Authors: Alan Hollinghurst
I think his father’s decision to show me what he was at work on was spontaneous, and so perhaps regretted: a moment of mid-evening confidence when a quiet chat, politely repeating itself and running down until it was time for me to go, would have been expected and even welcome. He had gone ahead, while I was saying to Marcel with a new fake-sternness, ‘I should like, you would like’, insisting on a pointless and unobserved distinction. I thought with surprising nostalgia of chasing velvety butterflies of vocab with Luc; and that in turn called up a summery haze of anxiety and desire.
Echevin’s study surprised me by being where it was: he had entered what I thought could only be a cupboard in the thickness of the wall but when I followed I passed through a short brick tunnel and climbed two steps into a bright, crammed office on the first floor of the adjacent building: the director’s office of the Orst Museum. I wondered if he regularly came back here after supper for silent work uninterrupted by the phone or the half-curious public chattering up the stairs that I saw through an open door beyond. A public brought in by the damp lowland weather, obedient to a notice in a hotel hallway or to a Michelin guide: what would they take away from these cryptic works of art? And what would their creator have cared for these chance visitors? Echevin gestured to a portrait photograph high on the wall: a lean-faced man of fifty, with a short, pointed silvery beard, sitting with cheek tilted towards the jewelled knob of a cane: the fastidious ironic look of the heterosexual bachelor, half dandy and half clergyman, and an air of steely enigma, almost as if he sought to outdo the starlit sphinx he had painted, which now stood propped against the opposite wall with rubber corners shielding the coffee-coloured gilt of its frame. (‘Just back from a Symbolist show in Munich,’ my host explained, proudly, but as if it were a bore.)
And maybe it was a bore to work so long and closely with a man who looked so coldly down from above two thousand books and catalogues (in French and Flemish, German and English, Danish, was that?, Hungarian, and Japanese) that somehow, if only by a footnote, touched on him, or on his world and time. Echevin’s note was less that of boredom than of a polite impatience, which I felt as I stumbled after him was directed equally at me and at Orst himself. Unsure quite what to do now we were there, standing side by side at the immense plain desk which took up half the room, he flicked open a folder and just like his son a minute or two before tapped the pile of photostats inside with a strong square finger. ‘These should interest you,’ he said, without complete conviction. He turned one or two of them over but didn’t give me time to see them properly. ‘His articles for the British press. There. “A Great Belgian Sculptor” – that was about Meunier – no, you may not know of him. That was in
The Studio
– and there, “Burne-Jones’s Funeral”, from
The Times
: did you know Burne-Jones was the first painter to be given a service at Westminster Abbey? A strange and admirable choice, don’t you think?’ He closed the folder again: ‘Orst was once a famous figure in London, when England was open to the influence of Europe and when Belgium was the focus of the avant-garde. But that was a long time ago.’
‘Yes, I’m afraid I’d never seen one of his pictures in the flesh until I arrived here.’
‘That is perfectly possible. There are a dozen or more at the Tate, but they haven’t been shown since before the war. There’s an important one in Leeds, “Rêveries”, some portraits in Glasgow, bought from the collection of Connal, one or two in Brighton’ –
those
, I thought, I might have seen on some camp, windswept weekend, rising at lunchtime and wandering half-hysterically about with whomever I had in tow, full of wild plans for getting rid of him – ‘and even a major drawing at your mad little Corley-Cripps Museum in Eastbourne, which is always so conveniently closed.’
He looked at me unblinkingly and I said, ‘Yes, I’m sorry about that’ – then he gave an enchanting smile and a little giggle, at which I felt a sudden and unexpected intimacy had been reached. I had a warm glow, half a shiver, a tear in my eyelashes, not enough to fall. I had seen the Corley-Cripps Museum years before with my gay uncle Wilfred, prospecting in the Newhaven area on some unexplained business of his own, and still vividly remembered the huge 1890s villa, with its green cupola and cars in a shed at the side that were almost as old as the house itself. We were admitted by a reluctant old woman in an overcoat, whom a pre-war photograph in one of the rooms enabled us to identify as Madeleine Corley-Cripps, daughter-in-law of the builder of the house. I might well have looked for a moment or two at a mystic panel by Orst, as I did certainly at the three Burne-Jones ladies and at blackened allegories by G. F. Watts. But their mysteries were dim beside the captivating dereliction of their surroundings – the click of loose tiles underfoot, the enormous moribund plants, the cases of damp-damaged memorabilia, the linings of the curtains tattered and brown and trailing on the floor, the view from the windows on to the garden, its statuary blistered and tarnished by the salt air.
He had only called it mad, but I hoped that my host, who must be a practised poker-around in odd and not always welcoming places, shared my love for this one – and love, in the sudden flush of enthusiasm, is what it was revealed to be. I wasn’t sure if the joke was already over. I wanted to say something about the cars, and how my uncle and I, once Madeleine Corley-Cripps had closed the front door behind us, slackened our pace down the drive, halted, and without a word turned back and crossed to the garages, with hasty glances over our shoulders and at a disreputable near-run. All old Corley-Cripps’s automobiles were there, three abreast and three deep: a sports Delage, an intensely rare Napier 90, a green Bentley, a long-nosed Isotta-Fraschini, a raffish little wasp-backed Bugatti – the other passion of that manufacturer of once world-famous pumps. And in what a dream light they lay, with the brambles straggling over the glass roof.
‘The thing I recall even more than the Burne-Jones “Beatrice” there,’ said Paul Echevin, ‘was an eight-litre Bentley of 1931 (I think), the first saloon to exceed 100 miles per hour. It must have been untouched for a quarter of a century. One dared not lay a finger on it for fear that it might fall into a heap of dust.’
It was a night of stars and cloud, not late, the odd canalside bar still lit and, as I came by, the voices of the last regulars within, chatting and grumbling discontinuously, arguing out of habit. I was happy to be out in this beautiful little city, unaware if I was warm or cold after the last cognac – the one I had not been expected to accept. I felt full of energy, as I often did when it was really time to go to bed, the time when through my clubbing years we all of us used to come alive again and go purposefully on. I hung about in the Grote Markt and heard two quarters chime from the Belfry and smoked a cigarette between. The shutters came down on a restaurant as two of the waiters, with anoraks over their white shirts and black bowties, loped for the last bus, already impatiently champing on its air-brakes.
When later I crossed the road to the old doctor’s house, I saw that the wicket at the side was open – I never left it like that at night, on firm instructions from the old doctor’s housekeeper. And when I entered the yard I saw at once that the window of the top room on the other staircase was glaringly alight: my new neighbours had arrived. I climbed the stairs two at a time in a mood of affronted possessiveness. After I had closed my door I stood tensely in the near-darkness and heard, from that silent realm that lay beyond my wall of cupboards, the voices of the Spanish girls.
What could they be doing in there? At first I thought their unusually penetrating laughs and shouts must be the high-spirited noises associated with arrival and unpacking, questions volleyed from one room to another as to where such and such a thing, plucked incredulously from a suitcase, should go. But no other sounds were to be heard – no shuffling about or opening and shutting of doors. Perhaps they were just sitting there, reading their school-books or darning their stockings, looking up from time to time, unable to resist screeching some hilarious commonplace at each other. I wasn’t sure of the layout of their quarters, and maybe they were quite unlike mine. I made a bit of noise myself, and in the middle of a long exchange which involved the singing of two or three verses of ‘When I’m Sixty-four’, marched along opening and slamming each of my cupboards in turn. Which made no difference whatsoever. In a moment of sudden despair I knew that they must have a guitar.
I got undressed and turned the light off and sat waiting for the next remark or the first explosive chord. Once or twice I thought I heard the first squeaking stoppings, the hunched rehearsal of the chord-changes before the right hand springs its hackneyed horrors from the box … But perhaps it was just a distant creaking in the house or the bell of the night tram out by the station. After a while I could hear only my own indignant pulse and the hairs on my legs sliding together. Then the twelve o’clock carillon from St Narcissus, almost welcome, with its plonking hymn that had become a sort of malign lullaby. ‘Yes, close your eyes up tight: You will not sleep tonight’ – the dud note, the metrical space marked only by a rusty click, falling on the word ‘eyes’.
Saturday, and a late start – waking in the usual cosy surge of memories and fantasies, the fantasies lacking in focus. It wouldn’t quite work with Luc, I recalled a lad or two I’d seen about in the street, then hustled Cherif in quickly for the close.
I took a shower, maddened by the sudden shrinking of the supply, spinning the hot tap and getting nothing but a feeble rope of cold. I stood out on the floor, leaning in through the curtain to test it. Then there was a far-off whining and knocking from the cistern in the roof, and the hot came thrashing back in an instant devilry of steam. Of course! It was my new neighbours at work, their shower had some kind of priority over mine, they could draw my water off and leave me shivering with annoyance.
I mopped my little mirror clean and peered into it. It was absurdly small – it would almost have gone in a handbag; my face was cropped by its edges and looked rather good in it, I thought, like the features of any biker in the classic frame of his helmet. I swept my thick black hair around – my best feature, which people sometimes thought was dyed if they hadn’t seen my forearms or bare legs. I imagined Luc might quite admire it, and see the claim it made for my being romantic and young. He ought to see it in this mirror, which left out all the rest of me. I thought of Cherif, with his comforting extra poundage, how he seemed to like all of me, and had no inkling of my steady disappointment at how I’d turned out and was likely to stay – never having looked fabulous in a swimsuit, caught in other people’s photographs with a certain undeniable burliness. While my hair was still wet I combed it back, and it lay appealingly where I left it. It appealed to me, that is to say, though perhaps to other people it was the tell-tale feature of my self-delusion.
I went for a wander through the cluster of ancient buildings which formed the still religious heart of the old town – the Cathedral, the Bishop’s Palace, the low dormered quadrangle of the Hospital – and out into the alleyways behind the Museum, to find that it was the day of the animal market. The vendors’ pickups and trailers were drawn up tight against the wall, and in between, on low barrows or simply standing on the cobbles, were the rustling, rackety cages that contained their wares. There was a ripe, unhappy smell that I remembered from the circus that ran up one childhood summer outside our windows at Rough Common; and then, as I walked along through a light crowd that seemed oppressive in the narrowly overhung street, a smell of frying onions, sausages and chips from one van and of fresh whelks and shrimps from another.
I’d heard about this market from someone at the Cassette, and knew it was popular with the local children, who were here now, laughing at a marmoset sprinting in a wheel or trying to provoke some reaction from the comatose tree-snakes and elderly, moulting parakeets, who stood first on one leg, then on the other, looking cynically about. I saw lizards, kittens, carp, canaries; I saw a little ginger monkey rubbing its nose like a person who is embarrassed; I saw tiny fluffy dogs you might mistake for slippers and insects you might think were shrivelled fallen leaves. One old woman had a biscuit-tin of spiders, and a scientific-looking man stood behind a glass case half full of earth, challenging you to believe that it contained a pair of nocturnal burrowing voles. I hung about with the families, who were in a mood of subdued hilarity, and strolled among the boys who were standing with their bikes, their expressions mingling teen contempt with innocent absorption. Occasionally a few francs would exchange hands, and the purchaser of a rabbit or a piranha would walk off briskly, as from a shady deal; I was being very English, no doubt, but I wondered what heartless caprice could lead anyone to buy here. I avoided the sellers’ eyes, and had the feeling that if I let them snare me with their sudden patter, or worse a huckster’s wordless beckon and hand on the elbow, I would be shown some further unwelcome curiosity, something uniquely poisonous or malformed.
The animal-sellers were a collection as rickety as the animals. Even the young ones had the weathered, impassive look of market-people everywhere, silent for long periods as if without expectation, then breaking into vaguely fraudulent animation. From the signs on their vans and their registrations it was clear that they came in from Holland, from the Ardennes, from northern France, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of this makeshift menagerie rattling from place to place across the rainy roads of Flanders, a reluctant fraternity, showing up each week or each month. There was shouting from further down the street, the yap of a dog and one or two other voices indistinctly raised. I couldn’t see through the crowd what was going on, but the way people turned and after a second or two resumed their conversation with a dismissive flap of the hand made me suppose it was a well-known drunk or the flare-up of some habitual old rivalry.