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davidastbury · 7 years

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Dec 2017 part 2

L'éducation Sentimentale

Leonardo’s Madonna touched him with icy fingers and he moved away. Once he visited Italy and stood perfectly still in front of Primavera, by Botticelli, as she tossed flowers and smiled at him, romping and randy. Others called to him - Renoir’s sizzling nudes, golden girls in the river, water up to their hips, splashing and laughing.

But he remained loyal to his Tess. She haunted him - and although he was never without a copy of the book, he could not bring himself to open it.

Tess - the love of his life.

Lorna and the Russians........1965

Lorna knew and loved all the classic Russian novels. Who introduced her to them, and why she so much enjoyed the teeming mass of brilliant, eccentric characters was a mystery – but then, who can explain anything? She loved them with a childlike enthusiasm, not at all like someone who studied to pass exams, and least of all like a scholar. She pronounced the names ‘Lermontov, Goncharov, Gogol, Turgenev’ as if they were poems, and liked nothing better than to relate extracts from her beloved Dostoyevsky. For most of us Dostoyevsky is like wading through treacle, but Lorna could navigate the acres of dense prose and relate, with hilarity, the saintly foolishness of the characters – the cringing wrong choices – the suicidal embarrassments!

Her boyfriend told me that they were having a party for her 21st birthday and I was invited. On the afternoon of the party I called at their flat and gave her my gift – an illustrated boxed set of Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’. She tore off the wrapping paper and with a shout, threw herself at me. The top of her head was in my face – the hot head full of wonderful Russians – and her dark hair tickled my nose.

On the Train

Mother and daughter. Daughter about five or six. People look across because the mother, who is thin and pale, has an unusual and persistent cough. Her cough is like a voice – it seems to ‘speak’ from inside her chest. Just the hum of the rails and the woman’s cough and we all shuffle our feet and wish the journey would end. I feel embarrassed for her and wish there could be some sort of diversion. Her head is turned away, towards the window but I don’t think she is aware of the view.

The daughter keeps glancing up at her mother and then back at us, as if challenging us.

Winter Sunshine

I catch my bleak reflection in the Hugo Boss shop window; my long black coat, gloves and scarf - shivering in the thin British sunshine. I look as if all my winters have come together to stress their supreme dominance, but I will have none of it – and turn away towards a young couple near me. She’s in ripped jeans and jumper; he’s in jeans and t-shirt – one thick tattooed arm around her waist. My multiple layers and fear of catching a chill must look odd to them – and they walk away, heads together, enjoying the pleasures of love in a cold climate.

On the Train …. 1964

Sitting facing me. She was reading – a fat paperback. My guess was around a thousand pages, and it been read before - although she was only a quarter of the way through (looking at it from the wrong side, of course) the book had that sagging limpness you find in thick paperbacks when read more than once. It was fiction too, but I couldn’t get the title because she held it down on her lap – legs crossed – concealing the cover and spine.

She was interesting. Old enough to be my mother, although there was little about her to prompt a nineteen–year-old male to think of his mother. Her diet starved thinness (I don’t think she was ill) made me think of Egon Schiele’s drawings – gaunt and aggressive. Dark hooded eyes, concave cheeks, sharp jaw, wide mouth - her coat, a houndstooth tweed looked fabulously expensive, the sort that Jaeger used to do – it was unfastened, and I could see her black jumper and skirt.

So the train rattled along and we sat with our knees almost touching. Occasionally she looked up and glanced at the other people in the carriage – just a glance, but you could see that her eyes were incapable of moderation – she looked at us with indifference, as you might expect – but you knew that her eyes had only one other mode, and that was a lethal possessiveness. There would be nothing in between – you would mean absolutely nothing to her, or you meant everything.

She was a bit of a sensation – the air was frazzling around her – she was exotic – at least for the male passengers on a provincial railway train in the north of England. Perhaps the male passengers had ideas of their own – no doubt ideas they wouldn’t have wished to share with anyone.

Me … I just wanted to know the title of her book.

City Snow

When you walk quickly people often stop you and ask the way – you look like someone who is busy, purposeful, knowing what you are doing. I was stopped yesterday on Mosley Street by a Pakistani girl; she had walked down from Piccadilly, probably from the railway station. She asked me if I knew how to get to ‘Albert Hall’ and I told her that there wasn’t an Albert Hall in Manchester, but there is an Albert Square – ‘Yes, yes, yes’ - she said - ‘Sorry, that’s what I meant, Albert Square.’ I gave her directions, which were fairly straightforward, but she looked doubtful and couldn’t identify where to turn right. I said that I was going that way and I would show her.

We set off together. She told me that the guidance on her mobile was useless – it kept telling her to go down Market Street. I said that Market Street was not a good idea. She said that it might be okay for cars and I replied that it was pedestrianised – she laughed. As we walked into St Peter’s Square it started to snow.

Pakistani girls are marvellously polite – I’ve noticed it before – reminding me of how the English used to be. They give up their seats on trains if they see you struggling; they step back in doorways to let you go first. Or maybe it’s just me; maybe they are just nice to white-haired men of a certain age. This girl couldn’t have been more than eighteen – she was bright and wide-eyed about all the Christmas lights as we came into Albert Square. She turned to me – to say thank you - snow landing on her baggy beanie hat, and she looked so sweet, so endearingly cute in her puffa jacket and skinny-leg jeans – jeans efficiently ripped and frayed and showing her brown knees.

As told to me….

‘I’ll tell you this – I was always brilliant at job interviews. I was at my best at interviews. If I got to the interview stage, the job was as good as mine. It was just a knack – whatever it was, I had buckets of it.

Once I went for an interview with a firm who set up exhibitions. They were based in swish offices in Chelsea, and it doesn’t get better than that. They also had a warehouse or whatever in Hertfordshire, although I wasn’t told what that was about. They had advertised for someone to expand their client base and help take on new areas of activity. Their basic work was subcontracting from the big London galleries but they wanted to go into trade exhibitions and the like. I went for an interview and - with absolutely no experience in that line of work - got the job.

I arrived on the Monday morning start date and was shown to my desk. Everyone was so nice and decent to me – they couldn’t do enough to make me feel at home. They showed me where to get coffee and snacks from, showed me how the holiday list was drawn up, showed me how to use the trade directories, how to work the internal messaging service, how to work the heater, how to claim expenses, which taxi firm they used, they showed me the conference room and the rooms for entertaining clients, they showed me where the toilets were.

The boss came to have a chat with me and he was so nice and friendly, he showed me his office and introduced me to senior staff, all of whom shook me warmly by the hand. The boss said that he liked to think there was more to working for the firm than just…well, working. They enjoyed being together outside business hours – they socialised – they had meals together and drank together – they made up a cricket team and played in the villages league in Hertfordshire.

Everything was perfect. I’d cracked the dream job. Great working environment, good salary, great workmates and – to put the final crowning glory on top of everything – I was introduced to Charlotte, who would ‘help me get settled in’. Beautiful Charlotte.

Most of the morning was spent learning about how exhibitions worked and it was fascinating. At twelve I was told it was lunchtime. I walked out onto the street and then into Fulham Road - and never went back.’

Stella ...... (for Mo Amv)

Our birthdays were in the same week, so there was a little celebration in the classroom for both of us together. We were seven years old.

Stella was different from the other (bossy) girls - she was quiet, withdrawn, shying away from any sort of attention - as if the only thing she hoped from life was to be left alone. If I search through files I’m sure I have a photograph of her – a class photo – and she’s at the front with her waxy hair and ugly National Health glasses – squinting in the sunshine. She lived in a very poor part of town, just a few streets from where I lived, but the houses had no bathrooms, no lavatories (there was a row of sheds in the yard which were emptied by council workers). She seemed to have no friends, and she had no dad.

It was summer and Stella had been away from school for a few days. I found out that she was ill after having dental treatment at the ‘school clinic’. This was a building of great terror to all of us. It was right next to the parish church and sometimes, in summer when the windows were open, you could hear the screams of children inside – having their teeth drilled without any form of anaesthetic.

And then I saw her in the street. I invited her to come to my house and she nodded. All the way she walked behind me and I had to keep turning to see if she was still there. As we got to the house I went to her and held her hand.

My mother, no doubt surprised, was very gracious to Stella - she made small talk but was okay at not getting any response and she brought some drinks and cakes into the front room for us. We watched TV, not speaking and not needing to.

Manchester Nights

They used to meet in a city centre bar – both going straight from their offices – this was during the week but never on a Friday evening – she had to explain to him. He would order a whisky sour and a vodka and they would sit in a banquette away from the door but facing the street. Just a young couple happy together; perhaps in love - nothing very unusual in all this – nothing at all.

Manchester was an austere city in the 1960s; not at all like the place it is today. You didn’t go to Manchester to have fun; it was a place of business; of dark warehouses and triumphal banks. No one lived in the centre, no trees, no greenery at all, no break from the heavy orthodoxy of commercialism.

But it was nice in the bar where nothing distracted them from each other – except her eyes kept flickering across to the street – to the building facing them in the street. She was mesmerised by the huge sign in the yellow street light:-

J. & E.W. Kegan (Imports) Ltd.

She read it as JEW.

‘Who is Sylvia? what is she,

That all our swains commend her?....’

(Two Gentlemen of Verona)

Well, I could tell him! Sylvia Hulme was twelve and she always had a swarm of younger children around her. I was the same age and was part of a gang and we spent the long summer holidays playing in fields and woods near the lake. Somehow, one sunny day, our two groupings met up, and sat on the ground and talked. One of Sylvia’s friends organised the younger ones and although I couldn’t see them, I could hear them laughing and shouting – and then they started to sing nursery songs. Sylvia was very much the boss but she was also gentle and understanding; she spoke to everyone and used their names – she had a forceful personality.

I don’t know how it happened – was there a pretext, had words been exchanged, had I given an audacious signal or had we mesmerised each other? Whatever it was, Sylvia and I got up and walked together into the half light of the trees - the mushroomy smell – the moss and dampness – the sky no longer above and earth no longer below - if you get my meaning.

The next time I heard of Sylvia was through a friend who told me that she was having private lessons in book-keeping from the superbly named Mr Byron. Mr Byron was an early-retired teacher – a tormented Romantic figure, fulfilling the promise of his name – from whose house came an endless parade of seventeen-year-old girls, all paying their four shillings an hour to get good ‘O’ level results.

I was eager to make contact with Sylvia so I waited across the road, facing the iron gates of maison Byron. She was very beautiful and was amused to see me waiting. Yes, she was having lessons in basic accountancy and no, she didn’t like it. She had other plans – she was joining the Navy, although her parents didn’t know that – yet.

And that was it. I never saw her again, or heard about her. I went home, thinking about what she had said – she was going to sea – going to sea, sea, sea. And then THAT afternoon came back – full force. With the wet grass and the smells and Sylvia taking hold of me like someone who knew what she was doing.

And beyond our own breathy noises, how we could hear the children singing a clapping song:-

‘A sailor went to sea, sea, sea

To see what he could see, see, see

But all that he could see, see, see

Was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea !!!’

Angela and Bob in Highgate…..(1966)

Nice couple, early/mid thirties, living in a lovely house in Cholmondeley Crescent, Highgate. He a scientist; researching into genetics; she teaching pharmacology at UCL; three young sons. They went out a lot – all sorts of invitations and hardly ever declined. Bob used to go parties with his students, and would come home late and Angela was fond of the London art scene and dragged her husband to first-nights. Bob made no secret of being ‘close’ to some of his female students. Angela insisted that she must never meet them. That was the way they lived.

Bob was an unlikely ladies man. He was dull looking and despite following the trends of the day – and holding on tightly to the idea that he was still young – he somehow always looked a bit old fashioned. I think he would have looked old fashioned at any point in history. It’s hard to actually put a finger on what was wrong, but he looked the type who belonged in a Pringle jumper and wore yellow driving gloves.

Angela, small, blonde and nervous, was quite different, she knew how to dress. All her clothes had a boutique look – expensive boutiques at that, and she had just the right throw-away attitude to complete the image. She carried an air of trashiness that made her very attractive.

Angela was more complicated than Bob. She loved the company of young, long-haired, bearded, troubled young men. She didn’t find many such in the faculty of pharmacy at the university, but she did find them in art schools. The ones she liked best were those in various stages of despair – who had no confidence in themselves – who had paint or plaster dust in their hair - who were poor and weren’t eating properly – who had emotional difficulties – who drank too much – who needed a good hot bath and a clean shirt - who smoked drugs – who didn’t believe they had anything to offer a girlfriend. Angela would throw herself into action. She, the genius at making things happen – and having the money to throw at it – she who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of restoring the undernourished body – she who had dabbled in psychiatry (Ronnie Laing was a friend of hers!) knew how to soothe the damaged psyche – she who lived with four males, knew how the masculine mind worked – she with her perfect head-girl accent and Rodeo Drive clothing and jangle of ethnic jewellery, could make mountains move – she took intense pleasure in sorting these young men out, putting them on their feet, so to speak.

I sometimes felt it was the sanitised perfection of her home life that drove Angela towards its opposite. The ideal husband, with his simple promiscuity, the creative children with their wooden toys, the lovely house with the stained glass upper windows, the bright kitchen, the balanced diets they all followed, the sheer cleanliness, the sheer success of their lives.

What became of them? Twenty years later Bob was no longer mentioned in medical directories, so we can presume that he had died. Much later, Angela, then in her eighties, and having lived for years in squats, became one of the campaigners in the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ incident – following which she took the demonstrations to St. Pauls and City Hall in London.

New Year’s Eve

It probably hasn’t occupied the minds of the others so why should I bother? No one has ever mentioned it to me – it is over and done with. Not many of us left now; our ranks thinned by this and that. But in my thoughts I can put it all together; I can recreate the time and the place. I can tease out the smiles and the occasional stabs of kindness. I can recreate the sharp shadows and the way we shouted above the noise. And the easy rides of our laughter and the unease at what would happen to us.

And the cold night outside when we huddled like survivors and looked up at the clock. How you opened your coat and it was like a warm room. How we all moved forward into our unexpected successes, tragedies – and betrayals.

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