My Other Life (25 page)

When I was stumped in my writing, I roamed around the damp yard behind my house, peering at plants. I tore old birds' nests apart to see how they had been made. I watched spiders feeding and ants hurrying and snails dragging themselves in their own spittle across the bricks. I put these London creatures into my Central American jungle. I observed a trickle of water and, for my fiction, turned it into a river, with mud slides and oxbows.

Sometimes, in the black late afternoon before the pubs opened, I walked—thinking with my feet. Walking the streets, I murmured to myself as my mind wandered. There were gaps in the day that baffled and intimidated me.

Musprat called, but I put him off. I did not want to be drawn into his life—the disorderly flat, the hasty meals, his intrusive borrowing and bitching, his writer's block, and wasted evenings at the Lambourne Club.

I wrote my book. I lived in my house. I loved my family. I had no other life in London, and indeed had not realized there was another life to be had, until Lady Max called again.

"Paul, is that you, dear boy?"

It was affectation, not fooling, and her voice was unmistakable, dark brown with cigarette smoke. I was alarmed, fearing another of her meals.

But no, she was calling to collect what I owed her. She used those very words. She said I had to go with her to the William Blake exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

"I'll meet you there inside the foyer in about an hour," she said.

That was my ten-pound repayment to her, my agreement to go. But I had done my work for the day. I did not feel I was being deceitful to Alison, though it was unfair to my sons—I knew that I would not be at the house when they returned home from school. I would miss Anton making tea and Will asking "What page are you on, Dad?" For that I resented Lady Max's sudden presumption and her insistent
Be there.

She was late—Londoners who regarded themselves as powerful were seldom punctual, though they always expected you to be. She arrived in a taxi and she looked rather small, mounting the wet black stairs alone. But this was a passing illusion. I had always seen her in the company of other people, and when I was next to her I felt very plain and out of step, an American again.

Lady Max had hardly greeted me. She said, "I love being in a museum on a rainy afternoon."

It was not rain but a low cloud, the mist and drizzle of a London winter that made the dark city even blacker.

"There's only one better place to be," she said.

We were passing a sensual Rodin sculpture, all muscles and bumps, a couple entwined like a big bronze walnut.

"Between the sheets," she said, "and preferably not alone."

She had a knack for uttering statements to which there was no reply. It was like a verbal form of snooker in which I was left holding the cue and not being able to use it.

We passed a set of big, flat Motherwells, all black shapes like moth-eaten shadows, a slashed and assertively striped Rauschenberg, a Hockney interior that sloped in three directions, a soft sculpture like a big toy, a rusty bike hung on wires, and a triptych the size of three billboards surfaced entirely with broken crockery.

The Blakes were behind this laborious frivolity, in a darkened exhibition room in low-lighted showcases. Walking just behind Lady Max in the darkness I felt her warmth, and her perfume stung my eyes with sweetness. Her white face, her full lips, her large eyes were reflected in the glass, layered with scenes from
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

"Ruskin called him a primitive," Lady Max said.

"So unfair. He had great technique, subtle color, and a kind of visionary quality. Look at that composition of flesh and spirit."

"Everyone says that about Blake." She had not even paused or turned.

But this was a standard London put-down, the accusation that you were being hopelessly unoriginal.
Everyone says that.
It sounded cruel, but it was just another move in a chess game. In my earlier years in London I would have hated her for saying it. Now I saw it as glibly defensive—a weak kind of teasing—and she would mock me if I reacted. The London response was not to complain but to do it back and do it better.

"Everyone says that because it's so obvious and because it's true," I said. "Ruskin was the weirdo, if you ask me. Not Blake. Ruskin was shocked by his wife's pubic hair. He thought she was the only woman in the world who had it, like a physical abnormality."

"There is so much more to Ruskin than that," Lady Max said.

"But the rest isn't as interesting," I said.

She liked that. "I rather like the nympholepsy. He adored little girls."

"Kiddie porn," I said.

"You sound so shocked. And yet Ruskin was an incredible romantic." She was staring down at the Blakes. "Speaking of pubic hair, some people shave it into peculiar designs."

"And some people twine marigolds into it," I said, "according to D. H. Lawrence."

"That's such a silly book," Lady Max said. "It's completely unbelievable. It's all Lawrence's lurid fantasies about the English class system—virile gamekeeper, sex-mad aristocrat, emasculated lord. And apart from anything else it gives an utterly inaccurate picture of oral sex technique."

She was bent over a lighted case of Blake etchings, her face shining at God the Father holding a set of gold compasses among jubilant angels and puffy clouds.

"She could hardly have sucked him off playing with his old job as though it was a cocktail sausage."

She said
orf
again, slightly dignifying the shocking expression. A shadowy man nearby grunted with unease and disapproval.

Though we were still in the darkened room and I could not see Lady Max's face, I had the impression she was smiling.

"The sexual virtuosity in your novels is much more impressive than Lawrence's."

This was an advance on
You're much better than Hugh Walpole.

"Sexual description is the great test of literary ability, I always think," she said.

"It's a problem, sex on the page. You have to choose the lingo of the clinic, the gutter, or the moralist. I use all three."

She was not listening. She said, "The way you handle sodomy."

My mouth had gone dry.

"You have marvelous penetration," she said.

Snookered.

"William Blake got married in a church near here," she said. "Want to see it?"

She took charge and we were soon outside, in the wet air, walking along the Embankment next to the whitish, depthless water, which seemed turbulent today.

"There was once a prison here," she said at the river's edge. "Millbank. James described it in
The Princess Casamassima.
"

I had just reviewed a Henry James book and did not know that.

"Notice how the river seems to be flowing upstream?" she said.

It was true—a burst cushion, a broken branch, and bits of plastic foam were floating towards Vauxhall Bridge.

"That's because it
is
floating upstream," she said. "It's all tidal as far as Richmond, you know. People in London are forever staring at the river, but they never see its real character, that its current changes direction four times a day."

As she spoke she raised a gloved hand.

"I can't walk any farther in these shoes."

These were the ones Musprat called her fuck-me shoes.

Her hailing a cab made me feel useless. And after the privacy, the intimacy of the taxi—the driver isolated, her hand resting on my thigh—there was something unexpected and punitive in the way she stepped out after the short ride and walked on, leaving me to pay the fare. In my confusion I gave the driver an absurdly large tip—he made a mocking noise at me to indicate that he was not impressed.

The church, St. Mary's Battersea, was sited directly on the south bank of the river, next to a flour mill and a public house, the Old Swan—the houseboats and brick façades of Chelsea just across the water. The church was in a perfect place, surrounded by light and water, with a Thames sailing barge moored beside it. Just upriver, above a black railway bridge, the sun was breaking from between some smoky clouds.

"Ken Tynan showed me this church," she said. "It's Georgian. Such a beauty."

"Tynan the theater critic?" I asked, unlatching the large church door for her and holding it open.

"And fetishist," she said, entering the church.

We passed though the crypt under a low wood-paneled choir loft to a side aisle glowing with patches of color from the light of the stained-glass windows. I picked up a leaflet from a side table and saw that Blake had indeed been married here, that Turner had visited, and more.

"Benedict Arnold is buried here, I see."

"Arnold, the brave hero," she said.

"Arnold the wicked spy."

"Don't be so predictable."

I approached the pretty altar and pulpit, thinking how orderly they were, and that though somewhat unadorned they were not severe, they had a purity of design, a spareness that had spirit and strength—thinking this while Lady Max began talking again and looking away.

"The rest of the time, Tynan was gadding about in women's clothes," she said. "He had mirrors on the ceiling of his bedroom. He said to me once, 'Have you ever tried soft fladge?' I suppose he meant gentle spankings. He had well-thumbed copies of
Rubber News.
This is authentic Georgian, you know."

She was working her way along the smooth carved pews to the altar rail.

"Is he dead, Tynan?"

"Oh, no. He's very ill, but that doesn't stop him," Lady Max said. "These days he dabbles in urolagnia with eleven-year-old girls. What do you call it? Golden showers—something like that? I adore these exquisite finials. What's wrong?"

I shook my head because what was there to say?

"I'm telling you things you need to know."

"About sex?"

"About London," she said. "The love and knowledge of London is in all the great English novels. You're funny. You don't know how good you are, or how great you can be. Now I must go."

We left the church and walked along Vicarage Crescent to find a taxi.

"Wilson lived there," she said in front of a two-story house made of gray brick. "A vastly underrated painter and great naturalist. He died at the South Pole with Scott."

Just before she got into the taxi, she said, "I have my accountant tomorrow, so we'll have to meet Thursday. I'll ring you."

She did not touch me, the English seldom touched, and that left me feeling even more flustered, in the cloud of her taxi's foul exhaust.

When Thursday came, I agreed to meet her in Mortlake that afternoon. As a consequence I had a productive morning writing my novel, and, stirred by her talk, I looked forward to seeing her.

The Mortlake excursion was to another church, a Catholic one—and in the high-walled churchyard, Sir Richard Burton's tomb, a marble monument in the shape of an Arabian tent.

"This grave has never appeared in any novel of London," she said. "I'm giving it to you."

I read the plaque and then began to tell Lady Max how Burton had explored unknown parts of Utah, when she interrupted.

"Because of the polygamy among Mormons there," she said. "Burton was sex mad but he combined it with scholarship and a love of languages. That's why he translated the
Kama Sutra,
and he was fascinated by fetishes."

There in the quiet churchyard of St. Mary Magdalene, she spoke about some episodes she'd had with men she had known as a girl — older men in every case—and how they had involved some sort of whipping, "and not soft fladge, I can tell you." The men had been canted over chairs while she had slashed at their buttocks, cutting them with a dog whip.

Then she giggled and pushed a branch aside and said, "It's all school nonsense. English men never get over it."

"What about English women?"

"We're all sorts, but the most effective kind are matrons—like our prime minister. Bossy and reliable, with big hospitable bosoms.

She put her hands on her hips and faced me, but I kept my distance.

That day we finished up at Richmond Park, looking at deer. The following day we met at the London Library, which was a private, members-only clublike place—Musprat was always mentioning it. Lady Max insisted that I become a member, there and then, and I did, writing a check for the thirty-pound annual membership fee and making a mental note that I might have to transfer funds so as not to be overdrawn.

After a weekend—Saturday shopping, Sunday outing to Box Hill—I met Lady Max at Blackfriars and she took me around some rotting Dickensian warehouses at Shad Thames.

"All of these wonderful old buildings will be renovated and made into hideous little flats for awful people one day."

That week she took me to Strawberry Hill, to Hogarth's House in Chiswick, to World's End, to the room van Gogh had rented in Brixton, to Sir John Soane's Museum. I had crossed Lincoln's Inn Fields thirty times and had never been aware of this lovely house that had been converted into a museum of exotic treasures.

I would be looking at a gable, or some fretwork, or a picture while she monologued in her offhand way about something totally unconnected, usually sexual.

"I thought I had seen everything," I would say.

"Yes, Sir John actually collected these artifacts himself."

"I mean, about what you just said about—what's the word?"

"Oh that.
Frottage.
It's just French for rubbing. Very subtle. Not very popular. Takes ages. Who has the time, my dear?" And she turned to an inked sheet of petroglyphs. "I much prefer that rubbing."

At Turpentine Lane in Victoria she pointed out the fact that the houses had no front doors, and in what perhaps seemed to her a logical progression—but surely a non sequitur?—added, "And I never wear knickers."

She deconstructed for me—the word was just becoming fashionable among reviewers that year—the Albert Memorial and said, "You should put this thing into a story sometime," and went on to tell me how, after the death of Albert, Queen Victoria developed a passion for her Scottish footman, John Brown.