Chatterton Page 4

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘My notes.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Actually.’

  Clearly Mary did not understand. T bought a file for them…’

  Harriet laughed very loudly, and once more the image of her assistant being whipped in front of her gleamed somewhat in that wonderful imagination. ‘I was hoping for a little more help than that, Miss Wilson.’ She seemed to regret her sudden formality. ‘Just to save me time, you know. Time past is time future, after all, isn’t it, darling?’ She made a grotesque face at the cat, distending her mouth sideways with her fingers, before resuming her conversation. ‘Didn’t I tell you something about Tom Eliot, and how he danced with me in his office at Fabers?’ Mary nodded, although she was now rather anxious about her employer’s intentions. ‘He was so good to me…’ Harriet was saying; in fact she remembered very little about the poet, and was not at all sure that he had ever known who she was. Mary assumed a reverential expression, and waited while her employer took four sips of gin in quick succession. ‘Why don’t you link dear Tom with those bits about Fitzrovia?’ She licked the alcohol from her upper lip. ‘There must be a connection, you know. I can’t think of everything.’ She went over to the alcove again and filled her glass: Mr Gaskell followed her, weaving its tail between her legs as she stood in front of the bottles, and she bent down to pour a little of the gin into its saucer which had been left there. She straightened herself with difficulty. ‘I can’t do it myself. I just can’t do it.’

  ‘Can’t get up, as it were?’

  ‘No, Miss Wilson. I can always rise. I am rather like Lazarus, in that respect at least.’ She left her glass, crossed the room and leaned over Mary; she was so close that her assistant could smell the sweet alcohol upon her breath. ‘I can’t write about the past. Mother’s hands are tied, don’t you see?’ Her hands came out before her, and she placed one on top of the other as if they were bound together with rope. Mary looked down at them in horror, while at the same time Harriet inspected the brown spots on her wrinkled and faded skin. ‘There is so much to hide,’ she said.

  Mary was alarmed. ‘But I can’t do it either!’

  ‘Can’t do what, dear?’

  ‘I can’t write it for you. I can’t make it up.’

  Harriet was stroking her hair. ‘But didn’t you know? Everything is made up.’ whereof we cannot speak As soon as Mary had left the house, closing the front door gently behind her, Harriet jumped up and once more found the pop-music station on her radio. As the beat reverberated around the room, and the cat shrank back, she executed a few kicks and twirls with a sudden burst of energy. But she stopped as quickly as she had begun, and gazed into the ormolu mirror which hung above the mantelpiece. ‘Listen,’ she said to her reflection, mouthing the words of the song, ‘let me tell you a secret.’

  She turned down the radio and, picking up the telephone, slowly dialled a number. She started talking into the air as soon as her call was answered: ‘No, Miss Wilson,’ she was saying, ‘I’ll sign that document later.’ Whenever she telephoned, she liked to give the impression that she was in the middle of pressing business. ‘Hello, darling, is that you?’ She was now addressing a real person, her particular friend Sarah Tilt. ‘Are you feeling easier in yourself? Some bowel movements, I hope? Good. At last. Listen, darling, Mother was planning a little visit.’ There was a pause. ‘Yes, it is rather important.’ She grimaced at Mr Gaskell, and whispered to it, ‘Don’t tell!’ Then she turned back to her friend’s increasingly impatient voice. ‘What was that, dear? No, I shan’t be staying long.’ She put down the receiver, slapped it and murmured, ‘Bitch!’

  As soon as she left the house she felt exhilarated. She lived in a small street off Bryanston Square – the area near Marble Arch which she still insisted on calling Stucconia or, when she was especially playful, Tyburnia. She took particular delight in showing visitors the small plaque which marks the spot where the gallows had once stood: They were hanged for sixpence,’ she used to say, ‘and now there’s no such coin! What strange tricks history plays on our pockets.’

  But this afternoon she was heading towards Bayswater, where Sarah Tilt lived. Despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary, Harriet still believed that walking ‘calmed’ her and that something close to a forced march helped her to ‘work things out’. In the course of these long and erratic journeys she had renamed all the familiar streets around her, and now it was through The Valley of Bones, Tarts’ Paradise and The Boulevard of Broken Dreams that she made her way. When she entered The Valley of Bones (so named because of the gleaming white facades of the Georgian mansions there), she began to brood upon her inconclusive conversation with Mary. Of course Harriet could not write out everything herself. If she told the truth, and described the real story of her life, if she revealed what even to herself she called her ‘secret’, there would be an outcry against her, a cleansing and a purification which, she was sure, would lead to her death… And she trembled with anticipation as she passed The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (a homosexual pick-up area) and turned into Tarts’ Paradise.

  At once she was on the alert, looking out for any signs of ‘the action’, as she used to describe it to Sarah Tilt; but it was too early for any sustained activity from the prostitutes who frequented this street, and Harriet irritably tried to recall what it was she had been thinking. But she could not remain introspective for long: something kept her back, making her attention swerve away from herself and accelerate in a different direction. She could penetrate a little way into herself but then the procedure went into reverse and she was forced upwards again into the world: the experience was like that of falling.

  Her fur hat slipped over the corner of her left eye and with a sigh she pushed it back again, gently fingering the small stuffed bird which was pinned to it; now, with both eyes back in action, she looked about her with renewed interest. A blind man was walking along Tarts’ Paradise; he paused uncertainly a few yards from her and tapped his stick in a circle in front of him. ‘All you need, old man,’ she said to herself, ‘is a circle of stage fire.’ Eagerly she went up to him, adopting once again her extravagant cockney accent. ‘Can I ‘elp, mite? I’m a pensioner meeself.’

  ‘I want the Post Office.’

  ‘I’m walking that deerection,’ she said, ‘I’ll tike yer.’ The man allowed himself to be grabbed by Harriet, although it seemed to her that he showed very little sign of gratitude. His face was impassive, however, and for a moment she glanced with fear at his white, upturned eyes. If he should be able to see her, after all… ‘Where’s your dawg, then?’

  ‘He’s sick.’ The man held out his stick, as if he were still unaccompanied. ‘He’s very old.’

  They walked for a moment in silence. ‘You know I wos goin’ blind once. I ‘ad cataracts.’ Harriet enjoyed inventing stories about herself. ‘I wos in a right stite abaht it.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  You nevah know, do yer?’

  ‘It’s not all bad,’ he said. ‘The less you see, the more you can imagine.’ He turned his face sideways to her, smiling, and she flinched. ‘You wouldn’t think I knew anything about colours, would you?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno.’

  ‘But I do. I have all these colours in my head.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he added, ‘it’s better not to see.’

  They were silent again for a while and Harriet clutched him more tightly, as if she were the one who needed direction. ‘Kin you feel that fur?’ she asked eventually, putting his hand upon her coat. That wos expensive, that wos! And,’ she added, expansively, ‘I’ve got a ‘at to match. Pity you can’t see it, it cost a bomb it did.’ She was enjoying her new identity. ‘When my old man passed on, ‘e left me a bit, you see. ‘E woz a taxidermist. Do yer know wot I mean when I siy taxidermy? I mean stuffin wiv odds and bobs.’ The old man nodded, but to Harriet he seemed uneasy. Could he tell from the tone of her voice that she was making up a story? And then it occurred to he
r how strange it was to be looking at someone who could not return that look: the horror of blindness lay less in being unable to see than in not knowing when you were being watched. Tell me,’ she said, “ow do yer keep yerself clean?’

  ‘I wash,’ he said sharply, ‘like everyone else.’

  ‘Yes, but ‘ow do yer know…’ She was going to ask how he could tell what everyone else did, but as she stared into his wounded attentive face she began to enter the darkness which enshrouded him. She began to imagine his life, feeling herself stumble and fall, so she pulled back. “Ere you are, mite,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s just dahn on the right. ‘Ave an ‘appy diy, luv.’ She turned away from him and, for a moment, she closed her eyes and became blind. thereof we must be silent Harriet was standing demurely in the corridor when Sarah Tilt opened the door. They kissed each on the cheek and then Sarah stepped back: ‘I see,’ she said, ‘that you’re wearing your Guards uniform.’ And indeed Harriet’s fur hat, which had slipped down again to the level of her eyebrows, did in part resemble a bearskin.

  ‘I thought if I wore fur, you would forgive me.’ This remark meant nothing to Sarah, but she was used to her inconsequence. ‘You seem to be looking well,’ Harriet added.

  ‘Whenever I hear that, I panic.’

  ‘Well, go on then. Panic.’ She walked through the hallway into the sitting room.

  Sarah followed, poking out her tongue at her old friend’s fur-clad back, and then asked her if she would care for ‘Coffee?’ She waited eagerly for her look of disappointment, which she knew Harriet found impossible to disguise, before going on. ‘Or would you prefer something with a spoon?’

  Harriet giggled and held up her index finger. ‘Just a tot, dear. Give Mother a gin while she’s still got the strength to swallow.’

  ‘And I’ve got the strength to watch.’

  Harriet had not heard this muttered aside. She had removed her fur hat, raising it above her head with both hands as if she were taking part in a disrobing ceremony of great antiquity; her capacious fur coat was more of a struggle, requiring a whole repertoire of movements before she could escape from it.

  ‘Finished?’ Sarah surveyed the expensive garment with a certain hostility.

  ‘Not finished, dear, just abandoned.’ Harriet accepted the glass of gin and the silver teaspoon which Sarah now offered her, and looked around the room as she took her first lingering sip. ‘You know,’ she went on, ‘this always reminds me of a psychiatrist’s office. Not that I’ve ever been to a psychiatrist, of course. I won’t be poked around.’ Sarah’s flat was furnished in a modern ‘functional’ style which, together with her collection of paintings in the Fifties abstract tradition, gave the room a somewhat chilling quality. Harriet began to stick the bottom half of her body into a corner, and for one horrible moment Sarah thought that she was about to relieve herself there.

  ‘What is this,’ Harriet asked, ‘that I am about to lower myself onto?’ The object in question resembled a plank sawn in half and mounted on an oil drum.

  ‘It’s called a chair.’

  ‘But why is it black? I don’t want to sit on black things.’

  ‘Not even your cat?’

  ‘Well, the exception proves the rule.’

  Sarah chose not to respond to this particular remark. That chair is very good for the posture, although God knows –’

  Harriet broke in. ‘But it’s not very good for a Chanel dress, is it?’

  Sarah eyed her once ‘chic’ red skirt with disapproval. ‘Not when it’s almost in rags, no.’ And then she added, not able to stop herself smiling, ‘You look like a dog’s dinner.’

  ‘Oh yum yum. What’s for tea?’ Both women laughed, and then sighed deeply.

  ‘Well,’ said Harriet, perched now upon the chair, ‘let’s try to be bright and cheerful. Ask me what I’ve been doing.’

  ‘I haven’t got a strong enough stomach.’

  ‘No. Go on. Ask me.’

  Sarah was determined not to be bullied into submission. ‘Have a nice banana, dear. You’re supposed to be the Queen of Romance, after all.’ This was the title Sarah had given her many years ago, although Harriet’s novels were generally considered mournful to the point of being macabre.

  Harriet looked down at the fruit bowl. ‘Where do they come from? The Third World?’ She uttered the last phrase with distaste.

  ‘I don’t know where they’ve come from,’ Sarah replied. ‘But I do know where they’re going.’ And she took one of them, peeled and began greedily to eat it. It was an old woman’s greed and it fascinated Harriet, who had been trying to imagine what she herself looked like when she ate. And she watched as Sarah daintily cleaned her upper lip, above which Harriet thought she could detect the first faint signs of a moustache. ‘Bananas help you see in the dark,’ Sarah said, putting away her handkerchief. ‘Or is that,’ she added, smiling furtively at Harriet, ‘just an old wives’ tale?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, would I? But that does remind me of something.’ Harriet sprang out of the chair. ‘I met a most peculiar blind man today. He told me he was a taxidermist. I never thought a blind man could lie, did you? Except,’ she went on after a pause, ‘you do get blind poets, don’t you?’

  ‘Aren’t they generally led by a boy?’

  Harriet did not reply to this, and she was already mimicking the actions of the man she had met upon her journey to Sarah’s, closing her eyes and feeling her way around the small sitting room. ‘Where’s my dog?’ she moaned. ‘Where’s Old Dog Tray?’

  She was putting her hands over several valuable artefacts, but Sarah resisted the temptation to scream at her. ‘You’ll give yourself a coronary, dear,’ she said gently. She had noticed before how age and relative fame had rendered Harriet less peaceful: the more she wrote, it seemed, the less coherent her personality became. ‘Why don’t you sit down for a moment?’

  Harriet stood in the middle of the room, rolling her eyes towards the back of her head in imitation of the blind man. Then she gazed at Sarah in feigned astonishment: ‘What brave new world is this,’ she said, ‘which has such women in it?’ Sarah pointed towards the chair, and Harriet sat down. ‘I don’t like the blind,’ she added. ‘They make my toes curl.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Sarah said sweetly, ‘that you had any feelings in that quarter.’

  ‘Mother has feelings of which you know nothing.’ Harriet looked at her sternly. ‘She’s all heart, and she always has been.’

  This was one of her most familiar claims, and it suggested that all other topics of conversation had now been exhausted. Harriet closed her eyes, and tried to stretch out in the chair; but it had no back to it, and she fell against the wall. Sarah was still not sure why Harriet had insisted on visiting her this particular afternoon, but she believed that she had already been given quite enough attention and ignored the squawk which came from her old friend as she toppled backwards. ‘Well,’ she said out loud. ‘Now let’s see. What have I been doing?’

  There was a protracted silence. ‘You were stripped and left for dead?’ Harriet suggested, struggling slowly towards an upright position. ‘Or was it something unpleasant?’

  Sarah ignored her. ‘I’ve been working very hard on the book.’ There was a note of defiance in her voice.

  ‘Really?’ Harriet knew that Sarah had been engaged on this project, a study of the images of death in English painting and provisionally entitled The Art of Death, for the last six years and still seemed to be no nearer completing it. ‘Still throwing our bucket down that old well, are we?’ Sarah looked at her angrily, and Harriet retreated a little. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘You know that death makes me nervous.’

  ‘Everything makes you nervous.’ Sarah was tempted to change the subject at once, since she was in fact afraid of Harriet’s scorn, but she needed to speak about it; this book would not let her rest. She had examined the various images of death, from the medieval depiction of the emaciated cadaver to the theatrical richness of Baroque funerar
y monuments, from the lugubrious narratives of Victorian genre painting to the abstract violence of contemporary art, and so she was now able to chart many of the alterations in the presentation of the deathbed scene, natural or pathetic, violent or solitary. And all the time it had been as if she were watching her own death.

  But then Sarah felt compelled to range wider – to understand everything, to recognise and to explain the imagery of death in all of its manifestations. She studied the artes moriendi of the seventeenth century; she visited museums in Greece and Italy in order to sketch reliquary urns; she documented the smallest changes in burial rites; she read manuals on dissection and embalming; she investigated the Romantic cult of the dead; in whatever town or city she found herself, she made a point of visiting its cemetery. And, as she did all this, she exorcised her own fears. She turned death into a spectacle. Yet, despite all of her research, she could not bring herself to complete the book; she had written certain chapters, and had made copious notes on the rest, but the final exposition of the subject resisted her. It would not stay still. And she was aware, too, that its completion would reinstate all of her old fears. For this would be her last book.