The Ground Beneath Her Feet (46 page)

Ormus has fully regained his touch with the ladies. Arrested by his beauty, by the grace of his long-striding walk, they sweep him off the city streets. The doors of the lonely city open wide. Sometimes he owns up to being the new boy on Radio Freddie, and feels the first astonishing cat-lappings, the addictive caresses, of Western fame.

Soon it begins to feel like a long time ago that he was Indian, with
family ties, with roots. In the white heat of the present tense these things have shrivelled and died. Race itself seems less of a fixed point than before. He finds that to these new eyes he looks indeterminate. He has already passed for Jewish, and now as he is noticed by the girls on their scooters and motorbikes, the girls in their bubble cars and Minis, the girls in their false eyelashes and high boots, as they screech to a halt and offer him a ride, he is taken for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Romany, a Frenchman, a Latin American, a “Red” Indian, a Greek. He is none of these, but he denies nothing; during these brief, casual encounters he adopts the protective colouring of how others see him. If asked a direct question he always tells the truth, but it embarrasses him more and more that people, young women particularly, find his true identity so sexually attractive for such phoney, Ginnish reasons.
Oh, that’s so spiritual
, they say, slipping out of their clothes.
So spiritual
, galloping him like a horse.
Spiritual
, wagging at him doggy fashion. Mortified, he finds these invitations impossible to refuse. The spiritual Indian, uprising, carnally conquers the West.

Here, he is at the frontier of the skin. Mull Standish meets him for coffee at the Café Braque in Chelsea. We aren’t going to conceal anything, Standish announces. We just aren’t going to make a big deal out of it, or you’ll be stuck in the ethnic ghetto for keeps. We’re also going to lie about your age. Pushing thirty is no time to start a career in this business. This here is electric babyland.

Eating his way through plateful after cottony plateful of Wonderloaf and butter—brought to the table with growing irritability and scorn by the Braque’s immortally surly waiters—Ormus ponders the link between deracination and success, and persuades himself that the taking of a stage name is not a dishonourable act. Who ever heard of Issur Danielovitch, not to mention Marian Montgomery, Archibald Leach, Bernie Schwartz, Stanley Jefferson, Allen Konigsberg, Betty Joan Perske, Camille Javal, Greta Gustafsson, Diana Fluck, Frances Gumm, or poor dear Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner, before they changed their names. Erté, Hergé, Ellery Queen, Weegee … The whole history of the pseudonym justifies him. Yet in the end he finds he can’t do it. He will remain Ormus Cama. This is his compromise: that the band will not bear his name, though the musicians Standish has assembled are a job lot of sessions artistes. He names this, his first outfit, after
the site of his first meeting with Vina. Rhythm Center. “She,” by Rhythm Center. I like it like it, Mull Standish says, sipping coffee, tapping his cane. Yes that yes that grooves.

Thank Christ, Standish adds. I thought you were going to call it White Bread.

Only when it’s too late will Ormus discover that Standish has issued a false biography of his new star, inventing a melting-pot, patchwork-quilt, rainbow-coalition tale of mixed genes, elaborating on the years of struggle in odd dives in European cities, everywhere but Hamburg (to avoid the Beatles comparison). The poverty, the despair, the overcoming, the making of the finished article. When he does find out, he confronts an unrepentant Standish, who lays down the law: The truth won’t play. This, however, is a resume with legs. Long legs.
Fabulous
legs. Sing the songs, sonny, and let Uncle Mull take care of business.

Later in his career, Ormus Cama will be attacked, often and viciously, for denying his origins. By then, however, Mull Standish will be dead.

Standish asks after the boys, and his demeanour alters. The bullish man of the world gives way to a more vulnerable and hesitant persona. What do they say? he probes, wincing slightly, his arms coming up a little way off the table, crossed, as if bracing for a blow. What do they say about me? She’s been poisoning them for two decades, turning their thoughts against me. Are they safe with her? God knows. She’s crazy, you know, you’ll have spotted that. Which cuts no ice with them. She’s the parent in place, while I, I have no defence. I left, I deserted them, I changed my what’s the new word orientation. My pointing towards the East. I can’t help that. But I’m here now, I want to be a, a good one, a real one, but maybe it’s too late, maybe I can’t.

Father, Ormus says. The word you’re avoiding.

So they hate me, right. You can tell me, I can take it. No; lie.

Ormus recounts a conversation with Antoinette Corinth. This may surprise you but I want them to like him, she said. It’s up to him to build the bridge, God knows he’s starting late, but yes, I can see he’s finally decided to try. OK. I want them to be close to their father. I want them even to love him, I want him to have the pleasure of his sons’ love, I want him to love their love so profoundly that he can’t do without it, I want that, even for him, why would I not want it?

He shakes his head, can’t believe it. She said that?

She said, It’s what I’m waiting for, Ormus recalls.

What does that mean?

In the sense of hoping for, I suppose. (Ormus is trying to be even-handed, trying not to take sides.) Maybe you’re seeing phantoms where none exist. Maybe she just has a more generous side than you’re willing to allow.

Yeah. And maybe the moon is made of cheese, Standish surrenders to sarcasm. Hey, look. Up in the sky, above the Pheasantry. Wasn’t that a flying pig?

Land, water, water, land. Time drips, floats, stretches, shrinks, passes. The story of the first record by Rhythm Center, its pirate provenance, Standish going from store to store around the country, begging, cajoling, threatening, begging some more: all this is well known. The song does well but not astoundingly well. Ormus’s nocturnal apostrophising of his lost love is catching on faster than his music. But Vina isn’t there. She lies over the ocean, she’s singing with Diana Ross at the Rainbow Room, she’s hanging out with Amos Voight and so on, and she hears nothing from her lovesick swain.

There is the war and the protest against the war. A generation is learning how to march, how to riot, it is inventing the chants that turn groups of kids into armies that have the power to frighten the state. What do we want when do we want it. One two three four, two four six eight. Ho ho ho.

The non-war news also feels high, spaced out, out of joint. In Spain a group of aristocrats has been unable to leave the grand salon of the urban mansion in which they recently enjoyed a sumptuous banquet. Nothing impedes them, yet they do not leave. At the gates of the compound in which the mansion stands, a similar invisible impediment prevents anyone from entering. Gawpers, the mansion’s domestic staff, the emergency services, press at the open gate but do not pass through. There is talk of a divine curse. Some claim to have heard the beating wings of the angel Azrael overhead. His dark shadow passes like a cloud.

A Polish patriot, Zbigniew Cybulski, has been murdered in a back yard, amid sheets blowing from washing lines. Blood spread across a white sheet held against his midriff. A battered tin mug that fell from
his hand has become a symbol of resistance. No: it is a holy relic, worthy of worship. Bow down.

An American girl in Paris is becoming an object of reverence. There are those who call her the reincarnation of the armoured virgin, St. Joan. A cult is in the process of being born.

These are not secular times. In the sphere of the secular all is bombs and death. Against which, it seems, sex and music may not be bulwarks enough.

A great movie star has tragically died. She was in love with two friends, who told her that her face, her smile, put them in mind of an ancient carving. They quarrelled over her. At length, after lunch in a small café, she took one of the friends for a ride in her car and deliberately drove straight off the end of a washed-out bridge, into the water. Both of them were killed. The other man, still seated at the café table, watched his beloved and his friend vanish for ever.

Not long before dying, the actress made a hit record, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. Now the record is played constantly, the first French song to zoom up the British charts, paving the way for Françoise Hardy and others. Ormus, whose French is poor, strains to understand the lyrics.

Everyone to his taste, turning, turning, in the whirlpool of life?

Is that it?

On board the
Frederica
, Ormus Cama notices that the sign on the wall in Eno’s cubicle has changed.
Keep your distance
. After that he makes a point of checking, and the changes continue. One week the sign says,
Don’t get too close
. Another,
Mend no fences
. Another,
Love not that ye be not loved
. Another,
Fight that sweet tooth. Save more than your teeth
. One message is long and in blank verse:

May the gods save me from becoming
a stateless refugee!
Dragging out an intolerable life
in desperate helplessness!
That is the most pitiful of all griefs;
death is better
.

Alis cracking up, Hawthorne Crossley says, Must be the sleep deprivation.

Must be the hat, Waldo opines, Or is he, by any chance, illegal?

If he was illegal they’d have closed us down by now, Hawthorne reasons.

Ormus says nothing when he sees the long text. He understands that Eno is sending a message directly to him. He feels the hot sting of its criticism and tries to catch the engineer’s eye. But Eno seems far away.

Many years will pass before Ormus Cama learns that the author of the long text is not Eno Barber but Euripides. The shorter texts, however, are Eno’s own.

Mind your backs. Mind your heads
. And these messages? Who are they for?

At The Witch, too, Ormus is receiving messages. She still sometimes comes to his bed when the whim takes her. Dialogue being over, they do not speak. They greet, fuck, part in silence: the copulation of ghosts. But sometimes she, too, leaves him notes. Some are melancholy, opaque.
If music could cure sorrow it would be precious. But no one thought of using songs and stringed instruments to banish the bitterness and pain of life
. Most of the notes, however, are about Antoinette, whose dominant personality seems entirely to have subjugated She’s. Antoinette’s hard life and times. Disowned by her wealthy family for marrying the club-footed Standish, and then abandoned by the bastard with two small children and no income, she dragged herself out of the gutter by her own talents and round-the-clock work.
She is a frightening woman; no one who makes an enemy of her will carry off an easy victory
.

The notes are confused. Sometimes they are fearful of Antoinette’s rage, at other times they praise her generous love. Towards Tommy Gin, with his vain tousle of carefully teased red hair, his floral waistcoats, his preening, his bigotry, She’s scribblings are unreservedly hostile.
He thinks he invented her, he thinks he invented everything, the clothes, the music, the attitude, the protest marches, the peace sign, the women’s movement, Black is Beautiful, the drugs, the books, the magazines, the whole generation. I guess none of us would have anything in our heads if not for him, but in fact he’s not important, just an evil little shit who knows how to get himself noticed, but she’s a real artist, she doesn’t go in for all that crap, she creates beauty from the depths of her wounded soul, and you wait and see, she’ll break off with him
any day now, she’ll cut him out completely, the Witch doesn’t need a Wizard, and once she’s dumped him he’ll just shrivel and die like a vampire in the sun
. It seems that silent She has a lot of words locked up inside her, after all. Apollo is in there. Behind the black Dionysiac clouds enveloping this young woman, the sun god is struggling to release his light. It doesn’t take Ormus long to understand that She is deeply in love with her boss. Men may come and men may go but the two dark ladies, the large flamboyant one upstairs and the small wasted one sitting in the purple dark below, are in it for the duration.

Distracted by this realization, Ormus perhaps fails to grasp what he is being told, on land by She, at sea by Eno Barber. That there is danger here, coming steadily closer. That the earth is beginning to tremble. Like most protagonists he is deaf to the warnings of the chorus. Even when he dreams a terrible dream—the boys tumbling down the maisonette stairs with the tops of their heads exploded, standing open like burst cans of beans—he attaches no weight to the portent. He is trying to keep a lid on his visionary tendency, in this milieu of cabbalistic nonsense he is making an effort to shun omens and keep a grip on the actual, to concentrate on the music and stand firm upon the dailiness of English life.

To hold on to the elation, the joy he brought with him, the idea of renewal.

His thoughts turn more and more towards Vina. The Vina that exists only in his imagination, whom he knows more intimately than any living being, is being confronted on the stage of that same imagination by another Vina, her adult self, her unknown twin. Life has happened to her and turned her into a stranger. New life, and the eternal haunting of the past. The dead family, the slaughtered goats, the murdering mother hanged in the loafing shed. Piloo, Chickaboom, those too, but above all the dead, pendant mother, and Nissy sitting with her, calling nobody, fearing that this present foretells her future. The dangling ankles, the long bare calves are the image of her own.

Ormus’s old fears creep back; he imagines Vina looking him blankly in the eye, saying,
No, that’s the past
, and walking off into some alien sunset, leaving his life emptied of meaning. But such dark fancies fail to overpower him. He is filled with light, radiant with possibility. He
hit bottom at the Cosmic Dancer and it showed him the way up. Now he is soaring towards the skies, none of his argosies shall fail, and at the appropriate moment he will find her, take her hand, and they will fly together over the bright glow of Metropolis at night. Like fairies, like long-tailed comets. Like stars. That’s his story, the one he’s written for himself, to which reality has no option but to conform.