Homesickness (9 page)

This faceless replacement of life and pleasure caught and held Louisa. She felt isolated and irrelevant; a childless body draped in fine clothing briefly bumping around. Even pleasure seemed futile. When the lights came on she suddenly wanted to be alone. The Kaddoks said something and stumbled out.

Louisa wanted to turn away.

‘Isn't it odd when you look at it,' Borelli was murmuring. Slumped in his seat he waved one hand: ‘That a place like this has been specially built to be filled with polite people, strangers sitting next to each other, to witness some entertainment or other performed by other people? And see how it's been built; deliberately ornate, almost grotesque. It has to be ornate. No one wants to come to a bare hall. This decoration says: you are out having a good time. You are, for the evening, in a separate remote world. Or feelings to that effect.'

The tall walls were fluted, balustraded, spiral-columned, draped with royal velvet and lunging caryatids. The ceiling was pastel cupola, inside of a lemon, gesso, adorned with little lights.

Borelli remained slumped.

‘I wonder if other cultures have these elaborate, set-aside places? It all seems strange. Do you feel that? I wouldn't, myself, have come here if I wasn't travelling.'

Louisa glanced at him. His speculations had wandered up and down and around her, searching. Vaguely they were similar to what she had been thinking, though not exactly.

‘Partly, that's why we travel. Tourism compresses time and events.' He laughed at himself. ‘In a sense we actually live longer. At least that's what a tourist somehow feels.'

‘You have so many theories.' And she was about to add, ‘What good do they do?' But when she looked at him, he was still slumped.

‘You were tired before; you look pale.'

He sat up. ‘You're right.'

Her foot knocked over the gin-and-tonic. It was enough: she began crying, a little. She couldn't stop herself.

Borelli was leaning close to her.

‘I am sorry. I didn't mean…'

‘It's not your fault. But I don't know,'

The night, the emptiness, the distance. Her size.

His hand took her arm.

‘Shhh. You should be happy. Imagine yourself. You're on holiday. Isn't that what they say?'

‘It was my husband's idea. It was to go away together. I don't mind but it was his idea. We haven't been getting on.'

‘Then, Louisa, you're not having a good time?'

‘I am really!' She suddenly smiled.

The Kaddoks had returned.

Taking out a small round mirror Louisa began checking her face and telling Borelli about the stripe painting Ken had bought at Christie's. He nodded, watching her. Part of Gwen's burlap shawl came between them. Smiling in the dark, Gwen asked if one of them could change seats so Leon could photograph the last act.

Such a cold afternoon, Tuesday, as expected. A river of a wind to boot. It soaked into their ears, chill brains, and down their open necks, cleft chins and cleavages. It soon found gullies in their trousers; entered regions where it shouldn't. They were crossing the Thames: which of the London bridges? It was possible to walk across all nine in a day. North had undertaken to guide them. He had a map and a pair of sturdy shoes. The cold certainly livened the man up. Among many other things he noted English tramps were attracted to bridges and invariably wore neckties (usually red). And it seemed that much of the population was either lost or establishing its location: so Sasha and Violet began laughing whenever they saw a couple bent over a map in a small sedan, or another policeman pointing for a squinting pedestrian. A colonel consulted a khaki compass. Taxi drivers shouted across at confused drivers. Almost from birth, North had an unusual knack for folding maps. People would bring them to him to fold. It was his love of maps, of globes and atlases, which had years ago led him, in a roundabout way, into the world of zoology. So many maps had he pored over in his time that he dressed, without fully realising, in the gentle pastels of cartography: yellow corduroy trousers (6000–9000 feet above sea level), the jacket of darkly woven maroon (Antarctic Tundra), shirt of Viyella peach (less than 1 inch of rainfall per annum), and the red fleck in his woollen tie looked like International Boundaries or ‘population over 500 persons per square mile'.

They sat down in ye olde tea shoppe and Sasha's nose was shining. Violet lit up a cigarette.

‘Colleague of mine in Sydney,' North was telling them, ‘collected railway stations. He claimed to have the finest collection, I think it was, in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course. Jack had travelled a good deal in his youth. For example, he still has the old Dresden station, and some of those in Japan, before they were destroyed. You'd find with Jack that he'd always angle a conversation around to bring out his “collection”. Nothing would stop him then.”

North laughed softly. His shoulders shook. Sasha and her friend were both interested.

‘In his collection he has the world's hottest station, the longest and the widest. There is one somewhere or other that's circular. He often mentions Mussolini's station at Rome. Do you know that one? Huge marble mausoleum. He even has one of the mock ones stashed away, built in Germany for the concentration camps… But I must say, others sound extremely attractive. Up in the Himalayas, a tiny one which smells of fresh tea leaves; coffee-smelling ones in Brazil too. My favourite is the Zanzibar station. According to Jack, it's always hot and has a permanent aroma of cloves.'

Sipping his tea, North pulled a face.

‘Reminds me. He spent years, home, trying to duplicate railway-station tea and coffee, but could never quite achieve this elusive wateriness. Let me think. What else did he have? That famous New York station located under the skyscraper, and a Mexican one inside a cathedral. Flinders Street, Amritsar, Edinburgh and Rangoon. In the Philippines the station built completely out of cane—cane walls, cane seats. There was a nightmarish one somewhere…I forget now…but it was completely rusty. The platform, benches, even the ticket office, according to him, were all made from old railway track. Passengers would always come away with orange hands. But he's like any collector. It's the rarities he's most proud about. He has one where the trains are always early, Latin American stations suspended by cables, and one near the Arctic Circle where the platform is made from blocks of ice, and replaced every night—a translucent station. A good collection. But I've been talking too much. Excuse me.'

‘No, go on! He sounds terribly interesting.'

‘Oddballs are, aren't they?' Violet added, inhaling; and a sliding shadow of a double decker engulfed her arms, face and throat.

North coughed. ‘Well, he prefers Leftish governments everywhere, because they appear to have more time for railway stations. His favourite painter of course is the Belgian man, Delvaux; and there's apparently a German collagist who liked to use train tickets in his act. With books he'll talk only about those which have a climactic chapter in railway stations. You know,
Anna Karenina, To the Finland Station
, and so on. The ones he holds high though are a little Czech book,
A Close Watch on the Trains
and an English one—John Wain—called
A Smaller Sky
. Both are novels set entirely inside railway stations. I can only tell you all that because he forced me to read them.'

Violet pulled a face. ‘Fancy living with such a man. How obsessive.'

‘I think it would be funny,' Sasha laughed.

Looking at North she noticed he'd let one of his cuffs unravel. A thread was hanging down.

‘He is obsessive, but then I've told you only the railway station side of him. I imagine he's what the newspapers call Incurable Romantic. He is a harmless, gentle character. Such people are antidotes; I sometimes think we'd go mad without them. Jack actually is extremely intelligent. In any case, collecting appears to be a central human characteristic. We are, ah, part Bower Bird.'

‘Is he a good friend of yours?' Sasha asked.

‘I used to see a good deal of him!'

‘I'd love to meet him.'

‘Sasha, what for?'

North smiled: lines spreading out from his eyes, sinusoidal projections. ‘If you like, but he's my age. He's old enough to be your grandfather. Shall we move? I think we should.'

Again and again: bent figures consulting maps. On the second last bridge they saw the Kaddoks approaching, Kaddok holding his wife's elbow, at a jog.

‘Hello,' Sasha waved. ‘We've just been—'

‘Leon's left his light meter on a train. Does anyone know the Lost Property Office? We can't get a taxi at this hour.'

As they spoke a ferry-load of tourists below tilted up and photographed them: five talking on a London bridge.

North said, ‘It used to be over there. It's not far, but it's complicated.' He turned to the others. ‘Shall we drop the last bridge?'

‘I'll come with you,' said Sasha.

It was an old brown station made redundant by inflation.

Sasha leaned against North, ‘I bet your friend what's-his-name doesn't have this one.'

North stroked his beard. ‘I don't remember it being like this myself.'

It resembled the small out-of-the-way museum, run by a dedicated amateur. The Found Objects, as the sign pointed inside, were behind the counter, placed at easy intervals on tables and shelves, labelled, clearly visible. There were also pigeon holes; as the attendant explained to North, these were for lost pigeons. You'd be surprised how many they get, some with foreign words on their feet.

While the Kaddoks were busy filling out a form, the attendant motioned the others to come behind the counter.

‘A lot of these Found Objects have been here for donkey's years.' He pointed to a white bicycle wheel with hand-pump attached. ‘Before my time,' he nodded, reading the red tape attached to it. ‘1913. Some of this stuff could be quite valuable.'

Early coins corroded with patina; dead letters now with several rare stamps; Victorian toys; dusty bottles of port; a 1913 edition of
A la recherche du temps perdu
(vol. I) in a Woolworths bag.

The collection of lost luggage alone offered a valuable insight into changing attitudes, the gradual democratisation of travel. The attendant here complained bitterly of lack of staff. A
catalogue raisonné
was badly needed. Sociologists had recently discovered the cache and published important findings. At one end of the scale was the monogrammed carpet bag of ‘
REES JEFFERIES
' left on a channel train one morning in the twenties; at the other more recent end were the unclaimed canvas bags with flap, grubby and open, the kind favoured and discarded by the international army of hirsute stowaways, bus travellers, hitch-hikers and bodgies.

In between steam trunks and enamelled tin productions, the inevitable Gladstone, and portmanteaux of silk-coated cardboard (port, short for
porter
—where have they gone?
Manteau
, the French for loose upper garment worn by women). There were cardboard valises, Argentine stitched leather or the classic papier-mâché model…plastic, vinyl, Taiwanese imitation leather…a floppy bag like a coarse pillow with rope handles…the ravages of inflation again. All were heavy with invisible possessions. Rusty locks, secret numbers, belts, string and leather straps prevented yawning! The sides and fronts were nostalgic collages of customs crayon and shipping line labels: those ships long broken up or (some) angled deep in Davy's locker. It was enough to make any ageing man ponder. The attendant had an enormous honest jaw, the bottom lip of which had rolled out with the gravity of the situation, exposing his stumps, his gums, and a spot of gold on the left. His eyes were small and red. He was more like a cemetery attendant.

He pointed to heavy ports fitted with little nylon wheels: favoured by elderly folk, young ladies and Boston Brahmins. They laughed when North picked up a Brisbane kitbag. How did that get there?

By far the most fascinating odd-lot, a perspex case, homemade, revealed three or four tins of kippers ‘swimming' among a man's soiled shirts and underclothing.

Violet, the actress, tried on a top hat and did a brief vaudeville shuffle.

North smiled but like the attendant looked on subdued.

‘That there's a burglar's torch,' he said to North. ‘At least that's what we think. No one is going to claim a lot of this stuff. But we can't throw it away.'

He tilted a motorcyclist's helmet to show a hairline crack.

‘Found near a railway intersection, 1963. So it was sent here. Out the back we have bags of fruit and sides of lamb. All rotting into another. We can't throw anything out. It's like abortion. I ask our staff: who has the right?'

Other found objects included a small meteorite the size of a basketball and a mountaineer's ice axe with IRVINE burnt into the handle.

At least here, unlike a museum, you could pick up an item and turn it over (although it would take three men to lift the meteorite). Each object appeared to be close, indeed intimately entwined, in the daily lives of ordinary people. So here the recent wide distance between artist and bewildered spectator was dramatically narrowed, if not entirely bridged. These objects were strange, yet compellingly ‘real'.