Diary of a Lone Twin

by David Loftus

  Sunday 29 July

  The Mews

  Sitting now on a dark and gloomy Sunday, the back of the heatwave broken with lightning and flash floods, in my Cabinet of Curiosities room, surrounded by piles of papers from the General Medical Council, coroners’ verdicts, solicitors’ statements, grovelling letters and scraps of papers bearing notes and scribbles, the word that seems to stand out most, bold and strong, is ‘deceased’. I hadn’t until now realized that deceased meant ‘recently died’. Whenever I’m asked ‘Where is John?’, I have replied ‘Deceased’ as it somehow felt gentler than ‘He died’, or indeed ‘He was killed’. If you look up the definition of the word, I’d be okay in the States where ‘deceased’ just means ‘dead’; I prefer the ‘depart from life’ or ‘no longer with us’ descriptions. One book suggested, ‘asleep, at peace, at rest, departed and gone’. Whereas another suggested, ‘When someone is deceased, they are dead – not dying or even just about to die. They are dead.’ I guess it all boils down to one thing in the end: they are no more.

  How wonderful is death

  Death, and his brother sleep!

  One, pale as yonder waning moon

  With lips of lurid blue;

  The other, rosy as the morn

  When throned on ocean’s wave

  It blushes o’er the world;

  Yet both so passing wonderful!

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Monday 30 July

  A painting on acetate overlaid upon a drawing of a bright sun depicting abstract bright yellow sunbeams, dated 23 May 1988, and found in the top drawer of the boat:

  ‘A little ray of sunshine to say that Johnny is proud of you, with all my love – Wamfi.’

  Dearest Ange, my darling wife, who worries about me, has this week written to Dr S, whom she has located living on the continent. I didn’t read the letter, but it has been posted. Who knows how he will react?

  Tuesday 31 July

  Shooting Jamie Oliver for a new campaign

  Last night, sitting in the bath, I was thinking about the way my and Johnny’s careers might have converged, meandered or diversified. We’d both always hoped for a career in art, after flirting with helicopter pilot and politician for a while. Architecture was an option for a while; John loved Mondrian and we were both introduced to the work of Richard Rogers by our father. He had surprisingly progressive admiration for modern architecture and design and an architecture path seemed a more stable way to tread. In our fifth year at Wallington Mother sent John and I to stay with ‘Uncle’ Brian Onions. Anne, his wife, was one of her distant cousins, and Brian was a bigwig at ICI. With hindsight, I wonder if we were sent away, up to Middlesbrough, to see how ‘real people’ worked, and jeepers it was certainly an eye-opener. John and I both loved Brian; a gentler man is rare indeed. He took us under his northern wings and showed us around the foundries and labs of ICI Wilton, but only after he’d made us smarten up and remove all of our poncey London punk-band badges and bracelets.

  Secretly we both hated it and it put us both off architecture for years. The architecture side was so mathematical and technical, the plant so cold and bleak and distant, but we didn’t want to let old Uncle Brian down so we stoically bore with it. Unused to being sent away from home, John and I behaved impeccably, keeping our badges by our bedside and only re-pinning them onto our lapels when we were safely on the train southbound, any ideas of architecture as a career replaced by dreams of snorkelling coral reefs and living on a boat.

  Wednesday 1 August

  Today I’m looking at album no. 2 from my mother’s collection, mostly shot in black and white, square format so on Father’s Yashica camera.

  The album covers just a couple of years in time, trips around the country visiting family and friends. There is a beauty of John and me, with our matching spades, eating finger sandwiches, sheltering from the wind, perched on a picnic blanket upon the step of a huge wooden coastal groyne, then another of John or I sitting on an old leather hamper with metal clasps, proper china teacups and biscuit tins. We’re dressed in cream corduroy shorts, white socks and woolly jumpers. Father Eric is smiling in every photo, so smartly dressed, as are we, even on the beach or in country streams, as are Uncles Derek and Patrick. Smart family Loftus.

  There are some lovely images from the early years at The Beeches, playing in the garden under the plum tree, John and I riding our large wooden steam train, made by Mr Frank (we called it ‘Billy’), or being pushed alarmingly high in the ‘shuggy boat’ swing by Uncle Pierre. One photo shows Mother looking rather fragile, tending to Ian on a see-saw in the garden. He was such an intense and difficult child and would often drive Mother to murderous thoughts, but in this picture she is holding his little hand, and she looks so thin and breakable. On the back she has written, ‘Out of hospital – Guillain–Barré – took years to fully recover, still after-effects in legs from angiogram, I think.’ I had forgotten that Mother had been ill, somehow, as ever, working her way through it even though she was almost on her knees. I remember now, discussing it with John at the time. We were used to Father and his dodgy ticker, but Mother was the glue that held us all together, kept us all well and on track, feeding our stomachs and our brains, and she had somehow been struck seriously ill with this rare, and to us worryingly complicated, autoimmune disorder which can lead to paralysis. It was genuinely terrifying at the time but has somehow been lost in the fog of other sickness memories.

  Otherwise it’s a happy album of beaches and Christmases, John and me in identikit Aran jumpers and cord dungarees, or full-on onesies, so ahead of our time, in the snow at The Beeches, on a rare white Christmas. It’s funny where I can tell the difference between us by a memory: a christening where I remember falling and cutting my knee, so I’ve got a handkerchief wrapped around my grazes, or remembering my trunks had a little buckle on the waistband. In one I think it’s me, aged about seven, but it’s John, it’s written on the back, wearing my Native American costume, something I wouldn’t have allowed.

  Our first Airfix models, our first transistor radios, our sister’s first dolls’ house, walking along Hadrian’s Wall with my first binoculars by my side, another tell-tale marker that ‘that one’ is me, skimming stones as ever, learning to swim in frozen Lakeland rivers, lined up photos of four skinny children in misfitting swimmers. So many happy memories abound.

  First day of the first Test against India this summer, going to read about it tomorrow in The Independent, for old time’s sake.

  Thursday 2 August

  27°C at 9p.m.

  Tonight Jamie, Gennaro and me launched Jamie’s new Italian book with an octopus feast for influential bloggers in his studio. To cap a busy day we also launched a new year of the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year awards, with me named chairman for my second year. Things are feeling back to normal.

  Friday 3 August

  The Beaumont Hotel, Mayfair 32°C

  Ange had left a present on my desk last night when I got in from the book launch. It’s a 1975 copy of The Beezer Annual. We’d have been eight. I don’t remember the comic stories, they’re unfunny and slightly inappropriate now, but the ‘factual and historical’ stories, very Look and Learn, I remember every detail of – John and I would study the detail of each drawing for hours. There’s one on Hadrian’s Wall, one on a kestrel called Chalk and very dubious one on a gun called Mons, which makes me think that the cartoonists and writers of The Beezer were having their own laugh, ‘Oh let’s slip in a story about “Mons” this year, let’s call the Martians “Gobblers”, who eat wood, and put in lots of stories about spanking, bullying “toffs” and calling everyone Fatso or Fatty.’ Editor replies, ‘We’d better then give the little buggers some facts about Hadrian’s Wall.’

  It’s bizarrely over 90 degrees in old London Town today, far too hot and sticky, ‘a sticky wicket’ as John used to say. India have just bowled out England for a second-innings lead of 194 and are 46–3 in the chase in a very tight first Test. (I
write this for Johnny.) John would have loved this weather, sitting in the garden at The Beeches after work, tweaking his Monkey bike or lazing on a blanket, his face, like a Parosian lizard, pointed upwards and outwards at the sun. It was a Loftus thing, not a strip-down-to-the-swimmers kind of tanning, more a roll-up-the-sleeves-and-the-turn-ups-shoes-off-face-to-the-sun kind of tanning. In the tanning stakes he always won, he tanned faster, never seemed to burn, always got the tell-tale black crease between forearm and bicep before me, hair bleaching in the sunshine a little quicker than mine, tan lasting longer than mine.

  My demons are rosé, Solpadeines and tanning. The trouble is that tanning is a Johnny legacy, like drawing, like Paros, like Lord of the Rings, like bracelets, and there aren’t that many legacies to hold on to.

  Saturday 4 August

  Morning

  Visited Mother this morning, the 32°C heat in London is draining her, but she’s bright and breezy as soon as she has opened the door and put the kettle on. I was early enough to catch her listing her cranial nerves, one by one – a daily exercise to prove her medical-student mind is still firing on all cylinders – while checking The Times obituary columns to see if any of her learned colleagues have popped from this mortal coil, as they are, with age, increasingly likely to do.

  This week Paros passed all of his exams with flying colours. I’m so very, very proud of him and I am certain he will make a wonderful doctor. My brother Ian’s own department, the Vascular, has had its own problems, with his surgical partner accused and then losing his job over allegations of bullying, again between departments. But the one thing that both Ian and Paros have, that sets them apart from the rest, is their extraordinary empathy, and it’s a relief to see, in my small world of Mother, Ian and Paros, that empathy still means something.

  Today I told Mother that Ange has found ‘Professor S’. She almost spat out her tea when she heard that Dr S had made professor, ‘Prof of what?!’ she exclaimed. Talking later of the coroner, she says to me, ‘To them it was just another day, bantering and making jokes with all of the lawyers, immune to the suffering of those around him.’ I asked Mother again, ‘Why was I not called?’ But there is no answer really, and we’ll certainly never get an answer from him now.

  I started writing on the boat today. A pair of herons, elegant and still, watch me as I write, and, dear Johnny, England has just snatched victory in a very closely fought first Test against India in Mumbai-esque temperatures.

  Sunday 5 August

  Morning at the boat 28°C

  ‘Naxos is a bit of a slut, while Paros is all gold and white like one of her once famous marbles. If Naxos is a vivid parrot, then Paros is a white dove.’

  —LAURENCE DURRELL, THE GREEK ISLANDS, 1978

  Yesterday, I took the little white pottery bird from Yria down to Mother’s and left it beside her corner chair to watch over her. She held it in her hands for ages, appreciating and stroking its soft, white chalkiness.

  Now I’m sitting on the boat with my beloved Ange, the only sound the trickle of water of the ebbing tide beneath the hull. No herons today, but plenty of mallards ducking and a-dabbling, uptails all, and a pair of cormorants fishing in the murky depths of Old Father Thames. Today is the anniversary of our first kiss, seven years ago, at the bottom of Dean Street in Soho. She’s lying beside me, reading one of my Charlie Parker thrillers, on a pink leather Moroccan pouffe, shielding her face from the hot sun in a paperback-shaped shadow.

  I’d admired Ange from afar for many years, always secretly fancied her when occasionally we crossed paths on projects when she worked for Jamie’s Foundation. Always smiling is how I think of her, one of those big, beaming, unforgettable smiles. When you’re on the receiving end of one of them, your day, however dull or frustrating, immediately brightens and feels just fine.

  Today we are lunching at Casa Manolo on jamón ibérico and cold Albariño and salty anchovies and olives. We met here an hour before we were ‘officially’ wed at Chelsea Town Hall.

  Once Jamie had furnished me with her number it took me a few weeks before I’d worked out what and how to text and why and where to meet and what to say, honestly believing I had no chance. Although we’d been separated for over eight years, I was still married to Debbie, and was a full-time father to Paros and Pascale. I had begun to feel impossibly undate-worthy.

  After a lot of false starts, I eventually got a date with Ange, and we met at the lovely Quo Vadis on a balmy summer’s evening, 5 August 2011. It was such a delightful evening, so relaxed and chirpy and talkative and jolly. We ate little, drank buckets of rosé and all was dandy, but I got the impression that she was totally unaware of my feelings towards her and, though she’d begun to understand that I was single, I thought there was absolutely no way in hell this gorgeous girl was going to want to share a snog with a broken and bashed old fart like me.

  I told her a bit about life, marriage, the Ps and I falteringly told her about John – she tells me now that the way I told her was as if I was telling the story for the first time, there was so much hesitant emotion in my voice. An hour or so later, waiting for our black cabs at the bottom of Dean Street I braved a hug and a gentle kiss, surprised and relieved and oh, so over-excited to see her head turn towards mine for the first of an eternal number of kisses on the lips. Our fate was sealed, sealed with a loving kiss.

  Wednesday 8 August

  Shooting in Old Basing

  On a three-day shoot with Christian (DJ BBQ), T-bone Chops (Chris) and Forage Sussex (Dave) in T-bone’s parents’ garden in Old Basing, a man’s world of old smokers, vintage Austin Sevens and hand-forged axes.

  Thursday 9 August

  Old Basing

  Third day shooting the madcap antics of the BBQ boys, black and white images of them standing on an old scimitar or a steampunk smoker playing two-headed bass guitars or wielding axes or live lobsters to heavy rock music and the distant crackle of thunder. Their world is a fiery one of smoke and brimstone and fire and skulls and blackened metal and noise and all rather wonderful for being so far from my own world.

  Saturday 11 August

  Ange and I visited Mother. She barely moved from her corner chair, looking more and more like a Beatrix Potter character. On seeing us she was chirpy and bright, inspecting Ange’s wrist injury with ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ and recommendations of lotions and potions.

  I’ve been looking at some of Johnny’s drawings, fascinated by the delicacy of his hand, his use of perspective, and, what was hardest for me to emulate, his use of colour. I’ve been scrabbling around in the garage at the Mews and I’ve found a few drawings and watercolours he made in Florida when he was holidaying there with Liz. They were staying with my godfather in the Florida Keys. He was a designer of space rockets who had become so socially afraid that he had begun to live on a yacht moored offshore from his family home.

  When John returned home he refurnished his bedroom in the style of the Keys, hitting Habitat for a clapperboard-style desk and deckchairs to replace his old Victorian armchair, which he dumped on me, painting his room in a Breton palette of blues and whites, with yucca and avocado plants. His bedroom became a hub of creativity, light and bright, filled with easels and paints, books and drawings, pictures by Mondrian and Caulfield, colourful and graphic as opposed to my darker, more music-driven, gig poster-graphic style.

  I was the dark to his light, the yin to his yang; where his room was filled with daylight and lit with Marie-style spotlights, mine was permanently shaded, gloomily lit with deep red darkroom lights, lava lamps and fairy lights; where his brightly painted shelves held framed Warhol prints, model cars, boats and soldiers, neat and ordered, mine held collections of skulls and fossils, wartime ephemera, half-torn Joy Division and Rip Rig + Panic posters. Where he had books on the art of Tolkien, the architecture of Rogers and Foster and the sculptures of Goldsworthy and Moore, I had the linocuts of Revolution in France and Spain, the album covers of Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols, Dada, and the sadomasoch
istic works of Alan Jones and Adam and the Ants.

  We were always terrified of dentists, mainly because of our treatment at the hands of the dentist of our teens, Mrs B, who lied every time about how long she’d have to use the drill, and laughed her toothless (worryingly so) laugh every time you lashed out screaming in pain. After John died I found a new dentist, having avoided them for decades. Quentin is a specialist in dealing with those who fear dentists more than anything else. Like me. In the early days of my treatment he went through the process of fitting a crown, talking me through the moulding, telling me that the chap who moulds the crown is an ex-pottery student from the Royal College, soothing me into the drilling and injecting moments with me believing that we’re actually embarking on more of an art project than a piece of serious dentistry. It was Quentin who suggested carving an icon into the tooth, ‘Like a boat or a camera icon,’ he suggested, ‘or something to do with John?’ That’s why I have a carving of a yin and yang in my first molar, bottom right-hand side.

  Sunday 12 August

  The Glorious Twelfth

  At the Mews I have a room I call ‘the Garage’ as it once housed my assistant Rosie’s decrepit Mini, my Alaskan canoe and a 1950s cable car stolen from Verbier by my chums for my birthday. It’s actually the stable, where the shire horses for the local brewery were kept, big imposing wooden doors at one end, our washroom at the other, and twenty years of photographic bumph in between. Behind the printer are several large portfolio cases, A1 in size, dusty and battered, zips rusted and broken, stuffed where they can be unseen and forgotten.

  Until today. These were the folios our parents bought us when we’d finished our post-O-Level summer holidays in the Orkneys, so large for two teenage twins that you can see the scrapes along their bases where they would catch on the ground on our walk to and from school. I popped one of our wedding playlists on the iPod and started to disentangle the mess of bulging and broken folios, releasing a billow of dust.