrasion of Kokoschka or Jasper Johns, but his fidelity to his palette and his subject matter was absolute. In picture after picture, using his favoured bile-greens and bathroom-tile blues, Trouget portrayed well-built nudes, willowy youths and neotenous golems, their heads part skull, part the melted plastic of dolls. There were also a lot of dogs – cartoonish and naturalistic.