Alma Cogan (17 page)

A week later I saw Jackie Kennedy on Fifth Avenue ringed by secret service people when I was just a face in the crowd. A few months later the President was dead.

But my strongest memory of the America Hotel is not of being glamoured by the Kennedy presence. It’s not even the scenes in the bar after the President’s departure, involving Sammy and Jackie’s secretary and her sister, the princess, when the three of them were all touching and dirty dancing and darting tongues.

What impressed me was the speed with which the bar closed over the occasion like quicksand, baffled the excitement surrounding the President’s visit, and quickly returned people to themselves; before long it was just another night being soaked up into the dark mahogany counters and tarry sepia patinas, taking its shape from the shifting volumes of Billy May’s and Nelson Riddle’s arrangements – these were played all night, every night, from first shout to last knockings, under some unspoken but generally accepted ordinance – for Sinatra.

The night moved back into itself, moment by boozy moment, and the valuable sense of being part of the uncalibrated flow of experience, of all being headed for the high-jump together, returned.

The idea that similar conditions could be consciously contrived only occurred to me in my second or third year here, when a parcel arrived containing what, to anybody else who might have opened it, would have seemed worthless bits and pieces, useless junk.

The International (never known as anything but the ‘Nash’) was a basement bar in a narrow lane joining St Giles High Street to Denmark Street/Tin Pan Alley. Its heyday was in the days when the Alley was a warren of broom cupboard studios cutting demo discs (some days you would swear you could see the pavement tossing and buckling, like a cartoon carpet with Tom and Jerry under it), and the Nash was the haunt of songwriters, publishers, pluggers, disc-jockeys and ‘talent’ – people like me, looking for a hit.

Because it stayed the same when everything around it was
being blown out of the water, the Nash became a refuge for the old guard. Eventually it turned into a period piece, popular for promotional parties and fashion shoots.

There was a rustle of media interest (he sent me the clippings) when Beatty, whose roost it had been for thirty-five years, retired in ’81 or ’82. By that time it had been taken over by cobwebby goths and punks and the art school crowd.

‘Dear Alma,’ Beatty wrote in the note which accompanied his parcel, ‘a few things which I hope may stir memories of happy times. If not, you don’t need me tell you what to do. Trust I will raise an elbow with you sometime in Imazaz (Imazaz the pub next door).’

In individually wrapped newspaper bundles, I found the following: a Watney’s Red barrel-shaped lamp base and a Furstenberg lager shade; a cardboard advertising plaque (‘Columbus discovered it/Don Juan loved it/Ron Davies drinks it’) for San Miguel beer; a bullfight poster with a blue bandarilla and ribbon attached; a charity collecting box with the picture of an emaciated child and the words ‘What is this child’s health worth to you?’; a gold plastic statue of a body-builder flexing his pecs but looking as if he’s holding his nose; a framed black-and-white photo of Mr Acker Bilk playing darts; a ‘straw’ boater with a red band reading ‘Packaging News’; two signs that hung for years behind the bar at the International (‘Warning – I may make mistakes, but being wrong isn’t one of them’; ‘The impossible we do today – miracles take a little longer’); and a faded photocopy of a Louis MacNeice poem in a deep nicotine-coloured (it was the feature all the items had in common) plastic frame:

These days, what I listen to, like what I read, mainly depends on chance, randomness, unintention – something sneaking up out of the jukebox being played in the pub as I pass, the radio playing as a background in the village shops or by gardeners in the village or tree-trimmers in the woods, or the audio systems of cars descending the hill at the rear of the house or parked up in the official parking areas or on the quay (a confirmation that cars now are engineered for optimum acoustic output).

I was woken up before eight this morning by car doors slamming and a modern remix – phased, synthed, lots of variable lag, the trebly trumpet riff blanked completely – of Tom Jones’
It’s
Not
Unusual
.

Conversion work on the old marine yard that shares the quay with Kiln Cottage started at the end of the summer. Since then the days have had an unbroken backing track of chartbusters and golden oldies whose hooks and catchy choruses have become a murmuring subconscious.

It’s music which feels laid on like the gas; an on-tap amenity. This is not the case with the fifties cabinet radio in the cottage, whose signal comes two ways: choked and very choked.

It is whiney, and strangled with static and interference, and as a consequence carries a sense of technological complexity and
distance
– radio waves fighting their way through the crowded sky and around natural barriers into the valley, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn.

I only switch on in the late evenings for the news, which I have learned to take spliced with plainchant and Javanese gamelan music, or underlaid with sing-song Dutch or glottal Spanish or a jazz ballad’s poignant seventh chords going out on the American Forces Network.

The equipment in the improvised bar in the lumber room which is put through its paces for an hour or so about this time every evening is compatibly lo-fi: a portable record-player of the stacking type (monophonic) and a cassette machine which occasionally chews up the tape.

I can’t ever remember liking more than a handful of records at
the same time. Like clothes and shoes, I tend to remain faithful to the same few pieces and play them into the ground.

For
Desert
Island
Discs
I found it difficult getting the selections up to the required eight: the four or five tracks I was hooked on at that point were, in an absolute, literal sense, all I wanted to hear. (In the end I threw in a Brahms symphony and a Love Duet by Verdi which I had to bluff my way around.)

I tend to play the same few tracks night after night, week after week sometimes, with a Mexican Mary or a Buñueloni or a slayer G and Τ to put me over the horizon.

I mentioned this (rather drunkenly) once to a friendly face in a crowded room – a volatilely-complexioned young man sipping un-iced water and practising tantric breathing. He said he must send me something about Philip V of Spain and the
castrato
, Farinelli; and, most improbably (he scribbled my address in the back of the copy of Salinger’s
Franny
and
Zooey
he had in his pocket) he did.

He added, ‘The belief in its mood-altering properties was rooted in ancient narratives of the miraculous effects of music: Homer recounting that his warriors’ choral singing could stave off the plague; Varro claiming that flute pieces relieved the pain of gout; the biblical David, on the testimony of the Scriptures, employing his musical ability to cure Saul’s mental derangement by playing the harp.’

My present listening – I’m listening to it now – consists of four versions of the Fields-Kern evergreen, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ – two vocal (by Fred Astaire, 1936 vintage, and Peggy Lee), two meandering jazz instrumentals.

I once had the difference between pop and jazz set out for me by a jazzman at whose feet I was prepared to sit in those days: ‘It’s as if you had two roads, both going in the same direction, but one of them was straight with no scenery around it, and the other twisted and turned and had a lot of beautiful trees on all sides.’

It put me on the defensive for a long time. But I’ve been around long enough now to stand my ground. There are times when you don’t want the scenic route; you want the road that gets you where you’re going fastest and is featureless only to those who are on it for the first time: for the regular user, its bald verges and concrete uprights are as loaded with meaning as the sayings of Einstein or the essays of Sartre.

I happen to find ‘The Way You Look …’ in the straight, no detours versions resonant enough.

But the way the melody unravels like string on the extended improvised tracks does take the mind for a different kind of walk – to a place where your whole life becomes suspended in time and you can feel immune, beyond calamity.

But it’s not happening tonight. Tonight I’m feeling unsettled and loosely wrapped. My thoughts keep lurching in a morbid direction – to photoelectric eyes guarding bedroom doors, and electric circuit sensors leading to the nearest police station.

When I explain what I found waiting for me here on my return from London, perhaps you’ll understand why.

I got back two days ago to find the cottage eerily as I’d left it, as if Ruth, Staff’s sister, and her children hadn’t been here at all. The kitchen window had been blacked out with mud thrown up by passing traffic, but that wasn’t surprising, given how close it is to the road.

When I finally got round to having a go at it this afternoon, however, rushing with a rag and a bucket before the dark set in, I discovered that it wasn’t mud at all but dogshit, daubed in a nauseatingly neat way that missed the glazing bars and reached far into the corners of the loosening elderly panes.

I noticed the letters last – two rows of four letters, one per pane:

They had been scratched in with a stick or other pointed object in faint, barely legible lines that quivered with drivenness and compacted human rage.

For the last few minutes I have been watching a piece of lemon pith rising and falling, falling then rising like the bubble in a spirit-level in my glass.

In addition to the souvenirs of the International – the advertising kitsch, the Red Barrel lamp (wired and lit) and the rest – there are rainyday pastimes, mounds of children’s things stored in here: a
table-tennis net with clamps, pimpled bats, game boards, plastic shuttlecocks, plimsolls, Wellingtons with frogs’ eyes, old-fashioned lead farm animals, learner fishing rods, rubber flippers, rainbow-soled flip-flops still lightly dusted with sand, snorkels with ping-pong ball breathing valves, a red plastic horse on springs, tiny plastic sandals, strap-on roller skates, a skateboard with the name ‘Lesley’ on Dymo-tape and cloudy blue nylon wheels.

‘We’re going to leave her room just as it was the morning she walked out of here …’

‘He just ran round to the shop to buy crisps and pop …’

‘It wasn’t late. She just went round her nan’s to show her her new watch …’

‘Please.
Please
. Just give us something to let us know she’s safe …’

The many faces have become one face – swollen, distraught, raw with grief and alarm, the scratchy halo of guilt just beginning to form.

Photographed in a raking light to emphasise the diagonal stress cracks, it is the face at the centre of the formal disposition of the police press conference, the focus of attention but wildly out-of-focus (tight on the eyes, camera-3) in the context of the silvery-roseate deputy chief-constable, the suited-up detective leading the hunt, the police PR flaks and human interest scribblers, the pretty WPC with French-rolled hair, a clearing skin problem, and easeful, telegenic body language.

It is a formation as easily readable as the ragged wave of police, friends, neighbours, tourist volunteers lapping slowly across the area of outstanding natural beauty, scouring the snicket popular with local courting couples, sudsing across the open terrain: another child disappeared off the street.