He met Lucinda Grey in the upstairs bar of the Cambridge pub one sunlit evening in the warm spring of 1983. When he walked into the bar, Crystal Gayle was singing ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ on the jukebox. He remembered that. It could have been Van Morrison singing ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ or Julie London singing ‘Cry Me A River’ or Nina Simone singing ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’. The upstairs bar at the Cambridge had just about the best jukebox of any pub in London. But it was Crystal Gayle. And Lucinda’s eyes were neither brown nor blue. They were green and remarkable, appraising him from the other side of the bar when he walked in. Closer, he could see that the pupils of her eyes were encircled at the inner limit of the green by iridescent flecks of gold. Her dress was gold, too – raw silk, slubbed and pleated. And her hair was the colour of dark honey, cut into a heavy bob.
It was a flamboyant year in a flamboyant decade and most of the crowd in the bar were students from the St Martin’s School of Art building a hundred yards along Charing Cross Road. It was bright in the bar in the early evening through the big windows overlooking Cambridge Circus. Dressed for the night, in the late daylight, the fashion course students were self-consciously poised and picturesque in their buttoned shoes and bias-cut skirts and tailored jackets and hats.
They formed separate groups, or orbits, the students in the Cambridge in those days, in that year. So those on the graphics course were deliberately monochromatic in black Levis and white Hanes T-shirts under their
MA
-1 flight jackets, the girls among them distinguished only by their peroxide rockabilly quiffs. The girls on the painting courses wore rah-rah skirts or jeans purposefully distressed with artfully torn sweats over tight white singlets, while the boys all dressed in the Jackson Pollock ensemble of jeans and plaid shirts and denim jackets. Footwear was crucial. To a man and woman, the graphics lot wore Doc Martens. The painter girls wore clumpy black engineer boots. The would be Pollocks wore Jackson’s Bass Weejun loafers carefully saved-for and purchased on their pilgrimage to an American-owned clothes shop called Simmons, in Covent Garden. Flip on Long Acre had made authentic Americana generally cheap. But the Flip merchandise came over tightly packed aboard container vessels to be pressed back into life when it arrived. So, of course, they didn’t sell the shoes.
Seaton was there to see his brother, Patrick, dressed tonight in a zoot suit and painted silk tie because they planned to go to a club and didn’t intend either to queue or to pay the entrance fee. If you were picturesque enough, it was a time and London, and particularly Soho, was a place where that could be done. The suit looked good on Patrick, who was broad-shouldered enough to carry the cut. Seaton was less convinced by the straw trilby tilted back on his brother’s head. As Patrick walked towards where he stood, Seaton saw that his brother had adopted a swaying sailor’s gait. You made yourself up, in those days, at the age they were. Some people were someone different every single night of the week.
‘Who is the tall blonde in the pleated dress?’
‘I’m fine, thanks. Well, fine other than the terminal illness they broke the news to me about this afternoon.’
‘The tall girl with the green eyes.’
Patrick sipped beer.
‘The straw trilby is a mistake.’
‘Makes me look like Felix Leiter. The CIA man in the Bond novels.’
But Seaton’s eyes and attention were again on Lucinda Grey.
‘Sinatra wore a hat like this on the cover of “Come Fly With Me”.’
‘Makes you look like a Yank tourist,’ Seaton said.
His brother thought about this and shrugged.
‘In a Norman Wisdom film.’
‘She’s a bit of an enigma,’ Patrick said. ‘A blonde of the glacial persuasion.’
‘So you can’t even introduce me.’
‘If I could, then obviously, I wouldn’t.’
Seaton pondered this, wondering was it a double bluff. He decided it wasn’t.
‘I can only tell you she’s on the fashion course,’ Patrick said. ‘And she keeps herself very much to herself.’
‘Evidently.’
Seaton didn’t get to speak to Lucinda Grey that night. He went with his brother to the Mud Club and the Wag, where they played Kid Creole and Animal Nightlife and where the air smelled intensely of the smoke of Marlboro Reds and hair gel and brilliantine and dance sweat and where everyone, as Seaton got drunker, looked like they were extras in a film set in Cuba before Batista was overthrown and Che Guevara and Castro set the long-prevailing fashion in the hot unruly places of the world for jungle fatigues. And some-time after midnight he picked up a black dental receptionist from Woodford Green whose style was somewhere between Carmen Miranda and the model in the Bounty Bar television commercial current just then. And he took her home and forgot almost entirely about the fashion student with iridescent green eyes from earlier in the evening in the upstairs bar at the Cambridge. He almost forgot her. But he didn’t quite.
And then he saw her again the following week at a club called the Wharf, which occupied a derelict warehouse building on an empty stretch of the Thames near the Shadwell Basin. It was the era of warehouse parties, word-of-mouth and flier events like the Dirtbox, floating notoriously between vacant tenements in King’s Cross, with its sound systems and zinc bathtubs full of ice cubes and tins of Saporo beer. But the Wharf had a gentler and more contrived atmosphere of tidal drift, almost of permanence. And its clientele reflected its status in contrivances of their own.
There was a boy in a matelot shirt and a canvas yacht cap like a Jean Genet caricature on the door. A scar blunted the bridge of his nose and his tattooed arms were sinewy and tanned. The spring was hot that year, warm already with the intense promise of the burning summer to come. The club was lit by yellow oil lamps, and starlight cast on to its ceiling in pale ripples reflected through the windows from the river below. Patrick was there with friends from St Martin’s. Stuart Lockyear was there. And Greg Foyle, whose pictures would one day sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were seated at a table on the other side of the dance floor and Patrick said something to Greg and Greg looked at Patrick and Paul knew from the look that his brother was very drunk.
He saw the mysterious girl from the fashion course, Lucinda Grey, sipping a viscous green drink from a shot glass in a flamboyant huddle of people by the bar. He became aware of the music, as the final notes of the Jacques Brel song, ‘Amsterdam’ faded. It was the version of the song sung in English by David Bowie. And in its histrionic aftermath he recognised the first bars of ‘Bad Day’, a new song sung by the English torch singer Carmel McCourt. She came from Manchester and she lived in Paris. Her songs were becoming very popular in the clubs that year. He breathed in the smell of the place; the mingled aromas of tar and timber and tobacco and dank night river. And he walked over to Patrick’s table and Greg poured him a drink from one of the bottles of Lambrusco they were sharing.
‘You’d be on the scent,’ his brother said to him. Patrick blinked, but the blear remained across his eyes.
Paul sipped wine.
‘In the hunt,’ Patrick said. ‘The chase. The game’s afoot, is it not?’
‘Don’t sound so disapproving. It’s hypocritical. You’d shag anything with a pulse.’
Patrick appeared to ponder this. ‘Wouldn’t necessarily insist on a pulse,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to over-egg the pudding.’
Paul laughed. And from the other side of the room, he saw Lucinda Grey smile at him above the shot glass held poised beneath her lips. She raised an arched eyebrow and, with the fingers of the hand not occupied with the glass, she beckoned him across.
‘Your fat rockabilly friend looks drunk.’ She sipped her drink and looked at him over its turning rim. The drink was iridescent, like her eyes.
Seaton looked back to his group. And back again at Lucinda Grey. She had her arms folded across her chest and the posture pulled the leather sleeves of her jacket, taut and soft. It had a mandarin collar, the jacket, and her neck was long under her jawline, the hair cut close, razored to a velvet nap above the hollow at the back, rising above her collar.
‘He isn’t fat. And he isn’t a rockabilly.’
Patrick, who was powerfully built but cherubic of cheek, had made the fatal mistake of wearing a letter jacket with some collegiate logo displayed across its back in his first week at art school. It had cost him thirty-five quid at Camden Market. And it had cost him any shred of credibility. He’d been the first to admit, afterwards, that this particular item of Americana had been a misjudgment. But despite the peach zoot suit he’d teamed with a hand-painted tie tonight, despite the careful strokes of eyelash dye he’d brushed into his pencil moustache, he’d been the Fat Rockabilly, at least in the third person, ever since.
‘You’re right,’ Seaton said. He sighed. ‘The Fat Rockabilly’s definitely had a few too many tonight.’
She lived in a hard-to-let council flat. She’d queued all night outside County Hall to get the tenancy, she told Seaton. It was in a walk-up block on Old Paradise Street, just on the south side of Lambeth Bridge. She told him this as he walked her home along the river an hour after meeting her, an hour after speaking to her for the first time. They passed an anchored barge in the darkness and the smell of gunpowder drifted up off the breeze on the river. It was one of the fire-works barges used in the GLC’s sporadic extravagant displays. A party boat wallowed by, over near the far bank, its lights pearly now through thickening mist and the voice of Boy George, thin and tremulous, singing ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ over its sound system.
He looked at her. He couldn’t stop looking at her. She was tall and slender in her black leather jacket and a cream silk blouse and a black calf-length skirt that hugged her hips, and there was something in her hair, brushed back from her face, that gave it an oily, intricate gleam when they passed under the bright globes, every few yards, of the Embankment lamps. Her skin was very pale and her mouth full under deep red lipstick. The Culture Club song carried over dark water and light jigged through mist on the distant boat. And Seaton smelled the scorch of dead rockets and burned-out Catherine wheels and his skin pricked and his heart hammered in his chest with the hurtling joy of life and youth and possibility. He’d never felt so alive. His life was a brimming adventure. A sensation accelerated through him and he took it for sexual anticipation, for lustful excitement. But it was more than that, he realised. It was a pure untrammeled anticipation of all the life he had to come. Later, he would remember this moment often. Later, much later, this moment and the remembered joy of it would come to visit him, unbidden, all the time.
There was a Stockman in the sitting room of her small second-floor flat. It was partially clothed in ruched pinned silk that looked blood red in the moonlight through the window but faded to something between terracotta and taupe when Lucinda switched on a standard lamp. The floor of the room was littered with pieces of dress patterns and swatches of cloth and sketches of clothes. She could really draw, he noticed. There was an electric sewing machine on a table with a pedal underneath. Her other furniture comprised an expensive-looking hi-fi and a small vinyl-covered sofa he thought he remembered having seen in the window of Practical Styling.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about the mess.’ She took off her jacket and hung it across the Stockman’s headless shoulders. ‘Would you like a drink?’
He could hear music coming from one of the flats of the floor above. The somnolent UB40 cover of ‘Red, Red Wine’. He looked at his watch. It was just after one in the morning. She took a record from its sleeve and put it on her turntable. Julie London began to sing ‘Cry Me A River’.
‘Do you have any beer?’
‘No boy drinks, I’m afraid,’ she said. She stood with her jacket off and her hands on her hips and her weight on one leg. Her breasts were small and high against the fabric of her blouse. Julie London was quietly histrionic through the loudspeakers. ‘There’s Chartreuse or Armagnac,’ she said.
Chartreuse. The green drink she’d been drinking in the Wharf.
‘Armagnac would be grand,’ he said.
‘Grand,’ she said.
‘It’s what they say at home.’ He felt foolish.
‘In Dublin’s fair city,’ she said. ‘Where the girls are so pretty.’
But he had never in truth seen a girl in Dublin with the looks on Lucinda Grey.
After a week, he moved in with her. Her flat was small, it was true, but they didn’t want the space to be apart. When they weren’t attending clubs and parties, they would sit through the lightening evenings on one of the wooden benches outside the Windmill pub nearby and sip beer opposite a peach tree that blossomed pink all through a perfect May. They rented videos, still a novelty, from the newsagent’s shop on Lambeth Walk. They rented
Hammett
and
One From The Heart
and laughed their way through
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
and
Trading Places
. They played tennis together in Archbishop’s Park on one of the two public courts surrounded by high elms and beech trees. At the end of the month, they hosted a ridiculously intimate cocktail party. Girls from Lucinda’s course wore paste jewellery and cocktail frocks and their hair piled and sculpted in gelled and sugared confections. Kid Creole cavorted on the stereo.
‘It won’t last,’ Patrick murmured, drinking a vile concoction called a Dark and Stormy, which Greg Foyle was dispensing from a steel shaker misty with cold in the heat of the tiny kitchen. ‘I doubt if your doomed romance will see out the summer.’ But he smiled as he said it. And Paul knew the remark must have seemed absurd, even to him.
During the day, Lucinda attended college and Paul worked at the second job he’d ever had, as a crime and local government reporter on a local London paper called the
Hackney Gazette
. He was a stringer for the
Evening Standard
and for the TV news magazine programme
London Tonight.
And he had proposed a feature to the features editor of
The Face
. And
The Face
had accepted his proposal. The world seemed so alive with novelty and hope that some mornings the light and hurtle of London seemed to gasp with it, having to catch up with itself, with its own gathering thrill and momentum. Life was a movie, of course. He was at that forgivable age of self-obsession. And he felt like his role was shifting in it from an extra to one of the principals. He didn’t want a starring part, his ego wasn’t that big. But, he thought soberly, Lucinda might be destined to occupy one. And he thought his own might be a telling cameo.
Seaton kept only two things from his past. The one was his brother, of course. The other was his boxing. He’d boxed as a youngster, scrupulously and well, learning at and then competing for the St Theresa’s club on Dublin’s northside. He enjoyed the rigour, maybe even the pain. The discipline of it seemed to seep into his soul. So he kept up his road-work when he moved to London and, in Lambeth, he ran laps of Archbishop’s Park and trained at the Fitzroy Lodge club housed in a railway arch on the corner of Hercules Road. Two nights a week and on a Saturday morning he would skip and hit the bags and work the speedball and do floorwork on one of the canvas mats. The club was run by a thin chain-smoking trainer called Mick. Mick’s office was a plywood and Formica den poised on a shaky balcony above the floor and twin training rings. Now and then he would emerge from its bitter Benson & Hedges fog to ask Seaton to spar with one of his prospects. So it was that Paul Seaton kept his body hard, attending his church of choice, honouring vanity and faith, always doing his regular penance.
On a Friday, his habit was to leave the
Gazette
office on Kingsland Road never later than four. He would head up West, meet his brother, have a Friday-night drink with the boys. But he’d taken to doing this early, curtailing it, besotted as he was with Lucinda Grey. So he’d meet the boys and then seek out Lucinda later, in the Dive Bar or the Cambridge or the Spice. She wasn’t hard to find. And it didn’t matter how packed with other people a place was. She was impossible to miss.
So it was at five o’clock on a Friday early in June, he sat drinking Lambrusco from a big two-litre bottle bought from an Italian deli on Old Compton Street. They were on the flat roof of the St Martin’s building on Charing Cross Road and London undulated around them through heat ripple and the smells of softening tar and street cooking and pollen from the flowers and leaves of summer trees in the squares. Hank Williams sang, keening and plaintive on a tape playing on Foyle’s paint-spattered beatbox. Seaton sat on the low wall surrounding the roof, at a spot above the open windows of their studio. Now and then, the smells of oil and turpentine rose to clash and coalesce on the hot breeze. It was very hot. The sun was very bright above them. They all wore Ray-Bans, except for Foyle, whose habit it was to narrow his eyes and squint into the light.
‘I saw a rehearsal for Lucinda’s degree show this morning,’ Lockyear said. Lockyear was dressed entirely out of Lawrence Corner, in a khaki shirt with pleated pockets and voluminous Desert Rat shorts. With his blond slicked-back hair, Seaton thought he looked like Franchot Tone in
Five Graves To Cairo
. ‘Her show was really good. The knob of the donkey, as they say in fashion circles. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she gets a first.’
‘I’ll be surprised if she gets a pass,’ Foyle said, who looked like Kerouac, like Kerouac would like to have looked, in his 501s and his print shirt and the haircut he still had then.
‘Some disparity there, boys, between a fail and a first,’ Seaton said.
‘I’d forgotten about the dissertation,’ Lockyear said. ‘Greg’s right. It’s a shame, because her degree collection is really strong.’
‘The knob of the donkey,’ Patrick said, nodding, sipping Lambrusco from a plastic cup. He was looking towards where the Post Office Tower undulated through heat ripple, from this distance like some frail and improbable movie prop.
‘Every silver lining has a cloud,’ Lockyear said.
Foyle was nodding, agreeing with him. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said. ‘A damn shame.’
‘What are you all talking about?’
His friends looked at Seaton and at one another. It was his brother who said, ‘Her dissertation. She hasn’t done it. She’s asked for and been given an extension on it and she still won’t get it in by the deadline. If she doesn’t, it’s an automatic fail. I can’t honestly believe she hasn’t told you.’
‘Well, she hasn’t.’
They looked at him, trying not to.
‘What’s it on?’
‘Pandora Gibson-Hoare,’ Foyle said.
The name meant something to Seaton. There was some old, almost involuntary memory there which stirred at the name, but remained opaque as his mind struggled through heat and wine drunk too early in the evening. Something he’d read or seen, some forgotten association stirred in the dimness of recollection but would not reveal itself. He gave up. ‘Who is she?’
‘Fucked if I know,’ Patrick said.
‘She was a photographer,’ Foyle said. ‘Portrait and fashion photography. She was one of the pioneers in fashion. But she did all her meaningful work very young. And she died young.’
‘Inconsiderate of her,’ Patrick said. ‘Dissertation-wise.’
‘She’s pretty obscure,’ Foyle said. ‘Hard to research. I’ve heard Lucinda hit a wall with her. It wasn’t laziness. Lucinda just got stuck.’
Seaton climbed down to the roof. He looked up at the sky, at vapour trails expanding and distorting miles up in the blue void. And he looked back to the group, noticing how clean-cut and absolute was the blackness of the shadows they cast on the flat surface of the roof. Hank Williams sang a song of dusty heartbroken longing on Greg Foyle’s beatbox. Beyond them, London toiled in the early-evening heat. You could look out from here across its shimmering topology and feel its energy and promise running through you like a charge. Pandora Gibson-Hoare. For some reason the name itself evoked in Seaton images of cars with running-boards and roofs of taut canvas and waxed bodywork sleek under black rain. He saw a convoy of them, the headlights yellow through an avenue of whispery trees. He could smell tobacco and cologne in the dark spaces behind the windscreen, see the motion of curved mudguard as the wheels they housed bounced and shivered over uncertain roads.
‘It’ll be a shame if Lucinda fails her degree,’ Lockyear said.
‘A travesty,’ Foyle said, swallowing wine.
‘Lucinda won’t fail her degree,’ Seaton said, dragging himself back into the here and now. And he knew that she wouldn’t. Because he wouldn’t allow it to happen.
The extension gave her a deadline that was still a fortnight away. He reckoned if he took one of the two weeks’ holiday he was owed, it would be more than enough time. But he reckoned without Lucinda’s principles, her integrity and her embarrassment at his finding out in the way he had about what she saw as a shameful academic and intellectual failing. Pride had made it a secret between them. He wondered that she could have hidden something so worrying, so well. But he only wondered briefly. Mostly he was just determined to help her. And not, honestly, just for her. Research and writing was what he did, after all. He wanted to help her, but he wanted to impress her, too.
He didn’t say anything until the following day, the Saturday, until after they had played tennis. They didn’t go for a drink after tennis on the Saturday. They had booked the court for the late afternoon. And the Windmill didn’t open on a Saturday evening. So they walked home and drank tea in their small sitting room with the window wide. Lucinda wore the white pleated tennis dress she had played in, her hair held back from her face by a white band. On anyone else, a dress for tennis in the park would have seemed to Seaton like an affectation. On Lucinda, it seemed the only possible attire. Her hair was still damp at the hairline with heat and effort as they sat and drank their tea.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the dissertation?’
The colour drained from Lucinda’s face. So pale did she become that he noticed with surprise that pale-green eye shadow sculpted the shape of her eye sockets between the lashes and the brows. He hadn’t been aware that she wore make-up in the daytime. She laughed, ‘I didn’t tell you because there is no dissertation to tell you about.’
‘Why isn’t there?’
Lucinda looked down at her hands. They were resting in her lap. She raised one and peeled the band from her head and freed her hair and shook it so the damp ends clustered in dark-blonde points around her face. ‘I chose the wrong subject,’ she said. And Seaton could hear how upset she was in the way her accent had reasserted itself in her speech. Her words sounded flat and northern. ‘I thought I was going to write something brilliant about a forgotten artist. I’ve ended up chasing a ghost.’
‘I can help you.’
Faintly, there was the familiar sound of music, ‘Red, Red Wine.’ from the flat upstairs.
‘Help me do what? Cheat?’
‘Help you get the degree your talent merits.’
She looked distressed. He had never seen her look so distressed. She looked trapped, in the heat, in the room, in his scrutiny.
‘Show me her pictures,’ he said, saying it to deflect attention from Lucinda, to get her out of the glare of her own exposure. She went over to a shelf above the television they had bought and took down a slim book with stiff card covers and handed it to him. Then she left the room. He could hear her fumbling in the bathroom cabinet for her asthma inhaler as he held the book between his fingers.
It was a monograph. The author was a man named Edwin Poole, his name etched in a typeface reminiscent, Seaton thought, of the Bloomsbury Group. Past the contents page, Poole had written around twelve hundred precise words about the photography of Pandora Gibson-Hoare. There followed twenty plates of formal portraiture taken in a rigid monochromatic universe that smelled of dust and remoteness rising in the heat of the bright June day from dead and brittle pages. There was a picture of a doleful escapologist burdened by chains on a bridge on the Seine, the river and city made recognisable by the skeletal tower in the distance behind the manacled figure. There was a picture of a circus clown, seated on a drum in a sawdust arena, the pompom buttons on his tunic absurdly large, somehow pathetic under such detailed scrutiny, what looked like blood sprinkled and dotted in the area around his giant feet. There was a picture of a ballerina poised in the wings of a lit stage. Her limbs were sinewy against the white flounce of her tutu and her face cadaverous under her black drawn-back hair as she sucked on a cigarette screwed into a tortoiseshell holder. A New York cop held the butt of a heavy revolver between finger and thumb with the disgust a man might display holding the tail of a suspended rat. A corpse was bundled in an overcoat at his feet. You could only guess at the sex of the apparent crime victim from the smallness and paleness of the one hand visible under the bulk of the coat. Seaton recognised the great French boxer Georges Carpentier, pictured eating a cream bun at a café table with brilliantine in his hair and a long gash over one eye coarsely stitched. There were some studies of a female cabaret artist with a fat python and one of a conjurer displaying a decaying smile and a glass orb that seemed to hang by magic in the air above a card table. A man posed half in shadow on the deck of a liner. There was no convenient lifebelt displayed to give the name of the ship. But Seaton recognised the subject as the English occultist Aleister Crowley. He was smiling at something. Or for the camera. Elsewhere, at an atelier, an audience of frosted women studied a thin mannequin pinned by fussing seamstresses into a gown.
There was power in Gibson-Hoare’s pictures, Seaton thought, but mostly it was the fascination the viewer felt at the sight of death, rather than any intrinsic quality in the work. There was something compelling about extinction, and these pictures, of course, documented a vanished world. It was what all the subjects had in common. They were gone. It was not a world, though, anyone was likely to feel much nostalgia or sense of loss for. It was too sad and grotesque for that. Maybe that was her art, her gift, to get not just under the gilt and glamour but beyond the nostalgic cosiness that characterised so many old photographs. Pandora Gibson-Hoare’s vision was not cosy or quaint. It was stark and unsettling. This was no sepiatinted series of artful reminiscences. Her world was not one Paul Seaton would have liked to have lived in. It was not one he would have even liked to visit, he thought, as he closed the thin book, wondering what on earth it was could have intrigued Lucinda about the woman’s work.
He read the monograph again. Edwin Poole had surprisingly little to say. His point seemed to be that Gibson-Hoare was technically accomplished in a way that few women photographers of the period were. And that she eschewed emotion in a way that few women photographers were capable of doing. Seaton was left with the view that the argument was more a way of dispelling the author’s prejudices than shedding any light on the artist under discussion. If Gibson-Hoare qualified as an artist. On this evidence, Seaton wasn’t sure that she did. Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography predated this stuff by more than fifty years and was just as technically accomplished. And if you wanted the triumph of narrative over emotion, you could do a lot worse than look at Lee Miller’s war photographs. And Lee Miller had been all woman. He looked at the contents page again as Lucinda came back into the room, changed out of her tennis clothes and carrying two mugs of tea for them. Poole’s monogram had been published in 1937.
‘Her cousin,’ Lucinda said, sitting down. ‘There was just a decade between them. He had no artistic pretensions of his own. He was twenty-seven and something important at Lloyds of London when her messy suicide looked like it might hurt his career.’ She sipped tea. ‘So he produced this, at his own expense, and had a few hundred copies printed.’