Conversations With Mr. Prain

I first met him at Camden Lock Market, in my second-hand book stall. I was sitting at the counter, behind the archaic cash register, pricing. It was spring. I had woken early and was feeling bright and refreshed from a walk up Primrose Hill before breakfast. Camden had succumbed yet again to vernal rejuvenation. Light green leaves rustled above the street litter. The canal bustled with boats on the move. Friends began talking of summer outings and new clothes, and even—for those who had been frugal over the winter—holidays in Greece or North Africa.

For reasons that can never be satisfactorily explained, the Market was not very busy that day. Most of the people that ambled through my stall kept slipping away without even catching my eye. Despite there being only a few paltry notes in my till, I did not feel dejected. I rather enjoyed the opportunity to day-dream of unattainable holidays, compose rudimentary short stories, and spectate. I eavesdropped on snatches of conversation. I re-arranged the table displays outside, and watched the sun gently illuminate
swathes of eastern drapery, amber jewellery from Poland, glass vials and brass hangings, the way Rembrandt would highlight such objects in his paintings. I looked at the diversity of passers-by, and inhaled spicy aromas from great bubbling vats of ethnic food.

I remember him coming in. I took note of him as an attractive, dark-haired man. I remember his clothes, not because they were startlingly strange, but because they were of high quality and rather conservative, which seemed out of place in the circumstances. He wore a light-blue jacket, cream trousers and a pin-striped shirt, all meticulously pressed and new, with tan-coloured slip-on shoes. This well-kept man was not at all like most of the visitors to the Market, and somewhat older than the average age, being—I guessed—in his mid forties.

He had with him two teenagers, a boy and a girl, though I did not get the impression they were his own children, unless he did not know his own children very well. Moreover, I detected something foreign in their accent, while he spoke with that particular brand of sardonic, vowel-rounded English that advertises wealth and good breeding. The three of them arrived at my stall and, without noticing me, made an arrangement. The teenagers strained to wander on their own. I imagine they felt embarrassed to be associated with someone middle-aged and staid in this avant-garde environment. He quickly agreed to their plan, and they sauntered off with restrained glee.

He seemed relieved to be rid of his charges. He glanced at his gold watch and began to peruse the shelves. Then he pulled down a few paperbacks and skimmed through them, soon moving on to weightier tomes of reproductions. I returned to my pricing, glancing at him now and then. It always amused me to see someone so conservative in this environment. Camden Lock, of course, is far more upmarket now than it used to be, with stalls displaying elegant craftwork and imports, but it sits like a treasure chest in a junkyard, surrounded by Goth shops, tattoo and piercing centres, garish painted buildings, magic mushroom sellers and the greatest range of seedy tat in England. He had obviously come here for the benefit of the teenagers, but he did not belong in Camden Market at all, rather in the British Museum.

I suppose it must have been a few minutes before I glanced up again, and found him staring at me. He held open a volume on the early work of Cézanne, with one hand under the spine, and the other about to turn the page. He was gaping at me as if I were a television showing some absolutely astonishing news: Tony Blair joins a Buddhist monastery; an alien spacecraft lands in Vladivostok. I thought I had better say something, so I told him that the book was £30 as it was in perfect condition. It had been left over from months before when its companion volumes had all been sold. It appeared that few people wanted reproductions of Cézanne’s youthful depictions of rapes and murders and all the gloomy outpourings of his obsessive mind:
this was not the Cézanne they knew. Nevertheless, I kept the price up, convinced that someone equally gloomy and obsessive would eventually pay a fair sum.

“Thirty pounds?” he repeated automatically. Then he came over to the counter, looking at me hard, and asked if I had managed to see the exhibition at the Royal Academy some years back, in which many of these works were shown. I admitted I had missed that one, and he commented, “It was very good. Quite a revelation.”

“Of what?” I asked.

“Of the secret, dark side of a man,” he said, and scrutinised me, apparently trying to think of something else to say that would permit him to gaze longer than was socially acceptable. But I was used to oddballs at the Market. People sometimes looked at me curiously, because I like to wear quirky vintage clothes and environmentalist badges; because I wear my curly blonde hair in unusual styles, and sometimes because they hear me speak and register foreignness. Often they ask me, “Are you Australian?”

“New Zealand,” I answer.

Then they usually tell me of a holiday, or about a relative who has emigrated, carefully mispronouncing a Maori place-name, to which I say, “Oh it’s great there. Very beautiful,” and smile.

And I smiled at this man with the menacing Cézanne.

“Would you hold it on the counter for me then,” he said, finally, as if waiting, as if I had been the one detaining him by refusing to take the proffered book from his hand.

“Of course,” I said, in my New Zealand accent, which most strongly comes upon me when faced with someone very British and in authority.

I took the book. He backed off and I ignored him, almost, when others came in to browse. I noted that he hovered around the foreign classics section, where he peeked up from the pages of Voltaire’s
Letters on England
.

When the browsers had departed and the stall was again clear, he stood before me once more and put some notes on the counter. “Quite a bargain for what it is,” he said. It always irritated me when people thought they had found a bargain on my shelves. Since he clearly had the money to have bought it for more and I could have done with the extra cash, it was especially irritating.

“Did I say thirty? I meant fifty!” I joked, ringing up the amount on the cash register. He smiled a little tightly and now seemed to be avoiding looking at me at all.

“You have a few other rarities here, I see,” he said. “I’m rather pleased to have found you.”

“Then I hope you’ll come back.”

He said he certainly would return on some future occasion, though he was not often in Camden. It was simply that he was guardian for the day of his niece and nephew, who grew up in Argentina, and now wished to see the sights of London on their English holiday.

He went out. I was left with the invaded feeling you get after you have been examined by a doctor.

He returned the next week, and then regularly every two weeks. Our conversations became steadily longer. Sometimes he stayed a good half hour, positioned in a moderately inconspicuous corner near the counter but still incongruous. We talked about art.

“I hope I’m not in the way,” he said, after a time, with a tone that indicated I should create more space for visitors of importance. Before his next visit, I excavated an appeasing selection of old editions for his first refusal, and this seemed to make him content.

Now and then I told him something about myself, though not that I was a writer. I had no intention of giving him a resumé of my life, and detoured into other things. He didn’t say he’d been to New Zealand, or had relatives there. We talked about the arts. He seemed to possess a vast knowledge of culture, past and present, and I rather liked demonstrating to him that I was urbane, despite growing up barefoot and wild in the land of green pastures, with no access to the Royal Opera House or the National Gallery. I had made it my business to know about literature, this being my trade. I had absorbed a fair amount about the visual arts from sharing flats with artists and reading their book collections, as well as going to exhibitions. I knew about theatre from attending plays as often as I could set aside the cost of a ticket, and from helping actor friends with their lines. I was always out and about in London visiting galleries, going to films, concerts, anything. I was not one for pubs and
clubs; I wanted substance, nothing shallow. I’d trek off to lectures at the Hayward, readings at the Poetry Café, films at Ciné Lumière, you name it. A culture vulture.

He, on the other hand, had the knowledge of a connoisseur. He had been nurtured on European culture from the cradle. He did not have to scavenge. He and his friends owned art works. He did not view them only in galleries.

From what I gathered, my perspectives on the latest exhibitions were, to him, off-beat, but I didn’t feel patronised. This was my domain, after all. He was the outsider. I talked off the top of my head, letting my feelings and ideas fly free without much concern about how he perceived them.

One day, when I was shelving some new stock, and he was browsing, I shared my eager excitement about the autumn’s up-coming Henri Rousseau show at the Tate Modern. “I can’t wait for that,” I enthused. “I love Rousseau’s jungles. I always want to walk into one of his paintings and smell the leaves. If you put a Rousseau picture in a cold room, you’d feel warmer instantly.”

“You do have a very unusual way of putting things,” he said, with curiosity. “Have you been exhibited yourself?”

“Me? I’m not an artist,” I said. How had he formed that impression?

“Really? I assumed you were. I suppose … you look like an artist.” There was something testing in his manner then, an intensity.

That made me pull a face. “Does an artist look a certain way?” I was wearing a 1970s geometric print dress and sandals and had my hair in plaits.

“You’re interested in art, but you’re not an artist,” he said, classifying me.

“I’m interested in anything. Don’t you know that we Kiwis come here to gorge ourselves on European culture?”

“And when you’re sufficiently fattened on the feast, you’ll return?” he asked, continuing the image.

“That’s what we generally do, if we only have New Zealand passports, but I had a Welsh paternal grandfather, so I have a British passport and permission to be a resident. I don’t know when I’ll go back home. I have too much of a craving for all the tasty dishes you have in your theatres, museums and art galleries.”

“Well, I’m glad the diet here doesn’t make you sick. It’s not always palatable, at least not to my taste.”