It occurred to me today I might read only Sebald and Shirley Hazzard, alternately, for the rest of the year and read deeply rather than widely. This novel is so good I have just sat down and read thirty pages aloud in the afternoon sun, the leaves scratching shadows on the page and the riverwater spiralling past my feet.
To turn the tide of a rainy & dismal afternoon I started reading. Beryl Bainbridge’s elegant eloquence has cheered me up no end… as her characters in this novel might say. This is from Master Georgie:
“It began to rain before I reached the Washington Hotel. I hadn’t my shawl, but a spot of damp was nothing to me. In winter, when the wind howled up from the river, I huddled in the doorway of the Star Theatre. Once, an actor came by and said I was pretty and why didn’t I come inside to get warm by the Green Room fire. I didn’t go because the rouge on his cheeks made him look more angry than kindly. Besides, I knew he was buttering me, the line of my mouth being too determined for prettiness and my eyes too deeply set, which lends me a melancholy look. Another time, in December, my feet turned quite blue and Mrs O’Gorman had to rub them with goose-fat to restore the circulation. What did I care! I’d freeze stiff for Master Georgie.
“In summer, my favourite place was on the granite steps at the entrance to the railway station in Lime Street. From there I could see down the slope to where the hotel stood within its square of garden, the red roses bobbing tall in the wind. On clear days, beneath high blue heavens, the humps of the Welsh hills rode the horizon. Now, the grey river met the grey sky, and a low white sun, sliced by the masts of ships, sailed through a splash of scarlet petals.”
In the Metro yesterday from the airport a man climbed onboard wearing immaculately pressed charcoal-coloured windbreaker and pleated pants, the uniform (according to his bright yellow logo) of a security firm: securidad. Later in the afternoon we saw two of his colleagues guarding a castle. He sat down and pulled out a beautiful copy of George Orwell’s 1984 and began to read. The cover was black with a big red slightly bleeding or tearful eye drawn on it.
Went down to the print shop to ask him to make me a copy of one of the two novels I’m hoping to finalize this winter. Like a PhD student at the far end of his thesis I lean on the counter and say cosily, “I wrote all of that. Can you believe…?”
The man laughs, a friendly laugh. I am thinking of the cartoon where the doctor examining an X-Ray tells his disappointed patient, “I’m sorry, Mr Bundle. I’m afraid you really don’t have a novel in you.” I say to the print guy, “I can see now why not everyone writes books. They are hard work.”
He spends a long time stacking and restacking the pages with his expert hands, the paper silky and obedient. Turning the pile of pages to stand landscape, then portrait, then landscape again he deftly slaps all the spiky leaves into one great block. Then he stows the whole thing in an exactly A4-sized carton which springs open from flat stowage. Glancing at me he reaches behind him and takes another carton, which he fits over the top. “Like a cake!” I say and carry it home in two hands through the freezing wind.
The place I’ve sublet has a shelf of Joanna Trollope novels and I’ve just reread two of them. It’s so interesting learning all the signs she uses to indicate class. In the gentry, rudeness indicates an unwillingness to pander to form, it is authenticity. In factory workers, rudeness betrays a lack of breeding. Horsey women have good-quality possessions which they do not value and treat casually. They do things carelessly, having nothing to prove, dropping tea bags on the floor, “sloshing” milk into mugs and speaking in clipped half-sentences: “Shut up! Bloody dogs. Sit over there, it’s the only comfortable chair. Chuck the cat off.”
The landed class recognize one another by signs: tea is always “China”, never “India”, perhaps because China eluded colonization by these characters’ forbears and thus like a spirited horse showed independence. To have middling-quality possessions and to take care of them is unmistakeably a sign one is trapped in the worst of all worlds: bourgeois, unimaginative, burgerlich middle class. At least the poor have their realness and dignity. At least the gentry have their self-assurance and intricate codes: ‘”Daddy says,” one ten year old said cheerfully to our main character Liza, surveying a French pronoun exercise almost obliterated in red ink, “that there’s really no hope for me because I’m as utterly thick as him.”‘ Very often Trollope’s plots seem to unravel the marital miseries of a couple ill-suited as to class: in the case of A Passionate Man, a lordly doctor and his timid wife whose appearance is dismissed as “pretty.” She’s not of good enough stock to be either ugly or beautiful.
In fact the approval of both aristocratic and poorly educated character types in these novels seems to revolve on their ‘realness’ – excusable bluntness in the gentry, forgiveable gaucheness in the “frightful woman” who runs the post office. The middle class, by aping their “superiors” but without access to the insider knowledge that would let them buy the right kind of tea, show themselves to be false.
The other novel I read yesterday, The Best of Friends, was reviewed (on the cover) by The Observer as “above all a novel filled with good advice.” Like a recipe book.
chapter xi: the window does not trap what it views
At the wilderness fundraiser we are third from the top, through no merit of our own. We are a last-minute substitution, they’ve bought tickets expecting to see a rockabilly quintet from Melbourne. It’s two months since we last played. From backstage we can hear the crowd talking in a dull roar between sets. I am perched on a stool with Sid’s drumsticks, riffing along the back of the rank green room couch trying to dispel a sudden onset of nerves.
Pommie Dave the bass player leans like a bouncer against the green room door, trapping the five of us in. His bulging arms are folded, he is retelling an interminable story. His marriage – that doghouse, that hobble, that curse – has finally come to an end, and inexplicably he’s decided to fight his wife for custody of the three kids whose birthdays he forgets year after year. The repetition of his bewilderment, the gloomy force of his aggrieved pursuit, have driven both the name bands out of the room towards the bar. He is used to holding court with endless tales of his wife’s cupidity. Now he is reduced to an audience of one: the borrowed fiddle player, a wiry folkie seconded from our guitarist’s Celtic project, who is too much of a guest, presumably, to tell Dave where to get off.
The fiddler lays out his borrowed chord sheets and frowns over them. I hope he’s had time to learn the songs. I wish Dave would leave him to concentrate. I have met the wife a couple of times, and liked her: a leathery, crop-haired woman who does not in any way resemble the sailor girl tattooed on Dave’s left bicep.
Secretly I applaud her feist in quashing his outrageous bid. Through her lawyers she has made allegations of drug use (true) and mental incompetence (debatable). As a result Dave has had to undergo ‘a state test’ of his sanity, and he is spluttering from sheer insult. “I mean, a test of your sanity?” he half-shouts, for the dozenth time. “What does that even mean?”
The fiddler’s name, I suddenly remember, is William. He calls himself Sweet William, but I can’t bring myself to. Behind him Sid hunches over his mess of rolling papers, dropping splinters of wiry tobacco. I feel for my own packet, deep in my bag. Like a wounded boxer Dave lurches his head, looking for a response. None of us is game to meet his eye.
“Seriously,” he says again. His voice rises. “What’s sanity, anyway. How can you test it. How can any of us prove our sanity?”
Rashly, I snort. He swings on me, points his trembling finger. Terror nibbles at me, vague and tiny and far away. “You, for example,” he says bitterly. “You crazy hippie chick. What could you possibly offer to prove your sanity to a court?”
Could I? What could I? I look from one face to the other. The others stare blearily back, too lazy for hostility. Is this my life then? I ask myself. That I should be shouted at by angry guys, be penned in the back of a beer-stinking hall, be pleased to be playing for free in someone else’s stead?
My mediocre guitar, my vague ambitions. The ill-formed songs I labour over in the middle of the night, with their lyrical subtleties no audience ever hears. Outside the crowd begins to roar and I catch a blur of movement in the long bank of mirrors. It is me, lissom and wiry in a tank top and sequinned shorts.
“Come on then,” accuses Dave doggedly. He levers himself upright at last. “Just name one thing you could prove in court – to prove your so-called sanity.”
This malice is new in him. Performance adrenalin kicks in. Something in my gut turns, a key in the lock of me, and I say quietly, “Any aspect of my fucking life, mate.”
“What’s that? Speak up!”
I stand up, knocking over the stool. I throw down the sticks. “I said,” I say, through clenched teeth, “any – aspect – of my – fucking – life.” I suck in a deep breath and all of a sudden I am shouting. “Go through my private papers, I don’t care! It’s all me! It’s all proceeding from the same intersection!”
Dave retreats, muttering. “Well that’s all very well,” he mutters. Behind me I hear a strangely unexpected sound. William the fiddle player is humming, actually humming. He has taken up the drumsticks where they fell and is plying them like a pair of chopsticks, pretending to be picking up letters off the chord charts and gleefully eating them. Our eyes meet, his are smiling, he offers me a secretive encouragement. From his couch at the far side of the room Sid stands up. “They’re done,” he says, and it’s true: the MC is back onstage, this is it, we’re on. “Ok!” says Dave. “Ok!” He touches my arm lightly as we pass through the narrow door.
We start hard. We play a tight set, angry, gradually unfolding, becoming joyful. Up the front people are holding out their hands across the lights. Dave shoots me a glinting glance of apology or challenge. We are in it for the music, and the music is in us. The low ceiling glints with lights. Men up the back leaning against the bar are bobbing their heads over their beers. We have set up a good pulsing dirty old blues with plenty of forwards but plenty of side-to-side. By the fourth number the whole place has that groove on, it has grown into a massive solid swaying, back and forth as though all of us were growing out of the sand on some shallow, shared seabed.
“Integrity means integrated,” Trix likes to say. I can hardly hear the fiddle over the din of the drums. But on the last song William steps forward into the light. He raises his bow and lets it descend, his long arms taut with an unexpected muscle. I step back, humming a backing vocal to give him the room. With a half nod he turns to stare at me hard, over the red-shining body of his old violin. He is mouthing something and I almost start forward, catching myself, gaining the chorus. The song crashes to an end and we are stumbling off in the dark, jostling one another at the door.
In the long narrow hallway William slows infinitesimally, letting me come alongside. He leans in and says, “You looked like the queen out there.” I take a breath, feeling the coils of my blood pulsing hard under his words. “Well,” he says, the other blokes pushing from behind – “not The Queen. But queen of some other, nicer world.”
Somehow it happens that after the bump-out and shoulder-slapping William offers me a lift in his old postal van. I climb in, sweating under my sequins, and we hurry home, screeching through the streets perhaps not fast but with the feel of speed, from his ill-tended brakes and the gleam in his eye, his flying scruff of hair and reckless cornering.
The city is sultry under low cloud. I follow him up the dark staircase to his flat. We crawl under the covers like two sleepy animals. Then he turns, and takes hold of me, and our animals are not in fact sleepy at all. We are racing, singing, climbing, falling, finding eachother and falling away, grimacing with a certainty that is fleeting and false but compelling. Compelling. Compelling.