V.
You may be wondering what became of Florence in all this. In spite of my running her colours up the mast early on, she was now out of sight and mind – or so, judging by my account, it would appear. In fact, just less than two months after our dinner in Covent Garden, and our abortive rendezvous the following morning, I received a letter. Even had Florence changed her usual style of envelope, I would have known my correspondent before reading a single word. There were inky thumbprints along the seal, and the erratic scrawl of the address was unmistakeable. But I did not open it. Instead I slipped it into the shoe box which contained all her letters, and pushed the box beneath my wardrobe. I can’t quite explain why; partly, I think, it was a case of wounded pride. Retrospection is torture, sometimes. I cringe to think how precious I was in those days; how puny was the hurt compared with what would come in later years, on a whole different order of magnitude, like the hissing of tin-drums drowned in the earth-quaking bellow of timpani. But I shall tell it as it was, not as I wish I could have been: for whatever reason Florence had stood me up in Marylebone, and to compound the offence had waited almost sixty days to apologise. It served to underline – to my mind, at least – how much more she meant to me than I to her, and the disparity was a humiliation. It was a betrayal and my adolescent revenge was to disregard, for a time, what I assumed to be her apology.
I told myself that as Florence’s star had set, so had others risen to take its place. Of course, what I hoped was a growing indifference to her was nothing of the kind. Simply refusing to face an upset does not cure one of it. But I was stubborn, and with each passing day her image, once so clear, seemed to fade. When my reply was eventually penned, I told myself, many months later, she would dissect it as carefully as I had in the past dissected hers. She would sense a formality, a coldness in the turns of phrase, and would understand how her indifference had stung. In the meantime there was Mathilde, and through her an entire universe to explore.
The party on Curzon Street was the first of many, and they grew increasingly dissolute, in no small part due to Elmo. His dark moods were lifting intermittently; I gathered he was back in contact with the politician’s son. (Megan relayed the news to me, and rather bitterly I sensed.) He threw dinner parties for friends and fellow artists, but rarely cooked himself, and for a lack of chairs these soirées normally took place on the carpet, with his guests sat cross-legged in a circle like Bedouins around a hookah pipe. Being still at school I could only attend those gatherings that took place at the weekend, and came to resent the liberty – and libertinism – of my newest acquaintances. I knew too well that lingering sense of having missed the event which then becomes sole topic of conversation, such as the night of the mysterious party guest who brought a live goat with him, although apparently the event was riotous even prior to his arrival. Chinese whispers undoubtedly magnified the scandal, but the version recounted to me by Esther, who was not there either, ran thus: the theme of the party was “Aztecs and Olmecs (Mayans forbidden)”, and a stepped pyramid of cinderblocks, borrowed from a nearby building site, had been constructed in the centre of the living room, plateauing at almost five feet off the carpet. Afanasiy, the Swiss-educated nineteen year-old son of a Kazakh industrialist, brought a goat as an offering to the gods. He had purchased it from a Smithfield market butcher, and probably would have murdered it too, atop the pyramid, had Elmo not intervened. When the police were called by the occupants of the apartment below – aroused, apparently, by the sound of distressed bleating – the goat had already been set free and was last seen bolting in the direction of Shepherd Street. Afanasiy, certainly quite deranged, left the party shortly afterwards and was never seen again. No one admitted to having invited him in the first place, but then who would? In anyone’s eyes but his, livestock was a step too far. The local magistrate evidently agreed, and Elmo’s household – which besides him comprised two out-of-work actors and a former solider – were fined ten shillings each.
It should be said that the vast majority of the Curzon Street gatherings were not so eventful as that evening, which I was sorry to miss. But even the tamer gatherings, profuse with smoke and chatter, were rife with allusions, inside jokes and references to people, paintings and plays (a great many of which I am sure were fictional). Missing one party, let alone two or three, meant playing a futile catch-up game at the next. I was a simpleton amongst sphinxes, and could not keep abreast of their riddling. But none were trickier than Elmo, who said little even in his lighter moods, and whose thoughts – if he had any – were carefully concealed. But I think that where Elmo was concerned, everybody felt in the dark to some extent, and that was a most irresistible attraction. His innermost circle, if it existed, was impenetrable. Who were those fortunate luminaries? What influence could they bring to bear on him? For such was Elmo’s gravity that when he moved the surrounding stars moved with him, and all but the most obstinate celestial debris fell into his orbit. He could no more turn them away than grow a second head. What few words he uttered they clung to, and when he danced they fell about him.
A consequence of Elmo’s revisiting his former beau was that Megan retreated. She was far too bland a personality to have ever stood a chance attracting him, but hope shall ever persevere until, like the glowing candlewick, it is pinched out. From doting vainly on Elmo she turned her attentions, quite unexpectedly, onto me, and within two months of our meeting on Curzon Street we were “stepping out” together. It was an artificial coupling, and not one I pursued with any great vigour. Mathilde practically commanded me to do it, and since I had never stepped out with anyone I agreed that I should learn the ropes.
“You are a mere schoolboy,” she had said to me, slipping her gloved hand into the crook of my arm. (I had somehow grown used to her exoticism, and in a short time we were practically friends.) Presently, we were strolling on Hampstead Heath on a Saturday morning, near to the ponds. Her pug, a relatively new acquisition, ran ahead of us, chasing moorhens from the water’s edge. “You are a schoolboy,” she repeated, “and you don’t understand how much you have yet to enjoy, and how much you have yet to learn. Just think what Megan could teach you.”
“But Mathilde, I don’t like her in that way – I’m not even sure she’s pretty.”
“Oh, don’t be so superficial.” She batted my ribcage with her hand. “Why, the most exhilarating men I have known were ugly, ugly things.”
I said nothing, and she went on. “Had they been handsome men, had they always been handsome men, then they’d have been vain and self-obsessed. They’d pretend to look at me, but all the while be looking behind me, trying to catch their faces in a mirror, like Narcissus gazing into the pond.” Who, I wondered, had taught her how to speak as though from a script? It was marvellous to listen to. On she went: “But the uglier man feels no entitlement. He cannot rely on his appearance. Nature has forced him to acquire intellect, or artistry, or wealth, or eloquence. The uglier man has earned my attention, and he works hard to keep it. Handsome men for the most part are lazy, idle lovers.”
“Girls – ,” I stuttered, “girls are different.” But being utterly virginal, this was baseless conjecture.
“Not so very different,” replied Mathilde. “In a similar way Nature forces ugly women, by way of compensating, to acquire certain feminine virtues.”
“Such as?”
Mathilde smiled her thin smile. “That, darling boy, is for you to find out. Let us just say that chastity and temperance do not cover it.”
In retrospect it is clear what she was driving at: what the school chaplain had cryptically referred to as “sins of the flesh”, and which I had once genuinely believed was a reference to eating non-kosher meat. But at the time I was nonplussed, and gave myself over to Mathilde’s schemes, believing she had my best interests at heart. (And what did Mathilde gain by toying with one so green, you may be curious to know? She told me later, many years later, when we were grown up and beyond our primes, that she had looked on me as unspoilt clay, ripe to be cast as her golem.)
The day after our walk, armed with a generous allowance from my father, I took Megan to dinner in Covent Garden, at the restaurant where my parents and I had eaten with the Barclays the summer before. It is fair to say that a vital ingredient, present in the first evening, was absent from the second. We were given a table by the window, and our dismal-looking candle guttered in a draught. A radiator, adjacent to the table, rattled ineffectually. Megan refused to be waited upon, and insisted on keeping the same knife and fork for each course. It upset the well-meaning staff, who had already taken quiet offence at her outfit, every aspect of which was minimalist and roughly tailored. The hemline of her skirt rode well above the knees, and her bare arms were covered with gooseflesh. She had an opera cloak – or a coarse imitation of one – which she draped over the back of her chair. I wondered what our fellow diners thought of us. Every now and then – particularly from the more conservative-looking types – a disapproving or lascivious glance was thrown in our direction, and I’m ashamed to say that I fantasised, briefly, of being Megan’s pimp. I might well have pondered loftier sentiments, such as appreciating her graceful, swanlike poise, or the delicacy with which she ate, only I was distracted by her style of “conversation”: forthright and very much one-way. It was in fact not so much a dinner as an hour’s lecture with the option of food. I had not heard of Moses Hess. I knew nothing of his methods and treatise, and had no desire to learn.
“Your problem,” she said at one point, viciously impaling a cherry on the leftmost prong of her pudding fork, “is that you’re still in school.” The way she said it, you would think I had chosen to be sixteen, and against her sound advice. “You see, being institutionalised you have a very narrow perspective on life.”
To what did I owe such venom? Actually, nothing specific. It was an assault, she later explained, on my conformism, of which she had a “general sense”. Her surliness might have been charming – might – were it not so clearly the imposture of a well brought-up girl, rebelling against her upbringing. But I was a sixteen year-old boy and cared very little about politics and philosophy. On the back of that unsuccessful dinner I resolved, in the future, to meet only in pubs and parks; she had little money of her own, somehow even less than I had, and I resented paying to be harangued.
But in spite of the hurdles I received much kudos from school friends on Megan’s account. I was not the first to have a girlfriend, but to have one almost four years older was unheard of, and it sealed my reputation at Dulwich. Prefects, who before had not deigned to acknowledge me, were now positively warm. Even certain of the younger masters, themselves fairly recent alumni, were impressed, though of course outwardly disapproving. If my loose association with an older group had buoyed my social standing, this latest development – a real, flesh-and-blood girlfriend – sent me into orbit. I was practically celebrity. Sophie caught wind of the news through Mathilde and Emilia, and soon she too was demanding my time. I had always been, in her eyes at least, a peripheral character. She used to consider me a fraud, I suspect, and a climber, but now that I moved in a faster set – and one which reeked of scandal – suddenly I was appealing to her. Previously unsuitable because my family were poor; now suitable because, poorness notwithstanding, it was rumoured that I drank and smoked, and fraternised with subversive, anti-establishment figures. In fact the likes of Megan and Esther were about as subversive as me. They were churchgoing, poppy-wearing and tea-drinking; Middle England, in other words, but with a token streak of anarchism. A handful of their peers were rather more seditious, but most were not. Most had reached for painting and sculpture with the dream of emulating those various bohemian factions which had gone before – Joan Miró, Carl van Vechten, Juan Gris et cetera – and whose adventures had sounded impossibly wonderful. It was a kind of rigid, collective nostalgia, and one sensed it in the littlest things: the cut of a suit, the brand of tobacco, the original cabaret poster, proudly framed. It was all backwards-looking.
Though I did not perceive it at the time, what these new pretenders lacked, and which their idols had possessed, was the combination of craftsmanship and vision, and the audacity to break with the past. (After all, every entrenched style was one upon a time the avant-garde.) Elmo possessed the first two qualities, but I don’t know that he was ever courageous. Megan’s charcoal sketches meanwhile were fetching, if a little trite. She had craftsmanship, but nothing else. Her habit, I noted uncharitably, was to depict static dynamism – a figure on the verge, or in the act, of motion – and to render it entirely static once more. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said she was drawing from drawings. But in spite of my dim views on her art, when the studio she cohabited was opened to the public (the schools did this from time to time, in order to attract prospective buyers and curators) I stood by loyally, handing out glasses of very cheap , hardly drinkable wine, chatting with visitors, and appearing older than my sixteen years.
The crowds were a jumble of artists’ parents and family, friends and hangers-on, and perfect strangers who knew nothing of art, or who knew too much. On the first such evening Megan sold three abstract watercolours to a plump, red-haired professor of ancient history at Edinburgh University. They had not been marked for sale and were laid on her credenza in varying states of incompletion – a mass of uncertain swirls and shallow stains of colour. But the don, who had travelled that very afternoon from Scotland, said they evoked for him a sense of “the fourth wall removed – art as meta-fiction”, and insisted on making a quite generous offer. Though undeniably pretentious he was also very personable, and complimentary of his surroundings. In a thick Dundee accent he asked where my own paintings were, and when I explained, sotto voce, that I was not an artist at all but Megan’s school-age boyfriend, he laughed uproariously and clapped me on the back.
“Good for you!” he cried, and a few heads in the room turned to look at him. We were in the corner of the studio, huddled somewhat conspiratorially. On this most flimsy of pretexts he launched into a sad, vaguely smutty tale – in a quieter voice, mercifully – of his own adolescent romance with an older, engaged woman, back in Scotland some forty years earlier. I am now hazy on the details, but the gist of it was that they fell in love as their affair drew on, only for her to disappear one day without a word of explanation. Almost half a year on she sent him a photograph of herself in bridal attire, evidently on her wedding day, in order to explain “where mere words were deficient”. This photograph the professor, then a mere boy of nineteen years, tossed into the sea at Loch Ailort, into the calm, inscrutable deep, but the image he could never erase from memory.
Presently, however, it was clear that in time he had surmounted heartbreak, for he sported a wedding ring of his own on a stout, sausage-like finger, and he had the plump carriage and bearing of a man well looked after.
When the visitors were gone, around ten o’clock, and Megan and I were left alone in her studio, we shared a kiss. She instigated it, and did so clumsily. I had been bent double, sweeping crumbs on the floor into a dustpan, and when I rose to my feet she was there before me, just inches away, pouting madly. (It was almost a head-butt, and would have been except for my quick reflexes.) She planted her hands on my waist, and her lips on mine. I meanwhile kept a firm clasp on the dustpan and brush. There are dual clichés in respect of one’s first properly amorous encounter: either the Earth moves, such as for Hemingway’s María, or it is underwhelming in the extreme. Our kiss, half-drunken and long anticipated, fell into that second category. But I had a sense of what it ought to have felt like, though did not, and so was encouraged to persevere, not out of any keenness for Megan but from a curiosity to see Mathilde’s plans fulfilled. I had unwittingly begun what I later classed as the first of three distinct transformations: an embracement of wantonness. For the time-being, Megan was mine to explore and exploit.
These newfound delusions of rakishness took a toll on my academics. From the dizzying heights of year ten, the fruits of which weighed heavily in engraved silverware, I was now looking at top-set demotion across the board. The physics master went as far as to draw for my parents a graph of my progress in the preceding three terms, which my friends found hilarious. Even the most forgiving extrapolation pointed to disgrace in the upcoming final exams.
“Too many late nights, eh Gatsby?” said Percy, teasing in his clumsy, bovine way. He had made the Gatsby joke at least twice before.
“Existential crisis,” I replied, affecting an air of exaggerated melancholy. The others laughed, as did Percy after some hesitation. He was slow on the uptake, poor Percy, and when in doubt typically aped our other friends.
We were sitting in a wood-panelled niche in a Victoria pub, close to Westminster Cathedral, working through grimy tankards of ale. It was a Friday afternoon. We were on an art field trip and were supposed to be drawing the façade of Lancaster House on the Mall. We had given our young tutor the slip, knowing he would be too embarrassed to report the matter. In any case we had arranged to catch a particular train back to Dulwich, and would re-join him there. If needed we would claim we had gotten lost and drawn Admiralty Arch instead. Yevgeny and another boy had both sketched the archway from memory, in the unlikely event we were called upon to prove our backstory.
“So what’ll you do?” asked Yevgeny, once the others had settled down. I shook my head.
“Not sure. I might have left it too late for Cambridge. Perhaps somewhere else will take me.”
Yevgeny grinned. “Seminary?”
“Possibly.”
“You have a vocation?”
“Oh yes – definitely.”
We spent the next hour, Yevgeny and I, foretelling my life as a priest. I would be the drunken sort, we decided – the kind to father children and embezzle the takings from the summer fête. He was a kind soul, Yevgeny.